Vice.com has a piece up titled How Sad Young Douchebags Took Over Modern Britain (H/T Captain Capitalism). In the piece the author struggles to identify why the culture of young men has changed in recent years:
But while it’s easy to scorn the banality—and the vanity—of the modern British douchebag, they’re only products of their environment. An environment that has very little to offer them anymore, other than gym memberships, intentionally ripped clothes, alcohol, and creatine. The institutions that gave British men a sense of well-being have been ripped apart. Nobody trusts the police any more; nobody wants to join the army because no one believes in its wars; traditional industries have been decimated, and the only thing to replace them are stifling, mind-numbing positions in service and retail.
Because of this, British men have tried to reimagine masculinity, in a hyper-realized, childish, desperate way. A new kind of machismo, built on fake bravado and vanity. British men are looking up to faux-hawked, peacocking, rich maniacs like Mario Balotelli for inspiration, because they really have nowhere else to look.
There is probably a kernel of truth to his suspected causes, but there is a much more fundamental cause which he overlooks entirely; the decline of marriage. Sexual access to the most attractive women is a primary motivator for men. In just a few decades the UK has gone from a society where the best way for a man to get access to an attractive woman was via marriage (or at least signaling husband potential) to the modern hookup culture where douchebags rule.
You can see the full extent of the change in the data on marriage rates from Table A1 in the report Cohabitation and marriage in Britain since the 1970s. In the early 1980s over 70% of British women had married by age 25. By 2004-2007 only 23% of British women had married by the same age.
Men will always compete with each other for access to the most attractive women, but how they compete is determined by the culture and the choices of the women themselves. A young man in the UK who wants to have sex with the most attractive women has a very obvious rational choice, and that is to become the douchebag Britain’s young women crave. This is without even considering the hostility towards husbands and fathers in the family courts, churches, and the culture at large. British society is sending young men a very strong message:
Steddie Eddie need not apply, but douchebags are most welcome.
Don’t feed the animals image by Jim Champion
