Young men mating is a modern construct

nonquitt · 2026-07-29T03:48:10+00:00

I think pair marriage is a highly successful social organization paradigm. Excess young males are bad news.

Digedag · 2026-07-29T02:43:54+00:00

All the great empires that rose kept young men away from sexual access until they reached older age.

And where are those great empires now?

Mountain_Snow3613 · 2026-07-29T05:18:12+00:00

Ok there's a lot going on here. It's clear that you have a strong bias and are likely trying to confirm your own hypothesis by cherry picking evidence. But you also found some academic sources, so hats off for that at least.

Let me address your sources:

The first source notes how foraging knowledge peaks later than the physical body does. However, foraging knowledge alone does not measure a man's value in a hunter-gatherer society. The actual physique needed to hunt animals is just as, if not, more important than foraging knowledge. Your claim implies that a 40 year old man would bring home more resources than a 25 year old in these societies. That's purely speculative. Most indigenous forager men had probably been taught the most essential knowledge by early adulthood.
Your second source is pretty commonly cited, but has been debunked/confirmed as misleading multiple times. The misleading implication is that ancient men were all virgins while the top 5% were living with harems of 15+ women. Many anthropologists have clarified the true cause of variation of genetic diversity between ancient men and women: ancient peoples fought a lot. When wars ended, the surviving males of the losing tribe were killed. The women were kept. This naturally led to a male gene pool with much lower diversity. It does NOT mean that high status men were hoarding 15+ wives each in ancient farming societies.
Your third source just says that the ideal age gap for men, in order to maximize their offspring, was 15 years in the case of a single indigenous society. Not only is this sample size ridiculously small (a single tribe), but it has nothing to do with your claim about mate hoarding. The abstract literally states that this was a MONOGAMOUS society, which literally contradicts your core thesis.

CokeAYCE · 2026-07-29T03:05:58+00:00

We wouldn't have evolved to have sexual attraction in our teens if it wasn't successful for our survival in nature. Those older societies only having 30+yr olds dating is the unnatural social construct and we are going back to our primal roots

NewSpring7520 · 2026-07-29T15:21:33+00:00

Younger men killing older men so they can get more mates is also natural

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BrainMarshal · 2026-07-29T10:26:28+00:00

The first link can't be reached.

The second link only spoke of a catastrophe 8000 years ago and said nothing about an age difference between men and women when they mate.

The third mentioned the Sami culture, not worldwide statistics.

This post makes bogus claims.

NoClerk951 · 2026-07-29T11:24:02+00:00

They also ate human meat and raped single digit aged girls. Abysmal logic

edjohn88 · 2026-07-29T12:33:41+00:00

You talking about the tribes where you men are just fuckholes for the old men?

Puzzleheaded_Award88 · 2026-07-29T14:56:16+00:00

Young men having an option is in mate is not a modern invention. In the middle ages, children of nobility would begin marrying at 12 to 14. The male loneliness epidemic is the product of many different situations. So let me ask this, you say women have no blame, but how is that possible when women find 80% of men unattractive?

Flightlessbirbz · 2026-07-29T22:35:29+00:00

The fact that in some specific tribes men didn’t find a mate until they were older does not mean that “young men mating is a modern construct.” There was a lot of variation in marriage age and sexual behaviors between cultures all throughout history.

I would say that overall the idea that “people always paired off and started having babies in their early teens until now, this is uNaTuRaL” is often exaggerated and pretty much bunk. Child marriages were mainly a practice among royalty for political reasons. Teen pregnancies are risky especially before 16, girls usually didn’t even start their periods until later, and young boys didn’t have the resources to support a family. As I stated before, this “men waited until 30 to become sexually active” thing was only very specific to certain cultures, but generally speaking, think people starting families at 20, not 14. But once again, there is no one single “what we used to do before modern constructs.”

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