The parent post is getting flack, but it’s hard to see why it is controversial. I have heard “women want a man who will provide and protect” from every single woman I have ever dated or been married to, from every female friend with whom I could have such deep conversations, and from the literature I read in my anthropology-adjacent academic field. At some point one feels one has enough data to reasonably assume it’s a heterosexual human universal (in the typological sense, i.e. not denying the existence of many exceptions).
I can believe that many women are having a hard time under modernity, because so many men no longer feel bound by the former expectations of old-school protector and provider behavior. Some men, like me, now view relationships as two autonomous individuals coming together to share sublime things like hobbies, art or travel, but don’t want to be viewed as a source of security. Other men might be just extracting casual sex from women and then will quickly move on. There’s much less social pressure on men to act a certain way, which in turn impacts on what women experience.
Making claims about "evolution" of "women" without even demonstrating a passing familiarity with the (controversial!) field of evolutionary psychology is a choice.
You’re probably consuming too much red pill nonsense if it’s hard for you to see why claiming that women who experience multiple sexual partners are mentally damaged is controversial.
The veneer of modern pop psych doesn’t change that this is just slut shaming, no different fundamentally from the claim that women who have multiple partners have loose vaginas. There’s no science behind these sorts of claims. It’s just a mask for insecurity.
Your understanding of the "anthropology-adjacent academic field" is wrong. There are so many ways humans have organized their societies and so many ways men and women have interacted, that to pretend there is some primeval hunter-gatherer society that generated all human evolutionary behaviours is silly. And a typical patriarchal construct that benefits men.
Because the post is making an unfounded claim about human female evolution along with another unfounded claim about modernity being different from the rest of history, which involves a ton of cultures and societies.
I think the claim that modernity is different is easily defendable. No society during the rest of history had such effective birth control, nor welfare states that removed pressure to produce offspring or even interact so much with family or other members of society. Again, as a man I feel like I am able to live a life very different than I would have been pressured into before, and this surely has ramifications for modern dating and relationships.
This is from the evolutionary psychiatry book The Moral Animal:
>"What the theory of natural selection says, rather, is that people's minds were designed to maximize fitness in the environment in which those minds evolved. This environment is known as the EEA—the environment of evolutionary adaptation. Or, more memorably: the 'ancestral environment.'...
>"What was the ancestral environment like? The closest thing to a twentieth-century example is a hunter-gatherer society, such as the !Kung San of the Kalahari Desert in Africa, the Inuit (Eskimos) of the Arctic region, or the Ache of Paraguay.
>"Inconveniently, hunter-gatherer societies are quite different from one another, rendering simple generalization about the crucible of human evolution difficult. This diversity is a reminder that the idea of a single EEA is actually a fiction, a composite drawing; our ancestral social environment no doubt changed much in the course of human evolution. Still, there are recurring themes among contemporary hunter-gatherer societies, and they suggest that some features probably stayed fairly constant during much of the evolution of the human mind. For example: people grew up near close kin in small villages where everyone knew everyone else and strangers didn't show up very often. People got married—monogamously or polygamously—and a female typically was married by the time she was old enough to be fertile."
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The idea that modern life is different is obvious.
I get the impression that there's some other conversation going on here that has nothing to do with evolution and you are not saying "lets all live in Igloos...".
I can believe that many women are having a hard time under modernity, because so many men no longer feel bound by the former expectations of old-school protector and provider behavior. Some men, like me, now view relationships as two autonomous individuals coming together to share sublime things like hobbies, art or travel, but don’t want to be viewed as a source of security. Other men might be just extracting casual sex from women and then will quickly move on. There’s much less social pressure on men to act a certain way, which in turn impacts on what women experience.