[cornholio]

It's hard to believe such an in depth overview of the anthropology of marriage skips the massive elephant in the room: that polygynous societies were widely found to be in a perpetual state of civil war and seem unable to develop stable, modern institutions. When a substantial part of your young men have no chance of ever buying themselves a wife, the only way they can be recognized and respected as adult men is to join a militia that promises one, or at least gives them guns so they can aquire by force the cows they need.

The corollary for western monogamous society should be clear: traditional marriage is not strictly repressive, it's also a form of egalitarianism and redistribution of social capital.

If we dismantle marriage and let raw pastoralist dynamics run rampant, we might very well see the same hypergamous tendencies and that many of those excluded from the love market take up "other", less peaceful pastimes.

[daymanstep]

If that's the case, then how comes China, which has a massive excess of males, hasn't erupted into civil war yet?

[cornholio]

China does not have a "massive" excess of males, just around 3-4% overall. The worst hit generations showed 15% more males than global averages, but this seems to be largely an administrative effect where girls were simply reported with a delay.

That being said, China does face a bride price crisis (caili), that has reached tens of thousands of dollars, an exorbitant sum for the the rural areas where it is common. This has led to unrest and public pressure on the government to intervene and regulate this market.

[buckle8017]

Extremely effective social controls designed to suppress an insurrection for all the other reasons Chinese would have wanted to revolt over the years.

[buckle8017]

This has already happened in a bunch of western countries to a limited extent.

The incel people are this social dynamic.

[matheusmoreira]

It all makes sense when viewed through the economic lens.

Sexual freedom is a lot like capitalism. It leads to wealth concentration. Very few men attract the majority of women. This implies a class of sexually poor men. I suppose so called incels rising up and trying to seize the means of reproduction is a predictable outcome.

Many religions impose a sort of sexual communism: they try to stabilize society by imposing monogamous relationships, thereby ensuring availability of women for every man and preventing the accumulation of sexual capital. This explicitly counteracts the hypergamous dynamic mentioned in TFA where women would prefer to share a rich man than be in a monogamous relationship with a poor one.