I can cite many examples of married with children boomer males that in today's market would have 0 chance of this ever happening and instead would be complete incels.
I can cite Boomer examples of this as well. They might not have been incels, but they would have experienced significantly longer sexual droughts. You might be able to extend that into the early part of Gen X. Gen X was a transitional generation. The bad stuff that really got exposed in the Millennial generation had its roots in Gen X. However, because Gen X was a smaller group, it didn't get noticed too much until the Millennials came of age and also the passage of time accentuated some negative trends.
The boomer generation doesn't realize this, but if you got an education or some sort of career training/skill and showed up to a steady job you could live a comfortable life. In today's world you have to be really on top of your game to get by, let alone be comfortable/successful.
The Boomer generation in the USA succeed more because the rest of the world was in shambles for 20-25 years after the end of World War 2. Japan started to turn the corner around 1970. The 1970s and 1980s were kind to Japan until the Nikkei crashed in 1989. China started to become economically more prosperous around the 1980s.
Boomer women in the USA were the last women that weren't entirely career oriented women. Women started showing up in the workforce more with the Silent Generation (late 1920s-1945 births). If you ever watched "Mad Men", Peggy Olson was a good example of this. Her character was born in 1939 and she became more careerist as she advanced at the ad agency. A Peggy Olson was somewhat out of the norm in the 1960s but women graduating college in the 1980s (late Boomers and early Gen X'ers) would have adopted the spirit of her fictional character that was rooted in some degree of reality.
When I was college from 2001-02 to 2004-05, it seemed like the prevailing expectation among my young women undergrad classmates was career development. These women expected to have a career as a result of getting a bachelor's degree. I would guess that most wanted motherhood at some point but they were expecting to be working mothers. The last sentence would only be true if they thought about the concept of motherhood at some point in their 18-22 year old existences.
In regards to dating, I feel it's a similar set of standards where you need to be really on top of your game and have a lot going for you just to be considered at all for even an average woman. If you live an average life of just getting by and are physically average, or perhaps below as many men are, you are going to struggle. It's not a good time to be a man in our society
The threshold of what it takes to attract and retain women has gone up. Having an income in the 70th percentile of income earners would have been a ticket to attracting and retaining solid women in 1980. In the 21st Century, the 70th percentile income earner (if he's a male) has no guarantee of consistent attraction and retention. Part of this is due to more women being in the workforce and having higher expectations of men. Suddenly, your above average salary as a man isn't all that impressive when her salary is nearly the same.
I've noticed that many women who end up single mothers often reproduced with men that would be considered "bad boys", where they do what they want and have no sense of responsibility towards anything in life. I feel that the women have this internal but unconscious process where they try to mold their male children into being a man that THEY wanted in that given set of circumstances, one that is highly responsible, puts family first, etc.
I agree with every observation here.
The problem is that these women most likely came across men like this when they were childless but did not find them attractive and readily overlooked them but instead were more attracted to these "bad boys" that would ultimately pump and dump them without a second thought. What ends up happening is you have a young male who has been molded to more or less behave in a way that is unattractive to these types of women.
These types of mothers are harmful to young boys. With absent or weak fathers, this parental programming becomes harmful. This is typical female stuff. What women say that they want and what they actual respond to in terms of attraction are completely different.
