Last summer, I wrote a post predicting that informal polygamy would be a consequence of the sexual revolution. Since then, I’ve encountered a blogger named Roissy, who’s says much the same thing, with a couple additions: one, the world of casual hook-ups and serial monogomay gives is already a lot like informal polygamy. Oh, and this is all allegedly going to lead to social collapse. In one post, (warning: crayon version of NSFW) he put it this way: “Enforced monogamy –> Emergent monogamy –> Civilization blossoms –> Emergent polygamy –> Enforced financial monogamy –> Decriminalization/Acceptance of polygamy –> Decivilization/Culling of excess betas –> Enforced monogamy (best case)/Reign of Chaos (worst case).” Another one went so far as to claim America may end up looking like a “patriarchal Middle Eastern caliphate.”

Read Roissy long enough, and you realize he basically hates everybody, or at least wants to have enough excuses for hating people in his back pocket to cover anyone he might meet. That acounts for a much of his doom-and-gloom tendencies. But this Conor Fiedersdorf post and the Kay Hymowitz piece that inspired it provided a recent reminder that the feeling of chaos isn’t some idiosyncracy of Roissy’s. Also, apparently Roissy has made some fans among social conservatives.

Ignoring Roissy for a moment: Will Wilkinson and the men quoted by Hymowitz are wrong to think this is all about the confusingness of rapid social change, and the latter group needs to stop whining. Most of the pain that these men are experiencing boils down the fact that women, unlike men, tend to be picky about who they get involved with: most would rather be single than be involved with a loser, and those who do do the casual hookup scene tend to be infinitely more discriminating than the men involved. (In my last year of undergrad, I heard a girl say that she didn’t need a relationship, just wanted to have sex, but found it almost impossible to find a man she was attracted to.) The result is that unattrative men end up involuntarily single. If there’s anything about this that could reasonably confuse men, it’s just that women tend to be less superficial than men, and what counts as having a good personality is more confusing than what counts as good looking–and because women have a rational fear of this.

Back to Roissy, it’s hard to see how informal polygamy, in and of itself, is going to bring about social collapse. Sure there will be frustrated men, but nothing on the scale of many early civilizations, which functioned okay even though massive harems were the law of the land. Perhaps the blame should go to disincentivizing male productivity, as men focus less on being able to provide for families and more on doing whatever it will take to attract women for short flings or one-night stands. Some anthropologists think this is what happens in hunter-gatherer societies: men hunt not because it makes sense from a feeding-the-family perspective, but because it gives them a chance to impress women. But again, the results may be unpleasant, but are unlikely to amount to social collapse: given the material windfall we have gotten from 21st century technology, it isn’t clear that society needs to be at 100% productivity to avoid collapse.

There’s also a where-evolution-is-headed angle, which is easier to dismiss (good, because it’s late and I have a birthday party to go to): if you’re worried about where evolution is headed, the Quiverfull should worry you a hell of a lot more than anything produced by the sexual revolution.