It is pretty unique to one sex, as twice as many women have ever reproduced than men (https://www.livescience.com/47976-more-mothers-in-human-hist...). There have even been times when 17 times more women have reproduced than men (https://genome.cshlp.org/content/25/4/459.long).

In fact, that many men will instinctively resort to any means in an effort to achieve higher status and probability of sex if they are socially isolated...

It’s acutally surprisingly obvious given the knowledge that it’s not the norm for men to have children, in evolutionary terms. So obvious it’s weird that there isn’t more focus on avoiding those outcomes in society.

Maybe it’s a leftover from agricultural society, where the institution of marriage reduced the tendency. I don’t prefer the strict marriage and fidelity norms of the past, but they certainly had a stabilizing effect. We don’t have a similarly effective stabilizer on the horizon.

So no biological evidence: nothing to support the "instinctual" claim.

One piece of evidence is that men have a flatter distribution of outcomes and more often than women are falling off either end of the chart, for better and worse.

All it takes is a look at those OkCupid studies for rating distributions to see how much larger the difference is between success and failure for men.

This problem is not exclusive to men, but affects more men.

Women more often have an expectation of mating upwards, and high status women have a similar problem of finding themselves excluded.

Its hard to feel too much sympathy for such women when the obvious answer would be to lower their standards somewhat. The exclusion seems to be down to their own choices.

I read an alternative interpretation somewhere about this. Take it with a grain of salt.

1. High status men have access to a lot of attractive women. With the way men's biology is wired, it wouldn't be surprising that they would choose an attractive, relatively lower status woman over a highly accomplished but not that attractive one.

2. High status men often have stressful work lives. They would probably prefer a partner that makes them feel relaxed at home. High status women usually have careers themselves so it would be difficult to provide this need.

You say that as though what they're attracted to is a purely conscious decision.

Certainly, women have unconscious desires. However, the existing situation is a “tragedy of the commons”. It is in any one woman’s individual interest to hold out for the best possible match that they can get. However, if that strategy is shared by the vast majority of women then they will end up in competition over a very small (somewhere between 5-10%) of the most attractive males. In view of this, it would be rational for many women to consider settling for less attractive men who still might be a good father/provider.

The fact that I like cake is not a conscious decision. My decision is whether I will eat it or not. You don't actually have to be with the people you're attracted to. (We all get old and ugly eventually anyway.)

> You don't actually have to be with the people you're attracted to

For that matter, you don't have to be with anybody at all, which may be why you see women rather be alone than follow parent's suggestion!

The requirements are different, a woman can reproduce as long as she gets food and shelter since finding willing men is easy, a man have way higher requirements on social status before he has a reasonable chance to reproduce.

So you'd expect anyone to get violent when they are starving or homeless, but only men to get violent if they don't see themselves getting a sex-partner in their future.

The theory is that females find it much easier to initiate reproduction (although the process is far more work for them once started).

Also through large parts of human history females were treated as chattel and weren't subjected to the same pressures as males.

Something about how only one in two males reproduce, but on average every human female has offspring?

so this implies that some men reproduce with more women than they "should", thus causing problems?

It refers to the fact that there are men excluded who are left to yearn from the sidelines.

It could also point to the possibility (and in some some cases a confirmed fact) that some men are raising kids that they didn't sire.

One male can make dozens of women pregnant. If you go back in time far enough, you'll see that most women had offspring in their lives, while the same certainly isn't true of most men.

I think that generally speaking, women tend to be more social, and, biologically speaking, have a higher desirability (it is low-effort for men to produce offspring, but high-effort for women).