What’s going on here?
Simple. World wide, many men have figured out that marriage and family is not going to happen.
When women have their own income, security, and better economic positions, they are no longer constrained in choices with regard to men. No longer required to choose reliability, dependability, loyalty as critical attributes of men.
Instead, women who have economic security can choose what they really desire: the most high-status, socially dominant, Alpha male. Usually though not always also the richest.
These mama’s boys understand: in the new competition for women, they won’t ever succeed. They won’t have a family of their own, as women are choosing “good genes” i.e. socially dominant Alpha Males as fathers for their children and don’t need or expect the fathers to marry them.
Among inner-city Black women, the illegitimacy rate is 90%. It is 70% among Black Women nationwide. You see the same dynamic among Black men. They understand a few men will be fathering the children of most of the women. Who often might have three children each with different fathers. To a lesser extent (Blacks are America’s “canary in the coal mine” socially) the same effect is seen in the White community, with greater frequency among poor whites and less among wealthy/educated whites.
Yeah I’m not surprised by this mama’s boy epidemic. It doesn’t help that the average man in his thirties has less income (where it matters) than his father in 1970. Who could buy a house where he cannot. But even if home ownership were in reach of most men in their late twenties and early thirties (it’s not, merely apartment living) it would not change the fundamental driver of mama’s boys.
Women’s choices. Women unconstrained by economic insecurity will choose socially dominant Alpha males and are willing to share them. Women are uninterested in the main in marriage, certainly to non-dominant men. Look at what many of these men are saying. They are staying with their parents because it’s the only AFFECTION they get.
What happens when their parents die as they will?
You’ll have a bunch of men in their forties or fifties, unconstrained by any human affection, with IMHO highly negative views of women, and no prospect of ever changing.
I would bet highly on the prospect of restrictions on women’s lives in all sorts of ways in the next ten years in Italy and elsewhere (including the US). What’s the comeback for men living alone (when their parents inevitably die)? What women will continue to not sleep with them?
[That so many men are forgoing even the hope of a live-in girlfriend with sex/intimacy on a daily basis says volumes on the absolute certainty with which these men have assessed their chances with women. Which must be considered zero. Such is the wages of de-facto polygamy.]
