I don’t think that is the case, the more “privledged” layers have traditionally married out of political, economic, and territorial necessity.
If I am a princess, be I ugly or beautiful, I’m in high demand in the territories looking for a alliance with my fathers state.
When it isn’t a landed, but economic issue, it is the portfolios of combining the estates.
Of course, a successful man may chuck this all aside and marry whomever he damn well pleases… especially if he feels secure with his neighbors and liked by his people.
Or, he can have a mistress and legitimize his kids out of necessity (his legit kids all die).
These aren’t the guys fighting over women. That is your perpetually drunkards in the lower class beating one another in the bar over the same skank, half the time she is married.
Your reading too much into traditional pulp fiction, we pass it off as culture today, but it was written to be salacious and to be of interest, for profit or for fame. Only a dipshit fights for pussy, if she demands it, drop the bitch on her ass.
This isn’t the same as your wife or girlfriend being attacked, or you being unprovoked attacked to get to her… that is assault and battery with an intent to rape. Evolution, contrary to the SatyrThink on this forum, doesn’t favor this. How do we know this? We lock them up, hang them in many countries to popular applause. Evolution clearly favors society weeding these fucks out. It isn’t that the rapist has power, or society does… neither do, as power doesn’t exist. But there is a dialectic at play, and most psychological pressures the random individuals within a society has, is aimed at stopping this.
If anything, we lean more towards the bonobo in fucking anything that moves, including women. Look at Nietzsche, more or less a constant cuckold. That didn’t evolve through power aggrandizement, but the need of partners in a relationship sticking to it for the sake of it. No fighting necessary involved, no violence necessary. He may still impregnate her latter on, get away with deposits elsewhere, but he is around to take care of the kids, some of which are likeky his offspring too… hence how that psychology evolved in the first place.
In no society I know of, is male cuckolding openly accepted anymore, Marco Polo encountered a few in central asia, necessarry to avoid inbreeding in isolated villages. This is pressured out more than it is encouraged to continue. Men having mistresses was more common, but that is going bye bye too.
There is the lower class Nietzschean countercultures, but to use a biblical expression, that is built on the sands. No solid foundation. Im doubting a multigenerational, family friendly community can emerge around BDSM. Polyamory maybe, but the results look like shit so far outside the pilygamy of the mornons, which was veru short lived, or in Islam, where it is barely existent anymore.
People do all sorts of crazy shit, it seems like so many trends are inevitable, but it is the stable families producing children who can in return produce more stable offspring. The lower and middle classes are losing their children to drugs fast… lots of deaths, a genocide of sorts. The conservative aspevts exists for a reason… it will assert itself more and more as time goes by as they get greater shares of the genepool.