Yeah, when I was in HS, the movie, The Last Picture Show came out. It was one of the earlier movies that made amorality moral. The lead character's girl friend was portrayed as a bitch because she wouldn't have sex with him. The only happy relationship in the movie was a high school boy having an extramarital affair with the coach's wife.
Prior to that, heroes had morphed from the Jimmy Stewart mold to Sean Connery. Stewart almost always played a devoted family man. Connery bedded several women in every one of his movies, even though he never had an emotional attachment to any of them. The James Bond character imprinted on me very strongly, and I suspect a lot of other guys were similarly influenced.
Playboy magazine was also influential. The girls were young, beautiful, and it portrayed a world in which sex was free, easy, and there were no STDs or unwanted pregnancies.
As to the appeal of Playboy, the best description I ever read was that it was a place where a guy who had a job he didn't like and was slightly intimidated by women could, for two dollars, enter a world where cuff links mattered.
I think in some ways men are MUCH more dependent on “love” than society lets on as a whole. They may instinctively crave sex, but perhaps they crave much more deep stuff - maybe even more than women.
My husband admits that looking at Playboy, et al, he once again felt alienated because he realized “these women aren’t ever going to interact with me in any way”, so what was the point of even looking? It only made him sadder to realize he didn’t have anyone to really love (sometimes).