Men on Strike. Helen Smith
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—A commenter named Ernie from PJMedia.com in response to my question, “Should Men Get Married?”1
There are many guys like Ernie all over the country who are no longer getting married. And why should they? Western culture has spent the past fifty years making marriage a better deal for women, while for men it’s become a real ball and chain, sometimes almost literally. Men used to go to work, come home and, after a hard day’s work providing for their families, they rested, ate dinner and felt like “the king of the castle.” Fast forward to today, where the man works all day, comes home to cook or wash dishes, is chided for not doing a good enough job, is relegated to the basement while the wife and kids enjoy the run of the house, and spends the weekends watching the kids with a dirty diaper bag slung across his shoulders or hanging out in a shopping mall holding his wife’s purse. On top of an already stressful life, he also gets a bunch of pitying stares from the younger men who wonder what he has become and how they can avoid the same fate.
Now, instead of equality in marriage, he can expect to share household tasks, act as unpaid bodyguard and home repairman, pay for most of the bills, help with the kids and, for all his efforts, be denigrated by the wife and society. And if he does fight back? He pays child support, gets half or more of his stuff taken and has to leave the house, and he might even get a restraining order or, worse, be charged with child or domestic abuse. What is there to gain?
It’s no wonder that fewer and fewer men are getting married now than in the past. Kay Hymowitz states in her book, Manning Up, that “in 1970, 80 percent of 25-to 29-year-old men were married; in 2007, only about 40 percent of them were. In 1970, 85 percent of 30- to 34-year-old men were married; in 2007, only 60 percent of them were.”2
Men no longer see marriage as being as important as they did even fifteen years ago. “According to Pew Research Center, the share of women ages eighteen to thirty-four that say having a successful marriage is one of the most important things in their lives rose nine percentage points since 1997—from 28 percent to 37 percent. For men, the opposite occurred. The share voicing this opinion dropped, from 35 percent to 29 percent.”3
Even in middle age, fewer men are getting married, especially those without a college degree. The New York Times reports that “about 18 percent of men ages 40 to 44 with less than four years of college have never married, according to census estimates. That is up from about 6 percent a quarter-century ago. Among similar men ages 35 to 39, the portion jumped to 22 percent from 8 percent in that time.”4 Even college-educated men are marrying less often at 84 percent, which is a decline of 9 percent since 1980.5 And the marriage rates in general keep plummeting. According to men’s activists Glenn Sacks and Dianna Thompson:
The US marriage rate has dipped 40% over the past four decades, to its lowest point ever. There are many plausible explanations for this trend, but one of the least mentioned is that American men, in the face of a family court system which is hopelessly stacked against them, have subconsciously launched a “marriage strike.”6
There are many reasons that men are not marrying, and one of them is certainly the marriage strike as described by Sacks and Thompson. However, though family court injustice plays a big part in why men are no longer marrying as often, it is just one aspect. Men have other psychological and legal concerns about marriage in today’s post-feminist society that increase the likelihood of the marriage strike. This chapter will address those concerns and look to answer the question, “Why aren’t men marrying as readily now as they did in the past?”
WHY MEN DON’T MARRY—FROM THE “EXPERTS’ ” PERSPECTIVE
As I read through all of the comments I have received from men around the country over the years on why they do not want to marry, I can’t help but feel that many so-called experts are wrong when they say that men are poor communicators. My interactions and observations show that men often know their minds very well, but they are reluctant to communicate in interpersonal and political settings for fear of coming across as weak or, worse, being accused of being sexist or misogynistic. Or sometimes, they are communicating, it’s just that no one is listening or people are actively rejecting what they say.
I have even had relatives or case workers—almost always women—who tell me that the boy or man they have accompanied for an evaluation or therapy will not talk; they are too closed down. Yet, not once in my twenty-plus-year career has one of those men or boys refused to talk. How did I get them to talk? I listened.
The problem today is that society is not listening to what men have to say if they do open up, and, at the same time, the risks for men in talking about these politically charged issues keep them silent, making it hard to glean the truth. Even those experts or authors who write books on the topic of male reluctance to marry and who profess to be somewhat pro-male seem to get it wrong. What they don’t realize is that the incentives to marry have changed for men, and they are no longer willing to risk so much more than in previous years to gain potentially so much less.
Authors Kay Hymowitz and Kathleen Parker have written books that, on the surface, seem to advocate for men. Hymowitz’s Manning Up: How the Rise of Women Has Turned Men into Boys7 and Kathleen Parker’s Save the Males: Why Men Matter, Why Women Should Care8 are a good start to recognizing the war against men in our society, but the condescending titles alone give the impression that the authors care not so much about men as about how men relate to women. This is not to say these two books aren’t important. They are, as they give some good background on how and why society treats men in unhealthy ways. But I do have some serious criticisms.
Newsflash: If you want to be pro-male, using terms like “child-man in the promised land,” as Hymowitz does, is not the way to do it—and, frankly, comparing “saving the males” to “saving the whales” as Parker’s book does is, well, insulting. It implies that men are comparable to animals, which of course is how some women and their sexist male counterparts think.
When reading through these two books, I get the impression not that men are autonomous beings who deserve equality as equal citizens in a democratic society, but rather that they should be treated well enough so that they will want to marry women, have children and support them so that women will have a better life. I have a different take: I propose that men are autonomous beings who are entitled to justice and equality and the pursuit of their own happiness because they are human beings in a supposedly free society. Too bad this is such a radical departure that a whole book has to be written just to make this point. One would think it would be obvious, but it is not obvious in today’s America.
Other books, such as Guyland9 by Michael Kimmel or Boys Adrift: The Five Factors Driving the Growing Epidemic of Unmotivated Boys and Underachieving Young Men10 by Leonard Sax, along with Hymowitz’s book, treat the men’s lack of interest in marriage as a kind of extended adolescence where men sit around playing video games and farting in order to ward off having to grow up. And all these “guys are losers” types stick together to add fuel to the negative image of men as boys. For example, Richard Whitmire, the author of Why Boys Fail11—another positive title!—endorses Hymowitz’s book by stating:
Kay Hymowitz does an exacting job describing the growing flock of man/children we’re seeing, and she lays out the disturbing reality of the “marriageable mate” dilemma. . . . Not only are there fewer college-educated men to marry, but many of those men who are available are little more than man/children—not anyone you would want your daughters to marry!12
As if that endorsement of Hymowitz’s book isn’t bad enough as an example of the condescension these men’s issues writers have for their subjects, Hymowitz, who professes herself to be “sympathetic” to men,13 has a chapter called “Child-Man in the Promised Land.” This chapter pokes fun at the men of today who refuse to grow up and who also—much to her chagrin—refuse to participate in “more civilized society”:
Nothing attests to the SYM’s [straight young male’s] growing economic and cultural muscle more than video games. Once upon a time, video games were for little