Men on Strike. Helen Smith
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have graduated from good schools, and have simply zero interest in women. They just have literally nothing in common with them and no interest in them.
The “strike” theory is generally correct, I think. The problem is that games and porn are entertaining, inexpensive, easily accessible, and reliable. Women can be entertaining, but they’re expensive, inaccessible for most men, and from the male perspective, shockingly unreliable. I would say that porn has raised the bar somewhat—it’s bound to be seriously annoying when Little Miss Real Life won’t give head when Jane Pornstar is twice as hot and is cheerfully performing all sorts of acrobatic stunts. And if you think about it, is a real woman who is average and only wants to have missionary-style sex once a week, minus a week for her period, actually any better than a wide variety of gorgeous porn stars catering to every bizarre fetish the Japanese can imagine and available on demand? It’s not quite so clear once you put it in those terms. The biggest communication problem is that most women see “relationship” as a positive thing. Most men see it as an ambiguous thing. So, when the selling point of Little Miss Real Life over Jane Pornstar is “relationship,” you can see where it’s not going to be very appealing. I don’t think there’s much of a “fuck you” element, though. The guys who think that way tend to be the players, particularly the Sigma players. A lot of the guys who opt out aren’t particularly angry at women, they just don’t see much point to pursuing involvement with them.40
Are video games that good, or are they giving those 76 percent of men who have to share 24 percent of the women a place to go where they feel good, masculine and alive, and where they feel more like an Alpha? Or as James Taranto of the Wall Street Journal said about guys who prefer video games to girls: “there’s a reason they’re attracted to that particular pursuit. Video games are a simulacrum of masculine virtue: challenge, mastery, control.”41 The Alpha question? That will have to be a question for future research. Meanwhile, let’s toss in some real-life guys who can shed more light on the marriage question.
WHAT MEN IN THE GYM AND AT THE BAR ARE SAYING ABOUT MARRIAGE
Eight out of ten girls my age today are “sketchy.”
—Twenty-three-year-old Max at the gym on why men don’t want to get married early
Marriage is a dying concept.
—Twenty-four-year-old Jamie, when asked why men don’t get married as often
I continued my search for everyday men out and about in the world and decided that the local gym might be a good place to informally target men who might be willing to talk about their views on marriage. I had been watching young and middle-aged men at a local gym for weeks and sizing up a few as potential interviewees. As I stared and watched many of them working out with weights, I caught their eyes and was a bit afraid that they thought I was a cougar on the prowl for some fresh prey. If only they knew it wasn’t that exciting. I was just there trying to find some potential research victims.
I finally approached a guy named “Max” who agreed to participate when I explained my book and need for his input. He seemed a bit reluctant at first, but when I told him that his interview would be anonymous and his name would be changed, he agreed. I could tell that he wasn’t sure if he should say anything negative and searched my face for a reaction. When he saw that I wasn’t upset or angered by anything that he said, he seemed to speak more openly about how men feel about marriage and women.
Max was a thoughtful twenty-three-year-old, muscular, white college student with blond hair from Michigan who told me up front that he had a girlfriend. “Do you want to get married?” I asked, to which he replied, “yes,” but admitted he was one of the “lucky” ones. When I asked him why, he stated that his girlfriend was trustworthy and honest, kind of like himself. He had been dating her for about a year and things had been going well.
He was raised by a single mother and his father left when he was young. His stepfather came into the home and acted as his dad, and his mother became a very happy person. “It was so much better with my stepfather there. My mother wasn’t lonely anymore. One of my uncles is divorced and I see how alone and lonely he is. My sister is also divorced, so yeah, I think about how marriage might not work out.” Max seemed a bit naive when it came to the legalities of marriage, stating that he had taken some classes in college on law but he didn’t know much about family court. He assumed that if he got divorced because his wife had cheated on him or done something wrong, the courts would be fair and lean in his favor. He did acknowledge, however, that “our society has shifted towards women. Even my stepdad makes all the money and my mother makes all the choices.”
Max didn’t seem quite as naive when it came to choosing women. “Most of my friends won’t even consider marriage until their late twenties. A couple of them have been in love and got hurt when they were younger and I think that’s why they don’t want to get married now. I think girls a long time ago, maybe forty or fifty years ago, were doing less cheating and were more trustworthy. Now girls are more like guys used to be. I would say that eight out of ten girls now are ‘sketchy’ and about six or seven guys out of ten are those that girls can trust.”
When I questioned him as to what “sketchy” meant, he replied that “a lot of girls today are crazy partiers; they flirt with other people and have sex with other guys. If they sleep with you on the first date, they are more likely to go off with someone else while they are with you. I think that’s why guys are waiting to get married; they have to go through eight of the ten girls to find the two that aren’t sketchy.”
I asked Max if it was available sex that made it more attractive to stay single, but his feeling seemed to be that readily available sex wasn’t necessarily the reason that guys didn’t want to marry. He explained that readily available sex, though, was a marker of a possibly untrustworthy woman; if she slept with you on the first date, she might sleep with your buddy on the next one. “My girlfriend made me wait,” he stated. He also added that as an accounting major, he did a cost-benefit analysis of marriage and felt that, for him, the benefits outweighed the costs. He does think he is unusual in his desire for marriage, as many of his friends have no interest.
In the past, having a sketchy wife who cheated was frowned upon and there were repercussions to her for doing so. Now cheating women are celebrated and encouraged by the culture. Even Whoopi Goldberg nonchalantly talked about how she cheated on her husband with little judgment or repercussions by society. In an interview, she stated, “is screwing around five or six times while married and with different men for that matter something you can say casually? In the celebrity world perhaps.”42 But if you are Tiger Woods, you can be hit in the head with a golf club if you cheat and society cheers on your wife for being empowered. You will also lose much of your income and assets in divorce court and may even lose your kids, even if the wife cheats. And you are always cast as the bad guy: People wonder what you did to make your wife cheat. If a man cheats, on the other hand, the wife is a victim and he’s a louse who deserves punishment.
Now that the risk in marriage for men is so high, guys must be much more careful about whom they marry. Neither the law nor the culture will support them if they make the wrong choice. Women are the empowered sex and their sexuality is celebrated. Men’s sexuality is much more controlled by the legal system and society, even—or maybe especially—in marriage.
My next interviewee at the gym was Jamie, a twenty-four-year-old who sells gym memberships and works fifty to sixty hours a week. He grew up in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and told me that his parents had been married twenty-seven years. “I don’t plan to get married until I am around thirty and I can afford it.” Jamie went to community college and has an associate’s degree in business administration. He would like to go on to a four-year college but said that he heard there was a high drop-out rate at the local state college and he didn’t know if it would be worth it.
He is living with two other male friends who are around his age and he pays his own way. He has a girlfriend and said that they go out on weekend nights when he has time, but he likes to sleep and cook when he is at home and doesn’t have a lot of time. “For most of my friends, marriage is the furthest thing from their mind,” he stated, and explained, “My generation