Posted on 09/03/2017 11:34:00 AM PDT by EdnaMode
Thanks to cheap sex, marriage may be doomed.
The share of Americans ages 25-34 who are married dropped 13 percentage points from 2000 to 2014. A new book by sociologist Mark Regnerus blames this declining rate on how easy it is for men to get off.
Regnerus calls it “cheap sex,” an economic term meant to describe sex that has very little cost in terms of time or emotional investment, giving it little value.
Regnerus bases his ideas, in part, on the work of British social theorist Anthony Giddens, who argued that the pill isolated sex from marriage and children. Add online pornography and dating sites to the mix and you don’t even need relationships.
The result is “two overlapping (but distinctive) markets, one for sex and one for marriage, with a rather large territory in between comprised of significant relationships of varying commitment and duration,” Regnerus writes in “Cheap Sex: The Transformation of Men, Marriage, and Monogamy” (Oxford University Press).
In generations past, women generally made men wait until marriage to have sex. To get a wife (and, therefore, sex), men had to be clean and presentable and have a good job. This, Regnerus reasons, gave men all the motivation they needed to become respectable members of society.
Now with porn on-demand and greater reproductive freedom, sex is a commodity available at any time. This has left men with little motivation for marriage, writes Regnerus, who cites demographer Steven Ruggles’ prediction that one of every three people in their 20s will never marry.
(Excerpt) Read more at nypost.com ...
>>Well, with the current laws, I’ve met women who’ve had to pay “support” for an ex-husband who simply refused to work or (in one case) because he couldn’t get a job because he was a child molester.
Is that just an anecdote or are you seriously claiming that this occurs often enough to have statistical significance as a driver for culture?
>>Once upon a time, men may not have set out to become fathers,
Again, this is a half-truth. Men did set out to be fathers in Puritan New England because 1) carrying on the name was important 2) making babies was socially required and 3) it was economically necessary to have farm help and someone to care for you in old age. But, there was the saying that the gestation period for a human is random for the first child and nine months for all the others.
>>The problem is our new non-Christian culture.
You are absolutely right. But that covers most of our problems. If you narrow the focus down to particular causes of men not marrying, then you need to get more specific than “them mens be a’needin’ some Jeezus!”
And they expect men to be impressed with their career. It doesn't work that way.
If your son is 19 or 20 and if he is actually saving money..that is one thing.
But if he is pushing 30..and hasnt put a dime away...you are being used by your own offspring.
The closer he gets to 30 the harder the excuse becomes why he is single and still living at home.
I don’t think it is cheap sex, I think it is expensive marriage. If you have an iffy job and your girl wants to be treated like a princess, easier to just hook up.
You are a bit out of touch here.
I just saw your loopy post to me talking about Rome, the bible and English policemen. It made no sense to me and I can see why you haven’t been too lucky with women. That’s part of the problem here; some men just can’t get it together. Women sense that, you know.
I agree; I think it is a sound response to a crappy economy when the young people aren’t starting their own families - especially in a state like NJ, where property taxes are high and retirees can’t stay in their homes because their fixed incomes won’t cover those taxes.
If I wasn’t married with a family, I’d probably still live at home - and couldn’t care less how much “society” tried to force me out. They wanted to marginalize men, they got it; now they can enjoy the consequences.
That's just plain weird.
That is an official statistic that was released for several years now, and I have college-age sons. Very much “in touch”...
It is; they just re-defined the term. Don’t label them! /s
Getting married is like handing a woman a loaded gun, that she can use at any time she wants.
Why get married?
Not all of us.
I reflect thankfully every day about my marriage and the wonderful woman I married. Yes, I went through a divorce from a long term marriage, but twenty years ago I married the girl that gives me joy each day.
I cannot imagine not being married to her.
You’re out of touch. Completely. My pretty, kind, hardworking, endearing cleaning woman (35 years old) cannot find a marriageable man because all the men disdain her “low class job”. I think Charles Murray even wrote a book about this!
Yeeee! Haaaw! ZZTop wrote “Mexican Blackbird” just for us.
I offer my love sonnet that I wrote for my wife yesterday on our 39th wedding anniversary, begging your indulgence, “We poets do crave immortality,” said Breaker Morant.
I dipped my pen my mighty love to scribe,
But found no sound that would its breadth surround,
My heart its depth I thought I might describe,
But found no cord that could so deeply sound.
Love’s composition glorious might be writ,
And sung by shining angels to the skies,
But stretch’d beside its purpose, poorly fit,
My feeble poem falling short, it dies.
But ah, when length of time to say, my lov’d,
The answer lept with joy to tongue and pen,
For well I knew that moment, well behoov’d,
When love and trothed purpose did begin.
And in between these thirty years and nine,
Love’s all is only thee and mine is thine.
“When I look at other couples in public, a lot of them just seem hopelessly out of shape. They way they walk and act implies they are damaged in some way. I rarely, if ever, noticed that growing up.”
Oh please! I noticed older people overweight and out of shape back in the 70’s and 80’s. Granted they were not morbidly obese like a lot are today but women were overweight and older men had “beer bellies”.
You are absolutely correct. My parents were in their prime from the mid 1950s, to the early 1960s. In all the pictures of them from that time period they literally look like movie stars. As you say however the women in the late 1970s to early 1980s were still looking “pretty darn good”. They still were keeping fit... the fashion just started slipping in a long steady slide to the nasty looking Chinese relaxed fit fat body suits they wear around these days.
My wife is a retired nurse, she says the worst thing that ever happened to nurse wear was when they dropped the duty dresses and started wearing pajamas (scrubs) with draw strings. Now you've got all of these fat men and women running around in clothes that look like the housekeepers attire. She says you can't tell the nurses and the doctors from the guy who is cleaning the toilet and there is no incentive to keep yourself looking good.
One time my crew and I did an inspection of a Catholic High School. They had pictures of all the graduating classes up on the wall going down the main hall. It was incredible to see the progression from the good looking kids of yesteryear up to the fat bodied slobby kids of today. It is no wonder that 70% can't even get into the army.
My wife and I ride a tandem bicycle to stay fit. It is amazing to me to see that most of the people out riding bicycles these days are 40 or older. There are very few young people who are serious riders.
It was a lot easier to be a virgin on your wedding night when you were getting married two or three years after going through puberty.
Expecting people to remain virgins throughout their 20s and into their 30s is not realistic or natural.
” I’ve met women who’ve had to pay “support” for an ex-husband who simply refused to work or (in one case) because he couldn’t get a job because he was a child molester.”
wait a second! He was a child molester? So why was he even having the kids anyway???!! Oh hell no what is wrong with the courts? Not only should she not be paying anything but he should be no where near those kids.
Please lighten up a bit-we are not all either whores or burqua-wearing servants in need of discipline/chastisement by our man-at least not where I live-as a widow who works for herself, I can do as I damned well please where men are concerned-and if my man EVER laid a hand on me, he would deeply regret it-I may be slender, but I do construction work and I can defend myself.
I have a macho man-a real man who is perfectly fine with a strong woman who is an equal. I do like my space, and so does he-so we have separate residences, but everyone knows we are a couple. We both have cats, work full-time-I’m like a lot of the widowed or divorced women out here-we don’t like metrosexuals-or men who have a need to rule over us-both can turn abusive in a heartbeat...
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