Posted on 05/22/2026 8:23:08 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
The warning signs have been there for decades.
Back in 1983, American author Barbara Ehrenreich wrote a powerful book — The Hearts of Men: American Dreams and the Flight from Commitment — arguing that a male revolt was underway. Since the 1950s, she suggested, men had begun rebelling against the breadwinner ethic, inspired by Playboy culture, the counterculture and a desire for personal freedom. They were rejecting the cultural ideology that had shamed them into tying the knot and becoming a good provider, lest they be seen as immature, irresponsible and less than a real man.
Ehrenreich understood that marriage was the mechanism by which society harnessed male productivity. Remove the shame and the yoke comes off.
Forty years on, the yoke has disappeared. In April 2026, the American male labour force participation rate hit its lowest level since records began in the 1940s, according to the US Bureau of Labour Statistics. One in three American men — roughly 33% — were not working or actively looking for work. The overall male participation rate for men aged 16 and over stood at just 67%, down from 73.5% two decades ago and from 87% in the postwar years when Ehrenreich’s story begins.
The trend is not confined to America. Similar declines — though less dramatic than in the United States — have occurred in the UK, Australia and Canada.
The marriage collapse runs in lockstep with the workforce data. According to US Census Bureau data, married-couple households made up 71% of all US households in 1970; today it’s just 47%. As University of Virginia sociologist Brad Wilcox documents in his 2024 book Get Married, the marriage rate has fallen 65% in the last half century.
Ehrenreich had made the argument that marriage and productivity were inseparable — that the same mechanism which got men to the altar got them to work. The data suggest she was right.
What Ehrenreich did not fully reckon with — and could not have foreseen in 1983 — was that the inducements for tying the knot would collapse. The shame mechanism has disappeared, yes. But the incentive has simultaneously imploded. The product on offer has changed beyond recognition. If you want to understand why men are voting with their feet, you need to look not just at what marriage now costs them — and the costs are severe — but at what it delivers. Increasingly, what it delivers is a pretty dud deal.
The modern woman: a prospectus:
They are the most miserable, anxious and insecure cohort in living memory — hardly great marriage material.
Most married women go off sex — and the husband who objects is seen as the problem.
Many women don’t actually like men very much. The more educated she is, the higher the contempt.
They’ve gone full throttle Left — and three quarters of college-educated women won’t even date a man who votes differently.
They’ve rigged the education system and colonised corporate and institutional life, turning universities and workplaces into man-repellent factories.
Yet their hypergamy is still running hot. Despite outnumbering men in education and careers, they still demand a tall, equally high-status unicorn.
The modern female threat-detection system is hyperactive. Almost any male behaviour — silence, opinions, jokes, breathing — gets flagged as a red flag.
They’re extremely well-versed in the lucrative economics of divorce, including a well-timed false allegation to eliminate tedious shared parenting.
What rational man reads this list and thinks: yes, that’s exactly what’s been missing from my life?
To examine more carefully what is going on here, let’s start by looking at the latest addition to this sorry reckoning. I’m referring to the finding published in the New Statesman last month that many young women don’t like men.
A Merlin Strategy poll of young Britons aged 18 to 30 found three times more young women than young men held a negative view of the opposite sex. Only about 50% of women had a positive view of men compared to 72% of men feeling positive about women. For women under 25, it was even starker: only around one-third (35%) reported a positive view of men. This applies particularly to professional and managerial young women of whom just 36% hold a positive view of men, compared with 61% of working-class women.
The contempt for men is hardly surprising – that’s what they have been taught. Mary Harrington, a British journalist and cultural critic who writes on Substack, frequently criticises what she calls the “femosphere” — the online feminist spaces where women bond through shared grievances about men.
“The online feminist scene often feels like one long group therapy session for women to compare notes on how awful men are,” she writes, suggesting this makes men the universal scapegoat, where ordinary male behaviour is routinely framed as toxic or oppressive, while women’s collective resentment is rewarded and amplified. “Casual, low-level male-bashing has become the background hum of progressive online culture.”
Not only does this toxic climate encourage women to be wary of men, but growing up in a hate-fuelled online sewer takes a toll on their mental health.
Psychologist Jonathan Haidt has long been warning that the toxic world of social media would lead to a rise in mental health problems, particularly in girls and young women.
“Since the early 2010s, young people across the developed world are becoming more anxious, depressed and lonely. The increases were even greater in young women,” he said.
Recent large-scale surveys (Ipsos 202-–2026 across 31 countries, Gallup 2025) are showing Gen Z women currently report the highest recorded levels of anxiety, persistent sadness, hopelessness and depression of any female generation at the same age.
Not much fun for their partners. Last year Psychology Today had a stark warning for men about these women as marriage prospects.
The saying ‘happy wife, happy life’ may have some validity, but the lesser-known saying ‘anxious wife, miserable life’ has research-approved validation. … The more neurotic the spouse is, the less happy the relationship — but women’s neuroticism seems to carry more weight in the overall marital happiness equation.
Then there’s the intriguing issue of married women turning off the tap, leaving sex-starved husbands as the norm. For as long as anyone can remember, men were shamed into showing up economically. Society has absolutely nothing to say to women who stop showing up sexually. One obligation was enforced by church, law and community for centuries. The other is now abrogated on the grounds of bodily autonomy.
So here we have the portrait of the modern woman as marriage prospect: miserable, anxious, politically radicalised, contemptuous of men, often sexually rejecting and trained to see menace in ordinary male behaviour. And yet the puzzled chorus from commentators, economists and policymakers continues: why won’t men commit? Why won’t they work?
The approved explanations are dutifully trotted out. The economic story: men have been displaced by automation and globalisation. The health story: opioids, disability, mental illness. The educational story: men are falling behind women in universities and therefore in the job market. The cultural story, favoured by progressive commentators: toxic masculinity is preventing men from adapting to a modern service economy. All of these contain a grain of truth. But they do not account for what is really going on. The obvious explanation — the one staring out of every data table — is intentionally ignored.
Marriage was the primary incentive for sustained male economic effort. It has always been — Ehrenreich knew it in 1983, and the economists have now confirmed it. There’s an economic research paper, ‘The Declining Labour Market Prospects of Less-Educated Men, which establishes that the prospect of forming and providing for a family constitutes a critical male labour supply incentive, and that the decline of stable marriage directly removes it. Researchers at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas calculated that declining marriage rates are responsible for roughly half the drop in the hours men work.
Remove the marriage and you remove the responsibility. The data have been telling us this for decades.
But here is what nobody in the mainstream conversation will say: it is not only that marriage has become too costly and too legally treacherous for men — though it has. It’s that many young women themselves have become, to put it plainly, not worth having. Half of young British women don’t trust men. More than half of educated young women view men negatively. They arrive at relationships pre-loaded with grievance, primed by algorithms that have fed them a diet of male failure and female outrage since adolescence. They are, by their own account, anxious, miserable and politically furious.
What rational man, surveying this landscape, concludes that what his life is missing is a legally booby-trapped commitment to a woman primed to be impossible to keep happy?
Ehrenreich feared in 1983 that if the shame mechanism collapsed, male productivity would follow. She was right. What she could not have anticipated was the other half of the equation — that the feminist revolution would produce not a generation of fulfilled, generous, companionable women, but one that is, by every available measure, angrier and unhappier than any before it.
The yoke is off. The men have looked at what’s on offer. And many have, with considerable rationality, decided to go and play video games instead.
As one of Australia’s first sex therapists, Bettina Arndt began her career discussing sex on television and training doctors and other professionals in sexual counselling at a time when such topics were largely taboo. Her current – and even more socially unacceptable – passion is exposing Australia’s unfair treatment of men through the relentless weaponisation of laws and policies that portray women solely as victims. Her decades of advocacy for fair treatment of men in the Family Court included serving on key government inquiries. Bettina makes YouTube videos and blogs on Substack.
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And the birthrate still declines, showing that "solution" isn't working.
If men are winning, then why are you still posting comments about all of the bias men face?
I don't share my thoughts because I think it will change the minds of people who think differently. I share my thoughts to show the people who think like me that they're not alone. In this case in particular, Bettina Arndt who wrote the piece for 'The Daily Sceptic' is promoting falsehoods as to the cause of why men are opting out.
You don't need to be a woman to know how ready men are to sell out for the promise, no matter how slight, of getting some.
Apparently less ready, hence the article. Hence the trend over the last few decades.
Men are increasingly choosing pornography because "the promise, no matter how slight, of getting some" isn't even worth more than $3.99 per month to OnlyFans.
The ‘Creepy’ Trend Targeting OnlyFans Models
Men are making it no longer their problem. That's the point of opting out.
Male homelessness is five time that of women. 80% of suicides are men. Boys commit suicide at almost twice the rate of girls. How has watching porn fixed any of this?
So, without evidence, readers can just assign intent to other commenters.
No, the readers can look into this for themselves.
As for men getting screwed, we wouldn't be reading these stories if it wasn't women now getting screwed by the system (that they worked to create).
Then go back to your porn activism, while women raise the generation that will take care of THEM when they're old, and won't even care who you are. Whose problem will that be?
No, soyboys opted out. Not a man in sight.
Like going to a modern riot, just to get laid.
But this article is about the MEN opting out of marriage, starting in the 1950s. So I’m trying to find out why the MEN started opting out, even when the women were still being traditional wives and mothers.
“This is what the politicians in Western Europe are going to find out. A LOT of the native men will not fight for you. If they have nothing, then they have nothing to lose.”
You may be interested in the book “Submission”. Western men turning to Islam to regain their self respect and rightful place in society.
>all of this come down to population control.
I follow, but IMO the population control (and migration) are not accidents either but means to an end.
They lead to a subservient population that can be ruled, which is what the human elites want (except the muhammedans will pillage right over them instead of taking orders, but that’s a separate discussion)
Such a subservient population can’t be controlled if they serve God, but only if they’re kept bound up by hatred, jealousy, want, division, laziness, and posessiveness. That’s what the evil one behind the elites wants.
IMO that’s the root cause. “For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places” (Eph 6:12). This is not a metaphor.
>Western men turning to Islam to regain their self respect and rightful place in society.
I fail to see how their rightful place in society is behind a young boy or a goat.
Not necessarily opting out but being rejected by feminism.
I remember Rosie the Riveter during WWII, but once the men came back home, the prevailing story in US culture was that women returned to the home. The 1950s aren't known for women having jobs other than secretary, nurse, and teacher. What jobs were women doing in the 1950s? They weren't swarming the colleges. According to National Geographic, women were only 21% of college students in the mid 50s. It's not a time we point to as a hotbed of feminism. Heck, even in the 1920s, the percentage of women in college was more than twice that.
So you agree with her that men have been abdicating responsibility for decades, you just disagree as to why?
Apparently fewer and fewer. The point of the article is that fewer women are raising the next generation. (On a related note, having children to take care of you in your old age is damn selfish and completely dehumanizing to those children).
...and won't even care who you are.
Not like they ever did. That's one point the article intentionally redirects away from. Men have awaken to the truth that women don't care about men. Women aren't innocent bystanders in this. They've voted for it and actively support it. They pretended they cared but once social media took off, women couldn't help themselves but go online and expose their callousness, indifference, and outright contributions.
Feminism didn't free women from the oppression they were told they were under, it freed men from the oppression they didn't know they were under.
Whose problem will that be?
Women's. It's already their problem. As the article points out, men are opting out.
According to this book, it started in the 1950s. How did the terms change in the 1950s?
Absolutely not. Women chose government over men and used the force of government against them.
They really thought men would tolerate it, and they were correct for two generations. Men figured out the lies and also the methodology to stop it.
None of this is going to end well...
...but it will end.
Says who? According to the CDC (April 2020), 1946 was when it reached an all-time high of 16.4, and then it declined to 8.4 by 1958. That's pretty darn significant, so the author was right to say it started in the 1950s. We've never reached that high again, not even close. So again I ask WHY. WHY in the 1950s. What were women doing wrong? (Because I know on FR, it's always the women who are in the wrong, I'm only humbly asking my masters WHAT exactly we did wrong even in the 1950s.)
Why? Says who? You have a source for that?
In the 1950s? Women chose government over men in the 1950s?
In my experirnce, men opted in
In the mid/late sixties, men married early to avoid the draft. Virtually all my friends and college friends married and thus avoided the draft.
The fact is that most of the men remained in these marriages for decades.
There are probably numerous contributions to feminism. Amongst them would be bored housewives, who listen to their husbands day and think he’s having a ball when he only shared the highlights.
Money is an aphrodisiac for women. To not have to depend on a husband, even if they were just transferring their dependent nature onto government and a boss, feels pretty good.
Corporations found they could double the productivity without doubling the wages.
Governments found they could double the tax base by having twice the workers.
Leftists wanted women in the work place in order to destroy the family. Every place where leftism took hold, one of the things they always did was get women into the workplace so children could be raised and propagandized by the government.
I’m not downplaying your experience, I’m just trying to find out why—nationwide—the marriage rate started going down after 1946. We all know it’s women’s fault (somehow, always). I’m just trying to find out what women were doing wrong even in the 1950s.
She said it "started" in the 1950s. We know from the data that marriage rates were still quite high and sustained in the 50s and 60s so though it may have "started" it was not very prevalent. So the terms of marriage must not have changed much in the 1950s.
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