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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???
Now I've read it all. Whoo boy.
Men "gamed the system" to give women alone the right to choose whether a child lives or dies?
Men "gamed the system" so that a man cannot remove financial responsibility for children as a woman could?
Men "gamed the system" to get thrown in prison if a man can't pay child support, instead of getting the government to give him money, housing, and even transportation, as a women gets if she can't pay?
Men "gamed the system" to pay child support with zero confirmation that the money is being spent on the child?
Men "gamed the system" to have men's Toxic Masculinity" vilified?
Men "gamed the system" so that a man can only show aggression when it's in the service of government but allow women to show aggression freely and are encouraged them to do so?
Men "gamed the system" so that women can lie about paternity of a child without fear of being charged for paternity fraud?
Men "gamed the system" so that the state can even force the cucked father to continue paying for a child PROVEN to not be his?
Men "gamed the system" so that a woman can falsely accuse a man of rape and when caught lying will face no charges?
Men "gamed the system" so they could be drafted into war by female politicians and voters who are not subject to the draft?
Men "gamed the system" to spend little to nothing on men's cancer research and treatment?
Men "gamed the system" to be excluded from consideration for college admissions, jobs, opportunities, and scholarships?
A friendly dispute: It sounds more as though you're saying that the urologist would want the wife's release. Your original statement frames it as the doctor requiring her permission, as though the husband were legally incompetent or under his wife's guardianship.
Suggested new statement:
"Some urologists ask married men to document that their wife has been notified or has acknowledged the decision, because if a vasectomy fails (meaning: the wife gets pregnant), the wife could otherwise join a lawsuit. But the husband does not legally need his wife's consent - the requirement is about liability protection, not permission."The fact that some gynecologists might not require the same sort of "liability release" might be due to female sterilization operations being more sure-fire; there is virtually no danger of the operation failing.
Regards,
The porn activism is YOUR focus, not mine. Porn activism is promoted by feminists.
As I simply pointed out, pornography is being used by men who've decided to opt out of relationships with women. It's not a cause of the declining birthrate in the U.S., it's a symptom.
Second, all of this is proof that your porn activism is a hopeless failure.
And lastly, it was moistly men who passed the laws that allowed all of this.
“...that it is men, not the women who are gaming the system”
Gaming?
Half the man’s assets, his house, his kids, 18 years of child support and paying a 15 year salary to the cheater. What man wouldn’t want to play the Simp-to-Servitude game?
I’m beginning to see you’re punking all of us. You’re point, or whatever is left of it, is clearly indefensible. I’m sure I’m not the only one who sees this.
You also misread my comments. Read the whole comment again.
Punking?
There are none so blind as those who will not see.
I rest my case.
Details, details......
You insist on calling it porn activism, either deceptively or ignorantly. Maybe it's projection on your part. I can also start the ad hominem attacks. Just say the word.
And lastly, it was mostly men who passed the laws that allowed all of this.
No. This began after women got the right to vote.
If your idea of real manhood is a muslim, you have got some very serious, significant problems.
>>>>Western men turning to Islam to regain their self respect and rightful place in society.<<<
No. 6 “I fail to see how their rightful place in society is behind a young boy or a goat.”
Or beating and selling women.
Pure speculation there, with no basis.
Just a claim....
REBUTTAL:
Identifying the "Playboy Philosophy" as a causative agent has about as much justification as assigning blame to Richard Wagner and Friedrich Nietzsche for Adolph Hitler's rise to power.
Hefner's Philosophy wasn't a precursor (in the sense of "causative agent") to feminism. When he launched the magazine in 1953, the first issue was printed in a run of only about 50,000 copies and assembled in his kitchen. Hefner said openly that he created the magazine as a reaction to the stifling, feminized domesticity of the post‑WWII household — a manifesto for the urban bachelor who rejected early marriage, suburban conformity, and the breadwinner‑provider trap.
The magazine didn't become a cultural phenomenon until much later. In its early years, it was a niche, aspirational lifestyle publication, not a motor of political change.
It should thus be seen more a reaction to growing "feminization" than an initiator of cultural shifts.
Regards,
Men, faithfully blame-shifting from the Garden.
I don't want to overstate the singular influence of one Disney movie - but I am inclined to give it some credence. This particular movie may have indeed helped to "normalize" divorce - and esp. "divorce on a mere whim" (I am only superficially familiar with the movie, but guess that the husband had not been jailed for curb-stomping the wife, nor that the wife had been caught being "tag-teamed" by the local bowling league - so it's safe to assume that the grounds were trivial).
Regards,
Metmom you are appealing to an agnostic/atheist BTW. If you want to shift this to a theological point in the face of modernism you best get your fellow females off that “Independence”/need no man/girrrllll powahhh/slay queen shtick. God created women because He did not man alone, hence God created the sexes to compliment each other.
They ("Rosie the Riveter" and her ilk) were, for the most part, thrown back out on their ear after the war ended (the "war heroes" were returning to their peace-time workplaces and were, naturally, accorded priority). The subsequent "Baby Boom" wouldn't have happened if the women had really resisted. For the most part, they were happy to discard their welding masks and work gloves and return to the kitchen.
Thus, for the sake of conceptual clarity, I am choosing to consider only factors noticeable after, say, 1946.
The mere fact that "Rosie & Co." had temporarily existed did, of course, leave an impression; it marked a sociological / cultural milestone - but the actual phenomenon (mass female employment - with many women occupying traditional male roles) was rolled back so quickly, that it remained only as a memory.
A powerful memory - but only a memory, nonetheless.
Regards,
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