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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That's included in my "2. Urbanization/mobility and less community policing" and "9. Shifts in parental authority."
"Community" encompasses close relatives (parents, aunts, uncles, etc.), and "parental authority" includes that as well.
Regards,
That's a very specific issue, and one I'm not really qualified to discuss.
(I had initially thought that you were addressing broader issues, like violence against women in all its forms, and that "bullying" was merely an example. With respect to the broader issue, I can do no more than simply say that it is wrong to villainize "men" collectively for the sins of a few.)
Re. your rebuttal that the aforementioned phenomenon ("bullying of schoolboys by schoolgirls") has been going on for decades: I can only repeat that I am not qualified to discuss this.
Re. my reference to "Boiling Frog" / "Camel's Nose": You forget that any given cohort of fathers probably only saw a narrow temporal window, during which time no significant change was observable. The shift occurred gradually - for any given cohort of fathers, no real change was perceptible. Every successive measure looked to them like a "baby step." And only when court cases made the headlines were fathers actually alerted to the extent of the problem (i.e., that school policies that may, on the surface, appear "innocent" were, in fact, being implemented with a heavy hand).
Regards,
And again, blame shifting.
It’s all women’s fault.....
Adam was with Eve when she ate.
She did not do that all alone.
Why didn’t Adam stop her?
And yes, if men were the head of the family as GOD intended, things would be a lot different. Likewise if women responded to that godly leadership as Scripture states, things would be a lot different. BOTH parties are to blame. It’s not just the fault of one or the other.
But these misogynist fest threads do NOTHING to rectify the situation.
Again with the blurring of lines and the failure to clearly distinguish between "men" and some men!
If you want to rigorously discuss (and hopefully solve) a problem, greater linguistic precision is vital!
20% of the men are siring 80% of the children in a certain important American demographic. If this continues, the ratio might get even worse. This amounts to serial polygyny - only the participants ain't gettin' married. It is, in any case, a form of harem-formation.
So don't (by omission) try to spread the blame!
Regards,
You lose! 😊
A voice of sanity on this thread and at 205 post mark, not one person has responded to your astute observation.
In my private replies it is 80% vs 20% with the 80% being in dull lonely marriages.
It does to me, if I'm trying to have a discussion with you.
EXACTLY! Man cannot be alone.
He didn't create man because women can't be alone! Because we can!!
LOL!! Oooohhhh, thank you.
Throughout this thread I have discussed both. I have discussed the abuse women face from human trafficking (prostitution, porn) and as it turns out, Only Fans, but I also discussed the schools allowing bullying of boys by girls. Maybe all men aren't guilty of participating, but few are doing anything to stop it.
Prove me wrong. Please.
Re. your rebuttal that the aforementioned phenomenon ("bullying of schoolboys by schoolgirls") has been going on for decades:
And you can't see a problem with that? Do you think it would have been allowed to go on for decades if the roles were reversed? Why or why not?
20% of the men are siring 80% of the children in a certain important American demographic. If this continues, the ratio might get even worse. This amounts to serial polygyny - only the participants ain't gettin' married. It is, in any case, a form of harem-formation.
What difference does that make in the context of this debate, which is that men are choosing porn over relationships. The end results is that women are going to have all of the power, and men will only fall further behind.
Anyone who has any doubts can read your first few posts to me on this thread.
I'm done with this. Maybe I'll revisit this thread in five years, and we'll see what progress men have made in fixing these issues.
I’m afraid it will fall on deaf ears.
Is having control over women the only way a man can have self-respect? Wow. Well, that does explain a lot, if nothing else.
Yeah, if you can't understand explanation versus promotion, there's no sense in reading, especially when it's women who promote their accounts OnlyFans, not me.
It's actually WORSE than that.
Dating a woman today is like picking up the baggage from every man in her life who's failed to "make her happy" and being responsible to make amends for all those men that "failed" in her eyes, and then "making her happy" too.
Nope.
Here's the reality for any single woman reading this response: YOU are responsible for your own happiness. No one else but YOU. If you aren't happy yourself, you have no business entering into any relationship with a man and expecting that man to "make you happy." That's a sure-fire recipe for failure and the only person to blame in this case is YOU.
By the way men, the same applies to you (us.)
Can't have a healthy relationship without two people who are already themselves, happy.
Being a modern slut, means you will never fully pair bond.
She’s always thinking another is out there who is perfect.
Men don’t want whores to be raising a family with.
They also know those bitches will take 50% of everything and play victim.
Its not worth the risk.
Women want bad guys they think they will change, then they get dumped with multiple baby daddies.
See. It happen repeatedly. The woman and her “friends “ just deny they had anything to do with circumstances. The men were the big meanies.
Because the premise is nonsense. Men were absolutely breadwinners and blue-pilled husbands and family men in the 50s.
They absolutely were NOT doing any kind of “Playboy lifestyle”.
The rebellion started in the 90s , 20 years after radical feminism took root.
Accurately pointing out that women are to blame isn’t blame -shifting.
This will only end and be reversed by 1)removal of all voting and political rights from women and 2) mass male violence against feminists.
It will eventually become inevitable.
I strongly suggest adhering to the stricter sense of "moral culpability" - i.e., that we not expand the definition to include "passivity."
Otherwise, one could foolishly argue that the European Jews were partially culpable for the Holocaust - because they didn't do enough to stop it.
Unnecessarily expanding the scope of the concept of "moral culpability" to include members of the victim class (i.e., men) who looked away, or didn't notice, and who did too little would derail this conversation.
alexander_busek: Re. your rebuttal that the aforementioned [claim that the] phenomenon ("bullying of schoolboys by schoolgirls") has been going on for decades
And you can't see a problem with that? Do you think it would have been allowed to go on for decades if the roles were reversed? Why or why not?
For the third time: I am not qualified to comment upon that! I know too little about the alleged phenomenon, can't cite statistics, can't "vet" your allegations, can't properly address your concerns. Sorry, but I must opt out of that sub-discussion!
alexander_busek: 20% of the men are siring 80% of the children in a certain important American demographic. If this continues, the ratio might get even worse. This amounts to serial polygyny - only the participants ain't gettin' married. It is, in any case, a form of harem-formation.
What difference does that make in the context of this debate, which is that men are choosing porn over relationships.
That is NOT the focus of the debate in which I am participating. SEE THE TITLE OF THE ARTICLE! (Hint: I regard porn as at most a tangential / side issue - because it is not as acutely moral in its nature. Yes: Porn can be harmful, it can be addictive, and its seamier side has some important societal implications. If you're religious, there might be reason to include it in this debate - i.e., one might then be able to argue that "men are sinning,too" / "men are likewise guilty." But as long as all participants are there voluntarily - true, by and large - then the ethical aspect is minor - in my opinion.)
The end results is that women are going to have all of the power, and men will only fall further behind.
You seem to be confused: You and I are basically on the same side - though you place emphasis on different sub-topics.
I find that the fact that 80% of the men (at least in one important segment) "can't get any" most certainly relevant to the topic at hand! Namely: The reasons for it are revealing (i.e., they reveal the terrible consequences of unleashed female sexual agency), and the results of it are revealing (the sidelining and suffering of vast swathes of the male population and their consequent withdrawal from society).
"No wonder men are opting out," indeed!
Regards,
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