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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No, a man marries a woman and the government as an unwelcome third party to every marriage.
And that government? It treats such contractual parties as aggregates, statistical samples, to its own benefit.
Arguably The Pill just helped it along.
American men gave women political and social freedom such as never seen before in human history. Women could do anything. An inordinate number of them chose degeneracy, whoring, Socialism, single-motherhood, children with multiple fathers, and showing their naked bodies on the internet.
Women didn't change. They were set free from the checks against their base nature. We're seeing them as they have always been. Our ancestors knew the true nature of women.
"The most elaborate cruelty in the way of insolence and insult is unpunishable by the law when committed by the wife. The husband remains bound to support his torturer, who may publicly waylay and insult him, harass him at his work, procure his dismissal, libel him by postcards sent to his workshop, or to his club. If he be a rich man, he can get some tardy redress in the way of palliation; but he remains liable to divorce and expropriation at his wife's behest. Now the feminine noblesse can torture their slaves with impunity. If the husband retaliates, the magistrate's order promptly consigns him to gaol and the prisoners' lash." - Ernest Belford Bax 'The Legal Subjection of Men' (1896)
"[Chivalry is] the deprivation, the robbery from men of the most elementary personal rights in order to endow women with privileges at the expense of men." - Ernest Belfort Bax "The Fraud of Feminism " (1913)
Maybe I’m a nutcase, but I’ve always liked men better than my fellow women. A childhood thing. Had the worlld’s greatest dad and a mother who hated me. Always liked animals better than people too..So I live alone with a cat and have as many male friends as women friends.
“I’ve slept with a hundred men and I can’t find any good men.”
Honey, the problem is you
And when they act like them, men reject them.
And while men reject women who act like them, they expect women to accept men.......so they expect women to accept what they themselves reject.......
I doubt any of the women haters see the irony here.
No, the problem is that men who sleep around aren’t good men either.
Just from my experience...
My father was probably the most lonely bored man I knew. Everyday for decades the same thing. Get up. Go to work. Come home. Eat a dull dinner maybe once in a while prepared by my mother. Take a shower. Go to bed. Rinse and repeat....for 40 years until dropping dead. Not a single day of his life filled with solitude or the adventure being a solo man can be. I did not want that life so never got married or had kids (that I know of) and can say I don’t regret it at all.
And look around at other marriages? How many are enjoyable happy marriages? How many can you look at and say “I want that.” Even on TV scripted marriages? Who would want that even? Stories like this make men out to have some sort of responsibility to breed the next generation of taxpayers and an endless ATM to fund people who hate us. Well. There are plenty of people being born and when the reward is nothing, it is no wonder men would check out of society’s traditional rolls we could be proud of. Men built civilization. And the people who benefit most from it are destroying it.
They are all tainted. Doesn’t matter where you meet women now with tiktok and the internet.
Women! You can’t live with them; pass the pretzels.
My father and mother acted like boyfriend and girlfriend for their entire 52 year marriage. My wife and I had a similar relationship through our 48 years of marriage.
Both were Catholic marriages.
,,, the upshot is - life has become a lot better for cats over the last few decades.
Best post of this thread by T.B. Yoits, The fact that a woman can accuse a man of rape and be proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that he is entirely unequivocally innocent and the female who knowingly accused the man faces no repercussions is huge. Add that to how easily a woman can get a Divorce and the wallet(the man) has is on the hook for child support/health insurance and in some instances the childrens college costs. A time frame of 18 to 22 years while he still needs to maintain his own existence or could possibly be incarcerated for non-payment. F’ing brutal. I went through the divorce thing once and ever re married . I now build boats (my own business) in a shop on my property which is fully paid for and never set an alarm and answer to no one but God. Congratulations females YOU PLAYED YOURSELVES. Chivalry is dead because of your ignorance/arrogance.
I’ve said it before. Every society settled on monogamy because it incentivizes the maximum number of men to work hard and be willing to defend that society. Women’s natural inclination seems to be to just go for the Chads even if it means being one of the Chad’s harem instead of pairing up with a man at her own level of attractiveness. The more government steps in to provide resources, the greater the temptation to revert to this.
Many single men without families thus have no incentive to work and if the West is ever pushed to the wall the politicians will find, no incentive to defend a society that views them as worthless and disposable. 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.
It’s as simple as men don’t want to enter into, won’t stand for, a hostile relationship.
My two questions before going out with my amazing husband were these—is he a Trump fan, does he like dogs? Once I knew he said yes to both, I was willing to go out with him. We hit it off like gangbusters. My best life was with him. He just passed away due to the horrible health care in NC. But we had an amazing time together.
You would prefer living in mud huts?
Regards,
I have a young engineer who works for me like this.
He’s smart, tall, athletic, funny. the office girls says he’s “very good looking”.
Churchgoer, hunter, lives on a small farm right outside town with his dad. Very politically conservative.
He had serious girlfriends in HS and college.
People try to match make him all the time. He’s literally said “women are not worth the trouble.”
I will say I knew his mother (she was crazy and left). So this may be the source of his poor opinion.
The men and women described in this article are all without God and have chosen to live without and outside of the man/woman husband/wife, family structure taught in God’s word. He created men and women, each in a way that they compliment each other, and each is important in their own way. But this whole structure which insures happiness, is intrinsically dependent on men and women living within God’s structure.
It is not surprising that a majority of people have ended up miserable and hating each other. Biblical prophecy tells us that it will happen and become more and more prevalent in our world as they become more and more self-centered and anti-God.
This particular item in the narrative is poorly presented and misleading. In fact, it’s probably not even relevant to the author’s underlying point. The reason for this is that the “aged 16 and over” statistic has no upper limit, and the size of the total potential work force in the U.S. includes everyone ages 16 and over who is not in school, in prison, or in a nursing home.
U.S. labor participation rates have declined over the last 80 years mainly because more and more Americans today are RETIRED, not because of any of the factors the author discusses here.
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