No Wonder Men Are Opting Out

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.

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.

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.

Adam was with Eve when she ate. She did not do that all alone. Why didn’t Adam stop her?

In Genesis 3:1, the serpent says:

“אַף כִּי אָמַר אֱלֹהִים לֹא תֹאכְלִי”

I.e., “Has God indeed said, you (fem. sg.) shall not eat…?”

The form תֹאכְלִי (“you shall eat”) is unmistakably feminine singular.

The Serpent seduces Eve only - Adam is not being addressed. The verb form makes that unambiguous! We can therefore rightly infer that he is not present. Also: Because he - who was already pre-eminent to Eve, even if not yet the "head" / "ruler" over Eve (that came only after the Fall) - would have certainly interceded, rather than stood by dumbly as the Serpent beguiled Eve.

So Adam was not present. So Eve must have subsequently gone to Adam (who had not been privy to the Serpent's seduction) and independently seduced / beguiled / tempted / enticed Adam.

But let me emphasize: This faith-based discussion is a digression, because we should instead be assigning blame and developing a rationale (a solution) that can be accepted by the American public at large - a great many of whom would resist any conclusions we drew or findings we arrived at based on Theology.

In other words: I would rather stick to the secular arguments, since they would be more robust / more-widely accepted. They won't help us solve the real-world problem because most Americans won't accept theological premises (based, e.g., on the personal pronouns of Ancient Hebrew).

Regards,

rollo tomasi: God created women because He did not man alone

A_perfect_lady: EXACTLY! Man cannot be alone. He didn't create man because women can't be alone! Because we can!! LOL!! Oooohhhh, thank you.

This is a textbook example of the formal logical fallacy known as Illicitly Converting a Conditional

A_perfect_lady implicitly treats rollo tomasi's original statement as if it were a biconditional / two-way. This is the classic invalid form:

𝑃 → 𝑄

and the fallacious inference:

Then 𝑄 → 𝑃

which does not follow from the original conditional.

A_perfect_lady has advanced an argument which flies in the face of Formal Logic.

Q.E.D.

Regards,

Being a modern slut, means you will never fully pair bond. She’s always thinking another is out there who is perfect.

Yes, the "Fried Female Pair-Bonding Synapses" argument! Excellent! The clinical evidence is in: Women process sex with multiple partners differently than men! Men can have sex with multiple partners without destroying their pair-bonding ability! (Who woulda thunk it?!) The licentious women end up creating "Franken-Chad" in their minds: A composite of the best elements of every man they have ever slept with: Chad's long schlong; Juan's edgy rebelliousness; Fred's high earning potential; Paul's demur romanticism; etc.

The average 20-year-old man - even if still technically a virgin - heck, even if he's never even been on a single date - will already have had more orgasms, in toto, than the most-experienced woman at the end of her life.

IN HIS MIND, the 20-year-old man will have already had more sex partners than even the most-experienced woman at the end of her life.

Those are admittedly fantasy partners - often no more than an image torn from a lingerie catalog - but the physiological (hormonal / brain chemistry / brain architecture) aspects are at least comparable to those which the man would have experienced with an actual, living sex partner. Inferior, but analogous.

And yet this 20-year-old man will still be fully capable of meeting and falling in love and pair-bonding with a young woman.

A 20-year-old woman who has already had dozens of male sex partners has, in contrast, already burned out her receptors. She will be incapable of forming a lasting pair-bond (e.g., within the institution of Holy Matrimony).

Men and women handle promiscuity differently. Sex (with multiple partners) seasons men. It does not disqualify them for a stable marriage. In contrast: Sex (with multiple partners) ruins women.

The Ancients knew this. There were injunctions against men "playing the field" - but it was because the community didn't want to have to deal with unwed mothers and their bastard offspring, esp. when sired by randy young bucks; a purely pragmatic reason. NOT because such behavior, per se, ruined the men.

Regards,

kosciusko51 (comment #83): To say it’s solely the fault of one sex or the other is nonsense. And to use the outliers as an excuse to burn the whole thing down is nonsense as well.

metmom: A voice of sanity on this thread and at 205 post mark, not one person has responded to your astute observation.

I have refuted kosciusko51's comment - though not to him directly. So now I'll address my refutation to him directly:

In the 18-30 age bracket in the modern U.S., women hold almost all the cards, on multiple levels (sociologically, legally, and - consequently - sexually). Others here have explained how; let me summarize:

1. Sociologically: "You go girl!", "girl boss," etc. have no male counterparts (that won't get you laughed off the stage and/or cancelled). In all mainstream media, the narrative is - at best - "Men dying in droves - Women hardest hit!" Hillary Clinton asserted that with a straight face! Oprah, Dr. Phil, Mark Greene, Michael Kimmel, Dr. Warren Farrell, and John Gray dominate the discourse and always frame the problem as ultimately the fault of men. (They should "step up," "man up," and be "good providers" because it's their "natural role" and they should expect NOTHING in return!)

2. Legally (this "bleeds" into sociology). "Me-Too," Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh's ridiculous accuser Christine Blasey Ford, divorce-court-raping of men, men being court-ordered to pay support for their wive's bastard children, kindergarten boys being accused of sexual assault and arrested/cuffed for "kissing a girl," etc., etc.

Regards,

Is having control over women the only way a man can have self-respect?

A man whose wife has been allowed to weaponize her unleashed sexuality (b/c society has removed all previously established injunctions and sanctions, incl. social shunning, shaming, and the pillory), and who in fact receives covering fire from society at large ("You go girl!" "You spend your 20s and early 30s 'finding yourself!'" "You have as many bastard children as you want!" "You freeze your eggs, if need be!", "No worries! Daddy State will subsidize your profligate lifestyle!", etc.), and who can expect to be drawn and quartered by the divorce courts - cannot have self-respect.

An as-yet unmarried man, faced with these prospects / with this bizarre sociological and cultural landscape - might well decide to instead retreat (rather than abandoning his self-respect).

Regards,

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