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.
You are the one choosing the word "boredom." You could have said "sadness, loneliness, isolation, resentment, frustration..." YOU chose the word "boredom" because that's how you see women's emotions. You don't see a woman whose husband isn't communicating with her as sad or lonely or frustrated, no, she's just Bored. That's your bias.
And before you say communication goes both ways, let's remember that no man has ever accused women of suffering in silence.
Wow, those surveys where married women reported themselves happy, you accepted unquestioningly. But here, suddenly, "experts" nudge the numbers higher and you nod along because self-reporting is no longer to be trusted. Hm.
Looks like both cheat at roughly similar rates with men only slightly higher.
Oh ho ho, no, you aren't sliding that by me. If surveys place men at 20-25%, why aren't experts suggesting that their numbers are higher too? Only the women!
Can you really not see your bias?
No, I'm sorry, we are not accepting surveys unquestioningly when they support your attitude, but bringing in "expert suggestions" when they need a little tweaking. Those surveys reveal men cheating at a markedly higher rate.
You're trying to make a mountain out of a molehill with this semantic argument.
And before you say communication goes both ways, let's remember that no man has ever accused women of suffering in silence.
I don't blame one sex only for growing apart or communication breakdowns.
Actually I just copied and pasted the statement in its entirety from Google.
Oh ho ho, no, you aren't sliding that by me. If surveys place men at 20-25%, why aren't experts suggesting that their numbers are higher too? Only the women!
Maybe those taking the surveys or shrinks or whomever they were referring to as "experts" felt women were more likely to under report their own infidelity more than men were. Dunno. Just a guess.
Can you really not see your bias?
Can you really not see that I just copied and pasted?
In any case, infidelity and abuse were significantly down the list of reasons why women file for divorce.
No, I think it's significant. You have said women file out of boredom. That is a gross misrepresentation. I don't even know how that came into your head. When communications break down, she feels SAD. LONELY. IGNORED. REJECTED. ABANDONED. TAKEN FOR GRANTED.
Do you understand? Do you understand that women are not just these weird creatures without emotions other than boredom or anger? Because that's what psychopaths are like. Do you think women are psychopaths?
Significantly? You keep using that word. I don't think it means what you think it means. If one in four women are being abused, that is significant. If infidelity is possibly as high as 55%... that is significant. My God. Even the low end posited 1 in 5 being cheated on.
If one in five Nissans explode when you start them, would you buy one??
It means other reasons were much more frequently listed. The rate of women cheating and abusing their husbands ain't a whole lot lower than vice versa.
If one if 5 Nissans blow up but the choice was otherwise don't have a means of getting around - because having a life partner and a family is that important - I'd be very careful about which Nissan I'd buy but I would definitely still be in the market for one.
No. Its a semantic molehill.
You have said women file out of boredom. That is a gross misrepresentation.
Boredom.....grew apart, inability to communicate. Same difference.
I don't even know how that came into your head. When communications break down, she feels SAD. LONELY. IGNORED. REJECTED. ABANDONED. TAKEN FOR GRANTED.
Maybe. Maybe she's just bored with the same ole same ole and the relationship doesn't do it for her anymore/is more trouble than its worth.
Do you understand? Do you understand that women are not just these weird creatures without emotions other than boredom or anger? Because that's what psychopaths are like.
See above. Relationships break down sometimes. I get it. That giddy/butterflies in the stomach feeling you have early on in the relationship doesn't last and some people come to the conclusion that they'd be happier being single. Sad when its a marriage, but I get how it happens. That doesn't require the other to have done anything particularly bad.
Do you think women are psychopaths?
Women getting physically beaten? "ONLY" one in four! (Not significant.)
Women getting cheated on? "ONLY" 22-50% (No big deal!)
Women feeling that their husbands don't communicate? "Pfff. She's just bored."
Nothing that happens to women is important to you, nothing they feel even registers. And you're not even a bad guy. You're actually pretty typical.
Look, I get that you're trying really hard to build up that molehill but nah. There's just not much you can make of it. Most women leave their marriages not because their husband was beastly to them but rather because the couple just couldn't sustain the relationship.
Women getting physically beaten? "ONLY" one in four! (Not significant.)
and 14% of men getting physically beaten. Not good that any of it takes place but this is not specific to either sex.....its not a unique male failing as you're trying to portray it.
Women getting cheated on? "ONLY" 22-50% (No big deal!)
and 1 in 5 men getting cheated on. See previous answer.
Women feeling that their husbands don't communicate? "Pfff. She's just bored."
Bored, don't communicate well, can't keep the relationship going. Same bucket of causes. Not horrible conduct by other, but things don't work out.
Nothing that happens to women is important to you, nothing they feel even registers. And you're not even a bad guy. You're actually pretty typical.
I notice you refuse to acknowledge how common these things are by women too. Its not good, but its hardly one sided. The commitment to hang in their and work through the issues that couples had in the past just isn't there anymore. Part of that is probably waiting until later to get married and more sex partners before marriage. As Teddy Roosevelt said: "Comparison is the thief of joy."
I don't comment because I have no business telling him anything. If a man is getting abused or cheated on, I have no desire to pressure him to "stay and work it out." Dude, run.
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