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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If only we could blame just ONE pill. Medicine cabinets have become closets. The brave new frontier is thinness and happy days by shooting up. Wonderful.
lol...I’d love to know how you came up with that
Wait.... that can't be right. Women were still being housewives and mothers. They could vote, but that was it. Feminism as we know it was still a good 20 years away.
I have been told over and over on this forum that men didn't start rejecting marriage, women did. Women became feminists, entered the workplace, took over the colleges... and THAT was why men were drawing back.
And when I said that men started it, and women began supporting themselves because they had to, I was told over and over by the men of Free Republic that No No No, women started this trend.
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....
What were women doing in the 1950s to "deserve" this? Anyone? Bueller?
U R not a nutcase. I’m sure you’re very popular.
Missing from the assessment is that an increasingly lot of women are just stupid.
There are endless examples of them being interviewed and asked simple questions like who is buried in Grant’s tomb or who is the Vice President and they are stumped.
Blame woke parents, the education system, the media and the democrat left.
The warning signs have been there for decades...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.
What were all those housewives doing wrong in the 1950s to start all this? I know everything men do is merely a reaction to the evil of women, so... can you tell me why this would start in the 50s? I thought it started in the 70s, because "feminism." But the 50s? What were women doing wrong in the 50s?
I usually would hang around with animals over people just about any time.
We are quickly becoming a matriarchy.
We’ll be easy pickings for a much more masculine culture.
Islam? China? Russia?
😎 Thanks for posting.
Men are out having all the fun. Think about it. Viagra invented by men for men. Computers too. The comfort of a ball game on the tube after a full days work with a beer and Whopper, all cheap. The ability to tell the world to go to hell when he’s on his own time.
Women dress up, even while exercising. Do they really have a choice? They have to spend a disproportionate part of theirs on their looks, their one marketable commodity. Act out and get drunk like men? Then they’re really in trouble. Nobody wants an old lady so what’s there to look forward to? Our ball game and beer will be waiting for us always.
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.
Can YOU tell me why this would start in the 1950s, when the women were still being housewives, dressing like women, not demanding equality...? Why the 50s? What were the women of the 50s doing wrong to make men want to abandon the social contract? What was wrong with 1950s women?
>shame mechanism collapsed, male productivity would follow
All that text and bookended by a monumental misreading.
Men don’t “MGTOW” because of lack of shame. Don’t worry on that account! They get shamed for (pick one or many as applicable) their maleness, for their skin tone, for their straightness, their Christianity, for having thoughts, for saying anything, and always also for not doing enough.
No, the men she’s writing about don’t follow into a good stable marriage because there’s no benefit. If it were a job description, it’d have no applicants. Work hard, get denigrated, passed over in your career, and those you serve will leave and be taken away from you. Woot!
Similarly the ladies were bullied into trading love, family, and stability for bitterness, emptiness, and futility - trying to be everything instead of something.
The people who designed this know all that. Their driving principles are envy, greed, wrath, lust, gluttony, sloth, and pride; exchanging a good thing for an empty thing.
So here’s the thing that IMO may sometimes escape even good Christians. When the Lord commands (either OT or NT commands) it’s not The Big Guy telling you to Give Up Fun because there are Cookies Later.
Even the head-scratchers in the OT are there because they are good for us. In the same way Dad said put a coat on when it’s cold, no ‘fun’ when you’re in the hallway but very nice when you’re out in the snow and better yet when you’re not sick for Christmas, these laws aren’t because “or else I’ll get you” but “because I know exactly what happens if you do or you don’t, and the results of ‘do’ are much better.”
Same thing here. “They need to be shamed into it” is useless.
>Maybe I’m a nutcase<
You are definitely NOT a nutcase.
The women were doing nothing wrong
By the sixties, there were so many electrical appliances and devices that they got their work accomplished and had nothing to do.
They began looking outside the home and discovered jobs. They had EEO passed and escaped the boredom tedium of nothing to occupy their time
I had to stop here. The feminists had a lot of help from men who, when faced with the prospect of losing a chance at some action, caved in to their agenda.
When the feminists remodeled the school system so that girls could hit or kick boys for any or no reason and didn't protect the boys or allow them to protect themselves, how did the boys' fathers respond? "Don't you ever hit a girl for any reason." Nobody wants anyone to hit anyone, but it never occurred to fathers that they should defend their sons against this open bias. Yet many of those same fathers will complain about the openly rigged system when they get dragged into family court.
Think about it. Did any of your fathers defend you from this?
The problem is that men don't care until it happens to them. That's the difference between them and other groups, in that other groups see injustice against one of them as injustice against all of them. They will unite when they think, right or wrong, that their rights are being violated.
I've had to deal with the justice system enough to know that, when a man and a women are involved, the male police officers and judges will make any excuse they can find to side with the women.
Why? Because men are naturally protective of women? Tell that to the trafficked women who are drugged up and forced to allow men to rape them so their captives can make billions off of them.
If men are so protective of women, then why are strip bars and pornographers making billions from men in an in an industry that openly exploits and abuses vulnerable women? Why are date rape drugs a thing?
Here's a clue, men. Women don't want you to protect them. They want you to stop being the thing they need protection from.
Of course that brings up the issue that women commit violent crimes against men too. That's true, but who is it that treats it like a joke, when it happens to other men?
For decades men have spent billions of dollars on strip bars, porn, and prostitution, and next to nothing fighting for their rights. With priorities like that, is it any wonder the entire system is biased against men?
My wife and I are very happily married. We have four great kids one is married with a child in the oven. (note the correct order) Another gets married to a wonderful young lady in the fall.
The secret-Traditional roles. When I proposed, my college educated wife said “Before I say yes, when we have kids can I stay home?
Absolutely. We made it work.
I disagree with your comment about the fun of the solo life. I travel a lot for my job so I’m on my own often. It can be very boring. Next week, I leave for a two-week trip. I’m spending more time planning what I’m going to do on the weekend then the two weeks I’ll be working, because I know I’ll be alone and bored.
Life is get up, shower, work, sleep. In other words, provide and be the role model for your children.
As we are now older and facing retirement, we’re looking forward to living more adventure-together, for as long as God gives us breath.
Just hit it and quit it!!
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