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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Openly exploits?
Abuses vulnerable women?
In reference to the recent death of the creator of the only pornography site 'OnlyFans':
"Rest in peace to the man whose work challenged a common lie and assumption about women being forced into the porn industry. His creation proves that when given the choice and opportunity, many women will choose to enter the prostitution industry voluntarily despite having no barriers to education or voting and in many cases enjoying more rights and privileges than men. And they are mostly supported by other women who frame these choices as freedom and sexual liberation."
- @Cr7Godbrand on X
you are correct about the problem, but miss the why in my opinion.
all of this come down to population control.
decades ago leftists worldwide were alarmed by world population growth. And thought something has to be done. So a multi-pronged agenda was implemented, and this was just one part of it.
this issue.
abortion
birth control
alimony
free sex
encouragement of gays
child labor laws
What do they all have in common? population control.
This all didn’t happen by accident; it was planned by the left to limit the world population. And it has worked so well that the left is now panicking about population decline, and that is what is driving the their embrace of immigration.
It’s about a way of life. The way women are doing things now, childlessness is becoming a norm. Our civilization is disappearing. It’s not about women working or not. It’s about the right order to do things in order for civilization to survive.
Women have the right to work if they want, but the Western way of life is disappearing for third world ethics. As things stand, women will be wearing bhurkas, as they are in Europe, because Europeans didn’t replenish themselves.
The right order to do things, for women, is to marry in her 20’s to a good man and have children and then work when the children are old enough.
It started in the 1950’s, because of WWII. That’s when feminism and the corporate agenda and government discovered that they could half the wages and double the taxation by having women work. It was a con job to eliminate the family.
If you need more, do a Youtube search on dead porn stars.
Do you really believe what you posted?
Misogynist: Someone who hates women as much as they hate each other.
No one, absolutely no one, hates women as much as they hate each other.
And the statistics for domestic violence show that lesbian couples have the highest rates of assaults on either partner, way more than heterosexual couples, while the lowest rates of assaults are among gay male pairs.
"When I opened the refuge in 1971, I knew from the beginning that it wasn’t just men. Of the first 100 women, 62 were as violent as the men they had left." - Erin Pizzey 'An invisible hero for invisible victims: interview with domestic violence pioneer, Erin Pizzey'
Pizzey became involved in running a refuge in New Mexico, as well as dealing with sexual abusers and paedophiles. Pizzey said of this work, "I discovered that there were just as many women paedophiles as there were men. Women go undetected, as usual."
Ah, but in this “modern” age, men can be “wives” too, y’know. (And, according to “experts”, “men” can also become pregnant ... although you have to be seriously mentally ill — and delusional — to go along with that inanity.)
Let's not pretend anyone forced them to. Accountability is kryptonite to women.
I agree with what you just posted here, but that still leaves my question. Who is it that treats female violence against men as a joke, when it happens to other men?
Throwing the abuse that everyone knows happens in the porn industry only makes it worse.
I dated for over a year a woman who blamed me for not anticipating her problems or wants.
Our friends told me I needed to get away from her, from early on, but I thought, early on, it was just temporary circumstances in her life.
It was really just “her,” and she put on a nice facade, to get me.
YES! They have a choice! And if you think women’s looks are their one marketable commodity I don’t know what to tell you
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?
1. Feminism predated the 1970s by decades. This didn't start in the 1950s.
2. Nice ad hominem attack with the "experts" jab.
3. The crux of the statement is "she suggested". It's her opinion, nothing more. Men didn't "rebel against the breadwinner ethic, inspired by a 'Playboy culture'.
We have been a misandrist matriarchy for quite some time. See Post 16.
Social media would lead to a rise in mental health problems.
But it’s not the weed huh Moe.
You're kidding right?
Sharon Osbourne joked on the national television show 'The Talk' about Catherine Kieu castrating her husband and throwing his penis in the garbage disposal unit. The other women laughed at, along with the women in the audience. Sharon Osbourne even laughed at it days later when she was forced to apologize by the network.
Ironically it was co-host Sarah Gilbert, a lesbian, who didn't laugh either time and called Sharon out on it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rYkuJXqLDkQ
Imagine the outrage, the protesting in the streets, the storming of the television studios if a man had made the same comment.
What abuse are OnlyFans "content creators" facing? Really, what abuse?
You refuse to see it but men are uniting and fighting for their rights and the rights of their sons by walking away. The use of pornography is the substitute for actual interactions while doing so.
No I'm not. I'm aware that some (actually a lot of) women joke about violence against men, but how many times do you see men laugh at other men who are assaulted by women?
Imagine the outrage, the protesting in the streets, the storming of the television studios if a man had made the same comment.
That's the problem. Men won't become outraged enough to do anything about it. Men should be in the streets making that exact point. However, one look at whoever it is they want to stick it into, and they cower into the background, even when their own sons are the victims.
You keep bringing up these biases, but I'm not saying the biases you bring up aren't real. What I'm saying is that men are either pushing them against other men to gain favor with whomever their target is, or at best just hanging their heads when it goes on around them. That will have to change before any of these biases are fixed.
I hate to tell you this but it's women who think their looks are their one marketable commodity. Women don't envy each other for their brains and contributions to society.
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