Posted on 09/24/2017 3:31:11 PM PDT by Tolerance Sucks Rocks
Spend a little time with single women in their early to mid-30s, and you'll be grateful you're not one of them. The relationship scene is even more dismal today than when I was their age. All the women want serious relationships that lead to marriage, but many of the men they meet do not. All too often a woman moves in with some guy, hoping they're on the road to somewhere. Two years later, he tells her he's not ready for marriage and kids just yet. Splat.
But wait. Hasn't online dating made the mating market easier? Yes – for men. If you really want to hear a woman rant, just utter the word Tinder.
Single women are more equal and empowered than ever before. They have unparalleled sexual, reproductive and economic autonomy. In many ways, they're doing much better than the men. (Just look at the lopsided university graduation rates, which are now around 60-40). And yet, large numbers of young women admit their private lives are a sad mess.
If you're a gender studies major, stop reading here. You're going to hate what I've got to say next. I don't like it much myself.
In a nutshell, over the past few decades, the traditional relationship exchange has broken down. It used to be that men and women each had something the other really needed. Men needed access to sex. Women needed access to resources. Men couldn't get steady access to sex unless they had resources to offer, so they worked hard for them. The partnership between men and women was a grand bargain that (usually) left both sides better off.
For men, sex was traditionally expensive. The price tag was a long-term commitment to provide for a woman (and children). But today, sex is cheap. And that changes everything.
This is the premise of a bracing new book, Cheap Sex, by American sociologist Mark Regnerus. Sex got cheap because of three technological developments: the advent of the Pill, which divorced fertility from sex; the onset of mass-produced, high-quality pornography; and the arrival of online dating sites, which make it easy for men to find willing sex partners.
Sexual liberation is a fabulous thing – in some ways. But it can also turn men into louts, because women don't expect much in return for access. Today, most men can have all the sex they want for very little cost – no fancy dinner required. The irony, as Mr. Regnerus writes, is that today's mating market is probably more dominated by men's interests than ever before.
When women complain that marriageable men (sober, steady good providers) are harder to find than ever, they may well be right. The marriage rate is falling steadily, especially among the lower middle class, while long-term stable marriage is increasingly a privilege reserved for the better off.
A lot of women seem to have their act together these days. But a lot of men don't. "I think the greatest, most astonishing fact that I am aware of in social science right now is that women have been able to hear the labour market screaming out 'You need more education'… and men have not," MIT economics professor Michael Greenstone says in Cheap Sex.
What might explain this puzzling fact? Men don't have to prove themselves as providers any more. They can get all the sex they want anyway – including online porn on demand that can make the real thing feel mildly disappointing. (Ask younger women about men and porn. You'll get an earful.)
Like it or not, women have always been the gatekeepers for sex – not because they don't like sex, too, but because (no matter what you learned in gender studies) men's sex drive is innately higher. This means it's up to us to make the rules. "Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free?" my father used to say. It drove me crazy when he said that. Now, it's dawned on me that he was right.
Since the women's cartel collapsed, women's bargaining power has seriously eroded. That's why so many single women hate Tinder, which has further commodified sex for the benefit of men. Women are just another consumer good in the shop window.
It may take a village to raise a child. But it takes a village to raise a husband, too. And modern society has largely abdicated from the job. "Good husband material doesn't occur naturally, but is instead the product (in part) of socialization, development, and social control," Mr. Regnerus writes. "[I]n the domain of sex and relationships men will act as nobly as women collectively demand."
Time to get our act together, ladies. If we don't, they won't either.
You sound like an embittered divorced man who lost custody of his kids. And here I had somehow gotten the impression that you are a Roman Catholic priest, who would naturally encourage holy matrimony as a beautiful vocation. Am I wrong?
I was cooking. LOL
:)
Try hypergamy. That is what we are stuck dealing wih today.
>>>“But today, sex is cheap. And that changes everything.”
No, it’s dangerous for the guy.<<<
Two sides of the same coin really: The price for not getting married isn’t much at all, since cheap sex exists. While the penalty for picking the wrong woman to marry is sky high (divorce rape).
>>>Anyone who writes that men prefer porn and masturbation over a real live woman is a dullard at best.<<<
You must not have heard that erectile dysfunction is a growing problem among young men. It turns out real women can’t excite them the way porn does.
If Groucho could have anticipated Hillary Clinton, he would have killed feminism in it’s crib.
“Marriage is a wonderful institution...But who wants to live in an institution.”
“the penalty for picking the wrong woman to marry is sky high (divorce rape)”
The penalty for picking the wrong woman is sky high, and divorce rape is the least of it.
Yea, but is that really rape rape?
I didn’t say anything about Holy Matrimony.
The only way to win (or not lose) a fixed game...is not to play.
If women would keep their legs shut, men would have no choice but to do that.
Since May 11, 2017
See? He *wasn't* born yesterday... ;-)
Note when a young woman follows her tingles and sleeps with a badboy, and inevitably gets pregnant, it's always the guy's fault?
And when a young man does everything right, and ends up alone, it's always his fault?
Men are seeing through the sham: women get to sleep around before marriage but still demand to marry just as high a quality man as if they were a virgin.
Once married, women are allowed to drop out of the workforce -- but men can't.
And women are allowed to have abortions unilaterally, but men can't have vasectomies unilaterally.
And after divorce, the man is still on the hook for $$$ with none of the other benefits of marriage accruing; so put the shoe on the other foot. Would women marry if a man could unilaterally divorce her, severing his requirement to provide, but she was still required to come over and give him sexual favors, without any guarantee of more than token connection with her own children?
Yes, I’m in the same camp you are. Although I try to treat women with respect, I’m not considered courtship material either.
These women who run around banging so-called alphas in their 20s, and then desperately seek a quality man in their 30s, when they’re losing their looks, can s*** my d***, as far as I’m concerned.
And of course, the good women are usually taken by sometime in their 20s. Why? Because they’re actually GOOD, that’s why.
I think some of them do reform, after a time, perhaps becoming “born-again virgins” seeking quality men, but I don’t have the patience to weed them out from all other ones.
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