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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I don't see men laught at other men who are assaulted by women.
But imagine the outrage if a man said an abused woman deserved it the way women say a man abused by a woman deserved it.
And as for Sharon Osbourne, not only was she not escorted out of the building right after she made her jokes about a castrated male victim, she kept her job. The hypocrisy has no bounds.
What a crock!!! I can see the headlines now. "A man was recently jailed for defending himself against an assault from a woman. In response, men united around their computers, pulled up porn, and sat there loving themselves. Faced with this united front, the courts had no choice but to free the man and file charges against the woman who assaulted him."
Men are still interacting with women, and women are still having kids without their commitment. That's the reality that shatters your delusions of activism.
What abuse are OnlyFans "content creators" facing? Really, what abuse?
I can't speak for specific cases but only in general. You can read the links I sent you, or you can pretend it doesn't happen.
Now THAT is funny!
You don't get out enough.
But imagine the outrage if a man said an abused woman deserved it the way women say a man abused by a woman deserved it.
You're going around in circles. I agree with this. It's time for men to put down the porn including the Only Fans porn you're defending and do something about it.
I’ve been reading the replies to this and other similar discussions.
The root cause of all of this is that humans are selfish, sinful creatures. And a marriage is one thing that really exposes that nature.
A good marriage is not one where both sides are thinking “what can the other do for me?” but where both sides are thinking “what can I do for the other?”. It is self-sacrifice, which modern culture abhors.
The feminist and anti-ferminist movements are about the power structure in relationships at all levels. When one views every relationship in terms of power, one will always find inequities.
For centuries, nearly all cultures and religions supported families as positive for the culture. When a culture doesn’t support the family, but actively promotes the destruction of it, it removes a positive restraint on selfishness.
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.
If you don’t think marriage is good for you, I respect your position. It’s not for everyone.
As I see it, the only solution is not to blame each other, but to try to bridge the divide, to promote societal norms that promote marriage, not to destroy them. But I doubt that’s possible in a society that has forgotten God.
You're posting on a thread titled "No Wonder Men Are Opting Out" about men opting out, yet you're claiming men are still interacting with women.
Yes, a declining number are, but you're ignoring or oblivious to the trend of falling birthrates and the increase in the number of single and childless women - the reason the opinion piece was written in the first place.
As for the "activism", men don't protest the way women do. They've chosen to walk away, and in increasing numbers. Because the know the only winning move is not to play.
And yes, the porn usage is a substitute for actual interaction. Yet you claim it's not because, as a woman, you insist on telling men what they think. (That's part of the problem, you know.)
No. I just don't project like you do.
Amazing.
I simply pointed out what porn is being used for and that it exposed women as choosing to do it versus being forced into it, and you determine I'm defending it.
Once again, a woman telling men what they need to do.
Men don't need to do anything. They don't need to "do something about it". Men are opting out as the thread is titled. (The author's reasons for it are wrong but men are opting out).
Women wanted to be boss babes who don't need no man, and now they are. Best of luck with it.
Unless they've come up with a viable way to make babies without men and are marketing it now, yes.
Yes, a declining number are, but you're ignoring or oblivious to the trend of falling birthrates and the increase in the number of single and childless women - the reason the opinion piece was written in the first place.
That may be true, but the percentage of babies born out of wedlock is now at 40%.
As for the "activism", men don't protest the way women do. They've chosen to walk away, and in increasing numbers. Because the know the only winning move is not to play.
If men are winning, then why are you still posting comments about all of the bias men face? You're the one who's contradicting yourself.
And yes, the porn usage is a poor substitute for actual interaction activism.
FIFY
Yet you claim it's not because, as a woman, you insist on telling men what they think. (That's part of the problem, you know.)
You don't need to be a woman to know how ready men are to sell out for the promise, no matter how slight, of getting some. It's most men who can't see what's happening, although some can.
“American men gave women political and social freedom such as never seen before in human history. Women could do anything. An inordinate number of them chose degeneracy, whoring, Socialism, single-motherhood, children with multiple fathers, and showing their naked bodies on the internet. “
Yep! Men have no one to blame but themselves.
Them passing the 19th amendment was their worst mistake.
Then don't. Whose problem is it when men get screwed by the system they refuse to change?
I simply pointed out what porn is being used for and that it exposed women as choosing to do it versus being forced into it, and you determine I'm defending it.
The readers can read your comments and decide for themselves.
So, no specific cases but insisting it occurs.
There are more than 4 million OnlyFans content creators who willingly show their naked bodies online. Who is forcing each of them to do this?
Men started rejecting marriage when the terms started to change to their detriment. You make the deal worse and worse and worse for someone you're going to reach a point when fewer and fewer of them will agree to make the deal.
Men are making it no longer their problem. That's the point of opting out.
As for men getting screwed, we wouldn't be reading these stories if it wasn't women now getting screwed by the system (that they worked to create).
Question: Did marriage rates decline significantly in the 1950s?
Answer: "No, U.S. marriage rates did not decline significantly in the 1950s; rather, they remained at a high, stable level following a massive post-World War II peak, and a notable, continuous decline did not begin until the 1970s and 1980s"
So, without evidence, readers can just assign intent to other commenters. Understood, women do it all the time. (That's also part of the problem, you know.)
“And while men reject women who act like them, they expect women to accept men.......so they expect women to accept what they themselves reject.......
I doubt any of the women haters see the irony here.”
You have the logic of a woman.
Desiring someone different from you doesn’t mean you dislike yourself. Wanting someone with desirable attributes that I don’t have is the most natural thing.
Have you ever heard of complementary relationships?
“The saying ‘happy wife, happy life’ may have some validity…”
Wrong. So very wrong.
It’s “Happy spouse happy house.”
L
“What were all those housewives doing wrong in the 1950s to start all this?”
They stopped putting out for their husbands.
L
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