Summary: An expert discusses women’s responses to men’s counter-strike to feminism (Game and MGTOW). It is the next round in the gender wars, with no end in sight. He speaks about the experience of young men and women individually trying to cope with the gender revolution. This is part two of his three-part analysis. Links appear at the end to the rest of this series about solutions to the gender wars.

Introduction

Enough analysis. This series is about solutions men are devising to the revolution in gender roles as the gender wars continue with no end in sight. My first two posts were about men as individuals finding their own solutions. Some learn Game to get casual sex. Some Men Go Their Own Way (MGTOW). Both feel good for a while. I doubt either will work for men or America over the long-term.

Here is the second of Dalrock’s reactions to those posts. He is a married man living with his wife and two kids in the Dallas/Fort Worth area. He uses his website to explore how the post-feminist world impacts him and his family. It is essential reading for anyone interested in these issues.

(4) Dalrock’s comment: women respond to men’s response to feminism

It is subtle now, but the panic has begun. We saw an early form of this in the “Marry Him” craze of articles at elite organizations around 10 years ago. By this I mean not just the article and book by Lori Gottlieb, but the related pieces by Bolick and others that also spawned books. Even Hannah Rosin’s The End of Men: And the Rise of Women was 80% spiking the football, and 20% Oh shit!

They seem to have collected themselves after that wave of panic, but the sentiment is still there if you are looking for it. See Wilcox toy with the idea of rolling back the worst excesses of the family courts here, before nervously asserting that there really isn’t a problem after all: “The state of matrimony” in World Magazine, 2017 — “What’s helping and hurting marriages in the United States?”

The secular left has begun to toy with the idea that feminism and the destruction of marriage may have gone a bit too far, while it is Christian conservatives who remain the real true believers. This appears in interesting ways and places, like this from the NY Times arguing that the key to lifelong marriage is to suck it up and not divorce: “The Wedding Toast I’ll Never Give” by Ada Calhoun in the NYT, 2015.

See also this by Caitlin Flanagan in The Atlantic. She is oddly nostalgic for traditional marriage and argues for “The Wifely Duty” (2003) — “Marriage used to provide access to sex. Now it provides access to celibacy.” Another example is the movie Divorce Corp: links to trailers here.

These are subtle in the grand scheme of things, but they show the pattern that I think we will see slowly grow.

My reply

Feminists are both pro & con for marriage!

There are two contrary threads to modern feminists’ beliefs about marriage. First, some feminists believe that it is unnecessary. As Irina Dunn said, “A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.” Kate Bolick is an advocate of women going their own way. Here is the introduction to her Vogue article “Why Having an Affair Was the Best Mistake I Ever Made.”

“At 28, Kate Bolick was a serial monogamist who couldn’t tell a lie. Then came an affair that set her on a completely different path.”

The article is a promotion for her best-seller, Spinster: Making a Life of One’s Own . The publisher’s blurb describes it as a look at our fun future.

“{It is} a revelatory and slyly erudite look at the pleasures and possibilities of remaining single. Using her own experiences as a starting point, journalist and cultural critic Kate Bolick invites us into her carefully considered, passionately lived life, weaving together the past and present to examine why­ she – along with over 100 million American women, whose ranks keep growing – remains unmarried.”

The “100 million” unmarried women is a bogus number. As of 2015, Census data shows that there were only 131 million women who were 15 years and older. Of those, 67 million were married, 11 million were widows, and only 52 million were divorced or never married.

The other school of feminism is “Marry Him”, advising women to “settle” rather than remain unmarried. Lori Gottlieb kicked off this movement with her 2008 article in The Atlantic: “Marry Him! The case for settling for Mr. Good Enough“, later expanded into a book with the same title . Her website shows that she made this into a business. It was a message with an eager audience of women approaching the Wall. More authoritative voices echoed her advice.

“When looking for a life partner, my advice to women is date all of them: the bad boys, the cool boys, the commitment-phobic boys, the crazy boys. But do not marry them. The things that make the bad boys sexy do not make them good husbands. When it comes time to settle down, find someone who wants an equal partner. Someone who thinks women should be smart, opinionated and ambitious. Someone who values fairness and expects or, even better, wants to do his share in the home.”

— Sheryl Sandberg (COO of Facebook) in her best-seller Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead (2013).

For more about settling, see A look at America’s future after marriage becomes rare. There is an important point never mentioned in the articles advocating that women “settle”: how does this work for the man? Dalrock explains Why we need to stop telling women to settle.

Women’s response to men’s response to feminism.

Dalrock’s last line nails it. The panic he describes is already visible to those that look at media marketed to women. There are three common responses by women.

First, there are those complaining that men won’t marry them. Such as “Peter Pan Syndrome: A Man’s Fear of Commitment” at the Self-Love-Beauty website — “This is when a man is afraid to grow up. They usually put themselves first and do not want to commit to anything. They are unable to face adult feelings and responsibilities.” Even better is “Where have all the good men gone?” by Alana Kirk in the Daily Mail. {Editor: The answer is “They’re back in your 20s where you left them.“} My favorite is this statement by Marcia Inhorn, Professor of Anthropology at Yale University and former President of the Society for Medical Anthropology (her website), in The Telegraph.

“These are highly educated, very successful women and one after another they were saying they couldn’t find a partner. How could it be that all these amazing, attractive intelligent women were lamenting about their ability to find a partner?”

She does not ask any men if they consider these women “attractive” and amazingly good way.

Second, there are women seeking help to get their men to marry them. Articles such as “Learn how to make him commit: The Secret Lives of Men” by Joel D. Amos. Expect to see much more of this as girls transition from their party-hard 20’s and attempt to marry those betas they long ignored or despised. This a problem unique to women; there is no similar large literature asking how to “get my woman to marry me.”

Third, there are rationalizations. Lots of rationalizations. This might be the genre with the greatest growth in the next decade. Expect to see many more stories like these.

“Women tell us frequently that they are freezing their eggs because the men they meet feel threatened by their success and so unwilling to commit to starting a family together.”

— Professor Geeta Nargund, Medical Director of U.K. clinic Create Fertility (bio here). From The Telegraph. See this for more about freezing your eggs for feminism!

“One hot summer day a Fox found a bunch of grapes ripening on a vine. ‘Just the things to quench my thirst!’ She ran and jumped, but missed the bunch. She tried again and again, but at last had to give it up. She walked away with her nose in the air, saying ‘I am sure they are sour.'” {By Æsop.}

See the other posts in this series

Some posts by Dalrock about the death of courtship

For More Information

Ideas! For shopping ideas, see my recommended books and films at Amazon.

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Books about the new era of marriage

Men on Strike: Why Men Are Boycotting Marriage, Fatherhood, and the American Dream – and Why It Matters by psychologist Helen Smith (2013).

The Privileged Sex by Martin van Creveld. You will never again see women’s role in society after reading this, by one of our era’s greatest historians.