Summary: Gender roles are changing at a rate not seen since the invention of agriculture. Marriage, the institution most affected, will radically change — or wither away. Here are reports from the front lines and speculation about the future. All we know for certain is that the future of marriage will be different than anything seen in our past, for good or ill. {Revised from 2015, with new information.}

Contents

Marriage, the foundation of society. The crisis of marriage. The numbers: marriage as it is and will be. One theory about the cause: men are “going Galt”. Clear thinking about the problem. A first shot in this phase of the gender revolution. Conclusions. Dalrock on marriage. For More Information.

(1) Marriage, the foundation of society

Left and Right offer us competing visions of a post-marriage (traditional) society. The Left hopes for a more egalitarian society, with government assistance substituting for the family (as is happening in Scandinavia).

The Right fears that continued decay in the current family structure means the decay of civilization — as George Gilder explains in Sexual Suicide (1973). These trends continued for another decade without an apocalypse, so he reissued the book in 1986 as Men and Marriage . Gilder described traditional form of marriage in America, like that described by Rousseau and de Tocqueville. From the publisher’s description…

“Drug Addiction, lack of education, welfare, children in poverty, violence, unemployment, single-parent homes-these critical problems facing our country today. Many ideas have been presented regarding the cause of these problems, but only George Gilder speaks directly and with authority about their one undeniable source: the disintegration of the American family.

“Men and Marriage examines the loss of the family and the well-defined sex roles it used to offer and how this loss has changed the focus of our society. Poverty, for instance, comes from the destruction of the family when single parents are abandoned by their lovers or older women are suddenly divorced because society approves of the husband’s new, younger girlfriend.

“Gilder claims that men will only own up to their paternal obligations when the women lead them to do so and that this civilizing influence, balanced with, proper economic support, is the most important part of maintaining a productive, healthy, loving society.”

Gilder describes the world as it once was.

“Men lust, but they know not what for; they wander, and lose track of the goal; they fight and compete, but they forget the prize; they spread seed, but spurn the seasons of growth; they chase power and glory, but miss the meaning of life.

“In creating civilization, women transform male lust into love; channel male wanderlust into jobs, homes, and families; link men to specific children; rear children into citizens; change hunters into fathers; divert male will to power into a drive to create. Women conceive the future that men tend to fell; they feed the children that men ignore. …

“Modern society relies on predictable, regular, long-term human activities, corresponding to the sexual faculties of women. The male pattern is the enemy of social stability. This is the ultimate source of female sexual control and the critical reason for it. Women domesticate and civilize male nature. They can jeopardize male discipline and identity, and civilization as well, merely by giving up the role.“

It never occurred to Gilder that since WWII feminism proposed doing exactly that — and that today young women are following their advice. Work, independence, and easy sex until 28, then marriage (the party plus fake vows) followed by work and children.

(2) The crisis of marriage

Marriage has been an institution in flux for centuries, but the rate of change accelerated after California Governor Ronald Reagan signed the revolutionary Family Law Act of 1969, retroactively abolishing the “traditional” binding contract of marriage and replacing it with no-fault divorce. This created our present system of serial monogamy (a series of monogamous pairings with the pretense of being for life). The feminist revolutions which followed forced further changes in marriage. Since then we’ve slid along the slippery slope, and still cannot see what lies at the end.

Let’s start this examination at an interview with Janice Shaw Crouse. She gives a status report on marriage today: “Bachelor Nation: 70% of Men Aged 20-34 Are Not Married“…

“Far too many young men have failed to make a normal progression into adult roles of responsibility and self-sufficiency, roles generally associated with marriage and fatherhood” … The high percentage of bachelors means bleak prospects for millions of young women who dream about a wedding day that may never come. “It’s very, very depressing … They’re not understanding how important it is for the culture, for society, for the strength of the nation to have strong families.”

Crouse sees the present but only in terms of yesterday’s norms. Today many young men reject the “normal progression into adult roles”. Many young women no longer “dream about a wedding day”, or are unwilling to make the compromises with a man to make that happen. As for the effect on society, it is just another of great experiments that we’re conducting — with our children as the lab rats.

Janice Shaw Crouse is a senior fellow at the Beverly LaHaye Institute at Concerned Women for America. She is the author of Marriage Matters: Perspectives on the Private and Public Importance of Marriage (2012), Children at Risk: The Precarious State of Children’s Well-Being in America and The Strength of a Godly Woman: Finding Your Unique Place in God’s Plan .

(3) The numbers: marriage as it is and will be

Pew Research provides detailed reports about the state of marriage, but is weak about the causes of these trends. Pew’s research shows that men’s weakening economic status vs. women renders many of them unmarriageable. The widening education gap guarantees that the economic gap will continue to widen. We already can see the effects rippling across society as women are moving on top of men in America. But they don’t mention that increasing rates of obesity take many young people off the “market” for marriage, that the increased availability of sex outside marriage reduces men’s incentives to marry, or the how easy divorce and child support make marriage a bad bet for men.

As for the future, they assume the usual smooth curve — assuming that current trends continue and then stabilize. Such conservative forecasts are always wrong for transformative events, like the adoption of cell phones. These follow an “S” curve. Marriage is in the first stage of what we think is rapid change. Ahead lies the steep part of the curve, as we pass tipping points and radical change happens. Afterwards, when the new institutions take hold, does the curve stabilize. By then marriage will either be far less common — or unrecognizable.

(a) More young people remain unmarried.

Percent of young people unmarried (<35) has steeply risen steeply, from 56% to 61%, during the past decade (Pew Research).

Percent of young men and women who are married and the average age of first marriage (Pew Research).

(b) The result will a society in which marriage plays a smaller part.

More young people will never marry: a 5x increase expected between 1960 and 2030 (Pew Research).

(4) One theory about the cause: men are “going Galt”

In Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged the wealthy “go Galt” and stepping away from the rat race to let the rest of society fend for itself. But now, in one of the most unanticipated turns of history, it appears that young men are doing so, preferring the easy enjoyments of casual sex, drugs, booze, sports, porn and computer games instead of pursuit of career advancement and women.

Hundreds of websites for men espouse these new values. It’s described by psychologist Helen Smith in Men on Strike: Why Men Are Boycotting Marriage, Fatherhood, and the American Dream – and Why It Matters (2013). From the publisher’s description…

“American society has become anti-male. Men are sensing the backlash and are consciously and unconsciously going “on strike.” They are dropping out of college, leaving the workforce and avoiding marriage and fatherhood at alarming rates. The trend is so pronounced that a number of books have been written about this “man-child” phenomenon, concluding that men have taken a vacation from responsibility simply because they can. But why should men participate in a system that seems to be increasingly stacked against them?

“As Men on Strike demonstrates, men aren’t dropping out because they are stuck in arrested development. They are instead acting rationally in response to the lack of incentives society offers them to be responsible fathers, husbands and providers. In addition, men are going on strike, either consciously or unconsciously, because they do not want to be injured by the myriad of laws, attitudes and hostility against them for the crime of happening to be male in the twenty-first century. Men are starting to fight back against the backlash. Men on Strike explains their battle cry.”

Also see Dr. Smith’s columns at PJmedia. In one she provides a better context for her book.

“The word ‘strike’ gives the idea that if marriage were more fair, men would opt back in. Some …say this is not true, that men have quit trying to get married and found alternate arrangements which are better suited for them. I think some men are on strike from marriage because it is a bad deal and others see marriage as obsolete and have quit trying altogether. Is strike the correct word? I don’t know.”

For more about the book, see a review by Masha Rifkin at The American Interest. For a more explicit version of this thinking see “Why men won’t marry you” by Suzanne Venker at Fox News and “Why You’re Not Married” by Tracy McMillan at the Huffington Post.

(5) Clear thinking about the problem

Unlike the above analysts, who see the decline of marriage as resulting from men’s weakening interest and ability to marry, here’s a woman warning that women are a cause of falling marriage rates.

“When people complain of men not marrying (even they who are able), they forget how little women offer in exchange for all they get by marriage. Girls are seldom taught to be of any use whatever to a man, so that I am astonished only at the numbers of men who do marry! Many girls do not even try to be agreeable to look at, much less to live with. They forget how numerous they are, and the small absolute need men have of wives; but, nevertheless, men do still marry, and would oftener marry could they find mates — women who are either helpful to them, or amusing, or pleasing to their eye.”

This is from The Art of Beauty by Mary Eliza Joy Haweis (1883). Concerns about the state of marriage — like worries about the younger generation — are a commonplace of history. That doesn’t mean her worries were foolish. A stable functional society requires constant thought and effort about its basic institutions.

To see women building a post-marriage society, look to the Nordic nations with their high numbers of single mothers. For example, Denmark — with its strong government financial support for single mothers, where donated sperm to single mothers is a rapidly-growing trend because women don’t need men — or perhaps men don’t want to become fathers (expressed in that article with a feminist spin: many men are “not ready for parenthood”, at least on the terms women offer).

(6) The first shot in this phase of the gender revolution

To understand what’s happening I recommend the book that started the backlash to the feminist victory: The Myth of Male Power (1993). Warren Farrell shows that most of the assertions about the “patriarchy” — the superior position of men in America — is false.

Here is an excerpt from a review at Amazon by Pradeep Ramanathan (Former EVP, National Coalition For Men)…

“The Myth of Male Power explains how almost all societies (American society in particular) are both matriarchal and patriarchal, how men’s and women’s roles provide unique benefits and limitations on each gender. Both men and women may be seen to be privileged and disadvantaged, each in different ways.

“The focus of the book, as the title suggests, is on the male role. This is done not to slight women’s issues, but rather to supplement the ever-growing body of literature and research on gender issues which tends to frame the problems from an essentially female perspective.”

(7) Conclusions

Today every society grapples with these questions. Saudi Arabia, Japan, Denmark, America — there are scores of paths to new structures for the family. I recommend learning from the successes and failures of others, remaining open to new ideas, and only slowly making changes to the legal structure of our core institutions.

I predict that America will do none of these things. Rather we will act like monkeys in the control room of nuclear power plant — flipping switches and spinning dials. Armed with only ideology, we alter the core systems of our society without experimentation or testing. Much as the communists did in Russia and China. Perhaps this will work better for us than for them.

It is too soon for predictions, other than that interesting times lie ahead.

(8) Dalrock

Dalrock has some fascinating analysis and commentary about marriage at his website.

(9) For More Information

The cold equations: “‘These boots are made for walking’: why most divorce filers are women” by Margaret F. Brinig and Douglas W. Allen in American Law and Economics Review, January 2000. Gated. Open copy here. H/t Dalrock.

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

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Essential reading to understand how we got here

The Privileged Sex by Martin van Creveld.

Summary by the publisher…

“Ever since Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique back in 1963, all of us have been told that women are discriminated against, oppressed, exploited, and abused by men. The barrage of accusations is intense, relentless, and seems to have neither beginning nor end. But are the charges true? Do women really have a worse time of it than men?

“This volume, one of the very few in any language, takes on these questions head on. Roaming far and wide, it examines many aspects of the problem as it has presented itself from the time of ancient Egypt right down to today’s most advanced Western societies. To anyone accustomed to the tsunami of feminist claims and complaints, the answers will come as a surprise.”