One of the biggest misconceptions in the manosphere is that women aren’t interested in marrying anymore. It is an understandable misconception, because the actions of today’s young women send a very confusing message. Only 20% of white women 20-24 years old in the U.S. have married. This is a very recent development; just ten years ago 30% of U.S. white women that age had already married. You only have to go back to 1996 in the US to see a time when half of all first marriages (of all races) involved brides who were under 25 (source).

The other piece of data which creates confusion is whether women stay married once they get married. As with the age of marriage data, this doesn’t suggest that women want marriage. Women initiate the vast majority of divorces, and the divorce rate has been roughly constant for the last 20 years. Additionally, women consume divorce fantasies without shame. If you are targeting entertainment to women it is a given that a core part of your offering needs to be divorce fantasy or women won’t be interested. This is no less true if you are selling entertainment to Christian women.

But the fact remains that while they want to put off getting married and generally don’t want to feel an obligation to stay married, young women still want to get married, and they even still want to be married. If your reaction to this statement is That doesn’t make sense! It can’t possibly be! then you need to remember that logic and honor aren’t what is driving large numbers of modern women. They have been told they can have it all, and getting married is a minimum requirement for a woman to have it all.

Having it all means the woman gets her feminist merit badge and freely spends her sexual capital during her most attractive and marriageable years. After this having it all means she finds a beta provider to underwrite her new preferred lifestyle, that of a stay at home or works-for-fun wife and perhaps mother. This of course sets her up for the next round of adventure, where she divorces the boring loyal dude and makes him continue to underwrite her lifestyle while she seeks out the secret multimillionaire hunky handyman whom she was meant to be with all along.

For those having trouble keeping track of all of this, having it all means:

Getting her feminist merit badge while: Having sex with the most attractive men who are willing to have sex with her. After a decade or so of this, she: Marries a nice reliable man who provides the financial support and social status of wife and perhaps mother. Once she has gotten out of this what she wants, she: Discovers that she is unhaaapy, and was somehow “trapped in marriage!” Many women prefer to savor this step for some period of time, perhaps even for many years. There is power and drama here and the next step contains risk. Is forced to divorce the bad man who made her unhaaapy by doing everything she demanded he do. Basks in the drama of a newly divorced woman, wronged by her ex husband and the society which forced her to marry the wrong man. Has sex with the most attractive men who are (still) willing to have sex with her. Since this misguided attempt at reliving the glory of her twenties is generally an immense disappointment, she then wants to quickly move on to: Finds her secret multimilionaire hunky handyman who insists that she marry him, thus returning her to the higher social status of wife.

Believe it or not, the having it all list ends here. A woman divorcing once and then marrying up says drama, rebirth, and empowerment. A woman divorcing twice says loser who couldn’t keep a man. Divorcing without remarrying says post marital spinster, also known as crazy cat lady her still married friends, colleagues, and relatives make fun of. Key to this process is to stick the landing so she winds up in the group making fun of the crazy cat ladies instead of becoming one of them.

But if you are a young woman looking to have it all sticking the landing isn’t something you need to worry about right now. You need to focus on your feminist merit badge while getting rogered by men who are very different than the kind of man you will eventually pressure to marry, the man to whom you will insist you “aren’t that kind of woman” so he needs to put a ring on it. And of course you need to make sure the pool of suckers potential husbands don’t notice what the larger script is.

This is where it is all starting to unravel. Game and the internet are conspiring to make it much more difficult to keep this open secret under wraps. Part of the problem is previous generations of women got married at such high rates the plan seems foolproof. Likewise, the fact that so many other women are doing the same thing provides a sense of safety in numbers. All of these factors are combining to create an environment where the men they are counting on manning up are instead at risk of catching on.

You remember the beta providers they are counting on, right? These are the men whose job it is to work extremely hard in their 20s to be prepared to support a wife and children in their 30s when their carousel queen is finally ready to “settle down”. In past generations the plan worked fairly well because most twenty something beta providers found themselves either on a track to marriage or at least with a periodic girlfriend. Now many of these men find themselves without any sexual interest from women through the bulk of their 20s. Most of these men will probably carry on as expected and “man up” once the tarts have been sufficiently popped. Now that she’s “found herself” (under a parade of men), I’m guessing large numbers of beta provider types will man up and do the right thing. However, some would be beta providers will drop out of the pool of eligible providers by either deciding to become the player the young women want, or by only working hard enough to get by. For those who don’t become a player or drop out however, there is the additional risk that they will get wise to the game; with the internet other women are all too freely spilling the beans. Professor Mentu recently shared this youtube video where a group of 30 something women are surprisingly candid about their own sexual choices (LSFW):

You sleep with the bad boy you do not marry him.

But it isn’t just these two women who are letting the cat out of the bag. Women around the internet are spoiling the narrative. CR at Gucci Little Piggy shared a brutally honest quote from an article on Wall Street Oasis:

“I like my current boyfriend but I am not attracted to him. I have been seeing a few other men on the side whom I find pretty attractive and excited to be with.” I knew a couple of banker chicks in NYC, who are doing exactly this. They feel that their current boyfriends are beta-males (good providers) while they look for fun with alpha-males.

In another (crass) post Mentu quotes a group of women discussing how it works on facebook:

Most guys could care less about our sex history (like they know anyway) as long as we don’t rub it in.

…How many women sleep with guys who know one another? The guys I date never knew one another!!! Sheeessshhh… They can never gauge my sex history unless I volunteer to tell them.

In the same post Mentu shares another woman’s candor about her sexual past on Yahoo Answers:

This is serious business. Not only does the internet make it more likely that a young man will randomly run into this kind of truth, but sites in the manosphere explain what is really going on. Making things worse, the women hoping to have it all are expecting their beta providers to remain unaware for well over a decade.

I’m sure this will work for many of them, but I can’t see it working for all of them.

We can do it poster from Wikipedia Commons