Considerations

Sec­ond in a series of essays

The war between the sexes — whether in tra­di­tional dat­ing, a dat­ing ser­vice, or dat­ing web­sites — has become a stale­mate. Men had been on the offen­sive by wield­ing most of the power in rela­tion­ships for thou­sands of years, but women had been turn­ing the tide back over the last forty. The result? Now, the two armies have stopped mov­ing. They have com­pletely sep­a­rated from each other, sit­ting motion­less while star­ing at each other across a no-man’s land of lone­li­ness and bro­ken hearts.

How do I know this? I read the headlines.

A major­ity of mar­riagable women are liv­ing with­out hus­bands. An increas­ing num­ber of sin­gle women are pur­chas­ing homes by themselves. The total num­ber of sin­gle Amer­i­cans is also grow­ing. More men say they never want to get mar­ried. In Britain, there are more sin­gle men than unat­tached women. Hun­dreds of web­sites offer advice for sin­gles rang­ing from pick­ing up a one-night stand to find­ing the love of one’s life.

More and more dat­ing web­sites exist for those who are unable to find a part­ner. (In busi­ness par­lance, the size of the mar­ket is increasing.) There are dozens of blogs on dat­ing on just this one list. Teenagers, col­lege stu­dents, and recent grad­u­ates are hooking-up rather than form­ing sig­nif­i­cant rela­tion­ships. Men and women are mar­ry­ing at increas­ingly older ages — now twenty-seven for men and twenty-five for women. “Starter mar­riages” are becom­ing more common.

Well, what’s going on?

First, we need to under­stand the basic men­tal­i­ties of men and women in the con­text of evo­lu­tion­ary psy­chol­ogy.* For tens of thou­sands of years, men were the providers of resources and pro­tec­tion while women took care of hearth and home. Nature pro­grammed men to spread their seed as far as pos­si­ble while women wanted men to stay and take care of their chil­dren. So, soci­ety founded the insti­tu­tion of mar­riage to get men to stay with the chil­dren. (I believe there are spir­i­tual aspects to mar­riage as well, but its prac­ti­cal­ity can­not be overstated.)

These needs and desires were pro­grammed into our soci­eties – and our brains — over mil­len­nia. Men and women needed each other because each half of a cou­ple pro­vided things that the other could not. Women wanted men who would pro­vide resources, and men wanted fer­tile women who would bear and raise their chil­dren. Women date up; men date beauty. Forty years of fem­i­nism can­not change these sub­con­scious attitudes.

Over the last sev­eral decades, how­ever, the roles have changed. Women have become inde­pen­dent, and men have become less nec­es­sary. (New York Times colum­nist Mau­reen Dowd even wrote a book with that as its title.) The end result — and the rea­son for the increas­ing preva­lence of sin­gle­ness – is sim­ple. Men and women feel that they no longer need each other, and this atti­tude is sep­a­rat­ing men and women:

That bat­tle of the sexes, accord­ing to Pro­fes­sor Andrew Hacker, a New York soci­ol­o­gist, will not be won any time soon. In a 2003 book Hacker argued that mar­riage rates may con­tinue to fall if young pro­fes­sional women seek only their finan­cial equals as mates.

“There is a greater divide between the sexes than at any time in liv­ing mem­ory,” Hacker said. “The result will be a greater sep­a­ra­tion of women and men, with ten­sions and recrim­i­na­tions afflict­ing beings once thought to be nat­u­rally companionable.”

Feminism’s Unin­tended Consequences

What caused this? Fem­i­nism. More specif­i­cally, the unin­tended con­se­quences of fem­i­nism. Fem­i­nism helped women to over­come their lowly, unde­served sta­tus as non-voting cit­i­zens whose only duties were to get mar­ried and have kids, but like every social move­ment, it has had effects that no one could have foreseen.

First, we must start with women. After all, women make the choices in the dat­ing game: Women choose which suit­ors have a chance, but men hit on every sin­gle girl above a cer­tain gen­eral thresh­old of attrac­tive­ness. When a man makes the “first move,” he is usu­ally respond­ing to a sub­con­scious sign of inter­est that the woman has already sent. This is an impor­tant prin­ci­ple. Women make most of the choices in the dat­ing scene because they must be picky: They only have one fer­tile egg per month, and they lit­er­ally live with the con­se­quences of sex. Now that women are becom­ing equal to – and even sur­pass­ing – men in school and in the work­place, they can take care of them­selves. They do not need a provider.

How­ever, this con­flicts with the sub­con­scious atti­tudes that women have. Girls are raised with tales of a per­fect Prince Charm­ing who will res­cue them. They idol­ize their fathers (for bet­ter or worse, depend­ing on what type of men they were). They are treated like princesses. Most impor­tantly, they have the evo­lu­tion­ary impulse to “date up.” They want some­one amazing. Women, indeed, want it all. (This atti­tude can lead to more regret later in life when they real­ize that no one can have it all.)

This desire, how­ever, works against a woman’s inter­ests. Women are pro­gress­ing along a set path – high school, col­lege, grad­u­ate school/career, mar­riage, and then fam­ily – and only worry about hav­ing fun while they are teenagers and twen­tysome­things. Mar­riage and fam­ily now seem to be bur­dens to delay as long as pos­si­ble rather than won­drous joys. The irony of the sit­u­a­tion is that women have the great­est chance of attract­ing a part­ner before the age of twenty-five, roughly when they are most attrac­tive. Biol­ogy, after all, is work­ing against them. There is noth­ing wrong with get­ting mar­ried in col­lege or grad­u­ate school and wait­ing to have chil­dren, but this thought rarely crosses anyone’s mind.

Focus­ing on one’s career for a long time also poses another risk. The more suc­cess­ful a woman becomes, the smaller the pool of accept­able men becomes. In other words, suc­cess­ful, career-oriented women price them­selves out of the mar­ket unless they date men who earn less money or have less edu­ca­tion. Authors like Bar­bara White­head com­plain that “there are no good men left,” but the real­ity is sim­ple: Men have not fallen; women have risen. It is hard to “date up,” for exam­ple, when one grad­u­ates from Har­vard and works on Wall Street. Many suc­cess­ful women are unhappy because they feel that they must hide their suc­cess (see here as well), or they sub­con­sciously resent their hus­bands or boyfriends if they earn lower salaries. Fem­i­nism, in a nut­shell, has made women pickier.

Men Are Scared and Pickier

Now, I’m not only blam­ing women. Men, too, are at fault. Fem­i­nism also made men pick­ier — but for dif­fer­ent rea­sons. Adver­tis­ers have always used sex to sell prod­ucts, but one unin­tended result of fem­i­nism is that overt sex­u­al­ity and pornog­ra­phy have become main­stream. (Pornog­ra­phy, accord­ing to one school of fem­i­nism, empow­ers women. I disagree.)

Men are bom­barded with images of fake, doc­tored, unre­al­is­tic women in tele­vi­sion pro­grams, adver­tis­ing and pornog­ra­phy. Their stan­dards have become higher, even though the vast major­ity of men should not rea­son­ably expect to date a Per­fect Ten (or even an Imper­fect Seven). Still, women have adapted to this trend by look­ing and act­ing like porn stars in order to attract men: expos­ing them­selves for Girls Gone Wild video crews; pos­ing in soft-core porn mag­a­zines like FHM and Maxim; mak­ing out with each other; wear­ing slutty clothes; and oth­er­wise act­ing like pieces of meat. (By the way, read this pro­file of Girls Gone Wild founder Joe Fran­cis. It will make you cringe.)

Fem­i­nism made men pick­ier, and it also made pre-marital sex accept­able and com­mon. How­ever, we have now trav­eled to the oppo­site end of the spec­trum. Men, by allow­ing their base instincts to take over, have allowed women to degrade them­selves rather than be treated respect­fully. In the end, women suf­fer because of the Madonna-Whore Com­plex: men want to hook-up with these women, but no man would ever marry one of them. Evo­lu­tion has taught men to value mar­i­tal fidelity — from a bio­log­i­cal standpoint, a man wants to be con­fi­dent that his chil­dren are, well, his. No guy wants to have sex with the girl whom every­one in the bar has already done. I won­der how many women are now alone because of this sen­ti­ment, but I imag­ine that the Madonna-Whore line is dif­fi­cult to tread.

The ease with which men can obtain sex is another rea­son for the lack­lus­ter dat­ing scene. Men, as a result of women’s liberation, can now have sex with women who are just as promis­cu­ous as they are. Why buy the cow when the milk is free? In fact, an unin­tended con­se­quence of fem­i­nism has been to remove any moti­va­tion for men to get mar­ried. Men do not need to take care of women. Men can get com­pan­ion­ship from his friends. Men can watch sports and play video games on flat-screen televisions. Men can have sex and hook-up with untold num­bers of avail­able women (or down­load free pornog­ra­phy). Men can cook for them­selves, or they can order take-out. Men can hire clean­ing services.

The only prac­ti­cal rea­son for mar­riage, it seems, is to raise chil­dren — but fewer and fewer men have that desire as well. Birth rates in the United States, as well as West­ern Europe, have been steadily declin­ing. I can­not pro­vide a sat­is­fac­tory expla­na­tion, but it seems that peo­ple have gen­er­ally become more self­ish and unwill­ing over the last sev­eral decades to spend their money and time on children. To para­phrase a line from a recent Econ­o­mist arti­cle, I guess club­bing is more fun than chang­ing diapers.

How­ever, there may be darker rea­sons for an anti-marriage bias among men. Recent hys­te­ria in the United States and Great Britain over sex­ual preda­tors has led soci­ety to view all men as poten­tial crim­i­nals who pose threats to chil­dren. Men have even had to develop cop­ing strate­gies as a result, and fewer of them are vol­un­teer­ing to work in edu­ca­tion and help chil­dren in need. Accord­ing to sev­eral reports, boys also face dis­crim­i­na­tion at school. I’m not sure that I would feel com­fort­able rais­ing chil­dren in this environment.

Male chil­dren may have a harder time at school, but men in gen­eral are now told that they are noth­ing more than idiots and buf­foons. Most tele­vi­sion com­mer­cials and nightly sit­coms por­tray men (and hus­bands) as stu­pid boors and women (and wives) as intel­li­gent and sexy. Women used to be stereo­typed as flakes, but now the tables have turned. Per­haps each gen­der will be treated with respect one day.

My gen­er­a­tion, the one that grew up in the sev­en­ties and eight­ies, became known as the Divorce Gen­er­a­tion for a rea­son. This upbring­ing has inter­fered, in para­dox­i­cal ways, with our searches for spouses. Since we grew up in bro­ken homes, we des­per­ately want to cre­ate the sta­ble homes that we never had. At the same time, we are extremely picky because we do not want to choose wrongly and endure a divorce again.

Men, however, fear divorce mainly because the courts are stacked against them. Fam­ily law comes from a time when women were depen­dent on men, so most divorce set­tle­ments included alimony and an equal divi­sion of assets. (Oh, and ex-wives always seem to get the chil­dren.) Despite the fact that men and women can now take care of themselves, women will still receive the house, the children, and half of her ex-husband’s salary. In a world in which half of all mar­riages will end in divorce, can men be blamed if they think that the ben­e­fit of mar­riage is not worth the risk?

Where We Stand

So, after all of the changes that fem­i­nism brought to soci­ety, this is where the two armies stand. Women are frus­trated because their worldly suc­cess has hin­dered their search for the manly provider that their genes and upbring­ing have told them to want. They are increas­ingly picky. They feel pres­sured to act in a hyper­sex­ual man­ner while know­ing that most men, in the end, will only marry the Madonna, not the Whore. Women real­ize that by becom­ing as inde­pen­dent as pos­si­ble, they are los­ing their abil­ity to become part of a code­pen­dent cou­ple. Women try to “have it all” — a full-time career with devot­ing enough time to raise a fam­ily well – while know­ing that it is prac­ti­cally impos­si­ble. Women think that all men are lazy slobs at best and poten­tial crim­i­nals at worst.

Men believe that they will all get a woman with the looks of a model and the abil­i­ties of a porn star, and they do not want to set­tle for any­thing less. At the same time, they want a vir­tu­ous woman who will raise chil­dren prop­erly and cre­ate a nice home. Men feel inad­e­quate because they are den­i­grated in the media, and they are unsure of their place in soci­ety because the role that evo­lu­tion has told them to play – that of manly provider — no longer exists. Men see lit­tle need for mar­riage because its ben­e­fits can be gained else­where, and they stand a fifty-fifty chance of los­ing their chil­dren and half their assets if they were to get married.

Many of the prac­ti­cal ben­e­fits of mar­riage are no longer applic­a­ble because both men and women are self-sufficient, so peo­ple may be look­ing pri­mar­ily for love. (See here as well.) While this is a nice thought, any­one who has been in the dat­ing scene for a while knows that it is extremely rare to find some­one with whom one imme­di­ately “clicks.” It is no won­der the peo­ple are remain­ing sin­gle for so long. But the longer that peo­ple are sin­gle and inde­pen­dent, the harder it is for peo­ple to com­pro­mise, change, leave their com­fort zones, and become part of an inter­de­pen­dent cou­ple (see this post, par­tic­u­larly the com­ment by 2 cents).

Now, the two armies – men and women – are sit­ting and fac­ing each other across the des­o­late no-man’s land. Each side wants to raise a neu­tral flag, stop the fight­ing, and offer terms of nego­ti­a­tion, but each side is too proud to make the first move. They would just rather talk amongst them­selves while com­plain­ing about the enemy — it’s eas­ier, of course. But no con­flict has ever been solved that way.

Other Essays: The True Clash of Civ­i­liza­tions and In Defense of Free Trade and Globalization

*Clar­i­fi­ca­tion: When I say “men” and “women,” I do not mean all men and women. I mean the major­ity of men and women. In addi­tion, I am dis­cussing gen­der rela­tions only in a het­ero­sex­ual context.

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