(Title riffs on an old joke about punctuation, contrasting that phrase with “woman, without her man, is nothing.” Same words, different punctuation, different meaning).
In a recent Matriarchal Blessing post Celeste Davis quotes from Scott Galloway (whom I mentioned in this post), the current Male Whisperer for explaining the problems with young men and why they’re just giving up. I haven’t listened to the podcast (fair warning) but these are the quotes she cites:
“Without the guardrails of a romantic relationship, men are just lost … I had a girl friend when I was 24 who told me ‘if you don’t stop getting high every night, I’m going to stop having sex with you.’ That was very motivating for me … If a man by the age of 30 hasn’t either lived with someone or married someone, there is a 1 in 3 chance he is going to have a substance abuse problem. … The reality is that when you ask a man if you could have 80% of everything you wanted, 75% say yeah I’m on board. But when you ask a woman if they could have 80% of everything they wanted, 75% of women say no that’s not good enough. … the bottom half of men are literally shut out of the dating market.”
In that previous post of mine I quoted Galloway saying only one in three men under 30 have a girlfriend, which he thought was part of the problem. Now I’m seeing it in a different light: is his point that men are detached from women or that women are just too damn picky?
This takes me back to my first ever Undead Sexist Cliches post, about how men’s failures are supposedly due to women not marrying them. A man needs a woman to marry, or at least bond with him because that will force him to shape up; without a partner they’ll turn into violent thugs, never accomplish anything, or (as Galloway says) have a substance abuse problem. It’s not exactly the same — Galloway apparently doesn’t think women having sex is part of the problem — but it seems to be sibling territory.
Let’s note the obvious problem that coincidence is not causation: are those 1 in 3 men developing substance abuse because they don’t have a woman in their life or are women avoiding them because of substance abuse? It’s good Galloway quit his substance abuse when his girlfriend pushed but is he argument all men will do the same rather than get the girl and keep abusing anyway? Are literally 50 percent of men unable to get dates because women are so insanely picky? I’m skeptical. That’s a standard incel argument and on the same spectrum as ideas of enforced monogamy (note: I am not accusing Galloway of advocating for that).
Underlying all these arguments is the idea that women are a root cause of male failure; if women would only be nicer, we wouldn’t have these problems or they’d at least be more manageable. Carried to the extreme (well, short of enforced monogamy) we get Gilder’s argument women have a moral duty to marry men, preferably those guys in the bottom 50 percent who will otherwise go off the rails. Never mind what women want, it’s their duty to society. As someone quoted in the Davis post says, it’s marriage as DEI for men.
Most of the people making this argument never suggest criticizing the failing men rather than women. That if young men are dropping out, we should be directing our ire at them, not women (Galloway, at least, says the men in the younger men’s lives should do exactly that). Single men’s bad behavior is just accepted as the way things are whereas women have agency (which can somehow transform men in a way nobody else would). And for some of the people spouting this cliche, having women married and tied down with kids, out of the workforce, would be a plus. It’s not only a sexist argument; the assumptions about men are deeply misandrist. Anti-feminists love to talk about how feminists hate and despise men, but they have a much lower regard for my gender (to the extent we can take their words seriously).
And while married men, according to some studies, flourish better than single men, the reverse is true of women. Women, for instance, are far more likely to end up with an unfair share of childcare and housework, even if they’re working as much as their spouse.
That puts me in mind of the book The Prophetic Imagination, in which Walter Brueggemann argues a true prophet not only sees the problems in the current system, they can envision a path forward to a new future. Maybe that’s what we need, a visionary who can see something other than the standard model of marriage, something that would encourage both sexes to come together. I’m not that visionary so I can’t imagine what that would be like. I hope someone can.
