The problem with this idea is that men's badness has trended down, but women have still become more career focused. I think the strong focus on "what if a man becomes abusive" is a significant part of the problem in that it stokes anxiety, regardless of the actual risk.
Not only that, but marriage has largely fallen among women with the lowest incomes, and fertility is lower with higher SES.
I think this is a clever idea, but doesn't seem to explain everything we're seeing.
has mens "badness" really trended down though? There's a lot more consumtion of pornography, a generally more hostile views towards women and less romance from what I can see. Women on the other hand seems to try more and more to cater to what they think the male gaze wants, yet this does not result in more marriages. When it comes to domestic violence in rural aereas in the US it has gone down but in urban aereas it has neither gone down or up the last 100 year, generally the same seems to be true in most western countries.
has mens "badness" really trended down though? There's a lot more consumtion of pornography, a generally more hostile views towards women and less romance from what I can see. Women on the other hand seems to try more and more to cater to what they think the male gaze wants, yet this does not result in more marriages. When it comes to domestic violence in rural aereas in the US it has gone down but in urban aereas it has neither gone down or up the last 100 year, generally the same seems to be true in most western countries.
People's egalitarian views have trended up, homicide has trended down, especially when you account for other factors, like population density. Is there a consistent century-long dataset for domestic violence? I'm not familiar with an urban/rural split, but if this were the case, shouldn't we see a dramatic difference in marriage rates? Not sure how big it actually is and how much is explained by religion and the like instead.
People also are having more relationships with more partners total as they date around, so it could just be reflecting a consistent percentage of abusers abusing more people.
“Men fail constantly.” Unfortunately the human condition. “Men are degenerates.” Can be, but I know many who are not. I am a senior, been married 55 years now. Four kids, married, ten grandchildren, one great grandson. We have many friends with a similar history. Perhaps fewer or more kids and grandchildren. Our wives raised our children and when the last one started attending jr.high, went to work outside the home. Some like my wife went on to university and careers afterwards. We both had what we wanted and needed. I should add that all these families, including ours, had a common faith and church experience. Our children and their spouses are following the same trend. By example I hold out hope for the younger generation.
Fathers make a huge difference in women's perspectives on marriage in my long experience talking about this with many women friends, married and single. Women who had fathers who were reliable and protective towards their mothers and the family, even of they weren't perfect, are instinctively drawn to male protection and marriage. Women who experienced fathers as unreliable or threatening are much more likely to choose alternatives. Everybody talks about the effect of divorce and fatherlessness on boys but it has a negative effect on girls too. I always think of Marilyn Monroe. She never could feel safe.
Pretty much totally agree on all this. One other factor I'd like to add: peer effects. Mothers without other mothers to hang out with is incredibly lonely.
Also re-affirms the problem of education taking too long. The times have changed and we really need to stratify and speed-run educational -- smarties should be going on the fast lane and jobs that simply don't need degrees shouldn't have them.
And on the other end, more kids finishing year 12 has been a mistake.
"Yet many women have chosen that path and whilst polls consistently show they’d like to have more kids than they do, they must have their reasons."
Keep in mind that the financial and time cost of rearing a human kitten to a more or less middle class standard has gone up astronomically in recent decades.
Wasn't long ago, you fed your offspring, put a roof over its head, and didn't beat it so bad it never got to be a big kid, and you were doing a pretty good job. Parent Of The Year, almost.
ADDENDUM: another problem with the tradwife prescription (marry a high value man early while sexual capital is at its peak and have babies early) is that there no longer is a stigma surrounding divorce, so you better hope that this guy will pay child support when he dumps your ass for a new cookie.
I have long maintained that the biggest beneficiaries of the Sexual Revolution are second tier alpha males. The JFKs and Franz Liszts of the world have always emulated feral tomcats, and now that lifestyle is open to the scion of the owner of a moderately successful insurance agency.
Your peice here has some validity to it. However, when you make statements such as “Men fail constantly. Men are degenerates.” You lose the reader - especially half the population. You do point out specific subsets of bad men - like abusers, which I think we all agree adds up to a bad man, but when you make wide sweeping generalizations, the rest of the article comes off as brittle.
You may have heard the quote - “hard times make strong men. Strong men make good times. Good times make weak men.” We are sadly seeing in society what the last line speaks to. We need to do more to support men while at the same time promoting women - it’s not a 0 sum game. If men are falling behind, that’s not good for society, because we’ll fall into “bad times” again, which I’m afraid we are already seeing come to fruition.
Women who get married, cohabitate, have children, etc, live longer, are happier, less suicidal and less likely to be on psychiatric meds. Data also shows that lesbians have the worst relationships. So let's first establish that women who do choose to act normal, ignore the feminist brainwashing, and partner up with men, do way better than women who don't. The real risk is not a bad husband - it is no husband at all.
The real change is not the supply of bad men - it is the threshold women now apply. Women are not insuring against more bad men. They are insuring against perfectly ordinary men who no longer meet the new cultural definition of “good.”
The article worries about the woman who quits work at 25, has kids, and then discovers at 45 her husband is abusive. Fair concern. But the data show this scenario is rare compared to the far more common one:
The woman who “levels up” with degrees and career, delays marriage to 35+, and then discovers that the pool of men willing to commit at that age is small, her fertility window is closing, and the men who remain often want younger partners who can still have children.
Result: 40–50 % childlessness for high-achieving women, lifelong regret rates of 25–35 %, and depression rates 2× higher than mothers in the same income bracket. So this "insurance" policy has a catastrophic payout ratio. The women who buy into this con deserve pity.
Now here is the part that the propaganda never mentions. The “high-achieving career woman” -the surgeon, the lawyer, the finance executive who “levels up” and then weeps at 45 over childlessness - is the exceptional case, the one the media parades as the archetype. She is rare. The vast majority of women who follow the "career first, independence first" path do not end up as empowered surgeons or CEOs. They end up as low-wage, precarious workers - retail clerks, administrative assistants, call-centre operators, gig-economy pieceworkers - trapped in jobs that offer neither status nor security, and leave them with enough to get by in their apartment with their antidepressants. Here are the numbers that destroy the myth.
- In the US, 70-75% of women aged 25-54 are in the labour force.
- Of those, 15-20% are in professional/managerial roles(the "high-achieving" category - doctors, lawyers, executives, engineers).
- The remaining 80-85% are in service, administrative, or sales occupations, with a median wage of $35-45k/year, often in part-time or gig work. The high-achieving surgeon who regrets not having children is the lottery winner the system parades to justify this messed-up game. The real face of the "empowered working woman" is the 38 yr old retail supervisor with growing credit card debt, living in a shared apartment, on SSRIs, and scrolling dating apps, wondering why life feels empty.
So when women compare a husband and child, they should compare it to a life of precarious hours, no savings, and no future.
If they don’t have a family then society loses their smart genes. No amount of doctoring could make up for that loss in the long run. And anyway a man could probably take their spot and do the same work.
If they do have a family they are probably going to take a step back from their career. Now society wasted decades of training and limited residency slots on someone that isn’t even going to use it.
If you care about doing the most good for the world (which doctors are constantly telling me they want to do) then generally the best thing well bred women can do is pass on their genes. This generally interferes with high intensity careers that you barely get started on until your fertility window closes.
But if your just out off yourself and being a doctor is what you think works for you, go ahead. I just don’t think society should encourage it (again, residency slots are limited, and I’m holding that aspect constant).
Of course I think that medical practices in which women excel should probably be streamlined to make getting out of school faster (pediatrics, etc). But I don’t think high end surgeon is ever going to a career that is amenable to family life. You basically want a dude that works 60+ hour weeks to maximize his earnings post school and then has a SAHM hopefully raising a bunch of kid with his smart genes.
The thing about being a smart person though is that living the same life that any female mammal has is insufficient and stifling. Imagine having intellect and being told its inappropriate for you to actually use it — the best you can do is breed smart sons who, because they’re male, will have the privilege of actually using their intellect for something. But for you — you get the same life as a cow or bear or whatever because you had the misfortune of being born female.
Imagine being told you belong to a sex where the average member is evolutionarily worthless and won’t even pass on their genes. That your god for little more then canon fodder, slavery, and slaughter. That the only way to have any human value is to win a brutal tournament with other men to become the few worthy of existing, and that the entire gender you are biologically programmed to live shares this assessment at the very core of their desire.
In comparison living a life of comfort where people literally give you whatever you want for merely existing and the only thing you aren’t optimized for is performance in the top 1%. Imagine settling for a merely excellent instead of extraordinary career with a successful and desirable mate and beautiful children who love you. Woe is the life of the high end female!
You believe yourself to be engaged in a brutal tournament for survival with other men? Woe is the life of the delusional male!
It’s not comfortable to be taken as livestock. Even if what you say is true and you’re in a blood sport with every other man at least you have a personhood to assert — at least you aren’t being reduced to a hole and told you have no value aside from what that hole in your body can do. At least you aren’t told in myriad ways that any ideas or ambitions you have beyond the use of that hole are foolish.
You are being told that the pursuit of societal extremities (which are mostly red queen races) to the point of making yourself an evolutionary dead end is a dumb move for both you and society. While nobody is forcing you not to be dumb, there is no reason for society to afford it either status or subsidy.
It actually has nothing to do with that but rather with the fact that they like having money and mostly do not want a family. Blaming men for women's choices is ridiculous but it gets you engagement.
Male inadequacy is *relative*. Assortative mating + 2:1 female to male ratio among college graduates means that half of women will be unable to match with a man her equal or "better".
I love how you didn’t just talk about biology or stats but actually got into how feelings of inadequacy play into this. Makes you see infertility in a totally different light. The part about identity and worth outside of performance really stuck with me. Definitely gives me a lot to think about.
What a career insures against is not just universal male badness, but the risk of divorce, which social norms and social institutions now make much easier than before.
I really think the problem is media and state messaging about men, not the men themselves. The narrative that men set everything up to exploit women, that they want power and domination, and that they're all potential rapists and abusers is very corrosive.
The stage is set very young, with little girls being fed fiction about independence alongside adverts about domestic abuse hotlines, careers advisors and youth workers being banned from discussing family planning except in the context of preventing births, and amplification of all the worst stories of men cheating or abusing women plastered over the media. There are almost no sources of encouragement for young women in forming relationships, let alone stepping away from the workforce and having a family.
Sure, some men could do better. But until we stop lying about them as a group, it is going to be hard to make women less fearful.
This article is the epitome of naivety. There are always monsters lurking in the shadows. Always. Fixate on a triviality for too long, and the monsters we’ll see your distraction as vulnerability and - bam - you become dinner. And the likely devouring monster of our future is Saracens taking over our civilization by sheer force of numbers. Figure it out ladies before you condemn your sister-in-law’s great grandchildren to Sharia law.
The problem with this idea is that men's badness has trended down, but women have still become more career focused. I think the strong focus on "what if a man becomes abusive" is a significant part of the problem in that it stokes anxiety, regardless of the actual risk.
Not only that, but marriage has largely fallen among women with the lowest incomes, and fertility is lower with higher SES.
I think this is a clever idea, but doesn't seem to explain everything we're seeing.
Agree, it's not everything... just a thing
has mens "badness" really trended down though? There's a lot more consumtion of pornography, a generally more hostile views towards women and less romance from what I can see. Women on the other hand seems to try more and more to cater to what they think the male gaze wants, yet this does not result in more marriages. When it comes to domestic violence in rural aereas in the US it has gone down but in urban aereas it has neither gone down or up the last 100 year, generally the same seems to be true in most western countries.
has mens "badness" really trended down though? There's a lot more consumtion of pornography, a generally more hostile views towards women and less romance from what I can see. Women on the other hand seems to try more and more to cater to what they think the male gaze wants, yet this does not result in more marriages. When it comes to domestic violence in rural aereas in the US it has gone down but in urban aereas it has neither gone down or up the last 100 year, generally the same seems to be true in most western countries.
considering there are less people in relationships, that means domestic violence has actually gone up..
People's egalitarian views have trended up, homicide has trended down, especially when you account for other factors, like population density. Is there a consistent century-long dataset for domestic violence? I'm not familiar with an urban/rural split, but if this were the case, shouldn't we see a dramatic difference in marriage rates? Not sure how big it actually is and how much is explained by religion and the like instead.
People also are having more relationships with more partners total as they date around, so it could just be reflecting a consistent percentage of abusers abusing more people.
“Men fail constantly.” Unfortunately the human condition. “Men are degenerates.” Can be, but I know many who are not. I am a senior, been married 55 years now. Four kids, married, ten grandchildren, one great grandson. We have many friends with a similar history. Perhaps fewer or more kids and grandchildren. Our wives raised our children and when the last one started attending jr.high, went to work outside the home. Some like my wife went on to university and careers afterwards. We both had what we wanted and needed. I should add that all these families, including ours, had a common faith and church experience. Our children and their spouses are following the same trend. By example I hold out hope for the younger generation.
God bless sir!
Thank you! And keep on writing. Good stuff.
Fathers make a huge difference in women's perspectives on marriage in my long experience talking about this with many women friends, married and single. Women who had fathers who were reliable and protective towards their mothers and the family, even of they weren't perfect, are instinctively drawn to male protection and marriage. Women who experienced fathers as unreliable or threatening are much more likely to choose alternatives. Everybody talks about the effect of divorce and fatherlessness on boys but it has a negative effect on girls too. I always think of Marilyn Monroe. She never could feel safe.
Pretty much totally agree on all this. One other factor I'd like to add: peer effects. Mothers without other mothers to hang out with is incredibly lonely.
Also re-affirms the problem of education taking too long. The times have changed and we really need to stratify and speed-run educational -- smarties should be going on the fast lane and jobs that simply don't need degrees shouldn't have them.
And on the other end, more kids finishing year 12 has been a mistake.
"Yet many women have chosen that path and whilst polls consistently show they’d like to have more kids than they do, they must have their reasons."
Keep in mind that the financial and time cost of rearing a human kitten to a more or less middle class standard has gone up astronomically in recent decades.
Wasn't long ago, you fed your offspring, put a roof over its head, and didn't beat it so bad it never got to be a big kid, and you were doing a pretty good job. Parent Of The Year, almost.
ADDENDUM: another problem with the tradwife prescription (marry a high value man early while sexual capital is at its peak and have babies early) is that there no longer is a stigma surrounding divorce, so you better hope that this guy will pay child support when he dumps your ass for a new cookie.
I have long maintained that the biggest beneficiaries of the Sexual Revolution are second tier alpha males. The JFKs and Franz Liszts of the world have always emulated feral tomcats, and now that lifestyle is open to the scion of the owner of a moderately successful insurance agency.
Feral males live in the projects and in mansions.
Enforcement is more efficient than in years past, but s lot of guys get paid under the table or otherwise still play games to avoid paying.
Decent and indecent men pay or don’t pay child support.
A lot of people aren't W-2 employees.
You’re talking in extremes.
Your peice here has some validity to it. However, when you make statements such as “Men fail constantly. Men are degenerates.” You lose the reader - especially half the population. You do point out specific subsets of bad men - like abusers, which I think we all agree adds up to a bad man, but when you make wide sweeping generalizations, the rest of the article comes off as brittle.
You may have heard the quote - “hard times make strong men. Strong men make good times. Good times make weak men.” We are sadly seeing in society what the last line speaks to. We need to do more to support men while at the same time promoting women - it’s not a 0 sum game. If men are falling behind, that’s not good for society, because we’ll fall into “bad times” again, which I’m afraid we are already seeing come to fruition.
Chat GPT told me the same thing but I think it's funny and I don't mind losing the people who are upset by those comments and don't get it
Totally fair - you know your audience!
Women who get married, cohabitate, have children, etc, live longer, are happier, less suicidal and less likely to be on psychiatric meds. Data also shows that lesbians have the worst relationships. So let's first establish that women who do choose to act normal, ignore the feminist brainwashing, and partner up with men, do way better than women who don't. The real risk is not a bad husband - it is no husband at all.
The real change is not the supply of bad men - it is the threshold women now apply. Women are not insuring against more bad men. They are insuring against perfectly ordinary men who no longer meet the new cultural definition of “good.”
The article worries about the woman who quits work at 25, has kids, and then discovers at 45 her husband is abusive. Fair concern. But the data show this scenario is rare compared to the far more common one:
The woman who “levels up” with degrees and career, delays marriage to 35+, and then discovers that the pool of men willing to commit at that age is small, her fertility window is closing, and the men who remain often want younger partners who can still have children.
Result: 40–50 % childlessness for high-achieving women, lifelong regret rates of 25–35 %, and depression rates 2× higher than mothers in the same income bracket. So this "insurance" policy has a catastrophic payout ratio. The women who buy into this con deserve pity.
Now here is the part that the propaganda never mentions. The “high-achieving career woman” -the surgeon, the lawyer, the finance executive who “levels up” and then weeps at 45 over childlessness - is the exceptional case, the one the media parades as the archetype. She is rare. The vast majority of women who follow the "career first, independence first" path do not end up as empowered surgeons or CEOs. They end up as low-wage, precarious workers - retail clerks, administrative assistants, call-centre operators, gig-economy pieceworkers - trapped in jobs that offer neither status nor security, and leave them with enough to get by in their apartment with their antidepressants. Here are the numbers that destroy the myth.
- In the US, 70-75% of women aged 25-54 are in the labour force.
- Of those, 15-20% are in professional/managerial roles(the "high-achieving" category - doctors, lawyers, executives, engineers).
- The remaining 80-85% are in service, administrative, or sales occupations, with a median wage of $35-45k/year, often in part-time or gig work. The high-achieving surgeon who regrets not having children is the lottery winner the system parades to justify this messed-up game. The real face of the "empowered working woman" is the 38 yr old retail supervisor with growing credit card debt, living in a shared apartment, on SSRIs, and scrolling dating apps, wondering why life feels empty.
So when women compare a husband and child, they should compare it to a life of precarious hours, no savings, and no future.
Women becoming doctors is a bad idea.
If they don’t have a family then society loses their smart genes. No amount of doctoring could make up for that loss in the long run. And anyway a man could probably take their spot and do the same work.
If they do have a family they are probably going to take a step back from their career. Now society wasted decades of training and limited residency slots on someone that isn’t even going to use it.
Bad all around.
Yeah you want the livestock class to behave as livestock, not as doctors god forbid
If you care about doing the most good for the world (which doctors are constantly telling me they want to do) then generally the best thing well bred women can do is pass on their genes. This generally interferes with high intensity careers that you barely get started on until your fertility window closes.
But if your just out off yourself and being a doctor is what you think works for you, go ahead. I just don’t think society should encourage it (again, residency slots are limited, and I’m holding that aspect constant).
Of course I think that medical practices in which women excel should probably be streamlined to make getting out of school faster (pediatrics, etc). But I don’t think high end surgeon is ever going to a career that is amenable to family life. You basically want a dude that works 60+ hour weeks to maximize his earnings post school and then has a SAHM hopefully raising a bunch of kid with his smart genes.
The thing about being a smart person though is that living the same life that any female mammal has is insufficient and stifling. Imagine having intellect and being told its inappropriate for you to actually use it — the best you can do is breed smart sons who, because they’re male, will have the privilege of actually using their intellect for something. But for you — you get the same life as a cow or bear or whatever because you had the misfortune of being born female.
Imagine being told you belong to a sex where the average member is evolutionarily worthless and won’t even pass on their genes. That your god for little more then canon fodder, slavery, and slaughter. That the only way to have any human value is to win a brutal tournament with other men to become the few worthy of existing, and that the entire gender you are biologically programmed to live shares this assessment at the very core of their desire.
In comparison living a life of comfort where people literally give you whatever you want for merely existing and the only thing you aren’t optimized for is performance in the top 1%. Imagine settling for a merely excellent instead of extraordinary career with a successful and desirable mate and beautiful children who love you. Woe is the life of the high end female!
You believe yourself to be engaged in a brutal tournament for survival with other men? Woe is the life of the delusional male!
It’s not comfortable to be taken as livestock. Even if what you say is true and you’re in a blood sport with every other man at least you have a personhood to assert — at least you aren’t being reduced to a hole and told you have no value aside from what that hole in your body can do. At least you aren’t told in myriad ways that any ideas or ambitions you have beyond the use of that hole are foolish.
You are being told that the pursuit of societal extremities (which are mostly red queen races) to the point of making yourself an evolutionary dead end is a dumb move for both you and society. While nobody is forcing you not to be dumb, there is no reason for society to afford it either status or subsidy.
It actually has nothing to do with that but rather with the fact that they like having money and mostly do not want a family. Blaming men for women's choices is ridiculous but it gets you engagement.
Male inadequacy is *relative*. Assortative mating + 2:1 female to male ratio among college graduates means that half of women will be unable to match with a man her equal or "better".
I love how you didn’t just talk about biology or stats but actually got into how feelings of inadequacy play into this. Makes you see infertility in a totally different light. The part about identity and worth outside of performance really stuck with me. Definitely gives me a lot to think about.
Great article. Is there any chance of the king returning to twitter?
No :)
Men couldn't run away from an abusive wife, and they still had to pay alimony. Can you suck women's dicks any harder?
What a career insures against is not just universal male badness, but the risk of divorce, which social norms and social institutions now make much easier than before.
I really think the problem is media and state messaging about men, not the men themselves. The narrative that men set everything up to exploit women, that they want power and domination, and that they're all potential rapists and abusers is very corrosive.
The stage is set very young, with little girls being fed fiction about independence alongside adverts about domestic abuse hotlines, careers advisors and youth workers being banned from discussing family planning except in the context of preventing births, and amplification of all the worst stories of men cheating or abusing women plastered over the media. There are almost no sources of encouragement for young women in forming relationships, let alone stepping away from the workforce and having a family.
Sure, some men could do better. But until we stop lying about them as a group, it is going to be hard to make women less fearful.
This article is the epitome of naivety. There are always monsters lurking in the shadows. Always. Fixate on a triviality for too long, and the monsters we’ll see your distraction as vulnerability and - bam - you become dinner. And the likely devouring monster of our future is Saracens taking over our civilization by sheer force of numbers. Figure it out ladies before you condemn your sister-in-law’s great grandchildren to Sharia law.