Book Review: Men On Strike
Written by JD Johannes
A significant portion of men are deliberately or un-consciously going on-strike against marriage. This is not a “man-child” syndrome of excessively extended “pre-adulthood” as author Kay Hymowitz argues, or a shirking of adult responsibility as asserted by others. These men are acting, “rationally in response to the lack of incentives today’s society offers” to get married says Helen Smith, PhD, and the strike will have a major impact on the shape of the US economy and society as men lean-back from the work force, culture and dating market.
Smith’s Men on Strike: Why Men are Boycotting Marriage, Fatherhood, and the American Dream—and Why it Matters (Encounter Books, 186 pages) is not a book for the timid. It is a quick paced, sharp, full-voiced counter to the books and magazine articles that “treat men and their behavior as the problem” by asking a tougher question: “What is it about our society that has made growing up seem so unattractive to these men?”
To put Men on Strike in context, Smith reviews the high-lights of the scholarly and popular literature on the growing trend of men avoiding marriage which can be best summed up by reading Hymowitz’ February 2011 article in the Wall Street Journal where she writes that for educated, professional “women, one key question won't go away: Where have the good men gone? Their male peers often come across as aging frat boys, maladroit geeks or grubby slackers.”
Hymowitz concedes that “pre-adulthood” is a good deal for many men, “But it's time to state what has become obvious to legions of frustrated young women: It doesn't bring out the best in men.” [In the WSJ article Hymowitz avoids the issue of some women setting unrealistically high standards for men, as noted by Lori Gottlieb in her March 2008 Atlantic article and subsequent book Marry Him: The Case for Settling for Mr. Good Enough]
Smith and Hymowitz are writing about the same demographic event, agree it will have wide ranging implications, but from approach it from different perspectives. Smith takes the seemingly unprecedented step of looking at it from a man’s point of view rather than the legions of “frustrated young women.” It is a frame that will surely win Smith many critics.
Using long quotes of men from a broad cross section of the country, Smith taps into the fears and frustrations of ordinary men with voices that are rarely heard in the major press. Some men are actively ‘Going Galt’ and intentionally dropping out of the economy and marriage market, others are engaged in a “reluctant retreat.” To many these voices will be shocking only because it is the first time they are hearing a lightly filtered sample of what men think and feel.
By using the words and perspective of men, Smith's Men on Strike is making a major contribution to advancing the understanding of an on-going social realignment and explains where some of the good men have gone.
The law, media, academy and economy are some of the reasons why being fathers and husbands is unattractive to men. Citing court cases involving absurd child support rulings [a 15-year-old boy having to pay child support to a 30-year-old woman who statutorily raped him], and Paternity Fraud [men having to pay child support for children not their own] Smith charts the legal mine-field men can find themselves in and how Family Courts and law are tilted in favor of women. The advice one legal scholar gives to men looking to avoid many legal problems of marriage and sex is to get a vasectomy.
Even if a man never has an encounter with the courts, there are other establishments bombarding him, “you are now seen by the media as a buffoon, a potential pervert, a bumbling dad—if not a deadbeat,” Smith writes. And there is of course Hymowitz’ previously quoted characterization.
If the portrayal of men in the media was just limited to the incompetent slacker, the harm of a million repetitions of that view would be minimal. Men though are portrayed in media and the academy as oppressors and predators leading to an irrational fear of men, expressed by one female blogger for the popular site The Frisky quoted by Smith:
“Deeply embedded in my unconscious was the notion that all men are potential predators. That there is something inherently creepy to being born male.”
Smith says this “fear and even outright loathing of men has worked its way into the public realm.”
Research by Australian professor Jim Macnamara found that 69% of reporting on men was negative with only 19% neutral. “Sadly, the only men on television these days who are not portrayed negatively are metrosexuals,” writes Smith citing the professor’s research. Her theory is that maybe women, like the blogger for The Frisky, are more comfortable with metrosexual men, “And we all know that nothing in our society is more important than making women feel comfortable.”
The majority of women though are comfortable with men, like men and have no intention of trapping a man in a fraudulent paternity suit, but the economic changes of the 21st century are shifting demographics in a way that account for why some men are opting out of marriage and the source of complaints by the professional, educated women about the lack of marriageable men.
the 1990s women have been attending and graduating college at higher rates than men. Single women now earn as much or more than single men of the same age. Smith points out these trends for many reasons, but also for how it relates to the social science theory of Hypergamy—women’s preference for men of higher economic or social standing.
Smith at this point takes an approach that will likely win her even more opposition—consulting men skilled at meeting and picking up women in social settings, practitioners of the The Game.
In the realm of applied social science, skilled pick up artists could teach a master class to most sociology professors on what works in real life. The rock solid foundation for success in picking up women is a display of higher social value. In the initial introduction and dates any form of higher social value will work, but eventually the mores of materialistic culture win out and it comes down to financial status.
As women attain higher social and financial status in larger numbers, the number of men in their potential marriage or long-term dating pool will decrease. It is just cold, hard math.
Smith quotes at length a blogger knowledgeable in The Game who sees the long-term societal implications:
“Men slowly discover that the efforts to win women’s attention via employment is not rewarding them the way it did for their dads and granddads, and that now only herculean efforts to make considerably more than women will give them an edge in the mating market. The male fecklessness…is actually a rational response to a changing sexual market where the rewards of female sexuality go disproportionately to charming, aloof jerks over meager beta providers.”
The Betas, men who lack “charm,” are often the machinery of the economy who do the boring, necessary and financially stable work. Their ability to never miss a mortgage payment was their edge in the mating market, but now that is not enough. And Betas face not only the financial status headwinds, but also mixed messages.
Though she does not address it directly in Men on Strike, some of the fecklessness of men results from the repeated messages on sexual harassment that have made many men hesitant to approach women in just about any context. The key word in sexual harassment law is “unwelcome.” Two men may engage in the exact same behavior, but if it is welcome, it is not harassment. The Betas, lacking charm, are afraid of it being unwelcome and the safest way to avoid being tagged as a creep or weirdo is to not directly ask a woman on a date. This approach is most common in a place like Washington, DC where so many people work in essentially the same industry, and it drives some women insane.
Lisa de Pasquale, a writer for Breitbart, says that for women in DC “the best we can hope for is non-date ask” in which the guy suggests a vague getting together sometime. Some see this as men being afraid of rejection, which it surely often is. Yet, it could just as easily be men who are afraid of getting labeled as a creep or weirdo in a town where everyone knows each other.
Women still want to date and marry men who are manly and perform some of the traditional male roles, but, as Smith observes, don’t understand “that when masculinity is frowned upon and belittled in every aspect of society from the media to the classroom, men start to internalize the message.”
This is where Gottlieb’s case for settling comes into focus and is worth quoting at length:
“When we’re holding out for deep romantic love, we have the fantasy that this level of passionate intensity will make us happier. But marrying Mr. Good Enough might be an equally viable option, especially if you’re looking for a stable, reliable life companion.
“A number of my single women friends admit (in hushed voices and after I swear I won’t use their real names here) that they’d readily settle now but wouldn’t have 10 years ago. They believe that part of the problem is that we grew up idealizing marriage—and that if we’d had a more realistic understanding of its cold, hard benefits, we might have done things differently. Instead, we grew up thinking that marriage meant feeling some kind of divine spark, and so we walked away from uninspiring relationships that might have made us happy in the context of a family.”
There is a cohort of educated, professional women who set the bar very high, so high few if any men can clear it. Smith says this leads an equally sized cohort of men to lean-back from dating, their careers and the broader culture.
“It seems the task of living up to women’s expectations is so high that many men just don’t measure up. They simply give up and find a life that brings them some reasonable amount of comfort,” writes Smith. “The problem for society is that even good women—who like men and would glad to have a husband or partner—often lose out because so many men (especially the Betas) have dropped out of the dating game altogether.”
What does it take to end the strike? Smith points toward social and political advocacy for men, which in the case of family law is needed and underway in some states.
The media and the academy’s portrayal of men will have to be changed by women—wives, mothers, sisters and women like Smith who will no longer accept their husbands, sons and brothers being stereotyped and men who no longer accept the portrayal as buffoons, oppressors and predators.
Smith does not discuss at length the solution to the social and economic shifts and their interaction with Hypergamy. The possible outcome though could be a return to larger age disparity at first marriage.
In the 1950s, the supposed Golden Age of Marriage, the average age difference at first marriage was 3.5 years, with the average age of men being 24 and women 20.5-years old. Since 1970 the average age at first marriage has been going up for men and women, but the age difference is only 1.5 years.
A few extra years in the workforce would be what men need to achieve the higher financial status required by educated women.
What I personally found most interesting about Men on Strike is that among all the men quoted I found only one rough approximate representative of myself. The only other time I saw myself was a demographic group in a non-scientific survey conducted by the blogger and theorist of The Game, Vox Day. Demographically I fit the profile of the High Alpha player who Vox says, “should probably be assumed to be a ruthless player intrinsically unfit for a long-term relationship.”
You see Dear Reader, I am a 40-year-old bachelor who, at this time, has no desire to get married or even cohabitate.
I do not see myself as on-strike as much embracing the lifestyle available to me as a bachelor with no kids, a respectable income and a very interesting line of work . This was not always the case. When I was 30 I had a ten-year plan that involved herculean efforts to earn money and culminated marriage. The plan abruptly ended in 2005 when I ran off to Fallujah, Iraq. Since then I have made 10 trips to the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan, often for months at a time. I cycled through marriage minded girlfriends who often gave ultimatums: The Wars or me. My favorite break-up ultimatum was, “for you, going to Afghanistan is like going to Disney World, and I’m not going to wait around worrying about you while you’re off having fun.” Her Disney World jab was not wholly inaccurate.
At one point I emailed Smith for advice and shortly after decided the sociological calculus was unavoidable. Few marriage minded women are going to accept my preferred occupation. Whenever I tell people about my work overseas their first response is often, “so, you’re not married and don’t have kids.” Rather than fight the sociology, I embraced it.
With marriage off-the-table I became very up-front with women: I will continue to go to Afghanistan until the wars are over and then I’ll find some other crazy adventure. By doing that I found there is a sizeable group of women, suburban, professional, usually divorced and close to my age who are not interested in marriage at this time, but do desire the companionship of men. It also helps that I’m completely different from the suburban men these women encounter every day.
Throughout my life it was with women that I had my most rewarding relationships whether as a mate or close friend. The key word being relationship.
My male friends more often than not fall into colleague/crony category and for the past eight years I spent months at a time living with Soldiers and Marines on the front lines in Iraq and Afghanistan. I have had several lifetimes’ worth of extreme male bonding.
The only time I felt truly lonely was when I was trying to date marriage minded women. The break-ups usually happened before I left on a trip to the wars. It is depressing to get back from spending two-weeks at a distant out-post and find an inbox filled with nothing but spam.
My life is now filled with relationships with women and these women stay with me through the trips to Afghanistan.
The prospect of marriage creates a set of expectations. By removing marriage as an option the expectations were reduced and a range of relationships from activity partner, to romantic-chivalrous, to exclusive physical intimacy with interesting, intelligent and beautiful women opened up.
I may be sort of on-strike against marriage, but I am not on-strike against relationships with women.
Written by JD Johannes
A significant portion of men are deliberately or un-consciously going on-strike against marriage. This is not a “man-child” syndrome of excessively extended “pre-adulthood” as author Kay Hymowitz argues, or a shirking of adult responsibility as asserted by others. These men are acting, “rationally in response to the lack of incentives today’s society offers” to get married says Helen Smith, PhD, and the strike will have a major impact on the shape of the US economy and society as men lean-back from the work force, culture and dating market.
Smith’s Men on Strike: Why Men are Boycotting Marriage, Fatherhood, and the American Dream—and Why it Matters (Encounter Books, 186 pages) is not a book for the timid. It is a quick paced, sharp, full-voiced counter to the books and magazine articles that “treat men and their behavior as the problem” by asking a tougher question: “What is it about our society that has made growing up seem so unattractive to these men?”
To put Men on Strike in context, Smith reviews the high-lights of the scholarly and popular literature on the growing trend of men avoiding marriage which can be best summed up by reading Hymowitz’ February 2011 article in the Wall Street Journal where she writes that for educated, professional “women, one key question won't go away: Where have the good men gone? Their male peers often come across as aging frat boys, maladroit geeks or grubby slackers.”
Hymowitz concedes that “pre-adulthood” is a good deal for many men, “But it's time to state what has become obvious to legions of frustrated young women: It doesn't bring out the best in men.” [In the WSJ article Hymowitz avoids the issue of some women setting unrealistically high standards for men, as noted by Lori Gottlieb in her March 2008 Atlantic article and subsequent book Marry Him: The Case for Settling for Mr. Good Enough]
Smith and Hymowitz are writing about the same demographic event, agree it will have wide ranging implications, but from approach it from different perspectives. Smith takes the seemingly unprecedented step of looking at it from a man’s point of view rather than the legions of “frustrated young women.” It is a frame that will surely win Smith many critics.
Using long quotes of men from a broad cross section of the country, Smith taps into the fears and frustrations of ordinary men with voices that are rarely heard in the major press. Some men are actively ‘Going Galt’ and intentionally dropping out of the economy and marriage market, others are engaged in a “reluctant retreat.” To many these voices will be shocking only because it is the first time they are hearing a lightly filtered sample of what men think and feel.
By using the words and perspective of men, Smith's Men on Strike is making a major contribution to advancing the understanding of an on-going social realignment and explains where some of the good men have gone.
The law, media, academy and economy are some of the reasons why being fathers and husbands is unattractive to men. Citing court cases involving absurd child support rulings [a 15-year-old boy having to pay child support to a 30-year-old woman who statutorily raped him], and Paternity Fraud [men having to pay child support for children not their own] Smith charts the legal mine-field men can find themselves in and how Family Courts and law are tilted in favor of women. The advice one legal scholar gives to men looking to avoid many legal problems of marriage and sex is to get a vasectomy.
Even if a man never has an encounter with the courts, there are other establishments bombarding him, “you are now seen by the media as a buffoon, a potential pervert, a bumbling dad—if not a deadbeat,” Smith writes. And there is of course Hymowitz’ previously quoted characterization.
If the portrayal of men in the media was just limited to the incompetent slacker, the harm of a million repetitions of that view would be minimal. Men though are portrayed in media and the academy as oppressors and predators leading to an irrational fear of men, expressed by one female blogger for the popular site The Frisky quoted by Smith:
“Deeply embedded in my unconscious was the notion that all men are potential predators. That there is something inherently creepy to being born male.”
Smith says this “fear and even outright loathing of men has worked its way into the public realm.”
Research by Australian professor Jim Macnamara found that 69% of reporting on men was negative with only 19% neutral. “Sadly, the only men on television these days who are not portrayed negatively are metrosexuals,” writes Smith citing the professor’s research. Her theory is that maybe women, like the blogger for The Frisky, are more comfortable with metrosexual men, “And we all know that nothing in our society is more important than making women feel comfortable.”
The majority of women though are comfortable with men, like men and have no intention of trapping a man in a fraudulent paternity suit, but the economic changes of the 21st century are shifting demographics in a way that account for why some men are opting out of marriage and the source of complaints by the professional, educated women about the lack of marriageable men.
the 1990s women have been attending and graduating college at higher rates than men. Single women now earn as much or more than single men of the same age. Smith points out these trends for many reasons, but also for how it relates to the social science theory of Hypergamy—women’s preference for men of higher economic or social standing.
Smith at this point takes an approach that will likely win her even more opposition—consulting men skilled at meeting and picking up women in social settings, practitioners of the The Game.
In the realm of applied social science, skilled pick up artists could teach a master class to most sociology professors on what works in real life. The rock solid foundation for success in picking up women is a display of higher social value. In the initial introduction and dates any form of higher social value will work, but eventually the mores of materialistic culture win out and it comes down to financial status.
As women attain higher social and financial status in larger numbers, the number of men in their potential marriage or long-term dating pool will decrease. It is just cold, hard math.
Smith quotes at length a blogger knowledgeable in The Game who sees the long-term societal implications:
“Men slowly discover that the efforts to win women’s attention via employment is not rewarding them the way it did for their dads and granddads, and that now only herculean efforts to make considerably more than women will give them an edge in the mating market. The male fecklessness…is actually a rational response to a changing sexual market where the rewards of female sexuality go disproportionately to charming, aloof jerks over meager beta providers.”
The Betas, men who lack “charm,” are often the machinery of the economy who do the boring, necessary and financially stable work. Their ability to never miss a mortgage payment was their edge in the mating market, but now that is not enough. And Betas face not only the financial status headwinds, but also mixed messages.
Though she does not address it directly in Men on Strike, some of the fecklessness of men results from the repeated messages on sexual harassment that have made many men hesitant to approach women in just about any context. The key word in sexual harassment law is “unwelcome.” Two men may engage in the exact same behavior, but if it is welcome, it is not harassment. The Betas, lacking charm, are afraid of it being unwelcome and the safest way to avoid being tagged as a creep or weirdo is to not directly ask a woman on a date. This approach is most common in a place like Washington, DC where so many people work in essentially the same industry, and it drives some women insane.
Lisa de Pasquale, a writer for Breitbart, says that for women in DC “the best we can hope for is non-date ask” in which the guy suggests a vague getting together sometime. Some see this as men being afraid of rejection, which it surely often is. Yet, it could just as easily be men who are afraid of getting labeled as a creep or weirdo in a town where everyone knows each other.
Women still want to date and marry men who are manly and perform some of the traditional male roles, but, as Smith observes, don’t understand “that when masculinity is frowned upon and belittled in every aspect of society from the media to the classroom, men start to internalize the message.”
This is where Gottlieb’s case for settling comes into focus and is worth quoting at length:
“When we’re holding out for deep romantic love, we have the fantasy that this level of passionate intensity will make us happier. But marrying Mr. Good Enough might be an equally viable option, especially if you’re looking for a stable, reliable life companion.
“A number of my single women friends admit (in hushed voices and after I swear I won’t use their real names here) that they’d readily settle now but wouldn’t have 10 years ago. They believe that part of the problem is that we grew up idealizing marriage—and that if we’d had a more realistic understanding of its cold, hard benefits, we might have done things differently. Instead, we grew up thinking that marriage meant feeling some kind of divine spark, and so we walked away from uninspiring relationships that might have made us happy in the context of a family.”
There is a cohort of educated, professional women who set the bar very high, so high few if any men can clear it. Smith says this leads an equally sized cohort of men to lean-back from dating, their careers and the broader culture.
“It seems the task of living up to women’s expectations is so high that many men just don’t measure up. They simply give up and find a life that brings them some reasonable amount of comfort,” writes Smith. “The problem for society is that even good women—who like men and would glad to have a husband or partner—often lose out because so many men (especially the Betas) have dropped out of the dating game altogether.”
What does it take to end the strike? Smith points toward social and political advocacy for men, which in the case of family law is needed and underway in some states.
The media and the academy’s portrayal of men will have to be changed by women—wives, mothers, sisters and women like Smith who will no longer accept their husbands, sons and brothers being stereotyped and men who no longer accept the portrayal as buffoons, oppressors and predators.
Smith does not discuss at length the solution to the social and economic shifts and their interaction with Hypergamy. The possible outcome though could be a return to larger age disparity at first marriage.
In the 1950s, the supposed Golden Age of Marriage, the average age difference at first marriage was 3.5 years, with the average age of men being 24 and women 20.5-years old. Since 1970 the average age at first marriage has been going up for men and women, but the age difference is only 1.5 years.
A few extra years in the workforce would be what men need to achieve the higher financial status required by educated women.
What I personally found most interesting about Men on Strike is that among all the men quoted I found only one rough approximate representative of myself. The only other time I saw myself was a demographic group in a non-scientific survey conducted by the blogger and theorist of The Game, Vox Day. Demographically I fit the profile of the High Alpha player who Vox says, “should probably be assumed to be a ruthless player intrinsically unfit for a long-term relationship.”
You see Dear Reader, I am a 40-year-old bachelor who, at this time, has no desire to get married or even cohabitate.
I do not see myself as on-strike as much embracing the lifestyle available to me as a bachelor with no kids, a respectable income and a very interesting line of work . This was not always the case. When I was 30 I had a ten-year plan that involved herculean efforts to earn money and culminated marriage. The plan abruptly ended in 2005 when I ran off to Fallujah, Iraq. Since then I have made 10 trips to the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan, often for months at a time. I cycled through marriage minded girlfriends who often gave ultimatums: The Wars or me. My favorite break-up ultimatum was, “for you, going to Afghanistan is like going to Disney World, and I’m not going to wait around worrying about you while you’re off having fun.” Her Disney World jab was not wholly inaccurate.
At one point I emailed Smith for advice and shortly after decided the sociological calculus was unavoidable. Few marriage minded women are going to accept my preferred occupation. Whenever I tell people about my work overseas their first response is often, “so, you’re not married and don’t have kids.” Rather than fight the sociology, I embraced it.
With marriage off-the-table I became very up-front with women: I will continue to go to Afghanistan until the wars are over and then I’ll find some other crazy adventure. By doing that I found there is a sizeable group of women, suburban, professional, usually divorced and close to my age who are not interested in marriage at this time, but do desire the companionship of men. It also helps that I’m completely different from the suburban men these women encounter every day.
Throughout my life it was with women that I had my most rewarding relationships whether as a mate or close friend. The key word being relationship.
My male friends more often than not fall into colleague/crony category and for the past eight years I spent months at a time living with Soldiers and Marines on the front lines in Iraq and Afghanistan. I have had several lifetimes’ worth of extreme male bonding.
The only time I felt truly lonely was when I was trying to date marriage minded women. The break-ups usually happened before I left on a trip to the wars. It is depressing to get back from spending two-weeks at a distant out-post and find an inbox filled with nothing but spam.
My life is now filled with relationships with women and these women stay with me through the trips to Afghanistan.
The prospect of marriage creates a set of expectations. By removing marriage as an option the expectations were reduced and a range of relationships from activity partner, to romantic-chivalrous, to exclusive physical intimacy with interesting, intelligent and beautiful women opened up.
I may be sort of on-strike against marriage, but I am not on-strike against relationships with women.
