A December 4th post by Milo Yiannopoulos in the
Breitbart.com blog brought up many issues faced by males now in their late
teens and 20s. Titled “The Sexodus, Part
1: The Men Giving Up on Women and Checking
Out of Society,” its thesis is that these teenagers and young adults have their
backs to the wall in various ways, and are responding by dropping out, in the
process holding themselves back socially and developmentally as well as
academically. As Yiannopoulos put it,
“social commentators, journalists, academics, scientists and young men
themselves have all spotted the trend: among men of about 15 to 30 years old,
ever-increasing numbers are checking out of society altogether, giving up on
women, sex and relationships and retreating into pornography, sexual fetishes,
chemical addictions, video games and, in some cases, boorish lad culture.” The article is a compendium of complaints young
men have, ranging from sort of whiny (that women think men “and their
preferences and needs can @#$% off and die”) and issues around since their
grandfathers’ times (“a lot of nice but awkward young men are opting out of
approaching women”), to controversial but reasonable observations (“in schools
today across Britain and America, boys are relentlessly pathologized”), and
clear effects of not enough work (“Nobody in my generation believes they’re
going to get a meaningful retirement”). The
most prominent root cause, though, is the permanent jobs crisis.
We can say four major things about job-shortage-related concerns
young males have. First, the generally
worse career outcomes of men since and including the Great Recession mean that
the old model of women’s incomes being secondary may be obsolescent. At the same time, men are still trained to expect
to be the main breadwinners, and it is a rare man of prime working age who honestly expects a spouse to provide a
choice of working a good job, working a low-paying but physically unthreatening
position, or staying home altogether.
Yet a stunning 75% of jobs lost in 2008 and 2009 came from males, and
the areas in which they dominate, such as manufacturing, have recovered slowly. Almost 60% of college undergraduates are now
female, as are most recipients of bachelor’s and master’s degrees. When controlled for age, education, and
number of years working full-time in a career, differences between the sexes in
earnings and promotions nearly or completely disappear. All that means that men cannot reasonably be expected
to take the lead in family income anywhere near as much as they still do, and
in many families, it is they, objectively, instead of their wives, who should
be “opting out.”
Second, the frequency of men’s unemployment has been causing
havoc in romantic relationships. Despite
their career opportunities moving steadily toward equality, the ancient pattern
of women selecting husbands who are well positioned to support them has barely
changed. The result is that more and
more men are ending up choosing, in the words of one of Yiannopoulos’s
interviewees, between being either “players” or boyfriends instead, if they go
after women at all. That is the main
reason why marriages, per recent articles, have become much more common in the
higher income brackets. Since single men
tend to be more destructive to themselves and others than those married, through
committing violent crimes and engaging in unhealthful habits, that is a real danger.
Third, mandatory consent laws for sexual advances and the
growing media attention on rape make the problem of men’s noninvolvement even worse. The massive majority of men would never
condone rape, which is above all else a violent crime, and know that romantic
and sexual situations are the most ambiguous ones there are. Neither men nor women are machines
programmed to know exactly what they will or will not engage in with whom. The venues where concerns about rape and
consent are concentrated, college campuses, are where men are most confused
about achieving sexual relationships anyway, which makes their apprehension
even worse and their likelihood of not trying during those formative years even
higher.
Fourth, much of men’s dropping out severely damages women as
well. Fewer husbands means fewer
wives. We have already seen this
situation in some largely black communities, where young women as a group have,
in recent decades, frankly run rings around men in education, emotional
maturity, and lack of criminal records; the upshot has been such things as
dating sites where the smaller pool of black men truly ready, able and willing
to settle down can choose from women required to post full-length photos of
themselves. Perhaps, in the 1950s when
getting family-supporting jobs out of high school was routine and Americans
wedded at the youngest ages in the country’s history, there were too many marriages, resulting in high rates
of, for example, spousal abuse. But now
we are going in the other direction, in which countless young men, in effect
only a good career position away, aren’t getting there, and there simply aren’t
and won’t be enough with strong traditional husband credentials to go
around. It is also much easier for
anyone to leave the workforce in mid-career, still far more common among women,
or even raise children, if they have a spouse providing the income or main
income.
It is possible that the number of good jobs with high shares
of men will continue to drop disproportionally.
That will make the problem of young men keeping their adolescent or
emerging adult lifestyles even worse, with even more, as Jack Donovan, one of Yiannopoulos’s
sources, wrote, having “done a cost-benefit analysis and realized it is a bad
deal.” That is not something we want as
a country.
What can we do about these problems? That will be the subject of next week’s post.
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