Townhall...
Blame
the Sexual Revolution, Not Men
By Mona Charen
October 20, 2011
Kate
Bolick stares out at the world
from the cover of The Atlantic magazine. She’s wearing a black lace
evening
dress. “What, Me Marry?” asks the headline. She isn’t smiling.
In
fact, she isn’t smiling in any of
the photos that accompany her several thousand-word essay on
singleness,
marriage and the changing nature of dating and mating in America today.
Bolick,
38, is groping toward accepting the idea that she may never marry. She
badly
wants to convince herself -- and us -- that older ideas about “unhappy”
spinsters are silly cultural baggage best dropped off at the curb. And
yet,
there are those glamour shots -- Bolick behind the wheel wearing a
fetching red
dress; Bolick in a gold evening gown holding a glass of champagne;
Bolick in a
black cocktail dress -- but her expressions range from pensive to sad
-- never
happy.
Bolick
seems genuinely conflicted
about marriage. The daughter of a committed feminist, she marched off
to third
grade “in tiny green or blue T-shirts declaring: A WOMAN WITHOUT A MAN
IS LIKE
A FISH WITHOUT A BICYCLE.” She recalls that when she was cuddling in
the back
seat of the family car with her high school boyfriend, her mother
turned around
and asked, “Isn’t it time you two started seeing other people?” She
took it for
granted, she writes, “that (I) would marry, and that there would always
be men
(I) wanted to marry.”
So
sure was she of the limitless
romantic opportunities available that at the age of 28, she broke up
with a
wonderful boyfriend. They had been together for three years. He was “an
exceptional person, intelligent, good-looking, loyal, kind.” Why did
she
discard him? “Something was missing.”
Ten
years later, she writes somewhat
(though not entirely) ruefully “If dating and mating is in fact a
marketplace .
. . today we’re contending with a new ‘dating gap,’ where
marriage-minded women
are increasingly confronted with either deadbeats or players.”
There
is a great deal of interesting
data in this piece. According to the Pew Research Center, 44 percent of
Millennials and 43 percent of Gen Xers think marriage is becoming
obsolete. As
of 2010, women held 51.4 percent of all managerial and professional
positions,
compared with 26 percent in 1980. Women account for the lion’s share of
bachelors and masters degrees, and make up a majority of the work
force. Three
quarters of the jobs lost during the recession were lost by men. “One
recent
study found a 40 percent increase in the number of men who are shorter
than
their wives.” Fully 50 percent of the adult population is single,
compared with
33 percent in 1950.
But
these trends, however interesting,
shed only an oblique light on the problem of the decline in
marriageable males.
Bolick edges closer to the truth in her discussion of sex.
“The
early 1990s,” she writes,
“witnessed the dawn of the ‘”hookup culture”’ at universities, as
colleges
stopped acting in loco parentis (actually they relinquished that role
in the
1970s) and undergraduates . . . started throwing themselves into a
frenzy of
one-night-stands.” Some young women, she notes, felt “forced into a
promiscuity
they didn’t ask for,” whereas young men “couldn’t be happier.”
According
to economist Robert H.
Frank, “when available women significantly outnumber men . . .
courtship
behavior changes in the direction of what men want.” And vice versa. If
there’s
a shortage of women, the females have more power to demand what they
want,
which tends to be (surprise!) monogamy. On college campuses, women
outnumber
men by 57 to 43 percent.
But
economic analysis can take you
only so far. Men’s capacity to insist upon promiscuity rests completely
on
female cooperation. And women have been foolishly compliant for decades.
They’ve
conspired in their own
disempowerment, not because they love their sexual freedom (though a
few may),
but because people like Gloria Steinem and Ms. Bolick’s mother
convinced them
that the old sexual mores, along with marriage and children, were
oppressive to
women.
The
resulting decline of marriage has
been a disaster for children, a deep disappointment to reluctantly
single women
and unhealthy for single men, who are less happy, shorter-lived and
less
wealthy than married men. The sexual revolution has left a trail of
destruction
in its wake, even when its victims don’t recognize the perpetrator.
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