Women are opting-out of marriage, not by choice but due to lack of choice
The facts are the facts and the story you tell, well, that's a totally 'nother thing.
Sometimes your inbox is still a place where good things arrive — and not just newsletters from your business banking account that no one asked for or pushy scammers demanding to know why you haven’t responded to their last 10 emails yet.
In the midst of hustling from a literary festival in Louisiana to a writers’ conference in Los Angeles, an email popped up in my inbox with the subject line, “NPR Interview Request.” Corey from Brittany Luse’s team was inviting me onto “It’s Been a Minute” to discuss a recent WSJ article about American women calling it a quits on matrimony.
In the article, journalist Rachel Wolfe talks to several women whose dating woes will make you want to weep and were more than familiar to me, a woman who just crossed over 40 with no ring on her finger. She speaks to a woman who significantly out earned a man who insisted that were they to have children, she would need to leave her career. Many women were icked out by men’s politics — your dude being pro your oppression is not a turn on. And online dating platforms continue to be a wasteland speckled with lackluster options for love.
On the show, Brittany asked me if I thought men had grown more conservative. I said no, that we are not the first generation of women to be disappointed by our options for partners, we’re just the first to have the economic and social capital to opt-out.
I pointed out that my mom was like 10-years-old when women first got the right to have credit card and mortgages in our own names. So I’m part of the first generation of women born with that right and inversely that means my pool of dating partners are the first generation men born without that fiscal advantage over women.
Which means, I argue, that they’re also the first generation of men who’ve had to vehemently voice their values versus it not even being a conversation because their stance was the default.
Wolfe responded that actually the data does show men have grown more conservative. Because the podcast will be whittled down to a little over 15 minutes, you can’t always follow up each comment with a rebuttal, but fortunately for you all, you subscribe to my newsletter where I can linger on a thought.
So I’m asking — does the data show that men have grown more conservative or does the data show that men’s responses have grown more conservative…?
There’s a difference between how you feel about women’s equality when it’s a hypothetical versus when it’s the person sleeping on the other half of your bed, drawing a larger salary at her job and asking you do your fair share of chores around the house. I believe a large portion of men have always felt entitled to their privileges over women, but were cool with the idea of women being equals as long is it wasn’t their woman. Kind of like the parents who don’t have racist bone in their body until their kid brings home a Black prom date.
Once your worldview is being threatened, you tend to become more vocal about what your beliefs and desires are — consider how the current political climate is a long drawn out backlash to Obama. When people realized chilling out on racism meant a Black man could become president, they made their bigotry more blatant.
When I look at the men of my father’s generation, I just have a hard time buying they’re somehow less conservative than the men of my own. According to Jane Ward, author of “The Tragedy of Heterosexuality,” heterosexuality has been failing women for decades. And I’m not refuting the data here — I haven’t even see data! I’m living this dating hell! I believe there is absolutely an issue here!
I’m just questioning the story we’re using the data to tell.
For example, a week or so after the WSJ piece, The Atlantic published a piece about how more and more educated women are marrying less educated men. In the WSJ, Wolfe reports that an education gap was partially responsible for fueling women’s lack of options. So which is it? Are women willing to marry less educated counterparts or are men without college degrees being forced from the marriage market? The Atlantic also reports that the success rate for these “unequal” marriages have grown over the years — but only if the uneducated male partner still out earns his smarty-pants wife.
Wolfe says the data shows men just aren’t making as much money and she says they don’t have as many appealing work opportunities. We actually recorded the episode of Equal Pay Day — the day white women have to work into the following year to earn as much as their white male counterparts did the previous year (Black women’s Equal Pay Day falls even later in the year…).
As long as I’m earning 70 cents for every $1 a white man makes, it’s going to be challenging for me to find empathy for men who are dissatisfied with their employment opportunities. But even when I do locate some compassion, I still struggle with why resolving these issues are such a struggle… for men.
bell hooks done already told us that feminism is for everybody. If men are dissatisfied with their plight in life, this is not a problem that falls to women to solve — we too are oppressed by the patriarchy! The answer to this marriage conundrum is not that women return to the shackles that bound our mothers and grandmothers. We should not be expected to sacrifice our liberties or our happiness on behalf of men. Men must free men.
Men can only free themselves of their societal restraints by divesting from the patriarchy. Until they can release whatever tangential benefits that still remain for them — because it looks like superior wages, education and love ain’t going their way — their self-value will always be anchored in their masculinity, or rather how successfully they ascribe to masculinity as defined by the conservative mainstream. A masculinity that doesn’t allow for emotional connection and divorces most men from much needed community (which is what has sustained women through the marriage decline and why there isn’t a female loneliness epidemic. Turns out crafting with the girlies can be very fulfilling!).
I would argue that the story to tell with this data is similar to the political backlash story, we are experiencing a backlash to feminism. Kai from Dense Discovery shared a NYT article in his newsletter a couple weeks ago that supports this take, there is “a cycle of male revanchism against successive waves of feminism. It returns every time women begin to make some headway toward equality, a seemingly inevitable early frost to the culture’s brief flowerings of feminism.”
And unfortunately for the women of my generation, we are being forced to date across and through a cultural schism. We were raised to expect husbands. Feminism taught us we were deserving of true partners. And many of us have received neither.
Anyways fellas, I guess us ladies will be at book club until y’all decide you want to be feminists too (also, any men who have already arrived at this conclusion — call me.)
All this to say, I really appreciate Brittany and the team having me on, it was so much fun, and shout out to Wolfe for doing the kind of reporting that revs up my mind. If you listen to ep, let me know what you think!