To me this seems like conservatives are adopting the progressive prohibition against ever being critical of someone else less well off than you (who’s in the ingroup).
If you can’t say that the reason marriage rates are falling is because a lot of working class men are losers, then you have to blame an acceptable target (educated and affluent women).
Fair comment, but I don't think a lot of working class men are losers! Rather, there's a lot of more structural problems in society that have created the conditions for their laggard performance.
Also, fwiw it's obviously amazing that women can divorce bad guys and have the economic agency to leave relationships. And shame on the social conservatives for wanting to drag us back to that oppressive era of American history.
It's a simple class issue, women and men in lower economic quintiles don't have a huge disparity if you remove stay-at-home women (20%ish v 30%ish), and top earning women marry at twice the rate of lower income women. I think this thread is pretty eye opening in that every lower income cohort male is called a loser and the real problem while the difference between genders really isn't that stark. Men make more and so are more likely to marry "down" the economic ladder, which skews this statistic even more. The "loser men" trope is tired and wrong.
There's no need to go calling people losers on an individual basis, but it's very clear that in our increasingly winner-take-all economy there are winners and losers.
Sure, but that is not gender specific. People in this thread aren't calling low income, low marriage rate women losers. I think some people are using the term to mean economic losers whereas many others here...are not
Being poor doesn't make you a loser. Being someone who is unwilling to work and then blames their misfortune on those around them does make you a loser.
If you’re someone alive today who was born in America, you're already one of the luckiest human beings in history. We've all won the lottery, and no amount of deindustrialization or whatever can change that.
Also, being MAGA makes you a loser, quite regardless of income. There’s a big gender gap in political beliefs. There are some MAGA women, but not nearly enough to date all the MAGA men!
Idk, I hang out in mixed class women’s online spaces and… what else do you call it when a guy can’t/won’t hold down reliable work, but ALSO refuses to contribute at home bc that’s “women’s work”? Bc a lot of working class men are like this and there’s structural issues at play sure, but also their own attitudes and decision making. It’s loserish if your conception of manhood is so narrow that if you can’t contribute the way you want you won’t contribute at all
We just can’t talk about class in our country. Neither the right nor the left can do it.
Working class people, by which I mean people that didn’t go to college, are mostly invisible, despite being a plurality. No one is writing about them in the NYT or Atlantic or WSJ.
The decline of marriage is clearly a class story. There was an article in the Atlantic about this before Covid, I think Vox (probably Yglesias?) has written this up as well years ago.
Working class people themselves don’t read articles, and educated people clearly don’t like reading about them.
I think this is correct. My wife is a veterinarian, which gives an interesting insight as a mix of high-SES postgraduate veterinarians and low-SES barely-finished high school vet techs (you don't even need an associates to be a vet tech). All the veterinarians in my wife's practice are married. Only like 20% of the techs and other pet handlers are married. Many have kids though. We've probably been to like 3 babyshowers for a single mom or unmarried couple. There's not really an appropriate way for the vets to take their friends enough to be invited to a baby shower techs aside and be like "WTF are you guys doing. Get married!" So we just stay critical to just our own class circles and the cycle continues.
This issue disproportionately impacts the working class but it’s not only a class story—there is later and lower marriage and fertility across the board.
Specifically, looking at US numbers, I think the decline in fertility is measured by births per woman has plateaued for college educated women while it continues to fall for working class women.
This is what annoys me about pieces like this. It focuses on a non-problem with college educated people and ignores where the real marriage disparity is, which is among poorer and uneducated cohorts.
Working class people *don’t read discussions such as these*. It’s good for the chattering classes to recognize themselves as an elite, but that cuts both ways.
I’m no expert but I’m skeptical that lower class women are refusing to marry eager to commit lower class men because they are “losers”. I think probably they can’t get them commit and men remain the marriage bottleneck and these women just have kids out of wedlock with unreliable partners, if at all.
Women gatekeep sex and men gatekeep marriage and it has ever been thus.
Hence the advice behind the advice of these pro marriage social conservatives is “don’t put out without a ring”.
Also, the policy implication of looking at lower income men as the problem is probably a significant amount of wealth redistribution, and heavy handed economic management to create stable, well paying career paths for people not really about to be nimble and flexible about it themselves.
"How'd that happen? I did everything they told me to. Did you know I build missiles? I helped to protect America. You should be rewarded for that. Instead they give it to the plastic surgeons, y'know, they lied to me."
That movie really spoke to something true, even if we’re only partly supposed to sympathize with him. I wish they had made him less of an abrasive asshole personally to underscore how unemployment in late middle age justifies domestic terrorism
I really would love to see what this movie is like if it isn't directed by Joel Schumacher but instead say Steven Soderbergh (after Sex, Lies and Videotape, guessing he had a lot of studios willing to give him a bigger budget movie) or good lord Quentin Tarantino or Spike Lee (trying to think of upcoming directors from the time period who could have really taken this story into very interesting direction as opposed to the more action/blockbuster angle Schumacher is more known for).
The U.S. like the USSR built a lot of metal. We just sold off or scrapped a bunch of the old stuff instead of putting everything ever produced in Siberia.
Or focus the re-distribution on the women (who will be the ones raising the children) and on the children themselves. Trying to force young men into commitment, fidelity and a responsible career path seems like a much tougher lift than persuading young women that they will have a stable economic base provided by the state if they choose to bear and raise children.
I think when you take a realistic look at the motivations of young men and young women (particularly in lower earning deciles) this emerges as a decent solution. If men in that cohort do not want the responsibilities and limitations of marriage and child-rearing, but we want to raise the number of births, then we need to rely on women to do it. Having a lot of single mothers is better than having no mothers at all. "We" don't have to do anything to encourage it, since 40% of all mothers in the bottom half of the income distribution are already single, and the "old school conservative" ideas like denying them and their children support unless / until they marry a man (any man) is just making their lives more miserable and their children less healthy and ultimately less productive than they would otherwise be. We have already "designed" the system that produces fewer marriages, more divorces and fewer births. The goal is to try to improve the outcomes, not to parade around preening and croaking about our so-called "traditional values" as we continue to fail to make young men want to settle down.
Yeah, I think I disagree with the idea that raising the birthrate by increasing it specifically at the lowest end of the income distribution is a net benefit.
I think the birthrate declining is a problem, but I am not yet at the point where just any solution that results in more babies is worth it.
That's fair, but there is no solution to the declining birthrate problem that does not involve producing a lot more single mothers. Technology-driven reductions in the constraints that have in previous generations driven young men and women together in durable, early-life, chid-rearing partnerships have triumphed.
You have a tendency to mention the monogamy point but I think this might just be you. Like sure, in theory I’m sure plenty of guys would love to be dating 3 models at once. But I don’t think your average guy in a relationship is that interested in stuff on the side. Or to put it another way: it’s not like the options for your typical guy are “monogamous relationship with average-looking woman” vs. “have your pick of beautiful women with no commitment required”
I know there's a lot of focus on noisy people in the 'manosphere' boasting about having multiple partners, but from what I can tell (which may be inaccurate, but is based on the cultural vibe) affairs are way down while 'ethical non-monogamy' is slightly up, which combined seem to suggest that hetero men either do not greatly prize the ability to have multiple partners or are totally afraid to exercise their preferences.
That’s a rather cartoonish reductio. The real question is whether you want to give up your ability to upgrade when what’s on offer is mediocre.
And plenty of men get involved in relationships that are jolly for a time but that they don’t want to lead to marriage. You might have been in a couple yourself
Sure. Its a lot more "fun" to take your money to Vegas and play at the casinos than it is to invest in an index fund. Index funds are by definition "mediocre."
And there are people who do win big at Vegas!
But which one will leave YOU in poverty and homeless and which one will make you a millionaire?
I think a fair number of men are encouraged to sow wild oats before settling down. I was. But not for too long. My mom was pretty adamant that neither I nor my sister get married before 30 because we wouldn’t be ready before then. She had a bad first marriage (with no kids out of it) and didn’t want that for us. Both of us were with the people we ended up marrying in our late 20s though.
And the tradeoff that comes is whether or not settling for such a level is better or worse than not being coupled at all. And like all tradeoffs, people can come to different conclusions on that.
I agree at the individual level. But for society as a whole something is clearly not working thus the fertility rates below replacement rate.
At the end of the day the measure of a successful society is can it reproduce and perpetuate itself.
Modern liberal societies seem to be failing that test. If we can't figure something out then we WILL be replaced by different societies/cultures that don't have that problem.
There is no shortage of humans in the world. Our lived experience is that we are able to attract a high performing slice of those by the attractiveness of being American. I’ll worry about us being unable to perpetuate ourselves the day other people decide they don’t want to become Americans.
Culture and belief are not inheritable traits. Without fail, so far we have assimilated and strengthened our culture through immigration more than reproduction. There is zero reason to believe that is soon to not be the case.
Maybe a bit pedantic, but if you believe that men are higher variance on all sorts of “makes a good partner” traits (which I do believe), the bottom half of the distribution will contain a bunch of completely unqualified partners. As an example (not to go all Charles Murray): the median man and median woman have very similar IQs, but to bottom tail man is WAY dumber than the bottom tail woman.
Yes, not the whole bottom 50%. I am only observing that (assuming a normal distribution, which IQ is I believe), if the medians (and thus the means under a normal distribution) are the same but the men are higher variance, the tails of the male distribution will be much longer than the tails of the female one.
With respect to IQ, the mean for men is 99.5, and the mean for women is 100.5, whereas the standard deviation for men is 15.5, and the SD for women is 14.5. That does have implications for the far tails, but less for the bulk of the distribution. If the situation w.r.t. the variables relevant to marraige is analogous, it likely does explain a part of the observed phenomena, but only a part (most likely a smaller part, IMO). I think it would be nice if we stopped referring to working class men as "losers", and knee-jerk blaming them for society's problems (to be clear, I didn't think you were, though).
30% are gay or bi. Which will be good, once they admit it, for politics, but tragic for the birth rate. We need those paired off straight couples with good values who will be good parents to make up for it and have lots more kids, like in the olden days. Because a fair amount of the people who have kids shouldn’t even be permitted to. Duggar types, antivaxxers, criminals, etc.
The median people in the U.S. need to lose alot of weight. Maybe that sounds harsh, but coming back from overseas I've been gobsmacked over my career how fat Americans are, and how the number of available attractive partners for both sexes has shrunk massively because people are just fat. GLP-1s might end up saving American fertility simply by making people attractive enough again. Another reason to get them cheap enough for the working class. PLus lowering medical costs from obesity would be great for the economy.
I just found out that an uncle, by marriage thankfully not by blood, was exactly this. He recently passed away at age 90, my aunt had passed away years earlier. At his funeral, my cousin said to us, "you know he was a dick, right?" We did not. Turns out he had numerous affairs, despite giving the appearance of being prim and proper. My aunt felt she was never in position to leave him, especially when she had kids, and so lived out her life unhappily.
This was the second time I heard a similar story at an elderly relative's funeral. I don't want anybody to go back to those times.
My thought is that many of these losers aren’t so bad but the hedonic treadmill of expectations and opportunity costs of alternatives have outpaced their value.
Then there is the social structure aspect. If a man has a precarious labor market situation then he can be more of a burden on a household than asset.
Exactly. I was on a professional forum a couple decades ago and there was this dude there who would not stop bitching about the fact that all his dad needed to get a wife was a pulse and a job, and it wasn't fair that women expected more now. No one gave him any pushback aside from me. (It was a male-dominated profession. The forum was heavily moderated but saying "bitches be crazy" was explicitly within the rules, because it was "just a joke." This was on the #1 forum for people in our profession at the time.)
>I was on a professional forum a couple decades ago... The forum was heavily moderated but saying "bitches be crazy" was explicitly within the rules...<
Damn, what was the profession, bounty hunters? Insult comics?
If it wasn't for the couple decades timing being a bit too long ago, it sounds a lot like an infamous forum (Economics Job Market Rumors) for young economists/econ grad students that was quite popular ca. 2015-2020. Reading it was a great reminder why it's actually good that academia isn't a boys' club anymore.
I remember hearing about that just because of the name, logging on only once, then turning around like an angry Viking who was tricked into sailing to Greenland.
The unsaid part here is that the woman who wpuld have married that "loser" is every bit as much of a "loser" as the man. She isnt the PhD woman working for the Cato Institute, she's making $13/hr working the front desk of a motel 6.
I don't want to be too unkind, but my experience with the bottom 20% of the socioeconomic ladder (which is fairly significant, I grew up in a rural southern area) is that the women are almost exclusively more responsible and harder-working than the men. So yes, it's true that the women in question are not exactly doing great for themselves economically, but they are at least likely to hold down a job, whereas the men (even the ones in stable relationships) are far more likely to be only doing gig work, involved in crime, or not working at all.
From the same area. Boys are raised with near zero expectations except to not be gay or feminine. They are completely neglected in our local culture. It might seem awesome to be raised with zero consequences or guardrails, but it dooms them later in life.
I find this hard to believe. Not the part about there being a lot of poor performing men but the idea that their women counterparts being these wizened adults in the room is nonsense. The typical women i know in this world have little to no marketable job skills, don't make good homemakers, spend money frivolously, and spend most of their time stirring up drama in their social circles. For every embarrassed woman tethered to a deadbeat guy that can't hold down a job there's a man working 60hours a week at the lumberyard to pay for his wife's out of control spending habits.
I was using it in roughly the same context as you. I don't believe someone working at Walmart is a loser. In the wider dating discourse a man with that job is too low status to be marriageable. But the flip isn't true. A man who does out earn a Walmart job is expected to treat his wife's Walmart job as equal to his own because “she works just as much as him”.
The point here is not to denigrate the people working at Walmart. Its to showcase the double standard of how that job is treated based on the gender of the worker wrt dating/marriage.
Is a major reason for less marriage at the low end of the education/income distribution women being unwilling to marry men they see as not good marriage prospects? How would we tell?
I doubt it that much. I think the guys that are bitching about it are terminally online in their parents’ basement and not putting themselves out there. Or have no social skills. But social skills are lacking among the Soylent Green generation (Z)
This is where sociologists doing interviews with large groups of women get narrative and stated preference data. Then they form a hypothesis and look at the question with aggregated economic data.
The men were always losers, the women just had no other choice. Now, in many ways, it is actually probably better financially (and emotionally) to for a non-college educated woman to have a job, but not a full-time relationship with a man.
23 year old women in rural Iowa working at a Wal-Mart can go home and read trashy Amazon Kindle stories and watch algorithmic content too.
Yeah, I wish more people would acknowledge that a bad marriage is a particularly hellish existence. Hell, the worst year of my life was having a bad roommate! I can't imagine the daily toll a bad marriage exerts.
Fantastic column. Jesse is correct. I wish we took material history more seriously. This shift is downstream of *birth control* and *the opening of the labor market to women*. We are stuck with pre-modern institutions which fail to reflect a change that happened 60 years ago. This lag is easiest to see around child care: shared care isn’t available for most children under the age of 5, after 3PM, or all summer.
The '60s broke the pre-60s system and froze its rubble into place: local land use is another example.
As opposed to marrying a guy and having a kid while said guy doesn't want to chip in despite at times, actually working less than you do?
If you say, while just pick the non-college educated guy in your area who has a decent job and wants to be reasonably equal about childcare, you've already limited your options by a lot and that's not even getting into over possible clashes about values.
Yet that same Walmart worker would be considered a loser based on that Walmart job alone. If we are going to say a man is unmarriagable over an hourly Walmart job then why do we pretend like its a good thing for a woman? Her wage isn't providing any more to a potential family than her male counterpart.
The shift toward fewer blue-collar jobs is an old story. But there’s also much more self-selection into same-class marriages. How often do you see office men marry their female admins, or male doctors marry female nurses now? It happens, but it used to be downright normal.
Weren't those admins or nurses from a considerably higher class than their equivalents today?
That is, young women from the middle class would not have access to a four-year college education and a BA, but might well go to secretarial college or nursing school and then end up marrying the doctor or office manager who might well have been a classmate of her brother in that very four-year college that the woman couldn't get into.
These days, that young woman is going to college herself and might become a doctor or a lawyer or a manager or go into marketing or HR.
Today's secretaries/admins and nurses (especially the LPNs, who are closer in educational achievement to the nurse of the 1950s or 1960s than the modern RN) are from a distinctly lower social tier than their predecessors 60 years ago.
Yeah, “Low Paid Nurses” are kind of being phased out in favor of “Rich Nurses” bc it’s hard to imagine anyone being the former and staying that way for long, there are lots of bridge programs. The only places that hire LPNs as actual nurses are nursing homes and the VA, anyway, probably also rural hospitals
The other meaning of RN (as “Royal Navy”) is so baked-in here, that we don’t have the concept of “Registered Nurses” - we just have “Nurses”. What the US calls an LPN, we call a “Nursing Associate”. There is also “Health Care Assistant” which is the equivalent of a US CNA.
We used to call HCAs “Nursing Assistants”, but people struggled to remember which of assistant and associate is more senior, so we changed them to HCAs. We also colour-coded all the uniforms in hospital (nurses don’t have to wear uniform outside of hospital, e.g. if they’re working for a GP).
In hospitals, Nurses wear (“Hospital”) blue, associates a lighter (“Sky”) blue. HCAs wear lilac (a pale purple) to emphasize they are not nurses, while the associates are a lower-level nurse.
The only exception is surgical scrubs are always green. Everyone wears green in a surgical theatre. The only people who wear green outside of theatre are pharmacists (who wear a completely different shade from surgical, and you’d never confuse them for surgical scrubs).
Interesting. Only some of our hospitals enforce the scrub color caste system. But it makes sense for the UK to have uniform rules since they have the same management across the board.
That theory is much popular (more assortative mating today) but I doubt if this is really true - because all the classical examples from the past are upper-class men marrying lower-class women (and the opposite was usually considered a social scandal - look to movies like "All That Heaven Allows"); attending that the number of men and women in each social class was roughly the same, many assymetric assortative marriage would mean many upper-class women and lower-class men staying single (what was not the case)
What I suspect is that much of the apparent inter-class marriages of the past were more the result of, in the past, many upper-class women not having upper-class jobs before marriage, giving the illusion that upper-class men were marrying lower-class women
I mean, the female admins are now analysts/salespeople/advertising execs/whatever as well and the nurses are now doctors too. It's the same reason actors end up marrying actors.
I think lots of doctors still marry nurses due to proximity effects. Lots of nurses even have masters degrees. Doctors aren’t generally marrying the person 15 years younger with an associates though.
It’s always been like this, IIRC DNA studies show most people had twice as many female ancestors as male ancestors because over half of males generally didn’t get to reproduce.
Right, but people having twice as many female ancestors means the percentage of men who reproduced would’ve been half the percentage of women, so if 1/3rd of women didn’t reproduce, then 2/3rds of men didn’t. It was not the norm historically for below-average or even average men to have a good family life.
There are many historic genetic bottlenecks (like the Neolithic horse people killing and displacing all the men in Europe), disparate male fatality rates, noble fertility patterns, and other not so nice things too.
In many ways it's a major success story that now the below-average men can have jobs and watch manosphere streamers, instead of their previous fate of being squished by a wooly mammoth
Feminism had an effect on men too. It relieved some of the pressure to live up to masculine gender norms regarding hard work and dependability and so men chose more “loserish” lifestyles that made them less attractive to women. Loser men (or “scrubs”) are the reverse of the girlboss archetype, and TLC could only do so much to discourage them.
In addition to City of Trees's point, when you combine economic growth and upward mobility over decades, you're going to change the composition of the working class over time.
We don’t have to call them losers. They aren’t interested in commitment. Why aren’t conservatives obsessing over the why, if they care so much?
The old conservative story is that women are also to blame for this disinterest. Women are supposed to control men by being “virtuous,” and if there is even one woman who is not “virtuous,” how can any man expect to live proper conservative lives?
The rate of children out-of-wedlock for Latinos, as a census category is about midway between the White and Black rate, it's especially high among recent arrivals from Central America - but much lower among South American origin groups.
The problem is they _always_ blame the women. @MY’s thesis is that lower-class _men_ are choosing not to marry not that they are losers that women don’t want to marry.
Impressive that you managed to tie this issue back to progressives. Sexism is just obviously a big part of the explanation. Political alignment is another: educated affluent women are quite liberal, while working class men are conservative. Must be the liberals' fault!
I know a few very successful couples who started dating in college and IMO should have gotten married in their mid 20s, but there was exactly zero chance that would cause them to *have kids* in their mid-20s which seems to be the unstated desire here
I got married at 25, am now in my mid 30s, still married, want kids but don't have them yet. My friend group, other college educated adults in their mid 30s, are all only now starting to have kids or trying to.
Only few of them are succesful and focusing on their careers. The reason they don't want kids is that they are a big responsibility! People these days want to use their 20s and early 30s to have fun, travel, and build the financial stability needed to provide for a new life.
The first 2 are cultural so I don't see how you can change that. For the later the biggest impact things would be to lower housing prices (people feel more "settled" and ready as a homeowner) and decrease daycare price (exactly no one looks forward to a "second mortgage").
Side note: my generation was (correctly) bombarded with messages that having children too early is life ruining since we were 12. Is it any wonder we now need to feel very secure to have them? And if you start at 35 you'll have 1-2 kids, not 2-4 like my mom's generation did.
Bingo! It is cultural. People in the past didn’t have the means to spend their whole 20s and 30s doing this. Now we do, and the culture has shifted as a result. Nobody wants to be the woman in the image at age 24. As a man in my 20s, I had zero interest in marriage and kids. By my mid 30s, I did.
“People these days want to use their 20s and early 30s to have fun, travel, and build the financial stability needed to provide for a new life.”
It seems like it must be heavily cultural, but the fertility collapse is everywhere, and the US, Japan, China, Russia, and Italy seem like pretty distinct cultures!
I think there are a couple common threads: Increasing wealth, more options for things to do with your time, good birth control technology. But yeah, the explanation for falling TFR in Singapore and in Turkey are necessarily going to be really different.
>But yeah, the explanation for falling TFR in Singapore and in Turkey are necessarily going to be really different.<
They *may* be "really different" (though I doubt it) but I don't see why they're *necessarily* different. The economic incentives to have fewer children increase remorselessly as societies urbanize and grow wealthier. Singapore is a lot richer than it was sixty years ago. But so is Turkey.
"And if you start at 35 you'll have 1-2 kids, not 2-4 like my mom's generation did."
I think people don't appreciate just how much harder this is than having kids younger. Kids are pretty physically demanding, both having them and also dealing with them. It also means that if your kids follow your example, you don't get grandkids until your 70+.
Also limits your parents’ ability to have a meaningful relationship with your kids. Obviously depends on what your age gap from your parents is, but if your parents had you at 30 and you have your first kid at 35, second at 37, your parents are 70 before the kids have any memory of them and 80yrs old trying to keep up with pre teens. I was close with my grandparents and my parents and as a result really wanted my kids to have a meaningful grandparent relationship with my parents and that was one reason I chose to have kids younger. (Not to mention younger grandparents can really extend your village in a way older ones just aren’t able to).
Interestingly though, the research really says the opposite: The older you are when you have your first kid, the happier you claim to be. And I have to say that as an older parent myself with many younger parent friends, my experience bears this out. Older parents seem more mentally (and probably also financially) prepared to deal with adversity and, having already had the chance to travel and experience the world without kids, are perhaps a bit more primed to appreciate the novelty of watching their kids have these experiences for the first time (and less resentful of being burdened with parenting while having the experience themselves).
That study is really weird. It measures across an incredibly broad number of countries with radically different circumstances and several of their results contradict other research (e.g. high income families being less happy with more children relative to middle income).
I will acknowledge that if you have kids when you are 25 vs. 35 you will like have more frustration at 28 than at 38 as most people grow more patient as they get older. But having a 13 year old when you are 38 compared to when you are 48 and having your grand kids when you are 50 compared to when you are 70 is a very strong counter balance.
I'm not so sure I follow the logic that taking care of a 13 year old is meaningfully more difficult when you're 48 than when you're 38. Taking care of a young child is physically taxing: You have to carry them around, sometimes you have to chase them, you pretty much always have to carry their stuff, but psychologically they are comparatively simple. Teenagers can carry their own stuff, but they come with a much more complicated set of problems, some of which require real maturity to deal with.
How grantparents feel about being grantparents at 50 vs 70 seems like a topic for a whole other paper, but almost certainly not something that is impacting people's reported happiness at age 40.
I think the intellectual and emotional maturity difference between 38 and 48 is much smaller than the physical capability. Its also been longer since you were a teenager.
Having younger grandparents who can help out more with kids is a really big difference for parents! A 73 year old grandparent is going to have way more trouble keeping up with a 3 year old than a 53 year old grandparent. Since grandparents are a key source of alloparenting, reducing that makes a meaningful difference in how much support parents have. It also makes a meaningful difference in how much fun being a grandparent which is one of the benefits of having kids in the first place.
First, it’s not that big of a difference as long as you don’t let your health go to shit.
Second, the old paradigm was people having kids in their 30’s and 40’s too, they were just having the 6th or 12th kid depending on when they got started.
Having kids late in life is not a new thing. The new thing is not starting in your teens or 20’s.
We are trading our first two kids for more years of education and experience, and that is not a bad trade. The fewer kids you have get more resources and attention.
1) "First, it’s not that big of a difference as long as you don’t let your health go to shit."
From the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists: "A woman's peak reproductive years are between the late teens and late 20s. By age 30, fertility (the ability to get pregnant) starts to decline. This decline happens faster once you reach your mid-30s. By 45, fertility has declined so much that getting pregnant naturally is unlikely."
2) "We are trading our first two kids for more years of education and experience, and that is not a bad trade. The fewer kids you have get more resources and attention."
There is significant literature from polling, interviews and such that say many couples who delay pregnancy end up with fewer children than they wanted. Many couples who are trying in the mid to late 30s end up with one child. Which is both bad for social stability, but more importantly denies parents and children the joy of children with siblings.
Look under the hood. The most up to date data shows that female fertility decline is marginal until one’s 40’s.
I would have liked to have 10 kids in theory. In reality I had 2 and that was enough given what I wanted to go through physically, our salaries, and our bandwidth. How would I answer that survey I wonder?
My kids are better off that I didn’t have as many kids as I wanted.
I'm confused by your points seeming contradictory. Either female fertility isn't dropping or it is, but that's good?
I'd argue both are incorrect. That female fertility has clearly been dropping and that its bad. If you don't think its going down, I'd be curious your explanation as for why there are almost a million fewer births now in the US than there were 20 years ago despite the US population being 12% higher.
I'm not going to speak to your personal situation, except to ask the following question - you had two kids. If you only had one child, you could have theoretically had more resources for them and not been as impacted physically, in your salaries or bandwidth. Do you think you would have been better off with just one child?
Because if the answer to that is no, then you value that extra child more than those things. Its possible that you might have similar feelings if you had a third. Or perhaps not. There are clearly decreasing returns for most people, but I think many people underrate the joys of multiple children.
To be clear, I'm not encouraging people to have 10, but more that they should have 2-3 instead of none or 1. That of course is general advice and there are many people who should have more or none at all.
I know a woman who married early, had kids in her twenties, and traveled extensiely all over the world with her kids. According to her, traveling with kids is a lot easier than it sounds, though it does require other lifestyle tradeoffs.
I was married at 25, first kid at 27, now working on number 3 at 33. Since that first kid, have been to India twice, Saudi Arabia, Austria, a host of places in the US - some with kids, some without. The benefit of having kids young is you don’t worry so much about trying something like traveling with them or figuring out how to make things work. Everyone now has this mindset of “fun now, then kids and no fun” so they delay until they’re ready to have no fun and then proceed to have kids and have no fun. But our approach was “fun now and kids now” - we weren’t ready to stop having fun so we didn’t! And it was fun!
My wife and I are trying to have kids now. We both like to travel and we've avoided "ultra easy" travel together (e.g. Western Europe, Canada, Italy) to save it for when we have kids. We've instead gone places that have some challenges or are a long flight away (Japan, Brazil).
We've taken our two-year-old to four countries already! I think part of the perception comes from people who wait until their kids are older to start, at which point the kid is reacting to a new situation, whereas my daughter has never known a life where she wasn't on a plane every few months. It's normal to her.
"Side note: my generation was (correctly) bombarded with messages that having children too early is life ruining since we were 12. Is it any wonder we now need to feel very secure to have them? And if you start at 35 you'll have 1-2 kids, not 2-4 like my mom's generation did."
I recall being bombarded by messages not to have kids while being a teenager. I don't recall messages to wait until later than that.
I don't remember anyone being like "having babies are life ruining until you turn 18, then it's cool". The message was definitely "if you have them too early you'll ruin your life, especially if you're a woman". We might have over indexed on what too early is. Or at least that was my experience.
This is exactly my cohort of friends. None of us had children until mid-30s. Many have one child or at most two. My younger daughter will graduate college when I am a couple of years from retirement age. My wife and I had a wonderful time dating, living together, getting married and living our lives until we decided (realized?) that we were in our mid-30s and having children was something we really wanted. I'm so very glad we had two wonderful daughters. We wish in retrospect that we had started a little earlier and had at least one more, but hindsight is 20/20 and, see above, we really enjoyed our early adulthood and meager but adequate disposable income before parenting became our priority. Addendum: very few couples in our cohort have divorced. A blessing.
Having kids is extremely high-variance, and there's no way to generalize from other people's experiences. Having said that ... there are a lot of things I want from life, but "see my kids get old(er)" is at the very top of that list and, as they say, it isn't close.
My wife and I had our first daughter in our mid thirties. I honestly think I would have been a terrible father in my twenties: I was selfish, distracted, and negligent.* But having kids changes you, sometimes for the better. In retrospect, I realize it might have been fine. The only thing I'm certain of is that we overshot the mark, at least a bit. I'm not sure whether we waited 3, 5, or 7 years longer than we needed to, and I can't imagine 𝘢𝘯𝘺𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘯𝘨 I could have read that would have made me pull the trigger. But I wish there had been.
* Parents could use a bit more of those last two in today's world, imo, but I'm talking about turning the dials all the way up.
I feel like the norm among highly educated people I know (or at least was eight years ago or whatever) is that a lot of them are basically married in their 20s anyway but they wait until they're 30 or 32 to actually have a wedding because maybe they're doing long distance for grad school or haven't saved up for the party or whatever (and aren't having kids yes). This is personal bias, but honestly it seems fine; they (we) all seem to have turned out just fine. There's still plenty of time to have two or three kids if you start at 32.
In principle, yes, but lots of things can inhibit kids even in the 30s. Basic chemotherapy, for example, is bad for male reproduction and generally apocalyptic for women's reproduction.
We got married when I was 27, were living in an apartment, wanted to wait till we got a house. After a year or two we realized we were never get into a house at this rate, so we actually moved in with my parents for 2+ years to save up. Finally got into a house in 2010 (the brief blip where home prices made sense).
Couple years later we started trying to have kids (probably earlier 30's). Had two miscarriages before finally having two kids.
It really does get harder when you wait, things might not go as smooth as you expect.
That’s what my in-laws did! Married in their early 20s, had my husband at 30. (Sad story: they actually wanted a second baby later, but my MIL had several miscarriages and was never able to carry to term again. Reproductive medicine was a lot less advanced back then, though.)
Agree 100%. I know a handful of couples where both people have college degrees and started dating in high school or early college, but then waited to get married until their late 20s. Weird to me, but there’s no way marrying earlier would’ve resulted in kids earlier.
I think those people are still success stories. The failure mode that these people seem to be worried about is being in relationships in your 20s with people who do not want to commit and have kids with you, or with whom you would not want to have kids. Start looking for a co parent earlier and then lock them down, basically.
Yeah I got married in my mid 20s to my college boyfriend but we still didn’t start trying for kids until our early 30s. Cuz like… why would we? Early 30s is still enough time to have 2, maybe even 3.
It’s just not enough to guarantee 3, or make 4 particularly likely. But why do I need that many? Kids have diminishing marginal returns imo. And having a responsibility-free 20s is awesome! Would I give that up to be able to have kids at all, yes absolutely. But to be able to 4 kids instead of 2? What exactly am I getting out of that 4th kid to make her worth the sleepless nights and stress and giving up my late 20s full of socializing and travel??
I always wonder how much of a "first mover" problem there is with marriage, as my personal anecdata supports a model where
1) A lot of people have extremely long term/permanent relationships that do not proceed to marriage
2) Everyone in a friends cohort that does marry tends to get married within a few years of each other
3) Proposals are *far* more likely to happen at another wedding than anywhere else
4) A lot of engagements linger for a long time until something else triggers the actual wedding
To me that suggests that a lot of the decision to get married is contingent on triggering events, and if you just increased people's exposure to fun, lovey-dovey events where people talk about long-term commitment you might just mechanically get a higher marriage rate.
Proposals are most likely to happen at a wedding? That seems wrong! Why would you do this to someone who invited you to their wedding? The wedding is supposed to center around the bride and groom. You don’t want the bride after the wedding to be like, “The wedding was beautiful and perfect, just as I always dreamed, until my dumbass cousin Chad got down on one knee in the middle of the dance floor and proposed to his girlfriend! Now he’ll be the first thing anyone remembers of my wedding! He totally upstaged me! Freaking Chad 🤬”
If you’re inspired by the romantic atmosphere of a wedding, propose to your girlfriend the weekend after, that’s my recommendation.
I am 23 now and have been married for 10 months. My husband and I are now both STEM graduate students. We have a great relationship and would like at least 3 kids (if not more) but are trying to figure out the best timeline to start having kids.
I sometimes think we should start trying for kids in my mid-twenties, but worry about the impact to my career. I'm primarily considering the push-and-pull of being a working mom and the ambitious jobs (i.e., bad work-life balance) I'm interested in having during my mid-twenties. Beyond those concerns, I feel pretty ready to have kids.
On my husband's end, I think his concerns are much more related to our ability to take care of a baby and the potential lifestyle impacts to our free-time. He is the youngest so never baby-sat or spent much time around kids so that has a big impact on our different perspectives.
I wonder if this is a broader trend or generalizable at all? We are clearly unique in getting married so young, especially considering that we are not really religious.
Be me, hate dating apps and want to meet men in person. Start volunteering with local community. Full of great guys but they are all already married. Join rock climbing group, but once again, most men are already married. In panic, start attending church fellowship events despite not being particularly pious. Full of the best dudes you'll ever meet, but naturally they are always married. For sure there is something wrong with me, but it would help to know where is this abundance of good men who just can't wait to start families that I keep hearing about.
Yes, the whole "get involved in non-dating interactions" argument regularly strikes me as missing the point that those interactions are intending to do something else other than being dating markets. We need more explicit matchmaking avenues that aren't designed to be a maw of dissatisfaction like is increasingly seen of online dating.
The trick is to get involved in those activities and find *friends*, then date *their* hot friends when you get invited to parties/gatherings/occasions unrelated to the original activity. The idea is to build more nodes into your social network.
The opposite - "explicit matchmaking avenues" are the better way to find BAD relationships (this is what happen when people enter in relationships with people who are not previous friends or at least close acquintances)
I don't quite understand what you're asserting here. If people don't have friends or at least close acquaintances who are also open to dating, what are people supposed to do?
This seems like a silly claim to make in an era where a huge proportion of the public met and later married a partner they found on a dating app (I.e. explicit matchmaking avenues)
There is certainly a market for lemons element to the dating market, but I don’t think it leads to bad relationships for the lemons. It leads to them remaining single perpetually
Matt articulates this well. It helps a lot to see a how consciousness a guy is in his natural habitat. Especially if you're interested in stuff beyond appearance.
When you get into your 30s dating becomes a market for lemons. My wife’s friend is dealing with this. I told her to date a short uggo because then she knows why they were single (unlike those NYC finance guys.)
I'm a short king (5'5"). I respectfully submit that single people who are having trouble finding the right man might not have that problem if they were willing to dock a couple of inches from their height requirements. My husband was!
I absolutely give this advice to all my single friends! I will never understand the superficiality around men’s height - it creates such a ripe arbitrage opportunity if you can get past it, you can get a man undervalued by the market and score a lot of better attributes. I don’t know any woman who wouldn’t trade a couple of inches of height for more kindness, intelligence, humor, etc but every time I mention it as a possible trade off they are astonished and have never considered it that way.
(Embarrassingly, I ended up with a 6’1” husband and so have to hem and haw that I WOULD have been happy with a shorter guy…)
For men the equivalent "hack" (assuming you draw the line at obesity which otherwise is the obvious place to look) is dating Black women, who are highly undervalued in the dating market
Interestingly, there was a 2008 study finding that marriages between white men and Black women are much less likely to end in divorce compared to white/white marriages: https://www.jstor.org/stable/20456781
I know that the data says the differences are only on the order of 2 or 3 percent, but I really think this is an East Coast-West Coast thing. For economic reasons, eligible bachelors tend to sort toward cities on the West Coast, and successful young women tend to sort toward the East Coast. And so you end up with guys in California saying there are no women, and women in NYC saying there are no men.
You're not wrong, but I assumed the person I was replying to was more likely to be in the 'champagne' dating pool based on the fact that they subscribe to Slow Boring.
Industry concentration. Tech and engineering jobs are present on both coasts, obviously, but as a proportional share of the overall job pool are more common in the West. And those jobs tend to be disproportionately male. On the East, I think it's more just a general result of the fact that young women are more college-educated than men, and so the general suite of white collar jobs (marketing, publishing, academia, non-profits, etc.) is going to have more young women even if the industry as a whole is fairly gender-balanced.
I’m a single man looking for a relationship that leads to marriage and kids, and I’ve had a similar experience but with the genders reversed. I can’t even remember the last time I met an attractive woman in person who was single. I’ve concluded that dating apps are the least bad option once you get into your 30s.
I suspect geography is a big part of my problem. An Eastern city with lots of colleges and hospitals so there is an lopsided amount of educated young women. All the lonely, hardworking, farm boys live a few states away from me.
Then you have a bunch of guys that wanted to work in technology that got stuck in Seattle or SF, working on teams composed entirely of men, with male coded hobbies, and a local population that skews very male.
I'm sorry you're having such a tough time! I remember being in my mid-20s and being frustrated with the dating market.
Consider getting on one of the PAID dating apps. I met my wife on eHarmony back in 2014. I'm not sure what the landscape is like now, but I remember even back then there was a DRAMATIC difference between paid dating apps (eHarmony, Match, etc) and the free apps (Tinder, Coffee Meet Bagel, etc).
Based on my experience and what I’ve seen of the data, a major driver of the decline of marriage in America, perhaps the biggest driver, is that it became socially acceptable for working class white women to cohabitate with men they weren’t married to. It became much more socially acceptable to have women out of wedlock children.
I have 3 aunts born in the early 60s. They didn’t go to college. They are all divorced. They married losers - abusive men, men with substance abuse issues, men who couldn’t hold down jobs, etc. My cousins, ie their kids, partnered with losers too, they just didn’t marry them. Instead they had kids out of wedlock.
I have 4 female first cousins. None of them are married. 3 of them are mothers, and 2 are divorced.
It does seem like the lesson many have learned from high divorce rates is “don’t get married” rather than “be a good partner and find a good partner.”
I think many of these decisions about whether and when to get married are driven by personal experience rather than broad societal trends. It’s why solving this is hard.
I mean sure, but in that situation people seem to be deciding I'll still partner with these people but won't marry them. When ideally the decision would be "I'm going to move" or "I'm going to be single." I get that it's easy for me to say that since I have found a great partner. But it seems uncontroversial to say that the outcome of not getting married but having kids with bad partners is not a good outcome.
Wait, that seems quite controversial! Single parenting is hard but has gotten easier over time, and I imagine that most single mothers are probably happier having a kid, on balance, than never having gotten pregnant. Most people like their kids!
First, you are both right. This is likely colored by my religous background and my personal experience where it was quite hard for my mom to raise 4 kids after my dad died. Certainly much harder than when my dad was around. Also you are right that single parenting is probably preferable to many/most over being single and childless. I overstated my point or at least calling the outcome bad was the wrong way to put it. It's not bad that single women are having kids. I do think studies show that being married to a good partner is better for everyone involved though.
Second, maybe I'm being overly romantic, but what I was mostly thinking was not an alternative where people simply don't have kids, but mostly that they find a good partner and get married and have kids. Like I said in my origional reply, I feel like the preferred lesson of the high divorce rate would be "be a good partner and find a good partner" but I don't think that's really been the takeaway. I think the more common takeaway is that marriage is bad and I don't need a partner.
No, that is certainly controversial. That’s a value judgment almost certainly based on your religion.
People are good. The US is in a good position because until the last couple of decades, we have had stronger natural population growth than other developed countries and we’ve had lots of immigration. Part of that strong population growth has been children, born into single mom situations or children raised by single mothers.
Yes this is it. Unfortunately this is true. When I was I kid (90s and 00s) society and the Christian church in the South (with which I’m most familiar) pushed women to marry/stay with these men who are unfit for marriage. There has since been a shift - and that’s a good thing.
If you set the standards low enough, people will make sure to sink enough to meet them.
If a person (man or woman) doesn't need to improve themselves enough to be worthy to be a spouse but still gets the apparent short-term benefits, why bother?
Didn’t Charles Murray try to tell this story 20 yrs ago? But he might have mixed it up with so many other things that everyone could just yell “Bell Curve racist” (with some good reason) and ignore the parts that might be valid.
Coming Apart was very much worth reading, and it was reviewed pretty widely. His thesis was that there was a social/values change that affected working class/underclass people far more than professional/educated class people, and partly he attributed this to people on the higher end of society not preaching what they practice. That is, most top-1%-income people live with something like what a person in the 1950s would call traditional values, but mostly pay lip service to a much more permissive set of values. But also probably this has to do with the massive sorting on intelligence/diligence that he discussed originally as a possibility in The Bell Curve.
Massive eyeroll at the idea that working class men would be super eager to marry and be supportive, involved fathers if only Teh Elitez scolded them harder.
Being a racist is a good disqualification. A friend of a friend dabled with Naziism. I don’t think it reflected any more than a desire to be edgy, but it’ll be a long time before I can take anything he says seriously because that represents such poor judgement and character
The thesis of Charles Murray's "The Bell Curve" was fundamentally hereditarian, and hereditarianism is anathema to most liberals because there is strong evidence that a hereditarian world view tends to make people callous towards their "inferiors".
The Nazi "Aktion T4" project to murder severely disabled Germans was a clear example of this, especially if we ask the question "why didn't the Soviets do something similar?"
Nazi Germany and the USSR were both totalitarian dictatorships that cared nothing for either public opinion or Abrahamic morality, and the USSR was also considerably poorer (to the point it had lost millions of its people in famines) such that it would have a considerably stronger material incentive to dispose of "useless eaters". And a policy of outright murdering the disabled (as opposed to the far more historically prevalent eugenicist policy of sterilizing them) doesn't even require one to hold that their disability was genetic in the first place.
Most people are at least somewhat hereditarian in their own lives though, as with the common voice when getting married to look at your future mother in law to see your future wife.
Hereditarianism is anathema to liberals because the blank slate is one of the most important underlying assumptions of a huge amount of liberal ideology. If you no longer take on faith that people are fundamentally equal, everything falls apart.
Maybe, just maybe working class people ought to start shaming other working class people into marriage instead of expecting the chattering classes to do it; assuming the lack of fingerwagging is the problem.
Yes this was always the problem with Stephanie Kelton's thesis: if being lectured at by the professional class got working class men to do things then they'd all be driving Prius's and voting for Elizabeth Warren--it's not like the professional classes never lecture the working class about *anything*. But it demonstrably doesn't work!
If anything, Trump is the GOP candidate who lectures the working class the least compared to the old country club and church Republicans of old, in part because he's the president who has had the messiest personal life in decades.
This is partly true, but in recent years the fertility of working class women has been converging with college educated. Maybe it's better sex education?
I think it’s more likely that birth control is harder to screw up these days than it used to be (eg if you have an IUD you literally do nothing vs remembering to take a pill every day at the same time or put a condom on every time)
If I remember correctly, a big part of Jordan Peterson's early rise to prominence was based on this type of message to young men. It was quite popular *among men* but widely panned during the height of the woke era (I hate that term, but don't know what else to call the ubiquitousness of DEI / Trans / pronouns during the 2015-2024 period)
Never been a big Peterson fan. Obviously he says some unobjectionable stuff about making your bed and generally being on top of your shit. But I think young boys also need to hear stuff like: be a compassionate person, a good listener, patient and respectful. I also never got the sense that Peterson wanted young men to seek out equality in their relationships. Like part of being in a modern educated relationship is being sometimes fluid in your gender roles and men shouldn't think they need to be typecasted as some macho macho man all the time.
To throw a bone to his defenders, Early Peterson is indeed very different from Later Peterson. He’s a cautionary tale about audience capture and the dangers of fame and buying your own hype.
Pretty much. I suspect there was a break somewhere.
And to be clear, I’m not exonerating his critics. He legit did get attacked for saying some rather banal and helpful shit, all because it wasn’t PRECISELY what the Toxic Masculinity crowd wanted to hear.
But as is often the case with victims of Taibbi-Greenwald Syndrome, the resulting Cancellation Overreaction Psychosis undoubtedly stems from deep personal flaws. Guys like Matt get cancelled, and yeah it sucks for them, but they don’t turn their backs on everything dear to them. Heck, even FdB, as fucked in the head as he is, never crossed that line. So, there’s always something else going on.
My hypothesis is, there’s some sort of nexus between entrepreneurial attitudes relating to PMC values, and how one deals with criticism. Matt’s known for going on tilt from time to time, but generally shrugs the criticism off, and also views his job as just another gig. He’s dedicated to the craft. Similarly, Freddie is pretty open about self-criticism, and legit doesn’t seem to care all that much about his sub’s growth; both men ultimately know that any value their gigs have is based on how true they are to themselves.
Peterson, Taibbi, Greenwald… these are people who had one big scoop, or were right about one big thing, and figured that entitled them to fixed sinecures within the PMC punditocracy. Instead of basing their work on a genuine authorial voice, once the first gig runs out, they scramble to take bigger and bigger gambles on another big payout that’ll float them until they win the next gamble, and the next after that.
Although there were some warning signs before, the big break with Peterson seems to be when he came back out of his coma. Or part of him did, and the rest never came back.
I repeat my standard refrain that if we don't allow there to be banal Jordan Petersons talking to the men and giving the men advice *for their own good* (and not what women wish men would be like), you will just eventually only be left with the Andrew Tates.
You can't fake this. Young men figure out very fast if the person giving them advice has their interests at heart or not.
I’m generally predisposed to be charitable towards feminists — I think a lot of the reaction to them is ugly and overblown, even when they aren’t being great themselves. I think it’s best to err on the side of being patient with all involved.
However, I’ve also become increasingly sympathetic to the still-charitable view that many of toxic masculinity’s biggest feminist critics basically want men who socialize more like women, and struggle to conceive of anything that could possibly be considered its own, separate thing from femininity such that it could be called a NON-toxic form of masculinity.
Like, that’s not to say that they all think all masculinity is toxic — they don’t — but whenever they decry toxic masculinity, the only alternatives they’re capable of suggesting (when they even bother) are basically gussied up feminine characteristics. And that’s okay to argue for, but just don’t gaslight me that repackaged femininity is the only form of acceptable masculinity.
They can't articulate non-toxic masculinity, but you don't believe they think all masculinity is toxic? Seems pretty clear to me that they do.
Something that is "toxic" cannot be repaired or redeemed, it can only be cleansed by removal. These are people who think language & microagressions are really important; they have been asked repeatedly to come up with a better term, and they have refused. I don't think the charitable interpretation is tenable at this point.
At the risk of being too literal toxicity is defined by the dosage. Hence water intoxication enough clean drinking water becomes toxic at a certain threshold.
It's not masculinity is toxic per se but that the proportion of masculinity to femininity or androgyny is too high. You could simply take the same impulses and water them down and you'd have non-toxic doses of masculinity.
Yes, I (a woman) found his early writing and speech to be very much about morality and being a good person - it resonated with me as the types of thing I would want my sons to hear. Then he went off the deep end post-coma.
I think he’s a cautionary tale about benzos personally. Dude had a bad reaction and went crazy (especially given the unhealthy info environment he landed in, with both unreasonable worshipers and crazy detractors).
Yeah. With all the visible homelessness and mental illness I really hope the kids viscerally understand that hard drugs are really a bad idea in a way that I didn’t growing up
Problem is that a lot of people are still very vocal in defending things like LSD. Ketamine, as an example, still has a large group of folks that are advocating for it.
Well, I did mean my post somewhat amusingly. I do think there is something different to crashing out and over dosing are a bit different than going somewhat crazy.
I would say that past 15 years that cultural elites have generally denigrated men and not offered them much patience, compassion, or respect.
For example, when you have the CDC listing disparate impacts of Covid or suicide and omitting the most disparately affected group (men) from any discussion, it signals something callous about priorities. It undermines trust.
I think this is pretty overstated, but I’d guess it would depend on how you are defining your population of “progressives.”
It seems more like everyone has a couple groups they just lack the ability to speak nicely about. A top example here would be the ways that people talk about people who live in cities while simultaneously bemoaning that people aren’t nice enough to rural residents.
Or even more germane, the way people talk about progressives.
I grew up in a rural area in the south, where "redneck" is a really common term, especially as an insult. One day a guy I know in high school posted on Facebook that it's the last acceptable insult, and he thought that was bad. I think there's some truth to that, and I decided to treat redneck as a kind of ethnicity, and refrain from looking down on or insulting them.
My response was far too flippant for such a serious topic.
I get annoyed when I see this response to male suicide statistics, and I wish people would be more explicit about what they're saying & why they think it's relevant.
Our culture penalizes men who express vulnerability or weakness; women are more likely to report feeling depressed; men are 500% more likely to commit suicide. To me, these facts paint a very clear picture, but I admit this is a complex topic & other interpretations are possible.
Sorry if I let anger get the better of me & came off like a jerk.
Peterson for me was the point when it became obvious that there's a bit of affirmative action going on for conservative intellectuals. Having someone say "clean your room" is a revelation when it's your parents and you're 5, but not if you're 30. He was more a lifestyle guru for the "failure to launch" crowd, which these days leans Trumpy.
To a certain extent, Peterson being held up as an intellectual was a bit of a category error, like when Bob Dylan won the Nobel Prize in Literature. At a fundamental level, people don't go to Paul Krugman, Francis Fukuyama, and Greg Mankiw primarily for life advice or to be a Successories poster. People read Gibbon to learn about Rome, not to break themselves out of bedrot. If he was younger and female, he would have just been seen as an influencer who then proceeded to blow up their life publicly, which seems to be the main TikTok influencer career path. Being an advice columnist is seen as less respectable to being an intellectual, so there was an incentive for a lot of people to use the wrong term for marketing and respectability purposes.
My main assertion is I think you have to include him with some of the contemporary "credentialed writers" that were around at the same time. The curators, as they were, were digging deep for an authoritative voice. The ones that were dug up from the left turned out to be full on grifters just as heavily.
My guess, after that, is that the right clings to the credentialed writers they find far stronger than the left tends to. I'm not entirely clear why, though.
Since the Bush years, conservative intellectuals have basically gone one of two routes:
- Been alienated by the Bush and Trump types into basically becoming standard liberals who are just a bit more uncomfortable around dyed pink hair than Ezra Klein-style liberals (Fukuyama, Bill Kristol, Fareed Zakaria, etc.)
- Gone down weird rabbit holes to stay a conservative in good standing while maintaining a grift
The only way to remain both a conservative and an intellectual is to be the type of conservative that only exists in faculty lounges these days.
Also, your roles are necessarily a bit different when you start having children. No matter how supportive a father I am (very), I couldn't ever carry a baby to term or breastfeed them, and doing those things has a big impact on everything else. A job with long hours or a lot of travel is hard to square with those things when you have very young children, and even when the kids are older it's almost unworkable for both parents to have the heavy travel jobs.
I think there's a wrong notion of equality that says "we both have the same tasks/goals/role in the family," and it's worth pushing back on that. A family where mom stays home with the kids and dad works a demanding job to pay the bills is going to have a different (and more traditional-looking) division of labor in the home than one where mom and dad both have full-time jobs, or one where dad works full-time and mom works part-time, or one where mom works full time and dad stays home with the kids, or whatever else.
Equality of opportunity is an oxymoron. My opportunities can never be exactly equal to yours or anyone else’s. You are being slippery even if you don’t know it.
Equality has never been intended to mean everyone is exactly equal; whether that means in ability, circumstances, or any other measurement. But it does mean that people shouldn’t be precluded from pursuing the opportunities that they would like to.
My wife and I can handle different tasks, utilize different strengths, hold down different jobs and still fit within a reasonable definition of equality.
So, what do you mean that relationships shouldn’t aim for equality?
When you say equality doesn’t mean we are equal you are being slippery.
Maybe you think the concept of equity is so beautiful it can handle some slipperiness but say X does not mean X is the literally definition of slippery.
I think your advice is good, but it misses the point of what Peterson and marriage were selling. Young people (especially working class men) want actionable, measurable achievements to chase. If the plan in 1950 was: get a job, get married, have kids, and that plan in 2026 seems disrupted, then the advice to be a better person doesn’t really stand in for the old sequence. I think that’s why the make your bed or learn to code brand of advice was appealing. It felt like forward momentum.
I never watched his content, but one of my best friends was driven crazy by the backlash against him. “The guy’s advice is take a shower, clean your room, and get a job. How did he become this avatar of right wing evil? Is there some anti-men-taking-showers constituency? Are men perpetuating systemic racism and sexism if they clean their rooms?”
Because to most left-leaning people he wasn't the "clean your room guy" he was the "freaking out about supposedly being under the yoke of the evil Canadian gov't to use the right pronouns" guy.
He had a point about that for like two minutes, and then he went on an all meat diet in Russia or whatever it was and came back full-on batshit. Not a well man, if he ever was.
Oh sure - but my point is Scott Galloway can of makes many of the same arguments and while there's some left-wing criticism because he has views left wingers disagree with, there's no push to paint him as some evil figure because at worse, he has some dumb ideas.
If he went to Russia I wonder if he was ensnared by an FSB honeytrap operation while he was there, and thus came back a kompromized asset of the Kremlin?
Like CarbonWaster said above - I'm sure there was a negative response to Peterson among some segments of left initially, but to my recollection he only became considered a strictly right wing figure once the pronoun stuff happened. And the real nutso Benzo addict happened after that. I could be wrong though.
Quite. 'The left' is a huge number of people so I'm not going to say 'nobody', but I really don't think many people on the left were angry about him advising people to take a shower and clean their room. The point is we were only a position to hear this banal advice because he was promoted on the basis of the frisson from his controversial opinions.
He was right about that, though. IIRC what he said was "I'm fine with using whoever's preferred pronouns, but making it illegal not to is crossing a line."
I misremembered; apparently he said he's happy to use whichever "traditional" pronoun trans people prefer, i.e. "he" or "she", but drew the line at neo or gender neutral pronouns, and also said making that illegal was crossing a line.
I'm a dyed in the wool progressive, and that's about where I come down. Trans people are real, they should be afforded dignity & respect; if you want to "dismantle the gender binary" you can do that on your own time, but I think it's silly, and forcing people to pretend to agree with you is a really bad idea for several reasons.
Being seen to advocate or acknowledge the challenges men faced during that era was seen as a “distraction” from the challenges women faced. It was very zero sum.
I don’t think so - early on he had some very reasonable takes that got him construed as being anti woman (like that the wage gap is not ex ante something that should be eliminated if it reflects women’s preference to prioritize other things like children, etc) but I never heard anything in the beginning (pre falling off the deep end) to be objectionable. (Am a woman)
Meh? If you’re going to make your public persona about a certain thing, you kind of DO invalidate it with directly hypocritical misconduct.
Like, if Rick Santorum comes out as gay, everyone instantly knows he’s an even bigger asshole than he ever came across as. By contrast, if he comes out as an anti-vaxxer, it doesn’t directly invalidate anything he said about homosexuality, because it has nothing to do with homosexuality.
The point here is the hypocrisy of the messenger doesn't change the message itself. Being strung out on benzos is bad and that fact doesn't change based on some internet takesters life choices.
He was prescribed those by a doctor because he was suffering chronic insomnia from a physical illness and later his wife came down with cancer and his anxiety compounded.
He previously said that benzodiaze isn't safe to take long-term, but when you are at the point of "haven't slept at all for three weeks" you are no longer in a good mental space to make decisions and try to meter yourself. Maybe he should have set up better advanced directives with his doctor but he was likely expecting, like the rest of us, to never ever have a need to deal with benzos in the first place.
The benzos are both the only thing that words to get some people to sleep, and insanely high-risk. (My sister - my best-educated, most conscientious sibling - managed to get sufficiently addicted to prescription benzos to lose her nursing license. She got her life together again, but it took years.)
Most good broad-applicability life advice is neither novel nor interesting, so to become a public figure who’s famous for giving such advice, you need to put it in some sort of weird attention-getting package that only loosely relates to the advice. In Peterson’s case, the framework included stuff like obsessions with transphobia and all-meat diets, confusing rhetoric about lobsters, and a body of psychoanalytic theory that, as far as I can tell from reading summaries, is like what Carl Jung would have produced if he routinely smoked crack.
It’s pretty obvious that the backlash was mostly more about the attention-seeking packaging than it was about “clean your room.” (Most of the object-level recommendations in “12 Rules for Life” are things that most adults would correctly agree with.)
I've never watched Peterson or any of these dudes but to this specific point, therein lies the paradox. If a man is already successful, super talented or attractive, or just otherwise juiced in somehow, he can let the small stuff go. On the other hand if he's at a point where he's seeking out this kind of advice, it's probably a good idea to take a look at the low hanging fruit that might in aggregate make his life better.
I never read his books (I'm a little old for self-help books directed at young men), but I did listen to a few episodes of his podcast, and he was really an excellent interviewer. Several of his podcast episodes were quite good, because he engaged deeply and intelligently with his interviewee.
It’s a way to have agency. If you’re the sort of person who is convinced that everything is rigged against you, such that you’re the overlapping audience for Peterson, Rogan, Andrew Tate, and the long tail of incel and mens’ rights psychos, then I imagine clean your room is good advice - to say nothing of its position relative to the alternatives.
It’s an important part of treatment for people who struggle to self-regulate. For Peterson’s (ideal) audience of young men who are trying to sort themselves out, it probably adds value despite not being crucial to anything. And if you can’t do it (raises hand), it’s a sign you might have attention or other issues you should address
I don’t think that “clean your room” is necessary or sufficient for life success, but I also think that more than half of people with dirty rooms would probably feel better after cleaning them. A lot of things that aren’t completely make or break are worth doing.
No one hires somebody to clean their room in the way Peterson means (well, I'm sure SOMEONE does, but it's not that common among successful people). The young men he's talking to literally just have trash lying everywhere and all kinds of stuff out on the ground or on their desk instead of put away. Things like washing your sheets, dusting, vacuuming, etc. are a whole tier higher.
In addition to what others have said - if you as a presumably somewhat low status man want to do one low hanging fruit thing to make your odds of finding an attractive mate much higher, cleaning your room is likely a very good place to start
Woke started in African American circles, then got appropriated by white progressives, then got contextualized into the NGO rent seeking grift, and now has finally become a core tenant of Republican pearl clutching and cancel culture.
I used to watch a fair bit of Peterson and I thought his Bible and mythology stuff was interesting, but he kind of screwed up his own life despite being incredibly successful so I’m not so sure it’s good for men to be taking him that seriously.
Certainly not anymore. 100% of the people I know in real life who became therapists did so as a way to sort through their own issues. I don’t know Peterson in real life but I’d say he’s the best example anyone could come up with of the phenomenon.
My guess is that the sudden change of his circumstances, from a somewhat charismatic college professor at a decent university with a couple of seldom-read books to a public speaker/player in the culture wars who was giving public lectures, debating people, fighting on Twitter with tons of people, getting called nasty names by one set of media outlets and nice names by a different set (neither of whom actually knew or cared much about his ideas--a click is a click), was really bad for him. Being put on a pedestal as a role model of some kind for young men probably wasn't great for him, either, though probably he'd have been okay with that if he could have just stayed as a college professor and maybe gone on an occasional book tour.
Sudden fame is hard on people, being treated as an icon of either virtue or vice is hard on people, having your life massively shaken up is hard even if you make more money/get more fame as a result, etc. I don't know if he ended up surrounded by worshipful groupie/disciple types, but that's extremely corrosive to your soul.
1) We have delayed adulthood so much in our society. We limit how much unsupervised and unstructured time we allocate to children more on average which means they don’t develop the independence necessary for adult life until later. For a long while we see less teens with jobs. This in turn has delayed natural adult relationships from developing.
2) The economic prospects of people without college degrees has materially eroded over the past 50 years. This coupled with the hedonic treadmill of expectations as to what children need and what families should have has created a barrier to coupling.
3) Marriage is also a status game. The evolution of online dating has made this type of pressure more acute. High status people often meet and marry in college when search costs for parters is relatively low. We are seeing people who don’t have high social status being left by the wayside and they don’t have the “college experience” to artificially put young people together in constant social situations.
4) Finally, the opportunity cost of marrying any specific individual has gone up over time. There are many more competitions for time, wages are higher so the returns to career investment are higher, and there are more “alternatives” to find a better match (perceived or real.)
point 1 is bang on. the number of students coming to college who are absolutely not ready for real life (accounting for all the "generation thinks the one coming after is worse" bias) is nuts.
It would probably help if more college students were not kids straight out of high school, but young adults (or occasionally not-so-young adults) with some experience of not being students. It's not original to me, of course, there's a thread discussing the idea right here in this comment section. https://www.slowboring.com/p/yelling-at-ambitious-young-women/comment/235963833
I definitely think that me joining the army first and then doing a CC before I went to a 4 year was the right course for me.
I wasn't ready for college right out of high school. I also think the vast majority of kids would do better going to a CC first. You save a ton of money and will often learn more due to smaller class sizes.
I wasn’t ready for real life when I went to college a decade ago (and subsequently didn’t date in college and am still single). I can only imagine it’s gotten much worse
It’s been said by others (Stephen Bradford Long’s substack is good here) that we need some type of coming-of-age ritual that afterward, you’re an adult. Nearly all primitive cultures did this.
The week I started high school, I decided independently that it was a good idea to start learning how to do my own laundry. This was before smart phones made it easier to learn everything immediately. When I got to college, I was surprised how many people I had to teach the basics of how to do laundry. (I was also surprised how many people would just leave tons of cash in unattended dryers for hours at a time.) That was over 20 years ago and it seems to have gotten worse.
To add on to 1 even though college could be a good place to find a romantic partner, it also is adding in an automatic time period where adulthood is delayed. Not really a surprise people are delaying marriage and kids when that is factored in. I guess the counterpoint is we are talking about people who don't go to college are the ones getting married less.
The treadmill of expectations is a big problem. It's very intimidating for people in their 20s who don't really have any money and showing people statistics about how it's easier to have kids in your 20s doesn't change the fact that young parenthood seems like a pathway to temporary poverty for most people.
That was my thought too. I know the data says that college-educated women are more likely to marry, but it's not the college degree that does it. I think more non-college alternatives for men and women both would be helpful instead of continuing the college-for-all push.
Idk, the reason you write things aimed at educated young women encouraging them to marry is the same reason NYT writes all their bizarro world lifestyle trends aimed at educated women, that's who reads lifestyle pieces.
If you want to reach non-college young men you'd do it on Twitch or write a pro-marriage Manga, or something.
Overall if you want to encourage hetero marriage, you should probably be engaging with both men and women.
I don’t think your average NYT lifestyle section reader is going there for actual life advice. I read the NYT Modern Love section for the same reason Denzel reads the paper in Training Day: it’s 90% bullshit but it’s entertaining.
If the columns are 90% bullshit, the comments must be 95%. My favorite obviously fake comment was somebody claiming to be a mom who said her daughter would jog in Central Park and would pull over and have sex with random men in the bushes and then keep jogging, and this mom was so cool and progressive that she thought this was great!
The ways in which the Internet allows men to live a rich fantasy life are a) obvious and b) the subject of much cultural discussion about how problematic or tolerable they are.
The ways in which the Internet allows women to live a rich fantasy life tend to get much less attention in the discourse, but they're no less rich and varied
Replace all those horrible gambling app ads during basketball games with PSAs encouraging young men to marry their girlfriend, stick around to raise their kid, be a dedicated father, etc.
This probably won't help much (changing social norms is hard), but at least it will get rid of the f--king 24/7/365 gambling ads.
There are billboards promoting fatherhood all over the hood in Memphis because, well, Memphis. Who knows, it may make a difference on the margins, but only on the margins - talk is cheap
“And this seems to me like a recurring problem in center-right discussions of marriage and family: Cultural conservatives are either afraid to say what they actually mean, or else are just so accustomed to arguing with feminists about abortion and child care subsidies that they reflexively want to continue fighting with them.”
Seems like the latter. And my guess is that there’s a funding ecosystem of geriatric donors who don’t think the family think tanks are getting the job done unless they’re browbeating women to settle down.
I'd like to tie this to pushing back at the polarization of all education before joining the labor force and all "leisure" (retirement) after leaving it. There should be less professional "penalty" for dropping in and out of the labor force to "go back to school" or to "have a few kids."
I also don't know how to effect this social change, but I think that a child allownce and progressive taxation of consumption (education is not consumption), not income, would help. :)
Hard agree. This has been a low key obsession of mine for a bit, a colleague and I were discussing how sabbaticals should be normalized and government supported. This was in an AI job loss prediction context, but it has many contextual applications.
As with most of this stuff, the solution is a cultural change. And a necessary if not sufficient condition is for the Brooklyn crowd to stop convincing itself that eg polyamory is cool and smart. And that’s why I’m a bit surprised that Matt doesn’t think the fact that we get endless content about how marriage is bad for women warrants much attention. One might even say the Brooklyn crowd is out of touch in this regard!
As someone who lives in Brooklyn I cannot roll my eyes at this hard enough. Like 95% of the people who live in Park Slope are married lawyers with 2 kids who volunteer at the PTO. And then the other 5% is the people writing the poly books because all the normies find them super salacious and buy them by the armful. It's like judging what the "Atlanta crowd" is like by watching episodes of the Real Housewives.
SF has a lot of cultural influence through the "tech industry" (software, apps, LLMs etc), the now-vast wealth of that industry, and people who are interested in the technophile Bay Area milieu. Look at how many billionaires have ties to the industry, or how many largely-online movements (the Rationalists, Effective Altruism, Neoreaction etc) have largely Bay Area footprints and have become more notorious than I expected when I first heard of them over a decade ago.
Mass culture no longer exists in a meaningful sense. Either elites out of touch or they are a significant influence on the population at large; it cannot be both.
The answer to "why is all of the family content from perspective X aimed at women" is obtained by deleting the words "from perspective X" from the question. The major consumers of this content are women, and I'm willing to be quite a lot that it's mostly women who are already in the situation being praised. If you got married already, then "yay marriage" content is great. If your options on Hinge are depressing, then "boo marriage" content is going to be popular.
Don’t get me wrong, I understand why it happens. But that’s what the IFS is (my guess) trying to counter. Whether it’s going to be successful or not - hey maybe, here we are talking about it, and everyone knows Brooklyn media elite opinion is downstream of SlowBorer elite-of-the-elite opinion. That’s why Joe Biden made all policy decisions by first calling up Matt and asking him what he thinks.
There's a lot of "Dewey defeats Truman" energy to a lot of these types of takes. The working class aren't waiting with baited breath for whatever Jezebel says they can do with their lives. It's a way to attack the UMC/PMC crowd from within while also elevating their own importance.
Yep; the people most invested in this stuff have never seen a factory floor or talked to a tradesman outside of a house call. It's amazing how the vox populi always seems to have been typed on a keyboard.
Judging by my factory floor there's not much evidence of this. The number of people that think "the Jews" control everything greatly exceeds those who have heard the term "polyamory".
The only people who live in Brolkyn I know have three children.
But leaving that aside, I’ve never understood how the exotic beliefs of some elites (that Henderson calls “Luxury Beliefs”) affect the attitudes of non-elites and only on certaing issues like marraige and family formation, but not climate change or immigration.
Is your claim that if support for pro-immigration politics isn’t above 50%, then elite culture (which is not the same as luxury beliefs) has no influence at all on non-elites?
My remark was that the claim that elite (unacted on) opinions are aleged to be a hugely corrupting influend on non elites about marriage and family, but not to be similarly effective concerning economic issues like immigration and climate change, is odd.
My point being that I don’t think elite opinions are that impotant for ehther kind of attitude.
Yes and my point is that no one makes those claims. Virtually anyone who claims that elite opinion influences attitudes on the subject of marriage and family formation will claim that it influences attitudes on immigration and climate change. But there’s the question of baselines, and degree of influence. And I don’t know that anyone says it has a “huge” influence.
I agree, but there are some good reasons for this. Skills really do stagnate. For example, my wife with an MBA used to be pretty darn good with excel. But after years of being a SHM, most of that is gone.
I gotta say. This is one of those topics where my patience for more charitable interpretations of right wingers really want has worn quite thin in recent years.
Matt I think you know the reason that messaging is almost never aimed at men and working class men when it comes to marriage advice coming from the right. Because the motivation is NOT about marriage or birth rates. This is about status and trying to turn back the clock on women’s rights.
You keep noting that Trump has tamped down the issue of abortion but you see to imply that he’s somehow taken the issue off the table and I find this bizarre. There are recent articles that detail all the ways the GOP is trying to limit or eliminate entirely access to Mifepristone. You’re the king of noting that politicians actual stated positions on issues are why voter vote the way they do, why do you think Ken Paxton is set to win a senate nomination in Texas?
I’m actually believe it or not “half glass full” about this stuff medium to long term. The number of Americans who want to turn back the clock on women’s rights is a distinct minority (I suspect this is part of why overturning Roe was not as popular as pundits expected as there was likely a decent number of people who said to themselves “they really did it! I didn’t think they actually would”. But take a look at the stuff that man child Hesgeth says and him trying to make sure as few women have positions of authority as possible in the military. Also, the SAVE Act! You know very well the real purpose of this bill.
I just feel like this is one of those issues where there is a complete lack of understanding or willingness to engage with how much gross reactionary forces have clearly gained an upper hand (and always had at least influence in modern times) within the GOP.
To do well in school requires intelligence, sure. But it also requires conscientiousness, agreeableness, good impulse control etc. Some folks here seem to be putting too much weight on the earnings part and if only the guys made more money they would be good husbands. But even if they made more money they'd still be lazy, disagreeable and impulsive. And at the end of the day a lot of women want a partner and not another (man) child.
TBF, part of the reason why women in prior decades were OK w/ the lazy, disagreeable, and impulsive men of the 70's, 80's and 90s is they likely made much more than they did.
But yes, the combo of increased economic security even for low wage women compared to 30 years ago + guys crappy actions make it easier for women to say nah. Especially in a world where women can log onto social media and find out what their possible partner does in their free time.
Yeah I think a big part of this isn't really that some segment of the population has somehow become worse on some metric. It's that society has become richer which has allowed more people to have optionality.
I used to live in Vietnam, which is dramatically poorer than America, and the whole concept of being a "gold digger" (but without the negative connotations that English phrase has, in Vietnamese you'd say "go fishing") or trading off your youth and beauty is prevalent there in ways that (mostly) died out decades ago in the US. Like, Vietnam has dozens of beauty pageants (don't ask me why) and all of them end up married to some rich businessman 20 years older.
At a smaller scale that same shift means all those men who uses to coast of being able to make $28/hour at the GM plant in Janesville suddenly need to bring more to the table.
I'd argue the guy making $28/hr at the GM plant is still probably fine and in some ways, probably better off than say, an IT guy making low six-figures in San Francisco who has never been in a workplace or classroom that wasn't 85%+ male since high school.
The issue is the guy who used to make $25/hr (equivalent) at another plant that didn't exist by time he was 19 and he now works making $15/hr installing solar panels or whatever needs more because now, instead of basically nothing, the women is also making similar amounts working behind the desk as a medical admin or more as a nurse.
Jesse Ewiak has an extremely bizarre hobby horse about disproportionately male workplaces specifically in Silicon Valley, which both disregards that (1) there are lots of other just as disproportionately male workplaces today and (2) prior to the 1970s, a very large percentage of workplaces were disproportionately male.
It's not.a hobby horse - it's pointing out reality.
If at starting at 15 or 16, a guy is largely going to overwhelmingly male high school classes on computer science, etc, is already largely involved in non-school activities that are online and disproportionately male, go to a college where they're in overwhelmingly male classes, then get a job in an industry that's overwhelmingly male in a city that due to that industry is tilted toward a young male population, those guys are going to have issues via sheer numbers.
The opposite is also somewhat true of say a woman that ends up in some female-heavy job in NYC, but those women are at least still getting dates, even if they aren't working out.
In the early 2000s, I worked at former cell-phone juggernaut Nokia. One day, I dropped my car off for service and got a ride to my office from one of the garage guys. When we got there, he looked up at our office towers and said "whoa, I bet there are a lot of babes in there."
As Helikitty pointed out, those guys likely due to the differing personality types/backgrounds, have connections to other parts of their extended family, etc., but also likely have been in more mixed situations before starting work at a male-dominated area.
If you work 40 hours at a factory, but then after work are on the weekends are hanging out with people you know from high school that are a mixed group due to activities like sports, music, or just general friend groups that build up.
As opposed to as I said, working 50-60 hours at your tech job, then going home and either doing coding on the side, playing video games, etc.
Though, I'd argue this polarization of the genders is creeping up even in non-typical areas.
Your last sentence is maybe one area where I have some sympathy for young men. It's at least possible that some men who would be willing to buck up and be good partners if presented with a relationship are being pre-screened out by social media creeping.
Ok but whenever this comes up I want to ask: aren’t these working class women *also* more likely to be lazy, disagreeable, low conscientiousness, and impulsive? Seems like men who are similar are perfect matches for them.
True but it should also track that as you go down the list the woman at the 30th percentile may be more conscientious than the 30th percentile man but that doesn't mean she's objectively very conscientious.
No it means she’s spending her days stirring up drama in her social circles. Its amazing to me that people are so incapable of admitting that your median woman is not some saint compared to the median man. Yes, there are men out there that are totally unworthy of a wife and there are roughly the same number of women out there unworthy of a husband.
Yup, I teach at a regional college, and male and female student behaviors are not similar. Women have conversations with older women in their family or community about how good the old days were for wives. The bad option is alive and tangible in a different way. Women also have a lot of information about what turns men on (or off!) in real time, vs what men say to each other before or after the fact about what they want.
I think most (but certainly not all) boys can grow up into those types of men. But it doesn't just magically happen. It happens under the weight of responsibility. Usually the responsibility of having a wife and family.
Marriage isn't the capstone from a successful life, it's the cornerstone you build that life on. Or to put it another way, most men need the love of a good women and the responsibility of a family to realize their potential.
Most? Sure 66% of 45 year old men are or have been married. But how far down the remaining 34% are we into till were into the 19th century temperance caricature of a mom sending her kids down to the bar on payday to drag their drunk dad home before he spends his whole paycheck.
This piece felt like it ended early. I kept expecting, "Okay here's the turn where Matt explains to me why less-educated men are no longer interested in getting married."
I think much of this is connected to the points made in the viral Jacob Savage article. (https://www.compactmag.com/article/the-lost-generation/). We have, for decades, in schools especially, prioritized the female/feminine over the male/masculine, especially in progressive/blue environments.* We really did make it much harder for men to thrive and feel they were valued.
Now, conservatives in power, many of whom are overtly sexist, want to restore men to their former glory and the way they see to do that is to punch down on those whom they think were unfairly benefited over the past thirty years: women and people of color.
Both approaches aren't very helpful if we want people to get married, let alone have kids. And the approaches that would budge the needle are both expensive and will require those on both sides to put aside their anger. This, sadly, seems unlikely.
*I have four children, all in their early 30s, two of whom are boy/girl twins. We live in a lovely, liberal, highly educated world. The difference in how my daughter was seen and treated compared to my son was stark.
It is not true that we somehow prioritize the feminine in schools now compared to 30 years ago. People who say this always mean that schools have too much sitting still doing worksheets, too much homework, not enough interactivity, etc. Well, guess what's declined over those 30 years -- homework, punishment for not sitting still, drills, you name it.
That was not my experience. I sent four kids through the school system, served as the chair of the SGC in every school my kids have been in, many in my family are educators in the public schools, and I have served on school committees. I have looked at the books libraries order, the ways we talk about physicality, the testing methods we use, you name it. I am in no way some conservative parent longing for the good old days.
There is kind of a weird double blind going on where there's lots of complains that schooling is too limiting of young boys, but also many of those people also complain about behavorial issues at schools not being dealt with...largely by young boys.
Plus right, while what's being taught might be different, the actual style of teaching - 'sit down at a desk and listen to a teacher' is not really that different than in 1995, 1975, or whenever people consider the time we better taught boys.
In fact 'sit down at a desk and listen' is _declining_ in favor of "use an ipad", "do a project", etc (which is also a bad trend but contradicts these complaints). Nobody had "play based curriculum" in the 80s.
Right if anything, from what I've read, in a lot of ways, classroom time is less structured, but from many of the complains of people claiming some discriminatory power against boys in schooling, going back to even 1990-style teaching would actually probably just exacerbate current gaps.
It actually turned out Dewey-style education (to be simplistic) was always tilted toward how young girls act, it just we didn't treat young girls equally in schooling until basically yesterday.
Unless the argument is exactly "by themselves, boys would be savages and only are good at school with rigid discipline; in contrasts, girls can survive a chaotic school because they are self-disciplined by nature" (I have a vague idea of have reading something similar by Christine Hoff Summers)
I think this is a separate issue from Savage's article. His experience is colored by working in television writing - an extremely competitive and sought after field. I can definitely grant than in similar fields (media, academia, Big Tech) it became harder to land these highly prestigious jobs as a white male. But the working class men Matt is discussing were never competing for these jobs in the first place.
Virtually every white working class man I know votes Republican because they believe they've been disenfranchised. I think the points Savage made can be applied to the experiences of many many non-professional males.
To me, the larger point in the Savage article is that for many reasons, a great many of which were based on fact, many men under 40 or so feel as though they have been cast aside by society. That's the point I was trying to make.
Realistically, I doubt this has anything to do with a serious policy argument -- I think it mostly reflects a kind of anxiety in which conservative women (and the men who marry them) feel about having traded career/education for starting a family earlier and they want to reassure themselves they did the right thing by saying it loudly.
But to be charitable let me try to offer a steelman of one view that those on the right could have: yes, educated women are doing relatively well in terms of getting married but less educated women are not but you can't exactly tell them "your not smart/educated/etc enough to wait to get married". Even if it's fine for educated women to hold off on marriage because they won't lack for partners and aren't going to make bad choices about having children outside of marriage that's not true for less educated women. But you don't convince people to do things by telling them they don't have the status to act like the educated women you do it by pretending they are getting the better deal by getting married while the educated women wait.
There is also the version that's basically about educated women not having enough children and thinks that if they get married earlier they might have more kids.
I completely agree with the suspicion that these people are motivated by anxiety over their life choices. I have observed in myself that I became a lot less judgmental about other people's decision-making in my head once I was genuinely confident and happy with my own choices. If you have to yell at other people to do what you did to prove that you did the right thing, it's a sign you don't really believe it.
I think this discourse suffers from ambiguity between two meanings of the word "loser," as in, "lower-SES men are losers":
1. lower-SES men by definition have lost in our economy; they don't have high status jobs/money
2. lower-SES men are men of bad character.
It's important to disambiguate these meanings.
Story time!
My husband's cousin "Bob" (not his real name) had a hard life. His mom, along with Bob and his three brothers, ran away from Bob's abusive dad when Bob was a child. The mother and four sons ended up in a homeless shelter, then the mother took to drugs and alcohol because of all the stress, and the boys were struggling. Bob made some not-great choices and got a girl pregnant when he was only 16, then shortly after he got her pregnant again, so now he was a father of two while still in his teens. As an extra layer on the turd sandwich, Bob's girlfriend then became addicted to drugs and Bob ended up with full legal custody of both children.
Bob had an epiphany: "shit got real, I have to get it together and be the best father I can be." He dropped out of high school (he would get his GED years later), took a (crappy) job to earn money to support himself and his children, and worked super hard. His aunt and uncle helped out with childcare as they were able. After a couple of years of this, Bob met "Alice," a woman of his age who lived in his neighborhood. If you were "Alice," would you date and marry Bob?
One possible answer is: no! The guy's a loser! He has a crappy low-paying job, he's saddled with another woman's children, he comes from a broken home and he doesn't even have a high school diploma.
The other possible answer is: yes! He's a good guy, doing his best with what he has, very hardworking and disciplined and he clearly loves his children.
Spoiler alert: Alice and Bob ended up getting married. They are still together and have four children (in addition to the two Bob had with his girlfriend). Bob kept working very hard and ended up opening his own auto shop, where his eldest son now works. We spent some time with them recently, and, no, they are not highly educated or wealthy, but they are great people. They are kind and loving toward each other and they clearly care about raising their children right. My son had a wonderful time playing with the younger kids. They are absolutely *not* losers.
Impressive story. And a good reminder that 99% of us here on Slow Boring have had it super easy by comparison and we should always be cognizant of that before we tear into people.
That's a very inspiring story. You should note here that both Bob's mom and his girlfriend were the exact kind of character-loser we tend to associate with men. You describe Bobs dad as abusive, which makes sense because he was an abusive loser. You describe his junkie mom as just a victim of the stress rather than a junkie loser. You say Bob fucked up by getting a girl pregnant and yet would you lay that same criticism on the girlfriend for getting pregnant by some 16 yr old kid or would you still frame it as Bobs fuckup?
This is the major problem with all of this discourse. We are eagerly willing to call out the character flaws in men that lead to their failed lives and yet those same character flaws in women are largely ignored or dismissed as somehow some deadbeat mans fault if they are acknowledged at all.
This is actually an interesting piece for me because, while I don't disagree with the overall argument, I suspect my ex-wife would tell our divorce (married at 30 and 27, respectively) as a story of an educated woman (MD) leaving an un(der)educated man (BA, only now pursuing a Masters in his late 30s) for not being sufficiently supportive or emotionally intelligent, and citing his military experience and career in federal law enforcement as evidence.
In reality, while there's some truth to that, I think it's complicated by the fact that I was coming to the end of a year in Iraq and I was the one wanting to try therapy upon return. Plus the fact that she was frustrated with her medical specialty because of relative low earnings (and is now presumably happier after marrying a finance bro), and generally saw public service careers as a waste (joke's on me though since Trump sort of proved her right).
I guess my point is that, while I support no-fault divorce for giving women a way out of terrible marriages (where I absolutely don't want them to be trapped, and I've seen some terrible husbands in the Army), I do think there should be some level of penalty for the spouse wanting to quickly and suddenly end a marriage (in the absence of something like clear cut adultery or violence).
ETA: Virginia requires a six month separation unless both parties waive, and I think one year (which is what they do for parents) is probably appropriate.
ETA2: FWIW, I remarried about two years later to a wonderful, sensitive women who if anything likes going to therapy a little too much. Unfortunately we seem likely to have missed the boat for kids, despite a lot of effort.
To me this seems like conservatives are adopting the progressive prohibition against ever being critical of someone else less well off than you (who’s in the ingroup).
If you can’t say that the reason marriage rates are falling is because a lot of working class men are losers, then you have to blame an acceptable target (educated and affluent women).
Fair comment, but I don't think a lot of working class men are losers! Rather, there's a lot of more structural problems in society that have created the conditions for their laggard performance.
Also, fwiw it's obviously amazing that women can divorce bad guys and have the economic agency to leave relationships. And shame on the social conservatives for wanting to drag us back to that oppressive era of American history.
It's a simple class issue, women and men in lower economic quintiles don't have a huge disparity if you remove stay-at-home women (20%ish v 30%ish), and top earning women marry at twice the rate of lower income women. I think this thread is pretty eye opening in that every lower income cohort male is called a loser and the real problem while the difference between genders really isn't that stark. Men make more and so are more likely to marry "down" the economic ladder, which skews this statistic even more. The "loser men" trope is tired and wrong.
There's no need to go calling people losers on an individual basis, but it's very clear that in our increasingly winner-take-all economy there are winners and losers.
Sure, but that is not gender specific. People in this thread aren't calling low income, low marriage rate women losers. I think some people are using the term to mean economic losers whereas many others here...are not
Being poor doesn't make you a loser. Being someone who is unwilling to work and then blames their misfortune on those around them does make you a loser.
If you’re someone alive today who was born in America, you're already one of the luckiest human beings in history. We've all won the lottery, and no amount of deindustrialization or whatever can change that.
Here we have the conflict between moral judgements and descriptions of relative status on display.
Also, being MAGA makes you a loser, quite regardless of income. There’s a big gender gap in political beliefs. There are some MAGA women, but not nearly enough to date all the MAGA men!
Idk, I hang out in mixed class women’s online spaces and… what else do you call it when a guy can’t/won’t hold down reliable work, but ALSO refuses to contribute at home bc that’s “women’s work”? Bc a lot of working class men are like this and there’s structural issues at play sure, but also their own attitudes and decision making. It’s loserish if your conception of manhood is so narrow that if you can’t contribute the way you want you won’t contribute at all
We just can’t talk about class in our country. Neither the right nor the left can do it.
Working class people, by which I mean people that didn’t go to college, are mostly invisible, despite being a plurality. No one is writing about them in the NYT or Atlantic or WSJ.
The decline of marriage is clearly a class story. There was an article in the Atlantic about this before Covid, I think Vox (probably Yglesias?) has written this up as well years ago.
Working class people themselves don’t read articles, and educated people clearly don’t like reading about them.
Plurality is always tricky because it depends on the categories, but fewer than 40% of all adults did not attend college at all.
I think this is correct. My wife is a veterinarian, which gives an interesting insight as a mix of high-SES postgraduate veterinarians and low-SES barely-finished high school vet techs (you don't even need an associates to be a vet tech). All the veterinarians in my wife's practice are married. Only like 20% of the techs and other pet handlers are married. Many have kids though. We've probably been to like 3 babyshowers for a single mom or unmarried couple. There's not really an appropriate way for the vets to take their friends enough to be invited to a baby shower techs aside and be like "WTF are you guys doing. Get married!" So we just stay critical to just our own class circles and the cycle continues.
They can just do it!
This issue disproportionately impacts the working class but it’s not only a class story—there is later and lower marriage and fertility across the board.
Specifically, looking at US numbers, I think the decline in fertility is measured by births per woman has plateaued for college educated women while it continues to fall for working class women.
This is what annoys me about pieces like this. It focuses on a non-problem with college educated people and ignores where the real marriage disparity is, which is among poorer and uneducated cohorts.
Working class people *don’t read discussions such as these*. It’s good for the chattering classes to recognize themselves as an elite, but that cuts both ways.
I’m no expert but I’m skeptical that lower class women are refusing to marry eager to commit lower class men because they are “losers”. I think probably they can’t get them commit and men remain the marriage bottleneck and these women just have kids out of wedlock with unreliable partners, if at all.
Women gatekeep sex and men gatekeep marriage and it has ever been thus.
Hence the advice behind the advice of these pro marriage social conservatives is “don’t put out without a ring”.
https://www.cartoonshateher.com/p/average-men-dont-have-the-cards
Also, the policy implication of looking at lower income men as the problem is probably a significant amount of wealth redistribution, and heavy handed economic management to create stable, well paying career paths for people not really about to be nimble and flexible about it themselves.
NBER had a paper drop last week where they looked at the effects of Cold War military spending and manufacturing employment/wages.
They claim a substantial part of deindustrialization in the U.S. can be in part explained by the wind down of military spending.
"How'd that happen? I did everything they told me to. Did you know I build missiles? I helped to protect America. You should be rewarded for that. Instead they give it to the plastic surgeons, y'know, they lied to me."
That movie really spoke to something true, even if we’re only partly supposed to sympathize with him. I wish they had made him less of an abrasive asshole personally to underscore how unemployment in late middle age justifies domestic terrorism
I really would love to see what this movie is like if it isn't directed by Joel Schumacher but instead say Steven Soderbergh (after Sex, Lies and Videotape, guessing he had a lot of studios willing to give him a bigger budget movie) or good lord Quentin Tarantino or Spike Lee (trying to think of upcoming directors from the time period who could have really taken this story into very interesting direction as opposed to the more action/blockbuster angle Schumacher is more known for).
If AI really does take a bunch of folks’ jobs, perhaps we can expect a more thoughtful remake. I’d like to see it.
It's interesting that he also hated neo-Nazis too. Tucker Carlson would call him a sellout these days.
What movie is this?
Falling Down staring Michael Douglas and Robert Duvall. Came out 1993
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0106856/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0_tt_8_nm_0_in_0_q_fallling%20dow
Beautiful
Find that hard to believe. The military industrial complex doesn’t seem like that big an industry.
https://www.nber.org/papers/w35008
The U.S. like the USSR built a lot of metal. We just sold off or scrapped a bunch of the old stuff instead of putting everything ever produced in Siberia.
Or focus the re-distribution on the women (who will be the ones raising the children) and on the children themselves. Trying to force young men into commitment, fidelity and a responsible career path seems like a much tougher lift than persuading young women that they will have a stable economic base provided by the state if they choose to bear and raise children.
I'm going to go old school conservative here, but this just strikes me as a horrifically bad idea.
It's somewhere quite a bit south of ideal to have kids raised by single mothers. I don't think we should be designing a system to encourage that.
I think when you take a realistic look at the motivations of young men and young women (particularly in lower earning deciles) this emerges as a decent solution. If men in that cohort do not want the responsibilities and limitations of marriage and child-rearing, but we want to raise the number of births, then we need to rely on women to do it. Having a lot of single mothers is better than having no mothers at all. "We" don't have to do anything to encourage it, since 40% of all mothers in the bottom half of the income distribution are already single, and the "old school conservative" ideas like denying them and their children support unless / until they marry a man (any man) is just making their lives more miserable and their children less healthy and ultimately less productive than they would otherwise be. We have already "designed" the system that produces fewer marriages, more divorces and fewer births. The goal is to try to improve the outcomes, not to parade around preening and croaking about our so-called "traditional values" as we continue to fail to make young men want to settle down.
Yeah, I think I disagree with the idea that raising the birthrate by increasing it specifically at the lowest end of the income distribution is a net benefit.
I think the birthrate declining is a problem, but I am not yet at the point where just any solution that results in more babies is worth it.
That's fair, but there is no solution to the declining birthrate problem that does not involve producing a lot more single mothers. Technology-driven reductions in the constraints that have in previous generations driven young men and women together in durable, early-life, chid-rearing partnerships have triumphed.
If we did it fairly, anyway. I’d be ok with such a system if we got eugenics-y about it
It’s not that working class men are doing worse than 50 years ago. It’s that women are doing well enough on their own to not want mediocre husbands.
But there are also men who don’t want mediocre monogamy.
You have a tendency to mention the monogamy point but I think this might just be you. Like sure, in theory I’m sure plenty of guys would love to be dating 3 models at once. But I don’t think your average guy in a relationship is that interested in stuff on the side. Or to put it another way: it’s not like the options for your typical guy are “monogamous relationship with average-looking woman” vs. “have your pick of beautiful women with no commitment required”
Dating 3 models at once also seems like way too much work anyway.
I'm having a hard enough time with just two plus my wife.
Building three model planes or model trains at once sounds like too much work.
So much drama
Not speaking for David, I think the monogamy part can be seen as a stand in for commitment and effort.
I know there's a lot of focus on noisy people in the 'manosphere' boasting about having multiple partners, but from what I can tell (which may be inaccurate, but is based on the cultural vibe) affairs are way down while 'ethical non-monogamy' is slightly up, which combined seem to suggest that hetero men either do not greatly prize the ability to have multiple partners or are totally afraid to exercise their preferences.
That’s a rather cartoonish reductio. The real question is whether you want to give up your ability to upgrade when what’s on offer is mediocre.
And plenty of men get involved in relationships that are jolly for a time but that they don’t want to lead to marriage. You might have been in a couple yourself
"...whether you want to give up your ability to upgrade when what’s on offer is mediocre."
Words to sweep any woman off her feet, right there!
I've realized that the common denominator among those with frustrated romantic lives is that they don't believe in romance.
One can both believe in romance and enjoy stochastic analysis.
My SB comments are not a courtship strategy.
Sure. Its a lot more "fun" to take your money to Vegas and play at the casinos than it is to invest in an index fund. Index funds are by definition "mediocre."
And there are people who do win big at Vegas!
But which one will leave YOU in poverty and homeless and which one will make you a millionaire?
Yes, that’s what I was taught college was for!
+10000
I think a fair number of men are encouraged to sow wild oats before settling down. I was. But not for too long. My mom was pretty adamant that neither I nor my sister get married before 30 because we wouldn’t be ready before then. She had a bad first marriage (with no kids out of it) and didn’t want that for us. Both of us were with the people we ended up marrying in our late 20s though.
At the end of the day, the median woman needs to be willing to settle for the median man.
And the median man needs to be willing to settle for the median woman.
And the tradeoff that comes is whether or not settling for such a level is better or worse than not being coupled at all. And like all tradeoffs, people can come to different conclusions on that.
I agree at the individual level. But for society as a whole something is clearly not working thus the fertility rates below replacement rate.
At the end of the day the measure of a successful society is can it reproduce and perpetuate itself.
Modern liberal societies seem to be failing that test. If we can't figure something out then we WILL be replaced by different societies/cultures that don't have that problem.
There is no shortage of humans in the world. Our lived experience is that we are able to attract a high performing slice of those by the attractiveness of being American. I’ll worry about us being unable to perpetuate ourselves the day other people decide they don’t want to become Americans.
Culture and belief are not inheritable traits. Without fail, so far we have assimilated and strengthened our culture through immigration more than reproduction. There is zero reason to believe that is soon to not be the case.
Maybe a bit pedantic, but if you believe that men are higher variance on all sorts of “makes a good partner” traits (which I do believe), the bottom half of the distribution will contain a bunch of completely unqualified partners. As an example (not to go all Charles Murray): the median man and median woman have very similar IQs, but to bottom tail man is WAY dumber than the bottom tail woman.
Great point i hadn't considered.
I guess the follow up question then.Would be what percentage of those men are truly unmarriable. Or unimprovable
It depends on the difference in means and the ratio of the variances, but it does not imply that 50% of men are "completely unqualified partners".
Yes, not the whole bottom 50%. I am only observing that (assuming a normal distribution, which IQ is I believe), if the medians (and thus the means under a normal distribution) are the same but the men are higher variance, the tails of the male distribution will be much longer than the tails of the female one.
With respect to IQ, the mean for men is 99.5, and the mean for women is 100.5, whereas the standard deviation for men is 15.5, and the SD for women is 14.5. That does have implications for the far tails, but less for the bulk of the distribution. If the situation w.r.t. the variables relevant to marraige is analogous, it likely does explain a part of the observed phenomena, but only a part (most likely a smaller part, IMO). I think it would be nice if we stopped referring to working class men as "losers", and knee-jerk blaming them for society's problems (to be clear, I didn't think you were, though).
And we all have gotten so fat and ugly on average!
The median woman is settling for the median man. Seventy plus percent of Americans get married at home point in their lives.
I would argue that 30% not getting married is in fact huge and a big problem.
If we needed to liberate Alsace, it would be. But I’m not raising my son to be a soldier and there are plenty of willing, English speaking immigrants.
30% are gay or bi. Which will be good, once they admit it, for politics, but tragic for the birth rate. We need those paired off straight couples with good values who will be good parents to make up for it and have lots more kids, like in the olden days. Because a fair amount of the people who have kids shouldn’t even be permitted to. Duggar types, antivaxxers, criminals, etc.
Lesbian couples can easily-ish have biological children.
The median people in the U.S. need to lose alot of weight. Maybe that sounds harsh, but coming back from overseas I've been gobsmacked over my career how fat Americans are, and how the number of available attractive partners for both sexes has shrunk massively because people are just fat. GLP-1s might end up saving American fertility simply by making people attractive enough again. Another reason to get them cheap enough for the working class. PLus lowering medical costs from obesity would be great for the economy.
This is called the "stable marraige problem".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stable_matching_problem
Or you can just go through life unmarried if you don't want to marry your median counterpart.
I don't know if he's disavowed this since, but a big part of Hillbilly Elegy was (working class) men ruining their own lives through bad decisions.
My question is how did we wind up creating such a large cohort of losers relative to previous cohorts?
I think the number has always been consistent across cohorts, but in the past society gave women fewer avenues to avoid those losers.
While it's still a problem today, there were a lot more battered wives 50+ years ago.
But also, back then a cad was more likely to get married and have a family, while still being a cad on the side. These days, that's uncommon.
I just found out that an uncle, by marriage thankfully not by blood, was exactly this. He recently passed away at age 90, my aunt had passed away years earlier. At his funeral, my cousin said to us, "you know he was a dick, right?" We did not. Turns out he had numerous affairs, despite giving the appearance of being prim and proper. My aunt felt she was never in position to leave him, especially when she had kids, and so lived out her life unhappily.
This was the second time I heard a similar story at an elderly relative's funeral. I don't want anybody to go back to those times.
My thought is that many of these losers aren’t so bad but the hedonic treadmill of expectations and opportunity costs of alternatives have outpaced their value.
Then there is the social structure aspect. If a man has a precarious labor market situation then he can be more of a burden on a household than asset.
Exactly. I was on a professional forum a couple decades ago and there was this dude there who would not stop bitching about the fact that all his dad needed to get a wife was a pulse and a job, and it wasn't fair that women expected more now. No one gave him any pushback aside from me. (It was a male-dominated profession. The forum was heavily moderated but saying "bitches be crazy" was explicitly within the rules, because it was "just a joke." This was on the #1 forum for people in our profession at the time.)
>I was on a professional forum a couple decades ago... The forum was heavily moderated but saying "bitches be crazy" was explicitly within the rules...<
Damn, what was the profession, bounty hunters? Insult comics?
If it wasn't for the couple decades timing being a bit too long ago, it sounds a lot like an infamous forum (Economics Job Market Rumors) for young economists/econ grad students that was quite popular ca. 2015-2020. Reading it was a great reminder why it's actually good that academia isn't a boys' club anymore.
I remember hearing about that just because of the name, logging on only once, then turning around like an angry Viking who was tricked into sailing to Greenland.
Actuarial
Wait - a fellow Rebel Forum person? Probably half the words I have written in my lifetime were lost when D W Simpson took that forum down.
The unsaid part here is that the woman who wpuld have married that "loser" is every bit as much of a "loser" as the man. She isnt the PhD woman working for the Cato Institute, she's making $13/hr working the front desk of a motel 6.
I don't want to be too unkind, but my experience with the bottom 20% of the socioeconomic ladder (which is fairly significant, I grew up in a rural southern area) is that the women are almost exclusively more responsible and harder-working than the men. So yes, it's true that the women in question are not exactly doing great for themselves economically, but they are at least likely to hold down a job, whereas the men (even the ones in stable relationships) are far more likely to be only doing gig work, involved in crime, or not working at all.
Yeah. Usually bc the women have young kids (out of wedlock), they have to step up. But this is probably true for the ones without kids.
From the same area. Boys are raised with near zero expectations except to not be gay or feminine. They are completely neglected in our local culture. It might seem awesome to be raised with zero consequences or guardrails, but it dooms them later in life.
I find this hard to believe. Not the part about there being a lot of poor performing men but the idea that their women counterparts being these wizened adults in the room is nonsense. The typical women i know in this world have little to no marketable job skills, don't make good homemakers, spend money frivolously, and spend most of their time stirring up drama in their social circles. For every embarrassed woman tethered to a deadbeat guy that can't hold down a job there's a man working 60hours a week at the lumberyard to pay for his wife's out of control spending habits.
If you're working 40 hours a week, you aren't in the bottom 20%. Not in my part of the rural south, at least.
She's also significantly less likely to be an alcoholic, gambling addict ...
"Somewhat" less likely to be an alcoholic. But catching up!
Gender Differences in the Epidemiology of Alcohol Use and Related Harms in the United States - PMC https://share.google/8KA77hy7PC0E0cYaQ
Just to clarify, that I am using “loser” as a descriptor of people who generally lots out during the neoliberal period (late 1970s to nowish.)
You and Jesse seem to be using it as a moral pejorative.
I was using it in roughly the same context as you. I don't believe someone working at Walmart is a loser. In the wider dating discourse a man with that job is too low status to be marriageable. But the flip isn't true. A man who does out earn a Walmart job is expected to treat his wife's Walmart job as equal to his own because “she works just as much as him”.
The point here is not to denigrate the people working at Walmart. Its to showcase the double standard of how that job is treated based on the gender of the worker wrt dating/marriage.
Is a major reason for less marriage at the low end of the education/income distribution women being unwilling to marry men they see as not good marriage prospects? How would we tell?
I doubt it that much. I think the guys that are bitching about it are terminally online in their parents’ basement and not putting themselves out there. Or have no social skills. But social skills are lacking among the Soylent Green generation (Z)
This is where sociologists doing interviews with large groups of women get narrative and stated preference data. Then they form a hypothesis and look at the question with aggregated economic data.
The men were always losers, the women just had no other choice. Now, in many ways, it is actually probably better financially (and emotionally) to for a non-college educated woman to have a job, but not a full-time relationship with a man.
23 year old women in rural Iowa working at a Wal-Mart can go home and read trashy Amazon Kindle stories and watch algorithmic content too.
Relationship with a bad partner <<<< being alone and watching streaming content <<<<<< relationship with a good partner
As a man I've always considered that I'd rather be alone than in a bad marriage.
I wouldn't think women should feel any differently.
I'm also pretty sure most of the guys complaining about not being able to find a girlfriend are probably not asking anyone out.
Yeah, I wish more people would acknowledge that a bad marriage is a particularly hellish existence. Hell, the worst year of my life was having a bad roommate! I can't imagine the daily toll a bad marriage exerts.
Fantastic column. Jesse is correct. I wish we took material history more seriously. This shift is downstream of *birth control* and *the opening of the labor market to women*. We are stuck with pre-modern institutions which fail to reflect a change that happened 60 years ago. This lag is easiest to see around child care: shared care isn’t available for most children under the age of 5, after 3PM, or all summer.
The '60s broke the pre-60s system and froze its rubble into place: local land use is another example.
This reads as a miserable existence.
As opposed to marrying a guy and having a kid while said guy doesn't want to chip in despite at times, actually working less than you do?
If you say, while just pick the non-college educated guy in your area who has a decent job and wants to be reasonably equal about childcare, you've already limited your options by a lot and that's not even getting into over possible clashes about values.
Yet that same Walmart worker would be considered a loser based on that Walmart job alone. If we are going to say a man is unmarriagable over an hourly Walmart job then why do we pretend like its a good thing for a woman? Her wage isn't providing any more to a potential family than her male counterpart.
Walmart workers are not losers. I really wish people would not have these kinds of attitudes. They deserve to be paid and treated fairly.
It's way the hell better than being married to a loser.
The shift toward fewer blue-collar jobs is an old story. But there’s also much more self-selection into same-class marriages. How often do you see office men marry their female admins, or male doctors marry female nurses now? It happens, but it used to be downright normal.
Weren't those admins or nurses from a considerably higher class than their equivalents today?
That is, young women from the middle class would not have access to a four-year college education and a BA, but might well go to secretarial college or nursing school and then end up marrying the doctor or office manager who might well have been a classmate of her brother in that very four-year college that the woman couldn't get into.
These days, that young woman is going to college herself and might become a doctor or a lawyer or a manager or go into marketing or HR.
Today's secretaries/admins and nurses (especially the LPNs, who are closer in educational achievement to the nurse of the 1950s or 1960s than the modern RN) are from a distinctly lower social tier than their predecessors 60 years ago.
Yeah, “Low Paid Nurses” are kind of being phased out in favor of “Rich Nurses” bc it’s hard to imagine anyone being the former and staying that way for long, there are lots of bridge programs. The only places that hire LPNs as actual nurses are nursing homes and the VA, anyway, probably also rural hospitals
The other meaning of RN (as “Royal Navy”) is so baked-in here, that we don’t have the concept of “Registered Nurses” - we just have “Nurses”. What the US calls an LPN, we call a “Nursing Associate”. There is also “Health Care Assistant” which is the equivalent of a US CNA.
We used to call HCAs “Nursing Assistants”, but people struggled to remember which of assistant and associate is more senior, so we changed them to HCAs. We also colour-coded all the uniforms in hospital (nurses don’t have to wear uniform outside of hospital, e.g. if they’re working for a GP).
In hospitals, Nurses wear (“Hospital”) blue, associates a lighter (“Sky”) blue. HCAs wear lilac (a pale purple) to emphasize they are not nurses, while the associates are a lower-level nurse.
The only exception is surgical scrubs are always green. Everyone wears green in a surgical theatre. The only people who wear green outside of theatre are pharmacists (who wear a completely different shade from surgical, and you’d never confuse them for surgical scrubs).
Interesting. Only some of our hospitals enforce the scrub color caste system. But it makes sense for the UK to have uniform rules since they have the same management across the board.
That theory is much popular (more assortative mating today) but I doubt if this is really true - because all the classical examples from the past are upper-class men marrying lower-class women (and the opposite was usually considered a social scandal - look to movies like "All That Heaven Allows"); attending that the number of men and women in each social class was roughly the same, many assymetric assortative marriage would mean many upper-class women and lower-class men staying single (what was not the case)
What I suspect is that much of the apparent inter-class marriages of the past were more the result of, in the past, many upper-class women not having upper-class jobs before marriage, giving the illusion that upper-class men were marrying lower-class women
Maybe those examples of the past were also shaped somewhat by more lower-class men being killed in wars or in workplace accidents?
I mean, the female admins are now analysts/salespeople/advertising execs/whatever as well and the nurses are now doctors too. It's the same reason actors end up marrying actors.
I think lots of doctors still marry nurses due to proximity effects. Lots of nurses even have masters degrees. Doctors aren’t generally marrying the person 15 years younger with an associates though.
It’s always been like this, IIRC DNA studies show most people had twice as many female ancestors as male ancestors because over half of males generally didn’t get to reproduce.
And like 1/3 of women never reproduced historically too.
Right, but people having twice as many female ancestors means the percentage of men who reproduced would’ve been half the percentage of women, so if 1/3rd of women didn’t reproduce, then 2/3rds of men didn’t. It was not the norm historically for below-average or even average men to have a good family life.
There are many historic genetic bottlenecks (like the Neolithic horse people killing and displacing all the men in Europe), disparate male fatality rates, noble fertility patterns, and other not so nice things too.
In many ways it's a major success story that now the below-average men can have jobs and watch manosphere streamers, instead of their previous fate of being squished by a wooly mammoth
Feminism had an effect on men too. It relieved some of the pressure to live up to masculine gender norms regarding hard work and dependability and so men chose more “loserish” lifestyles that made them less attractive to women. Loser men (or “scrubs”) are the reverse of the girlboss archetype, and TLC could only do so much to discourage them.
In addition to City of Trees's point, when you combine economic growth and upward mobility over decades, you're going to change the composition of the working class over time.
Video games
Two words: higher standards.
And especially the ability to have higher standards.
We don’t have to call them losers. They aren’t interested in commitment. Why aren’t conservatives obsessing over the why, if they care so much?
The old conservative story is that women are also to blame for this disinterest. Women are supposed to control men by being “virtuous,” and if there is even one woman who is not “virtuous,” how can any man expect to live proper conservative lives?
I sort of doubt it, because the largest groups of people who aren't marrying are Latinos, especially low-skill Latino immigrants, and Black people.
Latinos? Really? Obviously this is the case for black folks, where marriage really is a YUGE class delimiter.
The rate of children out-of-wedlock for Latinos, as a census category is about midway between the White and Black rate, it's especially high among recent arrivals from Central America - but much lower among South American origin groups.
Interesting
The problem is they _always_ blame the women. @MY’s thesis is that lower-class _men_ are choosing not to marry not that they are losers that women don’t want to marry.
Impressive that you managed to tie this issue back to progressives. Sexism is just obviously a big part of the explanation. Political alignment is another: educated affluent women are quite liberal, while working class men are conservative. Must be the liberals' fault!
I know a few very successful couples who started dating in college and IMO should have gotten married in their mid 20s, but there was exactly zero chance that would cause them to *have kids* in their mid-20s which seems to be the unstated desire here
I got married at 25, am now in my mid 30s, still married, want kids but don't have them yet. My friend group, other college educated adults in their mid 30s, are all only now starting to have kids or trying to.
Only few of them are succesful and focusing on their careers. The reason they don't want kids is that they are a big responsibility! People these days want to use their 20s and early 30s to have fun, travel, and build the financial stability needed to provide for a new life.
The first 2 are cultural so I don't see how you can change that. For the later the biggest impact things would be to lower housing prices (people feel more "settled" and ready as a homeowner) and decrease daycare price (exactly no one looks forward to a "second mortgage").
Side note: my generation was (correctly) bombarded with messages that having children too early is life ruining since we were 12. Is it any wonder we now need to feel very secure to have them? And if you start at 35 you'll have 1-2 kids, not 2-4 like my mom's generation did.
Bingo! It is cultural. People in the past didn’t have the means to spend their whole 20s and 30s doing this. Now we do, and the culture has shifted as a result. Nobody wants to be the woman in the image at age 24. As a man in my 20s, I had zero interest in marriage and kids. By my mid 30s, I did.
“People these days want to use their 20s and early 30s to have fun, travel, and build the financial stability needed to provide for a new life.”
It seems like it must be heavily cultural, but the fertility collapse is everywhere, and the US, Japan, China, Russia, and Italy seem like pretty distinct cultures!
While it feels like there should be one unifying explanation for why it's happening everywhere I think we are seeing many different things:
1. In rich countries the opportunity cost of having children has gone up, so people have them later.
2. The US made a lot of progress fighting teenage pregnancy in the 90s. Some countries, like a lot in LATAM, are only doing that now.
3. In very poor countries they are still urbanizing. Urbanization has a long history of reducing children per couple.
4. Probably something about technology and the phones making spreading cultural changes easier.
I'm sure there's a lot more
I think there are a couple common threads: Increasing wealth, more options for things to do with your time, good birth control technology. But yeah, the explanation for falling TFR in Singapore and in Turkey are necessarily going to be really different.
>But yeah, the explanation for falling TFR in Singapore and in Turkey are necessarily going to be really different.<
They *may* be "really different" (though I doubt it) but I don't see why they're *necessarily* different. The economic incentives to have fewer children increase remorselessly as societies urbanize and grow wealthier. Singapore is a lot richer than it was sixty years ago. But so is Turkey.
Opportunity cost summarizes a lot
"And if you start at 35 you'll have 1-2 kids, not 2-4 like my mom's generation did."
I think people don't appreciate just how much harder this is than having kids younger. Kids are pretty physically demanding, both having them and also dealing with them. It also means that if your kids follow your example, you don't get grandkids until your 70+.
Also limits your parents’ ability to have a meaningful relationship with your kids. Obviously depends on what your age gap from your parents is, but if your parents had you at 30 and you have your first kid at 35, second at 37, your parents are 70 before the kids have any memory of them and 80yrs old trying to keep up with pre teens. I was close with my grandparents and my parents and as a result really wanted my kids to have a meaningful grandparent relationship with my parents and that was one reason I chose to have kids younger. (Not to mention younger grandparents can really extend your village in a way older ones just aren’t able to).
Interestingly though, the research really says the opposite: The older you are when you have your first kid, the happier you claim to be. And I have to say that as an older parent myself with many younger parent friends, my experience bears this out. Older parents seem more mentally (and probably also financially) prepared to deal with adversity and, having already had the chance to travel and experience the world without kids, are perhaps a bit more primed to appreciate the novelty of watching their kids have these experiences for the first time (and less resentful of being burdened with parenting while having the experience themselves).
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3345518/
That study is really weird. It measures across an incredibly broad number of countries with radically different circumstances and several of their results contradict other research (e.g. high income families being less happy with more children relative to middle income).
I will acknowledge that if you have kids when you are 25 vs. 35 you will like have more frustration at 28 than at 38 as most people grow more patient as they get older. But having a 13 year old when you are 38 compared to when you are 48 and having your grand kids when you are 50 compared to when you are 70 is a very strong counter balance.
I'm not so sure I follow the logic that taking care of a 13 year old is meaningfully more difficult when you're 48 than when you're 38. Taking care of a young child is physically taxing: You have to carry them around, sometimes you have to chase them, you pretty much always have to carry their stuff, but psychologically they are comparatively simple. Teenagers can carry their own stuff, but they come with a much more complicated set of problems, some of which require real maturity to deal with.
How grantparents feel about being grantparents at 50 vs 70 seems like a topic for a whole other paper, but almost certainly not something that is impacting people's reported happiness at age 40.
I think the intellectual and emotional maturity difference between 38 and 48 is much smaller than the physical capability. Its also been longer since you were a teenager.
Having younger grandparents who can help out more with kids is a really big difference for parents! A 73 year old grandparent is going to have way more trouble keeping up with a 3 year old than a 53 year old grandparent. Since grandparents are a key source of alloparenting, reducing that makes a meaningful difference in how much support parents have. It also makes a meaningful difference in how much fun being a grandparent which is one of the benefits of having kids in the first place.
First, it’s not that big of a difference as long as you don’t let your health go to shit.
Second, the old paradigm was people having kids in their 30’s and 40’s too, they were just having the 6th or 12th kid depending on when they got started.
Having kids late in life is not a new thing. The new thing is not starting in your teens or 20’s.
We are trading our first two kids for more years of education and experience, and that is not a bad trade. The fewer kids you have get more resources and attention.
1) "First, it’s not that big of a difference as long as you don’t let your health go to shit."
From the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists: "A woman's peak reproductive years are between the late teens and late 20s. By age 30, fertility (the ability to get pregnant) starts to decline. This decline happens faster once you reach your mid-30s. By 45, fertility has declined so much that getting pregnant naturally is unlikely."
2) "We are trading our first two kids for more years of education and experience, and that is not a bad trade. The fewer kids you have get more resources and attention."
There is significant literature from polling, interviews and such that say many couples who delay pregnancy end up with fewer children than they wanted. Many couples who are trying in the mid to late 30s end up with one child. Which is both bad for social stability, but more importantly denies parents and children the joy of children with siblings.
Look under the hood. The most up to date data shows that female fertility decline is marginal until one’s 40’s.
I would have liked to have 10 kids in theory. In reality I had 2 and that was enough given what I wanted to go through physically, our salaries, and our bandwidth. How would I answer that survey I wonder?
My kids are better off that I didn’t have as many kids as I wanted.
I'm confused by your points seeming contradictory. Either female fertility isn't dropping or it is, but that's good?
I'd argue both are incorrect. That female fertility has clearly been dropping and that its bad. If you don't think its going down, I'd be curious your explanation as for why there are almost a million fewer births now in the US than there were 20 years ago despite the US population being 12% higher.
I'm not going to speak to your personal situation, except to ask the following question - you had two kids. If you only had one child, you could have theoretically had more resources for them and not been as impacted physically, in your salaries or bandwidth. Do you think you would have been better off with just one child?
Because if the answer to that is no, then you value that extra child more than those things. Its possible that you might have similar feelings if you had a third. Or perhaps not. There are clearly decreasing returns for most people, but I think many people underrate the joys of multiple children.
To be clear, I'm not encouraging people to have 10, but more that they should have 2-3 instead of none or 1. That of course is general advice and there are many people who should have more or none at all.
I know a woman who married early, had kids in her twenties, and traveled extensiely all over the world with her kids. According to her, traveling with kids is a lot easier than it sounds, though it does require other lifestyle tradeoffs.
I was married at 25, first kid at 27, now working on number 3 at 33. Since that first kid, have been to India twice, Saudi Arabia, Austria, a host of places in the US - some with kids, some without. The benefit of having kids young is you don’t worry so much about trying something like traveling with them or figuring out how to make things work. Everyone now has this mindset of “fun now, then kids and no fun” so they delay until they’re ready to have no fun and then proceed to have kids and have no fun. But our approach was “fun now and kids now” - we weren’t ready to stop having fun so we didn’t! And it was fun!
My wife and I are trying to have kids now. We both like to travel and we've avoided "ultra easy" travel together (e.g. Western Europe, Canada, Italy) to save it for when we have kids. We've instead gone places that have some challenges or are a long flight away (Japan, Brazil).
For what it's worth my friend took her kids to India, Indonesia and other "hard" places.
Having been to India as a single adult male, holy sh*t.
We've taken our two-year-old to four countries already! I think part of the perception comes from people who wait until their kids are older to start, at which point the kid is reacting to a new situation, whereas my daughter has never known a life where she wasn't on a plane every few months. It's normal to her.
You are in your mid thirties and want kids but don’t have them? Get to it! (Sorry I know that is rude and I don’t know your situation).
Yeah yeah... I already hear it from my mother once a week.
The current plan is for the house to come first as our living situation can't accomodate one. That hopefully happens this year.
Babies take up almost no room for like a year and 2BR apartments exist. No excuses!
cashes check from Mama Llama
"Side note: my generation was (correctly) bombarded with messages that having children too early is life ruining since we were 12. Is it any wonder we now need to feel very secure to have them? And if you start at 35 you'll have 1-2 kids, not 2-4 like my mom's generation did."
I recall being bombarded by messages not to have kids while being a teenager. I don't recall messages to wait until later than that.
I don't remember anyone being like "having babies are life ruining until you turn 18, then it's cool". The message was definitely "if you have them too early you'll ruin your life, especially if you're a woman". We might have over indexed on what too early is. Or at least that was my experience.
This is exactly my cohort of friends. None of us had children until mid-30s. Many have one child or at most two. My younger daughter will graduate college when I am a couple of years from retirement age. My wife and I had a wonderful time dating, living together, getting married and living our lives until we decided (realized?) that we were in our mid-30s and having children was something we really wanted. I'm so very glad we had two wonderful daughters. We wish in retrospect that we had started a little earlier and had at least one more, but hindsight is 20/20 and, see above, we really enjoyed our early adulthood and meager but adequate disposable income before parenting became our priority. Addendum: very few couples in our cohort have divorced. A blessing.
The
Having kids is extremely high-variance, and there's no way to generalize from other people's experiences. Having said that ... there are a lot of things I want from life, but "see my kids get old(er)" is at the very top of that list and, as they say, it isn't close.
My wife and I had our first daughter in our mid thirties. I honestly think I would have been a terrible father in my twenties: I was selfish, distracted, and negligent.* But having kids changes you, sometimes for the better. In retrospect, I realize it might have been fine. The only thing I'm certain of is that we overshot the mark, at least a bit. I'm not sure whether we waited 3, 5, or 7 years longer than we needed to, and I can't imagine 𝘢𝘯𝘺𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘯𝘨 I could have read that would have made me pull the trigger. But I wish there had been.
* Parents could use a bit more of those last two in today's world, imo, but I'm talking about turning the dials all the way up.
Student loan forgiveness would be a biggie, too
I feel like the norm among highly educated people I know (or at least was eight years ago or whatever) is that a lot of them are basically married in their 20s anyway but they wait until they're 30 or 32 to actually have a wedding because maybe they're doing long distance for grad school or haven't saved up for the party or whatever (and aren't having kids yes). This is personal bias, but honestly it seems fine; they (we) all seem to have turned out just fine. There's still plenty of time to have two or three kids if you start at 32.
In principle, yes, but lots of things can inhibit kids even in the 30s. Basic chemotherapy, for example, is bad for male reproduction and generally apocalyptic for women's reproduction.
Why is chemotherapy a major factor in this decision? I genuinely don't understand
Just an example of a fertility ruining health event that can happen
We got married when I was 27, were living in an apartment, wanted to wait till we got a house. After a year or two we realized we were never get into a house at this rate, so we actually moved in with my parents for 2+ years to save up. Finally got into a house in 2010 (the brief blip where home prices made sense).
Couple years later we started trying to have kids (probably earlier 30's). Had two miscarriages before finally having two kids.
It really does get harder when you wait, things might not go as smooth as you expect.
That’s what my in-laws did! Married in their early 20s, had my husband at 30. (Sad story: they actually wanted a second baby later, but my MIL had several miscarriages and was never able to carry to term again. Reproductive medicine was a lot less advanced back then, though.)
Yes. We got engaged earlier but same
Agree 100%. I know a handful of couples where both people have college degrees and started dating in high school or early college, but then waited to get married until their late 20s. Weird to me, but there’s no way marrying earlier would’ve resulted in kids earlier.
And we were the educated couple who got married at 23 (yes, religious). Still didn’t have a kid until 31 (young by academia standards though!)
I personally married my college girlfriend when I was 22 and we now have 2 kids, but we had the kids in our late 30s.
I think those people are still success stories. The failure mode that these people seem to be worried about is being in relationships in your 20s with people who do not want to commit and have kids with you, or with whom you would not want to have kids. Start looking for a co parent earlier and then lock them down, basically.
Yeah I got married in my mid 20s to my college boyfriend but we still didn’t start trying for kids until our early 30s. Cuz like… why would we? Early 30s is still enough time to have 2, maybe even 3.
It’s just not enough to guarantee 3, or make 4 particularly likely. But why do I need that many? Kids have diminishing marginal returns imo. And having a responsibility-free 20s is awesome! Would I give that up to be able to have kids at all, yes absolutely. But to be able to 4 kids instead of 2? What exactly am I getting out of that 4th kid to make her worth the sleepless nights and stress and giving up my late 20s full of socializing and travel??
I always wonder how much of a "first mover" problem there is with marriage, as my personal anecdata supports a model where
1) A lot of people have extremely long term/permanent relationships that do not proceed to marriage
2) Everyone in a friends cohort that does marry tends to get married within a few years of each other
3) Proposals are *far* more likely to happen at another wedding than anywhere else
4) A lot of engagements linger for a long time until something else triggers the actual wedding
To me that suggests that a lot of the decision to get married is contingent on triggering events, and if you just increased people's exposure to fun, lovey-dovey events where people talk about long-term commitment you might just mechanically get a higher marriage rate.
Proposals are most likely to happen at a wedding? That seems wrong! Why would you do this to someone who invited you to their wedding? The wedding is supposed to center around the bride and groom. You don’t want the bride after the wedding to be like, “The wedding was beautiful and perfect, just as I always dreamed, until my dumbass cousin Chad got down on one knee in the middle of the dance floor and proposed to his girlfriend! Now he’ll be the first thing anyone remembers of my wedding! He totally upstaged me! Freaking Chad 🤬”
If you’re inspired by the romantic atmosphere of a wedding, propose to your girlfriend the weekend after, that’s my recommendation.
I am 23 now and have been married for 10 months. My husband and I are now both STEM graduate students. We have a great relationship and would like at least 3 kids (if not more) but are trying to figure out the best timeline to start having kids.
I sometimes think we should start trying for kids in my mid-twenties, but worry about the impact to my career. I'm primarily considering the push-and-pull of being a working mom and the ambitious jobs (i.e., bad work-life balance) I'm interested in having during my mid-twenties. Beyond those concerns, I feel pretty ready to have kids.
On my husband's end, I think his concerns are much more related to our ability to take care of a baby and the potential lifestyle impacts to our free-time. He is the youngest so never baby-sat or spent much time around kids so that has a big impact on our different perspectives.
I wonder if this is a broader trend or generalizable at all? We are clearly unique in getting married so young, especially considering that we are not really religious.
Most folks want their student loans paid off before kids at the very least
I got married at 22 and had first kid at 29. Idk what you mean by “very successful” but our HH income is >$500k and we’re 40…
Be me, hate dating apps and want to meet men in person. Start volunteering with local community. Full of great guys but they are all already married. Join rock climbing group, but once again, most men are already married. In panic, start attending church fellowship events despite not being particularly pious. Full of the best dudes you'll ever meet, but naturally they are always married. For sure there is something wrong with me, but it would help to know where is this abundance of good men who just can't wait to start families that I keep hearing about.
Yes, the whole "get involved in non-dating interactions" argument regularly strikes me as missing the point that those interactions are intending to do something else other than being dating markets. We need more explicit matchmaking avenues that aren't designed to be a maw of dissatisfaction like is increasingly seen of online dating.
The trick is to get involved in those activities and find *friends*, then date *their* hot friends when you get invited to parties/gatherings/occasions unrelated to the original activity. The idea is to build more nodes into your social network.
Sure, but this is adding an incidental step to the goal at hand.
"We need more explicit matchmaking avenues"
The opposite - "explicit matchmaking avenues" are the better way to find BAD relationships (this is what happen when people enter in relationships with people who are not previous friends or at least close acquintances)
I don't quite understand what you're asserting here. If people don't have friends or at least close acquaintances who are also open to dating, what are people supposed to do?
If they're such good catches why are they in the matchmaking venues past their sell by date?
Could be many reasons! But if they want to look for someone they should be able to get some help if they need it.
You seem to live in a world where all married people are superior and all unmarried people are losers.
This seems like a silly claim to make in an era where a huge proportion of the public met and later married a partner they found on a dating app (I.e. explicit matchmaking avenues)
There is certainly a market for lemons element to the dating market, but I don’t think it leads to bad relationships for the lemons. It leads to them remaining single perpetually
Matt articulates this well. It helps a lot to see a how consciousness a guy is in his natural habitat. Especially if you're interested in stuff beyond appearance.
When you get into your 30s dating becomes a market for lemons. My wife’s friend is dealing with this. I told her to date a short uggo because then she knows why they were single (unlike those NYC finance guys.)
I'm a short king (5'5"). I respectfully submit that single people who are having trouble finding the right man might not have that problem if they were willing to dock a couple of inches from their height requirements. My husband was!
I absolutely give this advice to all my single friends! I will never understand the superficiality around men’s height - it creates such a ripe arbitrage opportunity if you can get past it, you can get a man undervalued by the market and score a lot of better attributes. I don’t know any woman who wouldn’t trade a couple of inches of height for more kindness, intelligence, humor, etc but every time I mention it as a possible trade off they are astonished and have never considered it that way.
(Embarrassingly, I ended up with a 6’1” husband and so have to hem and haw that I WOULD have been happy with a shorter guy…)
For men the equivalent "hack" (assuming you draw the line at obesity which otherwise is the obvious place to look) is dating Black women, who are highly undervalued in the dating market
Interestingly, there was a 2008 study finding that marriages between white men and Black women are much less likely to end in divorce compared to white/white marriages: https://www.jstor.org/stable/20456781
Represent!
I know that the data says the differences are only on the order of 2 or 3 percent, but I really think this is an East Coast-West Coast thing. For economic reasons, eligible bachelors tend to sort toward cities on the West Coast, and successful young women tend to sort toward the East Coast. And so you end up with guys in California saying there are no women, and women in NYC saying there are no men.
Anecdotally...this feels 100% true. Pacific NW here, and the male market seems oversaturated to the point of comedy (thanks Amazon "brogrammers" etc)
A NYC-SF teleporter would really do wonders for dating in both cities.
Send the eligible bachelors through the Alameda-Weehawken Burrito Tunnel!
https://idlewords.com/2007/04/the_alameda_weehawken_burrito_tunnel.htm
This is kind of a champagne problem though and not representative of the “working class” trend mentioned in the piece.
You're not wrong, but I assumed the person I was replying to was more likely to be in the 'champagne' dating pool based on the fact that they subscribe to Slow Boring.
What are the economic reasons at play?
Industry concentration. Tech and engineering jobs are present on both coasts, obviously, but as a proportional share of the overall job pool are more common in the West. And those jobs tend to be disproportionately male. On the East, I think it's more just a general result of the fact that young women are more college-educated than men, and so the general suite of white collar jobs (marketing, publishing, academia, non-profits, etc.) is going to have more young women even if the industry as a whole is fairly gender-balanced.
I’m a single man looking for a relationship that leads to marriage and kids, and I’ve had a similar experience but with the genders reversed. I can’t even remember the last time I met an attractive woman in person who was single. I’ve concluded that dating apps are the least bad option once you get into your 30s.
I suspect geography is a big part of my problem. An Eastern city with lots of colleges and hospitals so there is an lopsided amount of educated young women. All the lonely, hardworking, farm boys live a few states away from me.
Then you have a bunch of guys that wanted to work in technology that got stuck in Seattle or SF, working on teams composed entirely of men, with male coded hobbies, and a local population that skews very male.
Come to Seattle, we’re trying to find our good friend, who’s a really great guy, a girlfriend
You could always solve the "all the good ones are taken" problem by joining a polycule
/s
I'm sorry you're having such a tough time! I remember being in my mid-20s and being frustrated with the dating market.
Consider getting on one of the PAID dating apps. I met my wife on eHarmony back in 2014. I'm not sure what the landscape is like now, but I remember even back then there was a DRAMATIC difference between paid dating apps (eHarmony, Match, etc) and the free apps (Tinder, Coffee Meet Bagel, etc).
Good luck!
married man probably has an unmarried friend. meet him at a party. Ask married man if he has friends you could meet.
This requires being forward and vulnerable with acquaintances and strangers in a way that I don’t think most people are comfortable with.
Have you tried going to parties?
I think this is a great point. Which is why for "most" people college or shortly thereafter is the best time to meet and marry.
If for whatever reason you don't, things get a lot harder as most of the good ones are now taken.
Which sadly is where the apps might help...
Based on my experience and what I’ve seen of the data, a major driver of the decline of marriage in America, perhaps the biggest driver, is that it became socially acceptable for working class white women to cohabitate with men they weren’t married to. It became much more socially acceptable to have women out of wedlock children.
I have 3 aunts born in the early 60s. They didn’t go to college. They are all divorced. They married losers - abusive men, men with substance abuse issues, men who couldn’t hold down jobs, etc. My cousins, ie their kids, partnered with losers too, they just didn’t marry them. Instead they had kids out of wedlock.
I have 4 female first cousins. None of them are married. 3 of them are mothers, and 2 are divorced.
It does seem like the lesson many have learned from high divorce rates is “don’t get married” rather than “be a good partner and find a good partner.”
I think many of these decisions about whether and when to get married are driven by personal experience rather than broad societal trends. It’s why solving this is hard.
I mean, in large chunks of the country, there's a lack of good partners, period and there always have been and always will be.
I mean sure, but in that situation people seem to be deciding I'll still partner with these people but won't marry them. When ideally the decision would be "I'm going to move" or "I'm going to be single." I get that it's easy for me to say that since I have found a great partner. But it seems uncontroversial to say that the outcome of not getting married but having kids with bad partners is not a good outcome.
Wait, that seems quite controversial! Single parenting is hard but has gotten easier over time, and I imagine that most single mothers are probably happier having a kid, on balance, than never having gotten pregnant. Most people like their kids!
First, you are both right. This is likely colored by my religous background and my personal experience where it was quite hard for my mom to raise 4 kids after my dad died. Certainly much harder than when my dad was around. Also you are right that single parenting is probably preferable to many/most over being single and childless. I overstated my point or at least calling the outcome bad was the wrong way to put it. It's not bad that single women are having kids. I do think studies show that being married to a good partner is better for everyone involved though.
Second, maybe I'm being overly romantic, but what I was mostly thinking was not an alternative where people simply don't have kids, but mostly that they find a good partner and get married and have kids. Like I said in my origional reply, I feel like the preferred lesson of the high divorce rate would be "be a good partner and find a good partner" but I don't think that's really been the takeaway. I think the more common takeaway is that marriage is bad and I don't need a partner.
That's certainly a more reasonable version!
No, that is certainly controversial. That’s a value judgment almost certainly based on your religion.
People are good. The US is in a good position because until the last couple of decades, we have had stronger natural population growth than other developed countries and we’ve had lots of immigration. Part of that strong population growth has been children, born into single mom situations or children raised by single mothers.
Yes this is it. Unfortunately this is true. When I was I kid (90s and 00s) society and the Christian church in the South (with which I’m most familiar) pushed women to marry/stay with these men who are unfit for marriage. There has since been a shift - and that’s a good thing.
As they say, half of all people are below average. (Okay, half of all people are below the median.)
If you set the standards low enough, people will make sure to sink enough to meet them.
If a person (man or woman) doesn't need to improve themselves enough to be worthy to be a spouse but still gets the apparent short-term benefits, why bother?
Didn’t Charles Murray try to tell this story 20 yrs ago? But he might have mixed it up with so many other things that everyone could just yell “Bell Curve racist” (with some good reason) and ignore the parts that might be valid.
Coming Apart was very much worth reading, and it was reviewed pretty widely. His thesis was that there was a social/values change that affected working class/underclass people far more than professional/educated class people, and partly he attributed this to people on the higher end of society not preaching what they practice. That is, most top-1%-income people live with something like what a person in the 1950s would call traditional values, but mostly pay lip service to a much more permissive set of values. But also probably this has to do with the massive sorting on intelligence/diligence that he discussed originally as a possibility in The Bell Curve.
Massive eyeroll at the idea that working class men would be super eager to marry and be supportive, involved fathers if only Teh Elitez scolded them harder.
Being a racist is a good disqualification. A friend of a friend dabled with Naziism. I don’t think it reflected any more than a desire to be edgy, but it’ll be a long time before I can take anything he says seriously because that represents such poor judgement and character
The thesis of Charles Murray's "The Bell Curve" was fundamentally hereditarian, and hereditarianism is anathema to most liberals because there is strong evidence that a hereditarian world view tends to make people callous towards their "inferiors".
The Nazi "Aktion T4" project to murder severely disabled Germans was a clear example of this, especially if we ask the question "why didn't the Soviets do something similar?"
Nazi Germany and the USSR were both totalitarian dictatorships that cared nothing for either public opinion or Abrahamic morality, and the USSR was also considerably poorer (to the point it had lost millions of its people in famines) such that it would have a considerably stronger material incentive to dispose of "useless eaters". And a policy of outright murdering the disabled (as opposed to the far more historically prevalent eugenicist policy of sterilizing them) doesn't even require one to hold that their disability was genetic in the first place.
Most people are at least somewhat hereditarian in their own lives though, as with the common voice when getting married to look at your future mother in law to see your future wife.
Hereditarianism is anathema to liberals because the blank slate is one of the most important underlying assumptions of a huge amount of liberal ideology. If you no longer take on faith that people are fundamentally equal, everything falls apart.
People having equal worth (core tenet of liberalism) doesn't mean they are literally equal in skill
Equal in value as a human being (and before the eyes of the law) doesn't have to mean equal is everything else.
It's plainly clear that some people are smarter or more athletic or whatever than other people.
Nobody ever thought that Ben Franklin and the village idiot were the same in terms of smarts.
Maybe, just maybe working class people ought to start shaming other working class people into marriage instead of expecting the chattering classes to do it; assuming the lack of fingerwagging is the problem.
Yes this was always the problem with Stephanie Kelton's thesis: if being lectured at by the professional class got working class men to do things then they'd all be driving Prius's and voting for Elizabeth Warren--it's not like the professional classes never lecture the working class about *anything*. But it demonstrably doesn't work!
If anything, Trump is the GOP candidate who lectures the working class the least compared to the old country club and church Republicans of old, in part because he's the president who has had the messiest personal life in decades.
Thank you!
Not endorsing anything else he’s written but Charles Murray’s *Coming Apart* has lots of interesting data that is basically all about this.
This is partly true, but in recent years the fertility of working class women has been converging with college educated. Maybe it's better sex education?
I think it’s more likely that birth control is harder to screw up these days than it used to be (eg if you have an IUD you literally do nothing vs remembering to take a pill every day at the same time or put a condom on every time)
Fair enough. I’ve read that it’s mostly IUDs. Education is great but what moves the needle on the population level is better technology.
Good advice, Matt.
If I remember correctly, a big part of Jordan Peterson's early rise to prominence was based on this type of message to young men. It was quite popular *among men* but widely panned during the height of the woke era (I hate that term, but don't know what else to call the ubiquitousness of DEI / Trans / pronouns during the 2015-2024 period)
Never been a big Peterson fan. Obviously he says some unobjectionable stuff about making your bed and generally being on top of your shit. But I think young boys also need to hear stuff like: be a compassionate person, a good listener, patient and respectful. I also never got the sense that Peterson wanted young men to seek out equality in their relationships. Like part of being in a modern educated relationship is being sometimes fluid in your gender roles and men shouldn't think they need to be typecasted as some macho macho man all the time.
To throw a bone to his defenders, Early Peterson is indeed very different from Later Peterson. He’s a cautionary tale about audience capture and the dangers of fame and buying your own hype.
So was early Peterson basically just the more benign stuff?
Pretty much. I suspect there was a break somewhere.
And to be clear, I’m not exonerating his critics. He legit did get attacked for saying some rather banal and helpful shit, all because it wasn’t PRECISELY what the Toxic Masculinity crowd wanted to hear.
But as is often the case with victims of Taibbi-Greenwald Syndrome, the resulting Cancellation Overreaction Psychosis undoubtedly stems from deep personal flaws. Guys like Matt get cancelled, and yeah it sucks for them, but they don’t turn their backs on everything dear to them. Heck, even FdB, as fucked in the head as he is, never crossed that line. So, there’s always something else going on.
My hypothesis is, there’s some sort of nexus between entrepreneurial attitudes relating to PMC values, and how one deals with criticism. Matt’s known for going on tilt from time to time, but generally shrugs the criticism off, and also views his job as just another gig. He’s dedicated to the craft. Similarly, Freddie is pretty open about self-criticism, and legit doesn’t seem to care all that much about his sub’s growth; both men ultimately know that any value their gigs have is based on how true they are to themselves.
Peterson, Taibbi, Greenwald… these are people who had one big scoop, or were right about one big thing, and figured that entitled them to fixed sinecures within the PMC punditocracy. Instead of basing their work on a genuine authorial voice, once the first gig runs out, they scramble to take bigger and bigger gambles on another big payout that’ll float them until they win the next gamble, and the next after that.
Just a theory.
Although there were some warning signs before, the big break with Peterson seems to be when he came back out of his coma. Or part of him did, and the rest never came back.
I repeat my standard refrain that if we don't allow there to be banal Jordan Petersons talking to the men and giving the men advice *for their own good* (and not what women wish men would be like), you will just eventually only be left with the Andrew Tates.
You can't fake this. Young men figure out very fast if the person giving them advice has their interests at heart or not.
I’m generally predisposed to be charitable towards feminists — I think a lot of the reaction to them is ugly and overblown, even when they aren’t being great themselves. I think it’s best to err on the side of being patient with all involved.
However, I’ve also become increasingly sympathetic to the still-charitable view that many of toxic masculinity’s biggest feminist critics basically want men who socialize more like women, and struggle to conceive of anything that could possibly be considered its own, separate thing from femininity such that it could be called a NON-toxic form of masculinity.
Like, that’s not to say that they all think all masculinity is toxic — they don’t — but whenever they decry toxic masculinity, the only alternatives they’re capable of suggesting (when they even bother) are basically gussied up feminine characteristics. And that’s okay to argue for, but just don’t gaslight me that repackaged femininity is the only form of acceptable masculinity.
They can't articulate non-toxic masculinity, but you don't believe they think all masculinity is toxic? Seems pretty clear to me that they do.
Something that is "toxic" cannot be repaired or redeemed, it can only be cleansed by removal. These are people who think language & microagressions are really important; they have been asked repeatedly to come up with a better term, and they have refused. I don't think the charitable interpretation is tenable at this point.
At the risk of being too literal toxicity is defined by the dosage. Hence water intoxication enough clean drinking water becomes toxic at a certain threshold.
It's not masculinity is toxic per se but that the proportion of masculinity to femininity or androgyny is too high. You could simply take the same impulses and water them down and you'd have non-toxic doses of masculinity.
Yes, I (a woman) found his early writing and speech to be very much about morality and being a good person - it resonated with me as the types of thing I would want my sons to hear. Then he went off the deep end post-coma.
I think he’s a cautionary tale about benzos personally. Dude had a bad reaction and went crazy (especially given the unhealthy info environment he landed in, with both unreasonable worshipers and crazy detractors).
Feels like there are a lot of cautionary tales on drugs out there, now.
I'm beginning to think the teachers who told us to stay away from drugs may have been onto something!
Yeah. With all the visible homelessness and mental illness I really hope the kids viscerally understand that hard drugs are really a bad idea in a way that I didn’t growing up
For the vast majority of people drugs or alcohol are fine. They can partake on occasion and then go on to live normal lives.
For a small percent they can't. That small percent should be treated medically not criminally (unless they commit an actual crime of course).
When I was younger I tried pretty much everything under the sun. Then I grew older got married, now I don't even drink.
Problem is that a lot of people are still very vocal in defending things like LSD. Ketamine, as an example, still has a large group of folks that are advocating for it.
"how soon is now?"
Hendrix?
Billie Holiday?
Hank Williams?
Samuel Taylor Coleridge?
Well, I did mean my post somewhat amusingly. I do think there is something different to crashing out and over dosing are a bit different than going somewhat crazy.
I would say that past 15 years that cultural elites have generally denigrated men and not offered them much patience, compassion, or respect.
For example, when you have the CDC listing disparate impacts of Covid or suicide and omitting the most disparately affected group (men) from any discussion, it signals something callous about priorities. It undermines trust.
Look at how annoying some of the comments are on here
Generally the only bigotry progressives feel is acceptable is bigotry towards those without college degrees.
I think this is pretty overstated, but I’d guess it would depend on how you are defining your population of “progressives.”
It seems more like everyone has a couple groups they just lack the ability to speak nicely about. A top example here would be the ways that people talk about people who live in cities while simultaneously bemoaning that people aren’t nice enough to rural residents.
Or even more germane, the way people talk about progressives.
I grew up in a rural area in the south, where "redneck" is a really common term, especially as an insult. One day a guy I know in high school posted on Facebook that it's the last acceptable insult, and he thought that was bad. I think there's some truth to that, and I decided to treat redneck as a kind of ethnicity, and refrain from looking down on or insulting them.
Women attempt suicide more often but men are more likely to use guns
Are you saying it's a skill issue?
Is this a dark joke?
My response was far too flippant for such a serious topic.
I get annoyed when I see this response to male suicide statistics, and I wish people would be more explicit about what they're saying & why they think it's relevant.
Our culture penalizes men who express vulnerability or weakness; women are more likely to report feeling depressed; men are 500% more likely to commit suicide. To me, these facts paint a very clear picture, but I admit this is a complex topic & other interpretations are possible.
Sorry if I let anger get the better of me & came off like a jerk.
Peterson for me was the point when it became obvious that there's a bit of affirmative action going on for conservative intellectuals. Having someone say "clean your room" is a revelation when it's your parents and you're 5, but not if you're 30. He was more a lifestyle guru for the "failure to launch" crowd, which these days leans Trumpy.
I think this is mostly fair; but I also think he was somewhat standard self help. Didn't seem too different from any other self help I have seen.
And don't forget he rose at a similar time to the nonsense about how punctuality was white power. Was a crazy time all around.
To a certain extent, Peterson being held up as an intellectual was a bit of a category error, like when Bob Dylan won the Nobel Prize in Literature. At a fundamental level, people don't go to Paul Krugman, Francis Fukuyama, and Greg Mankiw primarily for life advice or to be a Successories poster. People read Gibbon to learn about Rome, not to break themselves out of bedrot. If he was younger and female, he would have just been seen as an influencer who then proceeded to blow up their life publicly, which seems to be the main TikTok influencer career path. Being an advice columnist is seen as less respectable to being an intellectual, so there was an incentive for a lot of people to use the wrong term for marketing and respectability purposes.
My main assertion is I think you have to include him with some of the contemporary "credentialed writers" that were around at the same time. The curators, as they were, were digging deep for an authoritative voice. The ones that were dug up from the left turned out to be full on grifters just as heavily.
My guess, after that, is that the right clings to the credentialed writers they find far stronger than the left tends to. I'm not entirely clear why, though.
Since the Bush years, conservative intellectuals have basically gone one of two routes:
- Been alienated by the Bush and Trump types into basically becoming standard liberals who are just a bit more uncomfortable around dyed pink hair than Ezra Klein-style liberals (Fukuyama, Bill Kristol, Fareed Zakaria, etc.)
- Gone down weird rabbit holes to stay a conservative in good standing while maintaining a grift
The only way to remain both a conservative and an intellectual is to be the type of conservative that only exists in faculty lounges these days.
Seeking out equality in a relationship is not necessarily a good thing. mutual respect is not the same thing as equality.
Also, your roles are necessarily a bit different when you start having children. No matter how supportive a father I am (very), I couldn't ever carry a baby to term or breastfeed them, and doing those things has a big impact on everything else. A job with long hours or a lot of travel is hard to square with those things when you have very young children, and even when the kids are older it's almost unworkable for both parents to have the heavy travel jobs.
What you described is no way way mutually exclusive from a vision of equality.
I think there's a wrong notion of equality that says "we both have the same tasks/goals/role in the family," and it's worth pushing back on that. A family where mom stays home with the kids and dad works a demanding job to pay the bills is going to have a different (and more traditional-looking) division of labor in the home than one where mom and dad both have full-time jobs, or one where dad works full-time and mom works part-time, or one where mom works full time and dad stays home with the kids, or whatever else.
Why? What does equality in a relationship look like to you? Does one party in a relationship not deserve equals rights and opportunity?
Equality of opportunity is an oxymoron. My opportunities can never be exactly equal to yours or anyone else’s. You are being slippery even if you don’t know it.
Calling me slippery here is dripping with irony.
Equality has never been intended to mean everyone is exactly equal; whether that means in ability, circumstances, or any other measurement. But it does mean that people shouldn’t be precluded from pursuing the opportunities that they would like to.
My wife and I can handle different tasks, utilize different strengths, hold down different jobs and still fit within a reasonable definition of equality.
So, what do you mean that relationships shouldn’t aim for equality?
When you say equality doesn’t mean we are equal you are being slippery.
Maybe you think the concept of equity is so beautiful it can handle some slipperiness but say X does not mean X is the literally definition of slippery.
I think your advice is good, but it misses the point of what Peterson and marriage were selling. Young people (especially working class men) want actionable, measurable achievements to chase. If the plan in 1950 was: get a job, get married, have kids, and that plan in 2026 seems disrupted, then the advice to be a better person doesn’t really stand in for the old sequence. I think that’s why the make your bed or learn to code brand of advice was appealing. It felt like forward momentum.
Men just need to hear over and over again be like Aragorn.
I never watched his content, but one of my best friends was driven crazy by the backlash against him. “The guy’s advice is take a shower, clean your room, and get a job. How did he become this avatar of right wing evil? Is there some anti-men-taking-showers constituency? Are men perpetuating systemic racism and sexism if they clean their rooms?”
Because to most left-leaning people he wasn't the "clean your room guy" he was the "freaking out about supposedly being under the yoke of the evil Canadian gov't to use the right pronouns" guy.
He had a point about that for like two minutes, and then he went on an all meat diet in Russia or whatever it was and came back full-on batshit. Not a well man, if he ever was.
Oh sure - but my point is Scott Galloway can of makes many of the same arguments and while there's some left-wing criticism because he has views left wingers disagree with, there's no push to paint him as some evil figure because at worse, he has some dumb ideas.
Yeah, I'm far from giving him credit for anything. He should have stuck with "clean your room".
If he went to Russia I wonder if he was ensnared by an FSB honeytrap operation while he was there, and thus came back a kompromized asset of the Kremlin?
Sometimes, people you disagree with are just people you disagree with, rather than agents of the vast evil conspiracy,
Thank you - it's absurd to discuss the negative response to Peterson on the left without this context.
Except that, AFAICT, the negative response to Peterson preceded Peterson's psychotic break.
Like CarbonWaster said above - I'm sure there was a negative response to Peterson among some segments of left initially, but to my recollection he only became considered a strictly right wing figure once the pronoun stuff happened. And the real nutso Benzo addict happened after that. I could be wrong though.
Quite. 'The left' is a huge number of people so I'm not going to say 'nobody', but I really don't think many people on the left were angry about him advising people to take a shower and clean their room. The point is we were only a position to hear this banal advice because he was promoted on the basis of the frisson from his controversial opinions.
He was right about that, though. IIRC what he said was "I'm fine with using whoever's preferred pronouns, but making it illegal not to is crossing a line."
That is definitely not what he said.
I misremembered; apparently he said he's happy to use whichever "traditional" pronoun trans people prefer, i.e. "he" or "she", but drew the line at neo or gender neutral pronouns, and also said making that illegal was crossing a line.
I'm a dyed in the wool progressive, and that's about where I come down. Trans people are real, they should be afforded dignity & respect; if you want to "dismantle the gender binary" you can do that on your own time, but I think it's silly, and forcing people to pretend to agree with you is a really bad idea for several reasons.
Being seen to advocate or acknowledge the challenges men faced during that era was seen as a “distraction” from the challenges women faced. It was very zero sum.
The rhetoric of those years was as toxic as current-day MAGA rhetoric, but with different targets and terminology.
The things he would say about women were always weird. Your friend was being disengenous.
I don’t think so - early on he had some very reasonable takes that got him construed as being anti woman (like that the wage gap is not ex ante something that should be eliminated if it reflects women’s preference to prioritize other things like children, etc) but I never heard anything in the beginning (pre falling off the deep end) to be objectionable. (Am a woman)
Maybe! I don’t even know what the guy sounds like. My friend was also not a consumer of his content.
Ironically, Peterson failed to take his own advice and is whacked out on benzos.
Which doesn't discredit his advice.
Meh? If you’re going to make your public persona about a certain thing, you kind of DO invalidate it with directly hypocritical misconduct.
Like, if Rick Santorum comes out as gay, everyone instantly knows he’s an even bigger asshole than he ever came across as. By contrast, if he comes out as an anti-vaxxer, it doesn’t directly invalidate anything he said about homosexuality, because it has nothing to do with homosexuality.
I told my kids not to drink alcohol until they were of age, even though I had my first beer at age 16.
Hypocrisy ex ante is different from hypocrisy post hoc.
“I learned this lesson” is different from “I told you not to do drugs but now I’m on drugs”.
The point here is the hypocrisy of the messenger doesn't change the message itself. Being strung out on benzos is bad and that fact doesn't change based on some internet takesters life choices.
He was prescribed those by a doctor because he was suffering chronic insomnia from a physical illness and later his wife came down with cancer and his anxiety compounded.
He previously said that benzodiaze isn't safe to take long-term, but when you are at the point of "haven't slept at all for three weeks" you are no longer in a good mental space to make decisions and try to meter yourself. Maybe he should have set up better advanced directives with his doctor but he was likely expecting, like the rest of us, to never ever have a need to deal with benzos in the first place.
The benzos are both the only thing that words to get some people to sleep, and insanely high-risk. (My sister - my best-educated, most conscientious sibling - managed to get sufficiently addicted to prescription benzos to lose her nursing license. She got her life together again, but it took years.)
Most good broad-applicability life advice is neither novel nor interesting, so to become a public figure who’s famous for giving such advice, you need to put it in some sort of weird attention-getting package that only loosely relates to the advice. In Peterson’s case, the framework included stuff like obsessions with transphobia and all-meat diets, confusing rhetoric about lobsters, and a body of psychoanalytic theory that, as far as I can tell from reading summaries, is like what Carl Jung would have produced if he routinely smoked crack.
It’s pretty obvious that the backlash was mostly more about the attention-seeking packaging than it was about “clean your room.” (Most of the object-level recommendations in “12 Rules for Life” are things that most adults would correctly agree with.)
“Clean your room” isn’t that important though! Lots of successful people never did it and most people who can afford it hire someone to do it.
I've never watched Peterson or any of these dudes but to this specific point, therein lies the paradox. If a man is already successful, super talented or attractive, or just otherwise juiced in somehow, he can let the small stuff go. On the other hand if he's at a point where he's seeking out this kind of advice, it's probably a good idea to take a look at the low hanging fruit that might in aggregate make his life better.
I never read his books (I'm a little old for self-help books directed at young men), but I did listen to a few episodes of his podcast, and he was really an excellent interviewer. Several of his podcast episodes were quite good, because he engaged deeply and intelligently with his interviewee.
It’s a way to have agency. If you’re the sort of person who is convinced that everything is rigged against you, such that you’re the overlapping audience for Peterson, Rogan, Andrew Tate, and the long tail of incel and mens’ rights psychos, then I imagine clean your room is good advice - to say nothing of its position relative to the alternatives.
It’s an important part of treatment for people who struggle to self-regulate. For Peterson’s (ideal) audience of young men who are trying to sort themselves out, it probably adds value despite not being crucial to anything. And if you can’t do it (raises hand), it’s a sign you might have attention or other issues you should address
I don’t think that “clean your room” is necessary or sufficient for life success, but I also think that more than half of people with dirty rooms would probably feel better after cleaning them. A lot of things that aren’t completely make or break are worth doing.
No one hires somebody to clean their room in the way Peterson means (well, I'm sure SOMEONE does, but it's not that common among successful people). The young men he's talking to literally just have trash lying everywhere and all kinds of stuff out on the ground or on their desk instead of put away. Things like washing your sheets, dusting, vacuuming, etc. are a whole tier higher.
In addition to what others have said - if you as a presumably somewhat low status man want to do one low hanging fruit thing to make your odds of finding an attractive mate much higher, cleaning your room is likely a very good place to start
It's about importing some of that army aura into everyday life.
Woke started in African American circles, then got appropriated by white progressives, then got contextualized into the NGO rent seeking grift, and now has finally become a core tenant of Republican pearl clutching and cancel culture.
MattY calls it the Great Awokening.
I also like MY's term and have 'appropriated' it.
The very term "woke" has its origins in African-American English.
To be frank, if you compare Jordan Peterson to the influencers young men listen to these days, he may as well be the Buddha.
I used to watch a fair bit of Peterson and I thought his Bible and mythology stuff was interesting, but he kind of screwed up his own life despite being incredibly successful so I’m not so sure it’s good for men to be taking him that seriously.
Media/online culture do not do a good job putting up role models--you get attention by being bad/loud/screwy in various ways.
Certainly not anymore. 100% of the people I know in real life who became therapists did so as a way to sort through their own issues. I don’t know Peterson in real life but I’d say he’s the best example anyone could come up with of the phenomenon.
My guess is that the sudden change of his circumstances, from a somewhat charismatic college professor at a decent university with a couple of seldom-read books to a public speaker/player in the culture wars who was giving public lectures, debating people, fighting on Twitter with tons of people, getting called nasty names by one set of media outlets and nice names by a different set (neither of whom actually knew or cared much about his ideas--a click is a click), was really bad for him. Being put on a pedestal as a role model of some kind for young men probably wasn't great for him, either, though probably he'd have been okay with that if he could have just stayed as a college professor and maybe gone on an occasional book tour.
Sudden fame is hard on people, being treated as an icon of either virtue or vice is hard on people, having your life massively shaken up is hard even if you make more money/get more fame as a result, etc. I don't know if he ended up surrounded by worshipful groupie/disciple types, but that's extremely corrosive to your soul.
A few thoughts.
1) We have delayed adulthood so much in our society. We limit how much unsupervised and unstructured time we allocate to children more on average which means they don’t develop the independence necessary for adult life until later. For a long while we see less teens with jobs. This in turn has delayed natural adult relationships from developing.
2) The economic prospects of people without college degrees has materially eroded over the past 50 years. This coupled with the hedonic treadmill of expectations as to what children need and what families should have has created a barrier to coupling.
3) Marriage is also a status game. The evolution of online dating has made this type of pressure more acute. High status people often meet and marry in college when search costs for parters is relatively low. We are seeing people who don’t have high social status being left by the wayside and they don’t have the “college experience” to artificially put young people together in constant social situations.
4) Finally, the opportunity cost of marrying any specific individual has gone up over time. There are many more competitions for time, wages are higher so the returns to career investment are higher, and there are more “alternatives” to find a better match (perceived or real.)
point 1 is bang on. the number of students coming to college who are absolutely not ready for real life (accounting for all the "generation thinks the one coming after is worse" bias) is nuts.
It would probably help if more college students were not kids straight out of high school, but young adults (or occasionally not-so-young adults) with some experience of not being students. It's not original to me, of course, there's a thread discussing the idea right here in this comment section. https://www.slowboring.com/p/yelling-at-ambitious-young-women/comment/235963833
I definitely think that me joining the army first and then doing a CC before I went to a 4 year was the right course for me.
I wasn't ready for college right out of high school. I also think the vast majority of kids would do better going to a CC first. You save a ton of money and will often learn more due to smaller class sizes.
I wasn’t ready for real life when I went to college a decade ago (and subsequently didn’t date in college and am still single). I can only imagine it’s gotten much worse
It’s been said by others (Stephen Bradford Long’s substack is good here) that we need some type of coming-of-age ritual that afterward, you’re an adult. Nearly all primitive cultures did this.
The week I started high school, I decided independently that it was a good idea to start learning how to do my own laundry. This was before smart phones made it easier to learn everything immediately. When I got to college, I was surprised how many people I had to teach the basics of how to do laundry. (I was also surprised how many people would just leave tons of cash in unattended dryers for hours at a time.) That was over 20 years ago and it seems to have gotten worse.
To add on to 1 even though college could be a good place to find a romantic partner, it also is adding in an automatic time period where adulthood is delayed. Not really a surprise people are delaying marriage and kids when that is factored in. I guess the counterpoint is we are talking about people who don't go to college are the ones getting married less.
The treadmill of expectations is a big problem. It's very intimidating for people in their 20s who don't really have any money and showing people statistics about how it's easier to have kids in your 20s doesn't change the fact that young parenthood seems like a pathway to temporary poverty for most people.
That was my thought too. I know the data says that college-educated women are more likely to marry, but it's not the college degree that does it. I think more non-college alternatives for men and women both would be helpful instead of continuing the college-for-all push.
Point 1 is the biggest thing I see a lot of. Extending a sort of adolescence out to 30 pushes all your other milestones further.
Point 1 is the biggest thing I see a lot of. Extending a sort of adolescence out to 30 pushes all your other milestones further.
Point 1 is the biggest thing I see a lot of. Extending a sort of adolescence out to 30 pushes all your other milestones further.
Point 1 is the biggest thing I see a lot of. Extending a sort of adolescence out to 30 pushes all your other milestones further.
Idk, the reason you write things aimed at educated young women encouraging them to marry is the same reason NYT writes all their bizarro world lifestyle trends aimed at educated women, that's who reads lifestyle pieces.
If you want to reach non-college young men you'd do it on Twitch or write a pro-marriage Manga, or something.
Overall if you want to encourage hetero marriage, you should probably be engaging with both men and women.
I don’t think your average NYT lifestyle section reader is going there for actual life advice. I read the NYT Modern Love section for the same reason Denzel reads the paper in Training Day: it’s 90% bullshit but it’s entertaining.
If the columns are 90% bullshit, the comments must be 95%. My favorite obviously fake comment was somebody claiming to be a mom who said her daughter would jog in Central Park and would pull over and have sex with random men in the bushes and then keep jogging, and this mom was so cool and progressive that she thought this was great!
The comment was highly upvoted.
Umm hooking up in parks is the gays’ turf no straights allowed tyvm
Yeah this is cultural appropriation.
The ways in which the Internet allows men to live a rich fantasy life are a) obvious and b) the subject of much cultural discussion about how problematic or tolerable they are.
The ways in which the Internet allows women to live a rich fantasy life tend to get much less attention in the discourse, but they're no less rich and varied
I'm going over 50% the comment was left by a man typing with one hand.
Boom.
[I-understood-that-reference!-Steve-Rogers.GIF]
Replace all those horrible gambling app ads during basketball games with PSAs encouraging young men to marry their girlfriend, stick around to raise their kid, be a dedicated father, etc.
This probably won't help much (changing social norms is hard), but at least it will get rid of the f--king 24/7/365 gambling ads.
TV can actually reflect culture. I believe there was a study that showed the MTV show 16 and pregnant actually lowered teenage births.
So yes, I would support government spending on adds, but more importantly on actual shows with the appropriate propaganda.
Show people that make the right decisions, but also people that make the wrong ones, and live to regret it. Bring back "the moral of the story"
I am now anti pro sports because gambling is bad.
There are billboards promoting fatherhood all over the hood in Memphis because, well, Memphis. Who knows, it may make a difference on the margins, but only on the margins - talk is cheap
Pro marriage manga had me cackling lol. But it is actually a good point!
“And this seems to me like a recurring problem in center-right discussions of marriage and family: Cultural conservatives are either afraid to say what they actually mean, or else are just so accustomed to arguing with feminists about abortion and child care subsidies that they reflexively want to continue fighting with them.”
Seems like the latter. And my guess is that there’s a funding ecosystem of geriatric donors who don’t think the family think tanks are getting the job done unless they’re browbeating women to settle down.
"Please address this directly at my three granddaughters so one of them gives me a great-grandchild before I die off!"
Hah!
I'm sure that the temptation for the latter is always there, but I'm much more suspecting the former, per my top level comment.
There clearly is a conservative version of the "Groups" which involves getting women to do what they are told.
This. Organized activist groups have a loud voice in public, even if they're not all that many people/voters.
I'd like to tie this to pushing back at the polarization of all education before joining the labor force and all "leisure" (retirement) after leaving it. There should be less professional "penalty" for dropping in and out of the labor force to "go back to school" or to "have a few kids."
I also don't know how to effect this social change, but I think that a child allownce and progressive taxation of consumption (education is not consumption), not income, would help. :)
Hard agree. This has been a low key obsession of mine for a bit, a colleague and I were discussing how sabbaticals should be normalized and government supported. This was in an AI job loss prediction context, but it has many contextual applications.
As with most of this stuff, the solution is a cultural change. And a necessary if not sufficient condition is for the Brooklyn crowd to stop convincing itself that eg polyamory is cool and smart. And that’s why I’m a bit surprised that Matt doesn’t think the fact that we get endless content about how marriage is bad for women warrants much attention. One might even say the Brooklyn crowd is out of touch in this regard!
As someone who lives in Brooklyn I cannot roll my eyes at this hard enough. Like 95% of the people who live in Park Slope are married lawyers with 2 kids who volunteer at the PTO. And then the other 5% is the people writing the poly books because all the normies find them super salacious and buy them by the armful. It's like judging what the "Atlanta crowd" is like by watching episodes of the Real Housewives.
Bro I live in Brooklyn too. Have my whole life. Also an extremely vanilla person like your Park Slope couple. But come on, what’s a better shorthand?
SF, definitely
But the SF crowd isn’t as influential culturally. Otherwise, good call.
SF has a lot of cultural influence through the "tech industry" (software, apps, LLMs etc), the now-vast wealth of that industry, and people who are interested in the technophile Bay Area milieu. Look at how many billionaires have ties to the industry, or how many largely-online movements (the Rationalists, Effective Altruism, Neoreaction etc) have largely Bay Area footprints and have become more notorious than I expected when I first heard of them over a decade ago.
Yeah but they're definitely more strongly associated with these fringe behaviors so it makes up for it.
hmmm, Bushwick maybe? A few years ago I'd have said Williamsburg, but it's looking more like Park Slope in terms of yuppies-with-strollers lately.
Ok I fully concede, Bushwick is the more precise terminology I should have used.
But people outside of the NYC sphere don’t know what Bushwick means; generalizing to Brooklyn is necessary to make the reference legible
There is no better shorthand because "people with weird lifestyles featured in the Cut" are not actually relevant to broad social trends in the US.
We’ll have to agree to disagree. Mass culture has many inputs upstream from elite culture.
Mass culture no longer exists in a meaningful sense. Either elites out of touch or they are a significant influence on the population at large; it cannot be both.
Everything is opt-in or algorithm-in.
The answer to "why is all of the family content from perspective X aimed at women" is obtained by deleting the words "from perspective X" from the question. The major consumers of this content are women, and I'm willing to be quite a lot that it's mostly women who are already in the situation being praised. If you got married already, then "yay marriage" content is great. If your options on Hinge are depressing, then "boo marriage" content is going to be popular.
Don’t get me wrong, I understand why it happens. But that’s what the IFS is (my guess) trying to counter. Whether it’s going to be successful or not - hey maybe, here we are talking about it, and everyone knows Brooklyn media elite opinion is downstream of SlowBorer elite-of-the-elite opinion. That’s why Joe Biden made all policy decisions by first calling up Matt and asking him what he thinks.
Do the hoi polloi actually take their cues from the Brooklyn crowd, or are they just a convenient scapegoat?
There's a lot of "Dewey defeats Truman" energy to a lot of these types of takes. The working class aren't waiting with baited breath for whatever Jezebel says they can do with their lives. It's a way to attack the UMC/PMC crowd from within while also elevating their own importance.
Yep; the people most invested in this stuff have never seen a factory floor or talked to a tradesman outside of a house call. It's amazing how the vox populi always seems to have been typed on a keyboard.
I think it’s clear that they do, inconsistently and downstream of several mediating factors.
Judging by my factory floor there's not much evidence of this. The number of people that think "the Jews" control everything greatly exceeds those who have heard the term "polyamory".
Ripe for a new theory in which the Jews use polyamory to control everything.
I’m sure this theory exists already
The gap is growing smaller though!
"Those high profile polyamory articles won't publish themselves!"
What does polyamory have to do with the expectation of no career breaks?
The only people who live in Brolkyn I know have three children.
But leaving that aside, I’ve never understood how the exotic beliefs of some elites (that Henderson calls “Luxury Beliefs”) affect the attitudes of non-elites and only on certaing issues like marraige and family formation, but not climate change or immigration.
Is your claim that if support for pro-immigration politics isn’t above 50%, then elite culture (which is not the same as luxury beliefs) has no influence at all on non-elites?
My remark was that the claim that elite (unacted on) opinions are aleged to be a hugely corrupting influend on non elites about marriage and family, but not to be similarly effective concerning economic issues like immigration and climate change, is odd.
My point being that I don’t think elite opinions are that impotant for ehther kind of attitude.
Yes and my point is that no one makes those claims. Virtually anyone who claims that elite opinion influences attitudes on the subject of marriage and family formation will claim that it influences attitudes on immigration and climate change. But there’s the question of baselines, and degree of influence. And I don’t know that anyone says it has a “huge” influence.
I agree, but that’s what the guy talking about people living in Brookland seem to imply.
Is the Brooklyn crowd responsible for the falling birth rate in places like Iran and Bangladesh?
Who said responsible? I know I didn’t.
I agree, but there are some good reasons for this. Skills really do stagnate. For example, my wife with an MBA used to be pretty darn good with excel. But after years of being a SHM, most of that is gone.
I gotta say. This is one of those topics where my patience for more charitable interpretations of right wingers really want has worn quite thin in recent years.
Matt I think you know the reason that messaging is almost never aimed at men and working class men when it comes to marriage advice coming from the right. Because the motivation is NOT about marriage or birth rates. This is about status and trying to turn back the clock on women’s rights.
You keep noting that Trump has tamped down the issue of abortion but you see to imply that he’s somehow taken the issue off the table and I find this bizarre. There are recent articles that detail all the ways the GOP is trying to limit or eliminate entirely access to Mifepristone. You’re the king of noting that politicians actual stated positions on issues are why voter vote the way they do, why do you think Ken Paxton is set to win a senate nomination in Texas?
I’m actually believe it or not “half glass full” about this stuff medium to long term. The number of Americans who want to turn back the clock on women’s rights is a distinct minority (I suspect this is part of why overturning Roe was not as popular as pundits expected as there was likely a decent number of people who said to themselves “they really did it! I didn’t think they actually would”. But take a look at the stuff that man child Hesgeth says and him trying to make sure as few women have positions of authority as possible in the military. Also, the SAVE Act! You know very well the real purpose of this bill.
I just feel like this is one of those issues where there is a complete lack of understanding or willingness to engage with how much gross reactionary forces have clearly gained an upper hand (and always had at least influence in modern times) within the GOP.
To do well in school requires intelligence, sure. But it also requires conscientiousness, agreeableness, good impulse control etc. Some folks here seem to be putting too much weight on the earnings part and if only the guys made more money they would be good husbands. But even if they made more money they'd still be lazy, disagreeable and impulsive. And at the end of the day a lot of women want a partner and not another (man) child.
TBF, part of the reason why women in prior decades were OK w/ the lazy, disagreeable, and impulsive men of the 70's, 80's and 90s is they likely made much more than they did.
But yes, the combo of increased economic security even for low wage women compared to 30 years ago + guys crappy actions make it easier for women to say nah. Especially in a world where women can log onto social media and find out what their possible partner does in their free time.
Yeah I think a big part of this isn't really that some segment of the population has somehow become worse on some metric. It's that society has become richer which has allowed more people to have optionality.
I used to live in Vietnam, which is dramatically poorer than America, and the whole concept of being a "gold digger" (but without the negative connotations that English phrase has, in Vietnamese you'd say "go fishing") or trading off your youth and beauty is prevalent there in ways that (mostly) died out decades ago in the US. Like, Vietnam has dozens of beauty pageants (don't ask me why) and all of them end up married to some rich businessman 20 years older.
At a smaller scale that same shift means all those men who uses to coast of being able to make $28/hour at the GM plant in Janesville suddenly need to bring more to the table.
I'd argue the guy making $28/hr at the GM plant is still probably fine and in some ways, probably better off than say, an IT guy making low six-figures in San Francisco who has never been in a workplace or classroom that wasn't 85%+ male since high school.
The issue is the guy who used to make $25/hr (equivalent) at another plant that didn't exist by time he was 19 and he now works making $15/hr installing solar panels or whatever needs more because now, instead of basically nothing, the women is also making similar amounts working behind the desk as a medical admin or more as a nurse.
Why would a male dominated workforce at a factory be better off than a male dominated workforce at a tech company? I don't quite follow.
Jesse Ewiak has an extremely bizarre hobby horse about disproportionately male workplaces specifically in Silicon Valley, which both disregards that (1) there are lots of other just as disproportionately male workplaces today and (2) prior to the 1970s, a very large percentage of workplaces were disproportionately male.
It's not.a hobby horse - it's pointing out reality.
If at starting at 15 or 16, a guy is largely going to overwhelmingly male high school classes on computer science, etc, is already largely involved in non-school activities that are online and disproportionately male, go to a college where they're in overwhelmingly male classes, then get a job in an industry that's overwhelmingly male in a city that due to that industry is tilted toward a young male population, those guys are going to have issues via sheer numbers.
The opposite is also somewhat true of say a woman that ends up in some female-heavy job in NYC, but those women are at least still getting dates, even if they aren't working out.
In the early 2000s, I worked at former cell-phone juggernaut Nokia. One day, I dropped my car off for service and got a ride to my office from one of the garage guys. When we got there, he looked up at our office towers and said "whoa, I bet there are a lot of babes in there."
Narrator: there were very few babes in there.
As Helikitty pointed out, those guys likely due to the differing personality types/backgrounds, have connections to other parts of their extended family, etc., but also likely have been in more mixed situations before starting work at a male-dominated area.
If you work 40 hours at a factory, but then after work are on the weekends are hanging out with people you know from high school that are a mixed group due to activities like sports, music, or just general friend groups that build up.
As opposed to as I said, working 50-60 hours at your tech job, then going home and either doing coding on the side, playing video games, etc.
Though, I'd argue this polarization of the genders is creeping up even in non-typical areas.
Cost of living if for no other reason.
I mean, that guy in Janesville probably lives close to his extended family and high school friends and has women his age in his social group
Your last sentence is maybe one area where I have some sympathy for young men. It's at least possible that some men who would be willing to buck up and be good partners if presented with a relationship are being pre-screened out by social media creeping.
Ok but whenever this comes up I want to ask: aren’t these working class women *also* more likely to be lazy, disagreeable, low conscientiousness, and impulsive? Seems like men who are similar are perfect matches for them.
Why do we assume that all women are great?
Even at the same status level, women are significantly less likely to be alcoholics, drug addicts, gambling addicts, physically abusive ...
Women do tend to be more agreeable and conscientious than men.
True but it should also track that as you go down the list the woman at the 30th percentile may be more conscientious than the 30th percentile man but that doesn't mean she's objectively very conscientious.
Yes so less bandwidth to deal with a man child.
No it means she’s spending her days stirring up drama in her social circles. Its amazing to me that people are so incapable of admitting that your median woman is not some saint compared to the median man. Yes, there are men out there that are totally unworthy of a wife and there are roughly the same number of women out there unworthy of a husband.
Yup, I teach at a regional college, and male and female student behaviors are not similar. Women have conversations with older women in their family or community about how good the old days were for wives. The bad option is alive and tangible in a different way. Women also have a lot of information about what turns men on (or off!) in real time, vs what men say to each other before or after the fact about what they want.
as someone who nearly didn’t finish college on account of being lazy and impulsive, I take exception to that “and” — I’m plenty agreeable!
I think most (but certainly not all) boys can grow up into those types of men. But it doesn't just magically happen. It happens under the weight of responsibility. Usually the responsibility of having a wife and family.
Marriage isn't the capstone from a successful life, it's the cornerstone you build that life on. Or to put it another way, most men need the love of a good women and the responsibility of a family to realize their potential.
Most? Sure 66% of 45 year old men are or have been married. But how far down the remaining 34% are we into till were into the 19th century temperance caricature of a mom sending her kids down to the bar on payday to drag their drunk dad home before he spends his whole paycheck.
This piece felt like it ended early. I kept expecting, "Okay here's the turn where Matt explains to me why less-educated men are no longer interested in getting married."
I think much of this is connected to the points made in the viral Jacob Savage article. (https://www.compactmag.com/article/the-lost-generation/). We have, for decades, in schools especially, prioritized the female/feminine over the male/masculine, especially in progressive/blue environments.* We really did make it much harder for men to thrive and feel they were valued.
Now, conservatives in power, many of whom are overtly sexist, want to restore men to their former glory and the way they see to do that is to punch down on those whom they think were unfairly benefited over the past thirty years: women and people of color.
Both approaches aren't very helpful if we want people to get married, let alone have kids. And the approaches that would budge the needle are both expensive and will require those on both sides to put aside their anger. This, sadly, seems unlikely.
*I have four children, all in their early 30s, two of whom are boy/girl twins. We live in a lovely, liberal, highly educated world. The difference in how my daughter was seen and treated compared to my son was stark.
It is not true that we somehow prioritize the feminine in schools now compared to 30 years ago. People who say this always mean that schools have too much sitting still doing worksheets, too much homework, not enough interactivity, etc. Well, guess what's declined over those 30 years -- homework, punishment for not sitting still, drills, you name it.
That was not my experience. I sent four kids through the school system, served as the chair of the SGC in every school my kids have been in, many in my family are educators in the public schools, and I have served on school committees. I have looked at the books libraries order, the ways we talk about physicality, the testing methods we use, you name it. I am in no way some conservative parent longing for the good old days.
Then give some specifics. Are you saying that we do more drill, or more mandatory sitting still, etc, than we did 30 years ago?
There is kind of a weird double blind going on where there's lots of complains that schooling is too limiting of young boys, but also many of those people also complain about behavorial issues at schools not being dealt with...largely by young boys.
Plus right, while what's being taught might be different, the actual style of teaching - 'sit down at a desk and listen to a teacher' is not really that different than in 1995, 1975, or whenever people consider the time we better taught boys.
In fact 'sit down at a desk and listen' is _declining_ in favor of "use an ipad", "do a project", etc (which is also a bad trend but contradicts these complaints). Nobody had "play based curriculum" in the 80s.
Right if anything, from what I've read, in a lot of ways, classroom time is less structured, but from many of the complains of people claiming some discriminatory power against boys in schooling, going back to even 1990-style teaching would actually probably just exacerbate current gaps.
It actually turned out Dewey-style education (to be simplistic) was always tilted toward how young girls act, it just we didn't treat young girls equally in schooling until basically yesterday.
Unless the argument is exactly "by themselves, boys would be savages and only are good at school with rigid discipline; in contrasts, girls can survive a chaotic school because they are self-disciplined by nature" (I have a vague idea of have reading something similar by Christine Hoff Summers)
I think this is a separate issue from Savage's article. His experience is colored by working in television writing - an extremely competitive and sought after field. I can definitely grant than in similar fields (media, academia, Big Tech) it became harder to land these highly prestigious jobs as a white male. But the working class men Matt is discussing were never competing for these jobs in the first place.
Virtually every white working class man I know votes Republican because they believe they've been disenfranchised. I think the points Savage made can be applied to the experiences of many many non-professional males.
Oh, I don't doubt they believe that.
To me, the larger point in the Savage article is that for many reasons, a great many of which were based on fact, many men under 40 or so feel as though they have been cast aside by society. That's the point I was trying to make.
Realistically, I doubt this has anything to do with a serious policy argument -- I think it mostly reflects a kind of anxiety in which conservative women (and the men who marry them) feel about having traded career/education for starting a family earlier and they want to reassure themselves they did the right thing by saying it loudly.
But to be charitable let me try to offer a steelman of one view that those on the right could have: yes, educated women are doing relatively well in terms of getting married but less educated women are not but you can't exactly tell them "your not smart/educated/etc enough to wait to get married". Even if it's fine for educated women to hold off on marriage because they won't lack for partners and aren't going to make bad choices about having children outside of marriage that's not true for less educated women. But you don't convince people to do things by telling them they don't have the status to act like the educated women you do it by pretending they are getting the better deal by getting married while the educated women wait.
There is also the version that's basically about educated women not having enough children and thinks that if they get married earlier they might have more kids.
I completely agree with the suspicion that these people are motivated by anxiety over their life choices. I have observed in myself that I became a lot less judgmental about other people's decision-making in my head once I was genuinely confident and happy with my own choices. If you have to yell at other people to do what you did to prove that you did the right thing, it's a sign you don't really believe it.
I think this discourse suffers from ambiguity between two meanings of the word "loser," as in, "lower-SES men are losers":
1. lower-SES men by definition have lost in our economy; they don't have high status jobs/money
2. lower-SES men are men of bad character.
It's important to disambiguate these meanings.
Story time!
My husband's cousin "Bob" (not his real name) had a hard life. His mom, along with Bob and his three brothers, ran away from Bob's abusive dad when Bob was a child. The mother and four sons ended up in a homeless shelter, then the mother took to drugs and alcohol because of all the stress, and the boys were struggling. Bob made some not-great choices and got a girl pregnant when he was only 16, then shortly after he got her pregnant again, so now he was a father of two while still in his teens. As an extra layer on the turd sandwich, Bob's girlfriend then became addicted to drugs and Bob ended up with full legal custody of both children.
Bob had an epiphany: "shit got real, I have to get it together and be the best father I can be." He dropped out of high school (he would get his GED years later), took a (crappy) job to earn money to support himself and his children, and worked super hard. His aunt and uncle helped out with childcare as they were able. After a couple of years of this, Bob met "Alice," a woman of his age who lived in his neighborhood. If you were "Alice," would you date and marry Bob?
One possible answer is: no! The guy's a loser! He has a crappy low-paying job, he's saddled with another woman's children, he comes from a broken home and he doesn't even have a high school diploma.
The other possible answer is: yes! He's a good guy, doing his best with what he has, very hardworking and disciplined and he clearly loves his children.
Spoiler alert: Alice and Bob ended up getting married. They are still together and have four children (in addition to the two Bob had with his girlfriend). Bob kept working very hard and ended up opening his own auto shop, where his eldest son now works. We spent some time with them recently, and, no, they are not highly educated or wealthy, but they are great people. They are kind and loving toward each other and they clearly care about raising their children right. My son had a wonderful time playing with the younger kids. They are absolutely *not* losers.
The moral of the story: character matters.
Impressive story. And a good reminder that 99% of us here on Slow Boring have had it super easy by comparison and we should always be cognizant of that before we tear into people.
Slow Boring readers think you are a low status loser if you don't have a graduate degree (idk maybe not true but it seems like that)
I am a grad school dropout - so I guess that makes me a low status loser :P
I'm a Slow Boring reader, and I absolutely don't think that.
Beautiful - I am very happy for them.
That's a very inspiring story. You should note here that both Bob's mom and his girlfriend were the exact kind of character-loser we tend to associate with men. You describe Bobs dad as abusive, which makes sense because he was an abusive loser. You describe his junkie mom as just a victim of the stress rather than a junkie loser. You say Bob fucked up by getting a girl pregnant and yet would you lay that same criticism on the girlfriend for getting pregnant by some 16 yr old kid or would you still frame it as Bobs fuckup?
This is the major problem with all of this discourse. We are eagerly willing to call out the character flaws in men that lead to their failed lives and yet those same character flaws in women are largely ignored or dismissed as somehow some deadbeat mans fault if they are acknowledged at all.
This is actually an interesting piece for me because, while I don't disagree with the overall argument, I suspect my ex-wife would tell our divorce (married at 30 and 27, respectively) as a story of an educated woman (MD) leaving an un(der)educated man (BA, only now pursuing a Masters in his late 30s) for not being sufficiently supportive or emotionally intelligent, and citing his military experience and career in federal law enforcement as evidence.
In reality, while there's some truth to that, I think it's complicated by the fact that I was coming to the end of a year in Iraq and I was the one wanting to try therapy upon return. Plus the fact that she was frustrated with her medical specialty because of relative low earnings (and is now presumably happier after marrying a finance bro), and generally saw public service careers as a waste (joke's on me though since Trump sort of proved her right).
I guess my point is that, while I support no-fault divorce for giving women a way out of terrible marriages (where I absolutely don't want them to be trapped, and I've seen some terrible husbands in the Army), I do think there should be some level of penalty for the spouse wanting to quickly and suddenly end a marriage (in the absence of something like clear cut adultery or violence).
ETA: Virginia requires a six month separation unless both parties waive, and I think one year (which is what they do for parents) is probably appropriate.
ETA2: FWIW, I remarried about two years later to a wonderful, sensitive women who if anything likes going to therapy a little too much. Unfortunately we seem likely to have missed the boat for kids, despite a lot of effort.
Many states require a year from when you separated to have passed before you can get a divorce. Would that be enough? I'm asking seriously.