If "it’s true that there is a fair amount of marriage-skeptical content in highbrow media, and it’s almost all woman-focused", then it's possible (I obviously don't know, but it's possible) that what I.F.S.'s articles are trying to do is counteract that and keep the status quo from collapsing.
It is also worth noting that there is absolutely nothing in the fact that college women's marraige rates have held steady while non-college women's rates have fallen to substantiate the claim that non-college _men_ are the bottleneck. That fact is equally consistent with non-college _women_, non-college men, _or both_ being the bottleneck.
"Imagine how much propaganda it took to convince women that this is oppressive..."
As for these meme, most women I've known in my life are trying to either get or maintain exactly this. The problem is not cunty feminists that dislike the idea of being a SAHM (though these women do exist - and are perfectly in their rights to make their own life choices), but the part of the meme that everyone is missing: the Dad in the suit.
1. Most guys out there just simply do not and will not ever make enough money to financially support a woman being a SAHM. Your ability to earn a good living is unfairly often determined by your educational and career choices you make in the 16-21 age range.
2. In spite of what they say, a lot of guys are just interested in women for sex, and not in showing up to be Dads and husbands. For proof (points to all of the single moms raising kids with zero help from a deadbeat sperm donor).
3. (I always beat this one to death) A lot of guys in the current young "zoomer" generation simply have no interest in actually putting themselves out there and trying to date women. Porn, video games, and social media is where they sink their energy.
Now in defense of men who reject pursuing fatherhood/husbandhood: there aren't a whole lot of benefits for men within husbandhood/fatherhood if they lack a deep desire to marry and have children. Parenting often sucks and is very hard. Marriage is likewise difficult, and both require you to give up A LOT of what you personally enjoy doing in exchange for kid duties and a woman who increasingly considers you "never doing enough" even when you put in a lot of effort. And even the wild sex that marriage advocates promise tends to taper off after the children come along.
There can certainly be satisfaction in marriage and fatherhood, and both institutions certainly have their benefits for men. But a lot of that is hard to see when you're 22 and passing the bong over a 1st person shooter.
I think it's underrated that men still receive these messages even when they're directed at women. Like as a man, I grew up consuming media that spent a lot of energy telling women to worry less about getting married, especially when young. I internalized that to mean the types of girls I should date should be girls who aren't interested in marriage and kids. If lots of men took the same memo, then presumably the young women around us knew that they needed to downplay marriage and kids if they wanted to attract a mate.
I wouldn't be surprised if it turns out that regardless of whose behavior it is you want to change, the most effective way to go about it is to lecture women and then let the culture work itself out from there. Lecturing men is probably counterproductive, especially if it's perceived as coming from women.
Is it possible that some men are being surpassed in the labor force by somewhat less deserving women, causing a situation where men with stable and higher prestige jobs are relatively scarce compared to women in a similar situation, which gives these men the accurate impression that they have many dating options, and women are disinclined to date men who have lower professional attainment, but the numbers do not match?
It’s a hypothesis, not an assertion. Commentators have suggested the opposite in the past, and in some cases it turned out to be true.
It would be foolish to suggest that discrimination against men doesn’t exist. Does discrimination against women still outweigh it? Genuinely hard to say.
Yelling? No. Introspection about why lower class men are not interested in marriage would be very interesting and maybe a good step towards boosting marriage rates.
So many lower class people view kids as a lesser commitment than marriage. That’s nuts.
Why would increasing participation by young, uneducated men be helpful to marriage? This is Trump’s core demographic. What makes anyone think that marriage as an institution (let alone the individual partners) would be better off if more of them got married?
Perhaps (and I’m just spit-balling here) a main reason that few uneducated, young men are getting married is that few willing partners exist for losers.
The problem isn't that the woman with a PhD who works for the CATO institute isn't marrying some car mechanic making 25$/hr in Kansas.
The problem is that the woman making 20$/hr working as marketing person considers that mechanic beneath her because she's "educated" via her 2.8GPA marketing degree. She is never going to achieve "career success" and climb the ladder to the high end of marketing salaries but she wont realize that till she's 35 and still a working level marketing employee for a C tier company in Kansas. The engineers working at that same company aren't going to see her as their educational or intellectual equal so marrying her represents a considerable dip in material lifestyle without any gain of mother or homemaker to make that dip worthwhile. That marketing lady is every bit as much a "loser" as the mechanic but everyone seal claps her mediocre achievements while telling that diesel mechanic he needs to "be better" to be worthy of love. She would be considerably better off realizing that the diesel mechanic is the kind of guy she should pair with, should not worry over missing a few years of cubicle drudgery to handle the kids while they are too young for school. She doesn't have to be "just a stay at home mom" her whole life either, just not pretend that missing a few years in the cubicle is the reason why she isn't in the c suite and that raising her own children is infinitely more rewarding to her than the TPS reports she files at her day job.
Fwiw, and another commenter may have already hit on this, the conservative argument is for _chastity_. (I'm not defending this view, just explaining the logic).
In the conservative view, women must hoard their sexuality to preserve it for maximal exchange value. Concretely, make your boyfriend commit before having sex. This improves women's short term bargaining position.
It has serious downsides, which I'll discuss briefly below, but it does point to a weakness in modern feminist recommendations -- which emphasize autonomy and physical pleasure in sexuality, rather than negotiating position. This oversight comes, I think, from the erroneous progressive assumption that we can create a world without underlying conflicts in interest. That men will just want to value what women value because there is only one true right way. In reality, there's always compromise. Marriage and family teach that very directly.
The problem with the chastity argument is not that it isn't identifying a relevant and important dynamic, but that it's setting up a poor information signal. Too many men will pretend to be marriage ready and it will be hard for young women to discern. So as usual, trying to "turn back the clock" is not going to work.
Spoiler Alert - even China can't stop people from waiting. Again, women's educational attainment raising + urbanity + general wealth means people all around the world not just in the US are no longer their small town getting hitched at 23 because otherwise there'll be no other options.
I'm not sure the infectiveness of government policy interventions means much here. The reality is that if the trajectory doesn't change then the society is going to collapse and it will either die out or change will be forced upon it.
So we’re basically all in agreement that a higher birth rate is desirable. Thing is, I think we might be overrating how hard it is to have multiple kids in your 30s. All it takes is a year per kid, my sister (who has a bachelors degree) started at 33 and had 3 by 37. It’s bad to space out kids more than a year or so anyway
I have really soured on the whole birth rate panic.
I'm not sure pursing natalist policies is really necessary for most Western countries as we can always adjust our population through immigration (but a better immigration system based on jobs is needed). Though I certainly don't mind helping young parents out with gov't benefits for humanitarian reasons.
But I should also disclose that I am a "total hypocrite" because I have 4 kids.
Here on SB it seems to be at the very least a consensus opinion. We’re mostly in our 40s and need a large workforce of young whippersnappers to pay an extravagant amount into social security in a couple decades
I'll agree that's the SB consensus. (I don't agree with it myself -- I'm fine with a declining population, I just don't think it needs to be government policy to promote it.)
I feel like we are now overcorrecting for a previous overcorrection about how there were no consequences for late fertility. Telling people they should marry and have kids in their early 20s is just crazy to me.
Sure but you don't really have to tell people to have kids at 21. You could probably solve most of this by just getting people to be on the lookout for their life partner starting at 18, be marrying by 22-25, and having their first kid kids by 26-28.
There would obviously be the expected amount of variance in this. Men and women pursuing doctoral degrees would probably be later than this but I doubt we have to worry too much about a woman M.D. because the most intelligent and most capable people in society are generally smart and capable enough to sort this out on their own. The problem exists below that where people need the societal guardrails to help them find success.
I became a dad at 24 (my wife was 23). Not sure I would recommend it unless you have a stable job and benefits like I did, being a college graduate and salaried financial professional at the time.
My main takeaway from marriage discussions is that we have succeeded in making the material conditions humans live in better, and we've made humans better, but we need to make humans themselves dramatically better to improve marriage rates.
Medical therapies to make humans more conscientious, more intelligent, and more physically fit would probably do a great deal to improve marriage rates. We have some of these, for example GLP-1 drugs. I'm optimistic we will develop more as AI speeds up the rate of medical innovation.
I actually think some form of mandatory national service would be helpful here (in addition to being good for other reasons), force people to do something productive out of high school, and put people in position to meet peers during the peak couple forming window, just like college does for the well off.
I think a lot of these takes are driven by conservative men being shitty dates and blaming the reason they didn’t get a second date on “women just don’t want to settle down with a nice guy anymore!”
If "it’s true that there is a fair amount of marriage-skeptical content in highbrow media, and it’s almost all woman-focused", then it's possible (I obviously don't know, but it's possible) that what I.F.S.'s articles are trying to do is counteract that and keep the status quo from collapsing.
It is also worth noting that there is absolutely nothing in the fact that college women's marraige rates have held steady while non-college women's rates have fallen to substantiate the claim that non-college _men_ are the bottleneck. That fact is equally consistent with non-college _women_, non-college men, _or both_ being the bottleneck.
"Imagine how much propaganda it took to convince women that this is oppressive..."
As for these meme, most women I've known in my life are trying to either get or maintain exactly this. The problem is not cunty feminists that dislike the idea of being a SAHM (though these women do exist - and are perfectly in their rights to make their own life choices), but the part of the meme that everyone is missing: the Dad in the suit.
1. Most guys out there just simply do not and will not ever make enough money to financially support a woman being a SAHM. Your ability to earn a good living is unfairly often determined by your educational and career choices you make in the 16-21 age range.
2. In spite of what they say, a lot of guys are just interested in women for sex, and not in showing up to be Dads and husbands. For proof (points to all of the single moms raising kids with zero help from a deadbeat sperm donor).
3. (I always beat this one to death) A lot of guys in the current young "zoomer" generation simply have no interest in actually putting themselves out there and trying to date women. Porn, video games, and social media is where they sink their energy.
Now in defense of men who reject pursuing fatherhood/husbandhood: there aren't a whole lot of benefits for men within husbandhood/fatherhood if they lack a deep desire to marry and have children. Parenting often sucks and is very hard. Marriage is likewise difficult, and both require you to give up A LOT of what you personally enjoy doing in exchange for kid duties and a woman who increasingly considers you "never doing enough" even when you put in a lot of effort. And even the wild sex that marriage advocates promise tends to taper off after the children come along.
There can certainly be satisfaction in marriage and fatherhood, and both institutions certainly have their benefits for men. But a lot of that is hard to see when you're 22 and passing the bong over a 1st person shooter.
I think it's underrated that men still receive these messages even when they're directed at women. Like as a man, I grew up consuming media that spent a lot of energy telling women to worry less about getting married, especially when young. I internalized that to mean the types of girls I should date should be girls who aren't interested in marriage and kids. If lots of men took the same memo, then presumably the young women around us knew that they needed to downplay marriage and kids if they wanted to attract a mate.
I wouldn't be surprised if it turns out that regardless of whose behavior it is you want to change, the most effective way to go about it is to lecture women and then let the culture work itself out from there. Lecturing men is probably counterproductive, especially if it's perceived as coming from women.
Matt attacking me, the college educated 38 year old in a professional job, living in sin with their girlfriend of 6 years.
Ehhh, I think Bo Burnham was right here, people need to lower their expectations.
I think we need a Slow Boring matchmaking group, everybody.
Is it possible that some men are being surpassed in the labor force by somewhat less deserving women, causing a situation where men with stable and higher prestige jobs are relatively scarce compared to women in a similar situation, which gives these men the accurate impression that they have many dating options, and women are disinclined to date men who have lower professional attainment, but the numbers do not match?
Less deserving women - sources please?
It’s a hypothesis, not an assertion. Commentators have suggested the opposite in the past, and in some cases it turned out to be true.
It would be foolish to suggest that discrimination against men doesn’t exist. Does discrimination against women still outweigh it? Genuinely hard to say.
I dunno about you guys, but as a teen I was bombarded with messaging about how teenage pregnancy was an epidemic ruining the lives of millions.
If you're not going to have kids anytime soon, what's the urgency to get married?
Yelling at women won't boost marriage
Yelling at men will 🤔
Yelling? No. Introspection about why lower class men are not interested in marriage would be very interesting and maybe a good step towards boosting marriage rates.
So many lower class people view kids as a lesser commitment than marriage. That’s nuts.
Why would increasing participation by young, uneducated men be helpful to marriage? This is Trump’s core demographic. What makes anyone think that marriage as an institution (let alone the individual partners) would be better off if more of them got married?
Perhaps (and I’m just spit-balling here) a main reason that few uneducated, young men are getting married is that few willing partners exist for losers.
The problem isn't that the woman with a PhD who works for the CATO institute isn't marrying some car mechanic making 25$/hr in Kansas.
The problem is that the woman making 20$/hr working as marketing person considers that mechanic beneath her because she's "educated" via her 2.8GPA marketing degree. She is never going to achieve "career success" and climb the ladder to the high end of marketing salaries but she wont realize that till she's 35 and still a working level marketing employee for a C tier company in Kansas. The engineers working at that same company aren't going to see her as their educational or intellectual equal so marrying her represents a considerable dip in material lifestyle without any gain of mother or homemaker to make that dip worthwhile. That marketing lady is every bit as much a "loser" as the mechanic but everyone seal claps her mediocre achievements while telling that diesel mechanic he needs to "be better" to be worthy of love. She would be considerably better off realizing that the diesel mechanic is the kind of guy she should pair with, should not worry over missing a few years of cubicle drudgery to handle the kids while they are too young for school. She doesn't have to be "just a stay at home mom" her whole life either, just not pretend that missing a few years in the cubicle is the reason why she isn't in the c suite and that raising her own children is infinitely more rewarding to her than the TPS reports she files at her day job.
Fwiw, and another commenter may have already hit on this, the conservative argument is for _chastity_. (I'm not defending this view, just explaining the logic).
In the conservative view, women must hoard their sexuality to preserve it for maximal exchange value. Concretely, make your boyfriend commit before having sex. This improves women's short term bargaining position.
It has serious downsides, which I'll discuss briefly below, but it does point to a weakness in modern feminist recommendations -- which emphasize autonomy and physical pleasure in sexuality, rather than negotiating position. This oversight comes, I think, from the erroneous progressive assumption that we can create a world without underlying conflicts in interest. That men will just want to value what women value because there is only one true right way. In reality, there's always compromise. Marriage and family teach that very directly.
The problem with the chastity argument is not that it isn't identifying a relevant and important dynamic, but that it's setting up a poor information signal. Too many men will pretend to be marriage ready and it will be hard for young women to discern. So as usual, trying to "turn back the clock" is not going to work.
Good thread from Dilan Esper building on Matt's point w/ data on age of marriage - https://x.com/dilanesper/status/2038979795296633182
Spoiler Alert - even China can't stop people from waiting. Again, women's educational attainment raising + urbanity + general wealth means people all around the world not just in the US are no longer their small town getting hitched at 23 because otherwise there'll be no other options.
I'm not sure the infectiveness of government policy interventions means much here. The reality is that if the trajectory doesn't change then the society is going to collapse and it will either die out or change will be forced upon it.
I was wondering why Dilan wasn't commenting here on this one--turns out he was busy on Twitter on the subject.
So we’re basically all in agreement that a higher birth rate is desirable. Thing is, I think we might be overrating how hard it is to have multiple kids in your 30s. All it takes is a year per kid, my sister (who has a bachelors degree) started at 33 and had 3 by 37. It’s bad to space out kids more than a year or so anyway
"So we’re basically all in agreement that a higher birth rate is desirable."
Objection, assumes facts not in evidence.
I have really soured on the whole birth rate panic.
I'm not sure pursing natalist policies is really necessary for most Western countries as we can always adjust our population through immigration (but a better immigration system based on jobs is needed). Though I certainly don't mind helping young parents out with gov't benefits for humanitarian reasons.
But I should also disclose that I am a "total hypocrite" because I have 4 kids.
Here on SB it seems to be at the very least a consensus opinion. We’re mostly in our 40s and need a large workforce of young whippersnappers to pay an extravagant amount into social security in a couple decades
I'll agree that's the SB consensus. (I don't agree with it myself -- I'm fine with a declining population, I just don't think it needs to be government policy to promote it.)
To me the ideal is a stable population. A very gradual decline would be fine, the problem is that these changes are cohort-based and steep
I feel like we are now overcorrecting for a previous overcorrection about how there were no consequences for late fertility. Telling people they should marry and have kids in their early 20s is just crazy to me.
Sure but you don't really have to tell people to have kids at 21. You could probably solve most of this by just getting people to be on the lookout for their life partner starting at 18, be marrying by 22-25, and having their first kid kids by 26-28.
There would obviously be the expected amount of variance in this. Men and women pursuing doctoral degrees would probably be later than this but I doubt we have to worry too much about a woman M.D. because the most intelligent and most capable people in society are generally smart and capable enough to sort this out on their own. The problem exists below that where people need the societal guardrails to help them find success.
I became a dad at 24 (my wife was 23). Not sure I would recommend it unless you have a stable job and benefits like I did, being a college graduate and salaried financial professional at the time.
My main takeaway from marriage discussions is that we have succeeded in making the material conditions humans live in better, and we've made humans better, but we need to make humans themselves dramatically better to improve marriage rates.
Medical therapies to make humans more conscientious, more intelligent, and more physically fit would probably do a great deal to improve marriage rates. We have some of these, for example GLP-1 drugs. I'm optimistic we will develop more as AI speeds up the rate of medical innovation.
I actually think some form of mandatory national service would be helpful here (in addition to being good for other reasons), force people to do something productive out of high school, and put people in position to meet peers during the peak couple forming window, just like college does for the well off.
Lots of countries have national mandatory service and very low marriage and birth rates, so I don't think that would do anything.
I think a lot of these takes are driven by conservative men being shitty dates and blaming the reason they didn’t get a second date on “women just don’t want to settle down with a nice guy anymore!”
There are darker trends becoming more public. We are not far from JD Vance counseling women to be nicer to their physically abusive husband.
It is hard not to suspect that this is the undercurrent anyways. Male status and the desire to beat women into submission.