“Dude, where’s my lifeboat?”
—Rich Lowry at National Review, explaining the new attitude of men in the twenty-first century1
On January 13, 2012, an Italian cruise ship, the Costa Concordia, partially sank off the coast of Tuscany with 4,252 people on board; thirty people died, sixty-four were injured and a couple are still missing.2 The captain, Francesco Schettino, was charged with “abandoning incapacitated passengers and failing to inform maritime authorities.”3 Crew members were not much more help than the captain as passengers reported that many of them left passengers to fend for themselves. Rich Lowry at National Review compared the crash of the Costa Concordia to the Titanic and how men responded in each:
“Every man for himself” is a phrase associated with the deadly Costa Concordia disaster, but not as a last-minute expedient. It appears to have been the natural order of things. In the words of one newspaper account, “An Australian mother and her young daughter have described being pushed aside by hysterical men as they tried to board lifeboats.” If the men of the Titanic had lived to read such a thing, they would have recoiled in shame. The Titanic’s crew surely would have thought the hysterics deserved to be shot on sight—and would have volunteered to perform the service.
Women and children were given priority in theory, but not necessarily in practice. The Australian mother said of the scene, “We just couldn’t believe it—especially the men, they were worse than the women.” Another woman passenger agreed, “There were big men, crew members, pushing their way past us to get into the lifeboats.” Yet another, a grandmother, complained, “I was standing by the lifeboats and men, big men, were banging into me and knocking the girls.”
Guys aboard the Costa Concordia apparently made sure the age of chivalry was good and dead by pushing it over and trampling on it in their heedless rush for the exits.4
Lowry seems to be blaming men for what happened on the Concordia by saying that the guys aboard made sure that chivalry is good and dead, but he misses the point. The guys’ behavior is a culmination that has been years in the making. Our society, the media, the government, women, white knights and Uncle Tims have regulated and demanded that any incentives men have for acting like men be taken away and decried masculinity as evil. Now they are seeing the result. Men have been listening to what society has been saying about them for more than forty years; they are perverts, wimps, cowards, assholes, jerks, good-for-nothing, bumbling deadbeats and expendable. Men got the message; now they are acting accordingly. As you sow, so shall you reap.
So now people are surprised when men are heading for the exits? They shouldn’t be surprised. Men have been pushed there for some time. We should actually be surprised that it has taken so long.
The Concordia is just a microcosm of what is happening in our greater society. Men are opting out, bailing out and going on strike in response to the attack on their gender; a society can’t spend more than forty years tearing down almost half of the population and expect them to respond with “give me another” forever. Pretty soon, a lot more men will be taking Captain Schettino’s lead and jumping ship—only it will be on a lot larger scale than a boatload of people. The war on men is suicidal for our society in so many ways, and treating men like the enemy is dangerous, both to men and to the society that needs their positive participation as fathers, husbands, role models and leaders.
Yes, we need women as role models and leaders, but that has been the theme for more than forty years, and girls and women have support in those areas and are doing well. More women than men are going to college,5 the fastest-growing jobs are those primarily occupied by women6 and women consume more health care dollars than men do.7 Our society has been building women up for decades and tearing men down for the same amount of time, and they are not doing so well as a group. Women are empowered; men are assholes who might rape you. That message, as the next section describes, is not a good one in promoting a healthy society.
STEREOTYPING MEN MAKES FOR A BAD SOCIETY
But these stereotypes also poison our public discourse, distort our understanding of the real differences among us, and reduce the chances for resolving those differences even in part. These stereotypes corrode the bonds of mutual concern and respect that hold a pluralistic society together. . . . To corrode these bonds unnecessarily is a dangerous thing.
—Douglas Laycock, in “Vicious Stereotypes in Polite Society”8
In the late 1980s, Wendy Brown, a professor of women’s studies, came face-to-face with a man who was culturally different from her while backpacking in the Sierra Nevada with friends. Her car had broken down, and she enlisted the help of a sportsman nearby who was wearing a National Rifle Association cap, drinking a beer, reading a porn magazine and scouting out the area for his hunting club. This kind man spent two hours helping this professor get her car started. You can probably guess the rest of the story. Naturally, for his trouble, Brown stereotyped him in an article in the Yale Law Journal as a potential rapist and had the audacity to exclaim, “During the hours I spent with him, I had no reason to conclude that his respect for women’s personhood ran any deeper than his respect for the lives of the Sierra deer.”9
Luckily, law professor Douglas Laycock wrote a rebuttal to Brown’s piece, stating why Brown was wrong for stereotyping a man who gave two hours of his time to help her—a woman after all! But his point is bigger than just two strangers meeting in the woods. He extrapolates from Brown’s anecdote to the larger society:
But these stereotypes also poison our public discourse, distort our understanding of the real differences among us, and reduce the chances for resolving those differences even in part. These stereotypes corrode the bonds of mutual concern and respect that hold a pluralistic society together. These bonds are stretched enough by honest disagreement and simple demands for change. Once in our history they broke entirely, and some minority groups have been placed outside their protection for long periods. But generally these bonds have held. They make it unsurprising when Americans from “opposite ends of the political and cultural universe” help one another.
To corrode these bonds unnecessarily is a dangerous thing. And we should have no illusions about who is most endangered. In any outbreak of intolerance, in any reduction of mutual concern and respect, the weak and oppressed will suffer more than the strong and dominant. Those who are most endangered by stereotypes and prejudice have special reasons to avoid invoking their own stereotypes and prejudices against others.10
As Laycock indicates, our society is built with the implicit understanding that, although we are all different, there are commonalities as Americans that bind us, and with that bond comes a willingness to help each other. What happens when those bonds erode and we are left without a lifeboat, kind of like what happened on the Concordia to some of the passengers who didn’t make it out alive? If we continue to teach men and boys that it is “every man for himself” by stereotyping, isolating and penalizing them for the crime of being born male in the twenty-first century, they will be reluctant to help or interact with women or others who may possibly endanger them. Our culture then comes to have a more dog-eat-dog quality that may limit our survival. People—both men and women—don’t know who they can trust, and society can break down to a third-world level.
Warren Farrell was interviewed for Forbes and made an important point that addresses why we need to focus on men’s issues in terms of their benefits to society:
Virtually every society that survived did so by socializing its sons to be disposable. Disposable in war; disposable in work. We need warriors and volunteer firefighters so we label these men heroes. Men need the approval, and want to be eligible for marriage and fatherhood, so we all have a vested interest in not questioning this socialization for disposability. Thus, men don’t speak up and women don’t hear what men don’t say. But exactly because men’s attitude toward their own problems remains “when the going gets tough, the tough get going,” and because few men realize that their facade of strength is their weakness, this outreach to the silent sex is all the more important.11
Farrell’s observation underscores two important points. The first is that society needs strong, capable men to do the things that it can’t do without and that, frankly, few women are really willing or able to do. The second is that by socializing men to serve in those roles, it has also socialized them out of being able to speak up when they are mistreated or taken for granted. Perhaps those Italian seamen were better complainers than the average American man—but do we really want to live in a women-and-children-last world? I don’t think that many men would really be happy with that either. A better solution is for men to retain their male virtues but learn to speak up for themselves when needed. Society—or at least the parts of society that cater to women—may not like that, but it’s a change society needs to make.
WHY MEN OPTING OUT ISN’T GOOD FOR SOCIETY
Men slowly discover that the effort to win women’s attention via employment is not rewarding them the way it did for their dads and granddads, and that now only herculean efforts to make considerably more than women will give them an edge in the mating market.
—Blogger Chateau Heartiste, on why men are opting out12
Men are now opting out of work and marriage altogether or are just not trying as hard in many cases. While this may be good for individual men, it is not good for society as a whole. The system we now have in place treats men with little to no respect and does not reward them but actively punishes them for doing the things that society has come to expect. Women as a whole don’t seem to like that men are now going on strike. For example, Lisa Belkin, a senior columnist at the Huffington Post, wrote an article entitled “Why Men Opting-Out Should Make You Angry,” suggesting that, yes, women should be angry that men have decided to opt out:
I have always wondered whether there would be the same anger at a story about men choosing to ratchet back their careers—work less, earn less, climb less of the ladder. . . .
Liza Mundy’s new book, “The Richer Sex: How the New Majority of Female Breadwinners is Transforming Sex, Love and Family,” is about many things. As its title suggests, it starts with the prediction that the economic relationship between the sexes is about to flip. Women are already outpacing men in some places and professions, Mundy writes, and in a shift that she compares to “the rise of agrarian society, the dawn of the industrial age, the ascent of the white-collar office worker, and the opening of the global economy” she extrapolates that women will come to be the majority of primary breadwinners in the US. . . .
There’s a lot to process—it takes Mundy an entire book—so let’s start with the section titled “The Opt-Out Revolution—Among Men.” Yes, it’s apparently their turn. Back in 1970, she writes, 80 percent of working age men were employed full-time, a number that has dropped over the decades to only 66 percent. Some of the reasons are cause for despair: unemployment, incarceration. But one segment have left the workplace for reasons Mundy celebrates—educated men who describe themselves as less ambitious, less likely to believe that men should earn more than women, and more interested in spending time with their children, and increasingly aware that the workplace, as constructed, makes it much too hard to do it all. . . .
Amy Vachon is the author, with her husband Marc, of the book “Equally Shared Parenting: Rewriting The Rules For A New Generation Of Parents.” They, too, thought that the future would look different than this—one that looks like their own carefully crafted life, where both men and women find work that is fulfilling (but does not take 70 hours a week) and are reasonably well paid (though not enough to necessarily support a family without a second income) and both partners share equally in chores and child rearing, but also get time for themselves.
Substituting one kind of inequity for another we mean we have travelled far and gotten nowhere, they warn. “If we flip the power to women, we’ll just end up with the same role responsibility burdens and imbalanced lives,” Amy told me, only with the genders reversed.13
“Welcome to reality, Ms. Belkin,” I thought. I enjoyed reading the comments to her article, which pretty much pointed out the same thing—that men have been dealing with a difficult situation for quite some time:
Rudy in la asks:
Have men opted out or been kicked out? There’s a difference and I wonder which one is causing this “phenomenon.”14
Men are going Galt these days and it is a well deserved thing. It is time the ladies worked 70–80 hours a week while the ladies support us for a few generations. They can die early and give men half during a divorce. While we are at it, I firmly believe women need to get some skin in the game during wars. America’s sons shouldn’t be the only ones good enough to be sent into the meat grinder of combat. A few million of our daughters need a military funeral so there’s some parity. You ladies can have the stress while we kick back so you can support us for a change.15
Whether men were kicked out or opted out of the job market and marriage, we should all be concerned with where this is leading as a society. Let me say again that as an individual man, opting out or going on strike is a valuable tool that may serve you well. I will even discuss it as an option in the next chapter on fighting back. However, for a society, it is detrimental to have so many men, especially young men, no longer willing, or unable to participate fully in work and in marriage. Charles Murray, in an article for the Wall Street Journal, points out that blue-collar men have been opting out of jobs and marriage even when the economy was good. He explains why:
If changes in the labor market don’t explain the development of the new lower class, what does? My own explanation is no secret. In my 1984 book “Losing Ground,” I put the blame on our growing welfare state and the perverse incentives that it created. I also have argued that the increasing economic independence of women, who flooded into the labor market in the 1970s and 1980s, played an important role.
Simplifying somewhat, here’s my reading of the relevant causes: Whether because of support from the state or earned income, women became much better able to support a child without a husband over the period of 1960 to 2010. As women needed men less, the social status that working-class men enjoyed if they supported families began to disappear. The sexual revolution exacerbated the situation, making it easy for men to get sex without bothering to get married. In such circumstances, it is not surprising that male fecklessness bloomed, especially in the working class.16
Naturally, white-knight Murray’s solution is to shame men into doing the “right thing,” but how much more shaming can society do? Short of locking up men for not marrying and working their fingers to the bone for women and kids, they are shaming men already. Anyone heard the word “man-child” that gets tossed around in books, magazines and the media like candy? An insightful blogger who calls himself Chateau Heartiste describes why these men are actually opting out:
Men, like men always do, are simply reacting to the conditions set on the ground by women.
Murray sees this, but doesn’t run with it. Women’s improved employment numbers, education and earning power (some of it contributed by government largesse) has had the effect of SHRINKING their acceptable dating pool. Material resources and occupational status are one way women judge men’s mate worthiness (not the only way, but the one way that viscerally matters to most beta males), and the innate female sexual disposition to be attracted—ANIMALISTICALLY ATTRACTED—to men with higher status and more resources than themselves necessarily means that financially independent women and government-assisted women are going to find fewer men in their social milieu attractive.
Result? Men slowly discover that the effort to win women’s attention via employment is not rewarding them the way it did for their dads and granddads, and that now only herculean efforts to make considerably more than women will give them an edge in the mating market. The male fecklessness that Murray lambasts is actually a rational male response to a changing sexual market where the rewards of female sexuality go disproportionately to charming, aloof jerks over meager beta providers.17
This lack of enthusiasm for work is showing up in the workforce statistics. The Daily Mail, a British newspaper, pointed out a staggering statistic in a recent column: “The 69.9 percent labor force participation rate for men is at lowest level ever recorded.”18 I was so surprised at this low number that I wrote a blog post asking my readers: “Why is the participation rate of men in the workforce so low?”19 Here is what they said.
JKB says:
Why work? Once you’ve made your nut, why do more? The ‘profits’ are eaten up either by your dependents, which is good, or now by the government, which is bad. Are the men completely out of the workforce or are they just not consistent? Or have white males just found alternative ways to keep themselves up than to participate by continual effort in a game rigged to favor others? I don’t think that so many men have dropped out completely but they sure might have dropped out of the government statistics created to track a large industrial workforce that stayed under the thumb of an employer or union.20
Oso Pardo states:
Personally, I’ve not dropped out of the traditional workforce, but am getting very close to that decision. The kids are out of college and employed, the wife is semi-retired and I’m getting really close to saying “screw it” and going back to consulting (I’m an Engineer) only this time for small jobs and cash only. The “safety net” looks to have become a nice comfortable hammock. Why continue to work my brains out only to support others who look down on me with disdain?21
Vic states:
Men are doing the math. When you see your friends vilified in family court by their “Christian” wives, you have to take a step back and ask yourself a question. If that admired pastor with 30 years of ministry, community service and business is going to lose his kids, income and ministry because his wife isn’t happy anymore, what chance do I have?22
Finally, commenter tobytylersf states:
I work in a law firm, in a staff position. I haven’t had a man for a boss in over 17 years. That is normal in most offices, as most middle-management positions are now filled by women. Since most people hiring hire people who look like themselves, guess what? Women managers tend to hire more women. It’s that simple, I think. Regardless of whatever “war on women” the Democrats claim, women still control most of the wealth in this country, and, since they are most of the middle managers in corporations, they control most of the hiring. Go figure.23
Men are both being forced out and dropping out of the workforce in spades and our society doesn’t care unless women like Lisa Belkin use the fact to complain about how it affects women. Maybe when there are no more men working, people will start to notice, until then, they will just continue to discuss the “war on women” until there are no men anywhere. Maybe that is what the feminists wanted all along. One thing is clear, if women were dropping out of the workforce at this rate, it would be considered a national crisis. But if men do it, there is hardly a whimper. But then, perhaps, that is how the society will go down, not with a bang, but with a whimper, because no one is listening.
It seems that the task of living up to women’s expectations is so high that many men just don’t measure up. They simply give up and find a life that brings them some reasonable amount of comfort. Yes, the basement, video games and porn might be a poor second (or not), but at least it’s attainable and doesn’t sit around trying to shame them for not performing up to par. The problem for society is that even good women—who like men and would be glad to have a husband or partner—often lose out because so many men (especially the Betas) have dropped out of the dating game altogether, kind of like Ernie and his roommates at the beginning of Chapter 1 on the marriage strike.
With fewer available men to marry, many women are left to live alone or have children by themselves. According to the New York Times, “more than half of births to American women under 30 occur outside marriage.”24 What price will these children and society pay when the kids grow up without a father or even a male role model because men are afraid to coach Little League for fear of being called a pervert? And if more women are bringing up kids without a father, they are likely to have fewer children. It’s hard enough to raise one child alone, much less two or more. According to the L.A. Times:
Births fell 4% from 2007 to 2009, the biggest drop for any two-year period since the mid-1970s, according to federal government data released Thursday.
The rate, 66.7 births per 1,000 women ages 15 to 44, isn’t the lowest in recent memory. The 1997 rate was an all-time low of 63.6. But the authors of the report say preliminary data show the birth rate continued falling through the first half of 2010.25
And it’s not just in the United States that low birth rate is a problem; in fact, the U.S. birth rate is not that bad. Birth rates are falling even more in other countries. Jim Macnamara, in his book on Media and Male Identity,26 mentioned a feature article published in the Sydney Morning Herald called, “So Who Wants to be a Father?” that examined Australia’s falling birth rate. The female author, Leslie Cannold (who interviewed no men), described the anguish and anxiety of women who want to have children. She then declared that the falling birth rate was a “male problem.” She concluded:
The sort of bloke in short supply is the sort who doesn’t throw up at the thought of love or even commitment, but looks quite capable of pulling off both should the need arise.27
So the author concludes incorrectly that the problem with low birth rate is caused by men who just don’t want to commit; men’s avoidance of fatherhood was addressed more correctly by a male reader who saw this article and wrote a letter to the editor of Good Weekend Magazine:
Did Leslie Cannold ever think to ask men why they are fatherhood-phobic? Maybe a visit to the local pub where many fortysomething men have sorry tales to tell of wives who initiated divorces would be revealing. All they are left with are bitter memories and the sizeable financial burden of child support. No wonder the current crop of potential fathers is wary.28
Yes, part of the current birth decline is the recession, but even in 1997, the rates were low in the United States. Some of this is probably due, in some part, to men’s reluctance to get involved with a system that gives them no incentive to marry and have children and actively punishes them if they do. How will these declining birth rates affect the future of the United States and other westernized countries? With fewer workers in the coming decades, who will provide services, work the jobs and pay into the already dwindling Social Security system?
With women raising kids alone by choice or otherwise, men will go off and do their own thing. Many will succeed and live a fine life, but others, mainly younger ones with fewer resources, may end up with few job skills or a dead-end job, little education, and feelings of alienation from society—which can lead to social instability. Men as a whole want to be doing things and taking risks that lead to innovation and economic growth, not hanging out all the time in the basement without purpose. As one of my insightful readers, David, said, “the issue of marginal men is something that should be looked at from the point of view of innovation and advancement being replaced by a stalled nation. A stalled nation has its men in idle. Highly active men in a town of 50,000 can do remarkable things—that’s all the Renaissance was. What can a small town do when the street corner is littered with men and feral dogs? Risk aversion does not a ‘Start-up Nation’ make.” No, it does not. Our nation will stagnate economically and culturally if we keep up this war on men.
Even if women pick up the slack, supporting the men on the margins will cost the country more than it can imagine, both economically and culturally. We need men’s contributions: Without them, our nation will decline as a world leader, a beacon of hope of freedom, and as an economic force to be reckoned with. Perhaps those of a liberal persuasion will take some pleasure in this decline, but reality may bring forth a different sentiment. We need men’s labor, their love of country and their sacrifice to survive; without it, we are at the mercy of those who wish to harm us; or maybe we will go down not with a bang, but with a whimper. Neither of these alternatives is a good one.
How can our society, because of a need for retribution, decide it is okay to waste men’s potential? And are people really willing to sacrifice their little sons’ emotional health and educational potential for the sake of revenge? Isn’t that child abuse? One argument for feminism was that we were wasting the potential of half of humanity. We’re no better off if we just waste the other half.
It’s been nineteen years since Warren Farrell wrote his book, The Myth of Male Power, and more than ten years since Christina Hoff Sommers wrote The War Against Boys. These powerful books made a difference and started the conversation about the war against men and boys, but they are just the tip of the Italian iceberg. If anything, the culture has gotten worse in its degree of injustice and revenge tactics against men since these books were written. The acceptance of male-bashing and misandry in our society that I have outlined in the previous chapters suggests now is the time for action as opposed to discussion when it comes to men’s rights, for no one is going to do anything about it without a fight. As Warren Farrell states, “Men must gather a new strength—the strength to fight the only world war in which the fodder is feelings. . . .”29 How do you fight back? The next chapter will show you.