I recently wrote a column lamenting the decline in marriage rates, noting that a record half of American adults are now single. As a long-married romantic, steeped in statistics suggesting that marriage correlates with happiness, I found that sad.
According to the criteria of
My readers, not so much.
Many female readers, in particular, dismissed heterosexual marriage as an outdated institution that coddles men and turns women into unpaid servants.
“Marriage is generally GREAT for men,” declared a reader from North Carolina whose comment in the column was the most liked, with more than 2,000 people recommending it. It falls to wives to provide care, she added, and “the sex that receives care will be happier than the sex that does not receive care.”
The second most recommended comment by readers came from a woman who said that when she and her friends get together, “we all say, ‘Never again.’ Men require a lot of care. “They can be real babies.”
I think these skeptics raise some valid points—men do need to get their act together!—even though I remain a firm believer in marriage for both straight and gay couples. But let’s leave aside for a moment the questions about marriage. The outpouring of anger among some female readers intrigued me because, while anecdotal, it aligns with considerable survey evidence of a growing political, cultural, and social divide between men and women across the industrialized world.
A survey in 20 countries by research group Glocalities found “a growing divide between young men and women” in political and social perspectives, while The Economist examined surveys in wealthy countries and also found that young women are becoming significantly more more liberal while young men are becoming relatively more conservative.
A study by Pew found that, compared to never-married women, never-married men in the United States are 50 percent more likely to align with Republicans.
An indicator of the rightward trend of young men: in 2014, men between 55 and 65 were the most conservative group, Glocalities data shows, while now young men are more conservative than older men.
The backdrop is that young people and men are lagging behind in education and are far less likely than women to earn college degrees. Many of these less-educated men struggle in the job market, and increasingly, some appear to blame their problems on feminism. Young men are more likely than older men to tell pollsters that “promoting the rights of women and girls has gone too far”; women of all ages disagree.
A notable 45 percent of young men ages 18 to 29 say men face discrimination in the U.S. today. Older men are less likely to feel this way. The result, polls suggest, is that men are becoming grumpier and more resentful of women’s success, and more drawn to conservative authoritarian populists, from Donald Trump to misogynistic internet personalities like Andrew Tate.
The Glocalities survey concluded that around the world the “radical right is increasingly finding fertile ground among young men, which is already impacting elections.”
One of the most talked about gender gaps is in South Korea, where nearly 80 percent of young men say men are discriminated against, and where President Yoon Suk Yeol was elected in 2022 partly on an anti-feminist platform. . The women have their own complaints, including how little help they get from their husbands at home. Some Korean feminists have created the 4B movement, which promotes no marriage, no babies, no dating, and no sex. South Korea’s total fertility rate has plummeted to one of the lowest in the world: the average woman now has just 0.7 children.
Brad Wilcox, a sociologist at the University of Virginia, suggests in a recent book on marriage that the gender divide in South Korea and other Asian countries may offer a glimpse of what lies ahead in the United States. He estimates that perhaps a third of young Americans today will never marry, and that cohabiting couples are no substitute for marriages. More people, he says, are simply detached and alone.
One window into gender tensions is a viral meme on TikTok in which women consider whether they would rather encounter a bear in the woods or a man. Many decide on the bear.
Young people not only marry less and have fewer partners; They are also having less sex. Traditionally, older people worried that young people were too promiscuous; Now maybe we geezers should worry about youthful celibacy.
Perhaps this gender gap will reverse and fix itself. Or maybe, as some of those women who commented suggested, it’s not a problem, or it’s just a problem for men.
