A physician friend IMed me “Feminism Is Leaving A Wake Of Unhappy, Unmarried, And Childless Women In Its Path” (Daily Wire):
Feminists claim to promote the advancement of women and gender equality, largely via the promotion of so-called sexual liberation, but their movement is leaving a wake of unhappy, unmarried, and childless women in its path, a real problem feminists seemingly refuse to entirely address.
According to a recent study from Yale University researchers, liberated, college educated women are freezing their eggs because they can’t find a man to marry and have children with before their natural childbearing years expire. In the U.K., for instance, one in five women is childless when their natural reproductive years expires, as opposed to one in ten women a mere generation prior.
So what’s to blame for this onslaught of college-educated yet terribly empty women?
The short answer is feminism.
The article links to “Shortage of eligible men has left women taking desperate steps to preserve their fertility, experts say” (Telegraph):
Prof Marcia Inhorn, Professor of Anthopolgy at Yale University, said professional women found themselves losing out in a game of “musical chairs” because there were simply too few men of the same calibre to go around.
“There is a major gap – they are literally missing men. There are not enough college graduates for them. In simple terms, this is about an oversupply of educated women,” she said.
This ties in loosely to Why don’t I know any single men? (my 2016 post that attracted 112 comments).
My response to the doctor:
Are we sure that there isn’t a simpler explanation? In the typical U.S. state or the U.K., a woman exposes herself to a property division and alimony lawsuit if she marries a lower-income partner. Why would a woman want to work hard until age 50 so that her husband can sue her and get paid alimony every month to have sex with a younger woman?
Her answer:
Funny you mention it. Just met anesthesiologist who is 51 – had a stay at home husband for 26 years (despite his engineering and MBA degree)- learned 3 months ago that he was rotating from one 26 year old to another.
(Note that the husband’s behavior is economically rational in Massachusetts or New York, but not in alimony-free Germany.)
Readers: What do you think? Does the egg-freezing industry owe its prosperity to (1) the abstract concept of “feminism,” (2) the economics of family law (marriage would give a male partner a financial incentive to discard an aging wife in favor of younger women, thus contributing to America’s shift to polygamy), or (3) more women have jobs that they love and they are too busy with work to find a partner?
Some reader comments on the cited Daily Wire story:
[Michael Hecht] The only reason I’m willing to settle down now is that my ex’s already cleaned me out…
[Pat Healy] Or maybe it’s because a large percentage of the available young men out there are un-marriageable pieces of crap, hopelessly addicted to porn, marginally employed, and essentially unable to care for themselves, let alone a family. My two dating-age daughters would lean heavily toward this explanation.
[Sentry, who describes herself as “one of the women who missed the first round of marriage”] Marriage poses a very real risk to men. They know that if the marriage ends in divorce, they will be kicked out of their home, lose their children, and half their income (sometimes more, depending on the state) for a decade or two. They know that if they offend their wives, she can lie about them, get them arrested for abuse that never occurred, get them jailed, and use their children as hostages and weapons. [interesting because it shows a conventional yet outdated view of family law as presenting litigation risk only for men.]
[Andrea L] That actually depends where you are. I lived in a “no-fault” divorce state. My husband refused to work, was very abusive to me and the kids (I found out later he was supplying drugs to the neighborhood kids). My lawyer told me that because I supported him during the marriage, he would get the house, the kids, the cars and child support and alimony even if the kids testified against him. I would have to pay all the bills. …
[Groundhog Day, responding to the above] Congratulations to your excellent choice!!! I know, it’s not your fault. It’s the men. They always magically morph from the most gentle, loving and romantic fellow into this abusive, binge-drinking, drug-abusing, child-torturing and wife-beating monster the very moment you toss the bouquet to be catched by the next victim of patriarchy – which feminism is actually fighting against…
[Allen Simms] … it’s taboo to criticize the OBVIOUSLY terrible choices of women. Women are the gatekeepers of sex, for better or worse. If women stop producing children with losers we will have much fewer losers. For some reason we find it okay to say “well the guy shouldn’t be a scum bag” but its not okay to say “women should stop opening their legs for scum bags”
[MattSE] Who wants to marry a pushy, self-centered broad who will probably divorce you 10 years from now?
[Stefan Stankovic, responding to the above] Not to mention, who the h3ll would marry a woman who needs multiple hands to count her sexual partners? That is becoming extremely common in my age bracket (I’m 24), and I would NEVER setlle with such a woman.
[VE, responding to MattSE] Read up on hypergamy, it explains why women can’t find ‘desirable’ partners. Essentially you’ve got all women chasing the top 10-20% of men and the pool is dwindling due to feminism and it’s real world deleterious effects on men.
[YeahNope, in the same thread] Polygamy is already prolific, it’s just hasn’t been formalized. Just by observing social groups you can see the high status men have unofficial harems of women that “share”.
[konokonohamaru] Not to mention, the fact that they’re looking for “committed” men is just a huge inconsistency in their worldview. They throw out religion, traditional values, and any semblance of moral absolutism, and they expect someone to commit to starting a family with them? Why should anyone do such a thing?
[David] Too many western feminized women use the biased anti-male laws to basically engage in serial marriage as a form of prostitution. This gives them the social veneer of “innocence”.
[PaulMurrayCbr] It’s that for men, commitment means lifelong, and for women it seems to mean “I’ll live with you for four to ten years and then I’ll leave you and take your children with me”.
[JoEd, responding] You forgot half of your net worth. They will take that too.
[KnowManIsle, responding] More than half.
[EventHorizon] … the problem is far less contentious: poor planning. Two days ago this very topic came up with a coworker. She is a nice lady that certainly is not your argumentative 3rd wave feminist. When she complained about her misfortune of finding a partner in her early 30s, I asked her “Percentage-wise, how important are your career and your desire to start a family to your life?”. She said “50-50”. When I followed with “So how do you actually split your time between these goals?”, she replied: “90% towards my career” …
Some reader comments on the linked-to Telegraph story:
[Ken Mitchell] There are just as many men as always – but when women earn more, there are fewer and fewer men who make even MORE.
[Cad Ders] Feminism is already a dead woman walking. All feminism has is shaming language and the State (ironically, ultimately other men) to keep men to the feminist line. … increasingly, the shaming doesn’t work. And men are disengaging from society in general to avoid entanglements with the state; if you don’t get married, you can’t be divorced, if you don’t co-habit you can’t have half your stuff appropriated, if you don’t have children, you can’t be on the hook for child support, if you don’t enter the corporate world you can’t be be accused of ‘harassment’ and if you don’t date you drastically reduce your chance of a false rape accusation. These are genuine threat points for men in the modern world that didn’t exist before feminism. … As feminism reduces the value of women (in men’s eyes), so men are reducing the amount of time, effort, attention and money they are willing to spend for the declining benefits modern women now bring to their lives. … the truth is that men don’t want to fight women, it goes against the core of what it means to be a man. But feminism thrust men into a fight that they neither started nor wanted. To the point that feminists are reduced to crowing about ‘winning’ battles that men never turned up for.
[Charles Blackson] There is no shortage of men of course. It’s simply female hypergamy in action. I take issue with the implication that these are high quality females though. Not the case. Rather they are life’s genetic dead ends. The only way you can possibly fail at life itself is to fail to have children. These females are literally evolutionarily unfit to pass their genes on to future generations.
[M’erica First] Let’s just call it like it is and not the BS spin that the author puts on this. Women are all about marrying someone that has money. … And if the marriage doesn’t work, then they get half of said money. … My father warned me against marriage, but I didn’t listen. I hope my son listens to me. I will do a much more thorough job of documenting the pitfalls to him. I hope he sees that I was simply a meal ticket, sperm donor and financial slave to his mom’s whims.
[Ian Noble] The marriage market has also been globalised and men can now find a thin, well-educated (but without a ridiculous sense of entitlement), attractive partner with good personal hygiene and an intact hymen who enjoys looking feminine and pleasing her husband. Such women are almost impossible to find in the UK and no amount of ‘marketing’ will change this fact – just as no amount of marketing could save British Leyland.
[Harry Beckett, responding] Yeah, but when you buy a Toyota it can’t wait a few years, get citizenship. divorce you, take half your stuff and then bring in the Japanese owner it really always wanted in the first place.
[FG Lorriman] Nature is sexist, and if any girl has any notion of having a family and children, they need to prioritise that. Sure, get the degree, but don’t shag your way through university; instead find clubs/guys who are looking to start families young. … women past about 30 are losing their looks and pudging or sagging rapidly. If they’ve been on the corporate/professional treadmill of hard hours, hard drinking and hard sh*gging, then you can pretty much forget it.
[Per Olausson] Social media. The commoditisation of sex appeal, status, looks and appearance. The assurgency of the political correct not just of opinions and politics but also who is acceptable to mate with. … Just put the smartphone down and interact with people you meet. Maybe something will sparkle. Even if he is “beneath and not worthy” of you. It worked for your parents and grandparents.
Related:
- What I learned at my 35th MIT reunion (marriage wasn’t a smart choice for my high-income female classmates)
> [interesting because it shows a conventional yet outdated view of family law as presenting litigation risk only for men.]
Phil, you often discuss the economic incentives for women (e.g. rational ones should all have sex with Massachusetts dermatologists), but the disincentive for men should be at least as powerful and probably deserves at least as much economic study. After all most people are strongly loss-averse.
Also, the comment you editorialized on doesn’t have to stem from an outdated view of family law as it’s responding to an article on highly educated women’s search for men (implicitly, men good enough for these women). Therefore one might look at the disincentive such men would have.
Z: I don’t disagree with you. But the article was also to some extent about women who are refusing to marry men with less education than themselves. A college-educated high-income woman who was willing to support a man voluntarily during marriage and then involuntarily through court-ordered alimony after he sues her would have a lot more marriage options than a woman who isn’t willing to undertake the permanent “breadwinner” role in what is statistically likely to be a temporary romantic coupling.
Phil, i have to admit, I was very alarmed by the tone of your post, which I felt implied that maybe women should settle for less than they absolutely deserve. Or that the advancement of women in society could come with tradeoffs. But then, after reading the actual article:
“Women tell us frequently that they are freezing their eggs because the men they meet feel threatened by their success and so unwilling to commit to starting a family together.”
“We are seeing some big societal issues, in particular in some social economic groups, with young men not committing.”
It was with great relief that I learned that everything is, after all, men’s fault. All is as it should be.
When you’re the alpha female, there’s nowhere to go for men but down. Being attracted to men of lower status is the missing requirement of gender equality no-one wants to admit.
Men are biologically attracted to young women — so as women age the competition increases. Women who devote their young years to professions that require serious time commitments risk that they will never marry or have children. But i think most women know this — which is why women are typically underrepresented in professions such as law and investment banking. Despite the media hype most women probably know that most women can’t have it all (though some seem to, particularly ones who are both highly intelligent and physically very attractive) and this stuff about freezing eggs, etc. is probably relevant to a minuscule portion of the female population.
See https://newschicagobooth.uchicago.edu/about/newsroom/news/2013/2013-02-18-bertrand for
A woman outearning her husband could even doom the marriage, as the researchers report this “increases the likelihood of divorce by 50 percent.”
Phil, you seem to forget the ace in the hole a wealthy women holds when dealing with a lower-income hubby who wants a divorce – the domestic violence card.
As soon as she gets him frozen out of the bank accounts and marital home, she has leverage to get him to settle for less than he’s be entitled to, i.e., what a woman in the same position would get.
And given the prevalence of STDs, psychological problems (~26% in women) and legal privileges women hold, why would a sane man take on the liability of marriage or cohabitation?
Empowered, sexually-vibrant women are now enjoying their liberty without the patriarchal shackles of marriage. Gather ye rosebuds while ye may…
I’m a 42-year-old, rich, highly accomplished, very intelligent man who will never marry, even though I can make a woman fall in love with me in about 10 minutes of conversation.
No one bothers to see things from the male perspective. Here’s the truth about women:
In their twenties, women rudely reject guys like me, and instead get their cunts widened into yawning chasms by felons, drug dealers, drummers (ugh!), and other assorted “men” of uncertain provenance. They march around in pink pussy hats, destroying Western civilization through Facebook and Twitter. They permanently deface their bodies with tattoos, piercings, and crazy-colored short hair. They develop Resting Bitch Face. They make “workplaces” (ew!) even more miserable through endless touchy-feely “initiatives.” They make false rape accusations after break-ups, and insist that kangaroo “courts” ruin innocent men. Women who do not participate in these trends nonetheless support them, out of a blind, sexist solidarity with all other women.
When their hard-partying ways have reduced their bodies to fat, useless rubble, these “women” look for Mr. Right. We turn them down, because we don’t want to end up like the dad in this video: https://youtu.be/XKfm723mISo
The judge in that case sent the dad to jail for thirty days. Without ever viewing that video.
Women lack compassion, logic, honor, loyalty, reliability, empathy, honesty, creativity, and foresight. Men had to evolve these qualities. Women pretend to have these qualities on Facebook, while being utterly devoid of them in real life; they are like evil, retarded children.
The only things today’s woman brings to the marriage table are credit card debt, student loan debt from a useless degree, many expensive shoes that she never wears, a corporate “job” that she will quit as soon as she has a sucker hooked, her beat-up, vast, disease-ridden vagina, utter contempt for men, and a limitless capacity for manipulation and selfishness.
We men refuse to enter into sexless marriages where we spend all our waking hours on the corporate treadmill, only to have half our stuff taken away by the courts during the divorce (half of marriages end in divorce, and women initiate 80 percent of divorces.) During divorce proceedings, the woman makes baseless allegations of abuse, through her scumbag lawyer, whom the man has to pay for. Once she gets alimony and child support, she shacks up with a drug-addicted ex-con, in the unnecessarily-large house her husband paid for. She uses the children to make her husband’s life a living hell, until he commits suicide (the leading cause of death for men under fifty.)
Men who can’t afford to pay child support go to jail. Which other debt can put you in prison?
No, thanks. I’d rather spend my time in beautiful villas in Bali. By myself. No selfies required; I don’t have to impress anyone.
Yeah, I’m bitter. And DELIRIOUSLY HAPPY without a nagging woman to ruin my life.
I follow the Buddha’s dying advice about women: Don’t look at them. If you see one, don’t talk to her. If you must speak to one, be mindful and maintain self control.
Women can go suck the big one. Just not mine.
Most children born in America are born to college educated women, who have low divorce rates. So if college education is making women overpaid and unhaaaappppppyyyy, why are their divorce rates low and why are they having the overwhelming majority of children (70%)? Most women aren’t the primary breadwinner in any decisive sense, maybe she makes 50k and he makes 45.
Practical: Are you sure that this stat isn’t mostly related to the fact that virtually all Americans go to college, at least for a semester or two? http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2013/05/10/record-share-of-new-mothers-are-college-educated/ confirms your statistic, but says “These benchmarks reflect a decades-long rise in the educational levels of all women” and “Although less educated women are a shrinking share of all new mothers, less educated women still have a higher average number of births throughout their lifetime than more educated women.”
(Note that these data are “some college or more.” Only 29 percent of new mothers actually had a Bachelor’s degree or higher, according to Pew.)
http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/01/15/for-most-highly-educated-women-motherhood-doesnt-start-until-the-30s/ says that college-educated women are having their first child at a later age than those without college degrees.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2103235/Most-children-U-S-born-wedlock.html says “More than half of births to American women younger than 30 are outside marriage”
https://www.theatlantic.com/sexes/archive/2013/02/lets-not-panic-over-women-with-more-education-having-fewer-kids/273070/
says “Women with more education have fewer children”
https://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21651833-why-best-educated-women-are-opting-more-children-having-it-all-and-then-some
says “It still holds true that the better-educated a woman is, the less likely she is to have a child.”
https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publications/2016/demo/p20-578.pdf shows that 65 percent of Americans aged 25-34 had “some college or more”. Women are more likely to go to college than men. So I don’t think you can look at this group as distinguished in some way from typical American women. These are typical American women.
Ananda: You write about student loan debt. I recently heard a story about a man who, as a slightly higher earner, had his ex-wifes debt given to him. Perhaps they did not even start dating in college. Both seemed to be in their 20s or early 30s. Even for 2 young people who have few assets, I guess with many going to college its essentially worth considering your lack of debt as an asset the size of the other spouses debt.
“Eligible men” here meaning men who will give their time and/or money to the woman. A resource grab.
Otherwise, each ‘eligible man’ has the potential to copulate with and impregnate 365+ women a year.