Making Men Marriageable

We cannot do it without God, or at least a strong dose of traditional morals.

Marriageable men are a hot topic lately. There aren’t enough! Perhaps you’ve heard. Many women who would like to marry are unable to find a “marriageable man” and instead raise children either alone or not at all. Labeling a man “unmarriageable” is harsh, but it’s understandable when you assess the complaints. What kind of life can a woman expect to build with a man who is unemployed, seemingly unemployable, and quite possibly wrestling with addiction? Men are getting fewer college degrees than women nowadays, which is really fine insofar as less-credentialed men are still finding gainful employment and establishing themselves, as some in fact do. Those men are now likely to marry college-educated women. But a sizable share unfortunately do not establish themselves, leaving non-college-educated women with very few options.

Unemployment and addiction are the most obvious problems. And while all forms of addiction are problematic, it’s worth noting in particular that pornography has become appallingly widespread, not to mention harder and more pernicious than ever. It’s not hard to understand why women are uninterested in being with men who have spent years marinating in media that grossly objectifies the female body. One wants to believe that the love of an actual woman would be transformative for such a man, speedily maturing him into someone who could look on her as a full-fledged person with her own complex ideas, hopes, commitments. One wants to believe that.

Women have plenty of problems too, of course! For one thing, they also are consuming porn in sizable quantities (albeit still far less than men). I myself also see phenomena like the “romantasy” craze as a kind of female counterpart to porn. Those books are, let us say, “emotionally masturbatory,” training women to expect constant, effortless emotional gratification from men with no real effort on their side. A woman with romantasy-trained sensibilities will be grossly unprepared to build real relationships with real men. And that’s really just the start. I am extremely interested in building and bolstering a more robust cultural respect for womanly honor.

Today’s piece is about men, however! I’ll address the female side of this equation in a separate missive, probably in conjunction with the publication of my remarks from the Women’s Convention. And though I have of course never been a man, I think I do legitimately have some standing to talk about them, as the mother of five sons. I’ve dabbled a bit in women’s advocacy, but I devote far more of my energies to “making men marriageable,” so you should believe me when I tell you that I truly care about this.

That being the case, I am overall pleased to see growing interest across the spectrum in diagnosing and addressing men’s challenges. Tell us what you can, social scientists! Presumably there are at least some things that can be done to make schools friendlier to boys. To create institutions and opportunities that can help young men thrive. At the very least, perhaps the public can be persuaded that overt discrimination against men in hiring is not good, nor likely to benefit women, children, or society at large. There is in fact a sense in which men are biologically “privileged,” first and foremost because their reproductive role is far less onerous than women’s. But that doesn’t make them “natural oppressors.” Societies thrive when they unlock their citizens’ potentialities, instead of resenting them for having those capacities in the first place. “Let’s not hate men for their excellences” is a great place to start in healing our toxic gender wars.

Having said all that, I think the data crunchers and policy analysts are going to run up against some hard limits in their efforts to help men. Masculine thriving requires a proper unfolding of masculine capacities, which in turn demands discipline, motivation, and the developed capacity to make good use of man’s (by nature) greater autonomy. You can’t achieve those things by turning men into a victim class, or teaching them to shill more savvily for their “rights.”

The problem is not so much that men are hated, scorned, and impotent to achieve anything. It’s more that the range of possibilities, for the lower-status man, are very compressed. “Winning” doesn’t look that exciting, and “losing” seems fairly tolerable.

Further, I think our “man problems” are, unfortunately, a fairly natural byproduct of a social structure that leaves a significant share of men with very little to gain or lose through personal striving. You could say, if you like, that we struggle with “structural immaturity.” Undistinguished men are very much the losers of the sort of society we’ve built.

A man may do amazing things when he has something to gain or lose, but men require motivation to be disciplined and productive. When they don’t see prospects for themselves or their families, men tend to fall apart. In our own society, men with education, intelligence, and talent have a lot to gain, while obviously those with careers, social status, and financial security have plenty to lose. Those men are doing fine. They’re productive and highly marriageable. For men of limited intelligence, skill, or social status, the outlook isn’t so rosy. They aren’t likely to get fancy jobs. Their capacity to cultivate high status, earning power, or influence is likewise limited. Our omnipresent media ensures that they are constantly watching other people achieve the things they cannot, which breeds resentment. So it’s a challenge. Motivating non-talented men is inevitably going to be hard.

Now, I think it’s important to note here that this is not just about a lack of prizes. That’s not even the main thing. Because actually, most men historically haven’t had a lot of gaudy prizes in reach; they’ve swung a pick or leaned on a hoe, feeling lucky if they get to have a woman share their bed, and triumphant if their family doesn’t freeze to death or starve. But that’s part of the problem, right? We don’t let people starve or freeze to death. As a provider, a low-achieving man may struggle mightily to compete with the state. As a sexual stimulant, the average woman may struggle mightily to compete with screens and artificial substitutes.

The problem, therefore, is not so much that men are hated, scorned, and impotent to achieve anything. It’s more that the range of possibilities, for the lower-status man, are very compressed. “Winning” doesn’t look that exciting, and “losing” seems fairly tolerable. I say “seems” because to me, the sorts of lives Nick Eberstadt describes in Men Without Work sound genuinely harrowing. I’d much rather die on a battlefield than be a man in my prime, allowing my muscles to slowly atrophy while I play video games 15 hours a day. But the latter is far less frightening from the outside. We have become a society of lotus eaters.

The policy people have various suggestions here, and some seem worth trying. I’m not at all opposed, for instance, to opening doors to vocational training for teens who are not scholastically inclined. Youth sports can be great for boys, and they merit public support. And even though Charles Fain Lehman gets a little over-enthused at times about banning all the sinful things, I do think there are times when bans and restrictions are warranted. But this is mostly all window dressing. None of it will meaningfully address the core, structural problem: too little to lose, not enough to gain.

Policymakers cannot simply create a space for struggling men by fiat. You can’t manufacture social respect, nor legislate it from the top. Not everyone wants to accept this, as we see especially in the people on the right who hope to use tariffs and subsidies to distort our labor markets specifically for the sake of creating “breadwinner jobs” for men. The first thing to be said about this is that it’s nearly always a bad idea to treat your economy like a thermostat, tinkering with the dials in hopes of achieving your desired social outcome. It doesn’t work, and there are always negative ramifications.

Here though, even the social goals should be truly offensive to anyone who truly respects masculinity. Men properly earn status by doing worthwhile things. Already, the state has undermined them by stepping in as provider-in-chief to their families. Now, even their jobs are going to be a patronizing gift from the state? You want to frustrate healthy economic development (e.g. make Americans poorer) in order to give men the privilege of punching a clock because Uncle Sam thinks it’s good for them. And this is supposed to achieve manly dignity? Can we stop digging here?

The initiative to “make breadwinner jobs” is silly anyway because America already has a serious need for more carpenters, tradesmen, cops, roofers, electricians, construction workers, and diesel mechanics, as well as teachers, EMTs, male nurses, firefighters. Those are real jobs (many of them quintessentially manly!) that we actually need people to do. I certainly want it to be possible for ordinary men to find respectable employment, marry, and raise families. But they can. That path very much exists.

Five years ago, in conversations about marriage, I was regularly being told that “men won’t take those jobs because there’s nothing in it for them, those hoity-toity college-educated women still won’t think they’re good enough.” I don’t hear that much anymore, probably because the data has clearly shown it to be false. Women are marrying those men. Apparently not everyone wants to be that man.

That’s unfortunate, because no institution, degree program, or labor market tweak will be able to turn normie men into superlative men. Not by worldly standards.

If only there were a philosophy, or worldview, that viewed every human being as intrinsically precious, ordered towards an exalted, supernatural end. One that sees marriage itself as a meaningful and deeply honorable vocation, an arduous but momentous quest. If only there were a place where human fatherhood was seen as surpassingly noble, analogous to God’s own providence over the world. If only.