Dr. Mark Regnerus is a sociologist at the University of Texas at Austin. He has published books on the changing nature of relationships with Oxford University Press. His newest book argues that the Sexual Revolution has caused men to lose interest in marriage because women are now giving them sex for free, without them having to prove their husband credentials first. This causes men to be disinterested in the traditional ways of impressing a woman, namely, getting a job, moving out, being willing to commit, and being able to provide for children who may appear.
The Daily Signal provides a case study taken from Regnerus’ latest book “Cheap Sex”, which illustrates the problem.
Excerpt:
Sarah is 32 years old and recently moved to Texas from New York, looking for a new start—in more ways than one.
Brooklyn had grown too expensive for her hipster pocketbook. A relationship she had hoped would blossom and mature there had instead withered. So to Austin she came, hoping she could improve upon her modest $22,000 annual earnings the previous year.
Her most recent sexual partner—Daniel—was not actually a relationship per se. He was not the reason she moved. Rather, he was a 23-year-old American she had met in China four years before during a three-week language immersion program.
[…]When they first met, and slept together, Sarah was in a relationship with David, the man for which she had moved to, and then away from, New York. She ended up “cheating on him,” that is, David, several times.
[…]If you’re having trouble keeping times, dates, and boyfriends straight, it’s understandable. Sarah herself laughs at the drama of it all.
[…]Getting serious was never much of an option. He was 23, and she was 32: “We both knew … he was graduating from college and, you know, like we both, at least I knew it was never gonna work out. I think he kind of felt the same way.”
[…]When asked how rapidly her relationships tend to become sexual, Sarah replied, “the first or second date.” That account did not stand out from those of many other interviewees.
The numbers are on her side, too. In the 2014 Relationships in America survey, sex before the relationship begins was the modal—meaning the most common—point at which Americans report having first had sex in their current relationships.
Is her timing of sex intentional? No. “It just happens,” she reasoned.
[…]This, she claims, is the standard approach to dating among her peers, if not necessarily the most optimal: “I don’t think it’s unusual, but I think that for a lasting relationship, it’s not the best approach.”
[…]Three years later, now 35, Sarah continues to live in Austin and continues to find commitment elusive. She does not dislike her life, but it is not the one she envisioned a decade earlier.
Daniel is a musician, which doesn’t surprise me at all. A musician, student or other unemployed penniless bad boy will not make any demands on the woman, because he almost certainly has no plan for the future. This is what women today want: someone for right now who doesn’t want her to do anything to prepare for marriage, e.g. – get a real job, stop the thrill-seeking, stop traveling the world. No matter what a woman says about marriage, if her actions now show an interest in fun and thrills, then she doesn’t want marriage.
The typical woman’s plan for marriage is simply to imagine marriage happening later somehow, without her having to do anything that she doesn’t feel like doing right now. It would be like “planning” for your retirement by taking trips all over the world right now, while imagining living off the interest from a million dollars in savings at age 55. And Christian women do this too. I know THREE Christian women in their 30s who chased after younger men who were still in college. One of them did it twice in a row!
This is what women today want:
- hot appearance
- confident words about the future
- empty resume
- empty bank account
- several years younger than they are
- no firm convictions about morality
- no firm convictions about theology
- progressive political views, especially on abortion
Men who have no jobs and no money don’t lead women, and are much easier for women to manipulate. The problem with these men is – as any married woman knows – is that those men do not commit. Why not? Because they cannot afford to commit. Marriage, put simply, costs money. Starter houses cost a quarter million. Children cost a quarter million each, not counting college. Retirement costs a quarter million per spouse. And so on. But there is no one in this society telling women that they need to care about choosing men who are serious about the objective duties of the husband role.
Women love to believe that they can choose a hot, irresponsible bad boy who gives them feelings, and then magically mold him into a husband: able to work hard, save money, be self-controlled, faithful and good with children. Feelings determine the choice of man, and feelings tell them that the man can be magically transformed into a husband somehow. Perhaps by giving him premarital sex! That will make him responsible. After all, you can put out a fire with gasoline, right? This is the most common approach women today take to relationships: get drunk, have sex with hot bad boy, shack up with him, wait for him to propose marriage.
I frequently tell my female friends about women I know like the one in the article – many raised by two married parents in Christian homes. They have arts degrees, empty resumes, empty bank accounts, and histories of alcoholism, bulimia, promiscuity and/or divorce. My female friends give me the same advice: “YOU NEED TO LOWER YOUR STANDARDS OR YOU’LL NEVER GET MARRIED”. If that’s the best that they can do, then it’s no wonder that men are not interested in marriage.
If you want men to be interested in marriage, fix the root cause. The root cause of the marriage rate declining is not men. The root cause is feminism – and young women’s blind acceptance of it.
WINTERY KNIGHT 
Reblogged this on Patriactionary and commented:
Most young women today are vapid skanks; no smart man would ever willingly marry any of them.
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I don’t think ALL your female friends tell you to lower your standards.
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Well, not the half-dozen of you on my panel of wise experts. But I was exaggerating for effect about the people at work and in church.
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“…Marriage, put simply, costs money. Starter houses cost a quarter million. Children cost a quarter million each, not counting college. Retirement costs a quarter million per spouse. And so on.”
Divorce costs men even MORE than marriage…which is the “elephant is the room” that these ‘researchers’ and journalists refuse to mention.
False accusations (of ‘domestic violence’, of ‘marital rape’, of child abuse,etc.), the biased and unjust anti-male machinations of ‘Family Court’, impoverishing amounts of ‘child support’ which is NEVER accounted for and tyranically enforced by imprisonment, legalized robbery of everything the husband has worked for: these are just the most basic of reasons why men refuse to marry, and what women, journalists, conservatives, and the government refuse to acknowledge.
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I read a lot of sociologists who wring their hands about the decline of marriage. They have a lot to say about Peter Pan men who refuse to get jobs and marry, nothing at all to say about the factors you enumerated. Unless and until the man-blamers get serious about rolling back feminism, marriage is dead. Killed by the “pro-marriage” man-blamers who are terrified of holding women accountable for their swallowing of radical feminism, hook, line and sinker.
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Marriage is just as dead as chivalry, and women killed them both — either by actively supporting feminism or by remaining silent on its misandry, anti-male policies, and propaganda. None of their hands are clean.
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Chivalry still works fine and it’s fun, but you have only do it to feminine anti-feminists.
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I think Wintery addressed divorce elsewhere, and divorce is (oddly) mostly initiated by women.
The court definitely favors women. I know many non-Christians who refuse to marry and merely cohabitate (“why buy the cow when you get the milk for free?”) to get around divorce. That seems like a coping strategy for them (I don’t read this as “not manning up”).
I also refused to go anywhere near a feminist — not that I ran into many Christian women who would say they were a feminist. I had a female friend from seminary who spoke to a women’s ministry event with the event titled: “Are Christianity and Feminism compatible?” Her conclusion in a nutshell: Feminism supports the freedom to do what you want (motto: “love yourself”); Christianity supports the freedom to do what is right (motto: “love one another”). So no, she did not find them compatible.
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If you want men to be interested in marriage, fix the root cause.
Asking women to be responsible for anything is, to their sensitive ears and fragile psyches, a vile, blasphemous, abusive insult. Asking them to mop up a mess that they’ve made (i.e., feminism) will prompt calls for tar and feathers.
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I’ve read Christian women’s blogs where they are more concerned about how a woman feels if she is judged for having premarital sex than about her obligation to follow what the Bible says in the first place. I’m not kidding. The emphasis is all on crying and feeling sad about the mean judgments. There is literally no seriousness at all about the Bible as a guide to moral behavior. I heard a story about a Catholic guy who came home to find his atheist wife in bed with someone else, and the first thing out of her mouth to him was “judge not, lest ye be judged”.
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This reminded me of a story a few months back of a Christian school that expelled a woman for engaging in premarital sex and getting pregnant. “Christians” rushed to her defense because she “kept the child”. As if the whole moral problem was whether she would feel pressured to killing her child in order to avoid getting caught and thus stay in school.
It was incredible. All of the sexual sin was written off immediately and she was praised for not killing her child while the school was criticized for expelling her for breaking her promise as a student to avoid sexual immorality. I’ll have to confirm it, but I remember even seeing people I really respect like Nancy Pearcy quoting articles that defend the woman and condemned the school.
This nonsense is everywhere. Women need to be held accountable (just as men are without hesitation). Women who engage in sexual immorality need to be dealt with. And as far as Christians go, it shouldn’t be morally praiseworthy not to hire someone to execute your own child. The response to a Christian woman not aborting her child should be “why was that even in question?”
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I was one of those you are describing, however, the issues are not the ones you attempt to portray.
The school was wrong to punish the girl under a biblical mandate. There is no biblical mandate. The school quite clearly violated the Matthew 18 process for how to deal with specific sins and was rightly condemned for it.
The focus of the Christian is to call to repentance not enact punishment. Not even Jesus enacted punishment (e.g. the woman caught in adultery), but repeatedly called sinners to repentance and forgave them when they did. Yet the school chose, falsely in the name of Jesus, to punish. The school flipped it when they condemned repentance by punishing the girl when she sought forgiveness.
Was the boy punished? No. Were the other kids in the school having premarital sex punished? Nope: such proof is rarely available to a school. It’s hard to say the punishment is for premarital sex when only pregnant girls are punished. This isn’t a higher moral standard, it’s unjustly selectively applying punishments. It is seeing the splinter and missing the plank: hypocrisy.
She was pressured to abort her child in order to avoid the sins of the school. We are right to call foul: on the school.
All of the sexual sin was written off immediately.
When the girl repented, were her sins forgiven? Do you know how many times you should forgive someone who sins against you rather than hold their sins against them? Why do you throw stones?
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I’m on the side of expelling people from Christian schools for sexuality immorality, because Paul teaches it in 1 Corinthians 6. One of the biggest arguments I find being made by atheists is that Christians live pretty much the same as non-Christians. We need to be wary of how people perceive the truth of Christianity based on how much of a difference it makes to our decision making.
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1+Corinthians+6&version=NIV
Also, just FYI, the throwing stones passage is not in the Bible, it’s a late addition – frequently quoted by people who reject the Bible as an authority on moral issues:
It’s also very important to understand the corrosive effects of sin on others in a group. Think of the case of divorce, for example. Divorce spreads. I would be in favor of expelling people who divorce for frivolous reasons from churches as well.
http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2013/10/21/is-divorce-contagious/
Just FYI, the studies by Mark Regnerus on premarital sex among evangelicals puts the number of evangelicals having premarital sex at 80-85%.
http://www.foxnews.com/story/2009/08/10/cant-wait-for-sex-just-get-married-some-say.html
Quote:
I think that number exists largely because Christian leaders don’t believe what the Bible teaches, including Jesus himself, on these issues. And I think the root of that disbelief is a fear of offending women, who want to be guided in their choices with men by their feelings rather than stuffy moral rules.
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WK,
Perhaps you meant to quote a passage other than 1 Cor 6? It does not authorize expulsion. How could it? It would violate the teaching of Jesus that when there is a dispute it be handled between two people, failing that between a small group of witnesses, and only failing that bring it to the congregation. Then, only after there is no repentance, is expulsion acceptable. The servant who failed to cancel the debt and show mercy was the one who was punished (Matt 18:32-34).
Sin does have corrosive effects. But we don’t expel people from the church because they engage in sin, we expel them when they fail to repent. The goal is not to make an example of people, for that leads to the danger of hypocrisy (Matt 7:5) and self-righteousness, but instead to win them over and bring them to repentance (Matt 18:15).
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1 Corinthians 5.
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Women want “Equality” with men ONLY as long as they don’t have to be held as responsible and accountable for their actions as men are.
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By all rights, we deserve to be held accountable and responsible for our actions. The punishment for sin is death. Instead, we long for repentance, forgiveness, and mercy. When our Father forgives our great debt that cannot be repaid (Matt 18:24), we must do the same (Matt. 18:35).
Do you think I am being soft on sin? By no means. Sin is not only corrosive, it is death. It is not soft on sin to extend forgiveness and mercy to those who repent of their sins: it is the command of Jesus and the duty of all Christians.
That girl who sinned and repented was punished by a body that did not show forgiveness and mercy.
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What I can’t stand is how the church is teaching young women that they are victims of the male sex drive and therefore not responsible for their bad decisions. I can’t count how many times I’ve heard a young woman give her testimony (usually with tears streaming down her face) and saying something like, “My boyfriend ‘manipulated’ me into having sex.”
Of course, it’s clear she’s not talking about rape. She means she consented to it, but regretted it later. Using this kind of language does not have no effect. I’m meeting more and more Christian women who honestly think they bare no responsibility for the sexual decisions they made while they were in their teens and early 20s and therefore Christian men have no right to hold it against them.
I’m sorry ladies. I can forgive you for making bad decisions, but I can’t pretend like those decisions have no effect. You haven’t demonstrated responsibility and are already statistically more likely to divorce me. I won’t be marrying you, and I will be advising other men that they shouldn’t as well.
We need to start teaching young women from an early age that they are responsible for the decisions they make and that those decisions have consequences.
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The combo of the Pill, promotion of sexual immorality for women, blaming male sex drives for women being sexually immoral, no-fault and feminism undermine marriage.
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Unmarried man here. Wealthy, too. The power of women’s sexuality is deadly, brehs. Never give the a woman legal and/or financial power over your life. Contrary to popular belief, women aren’t the fairer sex. They can be wolves in sheep’s clothing.
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