Bettina Arndt explains why traditional men are declining to date and marry

Well, the last (maybe) episode of Knight and Rose Show is up and I’m starting to wind down the blogging and spend more time on my health, fitness, nutrition and playing all the games that I had been neglecting. But I’m still very active on Twitter. And I saw a great article on there from Bettina Arndt, who is a pretty famous men’s advocate from Australia. This article will be helpful to traditional men living in a world of non-traditional women.

So, the first thing to do is link to the article and then give you my favorite part:

If you want to understand why men are voting with their feet, you need to look not just at what marriage now costs them — and the costs are severe — but at what it delivers. Increasingly, what it delivers is a pretty dud deal.

The modern woman: a prospectus.

  • They are the most miserable, anxious, and insecure cohort in living memory — hardly great marriage material.
  • Most married women go off sex — and the husband who objects is seen as the problem.
  • Many women don’t actually like men very much. The more educated she is, the higher the contempt.
  • They’ve gone full throttle left — and three quarters of college-educated women won’t even date a man who votes differently.
  • They’ve rigged the education system and colonised corporate and institutional life, turning universities and workplaces into man-repellent factories.
  • Yet their hypergamy (desire to marry up) is still running hot. Despite outnumbering men in education and careers, they demand a tall, equally high-status unicorn.
  • The modern female threat-detection system is hyperactive. Almost any male behaviour — silence, opinions, jokes, breathing — gets flagged as a red flag.
  • They’re extremely well-versed in the lucrative economics of divorce, including a well-timed false allegation to eliminate tedious shared parenting.

To examine more carefully what is going on here, let’s start by looking at the latest addition to this sorry reckoning. I’m referring to the finding published in New Statesman last month: that many young women don’t like men. A Merlin Strategy poll of young Britons aged 18 to 30 found three times more young women than young men held a negative view of the opposite sex. Only about 50% of women had a positive view of men compared to 72% of men feeling positive about women. For women under 25, it was even starker: only around one-third (35%) reported a positive view of men.

This applies particularly to professional and managerial young women of whom just 36 per cent hold a positive view of men, compared with 61 per cent of working-class women. In other words, the contempt for men is most concentrated in educated, middle-class women — precisely the demographic that has benefited most from feminist gains and whose prospects are objectively the strongest.

By the way, there used to be a guy who would write on these issues who was pretty good – his name is Dalrock. And he wrote a great article about this exact issue of traditional men realizing that marrying a non-traditional woman is a bad deal:

But there is another aspect to this, because women’s past decisions to delay marriage also played a role in shrinking the pool of men who prepared to take on the role of provider.

The first generations of women who decided to push out the age of marriage for the most part found that the same number of men still prepared to be husbands.  But over time as the length of the delay increased, this weakened the signal women collectively sent to young men that respectable men will be sexually successful.

It isn’t just that young women are now astonishingly open about their intent to have sex with badboys in their prime and settle for a beta provider at the last minute, although that has to have an impact.  It also isn’t just that as a society we see married fathers as beneath contempt, although surely that’s having an impact as well.

Today an 18 year old man doesn’t see the same incentive to knock himself out on education and career that men of previous generations saw.  Today an 18 year old man sees that for the next decade or so his most effective sexual strategy is to focus on being the sexy badboy young women dedicate their sexual prime to, not patiently preparing to be the boring loyal dude who will pick up the tab*.

And another great article that I really liked about how marriage has changed from being a good deal for men to being a bad deal for men:

Feminists and their enablers have slowly shaved off the value of marriage for men.

Marriage for men no longer means:

  • Being the legally and socially recognized head of the household.
  • An expectation of regular sex.
  • Legal rights to children.
  • Lifetime commitment.

As men came to accept each [change], additional [changes] were continuously made. Women chose to marry later in order to first have a degree. This older bride then came with a little extra attitude, maybe some student loan debts, and perhaps more expensive tastes. Again, the choice by men was to accept what was commonly on offer or avoid the transaction altogether.

[…]There’s just one more small thing. It took her so long to find you that you can’t reasonably expect her chastity to be perfectly in tact. I mean, it’s mostly there, but it suffered a ding or two. Her virginity was gone to her first boyfriend, but don’t worry it was very romantic and she still has fond memories of that special time. Not too long after that those jerks at the frat house did a number on her pride, but you can’t hold that against her. She’s a bright gal, and after that she learned how to hook up smart.

Sadly, Dalrock has stopped writing, and even taken down his blog to focus on his own wife and kids.

Now, when I think about Christian pastors and Christian leaders – and here I will include literally all of the people who are writing about relationships and marriage from a Christian perspective – they are all 100% clueless about how men are calculating the value proposition of marriage. The cannot name the threats facing men, and they blame women’s bad choices on men. So, no one traditional or conservative is leading women to be marriage-ready.

If you must get into a relationship with a woman, I would screen the candidate for a worldview like my podcast partner, Desert Rose. If you can’t get that level of apologetics knowledge and policy knowledge, forget about it. That’s the bare minimum for marriage and kids now.

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