This Yahoo News article explains, citing the research of Mark Regnerus. Notice that they use the phrase “gender equality” as a euphemism for feminism. The idea that men and women have no innate differences and no differing roles is the core feminist belief.

Excerpt:

In his presentation, “Sexual Economics: A Research-Based Theory of Sexual Interactions, or Why the Man Buys Dinner,” Baumeister, a psychologist, explained how applying economic principles helps understand people’s sexual decision-making, especially when they’re just beginning a relationship.

“Women’s sexuality has a kind of value that men’s sexuality does not,” he says. “Men will basically exchange other resources with women to have sex, but the reverse doesn’t work. Women … can trade sex for attention, for grades, for a promotion, for money, as in prostitution or sex with a celebrity.”

The idea, he says, is that men want sex more than women do (on average) and that sex in a relationship begins when women decide it’s time. Supply and demand rule, so whichever sex is more scarce has more power. The theory focuses on heterosexual interactions only.

When women outnumber men (as on many college campuses today) there’s more competition among women for those guys, says Mark Regnerus, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Texas-Austin. He addressed that in the book he co-wrote, Premarital Sex in America, out earlier this year.

Regnerus says Baumeister’s theory of sexual economics was a key element. “It’s a perspective through which to understand sexual relationships and sexual behavior,” he says.

Regnerus’ research attributes the rise of the “hookup” culture on campus to the fact that there are so many more women in college. He says Baumeister and Kathleen Vohs “wrote the key work on the subject” in 2004. Because a woman’s sexuality has a value to men, a man who wanted sex typically had to give her something of value, such as a marriage proposal.

Notice that marriage proposals don’t just come out of the blue. They need supporting evidence and accomplishments, or they look ridiculous.

Traditionally, a man would have to show a woman his suitability for the traditional roles of husband and father. He would have to demonstrate that to the woman, and to her father. He would have to declare his intentions, produce his “prospects”, including his degree transcripts, work history and financial holdings. That was before feminism. After feminism, women decided that men don’t have any special roles to fill, so there was no need for men to “apply for the job”, so to speak.

After feminism, we also had no-fault divorce made into law. This was done to accommodate women who had made poor choices when they married. No-fault divorce led to a massive exodus of fathers from the home. So now many women are growing up without fathers. We have also witnessed the rise of single motherhood by choice. With sex education, and the free availability of contraception and abortion, men have been taught to assume that sex is no big deal, and they are able to avoid committing and just get sex from the women who are giving it away for free. The remaining women who want a commitment quickly lower their expectations in order to avoid being passed up entirely. Consequently, many women have decided to get pregnant without a man, just so that they can have a relationship with someone who will not leave them. And this fatherless procreation is all taxpayer subsidized, often including free IVF for childless single women who put recreational sex and careers above marriage and child-bearing for the first 40 years of their lives.

Fatherlessness causes women to have sex at earlier and earlier ages, without any guarantee that the man can fulfill traditional roles or hold to a commitment. Feminism denies that men have distinct male roles, so women are giving up sex to men based solely on the man’s appearance and based on the approval of their peers, which is determined by a pop culture that denigrates chastity, courtship and marriage.

Fathers matter to daughters. In order to make a good choice of a man, a woman needs to see her father’s husband/father behavior to use as a measure. She needs to have a father to help her to moderate her emotions and to make romantic decisions based on practical demands of marriage and parenting. She needs to employ means/ends reasoning to evaluate a man for those roles. But feminism ejected fathers from the home, reducing the male role to sperm donor and taxpayer for welfare programs. Today, we have a generation of women who are basically giving away sex for free, with no romance or commitment in sight.

The feminist idea that “a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle” sounded good to a generation of feminists who had been mistreated by the “bad boys” whom they freely chose, but now we can see the result of that policy for their daughters. Oral sex on the first date is not uncommon for many teens, with no expectation of a follow-up phone call. That’s what feminism got women. All this raving about rape epidemics… and it turns out that feminism is itself largely responsible for the epidemic of forced/coerced sex. Surprise!

It looks like all those bossy, controlling, judgmental, logical, exclusive, intolerant, Christian fundamentalism men were actually more concerned with women’s happiness than feminists were all along. Maybe those boundaries were there for a reason? Maybe the Bible knows what it is talking about when it speaks about marriage, courting, family and chastity? Maybe.