This article from the Wall Street Journal explain why men are in decline. (H/T Mary, Tom)

Excerpt:

Few groups were hit harder by the recession than young men… The unemployment rate for males between 25 and 34 years old with high-school diplomas is 14.4%—up from 6.1% before the downturn four years ago and far above today’s 9% national rate. The picture is even more bleak for slightly younger men: 22.4% for high-school graduates 20 to 24 years old. That’s up from 10.4% four years ago.

[…]The share of men age 25-34 living with their parents jumped to 18.6% this year, up from 14.2% four years ago and the highest level since at least 1960, according to the Census Bureau.

Suzanne Venker comments on the consequences of this data for women for National Review.

Full text:

New data from the U.S. Census Bureau shows the percentage of men between the ages of 25 and 34 living at home rose from 14 percent in 2005 to 19 percent in 2011. Women, on the other hand, are doing just fine. Not only do they dominate today’s college campuses, they have little trouble staying away from mom and dad’s place. That’s because women are flourishing in the workforce while men are not. Writers and pundits blame this phenomenon on the economy, but the trend reflects a much larger sociological problem. America is in the midst of a sea change: Never before has it been more difficult for men and women to find their way to one another, settle in for the long haul, and build strong families together.

To read about it, you’d think the entire mess is out of our hands. You’d think the circumstances involving the roles of men and women in society have happened to us, rather than the other way around. The truth is that we created this new world — and while we may not be able to undo it, we can certainly stop the freight train from running off the tracks.

Hardly a day goes by that we aren’t made aware of this heartbreaking reality. It is so acute we now have not one but six new television series dedicated to men’s social demotion. In these programs, husbands are made to look like fools — while the wives wield a power so ugly it’s no wonder marriage has become so elusive. The modern generation has been sold a bill of goods about human nature, and the result is that men now have no idea how to be men. Why? Because women won’t let them.

There is a large and powerful group of women who see this shift in gender roles as a good thing. Hanna Rosin’s provocative piece in The Atlantic, called “The End of Men,” and Kate Bolick’s new piece “All the Single Ladies” (which may now become a TV series) make light of the demise of masculinity and the role men once played in society. They represent the kind of movers and shakers who help lead the feminist fight. Pointing to the latest statistics about men, they’d be likely to respond, “See how hopeless men are? Everything we’ve been saying about men all these years has proven to be true.”

But the laugh will be on them — if not for their own families, then for their children’s. The feminist policies that were put in place to help women flourish outside the home have suffocated men’s opportunities for economic self-sufficiency. In short, men’s desire to be good workers and family providers has been undermined. This is more than unfortunate; it is a loss of catastrophic proportions, for it is men’s consistent, full-time, year-round work that women depend on in order to live that ever-coveted “balanced life.” What too many women don’t understand (because they’ve been unduly influenced by feminist groupthink) is that male nature is ultimately beneficial to them, for women continue to put family — not career — at the center of their lives and are thus dependent on men to pick up the slack at the office.

It is a dangerous thing to create a society of frustrated young men. Feminists have no idea what a can of worms they’ve created — and what it’s about to do to our nation.

I think if we want men to marry, not only do we have to ask why the recession is affecting men disproportionately, but why the education system isn’t working for boys. We need to ask whether men learn better from female teachers or male teachers. We need to ask whether boys learn better in all-boys schools or in co-ed schools. We need to ask whether the promotion of sex education and contraception, which produces freely available sex, is the best way to encourage young men to prove themselves to women by trying hard to fit the traditional roles of protector, provider and moral/spiritual leader. We need to ask whether the denial of male-female differences encourages men to take on traditional male roles, and whether women are encouraged to prefer men who take on those roles. We need to ask whether our energy and economic policies favor job creation in areas dominated by men. We need to ask whether stimulus programs should be slanted towards industries dominated by women.  We need to ask whether affirmative action for women in education and at work helps men to be able to provide for a family. We need to ask whether men are well-served by no-fault divorce laws and biased domestic violence laws that promote false charges – especially during custody hearings. And lastly, we need to ask whether church serves men when it accepts or rejects postmodernism, anti-intellectualism and moral relativism.

But can’t we just tell men to “Man Up”?

The answer to the discincentives facing marriage-minded men is not a lazy, ignorant pronouncement for men to “Man Up”. That doesn’t solve any of the problems that cause men not to marry.

I think the desire of certain people to remove every incentive and capacity for men to perform as husbands and fathers – and then to nevertheless demand they marry and take on the traditional roles of men anyway without incentives or capacities – is the height of narcissism. Men are people too – we are not inanimate objects. We are not sperm donors and wallets. And if society decides to go in a direction where the traditional roles of men are replaced with  government social programs funded by high taxes and deficit spending, then marriage will die in this society.