Why Young Men Are Giving Up On Marriage

0_21_450_FightingCouple

Suzanne Venker’s article, “The War on Men,” which appeared on the website of Fox News in late November, has become a lodestone for feminist writers who have attacked her position that the institution of marriage is threatened, not enhanced, by the supposed gains of the feminist movement over the last 50 years.

“Where have all the good (meaning marriageable) men gone?” is a question much talked about lately in the secular media, Venker says, but her answer, backed up by statistics, is not to the liking of mainstream commentators influenced by feminism.

She points out that for the first time in US history, the number of women in the workforce has surpassed the number of men, while more women than men are acquiring university degrees.

“The problem? This new phenomenon has changed the dance between men and women,” Venker wrote. With feminism pushing them out of their traditional role of breadwinner, protector and provider – and divorce laws increasingly creating a dangerously precarious financial prospect for the men cut loose from marriage – men are simply no longer finding any benefit in it.

As a writer and researcher into the trends of marriage and relationships, Venker said, she has “accidentally stumbled upon a subculture” of men who say “in no uncertain terms, that they’re never getting married.”

A comment that was posted on this article sums up many things for me. This commenter goes a little further than I would, but he does make some interesting points. Read this and you come away with a better understanding as to why men act the way we do in the new millennium:

A comment by spookymulder8: There are many factors. While the Feminist doctrine has marginalized good men, it has also created a culture where more young men are inclined to see women as merely objects for sex in much the same way hardcore militant feminism taught many young women to be independent and see men as only necessary for breeding. No doubt this has been passed on to a younger generation of men who likewise will also be indoctrinated to see women as only necessary for sexual pleasure and who only expect the same from them, because marriage and the patriarchial responsibilities of it are no longer acceptable in the modernist world.

But good men who understand this are also discouraged. Divorce makes many men worried about ever getting into a relationship. Boys increasingly raised in a society where marriages break down are unlikely to think it’s worth the trouble. Ridiculous laws in divorce cases that favor women and make men slaves to courtroom declarations where their wealth is given to the woman who also gets full custody of the children is also very worrisome regardless of the circumstances. Men are no longer guaranteed their offspring. Men are increasingly told they have no say if the woman wants to abort their children.

Marriage itself is constantly becoming more meaningless. Pornography is increasingly rampant in destroying the bonds between men and women. And as society breaks down it creates uncertainty about the future with regards to the world we live in and would bring children into and economically depressing, that even otherwise men inclined to be responsible are put off from ever getting married because the future looks bleak.

Turning this around requires a return to the patriarchy, and proper institution of marriage and respect for sex within marriage. By containing the power of sex within marriage under the patriarchy, it forces men to improve themselves and become responsible patriarchs before even entering in marriage. The Patriarchy and institution of marriage therefore utilized men’s sex drives in a positive way to createa nd build a stable society. And patriarchial rights and the permanence of the marriage relationship without divorce maintained this stability. Patriarchies also have the added benefit of protecting women. No man could take advantage of a girl for sex. Today a man could court your 14 year old ddaughter and so long as he gets legal ‘consent’ he can have sex with her, privately get her pregnancy aborted at Planned Parenthood, then dump her. Parents can’t do anything. Under a patriarchy, no man could even consider courting a girl without going through her father first. If he dared to, then he would have violated the patriarch’s right (A daughter was considered legal property of the father for this reason, not because women are the lesser of men), and justice would have been severe.

However Hollywood and liberalism have painted a distorted view of the patriarchial system by focusing on ways it can be abused, much like hos they have demonized men to seem like drunken monsters despite the reality. In many ways women were even happier having the freedom to do what they wanted within the family and raise children while the men worked. Feminism was initially promoted as a ‘Sleeping Beauty Feminism’ doctrine that encouraged women to be more independent and enter the workforce as if they were wasting their abilities by being homemakers. This approach completely failed with women who were overall happy with their situation. It wasn’t until Feminism was pushed as the ‘Suffering Saints Faminism’ where the campaign focused on those women who were abused by demonic men that feminism finally started to take hold. It was all in how you frame it. There were plenty of legitimate reasons for the Women’s Rights movement in the modern era. However Feminism isn’t the same thing. It merely piggybacked on women’s rights. Many Christian women in the Women’s Rights movement only wanted accomodations to be made in the absence of men to prevent themselves being taken advantage of and to have their say in government policy through voting etc. Even the Old Testament laws make accomodations for women who find themselves without a husband for various circumstances who were in danger of losing their rightful priveledges. Feminism on the other hand was primarily driven by Communists who wished to make women workers subservient to the State contributing to production and consumerism. Basically cogs in the machine. The Church, Family, children and patriarchs and Marriage stood in the way. So these had to be destroyed so that the people would depend on the state and work for the benefit of the state. That is feminism’s origin. The rise of feminism and increased socialism and communism and practical atheism is all part and parcel of everything we observe happening around us.

Daddy Is Babysitting Tonight

I found a great rebuttal to a post on another site regarding a father being a babysitter. I used to get asked that kind of question while I was with my kids all the time. Daddy day? When is mommy coming home? Babysitting today? I usually cut folks off pretty quickly when I told them that fathers don’t babysit.

My daughter and I back in 2005

My daughter and I back in 2005

 

 

Ten reasons why saying a parent is inept at childcare says more about the marriage than the parent.

“This man is a father – his children’s legal guardian for flip’s sake.  He. Is. Not. Babysitting. But a lot of the time, it feels like he might as well be.”

This is the intro by a writer/dancer named Keesha in her ten reasons why fathers CAN be referred to as babysitters. The blog post appears on Scary Mommy, the website from Confessions of a Scary Mommy: An Honest and Irreverent Look at Motherhood, a 2012 best-selling collection of essays by Jill Smokler.

The list, meant to find humor in domestic discord, is based on specific type of husband, who works long hours away from home and is otherwise so uninvolved at home that he doesn’t even know where the diapers are. This is an endangered male, a grotesque more than a stereotype, and as the commenters make clear, this type of domestic discord usually ends with divorce. The generalizations are brutal—for men and women, for the at-home parent and the at-work parent—so we crafted a point-by-point response to refute some claims and redress others.

1. It’s a business arrangement. From sex to this-for-that night outs, taking a night out for yourself makes this type of spouse feel like “you owe him for his services” of being on kid duty. That sucks. It is not a business arrangement, it’s a marriage. If you respect him, you’ll know what to do next time he wants to go out with his friends. Say, “Have fun.” And if he acts or says things to make you feel indebted, tell him so. Or wait and tell the lawyers.

2. You feel like you’re overindulging. Is it worth going out, given the business arrangement outlined above? If you feel guilty taking time for yourself, then something is wrong with your relationship, something is not being communicated. Don’t blame him; it’s both of you.
Read more at http://goodmenproject.com/families/a-response-to-10-reasons-fathers-can-be-referred-to-as-babysitters/#T5jvTJKEXgJ7R05U.99

Ben Affleck on Fatherhood

1357750849_ben-affleck-lg

“They’re most important in my life,” the 40-year-old Argo filmmaker said. “Family is a wonderful thing, but it doesn’t mean you can’t do other stuff in your life. In fact, having a family makes whatever other thing you have that much richer. If it was just me, I’d be home alone and think, ‘Well, something good happened at work,’ but it’s much nicer to share it with people you love.”

Affleck added, “I think anytime you become a richer person you have more substance. I hope that happened to me with having a family, but you never know!”
Read more: http://www.usmagazine.com/celebrity-moms/news/ben-affleck-fatherhood-has-made-me-a-richer-person-2013101#ixzz2I0X3lONo

Gender Neutrality

hinds_princess_post2

Why do parents attempt to fit a square peg in a round hole? When new parents try their best to force a child to be gender-neutral, I find it to be totally ridiculous.

Boys and girls are inherently, fundamentally, and irreconcilably different.

In this article in Newsweek, Jesse Ellison wrote:

In 1978, the year I was born, feminists like my mother were embracing the notion that gender roles were entirely rooted in the way that you were raised. In the 1970s, the feminist fringe was giving up bras, shaving, and diets; they were lighting their own cigarettes and opening their own doors. It was the “new feminism,” and where the first movement was concerned with legal equality, like the right to vote, these women were focused on de facto equality: asserting that it was nurture, not nature, that made women and men different. To bust out of gender oppression also meant to assert that there was absolutely nothing different about our biological makeup.

“We all thought that the differences had to do with how you were brought up in a sexist culture, and if you gave children the same chances, it would equalize,” my mom says. “It took a while to think, ‘Maybe men and women really are different from each other, and they’re both equally valuable.’ “

That should be the end of the discussion, but it seems that we have so many new parents caught up in this ‘gender neutral’ nonsense. They all eventually fail in their attempts to turn boys into girls and vice versa. They squirm for a few years and come to the understanding that boys and girls, who eventually turn into men and women are…news flash…DIFFERENT! We have been mislead into believing that the sexes are the same.

In an articled titled ‘One Dad’s Ill-Fated Battle Against the Princesses’ published recently in The Atlantic, one father tried, and failed, to keep princesses away from his daughters. Yet another failed attempt in gender neutral child rearing.

Four years ago, the news that my wife and I were going to have twin girls coincided with the moment of my most fervent dedication to the notion that gender is, for the most part, socially constructed. Many academic types abandoned this attitude long ago, and regular people tend to as well, especially after being around a child of one gender or another for any length of time; but I clung to it. And sure enough, after spending most of my waking hours during the last three years with my little girls and their friends of both sexes, I had to admit that I can see some basic differences you can usually count on between even the youngest boys and girls.

Well, I’m glad you figured that our sir. I could have told you that before you had kids.

This princess stuff that people are so upset about? People say they don’t want their little girl to be a princess. Really? When I play in wedding bands every weekend, I see the inevitable result of the longing to be what many women secretly desire…to be a princesses. Yes, any woman that gets married eventually turns into that princess. I see nothing wrong with that. Yes, she is a princess for that day. Unfortunately, many of those princesses for a day also unrealistically expect to be treated like that for the rest of their lives.

The unrealistic expectation of being a princess for a lifetime is probably where the princess problem needs to be seriously addressed. That just might be a whole other blog post.

The author  writes about an opportunity to finally explain to his daughters how they could be anything they want and they shouldn’t aspire to be a princess. Just look at a career woman like Supreme Justice Sotamayor!

A few weeks ago, I stumbled upon a video clip from Sesame Street in which Abby Cadabby, the irrepressible fledgling fairy, talks to Sonia Sotomayor about the word “career.” Abby announces her aspiration to one day have “a career as a princess,” after which the Supreme Court Justice quickly convinces her that being a princess is not a career. “A career,” Sotomayor explains, “is a job that you train and prepare for, and that you plan to do for a long time.”

Well, isn’t being a mother, or a father a career to by this definition? It is amazing how much emphasis that our culture puts towards life outside the home. We seem to overlook the contributions stay at home parents make. Why do we do our best to prepare people for careers that we really cannot stand, yet rarely plan for the event that will bring us the most fulfillment. Being a parent is arguably most important thing us humans will ever do. I feel our culture has it backwards.

Yesterday morning, when I dropped the girls off at preschool, one of them, who used to say she was going to be a cowgirl when she grew up, repeated her latest dream, apropos of nothing: “I’m going to be a princess when I grow up.”

“But don’t you remember what Abby and the nice lady said? Is being a princess a real career?” That’s what I always say when she mentions her new life goal.

“No,” she said. “But I don’t want to have a real career.” Then she skipped off.

Everyone is not designed to be a supreme court justice, scientist, engineer, doctor or nuclear physicist. Maybe some of us will be plumbers, construction workers, customer service representatives, or hmmm, maybe, great mothers. Nah, THAT is not something we want our little girls to aspire to be. No way! Maybe we can teach our sons about how wonderful it is to be a….shhhhh… father. Nah, go out and be a real man and work for Goldman Sachs and be a captain of industry and make lots of money!!! Forget that fact that you will eventually have children who need you not just for your money. Your career is supposed to be your first priority?!

We tend to feed into cultural myths that do more harm than good.

Let girls be girls and boys be boys. Do you need proof that boys and girls are different? Have kids. Experience is the best teacher. If you don’t want to go down that route, I suggest you spend a day or two watching how boy splay and how girls play. They are totally different. Embrace the differences and enjoy it. Modern parents are fighting a battle they just cannot win. Nature always has the last laugh.

Why Men Are the Way They Are – Oprah -1987

I found these videos while doing some research on Dr. Warren Farrell. He was on The Oprah Winfrey show back in 1987. It’s great to look back at Oprah from this time period. She was just getting started and on her way to ruling the daytime TV world.

These videos feature Dr. WarrenFarrell. He came to prominence in the 1970s as one of the most vocal men championing the cause of second wave feminism and eventually became the only man to serve on the New York City Board of the National Organization of Women (NOW). However, when NOW took policy positions that Farrell regarded as anti-male and anti-father, he left and went on to continue supporting the expansion of women’s options while adding what he felt was missing about boys, men and fathers.

In a 1997 interview, Farrell stated:

Everything went well until the mid-seventies when NOW came out against the presumption of joint custody [of children following divorces]. I couldn’t believe the people I thought were pioneers in equality were saying that women should have the first option to have children or not to have children–that children should not have equal rights to their dad.

He is still one of the leading advocates for men and boys.

Watch all five of these videos. You might hear things that are pretty shocking. Some things might not surprise you. I feel it is time we revisit some of these same issues that were discussed back in 1987. It might be great to listen to a modern male perspective on divorce, relationships, custody, child rearing and marriage.

Balance. Life is all about balance. I feel at this point in our culture, there needs to be a little acknowledgment of opposing viewpoints. Men matter just as much as women and we should be allowed to voice our opinions and feelings. I really do not like dismissive attitudes, especially when men want to voice our opinions. When boys turn into men that have not sufficiently dealt with their emotions, all kinds of negativity spews from that fountain. Let us be heard, listen to what we have to say and hopefully we can make changes. Our culture can only benefit from everyone taking part.

Have you ever wondered why men are the way we are? Listen and you might learn a thing or two

Remember, this  was twenty-five years ago. Has our culture improved, remained the same or gotten worse?

Listen to several men from decades ago say the same thing you hear modern men say:

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zV60F3jBczA&w=560&h=315]

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gneHJCdaIDc&w=560&h=315]

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m0jXYfCgV7o&w=560&h=315]

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ea8IhAAsyaU&w=560&h=315]

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uf7LBoSg8Sg&w=560&h=315]