Here are some interesting facts and stats. As the article “The War on Women” says, more women wish to get married but there are fewer men interested.

The battle of the sexes is alive and well. According to Pew Research Center, the share of women ages eighteen to thirty-four that say having a successful marriage is one of the most important things in their lives rose nine percentage points since 1997 – from 28 percent to 37 percent. For men, the opposite occurred. The share voicing this opinion dropped, from 35 percent to 29 percent.

Believe it or not, modern women want to get married. Trouble is, men don’t.

But that’s not what I find especially interesting. What really stands out is how small the percentage of women and men looking for a happy marriage is. For women it is 37% and men 29%. The vast majority are not interested or at the minimum is for them a low priority. The author of this study is a woman, and this to me was the most interesting aspect of what she wrote:

In a nutshell, women are angry. They’re also defensive, though often unknowingly. That’s because they’ve been raised to think of men as the enemy. Armed with this new attitude, women pushed men off their pedestal (women had their own pedestal, but feminists convinced them otherwise) and climbed up to take what they were taught to believe was rightfully theirs.

Now the men have nowhere to go.

It is precisely this dynamic – women good/men bad – that has destroyed the relationship between the sexes. Yet somehow, men are still to blame when love goes awry. Heck, men have been to blame since feminists first took to the streets in the 1970s.

Indeed, this, according to the article, is the final outcome for the feminist movement:

Feminism serves men very well: they can have sex at hello and even live with their girlfriends with no responsibilities whatsoever.

But if that’s what women want, what more is there to say? Things change as discussed in a previous post. And there is also this from the Sydney Morning Herald which comes under the title, “Sexual economics: the price of sex has fallen to record lows”. And the article certainly seems to show it:

According to a study on the matter reported in the New York Post, women are giving it up more easily, readily and eagerly than ever before, without expectations of commitment, dinners, relationships or even a second date.

‘No wooing, dating, goofy text messaging,’ reported the Post in response to the new study on the price of sex, carried out by the University of Minnesota.

The original article from which this one was taken at The New York Post also tells the same story.

O tempora, o mores.

The more I think about it, the more it seems to me that a typical journalist has about the same level of knowledge and education as someone who teaches Grade VII. Their specialty is listening, summarising and writing down what others have said or done. There is no in depth knowledge of anything required yet not only do we filter our news through these people we actual pay attention to their views.

This cannot end well.

A great article by Bettina Arndt the other day about the changing nature of sexual relations. She is summarising an academic piece titled, “Sexual Economics, Culture, Men and Modern Sexual Trends“. The central point:

Back in the 1960s, it was difficult to get sex without being married so men married early. Yet to qualify as good husband material, men had to have a job, or at least the prospect of getting one, had to show they were willing to work hard and be willing to commit to family life. So a man’s overarching goal of getting sex motivated him to become a respectable stakeholder contributing to society, suggest the psychologists.

‘The fact that men became useful members of society as a result of their efforts to obtain sex is not trivial,’ declare Baumeister and Vohs, pointing out how much that has changed. Many young men nowadays can ‘skip the wearying detour of getting education and career prospects to qualify for sex’. They have easy access to abundant sexual satisfaction, facing an early sex life that, according to Baumeister, probably would have exceeded the most optimistic imagination of most men throughout history. So men learn early that they don’t need to buy the cow to get milk.

So how has sexual liberation worked out for men. Sounds pretty disappointing:

Baumeister and Vohs point out that the traditional notion of a sexually accommodating wife ‘has been eroded if not demolished by feminist ideology that has encouraged wives to expect husbands to wait patiently until the wife actually desires sex, with the result that marriage is a prolonged episode of sexual starvation for the husband’.

The result is marriage offers grim prospects for hot-blooded young men: ‘To sustain a marriage across multiple decades, most husbands must accommodate to the reality of having to contribute work and other resources to a wife whose contribution of sex dwindles sharply in both quantity and quality – and who also may disapprove sharply of him seeking satisfaction in alternative outlets such as prostitution, pornography and extramarital dalliance,’ say the psychologists.

It even seems that men are no longer as interested in finding success at work since it is so easy to find accommodating women. As Arndt puts it:

Despite the fact men still create and run most institutions, the workplace is becoming progressively rigged against them because of anti-discrimination measures favouring women. They ask how it is that men have acquiesced so readily in giving women the upper hand in gaining access to these institutions, suggesting it may be due to the fact success isn’t as important as it once was for men, when it was a prerequisite for sex.

It’s all speculation and who can ever know the truth of any of this but it is interesting and strangely plausible. And yet another article, by Margaret Wente in The Globe and Mail, discussing the same piece of research. The key para:

A lot of women are in no hurry to get married, either. But it might not work out so well for them. They’ve watched too much Sex in the City. They think they’ll still have the same choices at 35 and 40 that they had at 25. They have no idea that men’s choices will get better with age (especially if they’re successful), but theirs will get worse. Believe me, this sucks. But it’s the truth.

What’s that about we get old too soon and smart too late?