Men on Strike: Why Men Are Boycotting Marriage, Fatherhood, and the American Dream - and Why It Matters

by Helen Smith

it is proven again and again as newspaper articles and stories show men being sentenced to jail even after paying child support, men being falsely accused of rape, men being forced to pay exorbitant amounts of alimony, or men being dismissed from jobs or college over unproven sexual harassment charges.

“men’s rights activists”—the only “rights activists” who get no respect in today’s world.

If you don’t believe me, look up the work of Murray A. Straus.3 When he noted that, contrary to popular opinion, women play a large role in domestic violence, Straus received death threats. Why? Because he didn’t fall in line with the academic sycophants. Forget about getting your work into journals or libraries. The gatekeepers will make sure that your voice is not heard. Readers, however, are not so easily dissuaded from learning the truth.

When I was in the Marine Corps, I was sued by 11 different women for child support. When you are enlisted, much information about you becomes public record. Single mothers who are pressured by state welfare agencies to name a father find enlisted men who are stationed overseas and name them as the father. Now you’re supposed to have 3 things to start a paternity claim, like you have to be in the same country as the mother at the time she gets pregnant, but no one cares about that. I got home from Afghanistan and found my bank account emptied out with no recourse . . . because I missed court hearings I didn’t know were happening, and by default became the legal father of a child. It’s a huge scam, and no one cares. . . . The state gets their money back from a rube, and the mother stops getting hounded.

In your discussion of men’s lack of reproductive rights, you could have mentioned that some docs will not perform vasectomies on married men without written permission from their wives. They do it to protect themselves from lawsuits but still, try to imagine a woman needing written permission from her husband to get her tubes tied.

Martin Luther King Jr. once said from a Birmingham jail, “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”

All around you, you hear the question, “Where have all the good men gone?” But you know instinctively that it’s the wrong question. The right one is “Why have all the good men gone on strike?”

I used to consider myself a feminist but mistakenly thought feminism meant equality between the sexes. In today’s culture, it means female privilege, and I believe discrimination against men is every bit as bad as discrimination against women—

Men kill themselves over pain like this and the statistics show they do it often. In 2010, the latest suicide statistics show that 38,364 people killed themselves nationally and 30,277 of those were men.

Ironically, even when you look at the suicide statistics, mostly the concern seems to be about women who kill themselves. Apparently, our society cares so little about men that those who kill themselves are hardly news.

There is a term for bailing out of the mainstream of society that I blogged about in 2008 called “Going John Galt”6 or “going Galt” for short.

It is not only in family relationships that men are screwed, but also in many areas of modern society. Men are portrayed as the bad guys, ready to rape, pillage, beat or abuse women and children at the drop of a hat. From rape laws that protect women but not the men they may accuse falsely to the lack of due process in sexual harassment cases on college campuses to airlines that will not allow men (possible perverts!) to sit next to a child,9 our society is at war with men and men know it full well.

Psychologist Warren Farrell, in his prophetic book The Myth of Male Power, written in 1993, talks about “the men’s movement as an evolutionary shift” and says the movement will be “the most incremental of movements” because it is “hard to confront the feelings we’ve learned to repress and hard to confront the women we’ve learned to protect.”10 Farrell believes that the greatest challenge of the men’s movement will be “getting men to ask for help for themselves. Men were always able to ask for help on behalf of others—for a congregation, their wives, children, or a cause—but not for themselves.

According to Farrell, “major movements have two core stimuli: 1) emotional rejection; and 2) economic hurt. When a large number of people feel emotionally rejected and economically hurt at the same moment in history, a revolution is in the making.

Now, instead of equality in marriage, he can expect to share household tasks, act as unpaid bodyguard and home repairman, pay for most of the bills, help with the kids and, for all his efforts, be denigrated by the wife and society. And if he does fight back?

He pays child support, gets half or more of his stuff taken and has to leave the house, and he might even get a restraining order or, worse, be charged with child or domestic abuse. What is there to gain? It’s no wonder that fewer and fewer men are getting married now than in the past. Kay Hymowitz states in her book, Manning Up, that “in 1970, 80 percent of 25-to 29-year-old men were married; in 2007, only about 40 percent of them were. In 1970, 85 percent of 30- to 34-year-old men were married; in 2007, only 60 percent of them were.”2 Men no longer see marriage as being as important as they did even fifteen years ago. “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.”3 Even in middle age, fewer men are getting married, especially those without a college degree.

According to men’s activists Glenn Sacks and Dianna Thompson: The US marriage rate has dipped 40% over the past four decades, to its lowest point ever. There are many plausible explanations for this trend, but one of the least mentioned is that American men, in the face of a family court system which is hopelessly stacked against them, have subconsciously launched a “marriage strike.”

can’t help but feel that many so-called experts are wrong when they say that men are poor communicators. My interactions and observations show that men often know their minds very well, but they are reluctant to communicate in interpersonal and political settings for fear of coming across as weak or, worse, being accused of being sexist or misogynistic. Or sometimes, they are communicating, it’s just that no one is listening or people are actively rejecting what they say.

I have a different take: I propose that men are autonomous beings who are entitled to justice and equality and the pursuit of their own happiness because they are human beings in a supposedly free society.

Maybe there is no incentive to grow up anymore. It used to be that being a grown-up, responsible man was rewarded with respect, power and deference. Now you get much less of that, if any at all.

You have few rights and even less dignity. And what about the perks if you don’t get married and grow up? It turns out that there are many, as I discovered with a little digging.

First off, if you live with your girlfriend, research shows you might be happier than if you got married.

This means that men who live with girlfriends rather than get married may not be taken for granted as often, as it seems that married women often treat their husbands more like the hired help than an equal partner.

Marriage is also more likely to end in financial risk for a man if he is divorced.

The discrepancy between the life of the freer, single man and the life of the less respected, less free life of the married man is at the heart of why so many men have gone on strike.

Yes, perhaps men do feel less pressure to marry, which is a good thing in many ways. But rather than “let off the hook by permissive social mores,”25 the real reason many rational men do not marry is that the incentives have changed and growing up is no longer a reward but a punishment for men—so why do it?

It is said that men can’t handle intimacy. That’s not it at all. It is sadness that men can’t handle and they fear that intimacy will take them there. —Jack at Dr. Helen blog

Here is one example from an anonymous commenter: Problem is, at least 7 out of 10 guys I talk to tell me that it is one of the worst mistakes that they ever made. Some tell me not to marry American women, that they are all feminist at heart. One married guy told me that I could get the same effect by selling my house, giving all my money away and having someone castrate me. This is really starting to unnerve me and the more I learn about the legal bias against men, I’m beginning to back off of marriage. I love my girlfriend, but all of these guys say their girlfriends changed once they married and begin to dominate and control. I am starting to think marriage in America cannot be saved.

I met a woman that I was sure was my soul mate. I was deeply in love and so, I thought, was she. All this changed when I lost my high paying job through downsizing. To my credit, I went to work immediately and had two jobs, but still only made about 80% of my old income. My wife gave me a year and then began sleeping with a man, who hadn’t lost his job, in my bed while I was at work. She left with him, taking almost all of my savings and anything else she could carry. Her explanation was that she was “an expensive bitch” and she was unhappy because I worked so much. The adultery doesn’t seem to matter to the court and she got essentially everything. Besides the financial losses, I was so devastated by the betrayal that I could barely function for months. She treated me like garbage and I never worked harder at any endeavor in my life.

the problem is that marriage is quite explicitly NOT a contract in our modern society. Instead, it’s a collection of whatever the judiciary/legislature decides it is today.

Personally I hate the idea that a woman can stop anything and everything I care about doing just by making my life a living hell until I concede to her demands.

Vox Day is a blogger who runs the Alpha Game blog that is summed up with the following caption across the top: “Breaking the chains, winning the games, and saving Western Civilization.”35 He is also a game designer and author who is interested in the plight of the modern male. His site is a place for guys to discuss the difficulties of modern relationships, video games and just general guy stuff.

Vox Day, like so many of the pickup artist bloggers, has a male socio-sexual hierarchy that he uses to classify men. Here are a few of his classifications and their characteristics:

Monetary success does tend to correlate with sexual success for men. The average income of the 28 ALPHAs, who had an average age of 38, was 50% higher than the average at $112k. The average income of the male virgins, whose average age was 31, was 16% lower than the norm at $63k.

And yet, money is clearly not the only determinant since there are ALPHAs with no income and virgins with very high incomes. Still, throwing out just one outlier on both ends would make the correlation even stronger.

There is a noticeable difference between the Alphas and the High Alpha players. The obvious dividing line there is around 40+ partners. So, there is the all-important distinction many women have requested. Any man with more than 30+ historical partners should probably be assumed to be a ruthless player intrinsically unfit for a long-term relationship as 62% of the men in this category were anti-marriage.

It seems that men who have had more than thirty partners are less interested in marriage, as are men who are virgins, who are the most anti-marriage. The High Alpha men with numerous partners might be players and just enjoy being that way. But, female readers, take note: Those Alpha men with fifteen to thirty partners are the most marriage-minded. Perhaps if an Alpha is not an all-out player, he is more likely to have the confidence and prior positive experience to believe he can make a marriage work and is confident enough to feel that nothing will go wrong legally or otherwise.

For those men who are not Alphas, many fewer women are available. If 24 percent of the men are sharing 76 percent of the women, the sexual prospects are poor for the 76 percent of men who are sharing the other 24 percent of women.

The “strike” theory is generally correct, I think. The problem is that games and porn are entertaining, inexpensive, easily accessible, and reliable. Women can be entertaining, but they’re expensive, inaccessible for most men, and from the male perspective, shockingly unreliable.

Eight out of ten girls my age today are “sketchy.” —Twenty-three-year-old Max at the gym on why men don’t want to get married early

Marriage is a dying concept. —Twenty-four-year-old Jamie, when asked why men don’t get married as often

Even Whoopi Goldberg nonchalantly talked about how she cheated on her husband with little judgment or repercussions by society. In an interview, she stated, “is screwing around five or six times while married and with different men for that matter something you can say casually? In the celebrity world perhaps.”42 But if you are Tiger Woods, you can be hit in the head with a golf club if you cheat and society cheers on your wife for being empowered. You will also lose much of your income and assets in divorce court and may even lose your kids, even if the wife cheats. And you are always cast as the bad guy: People wonder what you did to make your wife cheat. If a man cheats, on the other hand, the wife is a victim and he’s a louse who deserves punishment.

As the saying goes, in vino veritas—a Latin phrase that translates to “in wine [there is the] truth.”

I thought about what Bruce said and realized that women are constantly upset or going after men regarding physical abuse because men are often physically stronger. But women are often verbally more skilled and more ready to manipulate others using these verbal skills. Men aren’t taught how to fight back verbally nor do they often want to; for some, it is not their nature. Men like Bruce would rather live the single life than have to spend their years being battered verbally without any recourse, since the laws and culture favor women and see men who cannot stand up for themselves as unworthy of sympathy, as wimps who can’t “man up” and stay in control.

However, in today’s society, manipulating a woman the way this girlfriend was manipulating and verbally berating Bruce would be seen as psychologically abusive if he responded in kind, and many men don’t have the stomach for it.

What this lawyer doesn’t seem to understand is that when masculinity is frowned upon and belittled in every aspect of society from the media to the classroom, men start to internalize the message. Our society tells men they are worthless perverts who reek of male privilege while simultaneously castrating them should they act in a manly manner, and now women are upset because men are becoming more feminized? You reap what you sow.

We are already moving toward a society in which women have colonized reproduction, along with childrearing, and men will have less and less incentive to participate fully in family life and more and more penalties if any problems arise. —Paul Nathanson and Katherine K. Young in Legalizing Misandry

Men’s rights are very much dependent on how honest she chooses to be. —Michael Higdon, Professor of Family Law, The University of Tennessee

In the 1990s, if a woman and man make love and she says she is using birth control but is not, she has the right to raise the child without his knowing he even has a child, and then to sue him for retroactive child support even ten to twenty years later (depending on the state). This forces him to take a job with more pay and more stress and therefore earlier death. . . . He has the option of being a slave (working for another without pay or choice) or being a criminal. Roe v. Wade gave women the vote over their bodies. Men still don’t have the vote over theirs—whether in love or war.

For example, courts almost exclusively favor the mother and force men to pay child support to mothers regardless of whether she used false information or made false statements to the man concerning birth control.