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

by Helen Smith

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?

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

What they don’t realize is that the incentives to marry have changed for men, and they are no longer willing to risk so much more than in previous years to gain potentially so much less.

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.

As a post-college man, you are now seen by the media as a buffoon, a potential pervert, a bumbling dad—if not a deadbeat—and your wife gives you a death stare if you don’t satisfy her every whim.17 You might even have a child and find out later that it’s not yours, yet you still have to pay up. In short, you are a sucker if you grow up and fulfill what society now expects of the average married male. You have few rights and even less dignity.

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. Men who are married tend to

see their friends and family less often, which can harm their self-esteem.21 Marriage is also more likely to end in financial risk for a man if he is divorced.

Women are told constantly by society that they are “empowered” and this often translates into a man working, earning a living, helping with the housework and being relegated to the basement while the rest of the family enjoys the entire house. Does he get rewarded for this behavior? No, he is often second to his wife, the kids and even the dog. Hence, all the “doghouse” references that reinforce the idea that if he doesn’t buck up and do what society and the wife expect of him, punishment will follow.

Ultimately, society is asking men to do something that is going against their own interests. Their lives as single men are fulfilling, happy and, if not respected, at least envied by their married brethren. Life as a married man is often difficult with few perks and little in the way of respect or rights.

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.

The researchers found that the top three reasons that men did not marry was “they can get sex without marriage more easily than in times past,” “they can enjoy the benefits of having a wife by cohabiting rather than marrying,” and “they want to avoid divorce and its financial

risks.”

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? More readily available sex may be the by-product of not having to grow up, but to grow up to possibly not get sex, to lose your dignity, your rights, your kids, and possibly your financial freedom and to be hurt is hardly worth the chance for some, and can be suicidal for others.

Instead of spending our time trying to figure out how to get men to commit to marriage in its current state, we should be asking more questions like how can we make marriage more appeal...

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.

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.

Paternity laws, the lack of choices that men have in their decisions for parenthood, and issues surrounding child support are also giving men cause to question whether they are full-fledged citizens in our society, or second-class citizens who are forced into involuntary servitude by the state and the women who profess to have once loved them.

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.

Men’s rights are very much dependent on how honest she chooses to be.

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.3

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.4 Because women are given special privilege under the law when it comes to reproduction and men are held fully responsible for their acts, it is very important for men, and teen males and their parents, to educate themselves in regard to paternity rights and child custody in order to make informed decisions.

. . . fatherhood can be a nightmare—legal, financial, and emotional—due to the laws governing divorce, custody, and access. These laws are not going to prevent all men from investing in family life, certainly not those who consider marriage a religious covenant, but they have already made many other

men think twice before becoming involved in what could easily become a no-win situation. Why invest so heavily in family life after all, if your children can be taken away from you or even turned against you so easily?

He realizes that a woman who says “It’s my body, it’s my business,” and then chooses to have a child that she makes him pay for; forces him to take a job he might like less just because it pays more; forces him to stress himself out and die early—forces him to use his body for eighteen years. If it’s his body being used for eighteen years, and his body dying sooner, shouldn’t it be his business, too? Isn’t two decades of a man’s life worth nine months of a

woman’s?

The court ruled that “[i]f the sexual intercourse which results in the birth of a child is involuntary or without actual consent, a mother may have ‘just cause’ . . . for failing or refusing to support such a child.”15 I thought that it was all about the “best interests of the child” when it came to child support in the United States. Apparently, that’s only if the parent is male. As the saying goes, “women have rights; men have responsibilities.” Not only are men responsible for kids whom they didn’t consent to fathering, but they are also responsible for kids whom are not even theirs genetically.

For men, there are no reproductive benefits to marriage anymore. —Blogger Mike T., reflecting on state-sanctioned paternity fraud16

Many of these female genetic counselors are concerned with how the mother would feel if her husband found out the truth, not the poor duped dad, of course. Talk about a good old girl’s network. But since no one cares much about men’s emotions in these cases—there is little formal research on the emotional damage that paternity fraud has on men—and states just care about extracting money from any man possible, not much is being done to combat paternity fraud.

So the most common responses to paternity fraud from the polltakers was anger at the mother who put the man in this position and anger at the state that forces him to pay for a child that is not his.

Initially, feminism was presented as being about equal rights between the sexes. Now it is often about revenge and special privileges for women and girls.

Boys and their masculine traits and needs are often frowned upon in U.S. schools, and boys are now seen as “defective girls” in need of a major overhaul.

According to Sommers, “gender experts at Harvard, Wellesley, and Tufts, and in the major women’s organizations, believe that boys and men in our society will remain sexist (and potentially dangerous) unless socialized away from conventional maleness. . . . The belief that

boys are being wrongly ‘masculinized’ is inspiring a movement to ‘construct boyhood’ in ways that will render boys less competitive, more emotionally expressive, more nurturing—more, in short, like girls.”10 Boys are the gender most at risk...

Why aren’t boys more engaged in school? According to Sommers, “schools today tend to be run by women for girls. Classrooms can be hostile environments for boys. They like action, competition and

adventure stories. Those are not in favor. Games like tag and dodge-ball are out; tug of war has become tug of peace, and male heroes have been replaced by Girl Power.”14 Boys even receive lower marks by female teachers according to research done for the London School of Economic’s Centre for Economic Performance.15 Boys now feel no connection to school, because they are square pegs being forced into a round hole.

universities are increasingly becoming feminized and many men, to use the antidiscrimination vocabulary, loathe a hostile working environment. In a word, males increasingly feel emasculated in

today’s universities.

Women’s groups follow a double standard: When women lag behind men, that is an injustice that must be aggressively targeted. But when men are lagging behind women, that is a triumph of equity to be celebrated.

Men are now subject to so many sexual harassment and campus policies surrounding their sexuality that they are afraid to have much to do with the multitudes of women surrounding them on the average college campus. Women may complain that there are no men available, but, while there is a man shortage, the men who are on campus are often reluctant to get involved with their female cohorts because they lack the rights afforded to a common criminal in a court of law.

Colleges have now become privileged finishing schools for girls. Except rather than teaching manners, they teach women that men are the enemy and men are treated as such on campus, unless they go along with the program that keeps them cowed or striking a PC pose. Many men have just decided that they don’t belong in college and are going on strike, consciously or unconsciously.

“historians aren’t sure of the precise date, but sometime around 1970, everyone in the United States drank acid-laced Kool-Aid,

tie-dyed their brains, and decided fathers were no longer necessary.”2 Not only have many Western societies decided fathers aren’t necessary, they have decided that most men are perverts, predators or goofballs who should be monitored in public and private spheres.

Watch any modern (1990’s +) cartoon and you will get the same messages about males/men: that they are inferior to women. It is part of an overall plot to weaken our society. Schools ingrain this same philosophy/message all day long, and on the weekends and after school, the television finishes the job.24

Mac says: Yes, the incessant male bashing is disgusting and hateful.

However, if women are stupid enough to fall for it, they deserve what they get. What lots of them aren’t getting is married, and a lot of that is because more and more men are seeing the truth about women’s part in the society surrounding us. . . . Long story short, women have much more to fear in a world where men not only don’t respect them but actually dislike them. It’s coming to that, and the women have only themselves to blame. Young girls today are going to live in a much harder world because of the choices their mothers and sisters made in the last 30 years.26

Bob says: I have been saying for 15+ years now that TV shows and commercials portray men as

idiots, morons, objects of ridicule and humiliation, etc. . . . I’m on strike and have been for years now. Women are so full of hatred and disdain for me, and they have been bred with this idea that they are “empowered” to rule over us in every way. Family law has done the same; completely stacked against men and gives women total power over relationships and family. It simply doesn’t make sense anymore to connect with women on a long term basis; and forget about marriage. With feminism inculcating the idea that women should rule and dominate men (by trashing them in ads and shows, and elsewhere), it is an absolute danger for a man to get married. The modern American woman does not make for a secure relationship;