Shame and the Single Man
Dr. Helen, the wife of Instapundit, is more than a little dubious that women will be successful in attempting to shame single men into marriage:
So now that so many men don’t get married, the society will spend it’s time trying to shame them and discriminate to keep those guys in line. I imagine this will backfire. I was talking to a shoe salesman in his thirties the other day where I am visiting in Santa Monica and he asked me about my work and I told him about my forthcoming book. Without any prompting, he said, “I don’t want to get married.” When I asked “Why?” he said, “The risk is too great and there is no benefit. Even if you get a pre-nup, it doesn’t work. There is no incentive to me.”
So just maybe there are rational reasons other than weirdness and “fussiness” that keep men from tying the knot. But then, that would mean a columnist like the one writing the piece mentioned would have to understand more about where men are coming from and less about how she and society want men to fall in line with what women and society expect.
She is correct to be dubious because what we're seeing here are examples of both marginal utility and female solipsism. The solipsism can be seen in how women frequently attempt to direct shaming tactics towards men because they find shaming tactics to be so effective with women and cannot imagine that men would respond differently. The marginal utility of the tactic can be seen in how American men have, over the last 40 years, become increasingly indifferent, indeed, in some cases even openly hostile, to female demands and female expectations of them.
The problems Western societies in general, and American society in particular, are already beginning to face were no less predictable than the problems facing Chinese and Indian societies as a result of their massive slaughter of the unborn female population. These problems are significantly different, of course. Contra the feminist assumptions, (and by now it should be no surprise to observe that events have proven them to be wrong yet again), just as the slaughter of girls has raised the relative MMV of the surviving women in Chinese and Indian society by reducing their supply, the legal degradation and economic deterioration of men has raised the relative MMV of the smaller number of men still deemed marriageable by women.
It is simple economic supply and demand at work, on both sides. The female demand for more education and financial success increases, thus raising the price of the desirable men. However, the male demand for women has significantly declined due to the increased legal risks and increasing age of women at first marriage, among other things, further reducing their supply. Anyone who has taken Econ 101 should be able to correctly calculate what the interaction of the moving supply and demand curves necessarily implies: women will find it harder and harder to find desirable men willing to marry them. In September, I pointed out that already, the math dictates "only one-third of women in college today can reasonably expect to marry a man who is as well-educated as they are." And that ratio is only going to continue falling as time goes on, barring massive social, economic, or political changes.
This change in marriage-related demographics is not the only, nor the primary, reason the West is in decline. But it is most definitely a powerful factor in speeding up the process of decline and fall... and trying to shame single men responding rationally to the changes in society into modifying their behavior is simply not a credible solution.
2024 ANALYSIS
Twelve years later, as anticipated, shame has entirely failed as a strategy to encourage more young men to get married. To the contrary, men have even begun to demonstrate less interest in pursuing sex as well as marriage. And the marriage rate has fallen another 8.6 percent in the interlude, from 16.3 per 1,000 in 2011 to 14.9 per 1,000 in 2021.
Although the initial cause for the post-1970 decline in the marriage rate was the introduction of no-fault divorce, the growing reluctance of young men to get married post-1980 mirrors the rising number of college-educated women, a connection that I first pointed out in 2011 and has continued ever since.
In 1970, men outnumbered women in college, accounting for 59% of undergraduate enrollment in two-year institutions and 57% in four-year institutions. This was partly due to the high numbers of men enrolling for the purpose of avoiding conscription during the Vietnam War. In fact, the gender enrollment gap closed sharply as soon as the draft ended in 1973. By 1980, gender was perfectly balanced in four-year colleges, and women outnumbered men in two-year schools, accounting for 55% of enrollment in those institutions.
Since 1980, the female-to-male ratio in two-year college enrollment continued to increase until it hit about 1.4 in 1995, stabilizing at that point. The relative female-to-male ratio in four-year college enrollment, however, increased steadily throughout this time period, reaching 1.3 in the fall of 2019.
In Western guilt cultures, hypergamy and economics are more powerful social forces than shame. However, there are signs that the influence of female overrepresentation in higher education is starting to wane, as the declining value of a university degree and the growing tendency of corporations to stop requiring university degrees from job applicants suggests that a university degree may eventually cease to be a primary requirement for hypergamous female attraction.
>>Twelve years later, as anticipated, shame has entirely failed as a strategy to encourage more young men to get married.
In order to say that 'shame has failed as a strategy' I would have thought it would have needed to be tried. I only know anecdotally, from the individuals I deal with and the stacks I read etc., but I would have said we lived in the least 'shamed' generation since... forever. I see people complaining about being shamed (particuarly women) in regards to marriage... but their comment thread immediately fills up with 'you go, girl, don't you feel embarassed about not being married!' The young man who isn't married isn't constantly lectured, let alone socially excluded.
No, I would say that it isn't that shame has failed, it is that it hasn't been tried. Because the would-be shamers are doing remarkably little shaming.
I think you'll find this demographic comparison of American generational and "gender"-ational groups interesting. (Certainly not "good," but interesting.) All brought to us by public education and modern academia. https://www.prri.org/research/generation-zs-views-on-generational-change-and-the-challenges-and-opportunities-ahead-a-political-and-cultural-glimpse-into-americas-future/