5 years later: marriage rates and spinsterhood projections

About 5 years ago I posted on Marriage rates and end game spinster predictions. In that article I estimated approximately:

1. 9-14% “unwanted spinsterhood” — about 1 in 10 women
2. 19-24% “unwanted cohabitation and unwanted spinsterhood” — about 2 in 10 women

IFStudies has a blog about: 1-in-4 projecting childlessness among today’s young women.

Image is from the above link.

Already over 30% of women are single at 35 years old, and only 15% are single at 50 years old. I believe this includes cohabitation data as well. My data I was working with in the other post was only up to age 44-45ish (same data as Dalrock), so going up to 50 provides even a better snapshot of what is going on. Currently 15% of women are single at 50% and that appears on the rise.

They estimate it’s going to be about 25% in the long run, or approximately on the upper bounds of what I estimated. However, that’s just singleness and doesn’t necessarily include unwanted cohabitation. Therefore, the number of women that are unhappy is likely about 10% larger than that which would place that around 35%.

Image is also from the above link.

Additionally, the try to control for those with “child free” ideals.

About 1% of women over the age of 40 are “childfree,” meaning they don’t have kids and they report having a zero-child ideal (or believe it’s not ideal to have children). An additional 2-4% are ambiguous; they might be childfree or childless. But even if those two groups are added together, yielding maybe 5% of women being childfree, about 15% of women over 40 in the GSS report having no children, yet having a fertility ideal higher than zero. These women are childless. In other words, even today, about 75% of women without children who are past their reproductive years are properly described as childless, not childfree.

Grouping the ambiguous with the childfree is being charitable. Instead of about 75% of the childless women, it’s likely to be closer to 80-90% or so are childless.

In another analysis, I talked about how it is likely obesity that is driving the decline in marriage.

Currently,

• 15% of women are childless.
• 34% of women have children out of wedlock (40% out of wedlock * 85% women with children).
• 51% of women have children in marriage

Both childless and out of wedlock births are increasing, so it’s possible that we’ll ultimately see only 30-40% or less children being born in wedlock.

This makes it all the more imperative to have good father figures, mentors, and discipleship programs from Churches. Lots of kids are going to be coming from broken families, and lots of men and women are going to be single.

Men supposedly dropping from the labor force because of social status

This article was a head scratcher.

But part of the population has been silently walking away from work for several decades—well before the COVID-19 pandemic began.

Men without four-year college degrees, between the ages of 25 and 54, have left the workforce in higher numbers than other groups. And they’re leaving in part because of their perceived social status relative to better-educated men of similar age, according to a new study from the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston.

Non-college-educated men have seen their pay shrink by more than 30% since 1980 compared to the average earnings of all other prime-age workers. Their weekly earnings have declined 17%, while those of college-educated men rose by 20%, adjusting for inflation. That earnings loss has caused a decline in their social status, prompting them to walk away from work entirely, Pinghui Wu, the author of the study, wrote.

“For many workers, a job not only offers financial security, it also affirms their status, which is tied to their position relative to their age peers and many social outcomes,” Wu wrote.

The study found that the decline in earnings for non-college-educated men over the last four decades has increased their likelihood of leaving the labor force by nearly half a percentage point. That also accounts for 44% of the increase in their exit rate.

Even though the pattern of men withdrawing from the labor force dates back several years, it has been more pronounced in recent years, as a number of men who left the workforce during the pandemic chose not to return.

Nearly 89.7% of men between 35 to 44 years were looking for jobs or already working as of November. That’s down from 90.9% before the pandemic, according to the New York Times.

Younger white men in particular were more likely to leave when their expected wages fell relative to their more educated peers, according to the Fed study. Unlike men, women have not seen the same level of decline in their wages based on education. That group has seen a 32% increase in weekly earnings, irrespective of their educational qualifications.

Essentially, because white men and other men are supposedly seeing their wages drop they’re leaving the workforce more often. This seems like garbage post-hoc analysis.

For as much as many people and companies say that you shouldn’t discuss pay, there’s not a lot of pay discussing going on for the most part. And even when someone hears about pay being discussed they’re not going to rage-quit their job because someone makes more than them. They’re just going to update their resume and apply for a different job or ask for a raise.

What is more likely is that failure to launch is increasing. One of the men I know is in his mid 30s and has basically given up. He’s working part time if at all and just living at his parents house after he couldn’t really find much job prospects after college.

I suspect this is the case with most of the statistics. They only look at the general aggregate and it seems like men are dropping out as wages are dropping. However, failure to launch has less to do with wages but the detonation of various college degrees that promised to have certain job prospects where there are few — AKA the “liberal arts” degrees in gender studies and whatever as opposed to STEM. Even STEM isn’t what it once was where the only useful science degrees are the ones that are related to engineering such as petroleum or chemical engineering. Biology and other science degrees are virtually worthless except as a stepping stone to professional degrees like medical doctors, nursing, and so on.

A solid job but underpaid men are still going to take it. This can be easily improved upon. But the total loss of job prospects with no way out leads men into a downward spiral of hopelessness. You see this all throughout the rust belt and cities where steel and other manufacturing jobs basically tanked.

The “jezebel spirit”

One of my readers sent me a article on the jezebel spirit in today’s women.

• She is very manipulative
• Hates men of God especially if they’re faithfully doing the work of God
• She joins weak churches and destroys them
• She hates prophets
• She targets single men to destroy their anointing
• She Operates in witchcraft; this includes jealousy, pride, envy, intimidation, manipulation, hatred
• She twists scripture
• She is Religious
• She Hates women and men in authority especially in authority over her
• She Seeks attention; looks to always gain a place of power or authority and would do anything to take someone’s place
• She Hates the Truth
• She will not submit to a man; if she does it’ll only be in order to gain ground or pretense, Conditional submission. “As long as you do this and this, I’ll submit to you”. Some wives allow this spirit to seduce them and they become submissive to their husbands only when it’s beneficial to them. This is rebellion in the Marriage bed. Submission is powerful and invites God’s blessings but the enemy lies to some wives enticing them to operate in a Jezebelic manner.
• She may look innocent and be widely known as being very helpful and friendly, but he/she is deceitfully cunning and subtle; like a snake.
• She has this deep feeling of wanting to be praised, worshipped, told nice things and complimented all the time. The Jezebel spirit likes to be adored like a God.
• She never forgets when she is wronged because people with the Jezebel spirit struggle to forgive others. Even capable of killing or destroying your life. They’ll even wait years to get revenge or find out something happended to you. They often believe everyone needs to pay for what they’ve done or said to hurt her.

While all of this is true, I’m very skeptical of people saying that they’re tempted by spirits or Satan. Heck, I’ve said Satan is a scapegoat before.

James 1:13 No one is to say when he is tempted, “I am being tempted by God”; for God cannot be tempted by evil, and He Himself does not tempt anyone. 14 But each one is tempted when he is carried away and enticed by his own lust. 15 Then when lust has conceived, it gives birth to sin; and sin, when it has run its course, brings forth death.

When you have a culture that diverges from Judeo-Christian ethics, you have increasing moral immaturity. This leads to people not knowing right from wrong and with their conscience’s seared they will be much more strongly prone to give into whatever desires their heart wants. This is where things like the destructive “jezebel spirit” comes in.

While I am not denying that Satan and demons are real, but in most cases humans — both men and women — fall to temptation of their own desires rather than having actual spiritual warfare against them.

In other words, most of the women who display the “jezebel spirit” are just doing it because it feels good to their flesh to play the victim and blame men for everything.

It is the women who are supposedly Christian who do the same thing that should know better. However, like all women it is easy for them to fall for the same temptations that display themselves in culture and to act the same way — to the destruction of their own marriages. Yet many of them claim to be Proverbs 31 and Titus 2 women.

The rising popularity of women supposedly understanding men

Info posted this vid in the comments on Jack’s post. Interestingly, I was in the middle of writing something on this.

 

The video basically mentions several women making in-roads into the “manosphere” by basically parroting “red pill” talking points. I didn’t know about RomaArmy before, but it proves the point.

• https://www.youtube.com/@RomaArmyMensRights/videos
• https://www.youtube.com/@JustPearlyThings/videos
• https://www.youtube.com/@CourtneyRyan/videos

Essentially, what is happening is something that is similar to what happened mid-manosphere. Dozens of women’s blogs popped up around the ‘sphere and men generally flocked to them. For the Christian manosphere that was Sunshine Mary’s blog for a while.

This is why around 2015 I wrote a post on why I stopped reading women’s blogs and that men should stop doing that.

What I see tend to see is that men who need to grow in masculinity read womens’ blogs is that they get very complacent with their own growth. In addition, what usually ends up happening is that any discourse usually devolves into the blame game or patting on the back which wastes valuable time that could be spent elsewhere.

On the other hand, some men get set off track and end up holding said women as ‘paragons of virtue’ when they are simply women who have the nature of women and make mistakes too. Married men often become discontented in their own marriage at this, and it sets up unrealistic expectations for single men looking to be married.

In general, obviously I’m a small blog but the theme remains for social media content like it does for blogs. Don’t follow women in general.

Women who are able to understand and articulate the male experience (or at least parrot it effectively) have an exponential power to gain a following from men and women. For instance, I’ve noticed a general phenomena on Instagram where men and women with about the same level of status or fame, then the woman has about 10x the amount of followers. So if the man has 100k followers, the woman will usually have 1 million followers. If he has 10k she will have 100k. 

While many women distrust said women in this instance, some of the women who are not woke will implicitly trust what the woman is saying because it comes from a woman and not a man. The vid makes the point that Rollo has 200k followers on Youtube and has been doing it for 20 years whereas these two in the past 2-3 years are already over 1M.

From the men’s side, it appears many men have this some sort of fantasy where they want to believe and want to think that women understand them. When women can articulate some of the male experience and how much harder it is compared to women and how the majority of men have gotten a really bad deal in the dating market it gives them hope.

While it’s true that some women can be taught these things and understand men better, I think generally it’s a big waste of time for men to invest in these types of things. We like to call the men that subscribe to a woman’s OnlyFans SIMPs, but this is nearly the same thing under the guise of supposed male improvement. It’s an emotional investment into something that isn’t going to be building you up that much and virtually places you in an echo chamber.

It’s attempting to find some sort of fantasy fulfillment in women, and even a woman that you’re not in a relationship with or married to. Neither is good, but the former seems more innocuous when it can be as destructive.

 

Morality and trends in sex

Wholly unsurprising analysis about the difference in morality of liberal versus conservative women. Obviously, the picture is from the link.

I’m a bit confused on people who would call themselves conservative but not 100% say that adultery is wrong. I know that not all people who are conservative are also conservative Christians, but I think that’s hard to find nowadays. Most people who call themselves conservatives and are probably not Christian likely do have vestiges of Judeo-Christian ethics though.

However, I’m not surprised that liberal women have a big gap in saying that a married woman having an affair is more acceptable than a man. Liberal women are the queens of the feminist double standards: “Men are more wrong, and generally women can very rarely do wrong.”

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https://ifstudies.org/blog/trends-in-sexual-activity-among-religious-teens (images from this source).

This is, again, wholly unsurprising given what came out of purity culture and whatnot.

Churchianity has replaced Christianity completely in this area. The few Churches that do preach against against sex don’t practically do anything about it: they don’t help parents teach their children at home (such as Deut 6 shema- teaching is supposed to not just be done by the Church or pastors but by fathers and mothers), the Church and parents still send the kids out to do whatever for singleness without giving them the tools for what to look for in a marriage and how to go about it, and other things like these.

It’s no wonder you can’t really tell a difference between the various forms of Christianity and non-Christians here. Same with the divorce rates. If you do the same things as the world then you’re going to look like the world.

The general process of sanctification with moral discernment, moral agency, and mature theosis

Reviewing one my comments, I never really thought of it as the process of sanctification as grounding moral agency. This in part stems from the previous post as well on Husbands are to improve the moral agency of their wives though sanctification.

“I’ve even come to the conclusion that Moral Agency is what the Bible refers to as Freedom in Christ.”

Interesting way to put it. I’ve said something similar, but not in those words.

I’ve always thought about it being the flipside Paul’s assessment that we once were “slaves to sin” and by repenting and following Jesus we have “freedom in Christ.”

Talked about this in Not Curses but Punishments (Genesis 3) Part 1 (2016/5/28). Not Curses but Punishments (Genesis 3) Part 2 (2016/5/28) alludes to the choice:

“Prior to the fall, Adam and Eve lived in perfect headship-submission in harmony. However, after the fall, Eve gets her just desserts punishment from eating of the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil — the choice to choose between good (submission) or evil (usurpation, rebellion, desire to be like man) in her relationship with her husband. Prior to the fall, her submission was present and easy; after the fall, her choice is more difficult, much like the other punishments.”

Moral agency… the choice to choose between good and evil. Though as sinners without a Savior we were almost doomed to fall to temptation. But Christ brings freedom to go beyond our circumstances there.

I’d also argue that moral agency is a process built up progressively as mentioned in 2 Peter:

2 Peter 1:5
For this very reason, make every effort to add to your faith goodness; and to goodness, knowledge; 6 and to knowledge, self-control; and to self-control, perseverance; and to perseverance, godliness; 7 and to godliness, mutual affection; and to mutual affection, love. 8 For if you possess these qualities in increasing measure, they will keep you from being ineffective and unproductive in your knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ. 9 But whoever does not have them is nearsighted and blind, forgetting that they have been cleansed from their past sins.

Faith -> goodness/virtue -> knowledge (of right and wrong) -> self control -> perseverance -> godliness

This is the path that a moral agent should take. The first 3 from faith, goodness / virtue, and knowledge help you to understand right from wrong, and then self control, perseverance, and godliness help you act on that. That culminates in ‘loving God and loving your neighbor as yourself’ with brotherly love / mutual affection and love.

What we have in 2 Peter 1 is the 3 part process of sanctification:

• Moral discernment — faith, goodness/virtue, and knowledge (of right and wrong)
• Moral agency — Choosing right (or wrong) based on moral discernment through self control, perseverance, and godliness
• Mature theosis (becoming like Jesus/God) — brotherly love and (agape) love.

We are all in the process of the spectrum of sanctification in many different areas of our lives.

Like with “natural marriage” as opposed to God’s “covenant marriage,” God has Created human conscious and interactions that those who follow His principles are generally successful (though not always) whether they consciously follow Him or not. This can be seen clearly as societies based around following Judeo-Christian ethics, virginity at marriage, lifelong marriage, and other sexual morality tend to be the most successful over time.

A society with a foundation of Judeo-Christian ethics generally conforms to the first 2 processes of moral discernment and moral agency. This is why both men and women were more mature in the past, yet going away from that over time leads to stunting of moral discernment and agency. This is why we have many men and especially women out there now with grade school, middle school, or high school level of moral agency at best.

Societies that encourage victim-hood or oppressed classes will naturally have increasing stunting of moral discernment and moral agency in those specific classes. After all, if you are a victim you can do no wrong because wrong is being done to you. It is the illusion of “no choice” and without choice you do not need moral discernment or moral agency.

Mature theosis seems to confined to maturity in Christ. The ability to transcend suffering circumstance with joy can only be done through the power of the Holy Spirit working in concert with a foundation of moral discernment and moral agency. These are some of the examples:

• For the joy set before Christ (we are that joy), He endured the cross – Hebrews 12
• The disciples being joyful and singing hymns after being beaten and imprison – Acts 16
• Christ’s call for us to love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us — Matthew 5

Drawing this back to womens’ moral agency, Adam was tasked with being the head of Eve in the garden and failed God by listening to Eve’s voice instead of God’s. Christ renews that with the New Creation in the New Testament with Paul showing us that we should emulate Christ’s example of being a head and loving the Church through the analogy — Christ:Church::Husbands:Wives.

This task bring us to the main 4 points of Jack’s summary on female agency in regard to being wives. To summarize, in my words:

1. Women’s capacity in moral agency is more difficult compared to men as they are more easily deceived and tend to be averse to accepting consequences of their actions. Husbands as such must live with their wives in an understanding way showing honor as women are a weaker vessel but co-heirs in Christ (1 Peter 3).
2. Women’s and men’s responsibility with their agency is sex specific to the Biblical marital roles and responsibilities. Men are to be the head/lead and love their wives, and wives are to be helpers, respect, and submit to their husbands.
3. Women’s agency in full maturity is weaker than men’s, but it still must be led and encouraged through a husband’s emulation of Christ’s love of for the purpose of sanctification. A woman/wife who has been more grounded in the Christian faith and practice will show obvious fruit in how she acts toward her husband and others in her life.
4. Women’s culpability in moral agency is still present and active. Eve was held responsible for God for listening to the voice of the serpent and being deceived and eating of the tree. Women are not victims. They have a choice to obey God or not from the beginning until now, and that has not changed.

This reminds me of the differential things we need to do for different scenarios from the Scriptures.

1 Thess 5:14 And we urge you, brothers, warn those who are idle and disruptive, encourage the disheartened, help the weak, be patient with everyone.

Depending on what is happening there needs to be a variable response to the situation. Boys and girls that are growing often need encouragement and help and definitely patience. However, if they are disruptive or idle they need warnings, rebuke, or correction.

The same can be true of a wife — and new brothers and sisters in Christ in discipleship — who may have stunted moral discernment and/or moral agency in certain circumstances to push them on the path to mature theosis. While patterns of behavior (both male and female) show that different frameworks are effective, we must take into account the specific circumstances surrounding the right or wrong and how to lead and teach effectively.

Husbands are to improve the moral agency of their wives through sanctification

Jack’s distribution on Zippy’s moral agency reminded me of most of the Big 6 personality trait distributions, male-female IQ distributions, and others. This seems to me like a fairly good way to assess moral agency as it stands.

Perhaps reading or math level could be a decent analogy. In inner city schools if the parents don’t teach their kids to take school seriously then they’re going to be stunted in their education. Their reading and writing and math will start to lag behind. However, the capacity for something like say math is relatively similar for boys and girls except boys generally trend stronger in the STEM subjects. Let’s go with this analogy.

There’s a common RP saying that “wives are the most responsible teenager in the room.” We’ll assess this later.

Cane Caldo made an astute observation on the temptation nature of men and women that has stuck with me for almost a decade now.

The typical desire of a typical man is weighed thus: “Can I get the goods without getting in trouble?” A woman says to herself, “How do I get the goods without getting in trouble?” While the difference in words is subtle to the ear; the meanings are widely separated. The thought of doing without is a secondary consideration at best. That’s just in the nature of a woman, and why they need a leader.

Now, try and imagine successive generations of women; each raised on more and more skewed diet of unmerited praise and affirmation, but without hearing “No” and without consequences. If you can’t imagine it, then go to the mall, or the office, or the DMV and open your bloody eyes.

So A power-play by a woman is not a misguided come-on. It’s a power-play. There could be a come-on mixed in, but the attempt at control is for its own sake; simply because she is driven to strive to be in control. The come-on (if there) is for him, but the power-play is for power.

Women who don’t want to be in control are a figment of the imagination. It’s their sin nature. The marriageable ones are those women who struggle against it. The honorable women are those who redirect their desires, and only ask themselves “How do I get The Good?”

The difference, as Cane explains, is very similar to how men and women evaluate right and wrong and their consequences.

• Men – Right or wrong? -> if wrong and I want it badly, can I do it without getting in trouble? -> if I can do it without getting in trouble, how can I do it without getting in trouble?
• Women – Right or wrong? -> if wrong and I want it badly, how can I do it without getting in trouble?

This is perhaps related to solipsism. As Cane says, the thought of doing without is a secondary consideration. When a woman really wants something she will do everything to make it happen (e.g. pursue an alpha). This is why Eve is easily deceived into taking and eating the fruit. Envy and jealousy are two of womens’ biggest struggles.

Now, we have some type of scenario where most men and women are able to get to college level of moral agency. Men probably have some sort of inherent advantage where they are more inclined to be 100% moral actors, but moral agency can be blunted if right and wrong are not taught adequately. Hence, why God instructed Israel’s men (Deut 6) to constantly teach the law to their children. Parents need to teach their kids right from wrong.

However, some men and even more women get stunted in their educational growth on moral agency. Just as rich parents who spoil their kids get kids who have no morals or responsibility, so too the culture at the moment pushes women to less morally capable than they are able to be.

When Judeo-Christian values were nearly universally accepted in the West most men and women got to at least high school or college level — probably 80-100% range — of being capable moral agents. However, with the increase in victimhood culture especially with women and minority groups, moral agency has started to plummet. We are seeing grade school and middle school level moral agents these days. Perhaps even some toddler level.

However, for Christians, Christ exemplifies this for the Church which is the analogy used for husbands and wives.

Ephesians 5:25 Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her 26 to make her holy, cleansing her by the washing with water through the word, 27 and to present her to himself as a radiant church, without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless.

Sanctification can only be had if someone is a moral agent and able to determine right and wrong. Only if they know what is right and wrong are they able to be convicted by their conscience and repent of their wrongdoing. Hence, why husbands are tasked with sanctifying their wives like Christ does the Church.

This is how the process usually goes:

Obviously, a wife who is respectful and submissive even when it is difficult is much easier to trust than one who is disrespectful and rebellious. But there are many different steps that it takes to get there. For instance,

1. A wife who is disrespectful and rebellious according to her own whims
2. A wife who knows what is right but can be disrespectful and rebellious when things get tough for her
3. A wife who knows what is right but has developed greater self control and perseverance but sometimes slips up when things are tough
4. A wife who knows what is right and it’s rare that she’s disrespectful and rebellious

There can be many in between with these circumstances like how she responds to teaching, correction, or rebuke for good or for evil. You could probably make another whole list or expand this one to 8-9 bullet points with these.

However, the point is that if you and your wife are a Christian and actively wanting to obey God and His Biblical roles and responsibilities, the sanctification process will be gradual over time in most cases and it is a process. This process is cultivated step by step and large jumps though they can happen tend to be unlikely since unlearning ingrained sinfulness is difficult.

Regardless of the level of moral agency of a wife started at or has grown in the process, the goal should be to continually sanctify her to be more like Jesus. Thus, her moral capability to acknowledge any wrongdoing and repent should increase over time. As she becomes a stronger moral agent, she will become a more mature Christian who can resist temptation more effectively.

Circling back to the “women are the most responsible teenager in the room” saying, I think this is conditionally true. It can be true if a woman is stuck a middle school to high school level of moral agency with associated responsibility. However, like most RP sayings they ignore the absolute truth from the Scriptures that women do have the capacity for moral growth through the sanctification process.

Cheap sex leads to decreasing marriage rates or not?

Back and forth articles on IFStudies.

• https://ifstudies.org/blog/new-research-on-cheap-sex-and-marriage-chances
• https://ifstudies.org/blog/sex-is-still-cheap-marriage-is-still-declining-a-response-to-wolfinger-and-perry-

I found these articles silly in terms of trying to understand why marriage rates have dropped because of ‘cheap sex’ or not. In them, basically they’re arguing the back and forth whether cheap sex has an influence on marriage rates given the decreasing amount of marriage formation the more sexual partners that one has.

While there is some validity in that notion — some men don’t want to marry women with very promiscuous pasts — the bigger issue is always going to be the nature of the expanding expectations that women have and the obesity(1) epidemic(2) for real(3).

Even in the “free love” 1960s-1970s most of the men and women there still got married. Dalrock’s coverage of the never married data shows that even with people racking up higher partner counts from 1960s-1970s (the 45-49 year old age groups in the 2000s and 2010s) they still got married past 90% rates like most successful civilizations.

The big meaningful differences between 1960s and 1970s is the rates of obesity have skyrocketed in addition to social media literally destroying the dating markets. Social media has become so curated that people only put out the best, and everyone needs to be in some neat little package. So when you meet other people that are not all that like most people are then there’s going to be mega-differences in expectations versus reality. I don’t even have to mention feminism in making womens’ expectations skyhigh either. Porn, being raised by divorced parents or single parents, and other factors likely play an influence as well.

Cheap sex may well explain a bit, but the bigger issues still loom.

Narrative denial – The crushing loneliness of the girl boss

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/crushing-loneliness-girl-boss-katherine-dee

When the COVID lockdowns began in March 2020—that great sterilization of our personal lives, that mass removal of distraction—I observed something strange. My peers, ordinarily proud of their independence, realized that they didn’t just love their families but kinda liked them. Other friends—friends who’d been stuck quarantining with roommates or, worse yet, alone—yearned for families. They began joking about how nice it’d be to have a husband and kids for company in eating or drinking themselves to death or, less gloomily, in sharing their freshly baked sourdoughs. With the mounting pressure of COVID restrictions, many people learned that their “chosen families” of friends and colleagues were less durable than they’d thought.

I wasn’t a detached onlooker. I, too, worked a tech job 3,000 miles away from my family, the kind located on a plush campus with floor-to-ceiling windows and on-demand gelato. Then suddenly the artifice was stripped away, and my time was no longer broken up by campus bike rides or leisurely strolls to the office sushi chef. I was alone facing the silence of the day, and I found myself confronted by questions I hadn’t asked since my early twenties: What am I for? Why am I doing any of this?

The consequences of believing that women should be just like men! Feminism is great, am I right?

It was around this time that I noticed an uptick in feminism-skeptical social media content. There’s always been a market for anti-feminism online for the same reasons that being a “gamer girl” sells: It leverages a niche position that’s in high demand but undersupplied. And yet this felt different. The feminism-critical content I was seeing came from all points on the political spectrum, across every race and economic demographic, and, importantly, from people who didn’t appear to be selling anything. Of course, there were some people angling to become capital-p Personalities, but mostly I saw ordinary women venting their frustrations, many of them spurred by the conditions brought on by the pandemic. Some of these women were part of larger digital subcultures, like the modest fashion movement, or the now infamous subreddit, Female Dating Strategy. Others were part of nascent philosophical and intellectual scenes, a reactionary feminism spearheaded by writers like Mary Harrington, Louise Perry, Nina Power, Helen Roy, and Alex Kaschuta.

But this didn’t seem like a case of subcultural capture, or a trendy ideology amplified by a small group of vocal spokespeople. It was a much broader feeling that something had gone terribly wrong, leaving so many women so deeply unhappy in lives that seemed, on the surface, to be tolerable, or even good.

“The ‘I’m an independent strong Black woman’ narrative is a scam,” said one TikTok video personality in August, cautioning Black women, in particular, against buying into the familiar “girl boss” narrative, and encouraging them to seek stability in their communities. Alt-girls with septum piercings and tattoo sleeves shared how the microblogging site Tumblr’s glamorization of sex work and BDSM put them in harm’s way. Another video, since taken down, featured Muslim women discussing the pitfalls of Western feminism.

These critiques crept into explicitly left and left-liberal spaces, too, not just those prone to agree with socially conservative thought. In the wake of the West Elm Caleb episode—a peak COVID-era social media spectacle in which several women realized they’d been ghosted by the same man—even the notoriously and often punitively “woke” Washington Post journalist Taylor Lorenz levied criticism against the excesses of #MeToo. Porn came under the microscope; dating app burnout escaped its manosphere containment zone; the perception of OnlyFans evolved from a “great way to make this month’s rent” to a predatory multilevel marketing scheme.

The women skeptical of feminism are that way for good reason. They see the despair at the end game. What is truly fulfilling? Your job? In all reality, it’s the family and relationships you make with others.

There’s this fashionable notion that women without children or husbands are happier. Let’s assume that’s true and not just a decontextualization of some rogue statistic with perfect headline potential. That would only be true in a society that can support it: a stable society built by people who make sacrifices and raise kids so that the childless rest can enjoy their lives. And importantly, it would only be true of some people, people who are aberrations to the norm. If everyone’s single and childless, then society stops being able to function. It’s like being a celebrity. If everyone is a celebrity, then nobody is a celebrity. Being unshackled from adult responsibilities is only attractive in a world that demands them in the first place.

The same realizations spurred by the shock of mandatory quarantines—that the burden of a family isn’t necessarily a bad one, that a life alone is only as fun as the distractions available—will come into even sharper relief as millennials enter middle age. Marriage and fertility rates continue to decline; meanwhile, the rates of deaths of despair, friendlessness, and loneliness balloon. Recognizing systemic problems is nothing new to us millennials, but what does seem to be new is the need to expand our purview beyond the realm of economics. If capitalism failed our generation, then it failed more than just our bank accounts. It disrupted everything from our identities and our family life to the way we make friends and find love. Suffering through this latest crisis isn’t just being burdened by student loans—it’s putting off kids, too. And the culture of capitalism is about marketing those failures as cool lifestyle choices. Podcasts like “Sofia with an F,” and “Why Won’t You Date Me,” are filled with reassurances that women can settle down whenever they want to. The horizon on choice doesn’t have to end if you have the right mindset and a willingness to freeze your eggs or make good use of IVF.

It’s not so much that millennials were just fed a bunch of lies and need to fix their behavior; it’s that their environment didn’t allow them to behave any differently, and they attacked anything but the root cause. The “girl boss” makes sense in an environment where you’re going to have to work a soul-sucking job no matter what; why not add a veneer of glamour to it? In a world where day care is an expensive necessity, there is a womblike comfort in telling yourself stories about how staying childless is an “act of heroism” or even a ticket to happiness….

…. Women are waking up to the truth through new expressions of feminism, growing digital subcultures, and reanimated political movements. But more broadly, they’re waking up to the truth in ordinary ways. They’re looking around at their lives and realizing that time is finite, and they’re long overdue for a change.

Ah, so close. We can’t blame feminism, but we can always divert blame back to easily scapegoats causes like capitalism. In this particular case, ironically there is no blame of the patriarchy (although I thought it was coming) or even men as men are typically the source of all of womens’ problems.

There’s always something to blame other than yourself or feminism for the choices that you make.

Actions have consequences. If you buy into feminism you get feminist results. The tragedy of it all is that feminist results are fairly predictable. Massive unhappiness, >30% of women have mental health issues, and so on. As commenters have noted, few from feminism “stick the landing” and even the examples of those who appear to have supposedly stuck the landing are probably unhappy in various different ways just like the glamor of celebrities is not all that.

More thoughts on the Validational sex equation

I’ve been mulling over the equation, especially after Jack’s most recent comment on me endorsing it.

This is what I observed about female nature while writing about Feminine Submission back in October. It IS VERY WEIRD to men, until you understand why. My conclusion was that this is a necessary (or at least a concomitant) element of Validation — of women feeling loved and becoming fully satisfied with the relationship.

Validation = Domination + Defilement –> Humility + Ego Affirmation –> Her Feeling Loved

It’s a “medium” (Rollo’s word H/T: deti) that expresses the Dominance / Submission structure of Tingly Respect / Headship.

I was somewhat surprised that even Deep Strength confirmed this.

I think the important takeaway for Christian men is that they should not be pansies with their wives in the bedroom. Doing crazy stuff to her can increase sanctification. Of course, Scott’s addendum applies here, as elsewhere: “IF she thinks you’re hot…”

The other important takeaway (that is rather regrettable IMO) is that those of us who have experienced this in a past relationship (deti, Scott, and me included) are rue to discover only now (too late) that THIS is true Biblical Headship, and that we threw it away, not knowing what it was, nor the value of it — and worse, dismissing and rejecting her as weird, debased, defiled, low-class, unChristian, etc., which comes off as a form of punishment for her conforming to the Headship structure. Then only later in life, we slowly begin to understand that THIS is what constitutes a truly good relationship.

Also, his explanation on sanctification and defilement:

Here it should be noted that Sanctification and Defilement have many similarities, and the thing that sets them apart is the context. Sex sanctifies a woman to one man and defiles her to all others. Thus, sex contributes to sanctification within marriage and to defilement outside of it.

The main thing I’ve been mulling over is defilement/sanctification, and the reason for that is not all sex in marriage is sanctifying. There are frigid wives and occasionally husbands who are doing it transactionally. Additionally, for non married women we also don’t necessarily get the defiling nature outside of marriage, and women have been known for serial monogamy and man-hopping at least if she’s promiscious and “trying to find herself.”

Liberal women for as much as they decry the patriarchy are turned on the most by male domination and humiliation. Validational sex for these women could be one night stands as much as with a boyfriend or in marriage.

Defilement, at least in terms of validational sex, seems to be the feelings result of domination. In other words, domination over a woman makes her feel like she is possessed by an attractive man. This is the main turn on for women in romance novels/porn where a man who ticks all the boxes of hypergamy — PSALMs + masculinity — such as the dominant, confident, successful, masculine, leader wants to take her and have his way with her. Hence, she is made his.

It seems to me that this would slightly change the equation of Validational sex to a string of causal consequences. Domination generally only occurs if a man is able to trigger her hypergamy strong enough.

1. Domination (before, during, and after sex)
2. Feeling of being possessed
3. Humility (he takes what is his) + Ego affirmation (he wants me) + defilement (she is his, and no other)
4. Her feeling loved

Equation form: Validational sex = Domination (before, during, and after sex) –> Feeling of being possessed –> Humility (he takes what is his) + Ego affirmation (he wants me) + defilement (she is his, and no other) –> Her feeling loved

This is the reason why validational sex can create alpha widows is because of the aspect of defilement that is included with her feeling loved by that man, and not necessarily the true sanctification/defilement that is supposed to be only in marriage.

In other words, as Dalrock aptly pointed out, the feeling of love is what sanctifies marriage instead of the commitment and covenant of marriage. This leads to to the elevation of validational sex as marriage, and why women feel like they’re being violated (or being forced, raped, etc) when they are not attracted to their husbands.