This is a guest post by Lucinda Hancock, who describes herself as the mother of her husband’s nine children.
In a recent internet exchange, Brad Wilcox made the case for men to “Be a Man. Get married.” , and was rejoined by a group of men, MenGoingTheirOwnWay, who refuted Wilcox’s claims of improved life, citing particularly the high divorce rate primarily initiated by women.
Wilcox’s point of view is problematic because he seems to take for granted the sexual loyalty of married women, which is the premise that makes his entire argument so easy to attack. It doesn’t seem to occur to him that most men simply don’t have confidence in their ability to hold onto devoted female attention without the society-wide sexual mores that used to promote female fidelity. But anyone who wants to revitalize a marriage culture must understand how marriage appeals to men in the first place as having a high probability of female loyalty. Wilcox seems to think that telling men they will work more hours for more money and live 10 years longer is sufficient incentive. But this sounds a lot like, “We keep you alive to serve this ship. Row well and live.” (from Ben Hur).
So why do men marry? What is the real incentive? It is true that the primary purpose of marriage for some men is to achieve the kind of status that will give them greater access to power and influence, but for most men, the purpose is verifiable reproduction. To paraphrase Jack Donovan, author of “The Way of Men”, if you fail to reproduce, your genes don’t make it to the next round. But the ability of marriage to guarantee female loyalty in reproduction has failed so decisively that it really has become somewhat of an illogical choice for the majority of men (based on the calculation of 44% of first marriages ending in divorce, and the doubling of never-married men since 1960). And many men have calculated that their best chances of reproduction lie in high numbers of low-investment ‘scoring’.
The primary tool by which marriage has been destroyed is feminism.
From the perspective of men, feminism has played the part of Iago in the play Othello. Iago convinces Othello that his wife, the virtuous Desdemona, is not being faithful, and the end result is tragic. In a similar way, feminism causes men to distrust even virtuous and well-meaning women, who often fail to see the sinister implications of what they perceive as innocent efforts at ‘fairness’ and ‘equality’. And even more obviously, feminism’s ascent to dominance has meant that women’s tendency to be loyal to dominant culture has made sexually chaste women a rarity. While feminism has had the effect of decreasing fertility among certain groups of women, mainly the highly educated and married, it has increased fertility among unmarried women.
Herein lies the incentive for low-investment scorers. Despite radical feminist ideology, the vast majority of women remain interested in becoming mothers. Only 1 in 5 women, currently, will never become mothers, and many of those women would have liked to be mothers, but simply failed to pursue such a goal with sufficient urgency. Modern women tend to regard becoming a parent as a sort of natural right regardless of marital status. Women are less aware of the basic reproductive insecurity most men face when female fidelity is actively discouraged. While most women understand the desire their children will have for a father, and also understand the benefit such a relationship will be to the child’s success and thriving in life, they are less likely to understand the ways that feminist undercurrents are weaving insecurity into the fabric of their relationships with men.
In Brad Wilcox’s response to the responses of MGTOW men, Wilcox brings out this angry sentiment of single men, “nor will I ever have kids with any woman unless guaranteed 50-50 custody.” These are not the words of a man who has no interest in being an involved father. And it shows an important fact. Flooding the single men demographic with disaffected men who really do want to be fathers has made it that much easier to be the kind of man whose primary interest is in siring children with the intention of abandonment. Indeed, despite the surface claims, almost every feminist talking point has had the effect of making life much easier for men whose primary interest is escaping the duties of fatherhood, giving them greater ease of access in the first place through feminist promotion of female sexual freedom and giving them easier outs by ’empowering’ women to be independent of “patriarchal” marriage, as well as making it easier to hide among large numbers of men who mainly lack confidence in women.
It is not a working strategy to tell men to ‘man up’ while entirely ignoring that a huge part of the marriage bargain is male confidence in reproduction. There is a strategy that could help alleviate the strain between the sexes that is resulting in so much anger on both sides (and so many fatherless children). Responsible men need to be more effective in repudiating feminism and understand it’s role in sowing distrust between the sexes. They must recognize that feminism is a profitable tool for the worst of men. This is a difficult path because many responsible men are beholden to women who care very much about the more innocent-seeming feminist aspects regarding ‘fairness’ and ‘equality’, but men need to remember that most women are simply being deceived about feminism and they need reinforcement in seeing its problems. That will never happen if good men don’t even fight the real enemy, which is the main problem with Wilcox’s “Be a man. Get married” video. It concedes ground to feminist lies that incline women to believe it reasonable to demand male productivity while denigrating responsible male authority. It other words, it says what women want to hear, but produces a result opposite of its apparent intent of persuading single men to marry.