An expert looks at the gender wars & sees wonders ahead!

Larry Kummer, Editor

8 years ago

Summary: An expert discusses the future of the gender wars. He speaks about the efforts of young men and women to individually find solutions. What happens next might shape America for years to come. Links appear at the end to the rest of this series.

My introduction

Enough analysis. This series is about solutions men are devising to the revolution in gender roles as the gender wars continue with no end in sight. My first two posts were about men as individuals finding their own solutions. Some learn Game to get casual sex. Some Men Go Their Own Way (MGTOW). Both feel good for a while. I doubt either will work for men or America over the long-term.

This is the third of Dalrock’s responses to those posts. He concludes with a look at the future of the gender wars. Dalrock is a married man living with his wife and two kids in the Dallas/Fort Worth area. He uses his website to explore how the post-feminist world impacts him and his family. It is essential reading for anyone interested in these issues.

(5) Dalrock’s comment: looking into our future

I think we will see a creeping panic from our ruling class as they realize that by replacing the marriage based family model with one founded on child support they have removed the incentive for men to produce the kinds of excess wealth that our progressive tax structure requires. Even worse, fatherless children are (on average) far more expensive to society than fathered children are, and this is true for life. So the income stream is at risk, and the expenses are going up.

The logical reaction is going to be to try to rework the system around the edges, rolling back the worst excesses of the family courts. This might have a small positive effect initially, but the risk is that by acknowledging the problem you will probably make it worse.

Right now the most effective tool our elites have is denial. See the videos from Dennis Prager, Brad Wilcox, etc. To roll back the worst excesses, you first have to admit there is a problem. Moreover, the whole delayed marriage scheme relies on men’s fear of being alone being greater than their greed.

Sooner or later women will have delayed marriage long enough that the market forces flip, and the subset of men that women want could become greedy just as women succumb to fear (as Rollo Tomassi’s Sexual Market Value chart helps explain). I see both of these problems coming due simultaneously, and I don’t see a palatable move our elites can take that won’t at least initially make their problem worse. I think they will try for years to slowly offer a bit more and more reforms while watching the problems get worse.

But that is where my crystal ball goes completely hazy. I don’t have a guess at what happens then.

Editor’s note.

“…a man may be allowed to keep poisons in his closet, but not to vend them about for cordials.”
— Said by the wise King of Brobdingnag in Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels.

Dalrock points to some big names among conservatives. Dennis Prager hosts “The Dennis Prager Show” (website). See his bio and his books. For a more balanced profile, see Wikipedia. Brad Wilcox is Director of the National Marriage Project. See his bio, or better yet, his Wikipedia profile. They have an immense audience for their horrific “conservative” advice. This video is an example of their work, along with a justly brutal analysis by Dalrock.

For a broader perspective, Dalrock has a brilliant and devastating post about social conservatives’ advocacy of radical feminism (one of the many strange bedfellows in these Crazy Years): “Why won’t these Peter Pan manboys man up and marry aging flighty selfish career gal sluts already?” Commenter Woof corrects Dalrock on an important point…

“Dennis Praeger {sic} does not argue ‘that it is good for men to marry and then have their wives divorce them.’ He claims instead that it’s good for society. He’s not saying the fatted calf benefits from the slaughter. He’s saying that the guests do.”

Conclusions from these two posts

There is no end in sight to the gender wars. What might the future hold for us?

My summary of Dalrock’s conclusions.

Understanding the new reality of changing gender roles will help men make better informed decisions. Changes in American society have made Game a useful tool for many young men (albeit a small percentage). It puts them in the sexual marketplace that they would otherwise be closed out from. For the foreseeable future individual solutions are a man’s best bet, no matter how thin they are.

Today most women delay marriage until their late twenties and early thirties. These women are finding it increasingly difficult to get men to marry them (see this graph of women unmarried, by age, in 1980 and 2015) . This is a rational response by men to the reduced incentives provided by marriage. Although most women have been able to marry, many women are beginning to panic at this trend. Their most common responses are complaining about men, seeking advice about ways to get married, and rationalizations about their inability to marry. None of these are effective for most women.

More broadly, denial is the most common response to this situation by women and our leaders (both liberal and conservative), broadcast by our media. Needless to say, that will not change anything. Eventually our elites probably will make small reforms, such as rolling back the worst excesses of the family courts. This might have a small positive effect, but acknowledging the problem probably will make it worse.

These trends will continue to grow in strength, with large and unforeseeable effects.

My conclusions.

I agree with Dalrock’s conclusions, and would state them more strongly. America’s family formation mechanism is unstable and has begun break donw – at an accelerating rate. Increasing numbers of men are using Game, abandoning “chivalry.” Increasing numbers are refusing to marry. Although their numbers are small, the resulting loud screams of pain and rage from women show the importance of this trend.

This series looks at today’s young men, those who are (roughly) 18-24. What they do might be an inflection point in our history — if large numbers of them refuse to marry when their gen’s young women decide to settle. This next phase of the gender wars might reshape American society.

I disagree with Dalrock in two ways about the nature of men’s responses. First, he sees men acting only as individuals, implementing solutions with varying but mostly moderate success. I believe the two most frequent responses — Game and MGTOW — will become increasingly common. But their weak effectiveness and large side-effects will become increasingly apparent, as will their adverse effect on society. Men can do little as individuals.

My second difference of opinion with Dalrock is more important. I believe men’s response as individuals is just the first wave reaction, and the least important one. Now many men are alienated from American society and their selves (as are many women, wearing ill-fitting identities crafted for them by radical feminists). They are isolated, as so many of the intermediate institutions of America have decayed (i.e., service and sports clubs – as described in Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community).

But pack formation is a behavior hard-wired into men. Under pressure from the gender wars, with individual solutions proving less than ideally effective, men will form groups – and then organizations. It will be men’s largest and most effective response to feminism. These, and the goals they choose, will shape American society for the next few generations. My guess: men will band together to do the big version of Game and MGTOW. Major social trends grow on an “s” curve, like bacteria. The first stage, where we are now, feels like change – but in hindsight will look flat compared with the near-vertical growth that lies ahead.

The next post in this series will describe this future and its implications. We will get a solution to the gender wars, but we might not like it.