![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Whither working men?
Jun. 29th, 2025 10:58 pm(Paraphrased from Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do About It.)
Six out of ten births to women without a high-school diploma occur out of wedlock. For women with a four-year college degree, that ratio is only one out of ten. And even if college educated women are not married by the time they have their first child, they are quite likely to be married by the time they have a second, usually to the man who is the father of both children.
Thus, marriage remains a central part of life to college-educated women, which seems like a contradiction: The women who are least likely to need a partner for economic support are the most likely to get married, and stay married.
To resolve this contradiction we acknowledge a shift in the purpose of marriage: Partners now see it as a joint venture for the purpose of parenting. A shared commitment to invest in kids, more than a commitment to financially support a spouse. "'Till death do us part" has transformed into something more like "'til the kids get into college."
Middle-class men, in white collar jobs, have seen their wages stay high, or even grow, in the last 40 years. Their access to more resources has also given them the security to evolve beyond the traditional male role, which makes them attractive prospects for affluent women.
Those women still weigh a man by his economic success, but also seek one who is "modern": Willing to share the practical duties of child-raising, more emotionally sophisticated, more respectful of women's choices.
Meanwhile, working-class men have seen their wages collectively drop. This has hollowed out their value and usefulness in the traditional male role: They struggle to be providers. To working-class women, these men are risky marriage prospects. Many women in fact choose to avoid the risk of marrying a "deadbeat", and elect to remain single parents. Not because they can thrive as single parents, but because they don't want things to get worse.
So, high earners are pooling resources in a marriage to raise kids; low earners are shying away from marriage because it threatens what little they have. And since affluent parents invest much more heavily in their kids, those kids tend to go on and become high earners, cycling this class division forward into the next generation.
So what do you do, as a working-class guy, when you barely make enough money to support yourself, and the women who will date you don't see you as marrying material? Your work life is unstable, your social life is unstable, your religious practice has atrophied, and you still somehow need to finance the core of a new nuclear family, with spouse and home and car and kids, and keep it stable. But how? Everything is telling you to be something you can't reach. Your idea of what it means to be a man, of what your own personal destiny is, starts to drift.
Six out of ten births to women without a high-school diploma occur out of wedlock. For women with a four-year college degree, that ratio is only one out of ten. And even if college educated women are not married by the time they have their first child, they are quite likely to be married by the time they have a second, usually to the man who is the father of both children.
Thus, marriage remains a central part of life to college-educated women, which seems like a contradiction: The women who are least likely to need a partner for economic support are the most likely to get married, and stay married.
To resolve this contradiction we acknowledge a shift in the purpose of marriage: Partners now see it as a joint venture for the purpose of parenting. A shared commitment to invest in kids, more than a commitment to financially support a spouse. "'Till death do us part" has transformed into something more like "'til the kids get into college."
Middle-class men, in white collar jobs, have seen their wages stay high, or even grow, in the last 40 years. Their access to more resources has also given them the security to evolve beyond the traditional male role, which makes them attractive prospects for affluent women.
Those women still weigh a man by his economic success, but also seek one who is "modern": Willing to share the practical duties of child-raising, more emotionally sophisticated, more respectful of women's choices.
Meanwhile, working-class men have seen their wages collectively drop. This has hollowed out their value and usefulness in the traditional male role: They struggle to be providers. To working-class women, these men are risky marriage prospects. Many women in fact choose to avoid the risk of marrying a "deadbeat", and elect to remain single parents. Not because they can thrive as single parents, but because they don't want things to get worse.
So, high earners are pooling resources in a marriage to raise kids; low earners are shying away from marriage because it threatens what little they have. And since affluent parents invest much more heavily in their kids, those kids tend to go on and become high earners, cycling this class division forward into the next generation.
So what do you do, as a working-class guy, when you barely make enough money to support yourself, and the women who will date you don't see you as marrying material? Your work life is unstable, your social life is unstable, your religious practice has atrophied, and you still somehow need to finance the core of a new nuclear family, with spouse and home and car and kids, and keep it stable. But how? Everything is telling you to be something you can't reach. Your idea of what it means to be a man, of what your own personal destiny is, starts to drift.
