I recently wrote an article for a great organization called I Believe in Love. The article was titled “Why Marriage Is Good For Men” and sought to argue that, despite the many reasons why men are avoiding marriage, it can still be of incredible benefit to men, provided they find the right woman.
What was fascinating to me were some of the responses I got in the comments section: clear expressions of the genuine fears that men have when it comes to marriage. Though there have been numerous books of late claiming that men aren’t getting married because they’re simply immature, an alternative rationale has been posited by Helen Smith in her book Men on Strike. Far from being thoughtless losers, men are simply being smart, muses Smith. After all, what’s in it for men when it comes to marriage? A man who chooses marriage has many obligations and expectations from society, but not many rewards. It is, Smith alleges, the opposite with their wives. And should the marriage end in divorce, the court system will very likely favor the woman when it comes to who’s offering the financial support to whom. The result, according to Smith, is that men are “going Galt,” a reference to Ayn Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged in which capitalist innovators, feeling unappreciated for their contributions, decide to remove themselves from society at large.
The responses to my article seemed to suggest that some men do in fact feel exactly as Smith described. One man noted that it is women who have undervalued marriage, since the vast majority of divorces are initiated by them. Another referred to marriage as “legal enslavement” and resented my claim that marriage is, for men, often a rite of passage into responsible adulthood that provides men a deeper sense of fulfillment. Still another questioned whether I had really demonstrated any benefits for men in marriage, claiming that I had simply tried to “shame men into their proper place.” This last claim underlies the suspicion that women know that men are desperately needed but aren’t willing to appreciate male input or provide tangible benefits to them for their efforts and even sacrifices. Therefore, these women simply insult men in hopes that they will return to “their place” as the support system that ostensibly “independent” women can take advantage of at their leisure, though without the respect that this position brought to men in the recent past.
Some feminists have, in answering these claims, assumed a Marxist kind of dualism on this point. Since men have traditionally had power, their core identity is one of oppressor; men do not have any genuine grievances but are simply reacting in fear to the fact that they have been displaced and are no longer needed. Or so the argument goes. But the problem with this kind of thinking is that it practically requires that the “oppressor” (men) be either destroyed or relegated to a subservient class. This kind of answer, which is not meant to encourage intelligent discussion but simply to shut it down, demonstrates that the fears of these men has at least the ring of truth. Surely the end game of women’s rights shouldn’t be to create a society modeled after the film The Wicker Man, where men are disposable at the altar of feminine power, but to create opportunities for both men and women to use and develop their natural abilities and to be respected members of equal standing within the human community.
How can we ensure such a future for our young boys as well as our young girls? How can we address the fears of men that they will not be respected for their efforts should they seek to step up and take responsibility? If men and women truly need each other, and they most certainly do, what changes in our thinking have to take place before both are given the freedom to reflect the image of God and be a benefit to their families and their communities?