One Monk's Journey Through Faith

In the The Atlantic there is another article concerning the disadvantageous status of boys in education today. And it's not just at the level of grade school education: for every 2 boys earning a B.A. this year, it is expected there will be three girls earning the same. There's more there, too.

If there's one marital status demographic that has significantly fallen behind, it is the single male (regardless of educational level). To put it another way:




Honestly, I have to agree that the erosion of marriage (and prevalence of eros) is due to women now setting the terms. Why should a single woman marry? It's a downgrade to personal power unless he's at least as educated. You don't need him for financial stability. You don't need him for legal representation. You don't need him for physical protection. No; men now only represent the luxury of sexual gratification. Since it comes down to sex, the religious choose to abstain (or try) and the secular choose non-committal relationships.

Whereas for single men without a degree, we have no financial stability. Marriage is profitable for us regardless of a woman's educational status (which will likely be higher, except in the case of males with PhDs). There has been an erosion in family values replaced with an emphasis on individual liberation. Yet, we humans are not made for individual self-sufficiency. We are made for a relationship of interdependence. And if women have power over men economically, but men have no equivalent power over women, then there is no true interdependence. And thus marriage and the nuclear family, as the backbone unit of which society is formed, is now eroding.

But if the gender social dynamic indeed no longer contains interdependence and women are given extreme benefits for being single while males are not, then it would make sense why certain young Christian women would aim for celibacy (and non-Christian ones just avoid marriage). Christian young women seem to feel hesitant about the commitment of marriage, which they interpret as (possibly) a call to celibacy, when it is in fact a matter of our American cherished virtue of personal freedom from interdependence.

I do lay this quite strongly (though perhaps not solely) at the feet of radical feminism's emphasis on individual freedom from constraints set by the social level of existence. Note that I am not giving a broad brush of condemnation to egalitarianism, since those two -isms are overlapping but not synonymous.