On September 23, 2017 The Globe and Mail, a Toronto newspaper, Canada’s number one, published an article by Margaret Wente, one of their columnists, entitled, Why are good men so hard to find? It seems that women do want men, do want husbands. I would have thought that, but I was surprised that a woman has admitted it in such a public way. In the first paragraph, she confesses:
All the women want serious relationships that lead to marriage, but many of the men they meet do not.
The next striking sentence a few paragraphs later reads:
(L)arge numbers of young women admit their private lives are a sad mess.
What got my attention here, besides the title, is a woman conceding this problem. She traces the problem in this paragraph:
In a nutshell, over the past few decades, the traditional relationship exchange has broken down. It used to be that men and women each had something the other really needed. Men needed access to sex. Women needed access to resources. Men couldn’t get steady access to sex unless they had resources to offer, so they worked hard for them. The partnership between men and women was a grand bargain that (usually) left both sides better off.
Traditional relationship exchange (laughing out loud). Wente doesn’t use the words “traditional marriage,” but I find her analysis of the problem pretty good. Don’t get me wrong, she doesn’t get it. She doesn’t understand it. She doesn’t have the solution. I really felt sorry for her. It’s sad. However, if you are looking at just the symptoms of the problem, sort of like looking at a runny nose, cough, and sore throat, she gets it. Her diagnosis is stunning.
Women want men, but men don’t want women, because they only want women for sex, and they don’t need them for sex any more. There is some truth in this, although Wente misses the real root of the problem, the actual problem, and, therefore, the solution. Women can decry the symptoms, hate what they mean, but they can’t admit the actual explanation and fix for it.
She relies on a new book, Cheap Sex by American sociologist Mark Regnerus, who gives three reasons sex got cheap, so that men don’t need women as far as this traditional relationship exchange. One, “the pill.” Two, the “onset of mass-produced high quality pornography,” and, three, “online dating sites.”
Like I said, Wente misses it. She totally misses it, but you can also understand why I think what she writes is fascinating. For all that women have wanted and tried to do about it, they are hurting more than ever, because now, more than ever, despite the very bad shape of men, men dominate the mating market, as Regnerus refers to it. Wente writes:
When women complain that marriageable men (sober, steady good providers) are harder to find than ever, they may well be right. The marriage rate is falling steadily, especially among the lower middle class, while long-term stable marriage is increasingly a privilege reserved for the better off.
“Marriageable men” are “sober, steady good providers.” This is the closest she gets to the root of the problem. Men do have the role of the provider, but with the aid and encouragement of women, they have abdicated that role. Men don’t have a role any more in our culture. If you don’t start with God’s design, then there is no authoritative reason for a male role. The women who expect it and call it marriageable are borrowing from a Christian worldview, whether they like it or not.
The last major paragraph of the article reads:
It may take a village to raise a child. But it takes a village to raise a husband, too. And modern society has largely abdicated from the job. “Good husband material doesn’t occur naturally, but is instead the product (in part) of socialization, development, and social control,” Mr. Regnerus writes. “[I]n the domain of sex and relationships men will act as nobly as women collectively demand.”
Tell-tale, she borrows from Hillary Clinton’s “it takes a village” mantra. If a woman wants failure, she can rely on Hillary’s point of view on this. Besides her own relationship with her own husband, nothing is more revealing than Hillary’s top assistant Human Abedin and husband Anthony Weiner. Nevertheless, Regnerus and Wente get it right that good husbands must be raised. Men who believe in a biblical male role train their boys to be biblical men.
The village has forsaken the boys because it has forsaken God and the Bible. God and the Bible establish the male role with the truth that men work, take responsibility, marry, protect, provide, and love. Can boys even be told that in our society? I don’t think so.
Sadly, even churches today are unwilling to raise men. The boys in churches often look like what Wente describes. They lack confidence that only comes from faith in and fellowship with God. Because of that, they don’t have the strength to lead.
I said that the boys don’t grow to be men because they don’t have the strength to lead. Women don’t want male leadership, even if they saw it. They want sobriety and support, until they want fun, frivolity, and their own careers. In other words, women want everything they want, but they don’t want what the actual male role is in their lives. If they had it, they would buck at it, and then pull the feminist card. Wente ought to admit this too.
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