Casualties of the 60's Feminist Revolution

Driven by a nearly pathological case of male envy, 60's radical feminists persuaded a generation of women to discard their femininity and become like men. Throw off sexual restraints! Forget marriage and family! Focus entirely on self-love and career building! How has it worked out a half-century later? Not so well. Recent articles tell of lonely, successful women and isolated, underachieving men—both products of the 60's sexual revolution, say the authors.

Last year Atlantic magazine published a report (The End of Men) on the "vast cultural consequences" of "the unprecedented role reversal now underway."

Earlier this year, women became the majority of the workforce for the first time in U.S. history. Most managers are now women too. And for every two men who get a college degree this year, three women will do the same. For years, women's progress has been cast as a struggle for equality. But what if equality isn't the end point? What if modern, post industrial society is simply better suited to women?

Kay Hymowitz explored these questions in her book, Manning Up: How the Rise of Women Turned Men into Boys. She concluded the cultural shifts have spawned a generation of child-men who feel dispensable in society and alpha girls who are leaving their male peers in the dust by most measure. (See our review, The Rocky Dating-and-Mating Road for Twenty-Something Grads.)

Bill Bennett, author of The Book of Man: Reading on the Path to Manhood, arrives at the same conclusion in an article posted this month at CNN:

For the first time in history, women are better educated, more ambitious and arguably more successful than men. We said, "You go girl," and they went. We celebrate the ascension of women but what will we do about what appears to be the very real decline of the other sex? The data does not bode well for men...

Today, 18- to 34-year-old men spend more time playing video games a day than 12- to 17-year-old boys. While women are graduating college and finding good jobs, too many men are not going to work, not getting married and not raising families. Women are beginning to take the place of men in many ways. This has led some to ask: do we even need men?

Feminists answered that question decades ago with the slogan, "a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle." It was funny back then, but a lot of lonely women today may not see the humor.

In "All the Single Ladies" in this month's Atlantic magazine, 39-year-old Kate Bolick reflects on her own, and others', singleness.

In 2001, when I was 28, I broke up with my boyfriend. Allan and I had been together for three years, and there was no good reason to end things. He was (and remains) an exceptional person, intelligent, good-looking, loyal, kind. My friends, many of whom were married or in marriage-track relationships, were bewildered. I was bewildered. To account for my behavior, all I had were two intangible yet undeniable convictions: something was missing; I wasn't ready to settle down.

The period that followed was awful. I barely ate for sobbing all the time. I missed Allan desperately--his calm, sure voice; the sweetly fastidious way he folded his shirts. On good days, I felt secure that I'd done the right thing. Learning to be alone would make me a better person, and eventually a better partner. On bad days, I feared I would be alone forever. Had I made the biggest mistake of my life?

[snip]

Well, there was a lot I didn't know 10 yeas ago. The decision to end a stable relationship for abstract rather than concrete reasons, I see now, is in keeping with a post-Boomer ideology that values emotional fulfillment above all else. And the elevation of independence over coupling is a second-wave feminist idea I'd acquired from my mother, who had embraced it, in part, I suspect to correct for her own choices.

What my mother could envision was a future in which I made my own choices. I don't think either of us could have predicted what happens when you multiply that sense of agency by an entire generation.

But what transpired next lay well beyond the powers of everybody’s imagination: as women have climbed ever higher, men have been falling behind. We’ve arrived at the top of the staircase, finally ready to start our lives, only to discover a cavernous room at the tail end of a party, most of the men gone already, some having never shown up—and those who remain are leering by the cheese table, or are, you know, the ones you don’t want to go out with.

Kate's 10-page article closes with a visit with 60-year-old Ellen, a resident at the non-religious all-female collective of Begijnhof in Amsterdam. Ellen doesn't seem to have a particularly close relationship with any of the other women at Begijnhof. And although she occasionally visits with a male friend outside the collective, it appears to be yet another relationship with no commitment.

Lack of commitment was always the problem with feminism's anti-man, anti-marriage, anti-family dogma. Humans are designed for the permanent commitment and bond of family that feminists' casual sex, parade of disposable partners, or life invested solely in high-powered careers can never fulfill.

The marriage vows—to have and to hold, from this day forward, for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, until death do us part—were meant to be more than a prologue to the biggest party of one's life. They hold the promise of a safe sanctuary for both genders from the storms of life ... of an albeit imperfect spouse with whom to weather those storms ... of strength when we feel weak ... of encouragement when we feel defeated ... of love even when we feel utterly unlikeable. Feminists sought transient relationships in which self-love substitutes for family. Marriage does the opposite: it seeks permanent relationships in which family grows to become greater than self.

Perhaps the next generation is beginning to correct for choices their own parents made. Or maybe they're simply rebelling against a sex-saturated culture. Whatever the reason, a majority of today's teens are remaining abstinent, reports a Heritage Foundation blog with the latest Centers for Disease Control (CDC) data on teen sexual activity.

Though the proportion of teens who are sexually experienced has remained relatively unchanged since 2002, the CDC report does note that the percentage represents a significant decline since 1988. And it's important to note that the proportion of youths who are abstinent has risen by 17 percent among teenage girls and by 47 percent among teenage boys since 1988. ... The recent data on teen sexual behavior gives cause for hope for the well-being and future prospects of the next generation.

It's a start.