I saw an interesting post on Katy Faust’s Substack and I wrote a long comment to it. I sent the comment to three of my manliest male friends (police officer, and two software engineers who run their own very profitable companies). They said “publish as is”. And I also sent it to a female co-worker, a female podcast co-host (Rose) and a very famous female Christian author. They all said “publish as is”. So, I published as is.
Below is my published comment to Katy’s article. Keep in mind, this was straight shoot from the hip, didn’t link to any studies, didn’t even proof-read it, with just fixing up the few typos that my female friends found. I am so happy with everyone who checked it over for me.
If you comment on Katy’s blog, please be kind. Don’t attack her personally. I hope I didn’t attack her personally in my comment. I was just trying to address what I see as a failing strategy. Katy herself is excellent. I regularly give her books away to friends (and I just warn them about her anti-male bias).
One of helpful editors sent me a couple of images, so take a look at those first:
And:
Here is the full text of my comment:
Speaking as someone who is a visible minority, has had to navigate legal immigration by merit, and worked 27 years in the competitive private sector in the field of technology (FT100 companies), I have a different view of how we should approach the twin problems of declining marriage rate and declining birth rate.
First, we don’t want to reduce male headship to “taking the initiative”. Leadership, as seen in great leaders like Dwight Eisenhower, involves making plans and making decisions to achieve real results. Someone who is a good leader is not someone who merely takes the initiative. It is someone who knows how to get from point A to point B, who has a record of doing it, and who knows how to make other people want to participate in the plan by following the leader’s decisions. Going up to a woman and starting a conversation is not leadership. It’s convenient for the woman to be passive and avoid rejection and decide if they like the man based on first impressions and feelings. But it is not actual leadership. And it is not demonstrating the kind of leadership that women will want from a husband and father in the long run.
Again, taking Eisenhower as the model, leadership would be if a man is able to motivate a woman into a long-term effort in which she takes independent action to help him to achieve the plan that he thinks is important. For a Christian man, that higher goal would not be the woman’s happiness, but serving God. A man’s purpose for a relationship with a woman is leading her to serve God. Masculinity is NOT “when a man uses his strength to benefit women”. (A social conservative once told me that was her definition of masculinity) Speaking as a non-white person, that view sounds exactly like slavery to me, and it implies that slaves who don’t like being slaves are lacking in character – i.e. – less masculine. A man whose first priority is serving God is going to be very skeptical about signing up for a relationship where the strength that God has entrusted him with is taken away from God, and transferred to the woman for her happiness. It’s not appealing to Christian men to disregard their goals for relationships and become a woman’s slave instead.
Now onto why men are declining to approach and pursue. The root cause of men’s disinterest in pursuing women is twofold. First, Christian parents and church pastors have not prepared women to resist secularism and leftism in the culture. The second concern is the changes to laws, workplaces, courts, etc. brought on by feminism.
What are the consequences of the widespread turn towards secularism and leftism in young women (according to surveys). Well, they tend to be attracted to left-wing and immoral men. Men who don’t judge, men who are permissive, men who don’t hold women accountable. More and more young women don’t value or choose chastity, pro-life advocacy, evidential apologetics, sobriety, frugality, etc. They aren’t being taught to by Christian parents and pastors, because women are already seen as perfect for marriage. Nothing to fix. You won’t find anything like Thomas Sowell economics, evidential apologetics, etc. in most Christian homes and churches. So, when good Christian men meet these women, they have to start from ground zero – and often after the women has lived out the secular feminist lifestyle through her late teens, her 20s, and sometimes even 30s and 40s. So no defenses to secularism and feminism get laid down in the years before college, and then these Christian women lose their faith and conservatism after a semester or two of college. Studies show that promiscuity is a risk for lower relationship quality and higher relationship instability. Relationship instability is already a big risk for women, who initiate 70% of divorces. The highest instability rate is for lesbians. This is because women naturally condition commitment on their feelings. Whatever we are doing right now, it’s not preparing women to get over this tendency.
And it’s not just avoiding moral and spiritual leadership. Studies on attraction show that many young women are looking for dark triad traits. Again, a few rounds with men who have these traits will make them very unattractive for good men who have kept themselves chaste and sober. The damage is more like student loan debt – it doesn’t just disappear by spiritual conversion in the mid-30s. It stays on the books and requires work to eliminate. And the attempt by good men to choose the right woman for the job or lead the wrong woman into becoming the right woman is often dismissed as “controlling” or “judging” or “emotional abuse” or worse. This is not a good situation for a good man to get involved with. Young women are not trained to be led on moral and spiritual issues, and male leadership is seen as suspicious and even evil.
The second problem is underestimating the effects of feminism in laws and courts on men’s incentives to marry. Most social conservatives can’t admit or list the problems that are causing well-educated, high-earning, commitment-ready Christian men to decline to date and marry. That would be things like no-fault divorce, bias in domestic violence, handling of false accusations, bias in custody assignment, more severe sentencing of men, paternity fraud permissiveness, and so on. If these problems are even admitted, they are usually blamed on men failing to make women sufficiently happy. Men can name dozens of clear examples of society treating men unfairly. If a good man is weighing what to do with the fruits of his labor, then he is going to be looking at these problems. Even if these threats are not likely to get the good man, they are signs of widespread approval of bias against men – even among parents, pastors and social conservatives. Many good men will choose to just use their hard-earned millions for other things – like Christian ministry and mentoring. Jesus never married nor did he have children. Was he doing a good job of obeying God the Father when he decided to focus on other things instead?
The naive approach of hoping that men will somehow just disregard the influence of 6 decades of feminism on 1) women’s character and choices and 2) the laws and courts has not worked, is not working now, and will never work. And just doubling down on making demands or shaming men is not going to make it work any better than it has been. Maybe we can start with a new definition of masculinity that is 100% opposed to the “masculinity is when men are women’s slaves” definition. Let’s make the new definition of masculinity this: “masculinity is when a man is able to disregard the attractiveness and sexual offers of women such that he is able to focus himself and the women around him on his higher responsibility to serve God”.
After that, we can ask good men what they want out of marriage, and how they see the effects of feminism on 1) women’s character and 2) the laws and courts, as deterrents to men marrying.
That’s it for the comment. Let me know what you thought of it in the comments to this post.
We have a long way to go to reverse feminism and misandry inside the church… and also in the minds of some Christian social conservatives. Unfortunately, I can’t think of a single prominent Christian leader who takes the concerns of men about dating and marriage seriously.
