Basically, an awful lot of men are—and always have been—volatile and unreliable. They drink, they get abusive, and they do stupid stuff. They're bad with money, they don't help with the kids, and they don't help around the house. They demand subservience. They demand sex. And even on the one dimension they're supposedly good for—being breadwinners—they frequently tend to screw up and get fired.If Drum is correct, women are rejecting marriage, not men. Marriage is a good deal for men, he implies. Men should be desperately looking for wives, asking women to marry them and being turned down ... but it's not happening that way.
In other words, marriage has been a bad deal for women pretty much forever. But they've been forced into it by cultural mores and economic imperatives, and that's the only reason it's been nearly universal in the past.
Nothing has changed much about that. It's still a bad deal for an awful lot of women, but cultural mores and economic imperatives have changed, and that means more women can afford to do what's right for themselves and stay unmarried these days.
But there's one exception to this: the college educated. Well-educated men are fairly reliable; they have good earning power; they generally aren't abusive; and they've been willing—slowly but steadily—to change their habits and help out with kids and housework. For college-educated women, then, marriage is a relatively good deal. For everyone else, not so much.
The men aren't asking; presumably they don't see marriage as a good deal either. We all have friends financially crippled by child support payments and alimony, having lost half their retirements. If you realistically fear marriage won't last, avoiding it is sensible.
That is the trouble with streetcorner sociology. Back to the drawing board, Kevin, your "dorm room bull" is just that.
