Janice Fiamengo - Men are Hot Commodities on Campus

It is well known that college-educated men who marry are, on average, likely to work the longest hours, seek promotion most aggressively, and become high earners focused on supporting their wives and families (even post-divorce, as too often happens). A woman who is fortunate enough to marry a man like this stands to secure a materially better life, often at her husband’s expense of health and leisure, than she would have had if she had depended solely on her own earning power and work ethic (women are famously more interested in “work-life balance” than men are). Now with these men in the minority, women are having to compete for the men’s attention, and we’re supposed to feel sorry for them….

The whole point of the article is to make clear to men that they are not to trade on their value when they’re in demand. They’re supposed to be grateful to be desired at all, and to believe that they are the lucky ones. Ultimately, they’re supposed to happily sacrifice themselves on the marital altar with a woman who will enjoy the fruits of their labor.…

The situation described in the article is a serious one despite the foolishness of the writer’s perspective. Our societies are telling women two contradictory things: that they can and should take men’s college spots, jobs, and status (and call that “equality”), and still expect to marry a high-status man who will provide for them lavishly and give them the option, if they want it, to work part-time or not at all.

The problem of declining male success has been evident for decades, but even the whistleblowers have been afraid to address it honestly. Christina Hoff Sommers published The War Against Boys (still a must-read) more than twenty years ago, showing how boys and young men were being discriminated against across the entire school system by mostly female teachers with anti-male convictions. She had to change the subtitle of the book, obviously under pressure from feminists, from “How Misguided Feminism is Harming our Young Men” to “How Misguided Policies are Harming our Young Men.” Even when feminism is directly responsible for a problem, it can never be named as such.

Universities have become so anti-male in their policies and teaching, not least in their sexual assault policies (see, for example, KC Johnson and Stuart Taylor’s definitive The Campus Rape Frenzy), that some men have made the decision to stay away, especially from university programs in the Humanities and Social Sciences, where the anti-male slant is unavoidable. Even in the tiny number of programs where young men are still relatively well represented, the feminist war continues. There is actually a worldwide international day commemorating governments’ stated goal to promote women in the few remaining higher education fields and professions in which women do not already outnumber men.

(Janice Fiamengo)

A large-scale study by two MIT researchers entitled Wayward Sons: The Emerging Gender Gap in Labor Markets and Education found that the trend has been building for decades, and they explain its circular nature.

 Low-income men lack the economic potential to attract and support a mate, but they are still likely to father children with women who choose to raise their children alone, an arrangement that contributes to child poverty, fatherlessness, and all the problems that come in their wake.

Sadly, male children born into single female parent households “appear to fare particularly poorly” suffering impaired health, delinquency, early school leaving, addiction, depression, and higher probability of incarceration. “Thus the poor economic prospects of less-educated males,” the study authors summarize, “may create differentially large disadvantages for their sons, potentially reinforcing the development of the gender gap in the next generation.” We can expect that even fewer young men will go to university in the future, and fewer women will find high-earning men to date and marry.

And now this predictable outcome is presented as the fault of the minority of young university men who are recognizing the short-term benefits of their scarcity.

The article throws around the grotesquely insulting and mocking phrase Golden Penis Syndrome, telling us at length how badly behaved some men are in these situations–with abundant anecdotes based on women’s (subject and unverifiable) tales of neglect and rudeness while berating men for thinking THEY are special. Your penises are not golden, is the implied smear throughout.

What really seems to bother the experts is that the women’s discontent shows that these men may actually be platinum.

The author of a book about dating designed to help women stay “in charge” recounts how at universities where men outnumber women, the guys make special Valentine’s cards for their female peers, and wake up early on Valentine’s Day to make pancakes for them. What are the young women doing for the guys at colleges where the female sex is over-represented? We know the answer: not much except complaining about poor treatment to anyone who’ll listen.

We can keep on blaming men for making decisions in their own short-term best interests, and we can keep on telling them that they should be grateful for any female attention at all, even while they’re pushed out of college and high-status jobs by gender equity policies, affirmative action hiring, and a maniacally woman-favoring culture.

Maybe instead it’s time to have a frank conversation about what men want and need, and why happy men are important in a well-functioning society.

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