No wonder men are opting out

The warning signs have been there for decades. Back in 1983, American author Barbara Ehrenreich wrote a powerful book — The Hearts of Men: American Dreams and the Flight from Commitment — arguing that a male revolt was underway. Since the 1950s, she suggested, men had begun rebelling against the breadwinner ethic – inspired by Playboy culture, the counterculture, and a desire for personal freedom. They were rejecting the cultural ideology that had shamed them into tying the knot and becoming a good provider, lest they be seen as immature, irresponsible, and less than a real man.

Ehrenreich understood that marriage was the mechanism by which society harnessed male productivity. Remove the shame, and the yoke comes off.

Forty years on, the yoke has disappeared. In April 2026, the American male labour force participation rate hit its lowest level since records began in the 1940s, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. One in three American men — roughly 33% — were not working or actively looking for work. The overall male participation rate for men aged 16 and over stood at just 67%, down from 73.5% two decades ago and from 87% in the postwar years when Ehrenreich’s story begins.

The trend is not confined to America. Australian men’s workforce participation has fallen from around 79% in 1978 to approximately 71% today (see below), while similar declines — though less dramatic than in the United States — have occurred in the UK and Canada.

The marriage collapse runs in lockstep with the workforce data. According to US Census Bureau data, married-couple households made up 71% of all US households in 1970 — today just 47%. As University of Virginia sociologist Brad Wilcox documents in his 2024 book, Get Married, the marriage rate has fallen 65% in the last half century.

Australia tells a similar story. The marriage rate has more than halved since 1971, from 13 per 1,000 people to just 5.5 in 2024 — and much of the slack has been taken up by de facto relationships which carry the legal obligations of marriage but none of its commitment or permanence. The numbers are moving in one direction only.

Ehrenreich had made the argument that marriage and productivity were inseparable — that the same mechanism which got men to the altar got them to work. The data suggests she was right.

What Ehrenreich did not fully reckon with — could not have foreseen in 1983 — was that the inducements for tying the knot would collapse. The shame mechanism has disappeared, yes. But the incentive has simultaneously imploded. The product on offer has changed beyond recognition.

If you want to understand why men are voting with their feet, you need to look not just at what marriage now costs them — and the costs are severe — but at what it delivers. Increasingly, what it delivers is a pretty dud deal.

The modern woman: a prospectus.

• They are the most miserable, anxious, and insecure cohort in living memory — hardly great marriage material.
• Most married women go off sex — and the husband who objects is seen as the problem.
• Many women don’t actually like men very much. The more educated she is, the higher the contempt.
• They’ve gone full throttle left — and three quarters of college-educated women won’t even date a man who votes differently.
• They’ve rigged the education system and colonised corporate and institutional life, turning universities and workplaces into man-repellent factories.
• Yet their hypergamy (desire to marry up) is still running hot. Despite outnumbering men in education and careers, they demand a tall, equally high-status unicorn.
• The modern female threat-detection system is hyperactive. Almost any male behaviour — silence, opinions, jokes, breathing — gets flagged as a red flag.
• They’re extremely well-versed in the lucrative economics of divorce, including a well-timed false allegation to eliminate tedious shared parenting.

  What rational man reads this list and thinks: yes, that’s exactly what’s been missing from my life?

To examine more carefully what is going on here, let’s start by looking at the latest addition to this sorry reckoning. I’m referring to the finding published in New Statesman last month: that many young women don’t like men. A Merlin Strategy poll of young Britons aged 18 to 30 found three times more young women than young men held a negative view of the opposite sex. Only about 50% of women had a positive view of men compared to 72% of men feeling positive about women. For women under 25, it was even starker: only around one-third (35%) reported a positive view of men.

This applies particularly to professional and managerial young women of whom just 36 per cent hold a positive view of men, compared with 61 per cent of working-class women. In other words, the contempt for men is most concentrated in educated, middle-class women — precisely the demographic that has benefited most from feminist gains and whose prospects are objectively the strongest.

The contempt for men is hardly surprising – that’s what they have been taught. Mary Harrington, a British journalist and cultural critic who writes on Substack, frequently critiques what she calls the “femosphere” — the online feminist spaces where women bond through shared grievances about men.

“The online feminist scene often feels like one long group therapy session for women to compare notes on how awful men are,” she writes, suggesting this makes men the universal scapegoat, where ordinary male behaviour is routinely framed as toxic or oppressive, while women’s collective resentment is rewarded and amplified. “Casual, low-level male-bashing has become the background hum of progressive online culture.”

Encountering these women isn’t much fun for men. Reddit recently published this telling comment: “It’s exhausting. You might be having a decent conversation, then she drops a casual “men suck” comment like it’s small talk. Feels like you’re starting every interaction with a presumption of guilt.”

My good friend Janice Fiamengo has just written a blog taking issue with media stories using the New Stateman data to declare young women hate men. Janice points out that only 3% of the women surveyed had a very negative view of men. She also takes comfort in the fact that a majority of the women felt at least “somewhat” or “very safe” around men – but to me a 51% majority is still pretty alarming. Ditto the fact that only 52% felt they could trust men. From the male perspective this still means a hell of a lot of distrustful women out there, which is a grim prospect when it comes to prospective partners.

And an awful lot of crazy, neurotic women. Not only does this toxic climate encourage women to be wary of men, but growing up in a hate-fuelled online sewer takes a toll on their mental health. Psychologist Jonathan Haidt has long been warning that the toxic world of social media would lead to a rise in mental health problems – particularly in girls and young women. “Since the early 2010s, young people across the developed world are becoming more anxious, depressed and lonely. The increases were even greater in young women,” he said.

Recent large-scale surveys (Ipsos 2025–2026 across 31 countries, Gallup 2025) are showing Gen Z women currently report the highest recorded levels of anxiety, persistent sadness/hopelessness, and depression of any female generation at the same age.

Around 33% of young women feel anxious or worried about the future “almost all the time”; 40% of Gen Z workers feel anxious or depressed at least a few times per week, according to recent 2025 surveys.

Not much fun for their partners. Last year Psychology Today, had a stark warning for men about these women as marriage prospects. “The saying ‘happy wife, happy life’ may have some validity, but the lesser-known saying ‘anxious wife, miserable life’ has research-approved validation. … The more neurotic the spouse is, the less happy the relationship — but women’s neuroticism seems to carry more weight in the overall marital happiness equation.”

Then there’s the intriguing issue of married women turning off the tap, leaving sex-starved husbands as the norm. For as long as anyone can remember, men were shamed into showing up economically. Society has absolutely nothing to say to women who stop showing up sexually. One obligation was enforced by church, law and community for centuries. The other is now abrogated on the grounds of bodily autonomy.

So here we have the portrait of the modern woman as marriage prospect: miserable, anxious, politically radicalised, contemptuous of men, often sexually rejecting and trained to see menace in ordinary male behaviour. And yet the puzzled chorus from commentators, economists and policymakers continues: why won’t men commit? Why won’t they work?

The approved explanations are dutifully trotted out. The economic story: men have been displaced by automation and globalisation. The health story: opioids, disability, mental illness. The educational story: men are falling behind women in universities and therefore in the job market. The cultural story, favoured by progressive commentators: toxic masculinity is preventing men from adapting to a modern service economy. All of these contain a grain of truth. But they do not account for what is really going on. The obvious explanation — the one staring out of every data table — is intentionally ignored.

Marriage was the primary incentive for sustained male economic effort. It has always been — Ehrenreich knew it in 1983, and the economists have now confirmed it. There’s an economic research paper – “The Declining Labor Market Prospects of Less-Educated Men” – which establishes that the prospect of forming and providing for a family constitutes a critical male labour supply incentive, and that the decline of stable marriage directly removes it. Researchers at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas calculated that declining marriage rates are responsible for roughly half the drop in the hours men work.

Remove the marriage, and you remove the responsibility. The data has been telling us this for decades.

But here is what nobody in the mainstream conversation will say: it is not only that marriage has become too costly and too legally treacherous for men — though it has. It is that many young women themselves have become, to put it plainly, not worth having. A third of young British women don’t trust men. More than half of educated young women view men negatively. They arrive at relationships pre-loaded with grievance, fluent in the language of red flags and emotional labour, primed by algorithms that have fed them a diet of male failure and female outrage since adolescence. They are, by their own account, anxious, miserable and politically furious.

What rational man, surveying this landscape, concludes that what his life is missing is a legally booby-trapped commitment to a woman primed to be impossible to keep happy.

Ehrenreich feared in 1983 that if the shame mechanism collapsed, male productivity would follow. She was right. What she could not have anticipated was the other half of the equation — that the feminist revolution would produce not a generation of fulfilled, generous, companionable women, but one that is, by every available measure, angrier and unhappier than any before it. The yoke is off. The men have looked at what’s on offer. And many have, with considerable rationality, decided to go and play video games instead.