No wonder men are opting out

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.