Unmanned: How the 21st century man is leaving his post

By: American Decency Staff

A few months ago, Ronald Bailey wrote a post on his blog at Reason.comcalled "The War on Men is Working" in which he quotes another blogby a University of Michigan economist, Mark Perry, regarding some recent Bureau of Labor statistics study. Here is the quoted section of Mr. Perry's blog.

"[The BLS Study] includes data on educational attainment at ages 23, 24, and 25 by gender from a longitudinal survey of 9,000 young men and women who were born between 1980 and 1984. For each of the three ages reported (23, 24, and 25) there is a significant gender gap favoring women for college degrees, and for the youngest cohort of 23-year-olds the gender disparity is huge: there are 165 women in the sample who have graduated from college at age 23 for every 100 of their male peers. (his emphasis) Also, at each age group there are more women currently enrolled in college than men (e.g. at age 23, 17.3% of women are enrolled in college vs. 16.8% of men), so there is really no chance that the college-degree gender gap will close in the future."

Interestingly enough, Ronald Bailey also brings attention to a Pew poll released last year, "Two-thirds (66%) of young women ages 18 to 34 rate career high on their list of life priorities, compared with 59% of young men. In 1997, 56% of young women and 58% of young men felt the same way.

Obviously, career as a priority sky-rocketed  for young women between the study and 1997 while the rate for men stayed virtually the same.   So, more women are obtaining college degrees than men, and presumably, are aiming higher.

The fact that the percentage of men claiming career as a high priority has stayed the same, while the rate of men earning college degrees (compared to women) has gone down suggests that, men, perhaps are not dreaming as big – shooting for careers not requiring a college education. 

Mr. Bailey closes his blog post with the humorous observation that, "giventhese trends, the dating scene for guys who do go to college must be awesome."

Funny you should say that, Ronald. According to the New York Times, it is.

"North Carolina, with a student body that is nearly 60 percent female, is just one of many large universities that at times feel eerily like women’s colleges. Women have represented about 57 percent of enrollments at American colleges since at least 2000, according to a recent report by the American Council on Education. Researchers there cite several reasons: women tend to have higher grades; men tend to drop out in disproportionate numbers; and female enrollment skews higher among older students, low-income students, and black and Hispanic students…

…Needless to say, this puts guys in a position to play the field, and tends to mean that even the ones willing to make a commitment come with storied romantic histories. Rachel Sasser, a senior history major at the table, said that before she and her boyfriend started dating, he had “hooked up with a least five of my friends in my sorority — that I know of.”

These sorts of romantic complications are hardly confined to North Carolina, an academically rigorous school where most students spend more time studying than socializing. The gender imbalance is also pronounced at some private colleges, such as New York University and Lewis & Clark in Portland, Ore., and large public universities in states like California, Florida and Georgia. The College of Charleston, a public liberal arts college in South Carolina, is 66 percent female. Some women at the University of Vermont, with an undergraduate body that is 55 percent female, sardonically refer to their college town, Burlington, as “Girlington.”

So, according to "researchers," women are trying harder (higher grades,) dropping out less, and enrolling more often.  The guys that do attend and don't drop out are very busy with extra-curricular activities.  That's coming from the liberal New York Times which is apparently naive enough to actually believe that,"most students spend more time studying than socializing."

This is not an encouraging commentary on the young collegiate male in general.

At this point, much could be said, I am sure, about the change in America's education system and the ways in which America's students have changed in their passion for knowledge and desire to learn and have given in to the myriad distractions and entertainments.  I, unfortunately, am not equipped to discuss it.  I once started to read Professor Alan Bloom's relevant book about the subject, "The Closing of the American Mind," but I didn't get very far past the part where he says today's students don't have the attention span required for traditional academia.

So, in review, more women than men are interested in college and more women than men graduate from college.  The men who do go to college have a pretty wide range of distractions to choose from.

Now, let's swing over to an opinion piece on FoxNews.comby Suzanne Venker entitled, "The War on Men." 

"The battle of the sexes is alive and well. According to Pew Research Center, the share of women ages eighteen to thirty-four that say having a successful marriage is one of the most important things in their lives rose nine percentage points since 1997 – from 28 percent to 37 percent. For men, the opposite occurred. The share voicing this opinion dropped, from 35 percent to 29 percent.

Believe it or not, modern women want to get married. Trouble is, men don’t.

The so-called dearth of good men (read: marriageable men) has been a hot subject in the media as of late. Much of the coverage has been in response to the fact that for the first time in history, women have become the majority of the U.S. workforce. They’re also getting most of the college degrees. The problem? This new phenomenon has changed the dance between men and women. "

Suzanne's article proved to be quite controversial because she went on to conclude that, "Men want to love women, not compete with them. They want to provide for and protect their families – it’s in their DNA. But modern women won’t let them."

Perhaps because she's a woman she feels the need to blame women.  I have the opposite problem.  I have no doubt that in some – probably many – cases, if the modern woman became a lady, the modern man would become a gentleman.  But I don't think that man's character chasm is woman's responsibility.  If anything, Biblically, it should be the other way around.

So, fewer men than women are graduating from college and pursuing careers and men don't want to get married.

Men also, tragically, don't want to be dads.  From the New York Times, "Itused to be called illegitimacy. Now it is the new normal. After steadily rising for five decades, the share of children born to unmarried women has crossed a threshold: more than half of births to American women under 30 occur outside marriage."

Tied to that startling tidbit, is this most recent revelation from Pew, "A record 40% of all households with children under the age of 18 include mothers who are either the sole or primary source of income for the family, according to a new Pew Research Center analysis of data from the U.S. Census Bureau. The share was just 11% in 1960."

With perhaps a few exceptions, we don't have the excuse of fighting off vicious attacks by "femi-nazis."  We don't have men being kicked out of colleges or not being allowed to marry.  In most cases, women are not withholding their children from their fathers.  It may be hard for a man to find a job in this economy, but apparently women aren't having the same problem.

What we do have is a lot of men who are not stepping up to their responsibilities.  The statistics above show this!  Could anyone say with a straight face that men have fewer opportunities than women?

So what's wrong with the 21st century man?

I said before that I don't like the term "war on men," but perhaps it is more appropriate than I thought.  There is no human war on men.

Satan, however, attacks on every side, placating man's need for sexual intimacy with porn and cheap hook ups, pacifying man's need to be a protector and hero in the real world with video games which allow him to be a warrior in the virtual world, and deadening man's desire to be the leader of his family with a false vision of foolish and feeble sitcom fatherhood.

We have a culture which sneers at gender roles, but we have no voice to counter it.  The church needs to realize that this is a serious issue, pick up the megaphone, and let men know that they were created for a purpose.

"Be fruitful and multiply," was a divine commission for the family to fulfill the roles that God designed for each member to live out.

The Bible has a lot to say about what God expects of His men, and central to that is His placement of man at the head of the family.  After all, Ephesians 5:23 says that "the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church," and verse 25 calls husband to love their wives "as Christ loved the church."  The family unit is designed to point the observers to Christ and how He loves His church, "[giving] Himself up for her."

No wonder Satan has thrown so much at men!  Can you imagine the implications for evangelism if every Christian family was a portrait of the sacrificial love of Christ for the church?

If you are interested in learning more about Biblical manhood and womanhood, I would point you to a couple of sermon series' that have helped me out by Pastor Eric Mason, which can be found here. Look for the "Newmanity" and "Eve Redeemed" series.

Another excellent resource we recommend is “Recovering Biblical Manhood & Womanhood” by John Piper and Wayne Grudem.

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