Her column today is really good. Do we Care about Boys? she wonders.
every sign that boys or men are hurting gets determinedly turned around into a happy news story of female success. The disconnect between the happy headlines and the reality underneath will only be solved by women. The irony of men is that they cannot defend themselves or organize around their own systemic, gendered problems. Putting their own gender in the position of “the weaker sex” unmans them — and also makes them deeply unattractive to women. It’s not going to happen.
the only way we are going to identify the new problem that has no name, own it, and do something about it, is if women with power make it a cause of our own. We have sons as well as daughters, nephews as well as nieces. We want husbands and fathers for ourselves or for our children who are confident, successful males and good family men willing and able to work hard to support those families. The problem is not that women are doing well, it’s that boys are doing badly. The two genders cannot be pitted against one another without all of us losing….
women are not necessarily happy about male failure. Betsy Stevenson and Justin Wolfers’ 2007 study, “The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness,” notes that “By many objective measures the lives of women in the United States have improved over the past 35 years, yet we show that measures of subjective well-being indicate that women’s happiness has declined both absolutely and relative to men.”When men fail, fewer women get married. Since 1970, the proportion of 30- to 44-year-olds who are married dropped from 84 percent to 60 percent. What’s next? Ask black women. In 1970, black wives were already more educated than their husbands, and just 62 percent of black people aged 30 to 44 then were married. By 2007 that figure had plunged to 33 percent. Fewer than one out of three black Americans in prime marrying/childbearing years is now married. This is one core reason why out-of-wedlock birthrates are so high.
Cooperation, not competition, between men and women. Respect for men and their contributions. Understanding and correcting the root causes of out-of-wedlock childbearing. These are the issues that got Maggie and I both into the marriage movement in the first place. And these are among the core values of the Ruth Institute.
Read her whole article here. And read about the Ruth Institute here.