When J.D. Vance announced a plan to offer public assistance for stay-at-home mothers, he was immediately blasted as a socialist wanting to turn the U.S. into a welfare state.
For some reason, it didn’t matter that this program already existed for mothers working outside the home, nor did it matter that Vance wanted to incentivize more women to stay at home and have children instead of spending their most fertile years working in an office. Altogether, this was less an instance of crypto-socialism and more an effort to repurpose a government program for a conservative end. And based on the most recent jobs report, enabling women to stay at home is more necessary than most people probably realize.
The good news was that there were 162,000 new jobs across different sectors last month. However, behind this number was a vast disparity: Around 158,000 (98 percent) of these new jobs went to women, while 4,000 (2 percent) went to men.
Some have claimed this as evidence that women are underpaid and forced to job-stack, while others point to the timing of the report, which favored employment in female-dominated jobs, such as teaching. But neither of these claims accounts for the strong preference for hiring women in traditionally male-dominated sectors like manufacturing and construction.
Others suggested these numbers are probably compensating for an earlier time when men were hired more. Nevertheless, according to The Post Millennial, “Women surpassed men in total payroll employment for the third time in history earlier this year.” This is not a correction but a continuation of what has been happening since Trump retook office last year.
In all likelihood, the real reason for the disparity is that women are applying for jobs in far greater numbers than men and employers are systematically discriminating against men.
This news should alarm everyone. If only 2 percent of new jobs went to women, there would be women’s marches in every city, and feminist politicians would fly into action. But when it’s men, most people just shrug. Even President Trump laughed about this, ironically remarking that this must be why women love him so much.
But this is no joking matter. Already, relations between men and women are worse than ever, and this will turn the current rift into an unbridgeable chasm. Men are actively being denied remunerative work that would elevate their social status and enable them to attract a spouse, and their loss is directly the result of women taking their jobs.
Despite innumerable negative reports on men, many of them are still making all the right moves to find work but are being rejected because of their sex. This, in turn, discourages other men who see no point in trying, leading to growing gaps in college attendance. Meanwhile, employers are losing out on talented workers, and the country is left with a surplus of unemployed and unemployable young men.
Although feminists might cast this as a massive boon for women, the practical consequence of this development is as bad for them as for the men. They are now deprived of suitable men to marry since the majority will be far beneath them in status and income level, which then puts immense pressure on women to work at a career themselves and forego marriage and family formation entirely. And if, by some miracle, they find a good man who can provide for them, and become stay-at-home mothers, they can be expected to be vilified as backward “tradwives” by other women.
As such, longstanding norms are being gradually reversed: Women are now the breadwinners, leaders, and protectors while men spend more time at home doing chores and handling child care. Not surprisingly, this unnatural arrangement has failed to make men or women happier. As survey after survey shows, both men and women are increasingly suffering from loneliness, anxiety, and depression.
Worse still, this reversal of norms has increasingly made men and women dislike one another, each blaming the other for their failings and becoming less attractive to the other. After all, why would any woman want to date and marry a passive man who makes less money than she does? And why would any man want to date and marry an entitled woman who doesn’t respect him?
South Korea demonstrates what happens when a battle of the sexes morphs into a nationwide, multigenerational war of the sexes: It goes extinct. Birth rates in the country are less than half of replacement levels, with its total population set to halve by 2100. Instead of coming together to resolve this crisis, the majority of Korean men and women often take opposing political and cultural stances. They are competitors in a zero-sum game that leads to societal decline.
With a 1.62 total fertility rate (more than twice that of South Korea but still below replacement levels), the U.S. is on track to experience the same problems. Already, the abysmal dating scene has prevented younger adults from coming together to start their families, and much of this is a direct consequence of most women outstripping most men economically.
Yet many people still treat this as a win-win situation. In theory, women are being empowered, and men are stepping back for the sake of “gender equity.” In reality, it’s a lose-lose situation where women are increasingly alienated from the home, men are alienated from work, and the two are alienated from each other.
The usual objection to returning to the former arrangement, where men went to work and women took care of the home, was that it denied opportunities to women and turned men into tyrants by giving them too much power. Even if this might have been the case in specific households — though the reality was far more nuanced than this crude characterization — it is obviously not remedied by denying men opportunities and turning women into tyrants. This only makes a bad situation far worse.
Rather, achieving a healthy balance between the sexes would involve finding a workable middle ground. Women can continue to enjoy economic opportunities, but this should not come at the cost of men doing the same. In policy terms, this means ending misguided affirmative-action policies that unjustly favor female advancement, along with punishing instances of reverse sexism that unfairly target men. This would also mean fighting back against the toxic messaging that stigmatizes domestic life and promotes militant misandry.
These moves should be combined with a society-wide push to encourage men to strive professionally and romantically. Too many are giving up on self-improvement because they understandably feel the world is stacked against them. The same people who tell these young men to quit complaining and work harder should redirect their efforts to reforming the current broken system so hard work is properly recognized and rewarded. Additionally, we should all help young people to understand that self-improvement is good in itself, a point I make sure to repeat every day in my high school English class.
For the record, none of this equates to DEI for men. It is simply restoring common sense, stability, and sexual complementarity in a culture that is coming apart. Men want and need to shoulder a greater burden of today’s labor while women want and need to shoulder less of that burden. Accomplishing this will not only make both sexes happier, but it will also make them like one another a lot more.
