There are now roughly 30.4 million unmarried American men between the ages of 20 and 39, nearly twice the number of married men in the same cohort. The predictable explanation is that men are to blame. Pornography, gaming, delayed adulthood, declining ambition, fear of commitment, social awkwardness, the manosphere, and economic stagnation all make the list of reasons. But after years of dissecting so-called “toxic masculinity,” perhaps it is time to ask what has toxic femininity done to the modern woman? Have women today become poor prospects for marriage?
That honest question may sound inflammatory because our culture has spent decades teaching women to evaluate men while treating reciprocal scrutiny as sexism. Women are encouraged to identify red flags, examine a man’s income, ambition, temperament, sexual habits, emotional intelligence, politics, attachment style, relationship with his mother, willingness to provide, and potential as a father. This is considered discernment, rightly so. Men, however, are increasingly discovering that asking similarly consequential questions about women’s character invites accusations of insecurity, misogyny, or an inability to “handle” independent women.
The frustration becomes easier to understand when you look at the culture young men are actually encountering. Social media tells women to know their worth, never settle, protect their peace, trust the ick, establish another boundary, identify the narcissist, and treat independence as a prerequisite for emotional health. Cosmopolitan recently described the practice of “decentering men” as a rejection of organizing women’s lives around male approval and the so-called patriarchy, while Psychology Today has promoted a model of “decentering men” built around preserving autonomy and identity while dating.
Of course, no woman should build her identity entirely around whether a man chooses her, and no one should remain in an abusive relationship for the sake of saying she has one. But the cumulative message is more radical than its internet virality. A culture built around protecting the self from imposition will eventually produce people who regard the obligation of duty itself with suspicion. Marriage, however, is almost entirely made of obligations. A husband will interfere with your preferences. Children will obliterate your schedule. Family will demand money, time, patience, forgiveness, dependence, and sacrifice precisely when self-actualization would be easier.
This is one reason so many young men look at today’s dating culture and see women who are prepared to choose husbands but less prepared to become wives.
The Lindsay Clancy trial let the cat out of the bag. What disturbed many young men was the intensity of identification with the woman who killed three children. They watched social media turn the case into another story about systems failing women; they watched TikTok conspiracy theories baselessly implicate Patrick Clancy in the children’s deaths; and some users went so far as to invoke zodiac signs while attempting to redirect suspicion toward Patrick. Some men began looking at their own girlfriends and asking an uncomfortable question: Can this woman become the mother of my future children?
The Clancy response exposed what years of discussion about “toxic masculinity” have conspicuously avoided: femininity can become toxic too. We have no difficulty admitting that masculine virtues require discipline. Yet feminine instincts are routinely treated differently. Empathy can become indulgence. Vulnerability can become a mechanism for escaping accountability. Emotional sensitivity can become manipulation. Social intelligence can become reputational warfare and exclusion. Female solidarity can become the instinct to identify with another woman before asking whether she is right. Compassion can become so detached from judgment that the person presenting the greatest emotional suffering becomes the presumed victim even when actual victims are lying dead.
Feminist ideology adds another layer. For decades, women have been trained to interpret their lives through systems of so-called oppression: patriarchy, unequal emotional labor, reproductive burdens, workplace discrimination, male violence, and expectations surrounding motherhood. The woman is increasingly understood first as someone acted upon rather than someone who acts, which means her failures are explained environmentally while male failures remain evidence of character.
This appears everywhere in contemporary culture. Male failure is moralized: grow up, work harder, stop watching porn, control your anger, earn more, become useful. Female failure is often therapeuticized: understand your trauma, honor your emotions, enforce your boundaries, protect your peace, consider how the system failed you. One sex is routinely told that maturity means mastering itself; the other is increasingly encouraged to understand and love itself as is.
Today’s young men are experiencing this in real time. They notice that many women still want the very masculine virtues the culture has spent decades problematizing. Women want men who are confident enough to initiate, ambitious enough to provide, strong enough to protect, decisive enough to lead, and emotionally steady enough to absorb difficulty without collapsing. Yet confidence can be redescribed as arrogance, provision as patriarchy, leadership as control, protectiveness as possessiveness, and stoicism as emotional unavailability. We have made masculinity culturally suspect while continuing to demand its benefits in private.
Meanwhile, young women’s own orientation toward marriage has changed dramatically. In 1993, 83 percent of female high-school seniors expected to marry someday, compared with 76 percent of boys. By 2023, the share of boys was virtually unchanged at 74 percent, while girls had fallen to 61 percent. The familiar story that men simply abandoned marriage while women patiently waited for them to mature is no longer intellectually adequate.
Women have agency too, which means they are capable of being badly formed by a culture rather than merely victimized by it. Too many young women have been formed to excel at independence without being formed for interdependence, to identify mistreatment without recognizing ordinary sacrifice, to demand emotional intelligence without cultivating emotional self-government, and to desire strong men while viewing traditional masculinity with suspicion. Social media has amplified those contradictions until they look like virtues.
For years, men have been told that wanting a good wife does not make them deserving of one. They must become husbands worth marrying. That remains true. But the inverse is equally true, no matter how uncomfortable our culture finds it. Wanting a good man does not make a woman marriage material. She has to become the kind of woman a good man can trust with his name, his home, his children, and the life he is trying to build.
Thirty million unmarried men are telling us something. Perhaps instead of automatically asking what is wrong with them, we should finally be willing to ask what kind of women our culture has taught them to choose from.
