"Men Without Work" review
Review here. From 2017 but still entirely relevant. Excerpt:
'Nicholas Eberstadt has become one of our highest-impact socioeconomic and demographic analysts, rivaling his American Enterprise Institute colleague Charles Murray. In Men without Work, he alerts us to a new “invisible national crisis.” This is the flight of some 10 million American men in their prime ages (between 25 and 54) from the work force, and indeed from all the commitments and responsibilities of civilized society. He documents an “immense army” of rootless “idlers,” tending toward obesity, popping pills (mainly prescription painkillers, but also, in alarming numbers, harder drugs), immersed in TV for an average of 21.7 hours a week and video games for 6.7 hours, and stickily keyboarding on an oily surf of terabytes of porn, all while their baby-boom elders retire, often on disability, and, as of this August, 337,000 manufacturing jobs go unfilled.
...
Every mainstream TV channel and magazine from Fortune to Wired joins the fray in a siege of affirmative-action journalism, pretending that the leading young inventors and entrepreneurs in America and the world are mostly female and that even Silicon Valley is somehow defective in gender diversity. Wired says the new Steve Jobs is a twelve-year-old girl in Mexico. Ellen Pao becomes a luminous cover attraction with absurd claims of discrimination against women at Kleiner Perkins, long the world’s most successful venture-capital firm (twelve out of 50 Kleiner partners are women). The explicit purpose of all this agitprop is to overthrow the “privileges of the patriarchy,” to break the grip of the “nuclear family,” to unseat the presumption of male breadwinners, to relieve women of their responsibility to bear and raise children, to liberate wives from bondage in bad marriages, and to shatter “glass ceilings” galore in a world where childbearing is mostly a “choice” rather than necessary for survival.
...
If you want a feminist culture that abolishes the “patriarchy” and denies all canonical male roles; that banishes carbon fuels, new chemicals, and the manufacturing they enable; that represses disruptive entrepreneurial behavior; and that enforces preferential representation of women throughout the commanding heights of the economy, you cannot at the same time have most men eagerly supporting the plan. Without most men on board, the nation will not be able to defend itself or produce new technology and enterprise. Without women bearing children and raising them in families, the nation will not be able to reproduce itself.
Eberstadt is thus pointing to a fatal flaw — a sexual suicide in an American polity where women outvote men and prefer socialism and stasis over progress and prosperity, where they choose dependency on government over collaboration with husbands and family. But this “choice” is so unnatural and ultimately self-defeating that it may well be reaching its morbid pinnacle today in a feminist bubble. Watch for an explosive reversal in coming years.'
- Log in to post comments