The Gender Gap and its impact on the global future

Christine Emba is author of a wonderful book called Rethinking Sex A Provocation . She is a New York Times contributor . And Aaron Wren , our old friend , who is a writer and author of Life in the Negative World . You can follow him at AaronRenncom . Christine , aaron , welcome .

And actually for this conversation I am coming off of in fact I just returned this morning from doing a set of focus groups in Raleigh , north Carolina , with men and women , asking them how they feel about relationships , dating , sex and the future . And things are looking grim .

Both men and women suggest that they are further apart from the opposite sex than they have been in the past . They both think that the opposite sex is less interested in pairing up and settling down than they were in the past . They feel kind of uniformly pessimistic about the dating scene and , frankly , about their chances of long-term partnership in the future .

And from talking to young men and women and also survey data shows this

it seems that there's like a real misunderstanding going on between both sides .

Women are becoming generally more progressive , tend to be left-leaning and are overtaking men in education and in financial well-being , frankly , while men perhaps as a reaction and also , of course , due to , you know , economic factors , the lack of certain jobs , the loss of manufacturing and other jobs that used to favor men are falling behind financially , or often

falling behind educationally , and seem rather resentful of women for that reason .

We see that some other countries the battle of the sexes has become worse the United States , south Korea , which is having a sort of going out of business sale . There's so few children . There is a growing sort of political polarization as well .

You know , maybe men , young men have become a little more conservative , young women have moved far to the left and so now you've kind of got the battle of the sexes , if you will , has become political and if you think about a society , has been very politically polarized .

You know , the idea of like dating someone of the opposite political persuasion is kind of what it used to be . You know , maybe a Catholic wouldn't marry a Presbyterian or something like that .

Well , now it's like a Democrat won't marry a Republican , and so when you , when you , when you're polarized by gender , that tends to , I think , undermine relationships , exactly what the underlying causes are . I'm not really sure , but let me throw something out there just as sort of a provocation .

I can't prove this , but since this is the feudal future podcast , if we put a feudalism lens on this , if you go back through history , put a feudalism lens on this , if you go back through history , what you would have had is a relatively small number of men at the very top , with all of the resources , including many of the women , and a lot of men at the

bottom without much . And you know , you keep seeing all these stats about for much of human history I don't remember the exact percentage , it's like 40% or more of men never procreated , whereas you would have polygamy , you'd have multiple men at the top .

So we're sort of seeing , maybe with income inequality , the same sorts of things , where you have this handful of stupendous winners and if you wealth on

a scale no one's ever had before . Harem's of women pumping them out like crazy . And again , the people who have that kind of money by and large are men and you know , to the extent that you know women have got that kind of cash , it tends to come through , you know they inherited it or got in a divorce or something like that .

So you do still have this gap , traditional gender gap , at the very top of society , whereas at the bottom it's sort of inverted and since it's , you think about , a pure middle structure . You know we're kind of going back to and of course in European feudalism there was still marriage .

But when you look at this highly , highly unequal societies like that , it does tend to produce a lot of male losers at the bottom .

Actually , I mean , first of all , one of the things that's worth noting is this gender polarization in sentiment kind of seems to be happening across social classes , but the fallout in specifically dating and marriage , like the lack of partnership , is much more visible among Americans , usually of like lower wealth strata .

The sort of elite Americans you know , women and men who have both gone to Ivy League colleges , both have successful careers , you know are doing well generally they're complaining about dating but they are still managing to pair up often .

But when you talk to sort of Americans who have maybe some college education or no college education , who are not doing as well financially , the idea of sort of marriage and pairing up looks like a totally different thing in that range and it's a thing that's not happening .

To what degree has this type of broadening out of the definition of sex ? How has that affected the future of male-female relationships ?

But I've also spent a lot of time writing and researching the question of men and masculinity and Erin and I have actually talked about this in other spaces .

But one of the things that I think may be happening with , if not the profusion of sort of like this gender , non-binary or gender shift is , is that it has kind of confused some definitions of masculinity or

femininity and for men especially , the sort of addition of this potential third gender , this sort of ability to switch from this to this kind of complicates and confuses the idea of masculinity . Like what is a man supposed to be ?

Actually it could have been defined as not a woman , but that there's also this sort of third mysterious thing and I think that makes , I think that adds a sort of a level of discomfort sometimes to the broad sort of gender relationship proceedings , because men especially become less sure of how to act , what they're supposed to be .

Aaron , are you observing the same thing or do you have a different take on this ?

So we have a 40% out of wedlock birth rate in the country which , thankfully , has really peaked it really hasn't gone up from there and we have something like 25% of children being raised in a single parent household and we have the highest level , the highest share of children being raised in a single parent household , and we have the highest level , the highest

share of children being raised in single parent households of any country in the world . And there's a kind of now infamous Pew graph of that around the country . You look at some third world kind of countries and how is it possible they have lower , you know lower single parenthood families ?

We have the highest , and economist Melissa Carney did a great book called the Two Parent Privilege , looking at what happens when you know you don't have children raised in an intact family and even when you control for income and all of that .

It's very negative and she found , for example , some particularly negative effects on black boys growing up in neighborhoods where there's a preponderance of non-intact families , and so I think when you don't have that male role model , someone who models in in a productive way what it means to be a man , you grow up confused and you see this .

I think you see this in JD Vance's memoir , you see it in Robert Henderson's kind of memoir Troubled and so I think that it becomes difficult for people who are in kind of a dysfunctional milieu . I mean people I think you know listen to podcasts like this , tend to imagine that you know small town American life or some great repository of American virtue .

These are very dysfunctional worlds . I mean again , robert Putnam's book Our Kids kind of talks about dysfunction of the working class .

So you have people who are growing up you know in , you know whether that be in urban environments or rural environments and this and just highly dysfunctional communities unstable employment , unstable family structures , many things of that nature . It's probably not a fertile environment for people to learn productive models of masculinity .

So I'm thinking again of these focus groups that we I am also a fellow at AEI alongside Melissa Carney and some others , but I was doing this set of focus groups with Dan Cox who runs the American the Center on the Survey Center on American Life , and we were asking about gender and relationships , and so we would go around the table and ask people well , did

your parents talk to you about the importance of getting married , of having a family ? And most of the people we talked to , even college-educated students , said they didn't . Their parents people we talked to , even college educated students , said they didn't .

Their parents or parent talked to them a lot about getting an education , getting a job , but sort of the family question was never really brought up . The finding a partner was never really brought up , and so we asked the moderator of these focus groups to sort of press on this question Like why do you think your parents didn't tell you about this ?

And around the table you know the majority we did six focus groups over the course of two days Around each table .

The majority of people who were there , ranging from the age of like 25 to 34 , said well , like my parents are divorced and their marriage was terrible , or I grew up , you know , with my mom only and she managed by herself , so she didn't impress upon me the need of having a male partner or getting married to a woman and keeping things together .

If anything , my parents warned me not to get tied to the wrong person or not to have kids too early . So there's a sort of like fear actually imparted about gender relations and this idea that the other sex was maybe nice to have occasionally , but definitely not necessary and shouldn't be the focus of your relationship .

You know , in having delved into feudalism quite a bit , you know one of the reasons why the Protestants triumphed over the Catholics is that a huge percentage of the reasons why the Protestants triumphed over the Catholics is that a huge percentage of the Catholic population that you know was celibate they were about 15% were either in the uh , they were either in

monastery or or , you know , in a nunnery that and whereas the Protestants really pushed having family , so demographically they did better . So what I'm wondering about long term , will it be the breeders , if you will , who are going to , who are going to triumph ?

You know , I assume you're familiar with Eric Kaufman's book the Religious Will Inherit the Earth , and I thought that was a really interesting point because , like I think about San Francisco and the very small number of children Well , in , I mean , marshall and I will be long gone , but you know , but my , my girls are going to grow up in a world where it's

going to be the

children of the people living in the Dallas suburbs who are going to be much more numerous than what's going to be coming out of San Francisco . So I really wonder where this dynamic goes long term , because obviously some people are getting married and having kids . They tend to have certain characteristics .

Israel's fertility , for example , is famously high , and that's not just among you know the Orthodox Among the secular as well . Yes , yeah , yeah , and that's not just among you know , the secular as well . Yes , yeah , yeah , it's , it's , but their view themselves is engaged in a project , you know , with a sort of transcendent dimension to it .

Uh , you could think also about the amish and the , the mormons , although the mormon fertility's fallen a lot . Uh , you know , there's some another one of these like great graphs you see on the internet . It's like america , you know 2200 , and like the whole country is now Amish except for a huge blob of Mormons Well , we'll have good cheese .

That have moved to Angola . Some controversy about them moving to Angola and you know part of it is when you have a lot of kids , you know you spread out and go places right , and so you know the Mennonites having a lot of kids , there are going to be a lot of Mennonites showing up . The Amish have exploded in Indiana , for example .

So certainly the decline of religion and even among the people who are religious , religion today is much more eminently focused that it is more this-worldly , less other-worldly . You don't see as many people going into monasteries or the priesthood or a lot of these things like you used to be or a lot of these things like you used to be .

It's much more concerned with kind of the affairs of this world in a sense .

And Notre Dame sociologist of religion , christian Smith , just has a new book out called why Religion Went Obsolete , and he talks about these cultural changes that happened in the 90s and 2000s that really essentially not that it rendered religion extinct , but kind of socially functionally in our society it's obsolete , we don't need it anymore , and so there probably is

a connection there . There probably is a connection , but how strong it's hard to say .

I'm thinking of sort of the OnlyFans phenomenon , for instance , this site where sort of people pay to kind of interact with people who are making their own porn , basically . And you know , five years ago it was still seen as like a very seedy kind of thing . Today , you know , you ask if have you heard of OnlyFans ? Like what do you think about it ?

People are like , yeah , I've heard of it and you know it's an empowering way to make money . Like that sea change in sentiment happens really fast . But to the point about whether it will actually replace people and replace these relationships , be seen as a substitute , I do think that it is becoming more and more sophisticated .

It is possible that it can sort of mimic the relationships that people actually wish that they had . It's kind of sycophantic right . Like you talk to AI , it kind of always affirms you , you get the perfect man every time , exactly . It's always on your side and that can be really comforting for people , but that's not a real relationship .

That's not how relationships work . So if you're dependent on AI as a friend or to learn about relationships , you're not learning how to function with real people in the real world . So it is a crutch , but it's a crutch that won't really get you anywhere .

But then one last point actually , and this is the thing that worries me the most , I have talked to men , including some sort of male friends of mine , who you know started dating late or got married later .

And I have like one person in mind who I was talking to about this the other day and he was saying that it was the pandemic that kind of forced him to get married , basically because before the pandemic , you know , he had like hobbies , he had friends , he wasn't dating that much , but like it was enough that it was .

It wasn't great , but it was fine , he had enough things that it was fine . Not , he wasn't miserable enough to , you know , force himself to change his life , but then during the pandemic , you know , he didn't have anyone to talk to .

He wasn't miserable enough to force himself to change his life , but then during the pandemic , he didn't have anyone to talk to , he didn't have a girlfriend . Those friends had peeled away . He wasn't able to casually date anymore , and so when the pandemic ended , he was like , oh , I was miserable . Now I need to change my life .

Now I need to just get over this hump and meet someone and get married , because I don't want to be miserable anymore and I feel like AI pornography .

Many of these sort of digital substitutes , for men especially , will end up keeping them in this place of like you know , I'm not miserable , it's not great , but I'm fine Like I don't have a girlfriend but I can watch porn . I don't have friends , but I can talk to AI .

And instead of being like , oh , I'm miserable , I need to change my life and meet people , I need to get out there and find a girlfriend . They'll just sort of subsist in this like I'm existing so digital technology as anesthetic .

women together , like I noticed very often . I don't know if you guys see the same thing , but I'll go out to dinner with my wife and I'll notice that most of the tables are mostly all women , occasionally a few guys , and I wonder if this is just you know something that we ?

Is there any way of breaking this pattern , because it doesn't seem like it's going to lead us to a particularly good place .

And you know a lot of women consume porn now too , a lot more than you think . But a lot of the men you're hearing reports of men in their 20s with erectile dysfunction , in part coming from the just copious quantities of extreme porn that they have . You know they've consumed the idea of like .

You know , any kind of ordinary relationship can't compete with hypernormal stimulus . If you think about , you know , marrying that to sex robots or something , when it gets into the future , you know it could be , it could be very grim . You know the so-called manosphere , all these kind of online men's , influencer people .

There's a lot to criticize about many of them , but one thing I will give them credit for at their best they encourage men to have agency and to avoid , avoid porn , avoid online dating and to actually go out into the real world and try to meet women . Now , some of their purposes are nefarious for that , but again , there's no kind of .

In a sense , you're the substance . You actually have to go out and like , be willing to walk up to a woman and initiate a conversation , and a lot of guys they're just not willing to do that and it's socially intimidating to do that .

And that's why the average guy , when he can just retreat into the porn fantasy or into swiping right or whatever , it makes it so much easier . You avoid the unpleasantness .

And so I think really working on people's sense of agency about their life in general is something we need to do , because it does seem like there's way too many passive kind of young men in general . Quite apart from the relationship issue , they're just kind of drifting in life .

in surveys , in qualitative reporting . When you talk to women , they are aware that men are watching porn and they notice in relationships and in their interactions with men how porn colors , how men act . You know they talk about experiencing fear on dates or in intimate situations with men .

You know the proportion of you know young women in Britain who say that they have been sort of choked without their consent during sex is something like a third and it's frightening and scary . And so they're like I don't want to deal with men , I mistrust men , I don't want to be around them , and that will definitely contribute to a gender divide .

Yeah , and as Aaron was saying , yeah , it's . It is disturbing actually when you begin to talk to women about what their experiences with men have been , especially young women , regarding sex , and you begin to understand why they're not necessarily as interested in dating .

But for men , I think there is this like odd sort of fear , fear and lack of agency happening too . I think some of it is a little bit of a post kind of me too hangover . Some of it is just like a quick changing social norm that , like younger men especially , have not caught up to and are not sure how to to act within .

But there's this idea that , like well , I don not caught up to it or not sure how to to act within . But there's this idea that , like well , I don't want to walk up to a woman and talk to her because , like , I'm afraid she'll think I'm a creep or , you know , I wouldn't talk to a woman at work , you know , because I don't want to get me too .

I remember in my book , actually , I interviewed one guy who was like , yeah , I want to date , but I would never date at work , I would never ask someone out at work .

That would be like handing someone a loaded gun , and I was like I don't know if it's that serious , but this idea that it's inappropriate or it's somehow dangerous to speak to women in public or to actually act on an express agency means that a lot of men just don't put themselves out there and they don't meet women .

And the men who then are able to overcome what seems like a social norm or , you know , overcome that fear , are often maybe more aggressive in other ways too , and that also contributes to sort of like a strange feeling .

what can we do ? I'm not sure if society can do it , but I think individuals could do it . What would be your advice on trying to correct this ? What would you say to your own children to get them to not fall into this kind of trap ?

Apparently , there are still like think tanks that were sort of established by Paul Ehrlich , the population bomb guy , who tries to , you know , educate the educators on how to incorporate , essentially , population limitation into their , into their , their thing .

So it's like , and if you look at any , any thing in the media about marriage , how many , how many news articles talk about a happy , normal marriage , or almost not a movie , a happy , normal marriage .

Or a movie Almost none you know it's like it's overwhelmingly negative or if it's something positive , it's sort of a glamorization of a niche lifestyle , like polyamory , for example . So the really society doesn't really send messages , parents aren't telling people to get married .

So I think you know we need to figure out a way to educate people on the realities of of life . I think a lot of people , if you ask people you know , young people would you like to get married and have kids , is that like , oh , I think a lot of them would still say , yeah , you know , I kind of like to have that . Uh , but nobody , nobody .

Especially when you're young . You don't really understand , like , what it means to be 75 years old , single . No , kids , like you can't even relate to that , uh . So I think we're kind of a little bit flying blind .

But the kids , I think you know talking to people about , about , about what you get from having getting married and brad wilco the sociologist has all the stats oh no , you might live longer , you'll probably have more money , all that stuff .

And then also like helping people understand that it's like you can't get into a college today , the way I got into college , which was like , oh , you know , it's my senior year , maybe I should send off some applications somewhere , kind of thing . You know we have to treat getting married .

Young people have to treat getting married the same way they treat getting into the college of their dreams . You have to have intentionality , you have to work on it . You have to work on your own product , your own resume , your own like you know , your own equivalent of test scores and GPA . You have to do what it takes .

You can't just say , well , you know it'll happen . You know nobody would say that about a career , nobody would say that about getting into college . You know the other things that matter in life , like we realize we have to have high intentionality in a very high degree of difficulty world .

And so I think you know kind of proactively getting young people to just understand like here's what you have to do , and like helping them , like you know , helping bring them along , and like modeling healthy lifestyles and agency and things of that nature . You know is important .

They have this idea that they'll get married someday but like , how do I ask someone out , like what are men and women looking for ? How do I behave with other people ? They feel like they have to come up with these norms on their own , which takes time , and then sometimes it takes too much time and you've kind of aged out of what you wanted .

So I think this , just like being realistic about marriage doesn't just happen , relationships don't just happen . You have to sort of go outside , you know , get off the apps , talk to people , try that out is important . And yeah , I would also say you know I've noticed this in the media too , especially in women's media .

You know , when there are conversations about marriage , it's so often you know a divorce memoir or you memoir or my marriage is terrible because my husband X and in talking to actually other female writers who are married and are happy . Many of them are like I feel like it's kind of passe or uncool to be like I like my husband a lot . I like my kids .

Actually they didn't ruin my career . I like my husband a lot . I like my kids actually they didn't ruin my career .

And yeah , I think being more open about how marriage can be just normal and nice not necessarily a disaster , not necessarily something that will set you back or take you off track , but actually that could propel you forward would be really important .

And then I think for adults generally , one of the crises that we're seeing with young people of both genders , but especially men , is just a crisis of role models . How do I become a man Like ? What are the things I need to do to get through life ? I wish my parents or somebody would just tell me what to do .

I think that older people actually need to take agency themselves and like if you , if there are young men or young women or single people in your community who you , who you see are floundering or who you notice are great , but they're alone , like you can step in and invite them over to your house , you know , to have dinner with your family to see what that

looks like you know , to have dinner with your family to see what that looks like you know , or introduce them to somebody who you think they might like . That sort of help from above , as it were , can be the push that younger people need .

So being able to understand the nature of that is something that you've helped us bring out today . So thank you so much .