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<h1 style="text-align: center;">Marriage Strike Future: Pervasive Thuggery In The Apocalyptic West</h1>  <img src="https://web.archive.org/web/20150519021332im_/http://splitsburgh.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/the_Post_apocalyptic_warrior_by_Juhho.jpeg" alt="" width="700" /> In Betty Friedan's pivotal work The Feminine Mystique (1963) she called the family a "comfortable concentration camp." Nearly twenty years later she backpedaled in The Second Stage (1981), claiming that her critique wasn't intended to eliminate marriage. Rather it was intended to encourage women to seek fulfillment outside of the family. Regardless, the comparison of a wife's domestic role with slavery was a seductive idea, crucial to the dogma of second-wave feminism. Husbands were their wives' greatest allies, and yet the backward notion that men were oppressors spread like wildfire. Middle-class housewives were pampered by their husbands to the point of a fault. Being protected from malicious outside forces created an existence so dull these women yearned for a narrative of conflict and excitement. Feminists earned adherents by successfully using rhetoric to make the drab, docile existence of the Western woman sound remarkable and her mission heroic. With the enemy reclining in the living room, lashing out at the patriarchy was as convenient as operating her male-supplied dishwasher. Despite meddling by second-wavers, it has primarily been women that have pushed for marriage, as it is women that get most benefit from it. One merely needs to peruse a list of wedding magazines to determine which gender is drawn in by the idea of a lavish ceremony. This day of adulation has become marriage's big selling point. The "commitment" that follows can be opted out of at any time, while men assume a disproportionate amount of the risk. Burdened with the blame if the union were to fail, young men are forced be be more pragmatic. They've watched their parents' marriage and those of their friend's parents crumble. Thus growing numbers have abandoned illusions of a happy marriage for themselves. <h2>Pop Feminism And Marriage Expectations</h2> These days, pop or "moderate" feminists are picking up the slack. Prominent feminists are living amazingly traditional lives. Jessica Valenti got hitched, caught baby rabies and has since quit blogging at Feministing to pen a book called Why Have Kids?: A New Mom Explores the Truth About Parenting and Happiness. Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love, wrote a humdrum follow-up called Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage. With the threat of deportation from the U.S., she married her third-world heartthrob Felipe. As a collective feminists have helped transform the once revered <a href="https://blog.loveawake.com/2020/12/14/how-to-make-gender-differences-work-for-your-marriage/">institution of marriage</a> into a dark comedy. And now that men are getting the joke en masse women are attempting create the illusion that the genie has been tossed back in the bottle. In retrospect the domestic slaves Betty Friedan spoke of were living the dream. Ever dissatisfied, women are struggling to retain the best bits of traditionalism and the best bits of feminist theory at the cost of men. There's an ever-growing stack of articles by the Woman's Studies set shaming young men for wasting their time draining bottles of Rolling Rock and playing Mass Effect, rather than bearing the brunt of responsibility in society for the benefit of women (aka "manning up"). Last-ditch efforts by the symphony of howling voices won't change a thing. The ship has sailed. <h2>Daddy State Breeding Hoodlums In Overdrive</h2> If the decline in marriage continues along its current trajectory it will be nearly obsolete by 2045. At this point only the very wealthy and very religious will continue the practice. <img src="https://web.archive.org/web/20150519021332im_/http://splitsburgh.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/Marriage-Decline-Graph.jpeg" alt="" width="612" height="345" /> While remaining single may be the only sensible option for men, considering the <a href="https://blog.loveawake.com/2020/03/30/80-20-why-affairs-dont-make-sense/">high cost of divorce</a> and anti-male nature of family law, this is a catastrophe for the future of the West. It will produce an Idiocracy-inspired dystopian society brimming with trailer trash. I see flashes of myself thirty years from now: wearing a Panama hat, squinty-eyed, clenched fists, sporting a demeanor similar to Clint Eastwood in Gran Torino. Here's why: <ol> <li>Clever, adaptive men have written off marriage. If born into a more favorable social climate they may have started a family, making this a missed opportunity for both the individual and society.</li> <li>As the marriage rate continues to plummet, inevitably more children will be raised by <a href="https://www.loveawake.com/free-online-dating/United-States-dating-service.html?page=31">single mothers</a> with the State "replacing" the man as provider and protector.</li> <li>As a result of point 2, the West will be overrun with maladjusted thug males, and trashy promiscuous females. Each new year will progressively turn out more criminally-inclined lowlifes before hitting rock-bottom in 2045.</li> <li>Unleashed hypergamy will cause women to judge men as sperm donors rather than life parters. Natural selection will increasingly favour the primal, anti-social ("alpha") males, while males most adapted to uphold civilization ("beta"), will be bred out of existence.</li> </ol> Alex Wise from the Loveawake dating site noted the following in his <a href="https://blog.loveawake.com">blog</a>: By 1996, 70 percent of inmates in state juvenile detention centers serving long-term sentences were raised by single mothers. Seventy percent of teenage births, dropouts, suicides, runaways, juvenile delinquents and child murderers involve children raised by single mothers. Girls raised without fathers are more sexually promiscuous and more likely to end up divorced. A 1990 study by the left-wing Progressive Policy Institute showed that, after controlling for single motherhood, the difference in black and white crime disappeared. <h2>Opting Out Of A Broken System</h2> Let's be clear. The idea of marriage is about appealing to me as getting stuck in a foothold trap near Alert, Nunavut, and gnawing off a portion of my leg in order to survive. Thus I'd never try to push a pro-marriage agenda on men for the sake of the greater good. A society run by corrupt politicians that has ceased to serve its male citizens effectively is not worth sacrificing for. Likewise, a spoiled Western female more apt to work against her husband than to work with him isn't worth the trouble. History has shown that great nations follow a similar pattern of growth, maturity and decline. It's a cyclical force great Emperors couldn't substantially affect. My choice: sit back and take in the spectacle of the West's downfall.