Western Monogamy in Decline
Once the cornerstone of Western civilization, monogamy is now in a state of seemingly irreversible decline. Statistics corroborate this trend. In England and Wales, from 1972 to 2016, the number of marriages has declined, but the number of divorces has risen dramatically. The general marriage rate (GMR), the number of people who marry per 1000 unmarried people, has also decreased significantly. In 1972, it was nearly 80% for males and 60% for females; by 2016, it was approximately 20% for both sexes (Office of National Statistics, 2019). The same trend can be observed in the United States, where marriage rates have steadily declined since 1980, and are now lower than they were in 1870, when marriage statistics were first collected (CDC National Center for Health Statistics, 2010). In 1960, 72% of American adults were married, but by 2017, only 50% were (Pew Research Center, 2017). Declining marriage rates have been statistically documented in Canada, Australia and New Zealand; even a Westernized society like Japan is not immune to the phenomenon of declining marriage rates.
It is no coincidence that declining marriage rates began in the 1960s and 1970s, during the heyday of the Sexual Revolution. The changing social mores of the age led to more permissive attitudes about sex; it also normalized sex outside of marriage. Wilhelm Reich, a Freudian psychoanalyst, was one of the intellectual godfathers of the Sexual Revolution; he argued that sexual expression was natural and that destructive institutions like the monogamous family and the state had sought to repress man’s libidinal energies. The many dangerous consequences of sexual repression included the rise of fascism and Nazism in Europe. The American sexologist Alfred Kinsey was another intellectual whose ideas made the Sexual Revolution possible. His Kinsey Reports revealed to the world that most Americans were deeply ashamed and ignorant of their own sexuality, the result of America’s puritanical moral values. The solution was to rid the world, or at least diminish the influence of the monogamous family and the conservative social morality that legitimized it as a viable institution. In addition to the liberal activism of Reich and Kinsey, Roth vs. United States (1957) and other Supreme Court cases made it increasingly difficult to secure criminal convictions for obscenity; court-mediated liberalization of sexual attitudes meant that obscenity and pornography openly flourished during the Sexual Revolution. Men, or more accurately, alpha males and women no longer had to rely on marriage for regular sexual intercourse.
The FDA’s approval of the combined oral contraceptive pill in 1960 and Roe vs. Wade (1973), which legalized abortion nationwide, played a major role in declining marriage rates. “The pill,” as it was known colloquially, was the most effective form of contraception to date; its effectiveness gave women full control over their own fertility; before, absence of effective contraceptives allowed men to play a considerable role. Now that women were able to control when and with whom they got pregnant, marriage could be delayed to pursue career and education. Women could also have sex whenever they wanted, without risk of unwanted pregnancy; they could postpone marriage indefinitely or not get married at all. Age of first marriage increased and fertility rates went into decline. In the 1960s, Lyndon B. Johnson’s “Great Society” programs, such as food stamps, Medicaid and rent subsidies for public housing encouraged unwed motherhood. Women who chose not to work or go to school could avoid marriage, but still raise a family with the help of the government. Biological fatherhood was rendered virtually obsolete almost overnight. For women of low socio-economic status, remaining single was far more lucrative than finding a partner willing to look after her.
Feminism and women’s rights bear significant responsibility for the decreasing importance of marriage in Western society. Contemporary feminists deny the existence of innate biological differences between males and females, with the exception of anatomical differences; what appear to be innate differences are the result of socialization. Feminists believe that males dominate society because of harmful sexist stereotyping. Only the radical transformation of Western society could free men and women from the patriarchal oppression of stereotyped sex roles. The denial of innate differences is too laughable for serious consideration, but the definitive case for the psychophysiological basis of male patriarchal dominance has already been made in Steven Goldberg’s classic Why Men Rule (1993). Furthermore, the vast majority of feminists are outright Marxists or Marxist-influenced. As can be seen from the writings of Friedrich Engels, Marxism logically entails feminism. In Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State (1884), he wrote:
Thus, wherever the monogamous family remains true to its historical origin and clearly reveals the antagonism between the man and the woman expressed in the man’s exclusive supremacy, it exhibits in miniature the same oppositions and contradictions as those in which society has been moving. […] The first condition for the liberation of the wife is to bring the whole female sex back into public industry, and that this in turn demands the abolition of the monogamous family as the economic unit of society.
Feminism is a totalitarian police-state ideology that requires the state’s coercive machinery to implement its policies, despite masquerading as a liberation movement. For example, in the United States, Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act prohibited sex discrimination, no doubt because of the feminist ideology that has been endorsed by all levels of government. Although feminists believe that the differential outcomes of men and women in Western society are the result of sexist discrimination, this has never been demonstrated empirically; the most credible evidence indicates that women and men have different outcomes because of their innate biological differences.
In 1967, President Johnson’s Executive Order 11375 required federal employers to eliminate sex-based discrimination through affirmative action. In 1972, the Equal Opportunity Employment Act provided the legislative machinery for the enforcement of Johnson’s executive order. Gains for white women in the labor market because of affirmative action were negligible, except in certain white-collar professions, but insomuch as it has been successful affirmative action has merely contributed to the prevalence of reverse discrimination against white males.
Since the 1970s, the government has heavily promoted feminist pedagogy in the public education system. Federal laws, such as Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, have been used to justify feminist propaganda in public school curricula and tertiary-level programs. Feminists have sought to remove all sexist language in textbooks and disseminate the view that innate sex differences are imaginary. There is no doubt that this systematic brainwashing in schools has been a major factor in women forsaking motherhood for career and a post-secondary education.
In the late 1970s, feminists lobbied the US federal government to classify sexual harassment as discrimination, as prohibited by Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, but it wasn’t until 1986 that the Supreme Court recognized it as a Title VII violation. Since then, governments in Western Europe and the Anglosphere have embraced feminist dogma about the “patriarchal oppression” of unwanted male sexual attention and implemented their own sexual harassment legislation. Sexual harassment laws are a means of warding off unattractive beta males, who must endure lifelong bachelorhood through no fault of their own, while females are allowed to freely indulge their primitive hypergamous instincts with wild abandon.
Since the 1960s, feminists have directed most of their venom at heterosexual intercourse and the nuclear family, the cornerstone of Western civilization. They have denounced the sex act and motherhood as “patriarchal oppression”; the monogamous family is derided as an exploitative institution where women are raped and brutalized. Because most women find most men unattractive, they needed to be economically incentivized to marry beta males. Women would stay at home to look after the children, while men were expected to be the family breadwinners. This gradually changed. In the 19th century, the onset of the Industrial Revolution meant that low status urban males – as well as some urban females – needed to work for wages to survive. However, women never constituted a significant percentage of the workforce until the 1950s. By the 1960s, feminists began encouraging women to pursue careers and an education, contrary to their innate desire for motherhood. By the 1970s, the feminist propaganda was having the desired effect: women began to enroll in institutions of higher learning in such record numbers that now, at least in the United States, the majority of bachelor’s degrees are awarded to women, although they still remain drastically underrepresented in STEM fields (National Center for Education Statistics, 2019). In most of Western Europe, North America and Japan, women are more likely to have completed a tertiary education than males, in some cases 20% more likely. The increase in female workforce participation and enrollment in institutions of higher learning has relieved women of the necessity of marrying lower status males to support themselves; instead, they can delay marriage for as long as they want, until they find the most “alpha” male they can attract or a reliable beta provider who can be easily financially exploited and then divorce-raped.
The end result of all the factors considered together is not only declining marriage and fertility rates, but a growing underclass of disgruntled bachelors. These are the forgotten victims of the Sexual Revolution and feminist social engineering. It is ironic that what began as a movement in favor of female equality has disempowered and disenfranchised so many males. Permanently barred from ever experiencing monogamy for genetic and biological reasons, these men must bear the brunt of Darwinian sexual selection. Notwithstanding feminist lies, women are the real sexists, all too willing to objectify men as walking ATMs with chiseled jawlines or vending machines that dispense high quality sperm on demand; in reality, men are the less superficial sex, which is why practically any woman can attract large numbers of men for sexual intercourse and long-term companionship with relative ease.
However, a growing class of bachelors who, in another age would have been married productive citizens, is an ominous sign of the anarchy and chaos to come, one that Western society ignores at its own peril. In all societies, a growing body of sexless or undersexed, unwanted men is a powerful destabilizing force; if there are no wars to kill off society’s excess men or allow men to capture and enslave women as spoils of war, then it is only a matter of time before the government must quell large-scale rebellion. Rebellions and wars, driven by an inequitable distribution of sexual resources, are by no means a rare occurrence or a feature of the human evolutionary past. Sociobiologist David Barash argues that the Arab Spring of 2010 to 2012, the massive anti-government protests and armed rebellions against the regimes of North Africa and the Middle East, were largely driven by male sexual frustration and loneliness. In his words, “a substantial underlying driver of social unrest was the widespread tradition in many Arab societies whereby even monogamous marriage isn’t tenable until a would-be groom has accumulated sufficient wealth to ‘afford’ a bride.” (2016)
The liberalization of sexual standards has practically destroyed family life and created an environment in which female hyperselectivity can flourish without being reined in by the dominant males who control society. Excessive polygyny and female hyperselectivity cannot long continue without some kind of violent response. Internecine strife over scarce sexual resources was endemic to Stone Age hunter-gatherer and Neolithic agropastoralist societies, which is why rulers constrained their polygynous tendencies or introduced monogamy to pacify inferior males; but now that Western elites have abandoned legally enforced monogamy, the time has once again become ripe for open rebellion against the status quo.
A Return to Stone Age and Neolithic Mating Patterns?
Monogamy gave large numbers of otherwise undesirable men a reason to contribute to society, thereby avoiding potential civil strife and rebellion. It further reduced male aggression by eliminating the need for intrasexual competition. The explosive growth in the number of bachelors since the mid-20th century has rendered monogamy increasingly irrelevant. This has exposed the ugly realities of Darwinian sexual selection, such as the fact that both sexes primarily value physical attractiveness in a partner. Facial attractiveness, which is more genetically heritable and a much stronger signal of phenotypic quality than body attractiveness, is more important for women than it is for men; for men, body attractiveness, which is highly malleable, can be just as important as facial attractiveness, if not more so (i.e. Currie & Little, 2009).
Thus, females evaluate male fitness on genetic factors beyond individual control, whereas males judge females on factors that can be easily changed. The female is the shallow sex, but the man is usually much deeper. This means that men are less discriminating than women in terms of physical appearance. Because women have little interest in sex for its own sake, they tend to dominate sexual marketplace transactions. If men are unable to meet or exceed a minimum threshold of physical attractiveness, they will find themselves permanently excluded from all mating opportunities (Fugère et al., 2017).
Women’s sex drive is not as urgent as men’s; this sex drive differential is a necessary precondition of the female’s natural tendency towards hypergamy. Women, regardless of physical attractiveness, personality or behavior, are daily inundated with offers of sex and marriage from beta males, so they can easily go without, typically for long periods of time; on the other hand, men with normal testosterone levels simply cannot endure prolonged abstinence without becoming anti-social or low-functioning. The stronger male sex drive means that the average man will not experience the level of sexual activity he desires; this is especially true of the unwanted bachelor, whose existence is one of chronic sexual starvation and loneliness. Monogamy alleviated the problem of frustrated male desire and female hyperselectivity by providing the man with a regular sexual outlet. Declining marriage rates mean more undersexed and sexless men, who will become increasingly angry as they become more numerous, only to realize that they have been shafted by the dominant liberal egalitarian and feminist ideology of the West’s hostile elites.
That prime age males typically outnumber prime age females in Western countries is another ugly reality. An unbalanced sex ratio, with more males than females, merely increases the severity of the male “sex deficit” (Hakim, 2015). According to the principle of least interest, if there is too much of one sex, that sex becomes relatively worthless. Because they are fewer, the average woman finds herself with a tremendous amount of sexual power; she can now delay marriage for as long as she wants, while she passes her time sport-fucking alpha males; even mediocre women have an abundance of sexual opportunities because of the surplus male population.
Surplus males are usually eliminated through wars; however, there haven’t been any major conflicts since WWII because of the long, uninterrupted Pax Americana. The liberal totalitarian policy of mass immigration from the Third World has significantly worsened the sexual marketplace effects of an already unbalanced sex ratio. This is because the majority of immigrants are single, prime age males. Since no corrective action will ever be taken as long as the liberal totalitarians remain in power, male sexual frustration and loneliness will reach crisis proportions in the near future.
The decline in marriage across the Western world has allowed women to re-assert their primitive hypergamous instincts and return to the mating behaviors of the Stone Age and the Neolithic. In the past, this female hyperselectivity meant that if an inferior male wanted a woman, he had to kill the alpha male. Because the alpha male was short-sighted and selfish, he had no reason to share his harem with inferior males. The reproductive rewards that came with exclusive sexual access to multiple females of child-bearing age were enormous; they would not be surrendered without armed force. During the Neolithic, unattached males would go to war against males of rival clans; if they were victorious, the defeated clan’s women were seized as war booty and forced to become the wives, concubines and sex slaves of the warriors. The practice of seizing women as war trophies featured prominently in the Old Testament tradition; in early Roman history, “the rape of the Sabine women” staved off Latin population decline. The medieval Vikings raided all Europe in search of female captives; they were brought back to Scandinavia as concubines and sex slaves.
Historically, men who find themselves permanently deprived of female companionship are a dangerous element to have in any society; those who allow this underclass of marriage-deprived males to grow are playing with fire. The founders of Greece and Rome were among the first to recognize this, which is why these ancient civilizations have an unbroken tradition of prescriptive monogamy; the institution of slavery was used as a safety valve to ensure male chastity and devotion to family.
Much violent conflict around the world has been instigated by unwanted bachelors. That male singleness is positively correlated with an increased risk of violence, not only against women, but within society as a whole has been validated by recent research (i.e. Seffrin 2018). This is certainly true of Moslem and even Asian countries, which have some of the world’s most unbalanced sex ratios. Sociobiologist David Barash writes (2016):
The resulting excess of men […] has a disruptive social effect […]: predisposing societies toward social disruption, increased violence, and possibly even war, ultimately because the reproductive prospects of these ‘excess’ men are limited or even foreclosed altogether. We need more attention to the societal consequences of altered sex ratios, whether generated by differential mortality or by social traditions—both of which in turn are often driven by our polygamous ancestry.
In the West, a man who finds himself deprived of sex and female companionship cannot simply go on a slave-hunting expedition like the Vikings of old. Taking women by force was what warriors did when they found themselves unable to attract women in their own societies. However, this option is no longer available. Instead, unattached males, especially whites, the demographic most affected by lack of monogamy, have taken to drugs and excessive drinking; they are even committing suicide in record numbers. Others have dropped out of school and the job market altogether, refusing to contribute to a society that ridicules or ignores their fundamental biological need for sex and female companionship. Men are even refusing to “go gentle into that good night”; they want revenge for what was wrongly denied them by a liberal totalitarian police state that terrorizes inferior males with incessant feminist propaganda and feminist-inspired legislation. Since 2014, there have been a number of high-profile acts of brutal violence committed by disgruntled and increasingly restless single men, beginning with Elliott Rodger and the Isla Vista killings.
A growing underclass of unwanted men should be treated for what it is, a crisis that will spiral out of control if ignored. As long as the hostile elite refuses to ensure that men have a stake in society by forcing women to suppress their hypergamous instincts and return to monogamy, this violence will only increase, becoming more widespread and indiscriminate as time goes on.
Western societies are currently regressing to a prehistoric phase of existence.
