Can Marriage Survive the Manosphere?

Coontz is cognizant of the economic obstacles that put marriage out of reach. Like the card-carrying socialist she once was, she calls for affordable childcare, paid leave, and other programs that would relieve the enormous burdens that America places on families. But her conclusion reads a bit like a marriage counseling pamphlet, albeit one peppered with academic citations. She encourages couples to socialize with other people, share chores by doing them together rather than just divvying them up, and add mystery or tension to a long-term relationship by taking risks. Relationships today, she writes, “require more time and effort, better negotiating skills, more give-and-take, and more willingness to step outside traditional gendered comfort zones than in the past.” But the very quality that makes companionate marriages so desirable and often beneficial when they work, Coontz notes, also makes them fragile: If a marriage is no longer enjoyable, what reason is there to remain committed, especially when unmarried life can be pretty fun, too?

Coontz’s relationship advice may work for the already married who just need to iron out a few kinks in the chore chart; then again, it might not, because stepping outside one’s traditional gendered comfort zone is hard, especially for men. Research from economists Kyle Hancock, Jeanne Lafortune, and Corinne Low in their paper “Winning the Bread and Baking It Too” has shown that even when men earn far less than their wives, including when they’re unemployed and not earning at all, their contribution to housework is negligible. For many financially independent women, such an unequal union may bring more burdens than benefits.

If millennials had to deal with “earworms” subtly overlaying their romantic relationships with outdated gender roles, Gen Z is finding its way through the rituals of coupling up in an age of what I might call “blowhorns,” contending with messages blasted out by professional misogynists such as Andrew Tate, the increasingly influential right-wing troll Nick Fuentes, or even the current president of the United States, who famously bragged about never having once changed a diaper (he has five kids). Young women, who report a growing identification with feminism, encounter a torrent of misogyny on social media; in a recent essay in The Guardian, the author, a 15-year-old girl writing anonymously, describes how within minutes of opening up an app, she’s confronted with “comment sections on a girl’s post filled with remarks about her body, videos made by men or boys captioned with a degrading joke, and even topics such as domestic violence or rape, trivialised and laughed about.”