the courts would be fair and lean in his favor. He did acknowledge, however, that “our society has shifted towards women. Even my stepdad makes all the money and my mother makes all the choices.”
Max didn’t seem quite as naive when it came to choosing women. “Most of my friends won’t even consider marriage until their late twenties. A couple of them have been in love and got hurt when they were younger and I think that’s why they don’t want to get married now. I think girls a long time ago, maybe forty or fifty years ago, were doing less cheating and were more trustworthy. Now girls are more like guys used to be. I would say that eight out of ten girls now are ‘sketchy’ and about six or seven guys out of ten are those that girls can trust.”
When I questioned him as to what “sketchy” meant, he replied that “a lot of girls today are crazy partiers; they flirt with other people and have sex with other guys. If they sleep with you on the first date, they are more likely to go off with someone else while they are with you. I think that’s why guys are waiting to get married; they have to go through eight of the ten girls to find the two that aren’t sketchy.”
I asked Max if it was available sex that made it more attractive to stay single, but his feeling seemed to be that readily available sex wasn’t necessarily the reason that guys didn’t want to marry. He explained that readily available sex, though, was a marker of a possibly untrustworthy woman; if she slept with you on the first date, she might sleep with your buddy on the next one. “My girlfriend made me wait,” he stated. He also added that as an accounting major, he did a cost-benefit analysis of marriage and felt that, for him, the benefits outweighed the costs. He does think he is unusual in his desire for marriage, as many of his friends have no interest.
In the past, having a sketchy wife who cheated was frowned upon and there were repercussions to her for doing so. Now cheating women are celebrated and encouraged by the culture. Even Whoopi Goldberg nonchalantly talked about how she cheated on her husband with little judgment or repercussions by society. In an interview, she stated, “is screwing around five or six times while married and with different men for that matter something you can say casually? In the celebrity world perhaps.”42 But if you are Tiger Woods, you can be hit in the head with a golf club if you cheat and society cheers on your wife for being empowered. You will also lose much of your income and assets in divorce court and may even lose your kids, even if the wife cheats. And you are always cast as the bad guy: People wonder what you did to make your wife cheat. If a man cheats, on the other hand, the wife is a victim and he’s a louse who deserves punishment.
Now that the risk in marriage for men is so high, guys must be much more careful about whom they marry. Neither the law nor the culture will support them if they make the wrong choice. Women are the empowered sex and their sexuality is celebrated. Men’s sexuality is much more controlled by the legal system and society, even—or maybe especially—in marriage.
My next interviewee at the gym was Jamie, a twenty-four-year-old who sells gym memberships and works fifty to sixty hours a week. He grew up in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and told me that his parents had been married twenty-seven years. “I don’t plan to get married until I am around thirty and I can afford it.” Jamie went to community college and has an associate’s degree in business administration. He would like to go on to a four-year college but said that he heard there was a high drop-out rate at the local state college and he didn’t know if it would be worth it.
He is living with two other male friends who are around his age and he pays his own way. He has a girlfriend and said that they go out on weekend nights when he has time, but he likes to sleep and cook when he is at home and doesn’t have a lot of time. “For most of my friends, marriage is the furthest thing from their mind,” he stated, and explained, “My generation spends a lot of time partying and there really isn’t much loyalty. If you are out and meet a girl or a girl you are seeing meets a guy, you might be interested in that person. You might hook up.” Jamie felt that his generation was influenced by celebrities and reality TV where everyone is partying and having a good time. “You see Kanye West and he has all these girls, not just one.” He does have a married friend “who can’t go out much because he has to stay home more often.” Jamie described marriage as a “dying concept” because people just seem to hook up, have kids and move on. He said that not getting married made a person “a lot more free.”
Jamie seemed to have a sense of learned helplessness in regards to a man’s part in sex, marriage or reproduction. He told me about a friend who, when he was twenty or so, was partying with a seventeen-year-old girl. The friend is unable to get a job now because the girl’s parents pressed charges and he is on a sex-offender registry. When asked how he would feel if this happened to him, Jamie just shrugged and said, “If the government passes strict laws, there’s nothing I can do. I can just make a choice not to do that.” I pointed out that he may not have a choice; for example, if he was in college and a girl said that he had sexually assaulted her, he might be found guilty by the school without a preponderance of evidence, even if he were innocent.
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