The American Family is Broken

The American family is broken. One cannot draw another conclusion from the Census Bureau’s recent report. If you want to know how many children are living in homes with married parents, the answer is 17.8 percent. More than 80% of American children grow up in, as is most likely, fatherless homes.

As a basis for comparison, five decades ago, which means, at the time that contemporary feminism began to infiltrate American culture, 40% of children were living with married parents.

The Daily Mail has the story, as does Bloomberg. To my knowledge the mainstream media has ignored it:

The Census Bureau's count showed that 17.8 percent of the United States' 130 million households featured married parents with children under the age of 18. 

That's only down from 18.6 percent from last year but down much more significantly from over 40 percent in 1970.

All things considered, blaming it on the pandemic is ridiculous.

One other data point is striking. If you want ask what percentage of Americans are living with a spouse, the number is 50%. In 1960 the number was 87%.

Americans are also living alone at a higher rate than they used to.

The percentage of adults in the US living with a spouse was 50 percent, down from 52 percent 10 years ago.   

Over 37 million adults lived alone in early 2021, up from 33 million in 2011. 

As far back as 1960, 87 percent of adults lived with a spouse. 

For your edification the statistics come to us from the U. S. Census Bureau:

The statistics come from the 2021 Current Population Survey’s Annual Social and Economic Supplement (ASEC), which collects labor force data as well as data on a variety of characteristics of households, living arrangements, married and unmarried couples and children. 

The statistics tell a story. The question is: what story do they tell? The easy answer is that they reflect the triumph of feminism. Feminists denounced marriage as a patriarchal institution, and decided that they wanted to remake it. Those would have been the best of cases. In truth, feminists exercised their awesome powers and broke the institution.

They also, apparently, broke American men.

Such is the conclusion reached by one Liza Featherstone in a New York Times article yesterday. She was complaining about Josh Hawley, who has been arguing that America is suffering a masculinity crisis. 

She explains:

Deindustrialization has stripped many men of their ability to earn a decent wage, as well as of the pride they once took in contributing to prosperous communities. Boys are sometimes overdisciplined and overmedicated for not conforming to behavioral expectations in school. And while more women than men are diagnosed with anxiety or depression, men are more likely to commit suicide or die of drug overdoses.

Fair enough. Given the war against men and boys, documented by Christina Hoff Summers, among others, one should not be surprised that the feminization of American culture should have beaten down boys and men. Naturally, Featherstone is seriously discomfited by manifestations of male machismo, but she does not know that machismo is a sign of female dominant cultures. When men are deprived of their ability to support their families and even to win wars, they resort to macho posturing.

But then, Featherstone trots out a piece of complete and utter stupidity. She writes:

None of these problems are caused by liberals. But liberalism hasn’t offered a positive message for men lately. In the media, universities and other liberal institutions, it sometimes seems that every man is potentially guilty of something. 

This sums up the problem. A dumb journalist cannot imagine that the war on men, the sense that men are demonized on a daily, even an hourly basis by the political left, and especially by feminists, should not have had a decisive role in producing this problem. For quite some time now schoolteachers have been beating boys into submission and have been glorifying girls. The result-- boys no longer want to pursue advanced education; boys do not want to compete in a game that is rigged against them. So you end up reading dumbed down articles by inferior writers like Liza Featherstone in the N Y Times.

As you might imagine, Featherstone believes that the solution lies in more government spending on more public programs. For certain people the government, the Nanny state, is always the solution. Rather than encourage initiative, rather than extol men for their achievements, Featherstone wants to make them wards of the state.

Tell me, how did she get to write this kind of swill for the New York Times? Might it not be a good thing to judge people according to their abilities, not according to their DNA?