The erosion of social trust is a defining mark of our time, a commonplace of today’s jeremiads. From government and ecclesial leaders to corporations, universities, and the media, Americans are weary of our institutions and disappointed by our leaders. Such widespread mistrust impacts the American regime significantly: Neither a market economy nor a republican polity can exist without the goodwill and fair dealing of its participants. But however much we are right to worry about the decline in social trust, it has nothing on the coming civilizational reckoning represented by the growing cleavage between the sexes.
It’s not only that young women are increasingly telling pollsters that they don’t want to marry or bear children. For the first time in US history, women are voting as a bloc to politically secure that act of radical bodily autonomy that signifies the full eclipse of trust in men.
It is fashionable on the political right today to blame women, especially progressive women, for the nation’s woes. Women are said to have become too ambitious and concerned with worldly accomplishments, or too superficial and overly emotional to recognize the evident goods of marriage and the joys of children. The best way to save the West, a right-wing fringe insists, would be simply to strip women of their civil and political rights, to return them to such a state of economic dependency that they would have no choice but to subordinate themselves—and their unruly ambitions—to men, or at least to a single man.
This misogynistic masculinism is growing on the right, even as progressive women seek refuge in a female president who promises protection from The Handmaid’s Tale. But these men have lost the thread. It’s true that individual women on social media, or groups of them at political rallies or in h.r. departments, sometimes display the irrationalism that these male provocateurs claim is “woman’s nature.” But these extreme emotional tendencies speak more of the want of authentic liberal education and the moral formation that has always been needed to order the human soul. Meanwhile, men’s own tendencies of dominating insensitivity—exacerbated by the loss of the character formation once central to even primary education in the West—only drive women further away. If there is blame to cast around, why focus it on women (or men) as a class, rather than the system of progressive education that simply trains children to compete in the global marketplace—as consumers, no less than knowledge and service workers—eclipsing the traditional model that intentionally channeled our desires toward cultivating the virtues that both men and women need?
Women’s professional advances in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, simultaneous with the loss of well-paying manufacturing jobs, may well have given working-class men the false impression that women no longer need them. But whatever impressive academic degrees or high occupational status the fairer sex may today hold, sexual intercourse still makes women far more vulnerable than men—physically and usually emotionally, too.
Sure, the modern woman can steel herself against such vulnerability with prophylactics, day-after pills, or surgeries to “empty the contents” of her womb. But women who haven’t become entirely hardened to the coarse reality of casual sex tend to find the recreational pleasure-seeking disappointing. Some women are voicing their regret. Further, the vast majority of women who become mothers—and most still do—quite enjoy raising their children alongside a good man. Indeed, not insignificant numbers, regardless of political affiliation, would relish the chance to relinquish some of their hard-earned economic independence to lean into tending to their small children for most of the hours of the day.
But a good man is hard to find. And it’s a shame that so many young women today risk sex with men who haven’t yet earned their trust.
Women today are bombarded with stories of our lousy family-leave policies, soaring housing prices, subpar childcare options, and the inherent dangers of pregnancy and childbirth. The dangers of childbirth have been overblown since Roe v. Wade was overturned—real maternal mortality rates are lower now than before the Supreme Court’s 2022 Dobbs decision—but it is true that pregnancy poses real and neglected risks to women, especially those who are disadvantaged. No wonder one study found that a majority of US women—especially those who are black and poor—experience toxophobia, the intense fear of pregnancy.
And how can young women even imagine caring for another when they struggle to take care of themselves? Smartphone-induced anxiety rates among young women are, after all, sky-high. Meanwhile, men, too, are struggling, with great numbers succumbing to porn and video-game addiction. If men can’t get off the computer, or respect their current (or future) mate enough to forgo watching other women disrobe online, how can women trust them with their vulnerability, their futures, their lives? Given the rapid global, technological, and cultural upheavals of our time—and the melting away of much that had been culturally stable—it is actually amazing that any woman would increase her own vulnerability, and reduce her social status, too, by becoming a mother. Unless she finds a trustworthy man with whom she can imagine a future.
But this abortion-centered female voting bloc isn’t the only notable data point in today’s battle of the sexes. Young men are, for the first time in American history, not only growing far more conservative than women; they are also growing more religious. This fact undoubtedly gives progressive women pause. Religious men, they assume, are those most likely to put a woman under his thumb. Brad Wilcox, a Compact contributor and a sociologist at the University of Virginia, has found that this assumption isn’t unfounded for nominally religious men, who are the demographic most likely to abuse their wives.
“Men and women—bound together by mutual trust and its fruits—may well save our civilization.”
But Wilcox’s research uncovered another data point that may well provide the opening to heal the new sex war. It’s one that makes sense of why this one-time progressive woman couldn’t be happier to be married for the last two decades to a devout Catholic man. Men who take the demands of the faith seriously—who attend church and pray regularly—are not only the least likely to abuse their wives. They are also the best of men, and in my experience, the most trustworthy and attractive of men, whose willingness to govern their appetites and humbly live for vulnerable others is a beauty to behold.
If these young, newly religious men can learn what it takes to grow in imitation of the God-Man—a process that is slow and humbling—they may well become real gentlemen. Further, to learn that it is something more than the strength of their physique, the shape of their jawline, or even how much they earn, that will make them worthy of a real woman’s enduring trust. Those men and women—bound together by mutual trust and its fruits—may well save our civilization.