Stephen Marche Quotes
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The wilderness within us is actually the best part of us.
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The research points pretty clearly to the rise of companionate marriage, and I just think it's going to keep being popular, for the very simple reason that it's basically the only way to afford a family life in the 21st-century in advanced economies. It's one of the major reasons for the spike in income inequality. Surgeons used to marry their secretaries. Now they marry other surgeons.
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I cannot imagine why a woman would ever call herself anything but a feminist. But a man calling himself a feminist, what does that mean? The answer is he wants to be taken as a good guy. Your choice is between saying you're a feminist and raising a flag at a "Take Back the Night" rally and being a men's rights activist, which is basically the only two ways men have of talking about gender right now, I mean that's just ridiculous. That's just two extremes that are totally useless.
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I don't really mind it when Trudeau calls himself a feminist because, you know, he did the half-female cabinet; that's something to be proud of. On the other hand, when you look at that recent Russian spousal abuse law or attacks on abortion in the U.S, you have to say that's a human rights issue, and feminism is just human rights.
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We're in Trump times - we're in the time this misogynist hate clown is the leader of the free world, and when Putin has made abusing your wife legal, and transgender bathrooms have just been disallowed in school. There are all these political setbacks. And there's no question that those setbacks are very real and need to be treated as civil-rights issues.
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Women become breadwinners, men become caregivers. That's the birth of intimate marriage.
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We have never been more detached from one another, or lonelier. In a world consumed by ever more novel modes of socializing, we have less and less actual society. We live in an accelerating contradiction: The more connected we become, the lonelier we are.
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One [paradox] is that pornography follows in that wake of women's liberation. The first instances of hard-core pornography were in late 18th-century in France, "the Golden Age of Women." The next wave in the 20th century comes from Sweden, one of the first countries where women voted. Then Germany, again, at the forefront of progress. Then America in the '80s, when women were closing the pay gap. And Japan, same thing.
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Men talk about masculinity through sports and clothes. They don't talk about gender, they talk about LeBron James and whether it's okay to wear lipstick and eyeliner. They're not getting to the question at hand, which is, "What does it mean to be a man when the traditional values of masculinity are eroding incredibly rapidly?'
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The easier sex gets, the less intimate every sexual act gets. In the Victorian period, a kiss was like a f - k. And now, you know, when actual sexual acts become so easy, their intimacy declines and their meaning declines.
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Culture is always the echo of economic realities; that's what Marx teaches. Feminism is a clear example of that.
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Look at the fact Donald Trump cannot tie a tie. My father took me aside and taught me how to do this when I was eight. He can't shake hands. These are the basic building blocks of traditional masculine style, and he's a parody of it.
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Men are not taking women's job, which are good jobs. Being a nurse is an excellent job.
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When you look at the biggest study of the American dream, the number-one correlate for upward mobility is having two parents in a home. It doesn't matter if they're male or female.
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Men who define themselves as breadwinners are going to have to leave the traditional iconography of masculinity behind if they want to be breadwinners.
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The more money women make, the less violence, the less sexual crimes against women. Everything horrific and misogynistic declines. But then what you're dealing with here is "What does it mean to be in love with people who are your equals?" And that's a very beautiful thing that we should cherish, but it's also incredibly tough in some ways.
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Men's gender problems cause them a lot of suffering. There is a massive spiking suicide rate in middle age for men and a cultural attitude to male friendship that is destructive.
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Men are enforced into a kind of silence about their gender; they're supposed to not think of it as a performance. That's the definition of manliness - that it's not a performance; it's being yourself, authentic. Whereas women have understood gender as performance. Men have not yet made that quantum leap, or rather they're making it in many ways, they're not thinking about it.
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I'd never call myself a feminist, and that the world doesn't need male feminists.
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Only idiots or snobs ever really thought less of 'genre books' of course. There are stupid books and there are smart books. There are well-written books and badly written books. There are fun books and boring books. All of these distinctions are vastly more important than the distinction between the literary and the non-literary.
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As you get closer to equality, you get more pornography. True patriarchal societies like Saudi Arabia do not allow pornography because women are not allowed to turn their bodies into a commodity; women are chattel.
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The first things that babies can notice is sex; the first thing that you can tell about a person when you see them walking down the street is their gender.
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You have two things happening: You have the cultural and economic reality of men falling apart and traditional masculinity falling apart.
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When you look at how men and women are living together, there are two processes at work. One, women are rising in the middle class; their earning potential is rising compared to men. It has been underway for 100 years, and nothing is going to stop it. On the other hand, women are denied iconic positions of power - equity partnerships law firms, Hollywood salaries.
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When you ask single men in their 20s, "Do you want children?" they want children more than women do. Again, economics drive this. If you're a 29-year-old woman, having a baby is going to seriously blow up your career. If you're a 29-year-old man, it isn't.
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The economy is changing everything. And men need to deal with that. Our response to it has been rage, stupidity and conscious avoidance of dealing with what the reality of being a man might be outside of empty concepts from ancient history.
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Marriage is this black box which is the key to all social and political problems; the family is the unit.
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Look at The Iliad, there's all this stuff about men loving children. The King of Sparta was the most brutal warrior of ancient Greece, and the only thing he liked to do was horse around with kids when he was back from slaughtering. One thing that feminism revealed is that being a distant patriarchal figure was not something men wanted to be. They want to be more involved in the lives of their children, and you can see that once they're allowed to have that connection, they crave it.
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Men are losing power in their daily lives, but manliness is still iconic of power. This creates incredible turbulence around masculinity and incredible confusion around gender norms that's only going to accelerate.
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What we're seeing now is not just a backlash against feminism. When you look at guys like [Jesse] Helms in the '80s or even Reagan and Bush, there was a real political backlash against feminism. This is different. This is a parodic recreation of the destruction of traditional masculinity. Look at these hollow men. Look at Steve Bannon who wears sweat pants, who doesn't shave. Or Yiannopoulos who is just a clown. This is toxic masculinity. It's new. To see it as a return to the past is a mistake. It's the breakdown of traditional masculinity, rather than its retrenchment.
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