The book tells stories about the wreckage of feminism and the sexual revoltuion. Each chapter takes one piece of the wreckage and gives it a face. The argument lives in the lives, not the abstractions. Statistics show up where they sharpen a portrait, never as the main course.
\nChapter 1. Reno Morning.
\nCalifornia in 1969. Ronald Reagan (1911-2004) signs the no-fault bill. The lawyers cheer. The reformers promise a kinder ending for marriages that have run their course. Within five years thirty states follow. The chapter walks through the political deal, the women’s magazines selling the new freedom, and the men who learned too late they could lose their children on a Tuesday morning for no stated reason.
\nChapter 2. The Suitcase Children.
\nJudith Wallerstein (1921-2012) followed sixty divorced families for twenty-five years. Her subjects did not heal. They learned to function while carrying a permanent fracture. The chapter gathers their accounts and lets the daughters of broken homes speak in their own voices about Christmas mornings split in half and stepfathers who never quite saw them.
\nChapter 3. Boys Without Fathers.
\nThe prison data. The school data. The suicide data. Then the boys themselves. A twenty-two-year-old in Cleveland talks about the man he made up in his head to replace the man who left. A judge in Memphis describes the procession of fatherless defendants. The chapter closes with the Black families Daniel Patrick Moynihan (1927-2003) tried to warn the country about in 1965, and what came after the country called him a racist and looked away.
\nChapter 4. Daughters Without Fathers.
\nBruce Ellis’s research on father absence and early puberty. The girls who start chasing men at thirteen. The procession of bad boyfriends, each one a partial answer to a question the father might have settled. A divorced woman watches her daughter make the same mistakes she made, and sees the pattern too late.
\nChapter 5. The Pill and the Price.
\nHumanae Vitae arrived in 1968. Paul VI (1897-1978) predicted the consequences with what now looks like clairvoyance. Mary Eberstadt did the accounting forty years later in Adam and Eve After the Pill. The chapter uses her frame and adds the women who took the deal and want a refund.
\nChapter 6. Hookup Nation.
\nA Yale sophomore tells the story of her freshman year. A Stanford boy explains what he thinks women want, and what he does to them. The Tinder generation describes a sexual market that produces no marriages, no children, and no happiness either. The chapter draws on Lisa Wade’s campus research and Kate Julian’s Atlantic reporting and lets the kids speak.
\nChapter 7. The Frozen Eggs.
\nA New York lawyer turns thirty-eight and starts the IVF appointments. She thought the timeline her professors gave her was the timeline her body would honor. The clinic explains the success rates. She does the math. The chapter follows three women through the same arithmetic and quotes the mothers who tried to warn them at twenty-five.
\nChapter 8. The Marriage Strike.
\nYoung men opt out. Some go to the gym and the video game console. Some go to Japan and learn the word herbivore. Some find the corners of the internet that name what they see. The chapter takes the men seriously, listens to what they say when no woman is in the room, and traces the incentives a man under thirty now faces if he considers a wife.
\nChapter 9. The Boyfriend in the Apartment.
\nThe Cinderella research. The elevated abuse risk for children living with an unrelated adult male. Social workers describe what they walk into. A mother explains how she missed the signs. The chapter handles the material with care and does not let the squeamishness of the topic cover for the dead children.
\nChapter 10. Family Court.
\nFathers reduced to wallets. Mothers using sons and daughters as instruments. Parental alienation. The lawyers who profit from the wreckage. A father in Texas describes his sixth motion to modify and his eighteen thousand dollars in arrears for a daughter he has not seen in four years.
\nChapter 11. Fishtown.
\nCharles Murray (b. 1943) wrote Coming Apart in 2012. The White working class of Fishtown, Pennsylvania stands in for what happened to ordinary American families after 1970. The marriages ended. The children scattered. The drug overdoses arrived. The chapter visits Fishtown and the towns like it and lets the grandmothers raising their grandchildren talk.
\nChapter 12. The Daycare Bargain.
\nA mother goes back to work at twelve weeks. The infant goes to a room with eight other infants and two underpaid workers. The cortisol studies. The attachment research. The mothers who say their children are fine and the mothers who say the truth. The chapter weighs what the family traded and asks who got the better end.
\nChapter 13. Pornography on the Phone.
\nA twelve-year-old boy with an iPhone. By fourteen he has seen things his grandfather saw at fifty if his grandfather saw them at all. The erectile dysfunction clinics now see men in their twenties. The chapter draws on Gail Dines and Mary Anne Layden and lets the young men describe what the internet did to their sexual imagination.
\nChapter 14. After the Abortion.
\nSixty million since 1973. The women who say they are fine, and the women in the post-abortion support groups. The men who learned years later. The doctors who quit. The chapter handles the material without polemic and lets the stories carry the weight.
\nChapter 15. The Older Single Woman.
\nThe wedding pages thinned out. The cats arrived. The antidepressants arrived. The wine arrived. A forty-six-year-old publishing executive describes her apartment at midnight. The chapter does not mock her. It asks what she was promised at twenty-two and who profited from the promise.
\nChapter 16. The Older Single Man.
\nThe suicides. The opiates. The disappearance into screens. A fifty-year-old machinist in Ohio has not been on a date in eleven years. A twenty-eight-year-old software engineer has never had a girlfriend. The chapter takes the men at face value and traces the path from the boy who was promised a wife to the man who has none.
\nChapter 17. The Empty Cradle.
\nSouth Korea at 0.7. Italy at 1.2. Japan closing schools. The cascade arrives. The chapter walks through the demographic math and visits the empty maternity wards and the towns where the last child was born ten years ago.
\nChapter 18. The Sudden Sons.
\nA mother in Oregon. Her fourteen-year-old daughter announces she is a boy. The school agrees. The therapist agrees. The mother says no and loses her daughter to the internet. Lisa Littman’s rapid-onset gender dysphoria research. Abigail Shrier and Irreversible Damage. The chapter lets the mothers tell what they saw.
\nChapter 19. Therapy as Family.
\nThe friend purchased by the hour. The mother replaced by the support group. The father replaced by the wellness coach. The pastor replaced by the life coach. The chapter traces the substitution and asks what gets lost when family functions are sold instead of given.
\nChapter 20. The Holdouts.
\nThe Mormons in Utah. The Hasidim in Brooklyn. The traditional Catholics in rural Pennsylvania. The homeschool families. They marry young, have many children, and pay social and economic prices for it. The chapter visits them and asks what they know that the rest of the country forgot.
\nChapter 21. The Accounting.
\nWhat the reformers of 1965 and 1970 and 1973 promised. What was delivered. The closing chapter does not preach. It sets the books side by side and lets the reader read the totals.
\nThe unifying move across the book is to refuse abstraction. Every chapter starts with a face, ends with a face, and uses the social science between as connective tissue rather than as the subject. The argument the book makes against feminism, no-fault divorce, single motherhood, and the sexual revolution is the argument the lives make. The author’s job is to get out of the way.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The book tells stories about the wreckage of feminism and the sexual revoltuion. Each chapter takes one piece of the wreckage and gives it a face. The argument lives in the lives, not the abstractions. Statistics show up where they … Continue reading