Can a James Bond Reboot Fix Masculinity?

Ted Gioia on James Bond, women marrying down, Mormon wives, and more in this week's digest.

People sometimes ask me for book recommendations. If you haven’t seen it already, I put together a list of 17 books that shaped my thinking.

Here’s this week’s news roundup.

James Bond and Masculinity

The great cultural critic Ted Gioia wrote a piece with ideas for rebooting the James Bond franchise to fix the crisis of masculinity.

I’ve spent the last few months doing a deep dive into books, movies, TV series, and various studies on contemporary masculinity. And they are a hot mess. If these are indicators of contemporary dude-ness, James Bond is finished. There’s no place for him in the current day.

For a start, I bought a stack of novels by young male writers who are redefining manhood in the current day. I was looking for insights, but all I got was an education in contemporary dysfunction and pathology.

I won’t even mention the names of the authors and books. I certainly don’t want to recommend them. Even worse, I’m ashamed to admit I read them. The characters are a sad assortment of wimps, losers, wannabes, incels, nerds, simps, scroll-and-swipers, round-the-clock gamers, wankers, and half-baked hipsters. I couldn’t find anything resembling a role model for a young man today.

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As a next step in my research, I spent many painful hours surveying the social media accounts of male influencers, who offer lots of advice online. But they come across as even more insecure than the nerds and gamers—constantly obsessing over their image, their pose, their pickup lines, their strutting and preening.

I can’t imagine James Bond following their lead either. They might serve as second-tier villains—but only as thugs-for-hire or part of an entourage. Even a Bond villain has to have some self-respect, no?

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Here’s the one big thing that movies and TV shows will never tell you about masculinity. But you need to learn it.

A man achieves happiness in life by delivering on his responsibilities. You have no idea how important this one thing will be to your mental health, your sense of self-worth, your relationships, and your ability to find meaning and purpose in your life.

I’m talking about your responsibilities to your family, your colleagues, your teammates, your friends, your communities and groups, your country—and even to total strangers. (Yes, you have responsibilities to them, too.)

But above all I’m talking about your responsibility to yourself. And when I say you owe something to yourself, I mean your higher image of who you should be.

Living up to these demands is what makes a man happy. It’s also what makes him manly.

A real man goes out into the world and gets things done in order to fulfill these obligations. And this is where traditional masculine values come in—toughness, perseverance, endurance, vitality, ruggedness, and all the rest.

If you figure this out, everything else will fall into place.

Gioia is a great thinker, so I was very interesting to see what he had to say.

Unfortunately, this one fell short.

Reducing masculinity to “delivering on his responsibilities” is perilously close to the way the evangelical church reduces it to service and sacrifice. That’s a big part of what it means to be a man, but very incomplete.

Mainstream and respectable authorities provide a vision of masculinity that’s unappealing - essentially, an “eat your spinach” approach to what it means to be a man - such that men turned instead into the massive online men’s influencer ecosystem. Successfully completing with that requires more than this kind of message.

Marrying Down

The Atlantic ran an interesting essay on how women are now more likely to marry a less-educated man than men are to marry a less-educated woman.

Once upon a time, it was fairly common for highly educated men in the United States to marry less-educated women. But beginning in the mid-20th century, as more women started to attend college, marriages seemed to move in a more egalitarian direction, at least in one respect: A greater number of men and women started partnering up with their educational equals. That trend, however, appears to have stalled and even reversed in recent years. Gaps in educational experience among heterosexual couples are growing again. And this time? It’s women who are “marrying down.”

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Christine Schwartz, a sociology professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, shared data with me on trends in the educational profile of heterosexual married couples from 1940 to 2020. According to her calculations, in 2020, American husbands and wives shared the same broad level of education in 44.5 percent of heterosexual marriages, down from more than 47 percent in the early 2000s. Of the educationally mixed marriages, the majority—62 percent—were hypogamous [marrying down, in contrast to hypergamy], up from 39 percent in 1980. Crunching the numbers slightly differently, Benjamin Goldman, an economics professor at Cornell University, found that among Americans born in 1930, 2.3 percent ended up in a marriage where the woman had a four-year degree and the man did not. Among the cohort of those born in 1980, that figure was 9.6 percent.

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For all that remains unknown about the dynamics of hypogamous relationships, a growing body of research suggests that women are indeed marrying less-educated men simply because that’s who is available—not necessarily because of changing preferences. In 2021, about 1.6 million more women than men were enrolled in four-year colleges in the United States, Clara Chambers, a research associate at Yale University, told me. But according to a recent paper she co-authored with Goldman and Joseph Winkelmann of Harvard University, marriage rates among college-educated women have been broadly stable. The explanation for that is fairly straightforward: Without enough college-educated men to go around, college-educated women must be marrying men without a degree. Evidence that the rise of hypogamy is largely a response to these demographic constraints—rather than to, say, women’s economic empowerment, the increase in online dating, or shifts in preferences—has been found in many countries.

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It’s important not to overstate the change under way here: Educational achievement does not map neatly onto earnings. Some research has found that women in hypogamous marriages, in the United States and abroad, are a bit more likely than other women to earn as much as or more than their husbands, Schwartz told me, but most don’t.

Click over to read the whole thing.

I haven’t had time to dig into the studies, but I’d be curious as to how much of this is driven by bachelors vs. masters degrees. Low status masters like education and social work have a very heavy female skew. (At the undergraduate level, nursing is another such degree. Female nurses frequently marry men in professions like firefighting or the military that may not require a degree).

The piece also notes that education is not income. Income seems to be a bigger factor than education in marriage choice per studies I’ve seen out of places like Norway.

In any case, it’s an interesting trend to watch. And it will be interesting to see the research come in on how these marriages fare.

Related from Suzanne Venker: Women would rather go it alone than be the primary provider

Mormon Wives

There’s a Hulu show called The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives that apparently developed out of a real life Tik Tok community called “MomTok,” the members of whom got into swinging. Jim Dalrymple writes about this.

Relevantly to the pre-show drama, [Taylor Frankie] Paul recently appeared on a podcast during which she provided more details about what happened. Apparently the swinging wasn’t quite so “soft.” And unsurprisingly, everything blew up when various swingers began to get emotionally attached to people other than their spouses. Paul’s husband also expressed concern that one of the women could get pregnant and no one in the group would know who the father was. Another revelation in the podcast — which I include less because it’s relevant to my argument than because it sheds light on these folks’ character — is that they were having drunken orgies while their kids were sleeping upstairs with a white noise machine. So, fantastic parenting.

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Everyone likes to have fun. But the cost of that fun turned out to be incredibly high for everyone involved: Paul reveals on the podcast that not only did her own marriage end, but so did the marriage of everyone else who participated in the swinging. Even the couple who watched eventually got divorced. It was divorces all around.

Slate also wrote a piece about the show.

TV shows about the LDS church have tended to focus on polygamy, going back to at least HBO’s Big Love. But now it seems there’s also a trend to try to portray Mormon women as sexy/slutty. It’s an interesting contrast with the wholesome image we associate with Mormons. It’s as if there’s a media push to change the LDS brand.

Related from the NYT: A Polyamory Novel for Generation X

Best of the Web

Matthew Schmitz: Elon’s Family Values

A battle has broken out on the American right. Two visions of what it means to have children are contending for supremacy. On one side stands the genetic-determinist right, which celebrates people with “good genes” who have children together inside or outside of wedlock, ideally with the aid of embryo selection and genetic screening. On the other side is the culturalist right, which insists on the importance of marriage and monogamy. The outcome of this battle is more important than most people realize. It will determine which conception of human excellence will guide Western societies in the twenty-first century.

Librarian of Celaeno: The Girl Who Went Home to Nebraska - Actually about dissident right influencer Nick Fuentes and his “groyper” army.

The sort of people who take genuine authenticity, love, talent, energy, and hope and drain it for their own purposes, taking all, giving nothing back, and leaving the husks of lives behind, that’s the problem. Everything wants a piece of you, your job, your games, your parasocial relationships, the whole fake and gay world we live in wants access to your very blood. Be careful to whom you offer yourself. It can be a matter of life and death. And on the other side of that, there’s a special place in hell for the destroyers of dreams, for the exploiters, the users, the abusers, and the indifferent. I hope you see the light before the end.

NYT: At Black Colleges, a Stubborn Gender Enrollment Gap Keeps Growing - Only 19% of the students at Howard University are black men! The article suggests that all-male Morehouse College is worried, but maybe they can find a way to benefit from this trend.

Der Spiegel: A Deadly Love Affair with a Chatbot - A 14yo who fell in love with a chatbot and ended up killing himself. Note: article is in English

Louise Perry: Are women innately Left wing?

Financial Times: South Korea’s academic race pushes half of under-6s into ‘cram’ schools - I’m beginning to understand why South Korea’s birth rate has collapsed

According to a first-of-its-kind government survey released on Thursday, 47.6 per cent of South Koreans under the age of six are enrolled in cram schools known as hagwon, for-profit private education centres that come on top of regular schooling. The survey also showed that a quarter of children under two are in cram schools.

Choi Min-young, a 38-year-old civil servant, spends about Won2.5mn a month on private education for her three children, nearly a third of her household income. Her six-year-old daughter and four-year-old son take English and abacus lessons in addition to painting and martial arts.

New Content and Media Mentions

I was mentioned by Mere Orthodoxy. And I was also a guest on the Civitas podcast this week.

New this week:

• My podcast guest this week was Josh Hammer on being Jewish in America, plus his new book Israel and Civilization.

• The Retreat of the Successful - Justin Powell on why local businesses - and the people who built them - are disappearing.

• Two Films That Defined the Future of Christian Politics - Joseph Holmes on how "God's Not Dead 2" and "Silence" predicted the fracturing of American Christianity

Related to Holmes’ film article, Matthew McManus wrote about the socialists that watched all the “God’s Not Dead” films.

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