Sex and the State

1 week ago | cathyreisenwitz.substack.com | Cathy Reisenwitz

I think we’ve (I’ve) been overcomplicating the question of why marriage rates are down in the US and other developed countries. The main reason is actually very simple. It’s a bad deal for women. I’m aware of the raft of books published in the last few years extolling the virtues of marriage and encouraging everyone to get hitched. They’ll tell you, correctly, that marriage is associated with a bevy of important benefits and very few downsides, on average.

1 week ago | cathyreisenwitz.substack.com | Cathy Reisenwitz

I knew the discussions at the Denver retreat left out something really important around gender. I couldn't quite articulate what it was until I heard Scott Galloway say it to Trevor Noah. Bottom-half women voted for Trump because they thought he would help their bottom-half sons. Bottom-half Black women stayed home for their bottom-half sons. The polls and vote counts are showing that the Democratic Party has a young, bottom-half male problem.

1 week ago | cathyreisenwitz.substack.com | Cathy Reisenwitz

Memorial Day seems like as good a time as any to publish just enough info on compulsory military service to (hopefully) provoke a few people who know a lot more than me about it into commenting with helpful corrections and context, thus getting me much closer to having an informed opinion on whether or not it could or would be worth the cost. If you’re new here, I write a lot about young, bottom-half men and the problems they both endure themselves and cause for others.

2 weeks ago | cathyreisenwitz.substack.com | Cathy Reisenwitz

Survivalwise, the second worst thing that could happen to a person is being ostracized. The first worst thing is being ignored. I’ve been thinking about attention a lot recently because I had a dip in paid subscribers and I need the opposite. I’m trying to do the hardest thing in algorithm-driven media landscape and extreme polarization. I’m trying to get attention to middle-of-the-road, pragmatic ideas conveyed with appropriate nuance. The thing is, I know how to get attention.

2 weeks ago | cathyreisenwitz.substack.com | Cathy Reisenwitz

The Democratic Party cannot win without “working” families. That was the main message of the recent PPI retreat I attended in Denver. We must win back voters who don’t have a college degree, who generally earn less than area median income, are more likely to live in exurban and rural areas, and are also disproportionately young men. None of that was news to me. I’m the hipster of “Democrats can and should try to win back bottom-half men.”What I learned was how much these voters dislike welfare.