Saving the Sexes, Saving Sex

Women may be freed from the traditional social constraints on their sexual behavior, but men lose their motivation to commit to marriage.

Every aspect of the sexual revolution makes it harder for love and marriage to emerge. Nathan Dumlao/Unsplash

I asked a young man who was applying for college what field he was interested in. He told me he wanted to be an actuary, a highly paid but challenging and difficult career. I asked him why that particular profession attracted him. He said it was because he wanted to be able to support his (future) family. He had researched typical starting salaries for particular fields and found this one near the top.

Now, having read many hundreds of essays by applicants to graduate schools in my own field—social work, a predominantly female and low-paid “helping profession”—I was startled by this response. I had never read such an answer in the many “Why I Want to Be a Social Worker” essays I had read, and if I had, I would have doubted the research skills of the applicant. No one ever entered my field, I suspected, because of its earnings potential. I had heard of young men choosing other fields because they wanted to make good money, but not of their doing so in order to support a family they did not yet have.