Men and Marriage by George Gilder 

The book is Men and Marriage by George Gilder. It was originally published in 1973 by Quadrangle/The New York Times Book Company as Sexual Suicide. I read the 2023 Canon Press hardcover edition. I read it in September of 2023.  

It’s titled Men and Marriage because it deals with men and their role in marriage.  

I read it because it was newly published by Canon Press. I had seen some things Canon was putting out about Gilder and the book. It sounded very interesting.  

Lauren got me the Men and Marriage gift box set that came with the book. It included a t-shirt, stickers and koozie. Canon also created a documentary so I subscribed to Canon plus to watch it.  

Gilders main thesis is that men are by nature barbarians and it’s up to women to tame and domesticate them. That is the only way a civilization can be created and sustained.  

He also says that women have sexual superiority in a relationship. The terms he uses here are not the best. What he means is that in a sexual encounter, women are gambling with higher stakes.  

A guy can plant his seed and move on with his life like nothing happened for the rest of his life. A woman will get pregnant and have a baby. She holds the higher sexual function of procreation, that is gestating and birthing a child.  

My main takeaway is that civilizations are built by men with families to feed.  

Gilder also offers fascinating assessment of homosexuality. He says homosexuality or any of the other alphabet options are not immutable characteristics but rather the result of sexual obsession and addiction.  

He makes a compelling case that we are all extremely sexual and sinful beings and are driven by our base instincts when it comes to sex, and if we don’t practice self-control then anyone can succumb to the abundance of urges and lack of options.  

He points to prisons. Were all these men and women just latent homosexuals? Or are they sexual beings with a lack of options while they’re in prison.  

According to the cultural consensus of today, no straight man should ever be able to be aroused by another man. It should be a physical impossibility under any circumstances.  

But there is no scientific evidence for this at all. In fact in many prisons we see the opposite. Given overwhelming sexual obsession and addiction, and a culture that says being gay is a perfectly fine option, some men will subconsciously choose that route.  

This book made me think about how winsome and egalitarian we tend to be around this topic. I’m really over it.  

We have to start talking about the truth of sex and gender and marriage. It made me think of Wiley’s book The Household and the War for the Cosmos.  

Marriage has come to mean anything we want it to mean and the family has broken down and now society is breaking down.  

To save the world we must save the family. God made the family to be the building blocks of a greater civilization, the foundation on which all other institutions ought to be built. We must get serious about that or we will lose our civilization.  

The only part that got a little confusing was Gilder’s explanation of women being the superior sexual gender.  

At first it sounds like he’s saying women are superior to men in general. That’s not what he means. He means women have more at stake in the act of sex and they do more to fulfill the ultimate purpose of sex, which is to procreate a child.  

Gilder’s tone is that of a realist. He’s taking humanity for how it displays itself. He’s not saying he’s happy about any of it or that this is the way things ought to be, he’s just finding the best way to deal with the situation we’re in, and that is for men and women to get real about natural gender roles and create families.  

The hero is the family man. The most important thing we can do is get married and have children and teach them to have those values as well.  

The villain to avoid is the worthless man. The man who does not want to ever get married and is happy to continues his life raping and pillaging a society’s resources.  

I’d recommend this not only to all Christian men but to all men. It’s important we understand the implications of shrugging off marriage and family as an optional things in a society. It isn’t. It’s crucial for a society to continue.  

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Notable Quotables 

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Before he can return to a woman, he must assert his manhood in action. The Zulu warrior had to kill a man, the Mandan youth had to endure torture, the Irish peasant had to build a house, the American man must find a job. This is the classic myth and the mundane reality of masculinity. (p7-8) 

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A man’s body is full only of undefined energies-and all these energies need the guidance of culture. He is therefore deeply dependent on the structure of the society to define his role. In all its specific expressions, manhood is made, not born. (p11) 

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Unless they have an enduring relationship with a woman-a relationship that affords them sexual confidence-men will accept almost any convenient sexual offer. (p13) 

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Marriage is not simply a ratification of an existing love. It is the conversion of that love into a biological and social continuity…The natural fulfillment of love is a child; (p20) 

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It is hard to exaggerate how different is the adolescent boy’s experience. His body is not evolving; it is launching an insurrection. It demands to be satisfied now, by external activity. Even in women and in male homosexuals, the injection of testosterone creates a desire for immediate but undefined sexual action…Rejection of the overwrought male by the underripe female is frequent and deepens the boy’s anxieties. (p38) 

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Tests among prisoners indicate that it is the ones with the greatest sexual-role anxieties who commit violent and predatory crimes. A man who cannot attain his manhood through an affirmative role resorts to the lowest terms of masculinity. What can he do that is exclusively male? He consults his body. He has a cock. But he is a failure and no woman wants it. He has greater physical strength and aggressiveness. He uses it. (p39) 

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Wise societies provide ample means for young men to affirm themselves without afflicting others. (p52) 

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The society thus has a much larger stake in employing young men than in employing young women. The unemployed man can contribute little to the community and will often disrupt it, but the woman may even do more good without a job than with one. Her joblessness may spur new efforts to induce a man to work, supporting her own crucial role as a mother. (p61) 

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Unlike men, who nearly always marry down economically, women nearly never do. A woman is understandably uninterested in wedding a man with less earnings capacity than her own, a man who will not be able to support her while she raises a child. (p62) 

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In a world where women do not say no, the man is never forced to settle down and make serious choices. His sex drive-the most powerful compulsion in his life-is never used to make him part of civilization as the supporter of a family. If a woman does not force him to make a long-term commitment-to marry-in general, he doesn’t. It is maternity that requires commitment. His sex drive only demands conquest, driving him from body to body in an unsettling hunt for variety and excitement in which much of the thrill is in the chase itself. (p73) 

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A society is essentially an organism. We cannot simply exclude a few million women from the fabric of families, remarry their husbands to younger women, and quietly return to our businesses as if nothing has happened. What has happened is a major rupture in the social system, felt everywhere. (p90) 

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Because psychologists cannot explain homosexuality, they discuss it in terms of sickness or mystery. But homosexuality is merely the most vivid and dramatic manifestation of the breakdown of monogamy-an extreme expression of the sexuality of single men. (p106) 

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But sexual decisions all too often slide down slippery slopes of accident and compulsion rather than step rationally toward pleasure. Sexual hungers spring not from the rational heights of the brain but from its glandular depths, not from the lofty cortex but from the unruly domain of the hypothalamus. A major goal of every civilization must be to bring these compulsions under control by the force of aspiration, worship, and reason. It is not easy. (p106) 

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Similarly the homosexual arena thrives less because men want it than because they cannot help themselves. Politicians risk their lives and careers to wallow in degradation; priests and pastors tear asunder the very sinews of their characters and stain the core of their reputations to perform acts that would befoul a word processor to describe; and the American Journal of Public Health reports that in late 1983, in the face of the rising AIDS epidemic, more than half of all gays were still performing their usual gymnastics. (p107) 

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Homosexuality may begin as merely a particularly elaborate form of masturbation. Among adolescents in particular it may arise as a mere exchange of reciprocal services, scarcely beyond the campfire “circle jerk.” But like masturbation and its associated pornography, the more limited exchanges tend to pall and demand ever more extreme measures to achieve the original effect. The mechanics of mutual massage give way to the passion and turbulence, fear and frenzy of sexual hierarchy and obsession. (p109) 

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The most crucial cause of the rise in homosexuality in America in recent decades is sexual liberation: the emancipation of men from monogamy. (p117) 

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polygyny produces homosexuality. For all the complexities of particular cases, a homosexual culture, whether in prisons, at sea, or in polygamous societies, originates with a lack of available young women. (p118) 

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The black family was breaking down because female jobs and welfare payments usurped the man’s role as provider, leaving fatherless families that tended to repeat themselves from generation to generation. (p124) 

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Black jazz is the most important serious American music, acknowledged around the world if not in our own universities. Our rock culture finds its musical and rhythmic inspiration and its erotic energy and idiom in the jazz, gospel, dance, and soul performances of blacks. (p133) 

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sociologists and economists will never acknowledge it, the U.S. does not suffer significantly from a problem of race or of poverty. Our problem is far worse: a crippling plague of broken families. (p152) 

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Without a stable family order, in which adult men civilize the young men, terror necessarily rules. (p173) 

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Their sexual anxieties sustain billion-dollar markets in porn and prostitution. Baffled by a car battery or blown fuse, disdainful of the blue-collar life, and ignorant of the labor and business of the world, they tend to obsess themselves with odd resentments and conspiracy theories, abstract ideas and symbols. (p183) 

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On farms, moreover, as every farmer knows, women did not restrict themselves to the kitchen and boudoir. Women in agriculture worked very hard beyond the hearth and cribside, commonly performing an array of jobs requiring far more onerous physical labor and longer hours than their current work. (p220) 

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American women perform full-time work chiefly as they always have: when they are forced to, usually by the desertion, divorce, death, or scarce earnings of their husbands…The influx of women into jobs reflects in part the greater number of divorced and single women and in part the abrupt decline in childbearing after the postWorld War II surge of fertility-not any basic change in the motives and roles of men and women. (p221) 

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Most feminist proposals seem designed to establish the working mother as the social norm by making it impossible for most male providers to support their families alone. The feminist attack on the social-security system for giving housewives a right to the husband’s benefits after he dies; the subsidies for day care; the affirmative-action quotas for women who pursue careers outside the home-all such measures seek to establish the careerist woman as the national standard and incapacitate the woman who tries to care for her own children. (p238) 

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When she raises the child she imparts in privacy her own individual values. She can create children who transcend consensus and prefigure the future: children of private singularity rather than “child-development policy.” (p265) 

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The woman’s place is in the home, and she does her best when she can get the man there, too, inducing him to submit most human activity to the domestic values of civilization. (p277) 

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Mass rape has been frequent throughout the history of war. The alternative to the system of men and marriage is usually the system of men and misogyny. The men are freed to pursue their own sexual cycles in uncivilized groups of hunters. (p288)