Has Brad Wilcox Noticed That Marriage Involves Sex?

I recently skimmed Brad Wilcox’s Get Married: Why Americans Must Defy the Elites, Forge Strong Families, and Save Civilization. His bromide against the elites was delivered from a sinecure at the anti-elite American Enterprise Institute. He opens the book by attacking noted elite Andrew Tate. It contains, of course, the obligatory lamentations about the Good Men Shortage in America, going on (as the elites won’t want you to) about their lack of direction, and gaming, and so on, and the toll this is taking on the fairer sex.

The book has 2 purposes: To argue that marriage, abstractly, is good for men and women, and then to expound the things that cause a marriage to succeed. Of course our dear Dr. Wilcox does not himself disambiguate these two purposes, for if he were to, a second question would arise: surely some subset of marriages are not a good idea, either because there is some structural gap between the two parties, or because the behavior of one or both parties inside the marriage will doom it. Ok. And if that’s true, the whole book falls apart very quickly, because now we aren’t arguing about whether it’s good abstractly but whether it’s good particularly.

But thankfully The Good Doctor offers men the blueprint for a happy, successful marriage in his chapter “To Provide, Protect, and Pay Attention: What Really Makes Her Happy.” There you have it fellas! Provision, protection, and paying attention. As he puts it, “So, on average, women enjoy happier (and more stable) unions when married to men who are good providers and emotionally engaged.”

We can wrestle in the mud of ridiculous social science or we can acknowledge what we all know to be true. While all 3 of these do in fact contribute to women’s happiness in a marriage, none of them are the visceral drivers of female sexual arousal. Whether through our own experience or observation of various chads in our lives, all men on some limbic level are aware that the reason Stacy is trying to make out with Chad in front of everyone at the bar has little to do with provision/protection or his emotional engagement.

And this gets to the broader oddity of the book. From reading it, you would think marriage can be pretty fairly summarized by “companionship + childrearing.” A 2-person Kiwanis club. It’s like if someone wrote “Play Basketball: Why Americans Should Hit The Court” and then only sort of explained that it might depend on how good you are at basketball, the driving factor of which being friendship with one’s teammates.

He does address sex in a few places, only to discuss the inevitable relative lack of desire on the wife’s part. His proposed solution is for her to keep in mind the importance of duty sex to mend the gap in desire. He especially likes religion for its tendency to promote duty sex, greasing the wheels of this rather irksome element of the Kiwanis club.

The truth of course is that the fundamental story of marriage is one of sex: sexual polarity, sexual desire, and healthy intersexual dynamics. And that the only men who are in happy marriages are the ones who regularly experience their wives’ genuine sexual desire.

Why are we surprised that our young people can’t be bothered to avoid sex outside marriage when our conservatives can’t be bothered to include it inside marriage?