RUSH: I want to get to this Millennial stuff because if I don’t do it now it’s gonna forever stay in this unused Stack. And there was a new one that got added to it today, and it’s this. So let’s start with the new one first. It’s from Breitbart, and it’s according to the latest research. “A new report reveals that a significant portion of American women refuse to date men who earn less than they do.”
Now, depending on your age, you may think this is new, but in truth, there’s nothing new about this. This has always been the case. Well, maybe a slight alteration. Maybe dating is what’s new. Have you heard the phrase — look, do not get mad at me here. I didn’t create the phrase, I didn’t invent it. Have you heard the phrase “women marry up”? You’ve heard that, Mr. Snerdley? What does that mean to you? And how long ago did you first hear that phrase? All your life.
So for at least 40 years you’ve been hearing the phrase “women marry up”? Men will joke and say they marry up. And most of the time it’s a joke, although in many cases it happens to be true, too. In many cases you wonder how the hell the guy pulled it off. Let’s be honest. So this is a news story that just gets recycled.
“The survey was conducted on members on the dating website, Plenty of Fish.”
You ever heard of that website? You have? You’ve heard of the website Plenty of Fish? Do you know where that phrase comes from? Yeah, when you break up and you’re down in the dumps, somebody will invariably say, “There’s a lot of fish in the sea. You don’t need to get heartbroken here.”
Okay. “More than one in five women, 22 percent, claimed that they would refuse to date a man who earned less than they do. In comparison, four percent of men and 11 percent of single individuals overall claimed that they would refuse to be the breadwinner in a relationship.”
So that starts all of this. And again, this is nothing new, this idea that women refuse to date or refuse to marry men who earn less than they do, although it is very sexist. But since women can’t be guilty of sexism, you can’t really say that, which takes us to the latest startling revelations about Millennials.
Two stories here, both from PJ Media, and one of them is on April 5th, and the other one was from the next day, April 6th. First one, “Millennial Men Prefer to Be Family Breadwinners, Have Stay-at-Home Wives.” Can I take you back to the early 90’s? Those of you who have been listening here nonstop for 30 years, you’ll remember this when I jog your memory. Throughout the course of this program there have been cultural upheavals, and during those upheavals I get calls from people, “Rush, when is this gonna stop? When is this insanity gonna stop?”
It doesn’t matter what the cultural upheaval is, it’s just a trend away from what everybody has defined as normal. It doesn’t necessarily have to be feminism or anything. Just anything that’s cultural, be it the coarseness of language, incivility of people getting along with each other, whatever it is, people think it represents deterioration, always say, “When’s it gonna stop?”
My answer was, after having researched this very thing — for example, why hasn’t this country just continued to head toward the sewer with each succeeding generation becoming worse than the previous one? When a generation features debauchery and sloth and all these things, and the next generation a little bit more, what stops it? Why is there a reversal? And the answer, according to research was that at some point — and it’s cyclical, and it’s almost, in terms of American history, guaranteed — that every third or fourth generation is going to get fed up with the lives that its parents and grandparents lived and want no part of it.
And this is how the downward spiral of cultural deterioration is arrested. At some point it gets so rotten and so bad that young people don’t want any part of the world in which their parents and grandparents lived. And so they forge a new way.
Now, I saw this headline, “Millennial Men Prefer to Be Family Breadwinners, Have Stay-at-Home Wives.” Do you realize, you go back to 1970 to ’75 to 1980, if a man said this and meant it, he was going to be targeted as a sexist, as a chauvinist, as anti-woman, “What do you mean you’re gonna be the breadwinner? What if the woman wants to be the breadwinner? Who says you get the right to be the breadwinner?” It was vicious.
Now, we’ve had all this news about Millennials, about how they’re still children and they refuse to grow up and they’re still childlike as though life is still day care, even their first couple years of college. They’re referred to as snowflakes, gentle snowflakes, can’t hand in controversy whatsoever. Then you see this. We heard that Millennials don’t want to buy cars. They don’t like the whole culture of driving a car, buying a car, destroys the planet. We heard they don’t like buying houses, they’d rather rent, don’t have the money, student loan debt.
But now what’s happening is, over the recent past we’re getting stories about Millennials all of a sudden becoming very interested in buying cars and very eager to actually buy and live in homes instead of renting apartments. And now this. “Millennial Men Prefer to Be Family Breadwinners, Have Stay-at-Home Wives.” Stay-at-home wives? I mean, you can’t get any more anti-feminist than that.
So my question is, are we at a point where we’ve been before where a generation refuses to abide by and live by the same rules, standards, behavioral norms of their parents and grandparents? Specifically, might I ask, is the Millennial generation the generation which is gonna break the back of modern-era feminism? I mean, a guy my age, I’m 66. And when I was the Millennials’ age, sometime between 25 and 34, to say something like this was deadly, in terms of relationships.
Then the second story that came the next day from the same website — ready for this? — “Millennial Women Re-embrace the Homemaker Life.” So on the one hand we have Millennial guys saying, “I don’t want my wife to work. I want to be the breadwinner. I want her staying home. I want her raising the kids. She’s going to do the job of raising the family and I’ll help her,” whatever it is, the standard way that it was prior to the modern era of feminism.
And then the shocker the next day, women, Millennial women say, “Hey, that’s great. I would love to be a homemaker. I don’t need to go to work. I don’t need a career. I’d be happy to be someone’s wife and a mother and stay at home and raise the kids.” This is culture shock.
Now, I find it fascinating, folks, as one who studies sociology and culture, and I have been one who’s asked over and over, when is the culture rot that surrounds us gonna reverse itself? ‘Cause it always does. It sometimes takes three, four generations to bottom out, but it always does. I mean, we had the Puritan era. We had the Roaring Twenties, then things got cleaned up. You go to the 50’s and it’s Donna Reed and Beaver Cleaver, so it’s a cyclical thing. It doesn’t continue downward spiral to the sewer.
So I started researching this. I started talking to people I know who have kids the Millennial age, and some of them told me that this is exactly what’s happening to their kids and their friends. Even the women who work do it at home. They want to stay home, even if they have jobs they’re considered stay at home jobs or whatever, they want the traditional domestic role that women have always had. I’ve gotta take a break ’cause I’m long, but I think this is fascinating.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: A great achievement of feminism was to somehow convince the world that it was oppressive to let women stay at home and take care of cooking and the kids and the house and all that. And now look what’s happened after — well, what’s it been– 40 years of focused oppressive feminism? Millennial women appear to be rejecting it.
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