The Era of The "Stage Five Clinger" is Over
The stereotype that wedding-crazy women dragged reluctant bachelors to the altar is now unbearably retro, and if anything, reversed. What changed?
Believe it or not, we had our own version of “gender discourse” in the 1990s and 2000s. And yes, I was a child during most of this era, but this type of gender discourse was visible even to people who were not terminally online, because it was all over mainstream media and the general zeitgeist.
The dominant genderslop theory of the era was that women wanted marriage (but more specifically, a wedding, the groom himself was less important) and men wanted sex. It was assumed that women and men were engaged in some kind of nonstop bartering dance where women doled out just enough sex as was necessary to acquire marriage and money, and men doled out just as much commitment as was necessary to acquire sex. Under this framework, a woman’s ideal setup might be a monogamous marriage to a rich but castrated man, who lavishes gifts upon her but doesn’t bother her with all the icky sex stuff. And for men, the platonic ideal would be a naked mattress on the floor of a storage unit, a cold beer, and a rotating harem of impossibly beautiful and sexually adventurous women, ideally many at once.
Given that both of these outcomes were unattainable, men and women married each other because it was the least-bad option. But still, a terrible trade deal for both parties, or so went the trope. Women would have to endure a gross man pawing at them for fifty years, and men—largely seen as the gender who benefited less from marriage—would have to deal with nagging, monogamy, and boredom just so they could weasel in a crumb of pussy on their birthdays. At some point, it was assumed that over time the wife would get so old and fat that even the man’s desire for sex would wane, and nobody would be getting anything out of the marriage, hence the variety of cartoons which essentially boil down to, “My bitch wife is fat.”
This was the world in which I grew up—a world that told me that in order to find a husband, I’d have to trick him, or at least make it a really good deal for him (sex on demand? threesomes? going to the strip club with him and being “cool” about it?) because no man actually wanted marriage and parenthood for the joy or fulfillment of it. Nobody explained how this trickery would be done, because even in the “old” days of the 2000s, withholding sex specifically to get a marriage proposal was not a thing anyone was actually doing. In fact, some people encouraged young women to have sex more freely and cut back on the marriage talk because men just wanted cool, chill, low maintenance girls. As I wrote before, of the prototypical “cool girl:”
She was independent, but in a way that was thoroughly unthreatening to men: she was guaranteed not to bother them.
But times have changed, or at least…the vibes and stereotype has changed. As the story now goes: marriage, once every woman’s rabid and singular focus, is now a one-way ticket to resentment, exhaustion and the “mental load,” while men, mooning over marriage and babies all day, get to bask in all the “free domestic labor.” Parenthood is a fun side quest for men looking to build a legacy as if they were in Crusader Kings and a thankless slog for women—just look at how men versus women talk about parenthood on Twitter, or even just the dynamic between Bluey’s parents. A viral video format shows a woman about to try on an engagement ring, changing her mind when she is overcome with horrific visions of domestic servitude. And the “trad” section of the manosphere surprisingly agrees with Invisible LaborTok, as they complain that modern women’s priorities (social media, frivolous travel and “girlbossing”) are wildly out of whack as they refuse to settle down and start a family—a desire which is now male-coded.
In the 2000s, men were simple creatures who just wanted sex and beer, if not for all these crazy bitches trying to marry them. In the 2020s, men are simple creatures who just want marriage and kids, if not for all these crazy bitches refusing to marry them.
But how did women go from being the ball and chain to being the ones afraid of getting saddled with one?
