But it probably bears about the same relation to reality as the feminist view that discrimination and bias against women are running rampant in America. To state the obvious, the vast majority of men and women still marry, though they do so later than men and women did a generation ago. There may be important differences between women and men, including men's greater propensity to enjoy no-strings sex, but this hardly means that men do not also feel a need for marriage and children or that women have no sexual desires beyond lifelong monogamy. Work-family conflicts are undoubtedly a real problem, but most women are not longing to go home. But the mother of all conservative gender myths is that the liberalization of divorce has robbed women of marital security, freeing men to walk out on them.
Studies consistently show, however, that two-thirds of the time it's the women who walk out.
Far fewer women than men agree that unhappily married parents should stay together for the sake of the children. The pro-life movement likes to portray women who have abortions as victims of selfish boyfriends unwilling to support the children they father. With this fixation on the evil that men do to women, the sexual politics of the right start to look like uncannily like a mirror image of radical feminism. It is, no doubt, the first book ever to boast blurbs from both neoconservative doyenne Gertrude Himmelfarb and lunatic-fringe feminist Andrea Dworkin. There are other parallels.