Can You Pity This Sad, Single Male Chauvinist?

Maybe he puts potential brides off when he explains, if the wife makes more money than he does, he won’t feel “manly”.

WASHINGTON, September 17, 1974: When George Gilder speaks, feminists won’t listen.

All he’s trying to tell them, he says, is that they should realize “the male is different from the female, and the effect of the feminists’ efforts is to subvert marriage.” Gilder doesn’t think it’s a good idea for women to make more money than their husbands, and he questions the “equity of a single woman making more than a married man with several children.” He’s even against the Equal Rights Amendment.

“But I despair of getting the feminists to listen to me,” laments Gilder, shaking his head and looking genuinely bewildered. Recently, Time magazine called him the “leading male-chauvinist-pig author,” and he rather likes the idea. He is, after all, “unalterably opposed to the women’s movement.”

He made his case against feminism last year in his book, “Sexual Suicide.” Last week he was back in town to promote “Naked Nomads” in which he outlines the pitiful plight of the single man.

It’s just a myth, he says, that the single man leads the kind of life glorified in Playboy magazine. According to Gilder, the single man engages in sexual activity only a fifth as frequently as married women. Single men are lonely, he says. So lonely that they have a higher rate of suicide, violence and early death than persons in any other adult category.

“Single men are losers. They cannot commit themselves to anybody,” says Gilder, who is 35 and single. He says he’s lived with three women in the past 10 years — with a few affairs in between — and he wants to get married. In fact, he was engaged once, to a screenwriter and novelist, and the last of the women with whom he has lived.

What went wrong? “She is very much an individual in her own right and I don’t think she was ready for marriage.” Did the women’s movement have anything to do with the break-up? “Well, she’s anti-feminist, but I think she has been affected by the atmosphere of the times.”

He hasn’t got anyone else picked out yet, but he’s a man with marriage on his mind. Marriage, he says, is the only recourse to the sad life of the single man. “Marriage is an anchor in one’s life, connecting one to other people.”

But there must be love, too. “Love is the sentiment of mortality,” says Gilder, who believes that most of the married people he knows love each other, “in one way or another.”

If marriage is so great, why are there so many divorces? Gilder says one reason is that a lot of married men are seduced by “the myth of the glittering lifestyle of the single man out there.” Only when they’re out in the cold do they realize how much better they had it in marriage.

Some marriages, he believes, are “vulnerable to divorce” because wife and husband isolate themselves from their parents and other relatives and encourage their children to be independent. But husbands, wives and children need to be dependent on each other, he says. “Society depends on the fabric of interdependence.”

In a marriage, the male should be the provider and the woman the nurturer, Gilder says. Unless a man is allowed to assume this role, “he won’t feel manly and he won’t be able to relate to a woman in a loving and compassionate way.”

Gilder says he tried to tell feminist Germaine Greer all about this during a talk show in Toronto recently, but she wouldn’t listen. Afterwards, though, he took her out for dinner and they talked for four hours and got along very well. (“I paid. I was glad to pay.”)

“I liked Germaine Greer a lot,” he says. “She’s intelligent, stimulating, weird, eccentric and fun.” He even had a fleeting notion of asking her to go to bed with him. But he didn’t. “I couldn’t consider her as a sex partner. That’s her predicament. She said in her book she only like to sleep with construction workers.”

He doesn’t begrudge her that. Nor does he begrudge her the financial success she’s had as a writer for magazines, including Playboy which won’t review his books.

Gloria Steinem may be the only feminist he hasn’t met, says Gilder, who was dropped into a nest of feminists recently by the man who interviewed him for Time magazine. “He wanted to create a story.”

He got one. The reporter took Gilder to a feminists’ brunch where, according to the magazine’s account, Gilder “was repeatedly invited to leave.”

Gilder discounts this version. “At the beginning, people told me it was offensive for me to be there,” he says, adding wistfully: “But I don’t think Barbara Seaman (author of “Free and Feminine”) really wanted me to leave.”

As much as he’d like to be loved by everybody, including feminists, Gilder isn’t about to go easy on the feminists. He thinks anthropologist Lionel Tiger, for one, is “smart and valuable, but he capitulates to the feminists too much. I suppose this reflects an attitude of chivalry. So many men capitulate. They say, ‘Gee! No, no! I believe in equal rights and equal pay.”

Gilder doesn’t agree, and he doesn’t mind saying so. Being the leading male chauvinist pig has its benefits — among them notoriety and publicity, Gilder is the first to admit.

But he may be through with women for a while. His next book will be anti-doomsday. “There’s this erroneous and widespread notion that the world is coming to an end…” he begins.

[This article originally appeared in The Washington Star News, September 17, 1974 as Take Pity On This Poor Single Chauvinist. #58 in a collection of more than 100 newspaper articles by Judy Flander from the second wave of the Women’s Movement reflecting the fervor and ingenuity of the women who rode the wave.]