The War of the Sexes Glossary: How Social Media Could Destroy American Marriage

Abstract

We viewed highly influential social media channels on the internet regularly using non-participant observation as our method. We observed hundreds of short videos on YouTube and other platforms, as a sociocultural anthropologic field study, from January 2023 to January 2024. Given the well documented decline in marriage globally, we sought to understand common themes shared by social media content providers. Our non-participant observations led us to develop the War of the Sexes Glossary. Generation Z appears to have solidified a worldview that marriage is unnecessary. Emil Brunner’s predictions from 1945 have come true, where he argued that “If the social basis, marriage, is rotten, the whole community is rotten.” The Manosphere, in direct response to feminists’ rhetoric, has fostered three main complaints prohibiting them from marriage commitment: “No Fault Divorce,” “Presumptive Paternity” and “My Body, My Choice.” We offer practicable solutions to policy makers on how to mitigate this dangerous worldview that, if not corrected, could destroy marriage in America.