“Why young men want old-school marriages,” read a headline in Vogue last month.
According to a recent sociological study, younger millennial men, particularly those born in the late 1980s and 1990s, are more likely to want a stay-at-home wife and believe that husbands should make, “all the important decisions in the family”.
In response, News Corp interviewed a few young men who attend a university in Melbourne.
Their insights included, “I need to marry someone who’ll look after the kids,” “None of us is looking at babies and getting all clucky and s**t. Why is everyone so scared of saying girls and guys are different? [sic]” and “girls are f*cking crazy.”
It painted a dire picture of millennial men in 2017.
The pendulum, it seems, has shifted direction.
As Chris Boeskool put it for The Huffington Post, “when you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression.” Could it be that millennial men feel robbed? That the ‘death’ of the traditional marriage has left men feeling worse off? That they yearn for a world more reminiscent of their grandfathers than their fathers?
In a bid to understand how young men see their future, I decided to ask them. I surveyed 40 men, from all over Australia, aged between 18 and 33. Most were unmarried and did not have children.
Here is what the millennial men who I spoke to want their futures to look like.