Undead sexist cliches someone should drive a stake through

This will be the first of three posts tackling sexist cliches that have been around for years.
One that’s been around at least since the early seventies is the idea that men’s success depends on women’s submission. The first version I read was that men attempt to build/create/make money to compensate for their lack of the ability to bear children. If women do all those things, plus bearing children, men will feel so emasculated they’ll just curl up and die.
Then there was George Gilder, in the 1980s, with his view that men can’t amount to anything unless they’re married. Women therefore have a moral duty to put their personal goals on hold, marry men and shape them up—preferably marry the meek loser-types who need inspiration rather than going for good-looking, successful men (as other writers have observed, it’s hard not to see a degree of self interest in this).
And now we have Mark Regnerus, who asserts that since men are driven to achieve by the drive for sex, if women don’t hold out sex until marriage, men will no longer achieve anything (“their sexual success may, ironically, be hindering their drive to achieve in life”). There’s more premarital sex available than there used to be; men are financially less well off than they used to be; therefore, male failure is women’s fault for giving it away!
As Echidne points out at the link, there’s little evidence of cause and effect in this. And I can think of plenty of counter-examples. Did John Adams, who was already happily married and a successful Massachusetts lawyer, feel the need to risk his future challenging the British Empire because he wanted to get laid? What about Cecil Rhodes, the 19th century multimillionaire, who built his empire while showing very little interest in women (I don’t mean he was gay—going off and doing Manly Stuff without women wasn’t terribly remarkable back then)?
And more to the point, why is this women’s problem, even if it were true? If men decide they’d rather party and sleep around than do anything with their life (and Regnerus doens’t make that point), shouldn’t he be yelling at them to get their act in gear?
Regnerus’ argument is that he’s really, really concerned for women: They’re giving the cow away and not getting the True Love they really want in return. Which is nominally the point of his article, with the Terrible, Terrible Consequences for society thrown in.
So I’m sure he’s recycling old sexist cliches with only the best of intentions.

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