Matt Walsh Explains The Dark Reality Of A Stay-At-Home Husband

**SPEAKER_1** (0:01)
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**Matt Walsh** (0:32)
Well, you younger folks won't remember this, but there was a time not very long ago when we had certain words we would use to describe useless men who sit around all day doing nothing.
We would call them deadbeats, bums, losers. If they were particularly lazy and incompetent, we'd call them congressmen. These days, there's another term that has suddenly entered common parlance. The media have been breathlessly reporting about the rise of so-called stay-at-home boyfriends. The Daily Mail has this headline this week.
Stay-at-home boyfriend becomes the new housewife as women outnumber men in the workforce for the third time in history. Now, as for how many of the men who've left the workforce have now embraced the unseemly life of a stay-at-home boyfriend, the Daily Mail provides no data. Fortune also reports this month that stay-at-home boyfriends have become an economic trend. But again, they're kind of light on actual data. Here's how they describe the phenomenon. Watch.

**SPEAKER_3** (1:28)
The stay-at-home boyfriend is someone who has either intentionally left the workforce or someone who has either never tried or really has felt dejected that they wouldn't even be able to get into it in the first place. Since 1990, we've had 7 million jobs where men outnumbered women. And now that's gone to basically zero. This is a non-temporary adjustment. Only three times it's happened in the history. According to Laura Ulrich, the economist at Indeed, it's not going to be a temporary thing. It's going to be permanent. Women will outnumber men.

**Matt Walsh** (1:55)
Now, it would seem quite unfair to assume that every man not currently employed is a stay at home boyfriend or a stay at home man of any kind. The stay at home man isn't just any man who happened to lose his job. He is a man who has made a lifestyle choice. He has decided to drop out of the workforce on a permanent or long-term basis so that a woman can provide for him. Now, in fairness, it's hard to tabulate the precise number of stay at home boyfriends. For one thing, there is no official census that quantifies this particular demographic. And for another, a man who is not married, has no kids, and stays at home while his girlfriend takes care of him can only barely be said to exist at all in the first place. I mean, this is a man so flimsy and frail, a man of such little consequence that it would be hard to count him or notice him even if he were sitting in the room with you. So the lack of data is understandable.
Stay at home husbands, on the other hand, can be counted. There are over 2 million stay at home husbands in America, according to the latest survey. They now make up 20 percent of all stay at home parents, and this proportion has doubled over the last few decades. We can extrapolate from the sharp uptick in stay at home husbands that the community of stay at home boyfriends has also expanded. There probably is some overlap here.
A stay at home boyfriend graduates in some cases to a stay at home husband, and then when he dies, he reincarnates into a barnacle, and then when he dies again, he goes back to being a stay at home boyfriend. It's like this cosmic cycle that repeats infinitely. Now, I'm going to have some harsh criticism, which is out of character for me, I realize, towards the house boyfriends and the house husbands. I can see that the latter group is less offensive than the former, though still problematic for reasons I will explain.
But before I critique the men and in the interests of equity and inclusion, which are values I hold close to my heart, as you know, I must lecture the women because if I know anything about women, it's that they enjoy being lectured by men, especially by men who are podcasters. So this will be a very satisfying experience for the women in the audience. Much of the commentary about the stay at home man trend has been distinctly insulting and condescending in tone, which includes the commentary you're currently listening to. But it's interesting to note that women, especially women in media, have been especially harsh about it, unashamedly so. Watch.