Men Is Cheap

When a Civil War substitute broker told business associates that "Men is cheep here to Day," he exposed an unsettling contradiction at the heart of the Union's war effort. Despite Northerners' devotion to the principles of free labor, the war produced rampant speculation and coercive labor arrangements that many Americans labeled fraudulent. Debates about this contradiction focused on employment agencies called "intelligence offices," institutions of dubious character that nevertheless served the military and domestic necessities of the Union army and Northern households. Northerners condemned labor agents for pocketing fees above and beyond contracts for wages between employers and employees. Yet the transactions these middlemen brokered with vulnerable Irish immigrants, Union soldiers and veterans, former slaves, and Confederate deserters defined the limits of independence in the wage labor economy and clarified who could prosper in it. Men Is Cheap shows that in the process of winning the war, Northerners were forced to grapple with the frauds of free labor. Labor brokers, by helping to staff the Union military and Yankee households, did indispensable work that helped the Northern state and Northern employers emerge victorious. They also gave rise to an economic and political system that enriched the managerial class at the expense of laborers--a reality that resonates to this day.

Sex is cheap. Coupled sexual activity has become more widely available than ever. Cheap sex has been made possible by two technologies that have little to do with each other - the Pill and high-quality pornography - and its distribution made more efficient by a third technological innovation, online dating. Together, they drive down the cost of real sex, and in turn slow the development of love, make fidelity more challenging, sexual malleability more common, and have even taken a toll on men's marriageability. Cheap Sex takes readers on an extended tour inside the American mating market, and highlights key patterns that characterize young adults' experience today, including the timing of first sex in relationships, overlapping partners, frustrating returns on their relational investments, and a failure to link future goals like marriage with how they navigate their current relationships. Drawing upon several large nationally-representative surveys, in-person interviews with 100 men and women, and the assertions of scholars ranging from evolutionary psychologists to gender theorists, what emerges is a story about social change, technological breakthroughs, and unintended consequences. Men and women have not fundamentally changed, but their unions have. No longer playing a supporting role in relationships, sex has emerged as a central priority in relationship development and continuation. But unravel the layers, and it is obvious that the emergence of "industrial sex" is far more a reflection of men's interests than women's.

"Men Is Cheap shows how the concepts of military and domestic necessity were connected in white northerners' minds and clarifies what they thought the war was fought over. In the process of winning the war, white northerners were forced to grapple with the frauds of free labor. Labor brokers, by helping to staff the Union military and Yankee households, did indispensable work that helped the northern state and northern employers emerge victorious"--

The current cultural assumptions about love, sex, dating and marriage are not only absurd, but a danger to society and to individuals. We're taken the most successful institution known to man, tinkered with it, played with it, and toyed with it until it's barely functional any more. Marriage simply isn't such a great deal any more, which is why many people are turning away from it. Especially young men. And if you look at the stats on divorce and the way men are treated in the family courts, you can hardly blame them. This little book says that the problem lies with all the modern assumptions we've tagged on to marriage. Marriage is (or at least it was) the structure that took the complicated mess of who we are as men and women and created a legal and social framework that used our natural impulses and desires to create a stable society. Marriage is what keeps human cultures from devolving into chaos. As western society has gotten further and further from a reality-based perspective on the sexes, marriage has been on the rocks. Some say there's even a marriage strike. These 50 politically incorrect thoughts call young men to abandon the modern approach and look at love, marriage and sex from a different point of view. It's a call to be counter-cultural in a way the hippies couldn't have imagined. Please note: this is not a scholarly work. If you're looking for studies and footnotes, look elsewhere. This book isn't intended to prove anything. It simply offers a different perspective.

The Civil War was just days old when the first enslaved men, women, and children began fleeing their plantations to seek refuge inside the lines of the Union army as it moved deep into the heart of the Confederacy. In the years that followed, hundreds of thousands more followed in a mass exodus from slavery that would destroy the system once and for all. Drawing on an extraordinary survey of slave refugee camps throughout the country, Embattled Freedom reveals as never before the everyday experiences of these refugees from slavery as they made their way through the vast landscape of army-supervised camps that emerged during the war. Amy Murrell Taylor vividly reconstructs the human world of wartime emancipation, taking readers inside military-issued tents and makeshift towns, through commissary warehouses and active combat, and into the realities of individuals and families struggling to survive physically as well as spiritually. Narrating their journeys in and out of the confines of the camps, Taylor shows in often gripping detail how the most basic necessities of life were elemental to a former slave's quest for freedom and full citizenship. The stories of individuals--storekeepers, a laundress, and a minister among them--anchor this ambitious and wide-ranging history and demonstrate with new clarity how contingent the slaves' pursuit of freedom was on the rhythms and culture of military life. Taylor brings new insight into the enormous risks taken by formerly enslaved people to find freedom in the midst of the nation's most destructive war.