The inevitable happened. From its editorial pages, The New York Times raised the alarm about childless cat ladies. Roughly a half-year after the liberal establishment freaked out about the natalist comment made by then vice presidential candidate JD Vance, the paper of record is beginning to show concern that women are lonely and the population is below replacement.
First, divorced former pornographer Rachel Drucker observed that frustrated women are on the prowl in modern America: “Still, I found myself watching the crowd as it moved past us: women walking in pairs or alone, dressed with care. At table after table at the nearby restaurants, there was a noticeable absence of men — at least of men seated in what looked like dates.”
This observation sounds familiar and is more revealing of the disposition of the fair sex than any survey where women claim — bitterly, most likely — that they are looking for friendship and self-improvement, not love.
The opponents of #MeToo warned about it in the late 2010s. We made dating too high stakes a game for men; make a wrong move and two decades later, the girl may accuse you of assault — and ruin your life.
#MeToo is the prime suspect in shaping the social arrangement that, as the Times’ piece suggests, women are not liking very much. But these days, loneliness is so profound and so widespread, it can’t be attributed to a single factor.
Our tradition teaches that young men risked their lives for love. The beauty of Helen of Troy sparked the Trojan War. Romeo defied his family and fought Juliet’s. Personally, I’m surprised that so many guys are reluctant to pursue women. When #MeToo blew up in 2016, I fully expected them to test societal limitations and come out on top.
Drucker may not — as some speculate — be a misandrist, but she gave us a hint of how she is responsible for the current situation. Perhaps she didn’t know what she was about to unleash. Nevertheless:
I spent over a decade behind the curtain of digital desire. As the custodian of records for Playboy and its affiliated hardcore properties, including sites like Spice TV, I was responsible for some of the most infringed-upon adult content in the world. I worked closely with copyright attorneys and marketing teams to understand exactly what it took to get a man to pay for content he could easily find for free.We knew what worked. We knew how to frame a face, a gesture, a moment of implication — just enough to ignite fantasy and open a wallet. I came to understand, in exact terms, what cues tempt the average 18-to-36-year-old cis heterosexual man. What drew him in. What kept him coming back. It wasn’t intimacy. It wasn’t mutuality. It was access to simulation — clean, fast and frictionless.
This is where men are at — and it’s easier than dealing with the unsteady emotional life of a real woman:
In that world, there’s no need for conversation. No effort. No curiosity. No reciprocity. No one’s feelings to consider, no vulnerability to navigate. Just a closed loop of consumption.
And when it’s not porn that fills up their time, it’s video games. Feminists were fools to roll out their hyped up anti-rape message when men were already retreating into cyber pleasuredome. Men are easy; they can be satisfied with Playboy and Nintendo. Women, on the other hand, are turned on by romance rather than visuals and yearn for the chase that only a real-life interaction can produce.
That’s why even when courtship happens, it happens in ways that women find unsatisfying. They complain about it — online. For instance, one viral meme shows a picture of a forlorn girl with the caption “me when I don’t wanna go on a first date but then I remember that I’ll be 30 this month and I’ve never had a boyfriend.” I thought it was odd that she would not want to go on the first date — in our experience, those were fun and entirely on our terms — but most dates today are with people from dating apps.
That holds true for the top 1%. For instance, Zohran Mamdani, the recent winner of the Democrat mayoral primary in New York, connected with his anti-Zionist, activist, artist wife on Hinge. Both of them come from money and prominence, yet America gave them no physical space where they could run into each other. Or else, Mamdani is not the Alpha he’s supposed to be.
As men are retreating into digital hedonism, women are looking for alternative ways to fill their time. One conspicuous area where the young female urbanites created a niche for themselves is in far-left political activism.
Most of the anti-Israel protesters in recent years have been young hipster chicks. They get quite hysterical in their activism — shrieking, proposing bizarre conspiracies, and ripping up posters of hostage children.
No doubt they fancy themselves to be revolutionaries — and revolutions are usually started by women — but they are started by women in bread lines, those performing their traditional roles and, requiring upper body strength, end up being fulfilled by men. Lonely women stand not so much for radical change, but for purposelessness and decline.
Society-wide singlehood is an existential problem because it leads to birth dearth. Here, too, feminists took to the New York Times Op-ed pages to propose a solution. Amanda Taub explores the idea of lavishly compensating mothers for having children. She notes that people usually end up having fewer children than initially desired — and I’m sure failing to pair up is the key part of that phenomenon. Offering money for a future child is a dubious motivation for a woman who can’t find anyone to be the father.
Low birth rates are not sustainable — eventually, societies will collapse, most likely from migration. In his dystopian fantasy Submission, Michel Houellebecq imagines the Muslim Brotherhood solidifying their coup in still majority Gaelic France by marrying off the atomized French elites to Muslim girls. He shows the land of quintessential Latin lovers withering away, and the Brotherhood offering a fix to their problems. Without any need to pursue a woman, a high status man can find himself a harem, perhaps filled with underage harlots — an arrangement almost as easy as web porn.
There is no easy solution to it all and maybe it’s already too late to alter the direction in which millennials and Gen Z are heading — their fate was probably sealed by the lockdowns. Parents should avoid media toys for their kids altogether — not just limit, but deny access. And, of course, we need to show more respect for masculine virtues. Maybe men will come back — we have no choice; it’s a question of life and death for our civilization.
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