In the middle of the Saturday dump run drive, sorry, “transfer station,” we somehow got onto the topic of toxic feminism and its effect on men and relationships. I take my trash to the dump (transfer station) every Saturday morning, and something prompted me to bring it up. My wife might say the wind blew or the sun shone. There’s always something political brewing on a few of the burners. But the words piled out the way a story gets retold to a room full of people who’ve heard it a few hundred times.
My wife is very patient.
This particular stool has three legs. The first is the idea women get in their heads about the man that’s right for them. Long story short, about 1% of the top 1% of men might fit the category, making millions of decent, capable, caring providers invisible. These women can’t understand why they can’t find a man when they are to blame.
The culture did this to them; they just haven’t figured out why that’s such a broken way to approach relationships.
The second leg is the bitter feminists who were raised on gender studies and the progressive view that makes them incompatible with all but a few men who are feeble enough, but therefore not strong enough. These women can’t understand why they can’t find a man.
We could add a dodgy third leg. The one spawned by the second that insists men can be women who then rob women of things real women must defend, or else, which makes a lot of people bitter. These omwne can’t find a man and don’t want a transman and they don’t understand why.
As amazing as it sounds, I somehow manage to communicate this in fewer words than I just used, a skill that has escaped me in print and is not likely to be reproducible in speech, if only serendipitously and in the moment.
Summarized, the feminist culture’s neo-Marxist leadership, which is bitter about being unable to find a man, has set the bar for young women who have become equally undateable. Well beyond the mental state necessary for a long-term relationship or the type of bonding and sacrifice required to make a marriage work.
The problem is exacerbated by a fact I’ve repeated often in recent months. Couples married for many years are having more, better, and more fulfilling sex than the ideological offspring of the sexual revolution.
You can have some things and not others, and the feminists have concluded they are unhappy about that.
Coincidentally, after returning from “the transfer station,” and walking the dog, Jeff Childers, Saturday Coffee, and Covid spent a lot of time on this very subject.
Beyond its superficial lament for missing male companionship, Rachel Drucker’s piece was a quiet, stylish elegy for the AWFLs themselves. Beneath the carefully curated pathos arose a more subtle grief: the mourning of a cohort of lonely liberal women who followed the progressive script, built their careers, kept themselves radiant and emotionally literate, and yet somehow wound up alone at the restaurant, surrounded by others just like them.
AWFL women were promised —by feminism 2.0, by culture, by prestige media like the Times— that if they became independent, confident, discerning, self-aware, and empowered, the rest would follow. Sure, patriarchal Prince Charming might not show up, but his liberal, emotionally available cousin would. The even-steven relationship would be better. Mutual. Adult. Female-focused.
But beyond that empty promise lies an even bigger falsehood. The AWFLs were assured they would never need men anyway. A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle. But now the bicycle’s gone missing, and the fish are writing op-eds wondering why the ocean feels so empty.
Hello! Rachel! You told men their services were no longer needed! You sneered that their masculinity was toxic in the workplace. Then they stopped showing up for work. Surprise! Consequences, meet cause.
AWFLs created a zero-sum game where they always win, and wonder why men don’t want to play. Under their AWFL rules, if a man leads, he’s controlling, but if he follows, he’s weak. If he pursues, he’s creepy—if he doesn’t, he’s cowardly. If he wins, it’s problematic. If he loses, it’s unattractive. Heads, she’s empowered. Tails, he’s inadequate.
The men and women in successful relationships tend to accept more traditional gender roles where men are men and women are women, and the differences are necessary for both stable and fulfilling relationships, as well as the foundation for raising the next generation of people who get that.
For a few decades, it looked like that ship had sailed, but the rise of Donald Trump, MAGA, and Jordan Peterson has reframed manhood and relationships in a way that has men abandoning the lies of the feminist political left and searching for women who are not polluted by its ideology.
That’s a scary proposition for Democrats who spent 20 million trying to connect with men who’ve left their party or may. Did they have to ask women if it was okay and how to do it? It feels like they did, and in the process, wasted 20 million. Most progressive women have no clue, as Jeff Childers correctly explains. He also reminds us that nature abhors a vacuum.
Women looking for meaningful relationships with actual men are likely to leave the Democratic party and its failed feminist message, too. Left-Wing party politics are incapable of leading anyone to happiness, and the more women discover this, aided by the left’s continued insistence that men should be allowed to rob them of success in sport, the faster the defections will accumulate.
Dems are losing minorities in record numbers. If they keep losing women, they will become a political and historical artifact, which is the best thing that could happen to women, minorities, relationships, future generations, and America.
