I sympathize with Ms Drucker or indeed any lonely heart, but she has undoubtedly supported every political trend leading to the present moment and now unfortunately reaps the consequences.
In the Before Times, old women used to be the most zealous enforcers of small-c conservatism, perhaps because they knew it was only social stricture which prevented mid-50s, divorced women from being tossed aside like yesterday’s news. A sad truth Ms Drucker learns now, too late.
I predict that younger people, post millennial’s, will ‘discover’ dating and intimacy and connection and love and marriage and naturally born children in one’s youth and going outside, and spontaneous social interaction and church and civic life- and all of it will be treated as a giant middle finger to millennial culture and not a hearkening back to norms.
Anecdotal, but the flip seems to be happening with the younger part of GenZ and now Gen Alpha. Older GenZ are stuck with Millennials in woke hell. It seems the Reddit generation (roughly 21-40) is the most lost.
Material conditions currently preclude a groundswell of young parents, and there are no signs of that changing anytime soon. Many people, and especially young people, just can’t afford to be parents.
I hope for a widespread rejection of social media as the force that controls human interaction, but the wealthiest and most connected people on earth who own these social networks are actively invested in preventing any loss of power.
And I hope for a resurgence in community involvement, but the quality of education has lowered enough that most young people have very little understanding or interest in the values that underpin (or once underpinned) our civic responsibilities.
In fact, the longer we live in a culture that glorifies success and abandons those in need of help, the less seriously young people are likely to take their civic responsibility.
Many things would have to fundamentally shift to access the cultural change you’re wishfully predicting. The world didn’t become this way just because one generation was bad and annoying. There have been many powerful forces guiding human behavior more towards selfishness and isolation, and those forces are still ensconced atop our global political structure.
Except that parenting used to simply happen spontaneously and in fact still does across the world. You don’t need money to have a baby just youth and health- young people will discover this power anew.
For hundreds of years people didn’t require a ‘certain amount of capital’ to have babies.
This will be remembered- living a ‘certain lifestyle’, is what is unnatural- not having children sans massive funds.
This "lifestyle" is a response to material conditions, it is not the cause of them.
Having a baby isn't free. It requires a certain amount of capital to have a child in a hospital. Pre-insurance number are in the $15k-$20k range, copay is somewhere from $500 to $3k. A midwife may be cheaper, but it won't be free, with services costing $6k-$10k and then figuring out whether your insurance covers it.
Whether you have insurance or no, the hospital will not turn you away. Cost benefit analysis über alles is already a thing of the past. Wages have not kept up since the 1970’s and only the well off can afford to analyze their lives and behavior in this way, sadly paralyzing most of them into late life breeding or none at all.
Restricting this comment to first world western nations as I believe that is the main context of our discussion.
I do not doubt that those who want to be parents badly enough can still have children regardless of whether it leaves them in poverty (or sinks them more deeply into it) as a family unit. I wasn’t actually contending that, as obviously pregnancy and childbirth are biological processes and can happen regardless of planning.
I am saying that, in the first world western nations that are experiencing a decline in childbirth, material conditions have made it so that having a child strains people’s limited resources and makes them comparatively much poorer than those who do not have children.
As things have stood for the last few decades, parents have less of a social safety net. They most often need to be a two-income household (US BLS reported in 2019 that 66% of married couples with children under 18 were dual income. I am certain it has risen further since then.) Many leave their hometowns to find work, separating them from family and fraying the concept of “the village” as our culture becomes more socially isolated thanks in large part to the effects of rapacious social media companies.
Working parents very often need to pay for daycare, which is priced to be juuust as much as families can possibly bear without it making more sense for one parent to just stay at home instead. Add to that all of the ordinary costs of housing, feeding and clothing a child, and even thrifty families feel the squeeze.
I am saying that fewer and fewer people will voluntarily choose parenthood over time if they’re barely getting by already and can’t conceive of adding a dependent. People want their kids to have a good life. Knowing that a child is a guaranteed ticket to decades of comparative poverty unless you have the skills or connections to be high earners is discouraging.
“People can just have kids again and find a way to make it work” is an optimistic wish that’s not grounded in reality or in the factors that actually influence people’s life decisions.
Bosh! It is this, ‘wanting their kids to have a good life’ bollocks that brought us here- all American kids should have a normal life. The ‘good life’ current parents envision for ‘their kids’, leaves out the whole bloody social compact!- and turns children into expensive pets instead of citizens. Rethink your paradigm.
The trend has only gone in one direction, since widespread visual mass media mid-20th century. It only accelerates each generation. People aren't different, they just react to differing material and technological incentives, as you note. I don't see any swing back, not unless something catastrophic happens and most of our technology and affluence is lost. Thus far it's a one way road, each generation is "worse" than the last on these particular metrics at least, because technology, especially mass communication technologies, allows it. The culture arose from the material and technological conditions, not the other way around. I'm with you that I would not expect a reversal if material conditions don't change first.
"As for me, I’ll keep showing up. Not because I’m waiting. Because I know what it feels like when someone finally arrives."
A young woman in her late teens or early 20s today doesn't know what it feels like. She has one less motivation to keep showing up. And the young man has never felt safety with a woman who isn't waiting to pounce on the wrong word (sexist, ableist, entitled, whatever), or wrong move, so he's not putting himself out there given the risks and lack of trust.
Sorry, I don’t buy it. I just don’t. I see this complaint from women time and again, but these are always the same women who feel entitled to someone far out of their league or who will drop a good guy because of political differences. And of course, they wait, and wait, and wait some more before they think about finding a guy to settle down with.
But what can a woman this old offer romantically? Conversation? “Emotional precision,” whatever that is? Grow up, lady, and enjoy mimosas with your friends.
That said, I know most guys suck. They’re losers who consume porn and use dating sites like a prostitution service. Many single men over 40 are obese jerks ready to con a gullible desperate woman. And yet, these guys are still chosen over the few good guys who happen to be a little bald or a few inches too short or lack game.
Both sides are missing one another. Another wistful reflection from a leftist spinster won’t really change that.
The article author proudly mentions she “optimized” internet porn engagement among 18 year olds. And she wants men to respect her? Stay away from my son you ghoul. Gleefully annihilating boys self respect by hooking them on their worst impulses. It’s primal rage bait. I don’t care if gay men or old ladies look at porn but for young straight men it’s poison. The male female dynamic makes the boys consuming it feel like shit. It’s so ignoble for straight men because they’re watching women.
She should be sentenced to a month in the van with WBE.
The point about motivated people still finding companionship and success while everyone who needs the social support of institutions is very important and underdiscussed. The mating process used to kind of just happen naturally as one progressed through life without too much conscious willpower. The push factors that led men to seek put women were embedded in life. Video games sap the drive to accomplish things, providing the illusion of accomplishment. Porn saps the sexual drive, providing satisfaction. Weed, alcohol, and nicotine are all available to dull the loneliness, but it's still there.
(with apologies to whomever I'm paraphrasing--) Everything bad for you is cheap or free, while the things you actually need just get more expensive by the minute
I think a lot of what "cringe" means is failing to understand the context of something.
Irony is constant in internet culture. Think about something like a navy seal copypasta. To someone who knows the context, it's a joke. It might be stupid - but reposting a long string of text where you threaten to murder someone is just something that people on the internet sometimes do. Of course, someone who hasn't seen it before will probably be baffled and bewildered. The clueless, if honest person who responds in earnest may be mocked and laughed at.
In this case, I think it's fair to say that we have had fifteen or twenty years of women celebrating their independence from men and their ability to take or leave us on the individual level. Further, a man who follows "the conversation" has probably experienced hundreds of women complaining that men talk too much, are too forward, take up too much space, demand too much attention and occupy too many important positions.
The woman in question seems like a decent and well-meaning person who isn't aware of this cultural context. It isn't acknowledged in the piece. Unfortunately, this may come off as cringe.
Hell is other people. Fuck all the cocksuckers who can’t get through the day without some other fucking human there to make them feel more important. Straight men don’t need the company of other straight men. Thats gay.
Right? Exactly why I love being gay! Wake up every morning next to my best friend. He supports & sacrifices for me as much as I for him. Plus all the porn I want without any nagging. We can even still both sleep around!!! There's a reason we got a lower divorce rate than straights or lesbians. Biggest threat to gay marriage is that the straight dudes will figure this out and try to horn in on our action. So yeah: companionship is totally gay! Don't you forget it!
As a bisexual man, it's astounding how much easier it is to deal with men than it is to deal with the insane and unending amount of work required to be with women.
While I find it difficult to sympathize with Ms Drucker, I thoroughly enjoyed this almost contrarian take. It was full of delightful pearls like the fact that most men (& women) need scripted social norms to navigate life's biggest decisions or obviously AI-optimized essays leaving the taste of plastic (that one really rang for me) or the reminder that women signaled male status, which many younger millenials and Gen Z never really understood. Thank you for a good essay even if I have a hard time getting there. If we are going to move forward as a culture, I'd consider this essay and its attitude as a strong place to start. It's just so hard not to give in to the addicting self-righteous fury that so many social media apps have ruthlessly optimized.
It’s strange how archetypically everyone has adopted the gay man’s lifestyle: he hangs out with friends and friends only while porn and sex addicted in private, incapable of seeking genuine companionship. The sexes are exclusive to the obvious bifurcated sides of the gay man’s psyche.
Also, you’re my best friend and all (virtually of course, like AI) but I think I spotted a typo:
“That essay concludes with a liberatory moment in which the author, free from men, jumps naked off a dock with female friends, finally experiencing the freedom and safety that *been made impossible by male desire:”
The initial demand was that married women be made free from the consequences of eternal birth of children, up til menopause- by the pill. This quickly morphed into young women making sex frictionless and worry free for men- and was marketed as female freedom, ‘having sex like a man’- this has led to valueless women , no marriage, children born only at the lower end of the social spectrum or manufactured in labs at the higher end and a vast groaning middle of careerism, porn and loneliness.
If women really enjoyed having sex like a man, they would not be crowing in the New York Times, about the liberation of having an unclaimed body, naked with girlfriends and fondled only by seaweeds- and in the next breath after curating and marketing pornography for a decade, asking, ‘where are the men?!’
The whole thing has degraded women and left a generation or two functionally barren and career driven, while men, freed from social and marital obligations use porn or use younger women men online, as real life porn and order grubhub.
I remember reading a British snob say that American women couldn’t talk about anything that wasn’t in their bodies, kids or meals . She had a point. How do these women go to restaurants all the time? I’m fighting my weight as it is.
Maybe do something else with your life, get some other interest.
I saw that "whatever" in your essay - I used it the other day, tho. aggressively toward a (litrul) Boomer who had come into my cafe from "protesting" outside and was standing behind me in line, complaining about how only Millennials are "socially engaged."
The "Gen Z" girl who makes my coffee marvelled at the exchange.
Men still go outside, they just don't go to lame restaurants in Wicker Park. And they don't go to those restaurants precisely because they spend LESS time on the internet than women.
I sympathize with Ms Drucker or indeed any lonely heart, but she has undoubtedly supported every political trend leading to the present moment and now unfortunately reaps the consequences.
In the Before Times, old women used to be the most zealous enforcers of small-c conservatism, perhaps because they knew it was only social stricture which prevented mid-50s, divorced women from being tossed aside like yesterday’s news. A sad truth Ms Drucker learns now, too late.
I predict that younger people, post millennial’s, will ‘discover’ dating and intimacy and connection and love and marriage and naturally born children in one’s youth and going outside, and spontaneous social interaction and church and civic life- and all of it will be treated as a giant middle finger to millennial culture and not a hearkening back to norms.
Anecdotal, but the flip seems to be happening with the younger part of GenZ and now Gen Alpha. Older GenZ are stuck with Millennials in woke hell. It seems the Reddit generation (roughly 21-40) is the most lost.
Wait a bit. It will eventually be ‘the new thing, to actually live!
Material conditions currently preclude a groundswell of young parents, and there are no signs of that changing anytime soon. Many people, and especially young people, just can’t afford to be parents.
I hope for a widespread rejection of social media as the force that controls human interaction, but the wealthiest and most connected people on earth who own these social networks are actively invested in preventing any loss of power.
And I hope for a resurgence in community involvement, but the quality of education has lowered enough that most young people have very little understanding or interest in the values that underpin (or once underpinned) our civic responsibilities.
In fact, the longer we live in a culture that glorifies success and abandons those in need of help, the less seriously young people are likely to take their civic responsibility.
Many things would have to fundamentally shift to access the cultural change you’re wishfully predicting. The world didn’t become this way just because one generation was bad and annoying. There have been many powerful forces guiding human behavior more towards selfishness and isolation, and those forces are still ensconced atop our global political structure.
Except that parenting used to simply happen spontaneously and in fact still does across the world. You don’t need money to have a baby just youth and health- young people will discover this power anew.
For hundreds of years people didn’t require a ‘certain amount of capital’ to have babies.
This will be remembered- living a ‘certain lifestyle’, is what is unnatural- not having children sans massive funds.
This "lifestyle" is a response to material conditions, it is not the cause of them.
Having a baby isn't free. It requires a certain amount of capital to have a child in a hospital. Pre-insurance number are in the $15k-$20k range, copay is somewhere from $500 to $3k. A midwife may be cheaper, but it won't be free, with services costing $6k-$10k and then figuring out whether your insurance covers it.
Whether you have insurance or no, the hospital will not turn you away. Cost benefit analysis über alles is already a thing of the past. Wages have not kept up since the 1970’s and only the well off can afford to analyze their lives and behavior in this way, sadly paralyzing most of them into late life breeding or none at all.
Restricting this comment to first world western nations as I believe that is the main context of our discussion.
I do not doubt that those who want to be parents badly enough can still have children regardless of whether it leaves them in poverty (or sinks them more deeply into it) as a family unit. I wasn’t actually contending that, as obviously pregnancy and childbirth are biological processes and can happen regardless of planning.
I am saying that, in the first world western nations that are experiencing a decline in childbirth, material conditions have made it so that having a child strains people’s limited resources and makes them comparatively much poorer than those who do not have children.
As things have stood for the last few decades, parents have less of a social safety net. They most often need to be a two-income household (US BLS reported in 2019 that 66% of married couples with children under 18 were dual income. I am certain it has risen further since then.) Many leave their hometowns to find work, separating them from family and fraying the concept of “the village” as our culture becomes more socially isolated thanks in large part to the effects of rapacious social media companies.
Working parents very often need to pay for daycare, which is priced to be juuust as much as families can possibly bear without it making more sense for one parent to just stay at home instead. Add to that all of the ordinary costs of housing, feeding and clothing a child, and even thrifty families feel the squeeze.
I am saying that fewer and fewer people will voluntarily choose parenthood over time if they’re barely getting by already and can’t conceive of adding a dependent. People want their kids to have a good life. Knowing that a child is a guaranteed ticket to decades of comparative poverty unless you have the skills or connections to be high earners is discouraging.
“People can just have kids again and find a way to make it work” is an optimistic wish that’s not grounded in reality or in the factors that actually influence people’s life decisions.
Bosh! It is this, ‘wanting their kids to have a good life’ bollocks that brought us here- all American kids should have a normal life. The ‘good life’ current parents envision for ‘their kids’, leaves out the whole bloody social compact!- and turns children into expensive pets instead of citizens. Rethink your paradigm.
The trend has only gone in one direction, since widespread visual mass media mid-20th century. It only accelerates each generation. People aren't different, they just react to differing material and technological incentives, as you note. I don't see any swing back, not unless something catastrophic happens and most of our technology and affluence is lost. Thus far it's a one way road, each generation is "worse" than the last on these particular metrics at least, because technology, especially mass communication technologies, allows it. The culture arose from the material and technological conditions, not the other way around. I'm with you that I would not expect a reversal if material conditions don't change first.
"As for me, I’ll keep showing up. Not because I’m waiting. Because I know what it feels like when someone finally arrives."
A young woman in her late teens or early 20s today doesn't know what it feels like. She has one less motivation to keep showing up. And the young man has never felt safety with a woman who isn't waiting to pounce on the wrong word (sexist, ableist, entitled, whatever), or wrong move, so he's not putting himself out there given the risks and lack of trust.
I'm sympathetic to this woman's arguments and complaints but highly suspect she's an unpleasant potential partner
Sorry, I don’t buy it. I just don’t. I see this complaint from women time and again, but these are always the same women who feel entitled to someone far out of their league or who will drop a good guy because of political differences. And of course, they wait, and wait, and wait some more before they think about finding a guy to settle down with.
But what can a woman this old offer romantically? Conversation? “Emotional precision,” whatever that is? Grow up, lady, and enjoy mimosas with your friends.
That said, I know most guys suck. They’re losers who consume porn and use dating sites like a prostitution service. Many single men over 40 are obese jerks ready to con a gullible desperate woman. And yet, these guys are still chosen over the few good guys who happen to be a little bald or a few inches too short or lack game.
Both sides are missing one another. Another wistful reflection from a leftist spinster won’t really change that.
The article author proudly mentions she “optimized” internet porn engagement among 18 year olds. And she wants men to respect her? Stay away from my son you ghoul. Gleefully annihilating boys self respect by hooking them on their worst impulses. It’s primal rage bait. I don’t care if gay men or old ladies look at porn but for young straight men it’s poison. The male female dynamic makes the boys consuming it feel like shit. It’s so ignoble for straight men because they’re watching women.
She should be sentenced to a month in the van with WBE.
The point about motivated people still finding companionship and success while everyone who needs the social support of institutions is very important and underdiscussed. The mating process used to kind of just happen naturally as one progressed through life without too much conscious willpower. The push factors that led men to seek put women were embedded in life. Video games sap the drive to accomplish things, providing the illusion of accomplishment. Porn saps the sexual drive, providing satisfaction. Weed, alcohol, and nicotine are all available to dull the loneliness, but it's still there.
(with apologies to whomever I'm paraphrasing--) Everything bad for you is cheap or free, while the things you actually need just get more expensive by the minute
I think a lot of what "cringe" means is failing to understand the context of something.
Irony is constant in internet culture. Think about something like a navy seal copypasta. To someone who knows the context, it's a joke. It might be stupid - but reposting a long string of text where you threaten to murder someone is just something that people on the internet sometimes do. Of course, someone who hasn't seen it before will probably be baffled and bewildered. The clueless, if honest person who responds in earnest may be mocked and laughed at.
In this case, I think it's fair to say that we have had fifteen or twenty years of women celebrating their independence from men and their ability to take or leave us on the individual level. Further, a man who follows "the conversation" has probably experienced hundreds of women complaining that men talk too much, are too forward, take up too much space, demand too much attention and occupy too many important positions.
The woman in question seems like a decent and well-meaning person who isn't aware of this cultural context. It isn't acknowledged in the piece. Unfortunately, this may come off as cringe.
Hell is other people. Fuck all the cocksuckers who can’t get through the day without some other fucking human there to make them feel more important. Straight men don’t need the company of other straight men. Thats gay.
Right? Exactly why I love being gay! Wake up every morning next to my best friend. He supports & sacrifices for me as much as I for him. Plus all the porn I want without any nagging. We can even still both sleep around!!! There's a reason we got a lower divorce rate than straights or lesbians. Biggest threat to gay marriage is that the straight dudes will figure this out and try to horn in on our action. So yeah: companionship is totally gay! Don't you forget it!
As a bisexual man, it's astounding how much easier it is to deal with men than it is to deal with the insane and unending amount of work required to be with women.
"Hell is other people."
Nice. I bought my wife a night shirt that says just that.
While I find it difficult to sympathize with Ms Drucker, I thoroughly enjoyed this almost contrarian take. It was full of delightful pearls like the fact that most men (& women) need scripted social norms to navigate life's biggest decisions or obviously AI-optimized essays leaving the taste of plastic (that one really rang for me) or the reminder that women signaled male status, which many younger millenials and Gen Z never really understood. Thank you for a good essay even if I have a hard time getting there. If we are going to move forward as a culture, I'd consider this essay and its attitude as a strong place to start. It's just so hard not to give in to the addicting self-righteous fury that so many social media apps have ruthlessly optimized.
Agreed- a welcome, nuanced take on a big topic that too rarely elicits this sort of reaction.
It’s strange how archetypically everyone has adopted the gay man’s lifestyle: he hangs out with friends and friends only while porn and sex addicted in private, incapable of seeking genuine companionship. The sexes are exclusive to the obvious bifurcated sides of the gay man’s psyche.
Also, you’re my best friend and all (virtually of course, like AI) but I think I spotted a typo:
“That essay concludes with a liberatory moment in which the author, free from men, jumps naked off a dock with female friends, finally experiencing the freedom and safety that *been made impossible by male desire:”
*had been
CAP's enemies sometimes slip typos into his writing
The initial demand was that married women be made free from the consequences of eternal birth of children, up til menopause- by the pill. This quickly morphed into young women making sex frictionless and worry free for men- and was marketed as female freedom, ‘having sex like a man’- this has led to valueless women , no marriage, children born only at the lower end of the social spectrum or manufactured in labs at the higher end and a vast groaning middle of careerism, porn and loneliness.
If women really enjoyed having sex like a man, they would not be crowing in the New York Times, about the liberation of having an unclaimed body, naked with girlfriends and fondled only by seaweeds- and in the next breath after curating and marketing pornography for a decade, asking, ‘where are the men?!’
The whole thing has degraded women and left a generation or two functionally barren and career driven, while men, freed from social and marital obligations use porn or use younger women men online, as real life porn and order grubhub.
It is a bleak sort of ‘freedom’ indeed.
I remember reading a British snob say that American women couldn’t talk about anything that wasn’t in their bodies, kids or meals . She had a point. How do these women go to restaurants all the time? I’m fighting my weight as it is.
Maybe do something else with your life, get some other interest.
I saw that "whatever" in your essay - I used it the other day, tho. aggressively toward a (litrul) Boomer who had come into my cafe from "protesting" outside and was standing behind me in line, complaining about how only Millennials are "socially engaged."
The "Gen Z" girl who makes my coffee marvelled at the exchange.
As Tim Dillion said, our billionaire elite now what the computer to be your girlfriend.
Unfortunately, for women like Drucker, she kinda did too.
Men still go outside, they just don't go to lame restaurants in Wicker Park. And they don't go to those restaurants precisely because they spend LESS time on the internet than women.