I liked something in the New York Times that everyone else hated.

And I felt sympathy for a Times protagonist. End times are nigh.

I usually try to avoid the New York Times’ Modern Love section if only out of a misplaced sense of self-regard. I like to think (whether it’s true or not) that I am above reading columns with titles such as, ‘What Shamu Taught Me About a Happy Marriage,’ ‘Oh No, They Think My Father Is My Husband,’ and ‘When Love Means Being Selfish (I knew I had to hold onto what I needed — even if that meant using a lawyer to get custody of a dog).’ While I sometimes read the New York Times, I recoil at the idea of being a ‘New York Times reader,’ although, if we’re being honest, that is my demographic and social milieu.

A recent Modern Love column, ‘Men, Where Have You Gone? Please Come Back,’ ended up in Twitter’s crosshairs and inspired enough ridicule and ire to make me curious whether it was as bad and lacking in self-awareness as people made it out to be.

I have a hobby where I file away in my memory the most cringe-inducing, detached-from-reality, and off-base specimens of Times journalism and opinion-having I can find. (I’m probably taking up brain storage space that should be allocated to joyful recollections of my children or something like that but whatever.) And so, anticipating another addition to my ‘collection’ of New York Times horrors, I clicked on the Modern Love column but then ended up being surprised and finding the piece poignant and affecting.

In the column, Rachel Drucker, a divorced woman in her 50s, claims to have anticipated how reductive and detached male sexual desire could become via time spent working in the pornography industry:

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 stimulation — clean, fast and frictionless.

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.

What struck me most wasn’t the extremity of the content; it was the emotional vacancy behind it. The drift. The way many men had quietly withdrawn from intimacy and vulnerability. Not with violence or resistance, but with indifference.

Drucker draws a line between the emotional vacancy of male sexual desire that porn made her attuned to and the current social withdrawal of men from women:

May 17. A warm Saturday night in Wicker Park, a vibrant stretch of Chicago where seven restaurants crowd a single block.

Troy and I were having dinner at Mama Delia, one of the quieter spots. The sidewalk patio held five tables: three two-tops, including ours, and a pair pulled together for a group of eight women. At those tables, Troy was the only man.

The scene was beautiful — low lights, shared plates, shoulders angled in. The kind of evening people wait for all winter. 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.

She says:

[The men] weren’t sitting across from someone on a Saturday night, trying to connect. They were scrolling. Dabbling. Disappearing behind firewalls, filters and curated personas. And while they disappeared, women continued to gather. To tend. To notice who wasn’t arriving — and to show up anyway.

At this point Drucker has provided all the ammunition that’s required for a pile on: Hasn’t there been a concerted cultural and ideological project pathologizing masculinity that has gone into overdrive over the past decade? Isn’t characterizing male interest and intent via pornography particularly ungenerous? If our ‘social economy’ purposefully offers men fewer ways to win, wouldn’t you expect men to show up less? Doesn’t it seem predictable that men would tend to avoid social spaces increasingly turned over to narcissistic social performances that intentionally exclude them? (And not to sound too moralizing but) wasn’t the concern about pornography always that it was corrosive in this particular way, that it provides men cheap sexual satisfaction without the requirement that they participate in a richer set of social interactions and obligations? (And ironically, by working in the porn industry wasn’t Drucker complicit in the project the ends of which she is now bemoaning?) You could make all sorts of criticisms like this and you wouldn’t be wrong, exactly.

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One of the great ironies of the internet is that it held a promise of freedom and connection but resulted in many people leading smaller, more restricted lives. (Pair that with midwit liberatory fantasizing and you have a recipe for social disaster.) I recently met up with an old friend who is a religiously observant Christian and (being generally ignorant of religious life myself) was struck by how important his church was to him, how it situated him in a community of people who supported each other in living life in a certain way. Being a member of a church (or a synagogue) was socially and culturally normative 25 years ago, it’s something most people used to do, but like many institutions, participation has fallen off precipitously. What’s filled that space besides the internet?

I’ll skip ahead. There’s no need to rehash the exhaustive discourse on how social institutions have been hollowed out other than to say that in 2025 it now seems remarkable that the average person used to have a family, a church, and an immediate community in which they were enmeshed, and along with many of the big things (marrying, having children, attending church) becoming less of a given, there are all sorts of smaller social life spaces that the doors are being shut to and lights turned off for, including perhaps dating.

Drucker is 54 and in about a decade, if not sooner, will be entering a phase of life which is more about reflection and looking back than new possibility. Her hopes of having the opportunity to meet someone, hit it off, and see where it goes would be a reasonable ask in the ‘before times’ prior to technology, sociopathy, and false liberatory promises poisoning social life and making basic human connections increasingly challenging. (I remember a couple years ago a junior female colleague at least a decade younger than me asking incredulously, after hearing about someone’s situationship, ‘Why is it so hard for people to date? Is it too much to ask to go out to dinner with the person you’re having sex with??’)

Drucker recounts interest she had in a man on a dating app:

I recently experienced a flicker of possibility. With James. We met on Raya, the dating app. There was something mutual from the start — wordplay, emotional precision, a tone that felt attuned. It was brief, but it caught light. I remember saying to him, “Even fleeting connections matter, when they’re mutual and lit from the inside.” I meant it.

There was just enough spark to wonder what might unfold. Enough curiosity to imagine a doorway. But he didn’t step through it. Not with a plan. Not with presence. He hovered — flirting, retreating, offering warmth but no direction.

Sexual tension and a spark aren’t reason enough to sit still and hope there’s substance behind the shimmer. So I named what I felt. I texted him clearly, with care, not simply to declare attraction but to extend a real invitation to explore what was possible. I didn’t chase. I invited, leaving the door open. If he ever wanted to cross the threshold — not just to take, but to meet — I was willing. I wanted. I still do.

He never replied. He still follows my Instagram stories — one of those small gestures of passive engagement that so many of us now mistake for closeness. It looks like interest. It feels like silence.

There are thousands of Jameses. I have known dozens. The arc varies, but the undertow is familiar.

Drucker also expresses some nostalgia for a time when men were more possessive of women and possessing a women signaled social status:

I remember when part of heterosexual male culture involved showing up with a woman to signal something — status, success, desirability. Women were once signifiers of value, even to other men. It wasn’t always healthy, but it meant that men had to show up and put in some effort.

That dynamic has quietly collapsed. We have moved into an era where many men no longer seek women to impress other men or to connect across difference. They perform elsewhere. Alone. They’ve filtered us out.

Drucker’s ambivalence is an interesting counterpoint to a 2017 Modern Love piece (republished in 2024) by a different author entitled, ‘My Body Doesn’t Belong to You,' that rejects any upside to men valuing women in this way and is described editorially by the Times as, ‘powerful testimony about the damaging effects of men’s possessiveness over women’s bodies.’ 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 had been made impossible by male desire:

A couple of years ago, in the warmth of summer, I stood naked on a dock, and my body was my body. My two girlfriends were standing naked beside me, and their bodies were their bodies. Our breasts were our breasts. Our clothes were our clothes that we had chosen to wear and chosen to take off, leaving them in warm heaps on the chilled wood next to the damp footprints, which were also ours.

When we jumped into the water, we chose to jump in. The weeds brushed against our bodies obliviously, encircling our fingers and toes and hips with no knowledge of or care about which was which.

We splashed water with our fists and yelled, but if we were afraid, it was only of fish. That thought made us laugh. We saluted the dark, starry, silent sky, and it did not so much as whistle or wink back.

Drucker’s essay ends poignantly with her waiting alone and hoping that someone is going to show up:

Come back. Not with flowers or fireworks, but with willingness. With your whole, beautiful, imperfect heart.

We’re still here. And we haven’t stopped hoping.

As for me, I’ll keep showing up. Not because I’m waiting. Because I know what it feels like when someone finally arrives.

The essay’s ending made me think back to the discourse between the sexes that dominated in the 90s when I was growing up that at least presumed it was possible to arrive at terms that could meet both men’s and women’s needs. Those negotiations don’t really exist now and it’s unclear who Drucker is speaking to: men have mostly walked away, the institutions (the media, academia, activist groups) don’t have the power to manufacture cultural consensus even on matters between the sexes, and rather than setting terms for rapprochement, men and women are finding ways to reduce their needs for each other. Women are independent financially and have all sorts of para-social activities to while away the time if men aren’t around. And adept men can readily access sex without much social effort or interaction while virtual substitutes are made available to the less desirable men who get shut out. Of course the men and women who are the most motivated and purposeful, who are resistant to false liberatory promises, and who understand that merging their lives with a partner opens rather than forecloses possibility are still likely to build successful relationships in spite of the bad incentives. But many others who have some slight disadvantage, who need help from supportive cultural and social norms, won’t. And so if we’re closing down the simple, paint-by-numbers, previously-agreed-upon, reliable social pathways for meeting someone (flirt at a bar or at work, get a number, go on a date, hit it off, etc.) what will be offered instead? New technological and therapeutic horrors? Time-wasting perpetual low-grade online sociopathy? It’s really not clear to me what we’re doing here or how what we’re doing can be justified. People seeking companionship deserve some rules to make things a little more navigable and they also deserve a little more dignity and compassion than they’re getting (even if they’re writing AI-optimized essays for the Modern Love section that leave a plastic aftertaste). The whole thing feels bad man.