Remember the 1970s slogan, "A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle"? That usually gets attributed to Gloria Steinem, but Steinem herself attributed it to Irina Dunn, who claimed to have written it first on a bathroom wall. It got hailed as an ode to female empowerment, but it also foreshadowed decades of popular-culture and political marginalization of men in relationships, also popularized by the late Erica Jong's 'zipless f***' fantasy in her 1973 novel Fear of Flying.
That itself metastasized into a hook-up culture that gave men every excuse to treat women as tools for self-gratification rather than potential partners in relationships. Feminists insisted that this provided equality with men, while simultaneously painting even consensual sex as a patriarchal exercise. Practically every form of traditional male-originated courtship became problematic, and ... men noticed.
Now women are noticing too, although perhaps still refusing to acknowledge their part in creating a social nightmare. Over the weekend, New York Times essayist Rachel Drucker lamented her discovery that the bicycles don't need the fish, either.
The NYT or Drucker had the gall to headline this essay, "Men, Where Have You Gone? Please Come Back," as if their disappearance from the dating scene was a mystery:
They 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.
I’m 54. I’ve been dating since the mid-80s, been married, been a mother, gotten divorced, had many relationships long and short. 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.
Gee, I wonder why that might be? Why might men in progressive-run environments avoid the risks erected by women in dating and sexual encounters? One might think that Drucker would explore some introspection over the decades of hostility toward men and courtship, but ... one would be wrong. There is not a syllable of introspection offered in this essay, not even an acknowledgment that men might even have an irrationally poor reaction to the hostility generated toward them by Woke Inc and the left-wing popular culture in Chicago and elsewhere.
Amusingly, Drucker instead asks men to look harder for their own flaws while asking them to engage:
You’ve retreated — not into malice, but into something softer and harder all at once: Avoidance. Exhaustion. Disrepair.
Maybe no one taught you how to stay. Maybe you tried once, and it hurt. Maybe the world told you your role was to provide, to perform, to protect — and never to feel.
"The world" does a lot of heavy lifting here. The progressive world has tried very hard to teach men, especially heterosexual men, that they are not just useless but a malevolent entity. This began -- as most social ills do of late -- in Academia more than two decades ago as part of the effort to deconstruct the patriarchy, where any potential approach for dating and socialization was treated like a potential assault. Universities and colleges held kangaroo courts over the most mild of social misunderstandings, stripping men of due process rights and ensuring that the process of dating ran a good risk of ruining the rest of their lives. The Obama administration accelerated that with its Dear Colleague letter to schools, warning that any school that did not adopt the Salem Witch Trial approach to complaints of sexual harassment would lose access to federal education funding.
Oddly, Drucker never mentions anything about how the "world" educated men in that fashion, and not just young men in schools. Progressives insisted on prioritizing sensitivity over common sense across a wide spectrum of settings, not just higher education, and succeeded at it in areas they control. The progressive world "taught" men that they would assume all of the risk in sexual relationships, especially in the one-night stands that Drucker says she misses, and that those risks would be absolutely ruinous.
With her progressive elite having set those incentives, Drucker finds herself shocked, shocked that men respond to them rationally. And what's more amazing is that Drucker complains about the impact that pornography has had on men, while noting that she worked in the industry and deliberately calculated the product to produce the responses she now laments:
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.
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.
I almost have no words here. Drucker not only ignores the manner in which progressive culture has created toxic incentives for men in courtship, she doesn't exhibit even a slight amount of acknowledgment for her own personal role in offering men safer alternatives for physical release, and then acculturating and grooming them to opt for those alternatives that she now laments.
And now, rather than offer some introspection into why men have filtered out women in these progressive circles, she begs men to "please come back." Drucker writes that she wants men to say that they "don't know how to do this perfectly, but I want to try." Why? Have the risks abated even a little, and have any of the incentives changed? Are these progressive circles even an iota less hostile to masculinity?
The answer to "Men, where have you gone?" is exactly where you sent them -- to the margins. And now that men in those progressive societies have decided that the bicycle doesn't need the fish either, the piscine set seems utterly unable to muster any introspection at all who taught whom, and what was truly learned.
Addendum: I suspect this is much more of a blue-zone issue than an overall problem in mainstream America. I'll discuss this tomorrow with Christian Toto in our next Off the Beaten Path episode.
