To insist that any determined individual can overcome loneliness if she tries hard enough is to ignore the social conditions that make loneliness so common, Lutkin writes. In her case, there were strong economic reasons that she focussed on work rather than on love for many years; she also pursued people who didn’t return her affections. And some significant part of her loneliness came not from being single but from living in a world that regards a romantic partner as the sine qua non of happy adulthood. Ironically, she suggests, celebrating single women as avatars of modern female empowerment has made things harder, not easier, for lonely women, by encouraging the view that their unhappiness is of their own making—the price they pay for putting their careers first, or being too choosy. She notes that the plight of lonely, sexless men tends to inspire more public concern and compassion than that of women. The term “incel” was invented by a woman hoping to commiserate with other unhappily celibate women, but it didn’t get much traction until it was appropriated by men and became a byword for sexual rage. This, Lutkin believes, reflects a conservative conviction that men have a right to sex.

Is this true? A less contentious explanation for the greater attention paid to male sexual inactivity might be that it has risen more dramatically among young men than among young women in recent years. In a study released in 2020, nearly one in three men between the ages of eighteen and twenty-four reported no sexual activity in the past year. What’s more, young male sexlessness, unlike the female variety, correlates with unemployment and low income. Men’s greater tendency to violence also probably creates greater public awareness. (Female incels, however grumpy they get, do not generally express their dissatisfaction by shooting up malls.) Nevertheless, Lutkin is surely right that women’s authority over their sexual and romantic fates is not as complete as the popular imagination would have it. Asked to explain why one out of four single American women hasn’t had a sex partner for two or more years (and more than one in ten haven’t had a sex partner for five or more years), researchers have cited women’s aversion to the “roughness” that has become a standard feature of contemporary, porn-inflected sex. In one recent study, around twenty-one per cent of female respondents reported that they had been choked during sex with men; around thirty-two per cent had experienced a man ejaculating on their faces; and thirty-four per cent had experienced “aggressive fellatio.” If, as Stephanie Coontz suggests, women feel freer these days to decline such encounters, that is of course a welcome development, but it’s hard to construe the liberty of choosing between celibacy and sexual strangulation as a feminist triumph.