The YouTube influencer SheRa Seven’s advice for young women is as sharp as the wings of her black eyeliner. To single ladies, she offers the following on sex: “The longer you hold off, the more that he will like you.” To married ones: “Don’t give it up every time he wants it. Make him wait, make him work for it still. Gotta make him chase!”

This chaste strategy, promoted by straight-talking female influencers with lush lips and eyelash extensions, is everywhere at the moment, proliferating under TikTok hashtags such as #feminineenergy and #lawofattraction. …

On this front, The Rules differs very little from the advice of contemporary dating influencers—or indeed the archaic courtship norms that ruled before the sexual revolution.

[May I suggest that the “archaic” norms turned out to be very well founded in both biology and psychology, and therefore promoted social stability. What has the sexual revolution produced? Certainly freer access to physical pleasure, but at what cost? The destruction of families, the misery of utilitarian approaches to human contact — a misery borne largely by women — and lost generations of both men and women completely lost about how to interact with each other and to channel their impulses into the most positive long-term outcomes. Those norms turned out to be timeless rather than archaic, but we talked ourselves into abandoning them because we thought we could change reality simply through wishcasting. — Ed]