Apparently there’s a fifty year old woman begging in the NY Times for men to be men again: Men, Where Have You Gone? Please Come Back. Happily, I never stopped being one. I was lucky to live my life in years of relatively positive relations between the sexes in Canada (up until 1990) and the rest of my life in places where they still are. I am somewhat intrigued by the idea that men have checked out. YouTube videos document the current Tinder, promiscuity, cupidity chaos well. Rachel Drucker’s a bit late to the party. Or she’s been living the party and only waking up now, amid the empty bottles and broken promises.
Forty-something Brandon Smith (about half a generation younger than me) decided to take on Rachel’s arguments head-on.
I can still explain for the NYT why men are walking away if they’re willing to listen.
- First, I must say that an author in her 50s still longing for casual sitcom encounters like she’s in her 20s reveals a lot about why modern women are oblivious. Real life is not Sex In The City – Most men of means do not gravitate towards long term relationships with women in their grandma phase. She should already be in a happy relationship or marriage, she’s had plenty of time to figure this out.
Feminism has made women think they can engage with life on their own schedule. They can’t.
This is self-evident. Risk of infertility or miscarriage skyrockets for first child after thirty-four. The older mothers one sees, most of them had at least one child earlier. Defy biology in favour of your career at your peril.
- Men are especially wary of women with baggage. Women initiate 70% of breakups and divorces and feminist influence over family law has made divorce easier and more lucrative than ever for women. The older a woman is the more baggage she has and the less likely a man is going to want to date her seriously, let alone put an expensive ring on her finger.
Western women have been taught they need to party in their 20s, then pursue serious relationships in their 30s or 40s. Meaning, they ignore their best prospects for at least a decade. Their ideology sets them up to enter the relationship market when their marriage value is lowest.
Those statistics are frightening. Family law in the United States and Canada has made the idea of a serious relationship seem like self-harm to most men. I’ve seen dozens of women cynically crow about how they took a man for whom she never cared to the cleaners. Bragging rights. The social contract is completely broken in Fortress North America.
And Brandon is absolutely right. Attractive women have the choice of their social circles from about seventeen to twenty-five. Choose a man who loves you and will make you happy and build your life with him. When I was young, this was harder as my generation of men was trained to pick the flowers as we walked and actively discouraged from settling down. It was the women who did the harm: “Don’t even consider marriage until you’re in your mid-thirties” more than one aunt from both sides of the family admonished me.
- Men are no longer tolerating the concept of the sexual revolution. They don’t want to take any chances on women who think promiscuity is a virtue. They know that statistically, women who sleep around lack discernment, the ability to connect, self respect and mental stability. Starting a relationship with such a person will only lead to disaster. They never stay happy for long (the grass is always greener). And so, men stay home. Want to get them back? Keep your body count low.
I’m not sure about the science, but empirical observations going back millennia indicate that when women either jump off the end of the pier as amateur nymphomaniacs or as sex pros, they rarely keep their marbles. The pros are a better bet as it’s mostly motivated behaviour which can bought out by plenty or diminishes when the buyers disappear. Sexual addiction, particularly in women, is only slightly healthier than heroine addiction.
The feminists gambled that if (almost) all women are promiscuous, men will accept promiscuity in their long-term partners. They made a losing bet here. Some men just decided to eat ice cream every day and throw away the cup afterwards. Others decided that they didn’t like ice cream enough to put up with the mess it makes when it melts.
- Third-Wave Feminists spent the better part of the last 20 years telling men they are pure evil for being masculine and wanting to chase women. So, men did what you asked of them – They stopped chasing you. They found other more interesting endeavors like their careers and their hobbies. If you want men to come back, perhaps you should APOLOGIZE for all those years of slander.
Apologies are not necessary. Excuses are just words. More intriguing behaviour and a better attitude are certainly requisite.
More interesting endavours? Speak for yourself, Brandon. There are few situations more stimulating than the company of an intelligent and attractive woman who is interested in that man. As the poets wrote last century:
The purring of the invisible antennae Is both stimulating and delightful.
and in 16th century France:
Quand à longs traits je bois l’amoureuse étincelle Qui sort de tes beaux yeux, les miens sont éblouis : D’esprit ni de raison, troublé, je ne jouis, Et comme ivre d’amour, tout le corps me chancelle.
and before the birth of our Lord and Saviour:
dulce ridentem, misero quod omnis eripit sensus mihi: nam simul te, Lesbia, aspexi, nihil est super mi vocis in ore;
Marvellous women are sublime. Slatterns are not.
- Modern women have greatly overestimated the usefulness of sex as a bartering tool for securing a man. If you want a man to stick around you’re going to have to show him love and respect, not just what’s inside your pants.
Well said. For men, the first two weeks without sex are difficult. After that it’s just habit. Curiously for women, sexual tension builds over time becoming worse over the long haul. Once young men decide they don’t need women and get used to it – well you have the situation today.
Plus every woman can provide sex. So to hold sex over a man he has to be incapable of finding sex elsewhere. Sex has been everywhere for at least thirty years.
- Men are far more conditioned to be alone than women are. Women are communal creatures. They rely on constant interactions, affirmations and group inclusion. Social media might fill the void for a while but it can’t give them what they really want – Intimate personal attention 24/7. Only a partner and children can give you that. In a battle of who can endure loneliness longer, men will win, so don’t make it into a battle.
Not sure I follow Brandon’s argument here. Both men and women are driven to reproduce (happily enough for the human race). While more men certainly can live happier lives as long wolves. neither men nor women as a group would be happier in solitude. Humans are fundamentally social animals (more pack animals like wolves than herd animals like cariboo though we show characteristics of both).
- I’ll tell you the biggest open secret that modern women still don’t understand – They claim that men are afraid of approaching them. They say that men today are “weak” and that they can’t handle the new era of the “boss babe”. They argue that men need to abandon their traditional masculine roles and act more feminine; this will make it easier for everyone to get along.
These are common jabs at the male ego designed to make men feel ashamed for distancing themselves from feminists. In reality, men value one thing above all else: Peace. If you can’t offer peace, then no man with any sense of self worth has a use for you. Feminists offer the opposite of peace, and so they have no value.
Not every man values peace as highly as Brandon Smith. On the other hand, the hyper bitchy standard Canadian female stance is about as appealing as laundry detergent for dinner. Canadian women drop their voices at the end of sentences, the men lift their voices at the end of the sentences. This is literal biological role reversal. Any man who wants to date men can just do it, especially in Canada. The gay community in Toronto is a whole lot more welcoming than T.O’s ubiquitous covens of careerist women.
Most men have no desire to take on feminine roles. If women are waiting for masculine men who will give wear aprons, they will be waiting a long time at an empty station. Still a more balanced approach is common among modern homes. For some reason, my partner loves construction type projects. She does most of these (I’ll help her) while I like to read poetry, fix technology and bikes. We both cook and we both do dishes.
The weird part of the boss bitch movement is that once these women emasculate their partners, they go out and seek strong masculine types to scratch their sexual urges. Working at 180˚ to biology is rarely a winning hand.
- Feminism, like all Marxist movements, is obsessed with power. Everything they do is driven by a desire for power and control; not just over their own lives but over the world around them. Modern women say they want the same power as men, but they need to accept that no matter how much the scales are tipped in their favor through laws, government subsidies, easy college grants, DEI hiring and unfair divorce, they will never be like men.
Brandon is wrong here. Women can be like men. Women like that become Margaret Thatcher, Hillary Clinton or Madeleine Albright. If they were men, nobody would like them either. Cruelty combined with a psychopathic desire for power is unattractive even in men. We shouldn’t let men get away with this kind of behaviour either. Many men like this die young.
What is most attractive in men is benevolent nobility and graceful generosity. The wise king, the kind prince.
The author suggests that men no longer shape the world because they have abandoned the current relationship dynamic. This is foolish. Men continue to shape everything around you. Every utility, every necessity, every government, nearly every company, your safety and security, your ability to be free, it’s all reliant on men. You have no power and you never will.
Two years ago I would probably have disagreed with Mr. Smith. The last two years have shown that men and “the world’s leading democracies” are quite capable of putting international relations and trade back to a caveman level. Just this week, a two-time Dutch Prime Minister absurdly curried the favour of “Europe’s Daddy” in the person of President D.J. Trump. All the money in the US has been going into the military for the last twenty years. Now all the money in Europe is going into the military. War appears to have returned for the next couple of decades, if we survive its radioactive depredations.
Israel’s unprovoked strikes on Syria, Lebanon and now Iran over the last five years have made it clear that might makes right. No one in power in the West even attempted to put the brakes on Israel war crimes. On a similar note, the West failed to make a deal with Russia in 2021 when a deal was easily to be had. Through countless mouthpieces (mostly British), Western leaders have demanded that “matters be settled on the battlefield”. Well at least until about six months ago when they started to conclusively lose the war for Ukraine.
This is not a woman’s world and we’re going back to a world where to survive a woman needs a powerful and even dangerous man at her side. It’s not a world, I’d choose. Men are dangerous, we are. Encouraging us to live as battle-hardened warriors will make everyone’s life more precarious.
Men should take a lot of blame for the culture we built where money and power are prized above all and the rich get a pass for bad behaviour. Value our teachers, our firemen, front-line emergency doctors (not just fat-cat specialists), builders. This idea that only businessmen and celebrities are valuable and that hard-working men but without extremely high net worth are unworthy renders women mad and a society non-functional.
But women should look hard at their own self-defeating behaviour. Ordinary women chronically chase the top percent of men (women grade men mostly on two attributes: net worth and height). Dumpy Cinderella is not a winning proposition. Getting to touch the magic wand in the dark doesn’t mean you’ll see the light of day in the company of “your catch”. Ladies, stop chasing the top ten percent of men and target the ordinary, good men who keep the lights on and the children safe.
If Western women had not so convincingly emasculated their men over the last forty years, there would be more strong men to stand up to the robber brutes like Donald Trump and Benjamin Mileikowsky and demand peace and prosperity. By emasculating men, women have made themselves and all of us less safe.