Where All the Men Have Gone

And how to bring them back.

In a recent New York Times article titled, “Men, Where Have You Gone? Please Come Back,” Rachel Drucker laments what she calls “a collective shift” in men, a “slow vanishing of presence.” So many single men, she writes, aren’t “sitting across from someone on a Saturday night, trying to connect.” Instead, they “have retreated from intimacy, hiding behind firewalls, filters and curated personas, dabbling and scrolling.” She adds, “We miss you.”

Ms. Drucker – a single, 54-year-old Chicagoan – hints that pornography is at least partly to blame for this state of affairs. She mentions that she herself spent years working in that field as the custodian of records for Playboy and its affiliated hardcore properties. She worked closely with marketing teams to understand “what cues tempt the average 18-to-36-year-old cis heterosexual man. What drew him in. What kept him coming back.” She learned that it wasn’t intimacy or mutuality, but “access to simulation.”

Now many men, she believes, have “quietly withdrawn from intimacy and vulnerability” into “indifference.” The sexes have moved, she observes, into an era when traditional courting has devolved into “directionless orbiting,” “men circling intimacy but never entering it… ‘seeing where it goes’ without ever going anywhere.” She even mourns the “unscripted contact” of one-night stands.

She concludes by pleading men, “You can still come back. We’re still here, those of us who are willing to cocreate something true… And we haven’t stopped hoping.”

The male retreat from the courting dance of days past is a tragedy, but so is Ms. Drucker’s obliviousness to the reasons for it. Yes, pornography is a huge factor; the ubiquitous availability of the most explicit imagery imaginable (and even unimaginable) to anyone with an internet connection is a terrible scourge in our society – and not only for boys and young men; it is having a devastating impact on girls as well, in a variety of ways.

But the broader explanation for the intimacy wasteland she is describing is more than a half century of radical feminism and its ruthless war on masculinity, femininity, and the nuclear family. She is finally noticing, but apparently not understanding, the blasted landscape left behind by the Sexual Revolution’s tornado of destruction since the 1960s and ‘70s that left old-fashioned courtship and sex roles in its self-indulgent wake.

If men have retreated from those traditional roles and social practices, it is because for decades the culture has been weaponized against men – disrespecting, devaluing, and even demonizing generations of them as “toxic.” Feminist thought leaders, with the complicity of many opportunistic male feminists, railed against the chimeras of “patriarchy” and “rape culture.” They demanded that men deconstruct their masculine nature to be more like, well, stereotypical women: vulnerable, emotional, and deferential to the opposite sex. They marginalized men as literally unnecessary while celebrating females as capable, courageous, girl-bosses who can and should do everything men can do. Anything less is seen as diminishing female capabilities and value. Meanwhile men are failing by almost every social metric, from education to the workplace.

Another factor is that the notorious and often cruel bias of family law against husbands and fathers has driven many men to see marriage as grossly inequitable and undesirable. Boys and young men have watched their fathers destroyed in family court and reduced to the indentured slavery of permanent alimony. They are now rethinking what they see as a no-win conventional lifestyle of marriage and family. Why volunteer to doom yourself, they ask themselves, to a system designed to bleed men dry of their money, health, and ambitions?

In recent years a backlash has begun swinging hard against the ravages of feminism, unfortunately driving millions of young men into the embrace of such online influencers as former kickboxer Andrew Tate. Tate flaunts a cartoonish vision of masculinity centered on flashy materialism and the violent domination and sexual exploitation of women. This backlash also includes an entire subculture called MGTOWs – Men Going Their Own Way by swearing off long-term relationships with women, whom they see as nothing more than greedy vampires who drain one husband, then trade up to a wealthier one.

To sum up, feminism promised to liberate women from what Karl Marx called the “slavery” of motherhood and marriage by pushing them into competition with men, and the Sexual Revolution granted them the freedom to indulge their sexual appetites as promiscuously as any man. The consequence has been a family-destroying disordering of society at home, in the workplace, and between the sexes. So now, women like Rachel Drucker, who worked in the porn industry and who confesses to many relationships including one-night stands, are left wondering why so many men have chosen to disengage, to guard themselves emotionally, financially, and physically behind a variety of walls.

If women want men to come back so that both can get off the sterile treadmill of dating apps and one-night stands, and resume the imperfect but genuine human dynamic of romance, it will happen only if the failed social experiments of the past are rolled back. This will require a concerted, grass-roots, long march through the institutions of the culture – from education to the news media to the entertainment industry – to undo the ruinous narratives that have brought us to this point.

We must stop smearing traditional masculinity as toxic and oppressive, and quit devaluing traditional femininity as demeaning and imprisoning. We must cease pitting the sexes against each other and reclaim a culture that honors and celebrates their complementary nature. The decades-long push to eradicate any differences between masculinity and femininity, to blur even their very definitions, has wrought nothing but misery, confusion, and resentment, and must be abandoned.

Sometimes societal progress can be made only by acknowledging we have taken a clearly destructive path and retracing our steps to where we first lost our way. It’s the only hope for men and women to – as Rachel Drucker put it with such yearning – cocreate something true.

The republication of this article is made possible by The Fred & Rheta Skelton Center for Cultural Renewal.