Our sons deserve to dress like men



Our sons are born into a world of moral and aesthetic chaos. There are no rules, no expectations, no limits.

The barriers that frame our traditionally fixed forms are broken down in front of our very eyes. Any sense of hierarchy is eviscerated. The definitions of man and woman are mutilated. Sacred and profane are turned in a blender together. Culture is flattened, and American aesthetics are forgotten.

Your grandfather learned how to dress from his father, and your father from his father. What are you teaching your son?

And in this perilous state, there are men who claim that clothes do not matter.

Cultural slop

These men do not understand the harsh reality that if they do not teach their sons how to dress, their sons will be swallowed up by the cultural slop of our era. They claim that clothes aren’t important and that men don’t need to care about how they dress. They couldn’t be more wrong.

It’s not only that this idea is wrong. It’s dangerous. It’s giving up and surrendering your son to the tides of mass-culture 2024. It’s this attitude that allows the creeping hands of culture-less androgyny to grasp the throat and squeeze.

This androgyny is a primary thrust of our time. A confusing of man and woman. Telling children that boys can be girls and girls can be boys. It’s in the language; it’s in the messaging; it’s in the clothes. If you do not resist aesthetically, you will be eaten alive. If you do not swim, you will float down the river like a dead log. To oppose the culture of 2024, it’s not enough to talk about it. You must embody it aesthetically. If you do, the impact is powerful.

Man or beast?

Why do we wear clothes? Because we are not beasts. We were exiled from the Garden many years ago, and since then, we have covered ourselves. Today, we have civilization. Since we do not walk around nude, our clothes reflect the divine and eternal forms of man and woman.

Deuteronomy 22:5 should come to mind. There is a reason why God tells us that men should not wear women’s clothes and women should not wear men’s clothes. Concerns about men and women wearing appropriate clothing are as deep in our civilizational psyche as practically any other concept.

Of course, clothes are not only about making a distinction between man and woman. Clothes are also about culture and values. When we look at someone, we see his clothes immediately. You cannot meet people and ignore their clothes. They scream out at you. You will always remember something about what someone wears. It’s not only the colors or the fabric. You communicate with your clothing. Clothes tell the world who you are, where you are from, and even what you believe — whether you like it or not. Clothes are an acute aesthetic manifestation and representation of both culture and sex.

How much “gender confusion” was there when women wore dresses and skirts regularly and men wore ties and jackets every week? Very little. It’s not that those things were the only things preventing the tragic chaos and confusion we see today, but those things were part of the broader aesthetic structure that kept order. We live in the world, not only in our minds. When men dressed like men, it kept them strong men. When women dressed like women, it kept them beautiful women.

Derelict

We read endlessly about the dire state of young men these days. After reading, do you think there is no connection between the nihilistic misery of young men and the fact that a great majority of them look like street urchins?

Do you think there is no connection between the depression and social isolation of the boys who wear foolish clothes and those clothes that only remind themselves of how foolish they are? Of course there is a connection. It is clear as day. Young men are being beaten down by their clothes, and no one will help.

Claiming that clothes don’t matter and thoughtlessly turning your son over to the mode du jour is surrendering to madness, giving up the fight, abdicating responsibility. It’s a sign of ignorance and unawareness.

A traditional value

It’s our job as fathers to teach our sons how to dress like men and with a sense of dignity. No one else is going to do it for us. It’s our responsibility. Our boys look up to us. We are their first teachers. This is not a new value. This is a traditional value. Your grandfather learned how to dress from his father and your father from his father. What are you teaching your son? That you don’t care? Or how to dress like a man of the West?

If you do not teach your son how to dress, the culture will do it for you. And this culture will not teach him to dress like a man. It will teach him to dress like a slob. It will teach him to dress in a way that depresses him. Our current culture will not try to elevate him. It does not want him to be strong and confident. Counting on the current culture to teach our sons how to dress is equivalent to turning your son loose on the internet all day, every day. You would never do that, would you?

Teaching our sons aesthetic values in personal dress is an important part of teaching them how to be men. This value has been terribly neglected in recent decades, and we are tragically living with the consequences. It is chaos, confusion, misery, and an ugly world. Our sons deserve better. Our sons deserve to dress like men.

Today's most urgent question: What is a man?



In my last piece, I reflected on the state of the NFL’s relationship with the rise of data analytics and how it’s been contributing to the progress of the transhumanist agenda.

It made me ponder more deeply the questions we as human beings are confronted with as we hurtle headfirst into a more and more technology-dependent society.

The things that gave men meaning in their lives have all but disappeared. And how do the masculinity gurus of conservatism address this? They cope.

As we become more dependent on technology to complete the tasks that human beings have always performed, we’ve come to the point where we must ask ourselves … what exactly are we?

Division of labor

My mind naturally began to think about the division of labor within traditional family households.

A wife and mother would traditionally be a homemaker and nurturer of the children. A husband and father would traditionally be the one who would labor out in the world and bring home the income and provisions.

This gender-oriented division of labor came into being almost entirely out of necessity. Sure, maybe social ideologies sprang up over time about gender roles that may or may not have been healthy. But fundamentally, a husband and wife performed the roles they did because a man can do things only a man can do and a woman can do things only a woman can do.

But now, we live in a different world, a very affluent, technology-dependent world. Everything is taken care of for us. Machines do almost all the essential work for us, and it’s only a matter of time until they do the entirety of it.

The American economy isn’t a manufacturing one any more. When most Americans go to “work,” it is not to labor but to provide some kind of service, which both men and women can do. And compared to the rest of the world, we make a lot of money performing these services.

Idle hands

It’s given us Americans security and time. And with security and time, we’ve gotten bored. So bored that we make up new problems for ourselves just to give us an artificial sense of insecurity. People are so free from their traditional gender roles (and therefore actual problems) that they now identify as new genders.

That conservative commentator Matt Walsh was able to produce an entire documentary dedicated to answering the question “What Is a Woman?” is a clear sign of how out of hand the situation has gotten. Everyone had a big, hearty laugh as they watched some blue-haired child psychologists squirm and struggle to define what an adult female human being is in exact terms.

But the problem is real, and it’s much deeper than a predatory pharmaceutical industry pushing kids and adults into gender-affirming surgery.

The necessary question

To fully appreciate the scope of the question “What is a woman?” we must ask the necessary (and more urgent) follow-up question: What is a man?

Seriously, what is a man in the 21st century … and beyond? It’s the most important question that absolutely no one is thinking about.

Think about what I’ve already said within this one article. We live in a time when all traditional roles have been stripped from both genders due to affluence, which is due to the development of automated technology.

And because we don’t make anything any more, what do we offer as an economy instead? Health care, education, retail, and entertainment.

Or in other words – nurturing, child-rearing, homemaking, and sex.

Monetizing the feminine

Any role that’s ever been traditionally feminine has been taken out of the households and plugged straight into the economy. In his book "The New Politics of Sex," political theorist Dr. Stephen Baskerville cites G.K. Chesterton on the matter:

If people cannot mind their own business, it cannot possibly be made economical to pay them to mind each other’s business; and still less to mind each other’s babies. ... The whole really rests on a plutocratic illusion of an infinite supply of servants. When we offer any other system as a "career for women," we are really proposing that an infinite number of them should become servants, of a plutocratic or bureaucratic sort. Ultimately, we are arguing that a woman should not be a mother to her own baby, but a nursemaid to somebody else’s baby. But it will not work, even on paper. We cannot all live by taking in each other’s washing, especially in the form of pinafores.

Motherly instincts have merely been bureaucratized, resulting in every woman either being cooped up in an office doing meaningless paperwork or cooped up in a shoebox apartment making OnlyFans content. Or both.

No market for manhood

Meanwhile, masculine roles got absolutely and systematically shafted by modernity.

Wanna get married to the woman of your dreams and raise a family? Sorry, the no-fault divorce and state welfare machineries have all but made real, long-lasting marriage an unappealing artifact of history.

Wanna take masculine pride in your occupation or the money you make? Good luck. America hasn't been a manufacturing economy in decades. All productive jobs involving real labor have been outsourced to China, automation, or H-1B immigrants.

Any man who currently has a “masculine” job such as farmer, truck driver, construction worker, or oil rigger will be replaced by a robot running the latest ChatGPT woke programming within the next 25 years.

That’s where we're at as men, and that's where we're going. We've been systematically disenfranchised. We've lost the means to exhibit patriarchal authority over the family unit due to the failure of marriage policy, and all opportunities to pursue productive labor and upward mobility are quickly dwindling due to automation.

The things that gave men meaning in their lives have all but disappeared.

Plato's man cave

And how do the masculinity gurus of conservatism address this?

They cope. They preach “primitivism” as the escape hatch from modernity. Go hunt. Go chop wood. Drink whiskey. Eat beef.

Even Matt Walsh gives his diagnosis on how to be a man: Don’t take any sick days from work.

Yeah, Stacey is girlbossing as she runs up racks with her nursing job and OnlyFans side hustle with $500K saved up in the bank while you're busy telling young, impressionable boys to man up and stay committed to an office job that will have him replaced within a decade, all from the comfort of your man-cave studio.

There is no “manning up” in 2024 and beyond. Wake up. The system has all but wiped out everything that once allowed men to find meaning in their lives.

So we need to tackle the question seriously and sincerely.

What is a man?

Should women date gamers? Should gamers watch 'Titanic'?



A couple of weeks ago, Liz Wheeler went viral on X for a post that listed men’s least attractive hobbies according to women.

While Wheeler (and now the community note) clarified that the statistics presented were satirical, it still managed to stir up quite a bit of controversy. The top hobby on the imaginary “most hated” list was video games.

What if regularly spending six consecutive hours playing video games isn’t bad because it’s unattractive but because it’s actually unhealthy?

Predictable gender war crossfire ensued. Men hissed back:

“Women like you assume your company is more interesting and valuable than a good video game. You are incorrect.”

“Women really do hate when men are happy doing something that isn’t centered around them.”

“Well, we're not going to sit around and watch the Titanic for the tenth time.”

On one hand, it is understandable to feel defensive when you perceive that something you personally enjoy or take pride in is generalized and belittled. This is the essence of stereotyping, and no one has the stomach for it any more. On the other, is the response proportional to the perceived offense, which was simply an expression of preference?

The internet has become a battleground for gendered infighting, and the constant bickering has done nothing but send us farther into our respective corners. We all want to generalize but not be generalized. Meme warfare offends this sensibility. It’s not for the faint of heart.

But — and hear me out — stereotypes exist for a reason. What if regularly spending six consecutive hours playing video games isn’t bad because it’s unattractive but because it’s actually unhealthy? In other words, what if it’s unattractive to women because it’s bad for men, not bad for men because it’s unattractive to women?

There's growing evidence to suggest that gaming can be just as addictive as gambling, leading to withdrawal from and loss of interest in social life and problems at school and work.

According to recent study on what's been termed internet gaming disorder:

Current prevalence estimates of IGD vary widely (2–15%). ... Prevalence may be underestimated due to low response (surveys take time away from gaming) and underreporting (a criterion of IGD is hiding one's extent of internet gaming). Yet, even by conservative estimates, with 318 million people in the US playing digital games, at least 5 million (probably many more) meet criteria for IGD, experiencing personal, social, and academic difficulties.

Perhaps women’s intuition isn’t as shallow as some have made it seem. Perhaps hard-core gaming, as the study suggests, indicates a deeper problem that impedes long-term social success in life. It’s too easy to dismiss Wheeler and the women who agree with her as nagging busybodies who just don’t like it when men “have fun.” Maybe some of them are. But maybe, deep down, some of these guys don’t like their reflection. Accountability is a bitter pill. Distraction is easier.

That said, on the particular level, does it really matter if a guy is a gamer as long as he isn’t hopelessly addicted and antisocial about it? If a gamer finds a woman and they fall madly in love, is he still “unattractive”? Certainly not to his sweetheart. And conversely, if you’re a woman who finds gaming unattractive, don’t date a gamer. It really is that simple. Who cares?

As one commenter said, “Attraction is subjective; hobbies don’t define someone’s worth or attractiveness. Crazy thought: Maybe we let people enjoy what they love without reducing their value based on personal preferences for entertainment.” Well said.

Meet the mothers defying America's birth dearth



In the midst of a historic "birth dearth," why do some 5% of American women choose to defy the demographic norm by bearing five or more children?

Catherine Ruth Pakaluk’s recent book, "Hannah’s Children: The Women Quietly Defying the Birth Dearth," is a compelling portrait of these overlooked but fascinating mothers, women who, like the biblical Hannah, see their children as their purpose, their contribution, and their greatest blessing.

"After three it gets easier because your older kids organically start to help, and you get better at what you’re doing. That’s a message few people hear. Five kids aren't five times harder than one."

Pakaluk is an associate professor of social research and economic thought at Catholic University and came onto "Girlboss, Interrupted" this week to talk about her (literally) vital work.

Herself the mother of eight, Pakaluk traveled across the United States and interviewed 55 college-educated women who were raising five or more children. Through open-ended questions, she sought to understand who these women are, why and when they chose to have a large family, and what this choice means for them, their families, and the nation.

In this exclusive interview for Align, Pakaluk elaborates on the challenges declining birth rates pose to society and what can or should be done to help.

Align: Why did you write this book? What do you hope that your work will do to add to or change the conversation around motherhood in America?

Catherine Ruth Pakaluk: Super low birth rates mean a future of economic stagnation — as the supply of workers and ideas slows down, political instability, as government revenues shrink, fraying social ties, as people grow up with fewer siblings and extended family. All these worries are coming to the surface in the national dialogue — and everyone wants to know: What will it take to reverse the trend? Can we incentivize women and families to have more babies?

But the conversation has totally overlooked the most important point of all: If people want children, why do they want them? What makes children and motherhood valuable? Are children worth wanting for their own sakes and not only as they fit into adult needs?

I wrote this book to put the question of the desirability of children front and center. We will not reverse the trend of low birth rates until we face that question. So I hoped my work would move us to talk more about the value of motherhood.

Align: Do you think that family life has been intentionally devalued? Cui bono?

CRP: Hard question. Of course, all kinds of things get devalued unintentionally when the comparison set changes. How valuable is this "compared to what"? Shiny new things come along. Apple watches devalued analog watches. The contraceptive revolution — the pill (in 1960) with legal abortion as backup — initiated the largest shift of mothers into the non-domestic workforce in history. I don’t think people thought of reproductive control as devaluing family life — but it fundamentally changed the choice set.

Before the pill, the alternative to having children would have been a lot of abstinence or forgoing marriage. After the pill, alternatives to having children included marriage, and — if you wanted it — more education and a job. All without a life of abstinence.

The pill changed the "compared to what" for family life, and many women, then and now, want some of that new "comparison" option. To the extent that higher education and jobs became viable for women — to that extent family life was "devalued." All of this can be true without any intentional plan to devalue motherhood.

We know that some technologies can be individually rational, that is, any single person feels better off using it — but as a group it puts the whole in a worse place. We’re starting to wonder if smartphones are like this — none of us wants to give one up personally, but overall we’re more anxious, depressed, and socially mixed up. Our kids may be suffering most of all. That’s a collective action problem. Looking back, the pill may be something like that — a rational choice for any one woman, but a bad deal when we’re all in. The pill initiated a shift to where a life dedicated to raising children no longer looks as valuable.

Separately, I do think powerful evil forces — principalities and powers — have worked to devalue human life in general, because God loves human life. These forces employ unsound economic theories and play on irrational fears that there won’t be enough stuff to go around. This is a longer story, but it reaches back at least two hundred years and includes Marxism, Darwinism, eugenics, Planned Parenthood, and the population bomb rhetoric and global policies. Now, any devaluation of human life per se will cash out as an attack on family life, since the family is the cradle of humanity.

Courtesy Regnery Gateway

Align: Why did you choose to focus on college-educated women?

CRP: There is a powerful correlation between higher women's education and lower birth rates, observed across countries and over time — so powerful that education is sometimes hailed as “the best contraceptive.” This is the reason why Emmanuel Macron commented about getting more education for girls in Africa, since “perfectly educated” women wouldn’t go on to have large families. My reply to his statement and my follow-up with a graduation photo inadvertently went viral with the hashtag #postcardsforMacron.

As people struggle to understand the future of fertility in the modern world, the perceived tension between women’s education and sustainable birth rates will be front and center. Some on the right are taking aim at women's education itself, asking if that’s the turn that takes us to below replacement fertility.

I don’t think that’s the story — but unpacking why that isn’t the story required talking to women with college degrees who seem to "defy" the trend. So that’s what I did. Their tale provided a counter-narrative — one in which the value of children takes center stage.

There’s a risk, of course, that some readers will wonder if I interviewed college-educated women because I think college degrees are ideal for women or for people. I didn’t, and I don’t. I actually tend to think too many men and women go to college today — but that's a subject for another time.

Align: Can you address the popular notion that having kids ruins one’s life? Did any of your case studies talk about this idea or mention how they deal with the real difficulties that children can introduce?

CRP: Lol. Absolutely! It came up in lots of ways — throughout the interviews. The short answer was something like — “of course, kids do ruin your life!” But what they ruin is life as you knew it. On the other side you get a new life, one you don’t know about yet.

You become a mom, the center of the universe for a person who will love you more than you knew it was possible to be loved. You become a heroine, a savior, an angel — the only pair of arms that will answer in the night. You get all this — yes, it wrings you dry sometimes, but it’s worth giving up the old life!

One of the moms said, “When you make a choice, something else dies.” That’s true for whatever you do. Nobody says, well, you became a lawyer, so your life is ruined. But of course, as a lawyer, you can’t sleep till noon or do whatever you want. Those luxuries die. And that’s okay. Anything demanding requires a change in your life — it’s just how much do you want it? Is it worth the change?

Chuong Nguyen, host of the "Unlicensed Philosophy" podcast (based in Budapest, Hungary) told me that his father used to say (and I’m paraphrasing): "The man I am today was born the day you were born." I really love that. I think that’s the way to think about it.

There are plenty of stories in the book about how women process the everyday difficulties. One of the main lessons — mothering little ones gets harder up to a point, maybe three kids. But after three it gets easier because your older kids organically start to help, and you get better at what you’re doing.

That’s a message few people hear. Five kids aren't five times harder than one. It’s actually a lot easier than having one — in terms of the lifestyle challenge.

Align: What do you think it will take for America to reverse its low fertility rates, leaving aside the question of immigration?

CRP: To reverse the low fertility trap, more women and men have to come to view children as blessings — expressions of God’s goodness, rather than as something like a consumer good you weigh against other goods in your life.

If kids are in the latter category, we tend to fit them into an ever-expanding set of things we want to have or do, and kids get a smaller and smaller share of time in adult lives. But when they’re in the former category, seen as blessings, they become something of first rank, something we order our lives around and make sacrifices for.

My work suggested that to reverse the birth rate, it won’t be enough to nudge people who see children as consumer goods into an extra child or more. We’ll need more of the people who see children as blessings and lovingly have three, four, or more children.

Israel has a stable above-replacement birth rate today because it has a higher percentage of devout Jews with larger families. That can be our future too. To get there, we need to pass legislation to allow all families to spend their tax dollars on religious and church-based schools where biblical values are nourished and protected.

We also need to pursue all other avenues to widen the impact of living religious communities — this generally means the state taking a step back and letting churches grow stronger by doing more: more charitable work, more youth work, more health care work, and more social assistance work.

In defense of passport bros



Men have been finding love abroad at least since Caesar hooked up with Cleopatra. In 2024, these mercenaries of the heart have a name: passport bros.

You'll find them everywhere from Bogota to Bangkok. Western men (often American) hoping to leverage their exoticism — and first-world income — into improving their dating odds.

You'll be surprised to discover that not all women approve. Beware, ladies: That charming digital nomad who just bought you a drink may be smuggling toxic anti-feminism and misogyny into your peaceful country.

Or, maybe he's simply seeking respite from his home country's rampant patriarchy smashing. The young men and women of America speak very different languages these days.

Consider the data from recent Gallup polling. Women 18-29 are 15% more likely to identify as "liberal" than men. This disparity is five times greater than it was in 2000. Is it any wonder that some men are so fed up with hearing about their "toxic masculinity" that they're packing their bags and leaving for good?

The Good Men Project, a website apparently dedicated to exploring “what it means to be a good man,” suggests that the passport bro has one motive: cheap, easy sex. A loser in the U.S. can become a lothario overseas.

Or, maybe they just want a healthy relationship with the opposite sex and realize this is much easier to pull off with a partner uncorrupted by more recent forms of feminism. A partner for whom the shallow, negative "empowerment" exemplified by Irina Dunn’s hoary slogan that “a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle” is patently absurd.

Such is the view of the consulting agency Passport Bros. Its objective is both basic and bullish: to create a global network of "passport brothers" who are well-traveled, open-minded, and possess an appreciation for diverse cultures and lifestyles.

Agency rep Chase Taylor tells me that he unknowingly became a “bro” way before the popular term even existed. “Back in 2009, after the end of a 14-year marriage, I began my travels abroad,” he says. “With the initial goal of healing and finding a way to put the pieces of my life back together, I found myself in the heart of Central America, with a group, hiking my way from Costa Rica up through Nicaragua, Honduras, and Guatemala.”

Originally from New York City, Taylor happens to be stateside as we speak — but not for long. He is in the process of relocating to the Mediterranean, which he admits involves inordinate amounts of tedious red tape.

Taylor dismisses critics as either "completely misinformed or ... simply regurgitating some negative third-party opinion."

One big misconception is that passport bros are only in it for sex. “While there are some who [are], there are literally hundreds of thousands of other men" who are not.

As for the bros who do seek love, Taylor says the stereotype of an uneducated, submissive, and desperately poor dating pool misses the mark.

“Many of these women are highly educated, and many even hold multiple degrees," says Taylor. They often have their own businesses or thriving professional careers.

Much like the women back home — but with a crucial difference. Unlike many of their indoctrinated American counterparts, foreign women "take pride in their femininity and understand the cooperative nature that’s required if a woman is genuinely serious about building a long-lasting, successful family unit.”

Got your own take on the contemporary dating scene? Passport Bros is currently soliciting video submissions to be featured on their site.

Confessions of a Willy Wonka romantic



A few years ago, I had the pleasure of going on about a dozen dates with an autistic woman I'll call C. I had chased her on and off for three years and was quite excited that she’d begun to reciprocate.

Being autistic myself, I thought we would be effortlessly compatible. Instead, it was like seeing myself from the outside, something I cannot do unaided, for the first time in my life.

“What a fascinating, beautifully strange person I’ve discovered!” But how long can I remain enthralled by a world I can never really enter?

At once, many mysteries of my interpersonal life were solved. Before, I understood I had some qualities people commonly find mildly unpleasant (outward coldness, insensitivity, difficulty giving comfort). Little stuff that’s not enough of a problem in itself to comment on, until the constant low-level irritation builds to a breaking point.

Which, from my perspective, always seems to come out of nowhere.

My time with C taught me what it’s like to be on the receiving end of those behaviors, as well as what makes tolerating them worth it, at least in the short term.

C is a lovely young woman, a bright shining star, unlike any other in the night sky. Her autism made her deeply insular; by inoculating her against outside influences, it also made her creative and brilliant in a way utterly unique to her.

Her inner world, insofar as she let me glimpse it, intoxicated me. Her mind was a vast empire of one, with its own language, currency, and history. C seemed to me walking "bottle world," a living, breathing wainscot society.

I quickly came to realize that no matter how fascinating I found it to observe this world, I would always remain outside it. This wasn't going to work.

Not that I left C of my own accord. It is she who moved on, making no bones about the fact that while she liked much of what I had to offer, my romantic partnership was of no interest.

Still, the uncanny experience of dating someone like myself made me ponder my previous breakups. Unlike C, who was refreshingly blunt and pragmatic, the neurotypical women in my past were never quite able to explain why they were leaving.

The usual cycle roughly follows the trajectory of one of cinema's more awkward love affairs: that between Enid and Seymour in the 2001 film "Ghost World." When alienated, proto-hipster high school senior Enid (Thora Birch) meets Steve Buscemi's cantankerous, hyper-verbal record collector, she becomes enamored.

“What a fascinating, beautifully strange person I’ve discovered!” She does start to notice some disagreeable idiosyncrasies, but the thrill of this rare specimen's company allows her to dismiss them. Over time, however, she grows disillusioned and increasingly distant.

For me, the beginning of the end generally comes when she broaches the subject of seeing other people. I promise to change; she counters that she doesn’t want me to. A very confusing response, until recently!

What is especially galling about this seemingly inevitable moment is that I've worked hard to overcome my inborn social deficits. I have painstakingly transformed myself into a man of social grace and savoir faire, a man who might be molded into what they call boyfriend material.

And I have indeed inexplicably managed to land some real stunners. Fool that I was, I thought passing this initial test was the hard part. In reality, it's where the real work begins.

What was required to make them stay? Whatever it was, I clearly lacked it. A common refrain was their insistence that I not change. They wanted me to go on being my wonderful, one-of-a-kind self ... as long as I did it away from them.

My experience with C gave me a new perspective. Such that I would now liken myself to a slightly more flattering cinematic avatar: Willy Wonka.

Wonka's mysterious Chocolate Factory may operate via obscure and unconventional systems, but it is highly effective. The weird little man makes the most disruptively delicious candy on the market. No small part of its appeal is a certain magic the inscrutability imparts.

Who wouldn't take the opportunity to see for oneself how these enticing confections are made?

At first, it’s magical. A privileged feeling, to share in such a secret. And such a rich, endlessly explorable place. It seems you'll never run out of marvels to discover.

Fast forward a year. You’re living full time in the factory. It's quite finite, after all — you've seen every room top to bottom. You drank from the chocolate river even though the fat German kid drowned in it. You tasted all the fruits on the wallpaper. You turned into a blueberry and back. You tasted every mushroom, flower, fern, boulder, and so on in the indoor park where everything is made of candy.

It’s all still made of candy a year later and will be the next year. You’re quite tired of candy by now, but you put on a show for Willy, who never tires of it. He’s always delighted when he finds you in that room. “Everything is candy!” he remarks with sincere wonder every time, as if realizing this anew.

“Hehe, yep. It’s aaaallll candy,” you tepidly reply.

Wonka is all candy as well; he has little interest or capacity for discussing anything else. You've also grown tired of that performative, doddering old-man routine, followed by the spritely, acrobatic somersault he pulls out every time you or anybody else meets with him. It's not that it's an act. He genuinely can’t not be that way.

What of his more alarming offenses? Can he help those, you wonder? He let a kid drown in chocolate to make a point about greed, then had his orange-hued workers sing a jaunty song about it. About those Oompa-Loompas: Do they receive a fair day's wage? Are they free to leave?

You could get Wonka to change. He'll do anything to convince you to stay at this point. Safety inspections for the great glass elevator? A DEI panel to address any Oompa-Loompa grievances? Overhauled management systems based on Six Sigma methodology? You got it, babe.

But who'd want to visit that factory? To make the "improvements" necessary for you to thrive there would be to destroy what makes it special in the first place. Worse, it would become an environment hostile to Wonka's own survival.

The only course of action is to depart as gracefully as you can, leaving it unspoiled for the kindred spirit who's bound to come along eventually.

Or, so I imagine each former girlfriend understood our parting. Perhaps, I'm fooling myself, overthinking what were no more than a series of classic "it's not you, it's me" brush-offs. But I like to think they experience at least a touch of the melancholy, stoic acceptance I felt in losing C.

Either way, it's not something I can afford to dwell on. I cater to a specific market, and I'm clearly not for everyone. Even the true connoisseurs sometimes find themselves unable to match my enthusiasm in the long run.

Fair enough. All I can do is continue to maintain the standards of quality ensured by my enjoyably uncompromising way of doing things. The right collaborator, when she comes along, will expect nothing less.

Have men and women fallen out of love?



When you’re in love, nothing feels cringe. I mean when you’re in the full flush of first attraction — nothing about the other person can possibly be annoying. Or else it’s only annoying in the “oh, you” sort of way. “She’s always on me about my old T-shirts.” “He’s the worst at texting back.” You roll your eyes. But you also kind of think it’s adorable.

Then, if the relationship turns sour, something ugly happens. The words stay the same, but the tone transforms. When you fall out of love, the very same quirks that once seemed endearing now fill you with disgust beyond all rational measure. “She’s always on me about my old T-shirts.” “He’s the worst at texting back!”

Today this is called “getting the ick.” In Tom Stoppard’s play "The Real Thing," two reckless paramours named Henry and Annie blow up their marriages to be together. Henry keeps finishing Annie’s sentences, which is cute until it’s not. When they finally have each other, the romance curdles into mundanity, then contempt: “For Christ’s sake, will you stop finishing my sentences for me?!” That line, so apparently simple, goes off like a grenade. Once she’s said it out loud, it becomes real: She’s got the ick.

These days, I get the disturbing impression that men and women in the aggregate have the ick for each other.

Everyone can cite some things about the opposite sex that they find mystifying and a little silly. “Is it really so hard for men to pick up after themselves?” “She’ll tell you about her problems, but she doesn’t want you to fix them.” These complaints, when made with affection, are actually part of love. Who are these mad and maddening creatures, we are saying, who complicate and yet complete the world?

But recently those very same sentiments have become bywords of intersexual warfare. “Is it really so hard for men to pick up after themselves? They’ve cheated us out of trillions of dollars!” “Women don’t want to fix their problems; they just want to drain men dry.”

This sounds to me like a society-wide case of the ick. A couple of weeks ago, basically every single person on the internet watched a young woman explain that after enough minor disappointments, a girl will simply shut down toward her boyfriend overall: “The problem now is that she’s unattracted to you and just simply does not like you any more.”

I suspect that video went so astronomically viral because it seems to describe not simply one failed relationship but an entire failed social arrangement between the sexes. Online, at least, we have spiraled into making hideous caricatures and impossible demands of one another: Never, ever flirt (you slut). Never talk to other women alone (you filthy animal).

Maybe it takes an outsider to see this, or maybe it’s all too easy for a gay guy to diagnose dysfunctions in the straight dating world (we have plenty of our own, I promise). But it does strike me that decades of angry grand pronouncements about “what men are like” and “how women act” have turned charming foibles into bitter accusations. The preposterous excesses of late 20th-century feminism — “a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle!” — and the lock-jawed tradwife/manosphere reaction in this century have teased men and women apart by stages. Is anybody happy with this state of affairs? It seems not.

In a real-life relationship, I propose, the cure for the ick is as follows. Spend less time grumbling theories about the other person to yourself in the shower and more time face to face with the other person, listening with charity. Because the secret is that he or she is neither the unblemished demigod you made when you were doe-eyed nor the incurable reprobate you make of him or her now that things have gone south. Love — real love, not infatuation — will mellow out slowly in the negotiation between you two as you are: quirky and obnoxious, elegant and strong, trying sincerely to know and be known.

Is it possible that a similar approach might work at the social level? I’m heartened to see people getting sick of capital-T theorizing about the opposite sex, be it trad or rad. I suspect the remedy lies in turning instead to seek actual community with people of both sexes. As Lane Scott wrote recently, the domestic bliss of the future won’t look exactly like it did before all this Sturm und Drang. Some things really have changed. That’s okay. We’re still the same species we were when we first fell in love. Lay your weapons and your tweet threads down. We can patch things up.

Editor's note:This essay was originally published on Spencer Klavan's Substack.

Mothers must sacrifice but should still ask for help



Starting a family wasn’t an ideological choice, but it began to feel like one during my first pregnancy.

I was 24 years old and fielding the same question over and over, from women young and old, all coastal urbanites: "Why don't you wait until you're 30?" You’d think I was a child bride.

Conservatives should know better than to minimize or deny the toll motherhood can take on a woman.

It’s breathtaking, the way people talk about pregnancy to a pregnant woman. I wouldn’t want to ruin my body. You’re never going to sleep again. Say goodbye to the good times. These jabs hurt. I turned to the internet in my irascible frustration and, frankly, loneliness.

There, I found traditional conservatives and crunchy midwives forming an unlikely Venn Diagram. Both offered a more openly positive and hopeful message: Women’s aversion to birth was all simply a matter of media brainwashing. Thanks to them, I came to believe that my body was built for birth; I would trust God with the rest. I assumed I’d be able to handle difficulty as it came. I was right, in a certain sense, and so were they. But in my naivete, I couldn’t imagine how difficult difficulty could be.

The culture of abortionist feminism produces mothers who view motherhood primarily as a consumer choice and treat female bodies more like machines than mothers. If this is how you think of your kids, you’re bound to resent them for the resources they consume: your time, energy, and youth — all of which you could’ve allocated to your career. When every baby is “optional,” subjecting his or her existence to a rigorous cost/benefit analysis makes perfect sense.

By rightly refusing to reduce children to a kind of luxury good that sacrifices a woman’s earning potential, the conservative Christian view offers an escape from this resentment. Motherhood is a vocation pointing toward eternity, a scheme under which our suffering is redemptive.

Without equivocation, I place this basic worldview firmly in the realm of truth. But in practice, especially for women of childbearing years, the notion that we overcome suffering exclusively by gritting our teeth and giving it up to God can lend itself to a unique form of Pelagianism, by which women start to reject all earthly support for their bodies and even their babies’ bodies.

Instead, they choose to view every maternal challenge as a spiritual problem rather than a legitimate mental, material, or, yes, medical issue. Baby not descending in labor? Clearly, mom has an “emotional blockage.” Breastfeeding making your hair fall out? Might want to address your “unwillingness to suffer.” God forbid you supplement with formula. I had a friend tell me recently that she felt paralyzingly guilty for leaving her children in another caregiver’s hands for an hour so she could pursue the diastasis recti therapy she needed to safely carry her present and future children.

It’s as if any acknowledgment of a real, treatable condition will open the door to all manners of “secular” medical intervention and lukewarm living, and all roads lead to abortion. This concern is understandable, but choosing life doesn’t automatically transport you to a soft-focus realm of cooing infants and blissful, smiling sacrifice. Pretending that’s the case risks alienating many would-be conservative women and undoing the pronatalist movement from within.

There is nearly endless Christian theological material on escaping the body, transcending the body, and denying the body, through fasting, withstanding torture, and fighting unto death. Motherhood presents a different kind of challenge: listening to the body, feeding the body, and nurturing the body inside your body to new life. In this more embodied state, there are ample opportunities to sanctify suffering, but it needn’t mean that we neglect legitimate strategies to improve our bodily health as mothers.

Besides, isn’t there something a little naively utopian about the right's vision of motherhood as all blissful, noble sacrifice? Something a little ... progressive? Conservatives should know better than to minimize or deny the toll motherhood can take on a woman. God knows she’s willing to give until it hurts and then some if it means getting the next generation across the finish line. But even the most selfless mom could use a little help now and then.

Does Pearl Davis hate women — or does she hate herself?



Of all the people pontificating online about dating and marriage, few figures are more polarizing than Pearl Davis.

Often hailed as the "female Andrew Tate," Davis is a woman who’s made her name by advising men not to listen to women.

Pearl Davis doesn't need your attention, whether scornful or admiring. What she could use are your prayers.

She’s always handy with a provocative generalization — just the kind of thing that gets traction on social media. In a now-deleted post on X, she proclaimed that “16 year old chicks are hotter than 26 year old chicks.” She's also invited female victims of abuse to consider their own complicity: “Was he really abusive or did you bring abuse out of him?”

Other typical Pearl takes include:

  • The worst thing a woman can be is fat;
  • Women lose their attractiveness (“hit the wall”) at age 30;
  • Women should expect and even want to be cheated on;
  • Paternity tests should be mandatory;
  • Women should be denied the right to vote.

Such talk has elevated Davis to the level of online villainhood that leads people to compile lists of her worst moments: “The Tragic Tale of Just Pearly Things | The Un-Pickable Pick-Me.”

And that was her plan all along, if you ask those to whom Davis is clearly a grifter who doesn’t believe what she espouses.

The evidence for this seems clear. Davis simply doesn’t live up to her own strict standards for being a high-value woman: virginity, model-level beauty, piety, submissiveness. And she doesn’t care.

In that case, why take the bait? Why give her the attention she so clearly craves?

That’s a question I've had to ask myself after letting Davis get under my skin one too many times.

Lately, however, I've started to see the brokenness beneath her routine. Pandering to the resentful and bitter worst of the "manosphere" seems a bit sad. So does boosting her own value in their eyes by devaluing other women.

In all likelihood, she really does believe at least some of what she says. Raised in a large and wealthy Catholic family, Davis admits to struggling with low self-esteem from a very young age. In manosphere influencers like Andrew Tate, she found confirmation of the deep flaws she always suspected she had. Since then, her project has been to confirm that these flaws exist in all women.

Doing so lets her opt out of normal female intrasexual competition for men by informing men that the contest is rigged and the prize is not worth having. She may be as "low-value" as the women she relentlessly criticizes, but at least she's aware of it.

The problem with this method of status-seeking is that it requires her to take more laughably extreme views as time goes on.

Case in point: a recent X post about how trans women are better at being women because they put “more effort into their appearance than most American women.” She also needs to become increasingly uncharitable to her opponents, making it ever more apparent that her rants are about self-aggrandizement rather than changing minds.

In a way, Pearl Davis is the right-wing version of Aella, the “ex-vangelical” who panders to libertine, "sex-positive," rationalist Silicon Valley men with degrading and extreme displays of promiscuity.

Both women seem obsessively, at times destructively, focused on acting out in the worst way possible. Both seem to have been "traumatized" to some degree by their Christian upbringings.

Were they truly to question their childhood faith rather than simply react to it, they might find valuable wisdom directly applicable to their predicaments. Namely, that every one of us, no matter what mistakes we make, has inherent, infinite value as a child of God.

Pearl Davis doesn't need your attention, whether scornful or admiring. What she could use are your prayers.

UVA professor's simple hack for a better life: 'Get Married'



When I watch Pearl Davis speak, my imagination wanders. Did Andrea Dworkin asexually spawn a severely mentally deficient homunculus who inherited all her mother’s unilateral hatred for one sex in particular but not the memory of which one or the capacity for circumspection to understand why? Or perhaps ... maybe ... her whole schtick is elaborate performance art based on "Right Wing Women." Genius.

Apparently, marriage needs defending not only from the left but also from whatever is calling itself “right” these days. With this unique political context in mind, I brought Professor Brad Wilcox of the University of Virginia onto "Girlboss, Interrupted" this week to talk about his new book: "Get Married: Why Americans Should Defy the Elites, Forge Strong Families, and Save Civilization" (Broadside Books, 2024).

Brad Wilcox is the director of the National Marriage Project, the Future of Freedom Fellow at the Institute for Family Studies, and a nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

Brad studies marriage, fatherhood, and the impact of strong and stable families on men, women, and children. Today, he offers his thoughts on the demise of America’s greatest institution — and what it will take to build from the ashes.

ALIGN: Why did you write this book? What do you hope that your work will do to add to or change the conversation around marriage in America?

BRAD WILCOX: I got into the business of studying marriage because I was concerned about kids, asking and answering questions like “how do they fare in bad marriages or single-parent homes as opposed to a more traditional arrangement?”

But more recently, through my work at the University of Virginia, I keep encountering young adults who are deeply discouraged about their prospects for marriage, if not totally uninterested. Their stance vis-à-vis marriage is often shaped by voices on the left and now right (nominally, at least, including Andrew Tate and Pearl Davis) who talk down marriage. Certain factions of the left tell us that marriage is a path to misery and immiseration for women. Certain factions of the right imply the same for men.

So I wrote the book in order to counter misinformation about marriage and family from all sides by simply putting forward the facts, statistically speaking, about its benefits. From this statistical, sociological perspective, we know that for most Americans, marriage is a path toward prosperity and happiness.

ALIGN: Why has our most important institution, marriage, as you argue, been so thoroughly devalued? Cui bono?

WILCOX: It’s a perplexing question.

Elites — who produce the culture of skepticism about marriage as journalists, professors, school superintendents, and Hollywood moguls — actually really enjoy it in their own lives. Most college-educated Americans (18-55) are married, whereas only a minority of less-educated Americans are married. This sort of gap was basically nonexistent just a few decades ago.

So while in public, they may deny or devalue or discount the importance of marriage because they wish to be seen as progressive, they are not actually bearing the consequences of their own trendsetting. By practicing the precise opposite of what they preach, elites only reinforce their own privilege and that of their kids, leaving those in lower-class worlds, who nonetheless aspire to elite status, less likely to enjoy the benefits of stable marriage.

The children of disorganized, non-marital arrangements are far less likely to find themselves in positions to compete with the children of elites in school, work, and life. It becomes a cycle. The cynicism is difficult to unsee.

ALIGN: You write about “the closing of the American heart,” in other words, men's and women’s growing cynicism toward one another, and now, political polarization away from one another. What is causing this? What can be done to solve it?

WILCOX: Today, dating and marriage languish for three reasons, primarily: 1) More men are floundering in school, work, and life — specifically in ways that make them less appealing as boyfriends and potential husbands. 2) Our society is more secular, and substantial numbers of young adults have abandoned the faith of their forebears. 3) We now prioritize the “Midas mindset” — school, money, and especially work — over love and marriage.

Each requires different solutions. 1) Boost the fortunes of boys in schools, limit their exposure to gaming and pornography, and promote a new prosocial masculinity. 2) Do a better job of transmitting faith between generations. 3) Paint a better and more appealing portrait of marriage and family to young adults in schools, youth groups, colleges, and social media.

ALIGN: The culture’s negative attitude toward marriage seems to come hand in hand with a tacit resentment of small children. Why, especially in a culture that regards itself with adulation in terms of civil rights, do we dehumanize kids? Can you address the popular notion that having kids ruins one’s life?

WILCOX: We’ve become consumed with what I call the “Midas mindset” — the idea that everything we touch should turn to gold, a focus on career and wealth. Having children forces you to focus on something besides your own life and your own career.

Therefore, much of the culture is telling our young adults that the sacrifices associated with parenthood are “not worth it.” Of course, it is also true that the costs of raising children, especially housing, health care, and education, seem more insurmountable to today’s young adults.

What too many people don’t realize is that yes, parenting is difficult, but most parents derive tremendous meaning, purpose, and happiness from their families. We have to do a better job of conveying the value of parenthood (beyond the dollars and cents) in the culture, but also consider policies (like an expanded child tax credit) that make it easier to afford children.

ALIGN: According to the sociological data you gathered, who are the happiest people in America and why?

WILCOX: Even I was surprised by some of the data we turned up for the book, and I’ve been looking at these figures for a long time. By far, the happiest people in America today are men and women who are married with children. Those who report being in good marriages experience the biggest happiness boost: a seemingly impossible 545% boost, which is more significant than the happiness won from a job, or money, or frequent sex.

In addition, religious conservatives trump every other demographic in happiness. The irony, of course, is that these are the very people whom many in the elite culture portray as miserable or uptight. Regardless of detractors, it seems that living in a community of people with shared values and who support you in your aspirations for a good marriage and family life seems to do the trick for many.

It’s not rocket science, and there are always anecdotal exceptions, which cannot be accounted for in a general statistical picture, but on the whole, the facts remain: No Americans are more likely to be succeeding at that classic American pursuit of happiness than conservative, religious, married mothers and fathers.