Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is a busy woman. When she’s not posting thirst traps on social media, she’s apparently planning a 2028 presidential run.

And she has no intention of letting anything derail her ambitions, least of all a dirty diaper.

A woman giving birth to her first child at age 42 faces the reality of attending high school graduation at age 60.

The 36-year-old’s recent decision to freeze her eggs, coming shortly after her split from ex-fiancé Riley Roberts, has only heightened speculation. Left-leaning commentators quickly hailed the move as a triumphant act of personal autonomy, a source of inspiration for career-minded women trying to balance climbing the ladder with the inconvenient realities of human biology.

But while Ocasio-Cortez has been canny about harnessing the attention her decision has generated, dismissing her Instagram announcement as an isolated stunt would be a mistake.

Across America, thousands of young women are making the exact same play, putting motherhood on ice to prioritize graduate credentials and promotions.

On ice

Now, a man — and a "privileged" white man in particular — critiquing women's reproductive choices inevitably invites comparisons to a hyper-liberal female columnist lecturing men on the finer points of masculinity. But there is a crucial difference. While woke gender commentary relies entirely on ideological grievance, hard biological and demographic data back up every single one of the following points.

A single egg-retrieval cycle costs anywhere between $12,000 and $20,000, with annual cryogenic storage fees adding another $1,000 or more just to keep the deep freeze running. Add in injectable hormone regimens that rack up thousands more per round, and the invoice quickly resembles a down payment on a house.

The financial gamble becomes outright predatory when weighed against the clinical evidence.

Eggs retrieved after age 35 have live-birth rates below 20% per batch. Recent studies show that 94% of women who freeze their eggs never even end up using them. In other words, many women put having a child on a mental to-do list right below traveling the world, making partner, or running for office, assuming medical technology will hold the door open indefinitely. They treat cryogenic storage as a biological safety net, paying thousands in annual storage fees for an insurance policy they will likely abandon. By the time they realize the safety net is largely psychological, the biological window has closed, leaving them with an empty nursery, a mountain of storage receipts, and a harsh lesson in the limits of corporate empowerment.

Time's up

Human biology runs on a clock, and no amount of liquid nitrogen can stop it. The medical risks associated with late-in-life pregnancies expand rapidly with every passing year. The probability of chromosomal abnormalities, including Down syndrome, rises from 1 in 1,250 for a mother at age 25 to 1 in 100 by age 40, spiking to 1 in 30 by age 45. Modern obstetrics performs modern-day miracles, but older pregnancies still carry significantly elevated rates of preeclampsia and premature deliveries.

The physiological tax continues long after leaving the delivery room. For parents entering their 50s, keeping up with energetic ankle-biters can be a torturous affair. A woman giving birth to her first child at age 42 faces the reality of attending high school graduation at age 60, rapidly approaching retirement age while simultaneously taking on university tuition bills. The prospect of ever seeing a grandchild reach adulthood becomes a statistical long shot.

National demographic stability relies on baseline replacement fertility. Specifically, it requires an average of 2.1 births per woman to maintain a functional society. In 2025, the total fertility rate in the U.S. dropped to an all-time low of 1.62 births per woman. By 2034, it is expected to fall to 1.6.

Normalizing the deferral of motherhood into a woman’s late 30s drives birth rates off a demographic cliff. Converting childbearing from a foundational milestone of young adulthood into an afterthought for middle-aged professionals is a slow-motion recipe for economic and cultural suicide.

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Double burden

For those wondering how we got here, one needn’t have an advanced degree in sociology to connect the dots. Modern feminism dismisses family life as little more than a foolish career setback. It sells women the lie that a cubicle, a stronger CV, and a performance review are inherently more fulfilling than creating a family. This same careless disregard extends to the political ideology that drove it.

During a recent interview on ABC’s "This Week," Ocasio-Cortez said, “Woke 1 was crazy,” punctuating the remark with a dismissive chuckle. She may find that era of radical activism amusing in retrospect, but the consequences were anything but funny. Innocent people lost their lives due to defunded police forces. Livelihoods vanished. Reputations were ruined. Social trust was completely incinerated. Yet now that the political winds have shifted, she stands atop the wreckage and simply laughs it off.

Just as that ideological crusade upended social norms, the cultural elevation of cryopreservation now seeks to upend basic human biology. When childbearing is delayed by 15 years, the generational bridge that historically sustained extended families begins to crumble. Grandparents who would otherwise provide vital child care and daily support in their 50s and 60s are instead in their 80s, requiring intensive care themselves just as their adult children are attempting to navigate the demands of newborn parenting.

This dynamic transforms what was once a natural, thriving family support network into a brutal double burden. Exhausted middle-aged parents in the “sandwich generation” are left caught between aging elders who need care and young children who also need care.

So for those who applaud Ocasio-Cortez, it’s worth asking what happens to America if more young women follow her lead. The uncomfortable reality is that many already are. She may yet become a mother in her 40s, but there is no guarantee she will — and many of the women now freezing their eggs may never become mothers either.

America has a marriage crisis — but it has nothing to do with money

For years, we've been force-fed the same sickening story. Young Americans aren't getting married because they simply can't afford to. The economy is disastrous, wages are too low, and housing costs require selling a kidney.

If we could just inject another thirty grand into everyone’s bank accounts, young lovers would magically sprint down the aisle. It’s a beautiful, thoroughly victim-centric fairy tale that makes everyone nod along. It’s also absolute nonsense.

Government handouts and cultural decay have combined to tell men that effort is for suckers.

A recent report from the Institute for Family Studies dismantles the narrative. The data reveals that the slow-motion suicide of American marriage has less to do with stagnant pay and much more to do with a mind virus that has convinced an entire generation they are too poor to love.

We love blaming the system because it absolves us of our crippling neuroses. But the numbers don’t lie, even if our Instagram feeds do.

Money changes everything?

Inflation-adjusted median earnings for young men recently hit a near 50-year high. Meanwhile, marriage rates continued their downward spiral. If money were the magic libido potion that many claim it is, these trends should move together. Instead, they look like two bitter, screaming divorcees tearing away from a shattered home in opposite directions.

Young men today generally out-earn the idealized pipe-smoking fathers of the 1960s and '70s. Those mid-century men somehow managed to marry and breed without first acquiring quartz countertops, stainless-steel appliances, or a diversified stock portfolio. They didn't postpone children until they could afford a five-star Disney excursion. Instead, they embraced the brutal reality of starting with absolutely nothing, expecting to build a life with someone they could love and trust.

Contrary to conventional wisdom, today's married 30-year-olds own homes at roughly the same rate as their counterparts in 1970. And those homes are massive, bloated monuments to excess, full of technology that would have looked like witchcraft a few decades ago. Somehow, grandparents survived the unbearable trauma of raising kids without an automated espresso maker, a smart home cinema system, or three streaming subscriptions to numb the existential dread.

L-R: Jason Mendez/Getty Images; Michael Nagle/Bloomberg/Getty Images

Mergers and acquisitions

Somewhere along the line, the classic vow "for richer or for poorer" was replaced with "call me when your credit score hits 800." Marriage is no longer the launchpad for adulthood, but the prize handed out at the end of an exhausting corporate obstacle course. You don’t get married to build a life any more; instead, you do it to signal to your peers that you have successfully conquered capitalism. What was once the beginning of a life is now a form of social proof.

We can thank Hollywood and Silicon Valley for this psychological castration. For decades, pop culture has glorified permanent adolescence and consequences-free swiping. Algorithms have transformed regular, middle-class existence into an agonizing, daily comparison against 20-year-old crypto-millionaires who rent private jets for 10 minutes to take a selfie. When every engagement announcement looks like a royal wedding funded by an oil cartel, an ordinary life feels like an insult.

The sickness runs deeper than mere vanity, though. We are also witnessing a strange strike among prime-age men who have voluntarily withdrawn from the workforce to master video games in permanently darkened rooms. Government handouts and cultural decay have combined to tell men that effort is for suckers. Why bother putting on a pair of pants and clocking in when you can just opt out entirely and vape in peace?

'Know your worth'

Meanwhile, modern relationship advice reads like a venture capital prospectus. Young women are bombarded with articles treating courtship like a hostile corporate takeover. "Know your worth," the influencers scream. "Never settle. Demand a partner who matches your tax bracket." And if you find him, make sure he can cook, make you laugh, and respond to texts immediately.

It sounds empowering, but it’s actually a recipe for dying alone with 12 cats. A dependable plumber making a healthy living is discarded because he doesn’t match the lifestyle of a fake TikTok entrepreneur posing next to a Lamborghini he almost certainly doesn’t own. Reality cannot compete with a manufactured version of it.

The ultimate irony is thick enough to choke on. The richest, safest, most pampered generation in human history genuinely believes it is too destitute to commit to another human being. We’ve systematically dismantled every single rung of the societal ladder and are now standing around scratching our heads, wondering why the birth rate resembles a flatline on a hospital monitor.

Until young Americans recognize that a good marriage is built on character rather than curated luxury, churches will remain empty, dating apps will remain an endless purgatory, and cats will eventually inherit more apartments than children.

Meet the 'femosphere': Angry young women who love to hate men

"Family Guy" does a spoof of "Return of the Jedi" that always makes me laugh. The characters travel the universe to meet with Rebel Alliance leader Mon Mothma, who they are surprised to discover is female.

"Hey, check it out," says Han Solo. "Another chick! The only other chick in the galaxy!"

Princess Leia looks her over, folds her arms, and says, "I don’t like her."

Feminism promised freedom; instead, it has left many woman imprisoned by their own high expectations and simmering resentment.

It’s a throwaway gag, but it nails a fundamental truth that rarely makes it into polite conversation: Feel-good female solidarity is often just a cover for fierce intra-sexual competition.

Frenemies forever

A few weeks ago, I was sitting in a pub with a friend when a group of young women came in to celebrate one of them landing her dream job.

As soon as the newly employed girl went to the bathroom, the "friends" morphed into mean girls, and the gossiping began.

Understanding Gen Z colloquialisms is hard at the best of times, let alone in a noisy pub, but they were loud enough that we came to understand much about the young woman's lack of fashion sense as well as her proclivity to sleep her way into job opportunities.

The woman returned from the toilets in tears; had she somehow sensed she was being discussed? No, it turned out another "friend" had posted something nasty about her in a private group chat. Comforting words quickly ensued.

Anyone who witnessed such dynamics in the wild would not be surprised by recent findings from the British think tank Demos that half of all "misogynistic" X posts are authored by the fairer sex.

Mad about you

But this isn’t just about women being catty in bars or nasty on social media. There’s a deeper, more corrosive issue at play: a generation of women who have been indoctrinated to be angry toward everyone — especially men.

This cultural shift was recently brought to light by the left-wing New Statesman in its April cover story, “Meet the Angry Young Women.” The investigation, for which the magazine commissioned the polling firm Merlin Strategy, explores an emergent counterpart to the much-discussed manosphere: the "femosphere," in which hostility toward men is not just accepted, but encouraged.

According to the Gallup World Poll, women have been getting steadily angrier for a decade, with the gap between the sexes widening every year. But this isn’t just about righteous fury against a glass ceiling — it’s about a generation of women who have been sold a feminist dream, only to find themselves in a nightmare of their own making.

Chromosomal cartel

This transformation is clearly reflected in the latest data from King’s College London and Ipsos. The research highlights a staggering generational divide: Gen Z women are now significantly more likely to identify as feminists than any previous generation. In America, this divide is particularly acute, with 53% of Gen Z women identifying as feminists, compared to just 32% of their male counterparts. This 21-point gap — the largest of any generation in America — indicates a fundamental breakdown in the ability to find peace with the opposite sex.

We are witnessing the birth of two distinct tribes that no longer speak the same language. While young men are retreating into digital enclaves, young women have secured the high ground in the institutional capture of culture. A major study of the American publishing industry found that women hold 74% of editorial roles, 78% of literary agent positions, and 71% of publishing jobs overall, with women occupying six in 10 jobs at the executive level.

This chromosomal cartel has fostered a monoculture, leaving young male writers increasingly sidelined in an industry that often demonizes masculinity. The result? A literary and cultural landscape dominated by an embittered female perspective.

The Merlin Strategy data shows that only 35% of women under 25 have a positive opinion of men. For the youngest cohort — those under 25 — this figure drops to just 11%. Let that sink in: Nine out of 10 young women view half the population with suspicion or outright disdain.

RELATED: Did feminism create wokeness?

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Dating disaster

Feminism’s reach is now so pervasive that relationships are routinely sacrificed on the altar of political purity. According to the Merlin data, 74% of Gen Z women say they would find it difficult to date someone who did not share their views on social justice. By turning politics into a prerequisite for romance, women are effectively shrinking their dating pool to a puddle. They self-select for loneliness, then wonder why the good men have vanished into the ether.

Meanwhile, young men are reacting to this hostility by checking out entirely. The KCL data supports this: 57% of Gen Z men believe efforts to promote women’s equality have gone so far that they now discriminate against men. This isn’t incel rhetoric, it’s a rational response to a culture that treats their very existence as a problem — something to be either avoided or mocked and ridiculed into obsolescence. Additionally, the data shows a shift back to traditionalism, with 31% of these young men now agreeing that a "wife should always obey her husband."

While the media wrings its hands over this supposed "right-wing" turn, it misses the reality: This is a counterreaction. If progressive women offer only self-righteous lectures and open hostility toward men, is it any wonder men are seeking the stability of traditional social contracts?

Man down

Or even opting out of the market entirely. “Men, Where Have You Gone?” asked a middle-aged woman lamenting her paltry dating life in the New York Times last year. For many men, the essay suggested another rhetorical question in response: Why attempt to woo someone who sees you as a born oppressor?

The irony is painful. Feminism promised freedom; instead, it has left many woman imprisoned by their own high expectations and simmering resentment. Told that their anger is a source of power, they are coming to realize it can also be a force of destruction.

If it’s a truism that men need women as a civilizing influence, we spend far less time acknowledging the cruelty that can run unchecked in all-female spaces. Men and women need each other. They are natural allies — and the further apart they drift, the more disordered things become.

To lose weight, ditch the 'unisex' approach

Discussing America's obesity epidemic feels as fresh as a gas-station sushi roll. We've had the headlines, the task forces, the Michelle Obama gardens, the lurid rise and fall of Jared-from-Subway. Every few years, medicine rediscovers the problem like a dog finding the same buried bone and acting stunned.

But researchers in Europe recently dug up something new. They studied hundreds of patients and found that obesity doesn't affect men and women the same way. It may be the same condition, but it runs on a different operating system and has a different damage report.

In short, men carry the problem where a tape measure finds it. Women carry it where only a lab result does.

Gut feeling

Men tend to pack fat deep in the abdomen. I’m talking about visceral fat, the kind that wraps around your organs like a tenant who stopped paying rent and refuses to leave. That fat is clinically nasty. It hammers the liver and wrecks metabolic function; it lays the groundwork for cardiovascular disease and has been convincingly linked to several cancers.

Women, by contrast, carry less of that abdominal load but show higher cholesterol and elevated inflammatory markers. Essentially, immune signals run hotter than they should and the biochemical alarm system never fully shuts off. The damage is systemic rather than structural. It’s less visible, but no less serious.

In short, men carry the problem where a tape measure finds it. Women carry it where only a lab result does.

If that sounds abstract, just picture your last family reunion. Or, if you want a more vivid case study, picture mine.

Family size

Obesity runs deep on both sides of my family. I mean that genetically, medically, and architecturally. Planning any gathering requires a kind of pre-event logistics that most people reserve for moving furniture or evacuating a small country. I have relatives who have single-handedly retired the booth as a viable seating option.

Virtually every family has the same cast, even if the staging varies. There's the uncle who describes himself as "big-boned" with the confidence of someone who has never once questioned that assessment. He has a belt buckle working well beyond its original job description and a firm belief that his blood pressure is "probably fine." There's the aunt who demolished two bowls of pasta, declared herself "stuffed," and is now on her third glass of wine, eyeing that slice of cake with the focused intensity of someone who has already decided.

His and hers

Conversations about self-respect and restraint matter. So does the fact that American health culture has failed both sexes spectacularly. We have had decades of treating obesity as a single, uniform problem with a single, uniform fix: Eat less. Move more. Have you considered a run? A juice cleanse? Intermittent fasting? Have you tried being less stressed? Have you tried drinking more water? Have you tried just trying harder?

The endless questions and secondhand advice land with the precision of a motivational poster and the clinical usefulness of a fortune cookie, while ignoring what estrogen and testosterone are actually doing to fat distribution and inflammation.

The European researchers make the obvious point that treatment should probably reflect this — targeted clinical approaches rather than the one-size-fits-all pamphlet model that has served us so poorly for so long. Men may need earlier metabolic intervention. Women may need more attention paid to the signals that get waved off as stress, hormones, or simply the price of admission for being female.

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Heavy going

Today, roughly 43% of American adults are obese. By the end of the decade, that number is expected to climb to nearly half, including close to one in four who will have severe obesity.

The children are worth mentioning. Around one-third of American kids between 6 and 17 are living with obesity or excess weight. Fat children tend to become even fatter adults, and the research on that pipeline is neither new nor ambiguous. These statistics arrive with enormous economic weight. Hundreds of billions in health care costs, lost productivity, and a medical system already struggling to keep pace with demand. This is a genuine crisis, and it deserves a serious response.

The study's real contribution isn't discovering that obesity exists, but insisting that obesity has never been one thing. It has always been at least two — running parallel, wearing the same label, causing different problems on different timelines in different bodies.

That distinction matters in the clinic. It matters in the conversation. And it matters every time someone who once lost eight pounds on a juice cleanse corners people at a cookout with personalized nutrition guidance that nobody requested and biology can’t honor. Good intentions and bad information have always made a combustible combination. In this case, they have been making policy for decades.

Trump’s prison order draws a line that reality should have drawn first

When the news broke that President Trump followed through on his promise to bar taxpayer-funded gender surgeries in federal prisons, the coverage quickly pivoted to one question: How will this affect transgender-identifying inmates?

As a former inmate — I served five years at the Central California Women’s Facility in Chowchilla — I kept thinking about the people the headlines keep skipping: the women forced to endure confinement while male inmates encroach on their privacy.

Women in prison deserve the dignity to heal without being sacrificed to an ideology.

After I did my time, I re-entered civil society and founded a nonprofit to help women build sustainable lives after prison. Not long after I got out, women still inside California’s prison system began calling me with alarming reports: Administrators were moving men into women’s prisons.

At first, I couldn’t believe it. No sane person should view placing males in a women’s prison as a “compassionate” policy. It only makes sense if you ignore what prison actually is — or if you want to impose a sinister ideology no matter who gets hurt.

Some of these males claim a female identity because women’s prisons tend to be less violent than men’s prisons. In some cases, they don’t even claim to be women. They claim to be “nonbinary” and gain admission anyway. These men do not always come with minor offenses or nonviolent histories. Some are rapists. Some are child molesters. Some committed brutal, unthinkable crimes.

For years, Bureau of Prisons policies on transgender health care moved forward with little acknowledgment of the harm they impose on incarcerated women. Women like me watched administrators apply sweeping ideological rules to an environment where the stakes involve physical safety, privacy, and survival.

Under the approach that dominated the last several years, officials treated the feelings and demands of men as more important than the safety and dignity of the women forced to live beside them.

Prison has never been, and never will be, a place for “one-size-fits-all” social experiments. Every decision inside a facility affects real human beings in extremely close quarters. Housing assignments, medical decisions, and institutional accommodations cannot follow slogans or pressure campaigns from outside groups. They must prioritize the safety and well-being of the people who live there.

Anyone who has lived inside prison understands how this plays out on the ground. Women cannot leave their cells without permission. They cannot lock their own doors. They cannot choose their cellmates. They shower under supervision, change clothes in shared spaces, and sleep just feet away from strangers. Many entered prison after surviving domestic violence, sexual assault, or trafficking.

Where is the compassion for those women — women trying to rehabilitate while they relive their trauma?

The system has told them, again and again, that their trauma doesn’t matter, their fear doesn’t matter, and their right to privacy doesn’t matter. Instead, officials tell them to prioritize the identity claims of men. Give an inch and the activists will take a mile — especially when you put men with histories of violence against women and children into living arrangements that involve showers, sleeping quarters, and constant proximity.

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President Trump’s executive order barring taxpayer-funded gender surgeries in federal prisons signals a shift away from treating prisons like laboratories for social experimentation. The order supports women and supports safety.

For incarcerated women, it means they no longer have to watch men receive treatments and accommodations designed to make them “feel like a woman,” while the women themselves lose basic standards of privacy and dignity the moment they enter custody.

Incarcerated people deserve humane treatment. That includes access to medical care, mental health care, and dignity.

But dignity cannot mean denying reality.

If you’ve lived behind the walls, you know what the outside world often forgets: These policies shape the daily lives of thousands of women. Their chance at rehabilitation suffers when officials force them to live in fear, relive trauma, and navigate needless threats of real violence. Women in prison deserve the dignity to heal without being sacrificed to an ideology.

'Looksmaxxing' king Clavicular: Charles Atlas for the TikTok era?

I remember, as a boy, seeing strange, old-fashioned advertisements in the backs of comic books. These were the same ones that were printed on the little comic strips you found inside Bazooka bubble gum.

The advertisement was a three-panel cartoon: 1) A muscle-bound bully kicks sand on a skinny guy and his girl at the beach. 2) The humiliated skinny guy goes home and kicks a chair. 3) The skinny guy buys an exercise device, gets muscles, and then beats up the bully.

Like Charles Atlas before him, 20-year-old Clavicular has become a worldwide brand by embodying a new approach to male physical attractiveness.

That’s a popular story. So popular it never goes away. You see it in movies to this day. Man starts out weak. Gets humiliated. Isolates himself and works to improve. And ultimately returns and prevails over his enemies.

It’s a male fantasy. It’s the daydream of every 12-year-old boy. It’s the ultimate form of street justice.

And it almost never happens in real life. Even as a child, I understood that. But it was still a satisfying story. So much so that you could sell stuff with it. Especially to gullible boys.

In this way, Charles Atlas, the inventor of these cartoons and the seller of various body-building regimens, became a rich man.

But even with my child mind, I could tell it was a trick. Because 1) you’re pretty much stuck with the muscles you have. And 2) normal people don’t really care that much about muscles.

Gimme Shelter

By the time I was a teenager, the Charles Atlas era was over. By the late 1970s, male role models were people like Mick Jagger. Or movie stars like Jack Nicholson. These guys weren’t weighed down with muscles.

Even tough guys like Robert De Niro and Al Pacino were much stronger mentally than they were physically. These guys weren’t going to manhandle you with sheer strength. They were going to outsmart you.

The only interesting celebrity of my generation who was somewhat muscular might be Henry Rollins. Though he never had the steroid-infused definition of a true bodybuilder. Besides which, Rollins' persona was never about being a strongman. It was more of a Nietzschean mental toughness. He was a “Whatever doesn’t kill me makes me stronger” kind of guy.

And of course Arnold Schwarzenegger comes to mind. But in his case, he was a funny and talented actor. His muscles got him into the film business, where he really shone. Before that, most people regarded him as a freak. I know I did.

Chris Delmas/Getty Images

The muscle-man always rings twice

Now, however, the ghost of Charles Atlas has returned. Young men are thinking about their muscles again. And it’s been going on for a while now.

It started with the “you just gotta lift” movement among young men. HR harassing you at work? Women won’t give you the time of day? Media portrays you as weak and ineffectual. You just gotta lift.

This began back in the 20-teens. Maybe the rise of Trump encouraged it. Guys feeling like they could be guys again. Or maybe in the face of decreasing prospects, guys were trying to hold on to their self-esteem.

Steroids and other medications might have added to the trend. Steroids continue to be popular with young males — both for sports and general appearance.

And then there’s the “going to the gym” trend. Both sexes participate in this. Some go to work out, others to socialize and mingle. It has become a place to make friends and find romance. And naturally, big muscles are big clout at the gym.

Enter the looksmaxxers

Now, after a decade of growing physique consciousness, a new generation has burst onto the scene. They call themselves looksmaxxers. And their point man is an internet streamer named Clavicular.

Like Charles Atlas before him, 20-year-old Clavicular has become a worldwide brand by embodying a new approach to male physical attractiveness.

He uses every means at his disposal: cosmetic, chemical, surgical, whatever it takes. There’s an entire science (or maybe pseudo-science) dedicated to this goal. Some aspects of which — "bonesmashing,” for instance—are quite alarming to contemplate.

Clavicular wasn’t the first to think of this. There is a whole community of looksmaxxers that he studied and learned from.

But like Charles Atlas before him, he has the charisma and business savvy to bring his movement to a larger public. At present, he is literally one of the most popular influencers in the world.

When he visits nightclubs or college campuses, Clavicular is mobbed by admirers and detractors. He believes that being (or appearing to be) tall, handsome, and muscular will literally change your life. Watching people mob him in public, it’s hard to disagree.

The beautiful and the damned

Young male conservatives have embraced Clavicular as their own. He has avoided any direct political alliances, but you can hear in his casual conversation echoes of the manosphere and contemporary conservative youth culture.

There are a lot of theories about the rise of looksmaxxing. Some believe it is the inevitable reaction to women reaching new heights in politics, business, media, and entertainment, while at the same time, men have lost ground.

Clavicular has said as much: In a world where the dating market has become increasingly exclusionary to all but the highest-status men, your average guy has to max out any advantage he has and enhance those advantages by any means necessary.

The great inversion

Like it or not, this is where we are. We’ve inverted traditional gender roles. Women, with their increasing access to status and power, are becoming more like men. And men, seeing their own possibilities diminished, are forced to exaggerate their physical attractiveness, like women.

It’s an interesting social experiment. But will the long-term effects be good for society? I kind of doubt it.

For the moment, Clavicular is affecting culture in ways that go beyond being good-looking or having big muscles. He has become a leader and spokesman for a whole generation of young men. Where he ultimately takes them remains to be seen.

John Doyle: Why you shouldn't ‘just find a girl at church’

Many young Christian men are familiar with the advice, “Just find your wife at church.”

However, BlazeTV host John Doyle points out that it’s just “an applause line.”

“They are saying that because it feels good to counter modern degenerate dating app culture by saying, ‘You know what you need to do? You need to be trad and you need to go to church. That’s where you’re going to find a good woman, is at church,'” Doyle says on “The John Doyle Show.”

Doyle believes that equality has shown that women “do not come to family as naturally as a lot of people would like to think,” and now those women who do want a family are fewer and farther between.

And too many conservatives make excuses for them.

According to Doyle, those conservatives will say things like, “Well, women actually are obviously desiring to have a family, and ... if [society] would only stop tricking them, then they could go be happy.”

“All of the rhetoric surrounding this issue places women on this pedestal and says, ‘You are not an agent. We cannot hold you accountable. It is only society that has tricked you, and you would be an angel were it not for these people tricking you into making bad decisions,’” Doyle explains.

“I’m not, like, dogging on Christian women. There are plenty of wonderful Christian women. I’m just talking about this kind of online discourse that tends to want to give this advice to these young guys, which I just don’t think is productive,” he says.

“Now, to be clear, I totally understand why people would view church as the best of all options. It seems to be the safest,” he continues, though he points out that there are plenty of churches these days run by “trans lesbian priests” that might not have the best women in attendance.

“Of course, there are plenty of conservative girls who go to church. You would be an idiot to say that’s not the case. Yet that doesn’t mean that every girl or even most girls who go to church are conservative in any meaningful sense,” he says.

“Church attendance really doesn’t tell you that much,” he continues. “It’s literally a meme on Instagram.”

Want more from John Doyle?

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'Trans' teens need someone to care, not 'health care'

Montpelier, Vermont, population 8,000: This is the smallest state capital in the country. If you have seen a postcard of a downtown in Vermont, it’s almost certainly Montpelier.

When I rolled into town in a U-Haul 23 years ago and came through a mountain pass and saw the town, I thought Disney rolled out a series of false fronts of Victorian Americana, because it looked like a movie set.

She was genuinely sweet, polite, and helpful. And she was so obviously a girl on the cusp of a womanhood I fear she will never have.

But when you get out of the car and look closely, you see the cancer. Like most Vermont towns and cities, “woke” has infected the shared public brain. Montpelier is bedecked with trans/queer flags, BLM signs, graffiti exhorting people to “fight the man.”

The city clerk posts on local online forums about how oppressed the “undocumented neighbors” are and how important it is to let them vote in city elections. Until recently there was an upscale, overpriced Marxist (heh) coffee and dessert shop named “Delicious Dissent.” Clenched-fist graphics sat alongside messages like “for the workers” in flowing, girly script painted on the windows.

Meeting 'Johnny'

But the people are even sadder, and “Johnny” is the saddest. She was the teen girl who checked out my order at one of the local markets. “Johnny” is not the name on her tag, but it’s a close approximation. She wore the name tag next to a series of buttons telling onlookers that her pronouns were “he/him” and that “nonbinary identities are valid.”

Readers, I had to leave quickly after my order, because I was tearing up, wishing this poor girl had better influences in her life.

We’re used to young wokesters being snide and socially aggressive; they’re often loud and insufferable. Not Johnny. I didn’t even notice her strange name badge and buttons at first because I was thinking about how unusually polite she was for a store clerk in 2026. Where I live, you are lucky to get eye contact from a clerk. More often, they ignore you, leave you to bag your own order, and stare at their phones while fiddling with the metal bull rings hanging from the middle of their noses.

Johnny was different. “Hi, how are you this evening?” she asked me. I perked up, eager to have that rare pleasant business transaction. We chitchatted about the coming snowstorm as she went through my items. But as I looked at her, my heart got soft and the sadness came.

She was morbidly obese, as are so many people in this town. Not just chubby, but dangerously fat. Heart-attack-by-30 fat. Her breasts were smashed down in a binder (a strap confused women wear when they’re trying to look like a “man”). Her hair had four inches of natural color and bright blue ends that had grown out. It wasn’t washed. Her face was covered with cystic acne, and her uniform hadn’t been cleaned.

Girl, interrupted

“Johnny.” “He/him.” A blind man could not have mistaken this girl for a man. Her voice was a girl’s voice. Her demeanor was feminine. She was genuinely sweet, polite, and helpful. And she was so obviously a girl on the cusp of a womanhood I fear she will never have. How long will it be before she gets “top surgery” — a cosmetic mastectomy — funded by Medicaid through the state? How long until she starts taking testosterone and permanently turns her voice into that frog-kazoo croak that “trans men” develop?

I don’t know anything about Johnny’s home life, but I can make some educated guesses. At absolute best, whatever parents she has neglected her. More likely, they have been actively abusive. No sane, moral parents allow or encourage their teen girl to strap down her breasts, eat to the point of dangerous obesity, never shower, and try to tell the world that she’s a male.

It’s not unlikely that her parent(s), however, actively encourage these morbid choices. Too many people in Vermont are in a state of actual psychosis. They are literally disconnected from reality. They actually believe girls can become men. They genuinely believe that most of us are white supremacists just waiting to lynch one of the approximately seven black people in town.

Bad education

And anyway, once the kids are in the public school system, their glazed-eyed “Karen” teachers encourage their self-destruction.

In 2021, the Burlington School District surveyed the sexual orientation and gender identity views of high school students. Yes. Teachers and adults are asking children who they want to sleep with and whether they believe they’re the opposite sex. Yes, this is child sexual abuse. Yes, they get away with it. Yes, everyone acts as though this is normal and not predatory.

The results, proudly published on the state health department’s website, are shocking. Fully 30% of these kids told survey-takers that they were “LGBTQ+.” Really? Nearly one-third of the students are either homosexual, bisexual, “transgender,” “nonbinary,” or “queer” (whatever the hell that means)?

Between parents who ought to be in prison and teachers, administrators, and health officials, kids like “Johnny” don’t have a chance.

Photo by Michael Kovac/Getty Images for Vanity Fair

Someone cared

Had I been born three decades later than I was, I would have ended up the male version of Johnny. I grew up fatherless, with only a temporary stepfather who beat me senseless and tried to murder my mother after molesting my sister. My mother was deranged with borderline personality disorder and tore through the house like a trailer-park version of Joan Crawford in “Mommie Dearest.”

Unsurprisingly, I turned out to be a homosexual beset with intractable PTSD. By the time I was 13, I had been placed in an institution for being “incorrigible.” That was no day in the park, but it was better than remaining at home with a gorgon wearing a mother mask.

In sixth grade, I remember walking to school one day in an almost catatonic state. I felt nothing. I thought nothing. It’s a hard feeling to describe, but I think “dissociation” is closest. For no reason I can remember, I pulled a red crayon out of my backpack and colored in my lips as if I were a stripper getting ready to perform.

Then I sat down in class and stared at the blackboard. I could hear Ms. Haag’s voice as she gave the lesson, but I heard the mush-mouth of the teacher’s voice in the old Charlie Brown cartoons. When class was over, Ms. Haag pulled a chair up in front of my desk and sat down, looking me in the eye. She held onto my hand and asked, “Josh, why did you put that on your mouth? Is something wrong that you want to talk about?”

“I don’t know” was all I said. And I didn’t know. I still don’t know. But someone cared. My teacher cared. Someone noticed, and someone said something.

A blind eye

There will be no Ms. Haag for today’s Johnnys. When society has been turned upside down, nothing is normal. Beauty is called ugly. Violence is called love. Men are called women. Abuse is called care.

Some grown-up somewhere in Johnny’s life has looked at her and felt what I felt. She wanted to ask Johnny what was wrong, because she could see that something — many things, probably — was terribly wrong. But she can’t. Because if you notice the horror, you are targeted. You’re called a child abuser for objecting to child abuse. You’re called a predator for wanting to shield the innocent. Any genuinely caring teacher who tried to intervene would be fired and then held up for public scorn as a bigoted tormentor of children.

I know how insane this reads, but it’s true. I live here, and I’ve been targeted for speaking out. This is the end-state of a society that runs on boundless narcissism and pathological lying. It’s satanic.

When I left the store with the bag that Johnny packed my order in, I put on my seatbelt and waited for a few minutes because I needed to cry. I wanted to be Johnny’s dad and save her. My God, won’t somebody help her?

All I can do for Johnny is pray, and I have been, even though I confess I’m not sure anyone is listening. Would you pray for her, too?

#USTOO: Men are fed up with female insanity. Here's what they tell me.

Men have a big problem these days: the women in their lives.

Simply put, their wives, mothers, sisters, co-workers, and other female friends have become unbearable.

I know of two licensed mental health counselors, both gay men, who will no longer accept female clients because it is too dangerous to be alone behind closed doors with women. Even if you’re gay.

I know because they've told me. Men come to me as a peer support counselor for private sessions to talk about these issues because they have no other venue where they can discuss them without being punished.

When I wrote about some of their stories, it became the most widely read article I have posted since joining Substack in 2022. It's called “When the women in your family go nuts.”

Deliberately provocative title? Yes. I want the clicks because readers reading what I write is how I get paid.

But I also want to rip the Band-Aid off. How else to describe the refusal of so many women to conform to basic standards of adult behavior — especially in public? Forget politics. These crying, screaming tantrums we constantly witness are no more about "fascism" than a toddler's checkout-line meltdown is about a lollipop. And they deserve as firm a response.

Everyone — women and men — knows this is true. But everyone is afraid to say it out loud.

I'm not.

Female trouble

There was nothing particularly groundbreaking or insightful about my Substack piece. What made it so popular was simply that it recounted the honest, unvarnished experiences of men dealing with female insanity. All without judgment or accusations of "misogyny."

Today I thought I would tell some more of their stories.

Let me warn you up front: This isn't exactly a conservative vs. liberal issue. While most of this behavior occurs in leftist women, even right-wing women in our era are more entitled and expect special female-only deference. Such is life in a society that has been under the stiletto heel of feminist thought since the 1960s.

And needless to say, not all women are like this. I am diagnosing a trend within a population, not condemning an entire sex. So ladies: If you think this doesn't apply to you, it probably doesn't. Although if you find all of this "offensive," you might ask yourself why.

Deadly 'empowerment'

One reason I think it's important to keep pointing this out is that it's getting worse — sometimes with deadly consequences. Take the recent case of Renee Good, the woman shot and killed by an ICE agent last week in Minneapolis.

Good was tailing ICE agents in her car in order to frustrate their attempts to arrest illegal aliens. Video shows her placing her SUV crosswise in the road, mocking officers who ordered her to move, and then seemingly attempting to drive directly into one of them. That officer fired his gun multiple times, killing Good.

Good was a mother and a widow; her senseless death leaves three young children orphans. A sad detail of the incident is that Good's lesbian "wife" was also on the scene and appeared to encourage Good's aggressive behavior right up until she was shot.

This is what happens when a culture pushes "empowerment" without prudence or accountability. Good was so convinced of her own righteousness that she thought it was a good and noble idea to "protest" by weaponizing her car against an officer of the law. Her closest companion egged her on. Good paid the ultimate price.

The man she attacked with her car could just as easily have been killed. And, of course, our attention has now been captured by yet another, instantly "politicized" tragedy only serving to exacerbate the forces tearing America apart.

Photo by Jason Alpert-Wisnia/Hans Lucas/AFP via Getty Images

None of the stories below involve such extremes; thankfully, this isn't the norm. But everyday entitled female behavior does take a toll, destroying relationships, marriages, and careers. And there's no telling when — as in the case of Renee Good — it could erupt into something even worse.

Note: These are composites so that no individual man’s specific story can be identified. But all these scenarios are real.

What’s more, they come from gay men and straight men. Even gay men, who are widely known to have many more female friendships than straight men, are finding their female friendships fraught and, often, too much to take. There’s no difference between the experience of a gay man and a straight man in this area except for the lack of romantic and sexual contact.

Bob, hotel executive

Bob works for a name-brand luxury hotel chain with properties around the world. He’s a vice president in charge of marketing, a field that is overwhelmingly female. His employee Becca has gotten herself into a position of power over her own boss such that he has to do what she says, not the other way around.

Becca accomplished this by turning on the tears the first time Bob rejected some of her work. It was a presentation that met none of the project goals, lacked necessary detail, and took credit for work done by other departments.

Bob told her this, so Becca started crying. This cycle was repeated a few times until Bob told Becca that she needed to complete her assigned tasks like all other employees. So Becca went to HR and filed a complaint that Bob was “aggressive with women.”

The female HR bosses now demand that Bob have “regular check-ins” about his tone with Becca. Bob comes to me in frustration because no one will listen to him because he’s a man. He can’t talk to Becca like an adult; he can’t hold her to standards. And now he has to do her work, too, because if the project isn’t completed, the client won’t pay for it.

Sam, husband

Sam has been married for 14 years and has three daughters with his wife, Courtney. Sam describes what kind of woman Courtney was in the beginning of their marriage: smart, humorous, considerate, and as into him as he was into her.

Over the course of their marriage, Courtney’s leftist Democrat politics have gone to the extreme edge. Not a day goes by that she doesn’t complain out loud about the “fascist dictator Donald Trump.” She blows up Sam’s phone with Facebook threads while demanding to know if Sam has "something to say about your president.”

She has now taken to criticizing his hobby in the garage, calling it “dangerous” and saying Sam has no right to “endanger our family with chemicals like that in the garage.” Sam’s hobby is building model tabletop gasoline engines. Courtney gets hysterical about Sam keeping a red one-gallon can of gasoline in the garage (no, she doesn’t fear the 20-gallon gasoline tank in her SUV that is also in the garage), telling him he is putting the family at risk of “an explosion.”

Meanwhile, Sam’s three daughters, all adolescents, talk to him like he’s a servant. They mouth off, refuse to complete tasks, and complain to their mother that their dad is “too strict” and doesn’t “validate" their feelings.

Sam loves Courtney, but he can’t understand what she has become. He suspects Courtney does not love him any more and thinks she doesn’t respect him as a fellow adult. Sadly, I told Sam that I think he’s right. It’s obvious that Courtney doesn’t respect him, and women who love their husbands don’t treat them this way.

Sam’s lot is to figure out how he can prevent his teenage daughters from becoming as emotionally unstable and entitled as their mother has become. Frankly, I don’t think he can.

Gary, piano teacher

Gary taught piano for years at a Midwestern university. In middle age, he is the classic “sensitive, artistic man.” His manner and affect are gentle and soft-spoken. He likes to get lost in sheet music and is visibly transported when he plays. All of this is to say that to most people, Gary reads as “gay.” And he is. And everyone knows this.

One of his female students, Cindy, decided that she did not like Gary’s assignments and did not like the less-than-A grades he gave to her class work. She started her campaign against him by saying he didn’t speak to her “respectfully,” a charge she leveled whenever he told her that her work did not meet standards.

Gary did not cave. He did not inflate her grades. Cindy escalated by going to the student services office and claiming that Gary was “being creepy” and “seemed to be making sexual jokes and advances” at her during conferences in his office. Remember, readers, everyone at the university knows that Gary is a homosexual.

Yet Cindy’s complaint was taken seriously, and Gary went through a Title IX investigation. While he was eventually cleared, he wasn’t really cleared. His reputation was ruined at the university, and he can’t get a job at another school because that reputational smear has spread throughout the musical academic world.

Gary is now doing odd landscaping jobs to pay his mortgage.

Gary isn’t the only gay man successfully accused of sexually harassing women. I know of two licensed mental health counselors, both gay men, who will no longer accept female clients because it is too dangerous to be alone behind closed doors with women. Even if you’re gay.

Alex, aspiring husband and father

Alex is in his 30s and hopes to get married and have kids, but despairs of being able to achieve that. Everyone in his age group finds their mates with dating apps instead of meeting people in the real world, but it hasn’t worked out well for Alex.

“You can’t even hint that you’re a conservative on those apps, or women will reject you,” he told me during one session. “Then they tell other women on the app that you’re a fascist who loves Trump the dictator and that you’re a misogynist who will hurt women.”

During the few real-life dates Alex managed to arrange through the app, the same behavior came out at a restaurant, only more slowly. He would meet an attractive woman for a dinner out, and sooner or later she would find a way to turn the conversation to his politics. This is the notorious “s**t test” that women today inflict on men to sniff out the bad troglodyte conservatives.

Alex told me about a date with an attractive, witty woman that went south when he told her what he was looking for: a wife and children in their own home, in the traditional way. His date heard something different. According to her, Alex had exposed himself as a “regressive” and “misogynist” patriarch. She had more self-respect than to spend time with a man who wanted her pregnant and chained to the kitchen, she said, and walked away.

I could give you dozens more true-to-life scenarios like these. While it is true that my client base is self-selecting — these guys aren’t coming to me because they’re happy with their lives — their experiences mirror the experiences that men from all walks of life are talking about.

This isn’t an extreme fringe, and it’s not “mostly lol/lmao incel baby men who live in Mommy’s basement.” To the extent that these men are involuntarily celibate, it’s largely because modern women don’t want men. They want gelded, feminized, diffident milk rags who spout things like “happy wife, happy life.”

Except they don’t. Not really. Women, deep down, want what women have always wanted. They want strong, assertive men who can provide for the family and protect the women and children. They want this because it’s natural and hardwired into our biology. Feminism is a lie, but it’s a lie that has permanently ruined the chance for happiness in the lives of millions of men and women.

I don’t know what to “prescribe” to change this problem. I don’t know how we get there, but I have some ideas about what needs to change in order for American men and women to build fulfilling lives with each other again.

The family has to be put first again, not last.
Leftist derision of traditional family values needs to be loudly mocked and excoriated. It’s time those on that side are made to pipe down the way they’ve been shutting up the right since the 1960s. Or, in Archie Bunker terms, “stifle it.”
Men have to stop accepting this shrew behavior from women. And they have to take the risk of being called “misogynist” in the interim period while women scream and object. We have to go through the problem and take the wounds before we can get to peace on the other side.
Sane women (and there are a lot of them; they tend to be married with children and conservative) will need to put social pressure on the bitch contingent. Don’t maintain friendships with women like this, and tell them why. Defend your husbands and the male sex when your girlfriends talk them down. Turn their mean-girl rhetoric right back on them.

Readers, what’s your prescription?