The relations between the sexes are ending – the reason is not technology

For over two decades now the frequency of sex between men and women has been continuously dropping in young people. A study from 2020 that analyzed data collected between 2016 to 2018 has reported that 31% of guys in the age of 18 to 24, and 19% of girls of that age, did not have sex in the year preceding the study. While among guys this was a 63% increase in sexlessness, from 19% in 2002 to 31% today, for girls the change was much smaller, from 15% to 19% today. That is, sexlessness is currently 63% higher in guys than in girls, while in 2002 it was 26% higher in guys; in the 1970s it was probably reversed and lower in guys than in girls, making the shift an extremely dramatic and radical one. During the period between 2002 and 2018, in men aged 25-34 there was a doubling in sexlessness from 7% to 14%, compared to a smaller rise in women from 7% to 12%, that again recapitulates the reversal of sexlessness between the sexes, from a flipping-point in 2002 when the rates where the same. Another study, from 2017, which surveyed over 26,000 respondents in the US and assessed the change in sexlessness between 1989 and 2014, also demonstrated a decline in sex, and noted that it was the strongest in those born in the 90s.

The cessation of sexual intimacy between men and women is part of a wider rupture at the heart of their relations. For several decades now the notion of living as a couple has been continuously diminishing in the West. During 200 years of industrialization and urbanization, the number of people living alone increased only slowly, but then, from the 1970s until 2020 the proportion of individuals living alone has rocketed exponentially and reached in western cities up to 60% of homes, that is, the majority of cities households (see figure).

At the same time, over the same decades the prevalence of loneliness has been growing exponentially and doubled itself, and more so in the generation that grew up into this era, in which for the first time younger people are lonelier than the elderly. In the United States the anxiety and loneliness of young women have doubled compared to the former generation, reaching almost 60% of them – the same portion of those aged 35 and under who live without a spouse.

Feminists were the first to blame the disconnect between the sexes on technology, citing the availability of porn and dating apps. However, this idea has a grave problem.

The problem is, that attributing the cessation in relations to technology contradicts a very specific and consistent set of data. If technology had the impact feminism attributes to it there should have been a decline in relations in all parts of society that use this technology, namely, in homosexual men and women as well; after all, straight and gay people use the same technology. But the findings show the very opposite. Between the years 1990-2014, the same period examined in one of the studies described above, sexual activity doubled in gay men from 4% to 8% and in gay women from 3% to 8%. LGBT researchers have done much more than finding an association here – they have shown that the cause for the doubling in homosexual activity is technology, that is, that the impact of technology on relations is of increasing it, not decreasing it.

This should come as no surprise. Technology allows communication with thousands of people and thus increases possibilities, and ultimately the ability to find matches. Of course, there are all kinds of differences between gays and straights that might have caused these startling outcomes that completely contradict the idea which feminists were quick to propose – that the cessation of the relations should be attributed to technology. But one such difference which is possibly the most prominent gap between the gay and straight populations when we discuss cessation of sexuality, is that only one of the two was at the center of attention of a social movement which made sexuality and couplehood its primary target.

For decades, a social movement has persistently presented relations as harmful, while gradually ruling out an ever-growing part of the gestures of the language of sexuality by calling more and more of its letters (looks, hints, flirting) “violence” and by presenting its tokens as expressing “hate”, meaning they must be eliminated. The regulation of all aspects of intimate relations by this social movement was never directed at the courtship of gay men and women. Only straights were increasingly subjected to an explicit, detailed, relentless deletion of token after token of the subtle gestures of the language used by men and women to engage sexually, without which, it is expected that they will be unable to communicate their sexuality and their relations will cease. Only straight relations were the target of a social movement that persistently disseminated a perception of couplehood, that is, of love, as harmful by essence, and therefore as something that should cease to exist. That movement, is called feminism.

The rise and growth of a concentrated effort by feminists to target the relations could have been just an accidental accumulation of actions, but the fact that right at the onset of feminism in the 1970s, feminists declared that their goal is ending the relations between the sexes, leaves no room for such a possibility – feminism was organized against the relations because ending them was indeed a declared goal from its very inception, and for many, the goal.

A founding mother of feminism named Betty Friedan, announced in a book published in 1963 under the title The Feminine Mystique (26,421 Goodreads ratings), that marriage is for women what the concentration camps were for the Jewish people – “…women who ‘adjust’ as housewives, who grow up wanting to be ‘just a housewife,’ are in as much danger as the millions who walked to their own death in the concentration camps… they are suffering a slow death of mind and spirit.” Kate Millet, a feminist known for a book from 1970 called Sexual Politics (3,512 Goodreads ratings) is quoted writing, “The complete destruction of traditional marriage and the nuclear family is the revolutionary or utopian goal of feminism.”

Although feminists phrased their goal in terms of ending marriage, a framing which conservatives immediately internalized, the feminist attack was and is, not against marriage itself, but rather on the very existence of romantic relations between the two sexes that entail a shared life. Marriage was the bearer of the battering only because this was how couplehood existed when the feminist attack began in the 1960s and 1970s. Feminists attempted to assign to marriage those attributes of relationships which they regarded as women’s oppression, but if we examine those aspects, we find that they have nothing to do with marriage – these are simply the features of living as a couple regardless of whether the relations are formalized or not.

A staggering example where a feature of any couplehood is attributed to marriage is a quote from a book called The Female Eunuch (6,663 Goodreads ratings) by a feminist named Germaine Greer, considered another founding mother of feminism: “A housewife’s work has no results: it simply has to be done again. Bringing up children is not a real occupation, because children come up just the same, brought up or not.” Aside from the fallacy at the end which contradicts everything feminists believe in about programming human beings from infancy as if humans are biological Turing machines, this quote cites a price that most people have to pay to share their life with another human being – that is, repetitiveness that carries little personal growth or interest. This is attributed to marriage, while in fact it is a consequence of living as a couple, since couples usually have children and children require taking care of and a livelihood, both practices being in most lives, repetitive and non-cumulative, in the sense that a monumental creation will not be left after the relentless daily efforts – most of humanity will not be Andy Warhol. We may also observe how the feminist fails to realize that from the work the man performs at a shoelaces factory daily even less comes out – he operates his mind and body as if he was a machine to execute repetitive movements and thoughts – the feminist is so incapable of regarding him as a human being that she believes that what she sees, is what he is – a machine (feminists were incapable of humanizing men even enough to observe that both sexes commit the same level of sacrifice, albeit in sometimes different ways, for love).

The example given above is typical of the books mentioned. Mutual loyalty which is a mutual sacrifice in relationships in general, gays included, is described in feminism as a sacrifice only women are providing and as resulting only from marriage. Showing intimacy without always feeling sexual attraction in order to provide emotional and physical care to a loved one, which is done by men just as often and is a feature of long-lasting relationships, is attributed to formal marriage (and equated with slavery after being discussed as something only women engage in). Even the sheer boredom of the life of most ordinary people, that most humans will endure with or without couplehood, is attributed to marriage (and treated as a hardship only women undergo and blamed on men, while the fact that men are just as tormented by the essential futility of most lives is ignored, because of the typical inability to think of men as having the same humanity as women).

All those dimensions of couplehood that feminists regarded as woman’s slavery resulting from the concept of marriage, are things that accompany any long-lasting couplehood and are not unique to marriage (nor to women, nor to women living with men; those aspects of sharing one’s life with another are recorded in gay couples of both sexes when they have a long-lasting relationship, especially with children). Conservatives who sprang to the rescue of their religious beliefs about marriage in response to the feminist focus on the term “marriage”, caused society to ignore the fact that the feminist attack was not at all against the specific arrangement called marriage, but against any long-term committed relations between the sexes. The feminist would accept the statement I’ve just made and only request to replace “any” with “the” – she would contend that feminists were troubled by the specific features of couplehood “at the time”, and not with couplehood in general, but this is precisely the fatal feminist mistake that eventually ended the relations, because of two misunderstandings it entails – first, these are indeed the features of any couplehood including between gays because living as a couple involves compromise, when being considerate, and secondly, the sacrifices are of both sexes and not “female slavery” (only dehumanization of men prevented feminists from seeing that). It is thus any long-lasting relationship between the sexes that was targeted. Marriage was put at the center of attention only because this is how men and women used to share their lives when the attack began.

Many influential feminists were open about the feminist goal of ending the very existence of relations between the sexes – a cessation of heterosexuality. Andrea Dworkin, a name known to probably every living feminist, announced in her 1974 book Women Hating (1,203 Goodreads ratings) that “women live with those who oppress them, sleep with them, have their children – we are tangled, hopelessly it seems, in the gut of the machinery and way of life which is ruinous to us”, and later declared in her book Intercourse that came out in 1987 (1,901 Goodreads ratings) that “Intercourse is the pure, sterile, formal expression of men’s contempt for women.” Another example is a paper published in 1980 by a feminist named Adrienne Rich who disseminated an idea she termed “compulsory heterosexuality“, which refers to her conviction that relations between the sexes are artificial and that their very existence is oppression.

Women who wish to believe that feminism is something else than that, would want to argue that “this is not feminism”, however, by that they will be ignoring the fact that based on this anti-heterosexual feminism, in the last three decades feminists popularized the idea of “you don’t need a man” (hundreds of thousands of examples can be found online, as here, here, here, here, and here; a song titled “I don’t need a man” reached 100 million views), creating within feminism a culture which is best described as a “Women Going Their Own Way” movement, WGTOW (to which men, when left alone by WGTOW, have responded a decade or so later with forced acceptance by creating their own GTOW, that is, MGTOW). The “this is not feminism” reflex is the further denial of the fact that over the past two decades the WGTOW feminism grew increasingly stronger until it took over all of feminism and raised its banner over every feminist establishment and forum in the aftermath of Me Too.

Most women were most of the time unaware of the feminist manifestos where the objective of ending all relations had been announced and declared. Since it was evidently clear to feminists that if women were to be informed about such a goal they will be reluctant to collaborate, those involved in popularizing feminism made a habit of disseminating to women messages that made feminist ideas on courtship and couplehood seem related to equality, rights or healthy relationships with men, while in fact those advice and decrees were derived from the concept that all relations must end and conceived with that goal in mind. Women were not advised as to the actual purpose, and of the desired and expected consequences, of the messages ingrained in them. Feminists were not planning to share that with them. Hence, what was written above is not that women willingly adopted views with an intention of ending all sexes relations – they internalized and implemented perceptions designed to lead to that, while thinking that these notions are related to equality and to healthy relationships. Feminists disseminated to women their views in a patronizing manner – or a matronizing manner – without sharing the underlying motivation and inevitable outcomes. What arguments were given to women to cause them to unknowingly help feminism accomplish its goal of ending the relations between the sexes, and in what way were they false? We will now take a quick dive into four short examples.

“Marriage benefits mostly men – here, look, married men live longer than unmarried men but married women don’t live longer than unmarried women”. The conclusion that marriage benefits only men can’t be deduced from these data – women don’t tend to marry sick poor men and sick poor men live less than rich healthy men. Those men who do marry tend to be healthier, lead a less risky life and have more access to health services and thus live longer.

“Most divorces are initiated by women – proof that marriage is not good for women”. Feminism is encouraging women for decades in every means possible to divorce. Because of the feminist view of marriage as captivity, it formed in the legal system an entire set of incentives for women to divorce, so that at least some women would actually benefit more from a divorce than from staying in a good (normal, human) relationship (we are not discussing here a simple benefit, but those cases were laws enable a woman to obtain her spouse’s basic resources such as his home shortly after the marriege and without children). Feminism likewise encouraged women to think lightly of divorce, and generated social norms of treating reasons that society would not accept from a man as grounds for a divorce, as perfectly understandable if a woman is divorcing because of them (if a man initiates a divorce because he is “bored”, society regards it as abandoning his responsibilities, but “boredom” is considered a more than adequate reason for a woman to divorce; the same goes for losing attraction or having a dream to fulfill – feminism generated social scrutiny on these for men alongside wide social acceptance of these for women). At the same time, feminism made it extremely dangerous for men to divorce – a normative man will be taking the risk of being left without a home, finding himself on a bench in the park, or even being suspected of abuse or arrested just because he wanted a divorce, which means that even under extreme conditions such as infidelity or physical or mental abuse, men will be afraid to file for a divorce. Thus women had incentives to initiate divorces and men an opposite incentive to be afraid of initiating it, resulting in the majority of divorces being initiated by women, because of feminist actions, not because of men. In other words, feminists created the circumstances that resulted in much higher woman-initiated divorce rates compared to man-initiated, and then raised a pointing finger, directed it at their own making and said to women – “See? Proof that marriage and couplehood are not good for women”.

“Living as a couple is like having another child in the house, just more burden – it’s actually easier to raise a child on your own”. This is a false description of child-rearing and of couplehood. Women who raise children alone, unless they are the 1% of millionaires who let others care for their children for them, are constantly on the verge of collapse. As the father of a 6 years-old boy I can attest that children, especially when they are babies and toddlers, require second by second attention, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, year after year after year. Married women have someone to share the burden with, and it is immaterial whether this comes in the form of doing the same chores or through splitting responsibilities (for example, one person working and the other taking care of the children, or both working and looking after the kids, either in a similar way, or, each in specific things – one taking to the park, another making food for the baby). Regardless of how the man functions, be it only at work or at home and at work, he takes away a considerable part of the burden. There’s no way of measuring whether “it’s half”, and it’s immaterial. In a loving relationship, each knows the needs of the other and both try to help each other, not to compete against each other. They have the same goal after all. It is a feminist misrepresentation of reality, that women are “better off alone” because “a man is just another child”. It is matronizing, and misleading.

“There’s no need to have a man as a father – women can function as fathers”. Children receive different necessary nurturing from fathers and mothers and both inputs are imperative for them. No, women cannot function as fathers, with all due exceptions, and fatherless children have an extremely higher probability of a host of problems in both boys and girls. Every mother knows that children must be guided and handled, but, that children reject rules and limitations, and, that fathers are authoritative enough to make children accept basic rules necessary for their functioning and for their health and well-being (more accurately, men seem to perceive callenges to their authority more calmly and this calmness is the very projection of authority, or confidence; while almost every person who worked under a woman has probably noticed that women are often paralyzed when their authority is being challanged causing them to react aggressively or more generally without self-control, which has the opposite effect, of dissolving a person’s authority; if this triggers the latter procces again, an escalation-loop is formed). Women who attempt to provide this necessary authority, find themselves fighting the child, and for lack of better options resort to “you are hurting your mother”. This is not a healthy self-perception to create in a child, but women who attempt to function as fathers have no other choice. The result is devastating for the child, who instead of learning to control herself or himself (which will be necessary for them in order to follow their plans in the future), learns that she or he are essentially bad, instead of good and apt. The fact of the matter is that the feminist message to women is false. Men and women are not interchangeable, manhood and womanhood do exist and are innate. Generally speaking and with due exceptions, a woman cannot be a father, and children need, yes, both a father and a mother (this has no bearing on gay marriage. Mothers and fathers can have arrangements that allow the child to have both a mother and a father).

It is ludicrous to try and ignore the causal chain. Feminism announces in the 1970s that its goal is ending the relations between the sexes; feminists spend five decades disseminating to women and girls misrepresentations of data to drive them to actions that generate feminism’s declared goal (encouraging to divorce, discouraging any couplehood, unrealistically idealizing singlehood, as well as suppressing and misrepresenting data on depression and anxiety that result from loneliness and figures on damage to boys and girls raised without fathers); feminists methodically ban letter by letter, the subtle language that both sexes have for communicating desires and sexual interest, by womansplaining men to women in saying to women that what men feel when expressing the tokens, is hate (these are the same tokens used by women in flirting and which women know from introspection that come from desire and attraction and not from “hate” – looks, hints, light touch), until the sexes are left with no code for engaging one another intimately and sexually; WGTOW-feminism slowly spreads until it becomes in the last decade and a half practically all of feminism; feminism gradually becomes more prominent in society until “feminist” – now meaning mostly a WGTOW who treats relations as harmful and the language of sexuality as violence and hate – is regarded as the social definition of a moral person; sexuality and relations between men and women cease and diminish.

When a declared goal of feminism is to end the relations and feminism then vigorously performs actions meant explicitly to achieve that until society internalizes the actions and regards them as “moral imperatives”, then feminism is what causes the decline in the relations between men and women, by banning the language humans have to communicate about sex and love and by inciting women and girls against relations with men with misrepresentation of data. Attributing the looming end of the relations, that is of love, to “technology”, while the very same technology doubled relations in groups not regulated and targeted by feminists – gays and lesbians – should be added under the dictionary definition of “gas-lighting” as the archetypal practical example.

Since the hold of feminism in its WGTOW form over Western societies only grows stronger and no criticism is allowed in the mainstream – in the media or in culture, in the academia or in education – its effect is not a temporary deviation. It is leading to a species-wide divorce. This, as shown above, was, and is, the goal that feminism progressively crystalized around.

If you only intended to be an “equalist” and not to support a species-wide separation, you might want to call yourself a lovist, and not a feminist. Because like it or not, and one must also add – unfortunately for some of the original aims of early feminism – a species-wide divide is what you support when you support feminism. The WGTOW feminism is a strong movement with a high amount of control over the centers of power – I assure you that every person who attempted to “change feminism from within” only got to feel that power personally – through isolation, firing from work, an end to a career, termination of friendships. There is no way to “change feminism from within”, it is too powerful. You can only change the course society takes, by showing to as many people as possible that a person who supports equality is called a humanist – or a lovist when he applies universal humanism specifically to the two sexes – not a feminist, and hope that enough people abandon feminism to join you in equality and love, under a definition of equality as in lovism – equal opportunity and without any hatred toward any sex.

Ultimately, we must keep being thinking and feeling individuals, whether we are men or women, liberals or conservatives, and understand that the feminist attack is simply against love, not against marriage specifically. This attack is not something to try and justify or rationalize – it is a charge against the most basic and fundamental human need – the need for love.

Abandoning feminism does not mean in any way letting go of equality – not at all! Equality was created much before feminism, by humanism (the vote, equal pay laws, the exodus into the workplace, international women’s day – all were accomplished by humanists, of both sexes, decades before feminism appeared), and this will continue after feminism. And, the intimate relations, which are not addressed by general humanism (as it articulated the relations between the individual and the state, and seldomly between two individuals), are likewise not addressed by feminism – these intimate relations require not a one-sided movement that believes in fear and force, but a mutual and shared perception which is based on listening and understanding, like lovism, otherwise it won’t work. Just say it – “I’m not a feminist! I’m a lovist! I don’t support only women – I support both sexes!” If you can’t say it, how do you expect to find love in this world, when you endorse a system of hatred toward men that aspires to end all relations between the sexes? Within lovism, men and women will be able to talk together about what’s important to each of them and about what hurts each of them, and you will be protected through empathy and solidarity instead of attempting to gain protection from instilling hate and fear as feminism tries. Feminism is not providing you with anything of what you want, your goals are not its goals. If equality, consideration, safety and love are what you wish for, you are a lovist. So say it, “I’m a lovist!” If women and men won’t say it, together, we are headed toward a complete disconnect between the sexes, an end to relations, the end of love. Not toward any of the wishes you imagined feminism aims to fulfill.