Feminism Told Women They Didn’t Need Men – Now They’re Dining Alone, Writing Op-Eds, and Wondering Where Everyone Went

The New York Times is, once again, baffled. This time, over the timeless issue of romance. Yesterday, the mystified Grey Lady ran a poignant, but querulous, story headlined, “Men, Where Have You Gone? Please Come Back.” I could have just told the author: they ran away, terrified! But that would spoil the takedown. And the comments were closed, so she isn’t listening anyway. Anyway, she has her own theory. Hint: it’s all men’s fault:

 
The piece’s writer, Rachel Drucker, 53, described herself as a divorced former custodian of records for Playboy Magazine. Thanks to her smut-peddling experience, she’s become an expert on men. Or at least, that’s what she thinks. “I came to understand,” Rachel lectured readers, “in exact terms, what cues tempt the average 18-to-36-year-old cis heterosexual man.”

But alas! At 53, Rachel’s bag of transactional smut-peddling tricks is empty. Or at least, she’s shot past the 18-36 runway. Rachel now lives in a rom-com. She described her New York life as though she were a main character in Sex and the City. After one gentleman politely excused himself at the last minute from a date, she got dolled up anyway and took herself out for dinner. Rachel doesn’t need a man!

But the tragedy was, reading between the lines, somewhere between the grilled artichoke hearts and the vermouth spritz, she’d obviously pined for an accidental meet-cute with a male version of herself, maybe one who’d also been stood up for a date, and they would serendipitously bond over chardonnay and their mutual misfortunes.

But it was not to be. No epiphany with a stranger. Just the check. Worse, the neo-Carrie Bradshaw found the restaurant packed almost entirely with other liberal women. Only other protagonists. No eligible bachelor co-stars of any kind, even already-taken ones.

Men, Rachel concluded, “weren’t sitting across from someone on a Saturday night, trying to connect. They were scrolling. Dabbling. Disappearing.”

Rather than producing any self-reflection, Rachel’s experiences led her to wonder: what is wrong with men? It was her piece’s quiet fulcrum, the tell or giveaway. Blame others. There’s zero indication that Drucker ever questions the dominant feminist narrative of the last two decades, nor wonders if the “quiet confidence” she admires in the restaurant’s other single, liberal women might feel, from across the gender aisle, like impenetrability or even contempt.

Rachel’s surfeit of unself-awareness wasn’t just the article’s signature, it was its explanation. At one point, Rachel described having “James” on the hook, trading tentative text messages, feeling a spark of promise and a shiver of excited possibility. But it wasn’t happening fast enough. So Rachel pushed for more. “I named what I felt. I texted him clearly, with care, not simply to declare attraction but to extend a real invitation to explore what was possible.”

He ghosted her.

In Rachel’s frame, her pushy texts weren’t controlling— they were a sign of emotional leadership. Through her AWFL lens, she interpreted her initiative not as pressure, but as generous and reasonable. (Portland readers: AWFL=Affluent, White Female Liberals.) When ‘James’ didn’t reciprocate, his silence became further proof of male failure, passivity, and avoidance, which Rachel contemptuously called “directionless orbiting.”

Maybe James, like so many other men today, is wary not of intimacy— but of progressive scripts. Of being drafted into someone else’s post-feminist storyline the moment he lingers too long on a glance. Or says the wrong thing, or even nothing at all.

Lacking any semblance of empathy, Rachel has no curiosity in, or time for, considering the male experience. Instead of assuming male absence was proof of dysfunction, the former Playboy records custodian might instead have considered the possibility that, by vanishing, men are exercising agency. Not disappearing so much as choosing something different. Silence is, after all, a form of polite refusal.

Beyond its superficial lament for missing male companionship, Rachel Drucker’s piece was a quiet, stylish elegy for the AWFLs themselves. Beneath the carefully curated pathos arose a more subtle grief: the mourning of a cohort of lonely liberal women who followed the progressive script, built their careers, kept themselves radiant and emotionally literate, and yet somehow wound up alone at the restaurant, surrounded by others just like them.

 
AWFL women were promised —by feminism 2.0, by culture, by prestige media like the Times— that if they became independent, confident, discerning, self-aware, and empowered, the rest would follow. Sure, patriarchal Prince Charming might not show up, but his liberal, emotionally available cousin would. The even-steven relationship would be better. Mutual. Adult. Female-focused.

But beyond that empty promise lies an even bigger falsehood. The AWFLs were assured they would never need men anyway. A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle. But now the bicycle’s gone missing, and the fish are writing op-eds wondering why the ocean feels so empty.

Hello! Rachel! You told men their services were no longer needed! You sneered that their masculinity was toxic in the workplace. Then they stopped showing up for work. Surprise! Consequences, meet cause.

AWFLs created a zero-sum game where they always win, and wonder why men don’t want to play. Under their AWFL rules, if a man leads, he’s controlling, but if he follows, he’s weak. If he pursues, he’s creepy—if he doesn’t, he’s cowardly. If he wins, it’s problematic. If he loses, it’s unattractive. Heads, she’s empowered. Tails, he’s inadequate.

If we want to explain the explosion of men —especially young men— flocking to MAGA, look no further than Rachel Drucker. Thank you, AWFLs. The broader MAGA ethos offers men something feminized liberalism never has: respect for masculinity. Strength, protection, risk-taking, family provision— under MAGA, those are not patriarchal threats; they are cherished virtues.

Behold, Vanity Fair, two weeks prior to Trump’s re-election:

 
“Young men,” said Charlie Kirk, 31, “are profoundly more conservative than people would have expected and, in fact, are the most conservative generation of young men in 50 years. They want to be part of a political movement that doesn’t hate them.”

Paging David Hogg. Hogg played the game, tried to lead, and they took away his man card. Wait. They didn’t just take his man card; they shredded it, recycled it, and used it to print another DEI pamphlet.

Which brings us to the ghost in the machine, and the Democrats’ most durable and problematic contradiction. Democrats originally recruited women with a seductive, post-feminist message: you don’t need men. For some women, that might be true. But the maximalist message that no women need men contained its own self-destruct script: men are unnecessary.

In other words, if women don’t need men, why does anybody?

If they’d been smart, and not drunk on their own cultural momentum, the Democrats could have tempered the post-feminist narrative with a complementary message honoring male worth, rather than discarding it like a used, Y-chromosome, Starbucks mochachino cup.

Democrats never filled in the masculine blank. They just told liberal men, “thanks for everything, fellas. Your services are no longer required. Here’s a podcast and a prescription.” Feminism was smart enough to point out that “Housewives aren’t just housewives—they do important, unpaid labor.” But feminism, not as emotionally intelligent as it thought, was too moronic to follow that with, “…and husbands aren’t just breadwinners— they protect, sacrifice, and stabilize.”

Until very recently, the no-man message won elections, since party affiliations are sticky, and the timid GOP feared angering feminist harpies. (And who can blame them?) But, instead of balance, the no-men message demanded cultural reversal. Instead of equality, it demanded erasure. And men, increasingly pathologized, began to opt out of relationships, institutions, and even political engagement, in droves … until Trump lit the bat signal.

The most terrifying development, which gives Democrats sleepless nights in bafflement and confusion, is the organically growing social media army of TradWife Influencers. In case you haven’t heard of it, it’s a cultural countercurrent in which young women publicly embrace and celebrate traditional gender roles, especially in marriage and family life. It’s not a political party, but a lifestyle posture, a social media aesthetic, and a rebuke of fourth-wave feminism, all cheerfully wrapped in a homemade dress.

 
You’ll find TradWives blossoming on TikTok, kneading bread, wearing flowery gingham dresses, quoting Scripture, and extolling the joys of submitting to their husbands and having dinner ready and the house clean when he gets home from work. To say TradWives annoy feminists and progressives is like saying the odd Iranian missile tends to stir up the Israelis.

In other words, TradWifery is not just opposition to feminism. It’s an existential threat.

Progressives know it. But they are trapped. They appear flummoxed and terrified by TradWives. They never saw this coming. Worse, the average TikTok TradWife doesn’t argue with feminism. She doesn’t debate. She just smiles, bakes a pie, raises well-mannered children, praises her husband— and then posts a slow-motion video of folding laundry while whispering Proverbs 31 into the algorithms.

Set aside the vexing question of whether TradWifery is good or bad for the movement. Consider instead the alternative ideals that the two parties offer to young men. From about age 12 onward, male attention locks on one singular goal with laser clarity: attracting, impressing, connecting with, and “interacting” with women. (More delicately: winning the interest of girls they desire.)

Men want women.

MAGA (decorated with attractive promises like TradWives) offers young men a clear script. Be strong, be competent, be a provider. In return, get admiration, feminine warmth, loyalty, and—yes—sex. It offers them an attractive, romantic vision: Wife, kids, hearths, hearts, legacy, respect, and love. Purpose and pleasure.

 
Meanwhile, Democrats and their faltering progressive culture offer only ambiguity. What even is a man? Progressivism reduces manhood to a lack of boobs and a fake phallus. Modern liberal dating is even worse: Mandatory consent seminars, tattooed feminists, emotional manipulation to date trans men, chronic fear of offending, recurrent false rape accusations, and skeptical partners programmed to expect male failure.

Democrat advice to liberal men is equally muddled and frankly, doesn’t work. Progressive men are told to be vulnerable— but not too soon, not too needily, and without expecting anything in return. Liberal men must respect women’s independence while somehow still impressing them, without guidelines, roadmaps, or successful examples to follow.

Put yourself in a young man’s shoes. It’s 2025, and you’re 22. Which side would you choose?

Young men aren’t just defecting from Democrat politics. They’re defecting from secular modernity. From its rootless, performative, hyper-individualistic consumer culture. They’re not just changing their votes— they’re changing their values, aesthetics, goals, and gods.

 
Young men are trading Burning Man for the Orthodox Church. While progressive denominations are shrinking, traditional denominations are swelling. Surprisingly, in three different mainline Baptist services I’ve attended in the last thirty days, the pastors have delivered full-throated sermons on Biblical marital submission— an Ephesians 5 topic they used to avoid like the plague.

Don’t misread me: I’m not lecturing anybody about submission or anything else. I’m just a lawyer, not a theologian or a marital counselor. I’m merely observing the moment, and how disastrous this moment is for the Democrats.

But in case it’s a foreign concept, as I understand it, Biblical submission isn’t about domination or power structures— it’s about alignment, mutual trust, male leadership, and spiritual gravity. And it seems a lot of people —men and women alike— are starving for that kind of clarity and want out of the cesspool of subjective moral ambiguity.

 
Yesterday, the Daily Chaos (Kos) ran a bleak, blamey story headlined, “Why men are a problem for Democrats—and what we can do about it.” But they still don’t get it. According to Kos, “Men are a serious problem for Democrats — and for our hopes of building a more progressive America.”

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