This stunning statistic comes to us courtesy of a viral essay by Costin Alamariu, a Yale-educated Right-wing philosopher and eugenicist, who is interested in the problems of breeding “high-human-capital” individuals. Alamariu writes in a distinctive typo-larded and grammatically scrambled style, under the nom de plume Bronze Age Pervert, or BAP, and has been one of the influential figures in the rise of hyper-masculinism and the return of biological vitalism on the Right. (Men of the Bronze Age don’t use spellcheck, get it?)

BAP believes that egalitarian, collectivist, female-led torpor has been the human norm since prehistory — echoing Camille Paglia’s statement that “if civilization had been left in female hands, we would still be living in grass huts” — and that Western civilization has been a fluke, the fragile accomplishment of the violent seizure of power by a naturally (genetically) excellent male-warrior-aristocrat class. Such rule is inherently patriarchal, violent, expansionist, racialist, and misogynist, he believes — but it has been responsible for the flowers of human culture, from technology to the Renaissance. Our current “gyno-gerontocracy” — rule by women and old people — hello, Biden-Harris ticket — represents a return to the droopy baseline. BAP is pessimistic that the state of affairs can be changed, but the solution, as he sees it, is selective breeding of elite humans. 

But how to persuade the high-human-capital women, who BAP believes are responsible for the population drain in the upper echelons, to have more sex and more babies? 

The answer is turning “the anxious professional female” on to penis-worship, the celebration of male beauty, and pagan-style orgiastic sex cults. The non-fertile female type, he says, is one we’re all familiar with: “an intelligent, articulate woman, not bad-looking has a series of monogamous relationships, often including cohabitation…. None of these ‘work out,’ none result in children. At some point she realizes she’s 44 and childless. Why … I’m not sure even she knows.” 

What these ladies need is not “reason, civic consciousness, and state law,” but an “obscure or even occult” remedy: an inspiration to penis-worship, and an increase of ecstatic sexuality, sexual frenzy, fuck-craziness, glamor and vigor. “Impregnation and births come from the erect phallus, and from … the male instinct and male sexual desire,” he writes. Only hot young men can “reignite fertility” in young women, using the device endowed to them by nature.

As an anxious professional woman of somewhat this demographic, I have no love for the individualism and nihilism of the manosphere, but: this is an excellent idea. 

The lack of frenzied penis-worship among women is a huge social problem. Any sexual encounter that inspires truly sincere frenzied penis-worship, might, given the mystical properties of sexuality, melt the ice between the genders that is at least in part responsible for the population collapse. It might also be a gateway to the kind of thinking that values children.  

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BAP’s concern is less narrow than perhaps it seems. Even non-eugenicists are aware that we are experiencing a global population decline, with fertility in the United States at 1.6 births per woman, part of a downward trend that’s visible everywhere in the world outside of Sub-Saharan Africa (and even there, rates are on a downward trajectory). 

These trends cut across cultures and income levels and aren’t hugely impacted by family-leave policies or the other factors we tend to fight about, like a society’s relative liberalism versus conservatism and religiosity. One driver is science — obviously, in a world with universal contraception, no one has to get pregnant anymore; and rising infertility is also an issue — but another is that people are remaining single (fertility among married people is also declining, but much less precipitously). People can’t find partners they like, and even if they do, they make a rational cost-benefit analysis that chooses known goods such as money and travel and organic cocktails over potential goods, such as the happiness they might experience having children.  

BAP is correct that the conventional wisdom on how to reverse these trends is inadequate and somewhat circular — it has been observed that people who are married and religious have more children, but that doesn’t mean that promoting marriage and religion (for the purpose of promoting more children) will have any influence on people who don’t want children in the first place. And he is also correct that the shift would have to bring men and women together, and must take place in the spiritual, not the material realm. His reliance on the “occult,” which I’d interpret as mystery or the transcendent, is apt.  

Unfortunately, he’s also a nihilist hyper-individualist who worships technology, hates women, and sees no inherent value in human life; so there are some flaws in his social reasoning. He has a glimmer that something transcendent is needed, but his best idea on how to inspire “veneration” of the penis and how to “valorize” male beauty is … government sponsored PR campaigns. Just imagine: We’ll text you a picture of a penis if you text us a six-digit code. He admits, reluctantly, that female consent is necessary. But his suggestion for what might inspire women to go wild is porn-brained … an orgy. It’s a popular female fantasy, according to PornHub and Allure magazine, which published an article entitled “Yes, Your Gangbang Fantasy is Normal” in 2018. But it certainly isn’t a popular female activity. (He might also consider that whatever Allure magazine is selling young women, the Right shouldn’t be.) 

He is aware that carrying a baby to term will take a high toll on the woman … so he suggests government payments of $500,000 per birth. This is less tepid than the current $2,200 child tax credit, but hardly represents the lost income possibilities for a high-human-capital earner. And he makes no provision for the dads sticking around: $500,000 goes even less far over 18 years if you aren’t receiving childcare. Essentially, he’s writing a polemic on fertility, while holding all the cultural attitudes that have created the fertility crisis: he has no interest in actual children, believes that a woman’s “reluctance at being impregnated and taking a pregnancy to term” is entirely rational, and suggests that maybe the kids could be given away to government-sponsored daycares in order to not inconvenience the parents as they individualism-maxx their way towards eternity. Universal Pre-K and younger is already the socialist-mediocre ideal — he is no different. 

These are problems of the manosphere overall: in response to the excesses of toxic feminism, its adherents have adopted an equal and opposite kind of toxic masculinism that attempts to rehabilitate masculine vice without adopting any form of masculine virtue. Husbandry, paternity, nurture, protectiveness, loyalty, self-mastery, responsibility, legitimate authority, generosity, self-sacrifice, gentleness-in-strength, are all either unknown or unnecessary. BAP, who prescribes pregnancy and “creampie” porn for his utopia is either unaware or doesn’t care that virility originally meant resisting the urge to live full time in the goon cave. 

To accomplish BAP’s goal more realistically, and for everyone, not just the elite, the manosphere would do well to consult two books on sexuality and fertility penned by women outside the mainstream feminist orbit. The first, Naomi Wolf’s Vagina: A New Biography, published in 2013, supports BAP’s intuition that a kind of mystic-ecstatic sexual pairing is the key to female creativity and happiness. The second, Hannah’s Children: The Women Quietly Defying the Birth Dearth, published in 2024 by Catherine Ruth Pakaluk, is a serious scholarly work by a Catholic economist and mother of eight, which sheds light on the reasons women might become hyper-fertile. 

Wolf’s Vagina starts with the author’s personal story of how a pinched pelvic nerve from a degenerative back condition interfered with her orgasms and also drained her life of creativity and meaning. Her journey toward recovery set her off on a deep dive into female sexual biology and the science of female pleasure, which brought her to some startling — though highly speculative — conclusions: that women are more “animal” and more sexual than men; that the seat of a woman’s selfhood and soul is her sexuality; and that her creative powers are fundamentally tied to having good sex.  

She based some of this on her discovery of the pelvic nerve, which, “like most women,” she had known nothing at all about before her injury. Beneath the superficial organs we are all familiar with, lies a tangled, complex, multiply branching, and “completely unique for every individual woman” (emphasis hers) network of nerves that originates at the sacral vertebrae, swirls throughout the pelvis, and laces densely around multiple locations (walls of the vagina, clitoris, cervix, perineum and anus). It’s well-known to neuroscience, she discovers, that variations in female orgasms (clitoral, vaginal, both-at-once) as well as the level of difficulty in attaining them, depend largely on the arrangement and density of these nerves. (A world of Freudian theory about the female orgasm, defeated in a single blow.) To have good sex with a woman, in other words, you must know her as an individual; you must be paying attention; it is a relational as well as a physical act. 

The male pelvic nerve, on the other hand, is vastly smaller and simpler, is basically the same for all men, and is arranged in a grid. 

Next, Wolf discussed the role of the autonomic nervous system, which controls what our bodies do beyond our conscious control, and regulates many of the other biological processes of female arousal besides brute stimulation. Science, she says, has proved that the “activation” of this system depends on how women feel — along an axis of safe, valued, relaxed, not-in-danger, etc. The “activated” ANS produces arousal and causes women to release euphoric affection-and-emotion chemicals, much more intensely than men do. It also has profound effects on the brain, including “deactivating centers for behavioral regulation,” changing responses to pain, and producing altered states of consciousness: when the ANS is fully activated, “one could say that [the woman] actually becomes, biochemically, a wild woman.”

The ANS arousal process is similar in men but again is vastly less sensitive and complex — and less responsive to touch and more to “words of respect and appreciation.” (Pro tip: “men’s physiological distress levels in relationship conflicts” also lower in response to such words.) 

These facts of biology suggested to Wolf a particular kind of lovemaking — slow, attentive, exploratory, particular — that will produce intense attachment and emotion, and also a kind of transcendent bliss. The BAP dream is real, but it’s achieved through actual human intimacy, not at the orgy.

Women are even programmed, Wolf said, by the balance of chemicals released by pressure against the cervix (penetration) to get the greatest reward through the agency of “the other,” meaning a man and his penis. Penis-worship thus is hard-wired and doesn’t need the PR campaign — it needs only the functioning penis and a man who knows what to do with it. Wolf argued that it was a mistake of second-wave feminism to suggest that women could do without men: we are unhappy and incomplete without them, biologically. (This book marked the end of her acceptance in the feminist mainstream.) 

As a feminist in the era of contraception, Wolf did not connect the relationship-building and female-creativity-stoking properties of sex with procreation, nor did she ask what the hormonal and chemical effects of specifically procreative sex might be. In the 2020s, we might extrapolate that these effects exist, thanks to the research of Sarah E. Hill on how hormonal birth control changes not just women’s bodies, but their minds and life-choices, as well. Might the vaginally fulfilled woman Wolf described, experiencing her natural reproductive cycle, spread her creative urges more widely, and wish to create not just art, but life? Might the feelings such as love and appreciation for the other experienced in this kind of ideal union make her less selfish, less individualist, and more open to caring for a child, both spiritually and biochemically?  

Some indications that it’s possible come from economist Catherine Ruth Pakaluk’s Hannah’s Children: The Women Quietly Defying the Birth Dearth. The author and her research team performed the first qualitative study of American women who have more than 5 children (around 5% of the population), operating on the essential insight that “if a phenomenon is sufficiently consequential, then its absence must be consequential” — if most women have low fertility, studying those who don’t have low fertility will tell us something about how to cure the disease. She notes that the cure for smallpox was discovered when it was noticed that some people — dairymen and milkmaids — were immune to it. (The milder cowpox virus provided immunity to smallpox, and was crucial in developing the vaccine.) 

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Pakaluk and her team visited 55 college-educated women of varied socioeconomic status across America, conducting interviews that might provide insights into their motivation, and a clue into what’s lacking in the culture at large. The author chose women who would describe their child-bearing as purposeful, because she was looking for the reasons behind the choice; and she picked college-educated women because she wanted subjects to be facing the modern dilemma in which “education raises the opportunity cost of forgoing the labor market to have children.” 

Pakaluk finds variation, of course, but also deep similarities. Some of the women she interviewed grew up in big families and always knew they wanted to have a large family; others, like the Hannah of her title, quoted in chapter two, say they could never have imagined having so many, and invoke the mystical and spiritual to explain their reasoning. “People think on a rational level, and I think maybe a little bit more super-rational thinking has to infiltrate the masses to know that things are possible, like the possibilities of expansion in your life,” Hannah says. 

The women in this cohort describe the choice to have many children as a rejection of selfish individualism: “a deliberate rejection of an autonomous, customized, self-regarding lifestyle in favor of a way of life intentionally limited by the demands of motherhood,” Pakaluk writes. Some work, some don’t, but all are making “costly personal sacrifices” — because they seem worth it. These women believe they are getting more than they are giving up. They value the children themselves, and the expansion of heart and soul they experience by being mother to many. The many voices in the book all converge on this theme: nothing is as good — we just fell in love with babies. 

Most women in this day and age won’t recognize this. Motherhood is hard, and hard to adjust to when you are raised with careerist expectations of status and success. New York Magazine’s The Cut recently shared with us, “Stories from Real Women Who Regret Having Children” — and I’m quite sure none of them were making it up. However most modern women are also, in some sense, resisting: trying to “keep my identity,” hold onto “me time,” make sure “nothing changes.”  They don’t do motherhood  the way the pronatalists Pakaluk interviewed do: fully accepted, as a “vocation” and a “calling,” and a place to find an identity rather than lose one.   

Unhappy mothers may also be stopping too soon. Pakaluk discovered that having a lot of siblings benefits the family in unexpected ways. In larger families, the necessity for everyone to pull together, teaches children responsibility, is a natural corrective for selfishness, and gives them a sense of purpose as well. With just one or two: you get brats. New babies, for 20% of Pakaluk’s interviewees, are discovered to solve emotional or other family problems. 

Moreover, despite our careers and fully maximized lives, we are also experiencing an epidemic of specifically female unhappiness, which may be related to lack of childbearing. Women’s rates of happiness have been declining since 1970, “both absolutely and relative to men,” Pakaluk reports. At the same time, we are having fewer children overall, and fewer than we say we want.

So here’s a different, more radical, less modest proposal: for happiness and fulfillment, women need men, and a lot of babies. The solution to the fertility crisis is overcoming 100 years of feminism and taboo, and telling them so. 

Yet by the end of the Fifties, Eisenhower was rejected by the nation’s tastemakers as dull, doddering and spent: Ike, they said, played golf for eight years. As the GIs were domesticated by middle-class life in the suburbs, there came a new hero to behold: JFK also fought in the war, but his distinguishing traits were youth, manly vigour and an irrepressible sense of hipness, which had special appeal for those born after the war — the “Baby Boomers”.

Responding to this air of expectation was Norman Mailer, the enfant terrible of the literary world, who in both his novels and his personal life exuded machismo: an angry undercurrent of male alienation that flowed just beneath the surface of the reigning suburban culture.

Weeks before the 1960 election, Mailer wrote his first political essay. Published in Esquire, his aim in “Superman Comes to the Supermarket” was not just to boost Kennedy as the hero Americans needed, but to attack and discredit everything the Eisenhower era represented: its deeply “square” ideas of manhood — arising from notions of duty, responsibility, self-control and an engrained respect for authority — sounded almost Victorian to Mailer’s ears. “A tasteless, sexless, odourless sanctity in architecture, manners, modes, styles has been the result” of Ike’s leadership, he claimed. In place of the conformist “organisation man” of the Fifties, Mailer envisioned a new and vital masculine archetype for the Sixties, someone who can “touch depths in American life which were uncharted”.

Holding up JFK as the vessel, Mailer hoped that politics could be fused with the “underground river” of the American psyche — the unconscious realms of myth, art, instinct and aesthetics — and thus turned into an arena for limitless self-expression. His vision was a potent expression of the Sixties ethos, predicated as it was on the individual’s restless spirit of rebellion against the institutions.

Though that decade saw the rise of feminism, a no less important but overlooked development was the change in the dominant models of masculinity. The old masculine archetypes — the GI, the pioneer, the sheriff, the crew-cutted astronaut — represented the austere vanguard of modernity which heralded the arrival of civilisation and progress. The new male archetype birthed by the post-Boomer pop culture — the long-haired rock star, the brooding beat poet, the hippie wildman, the Third World guerilla, Mailer’s own “White Negro” — were sensuous rebels against modernity, who sought to topple the structures of civilisation in the name of a heedless and undefined freedom.

This permissive cultural emancipation of the Sixties after Kennedy was then enlarged by the neoliberal economic emancipation of the Eighties under Reagan, which entrenched the new moral status quo, or what may be called “the Boomer consensus”, based on the formula of hedonism plus markets. This dispensation was embodied in equal part by the two dominant Boomer politicians of the Nineties, the liberal Bill Clinton and the conservative Newt Gingrich, who both expanded the reach of unregulated markets, shrank the size of the state and subjected US politics to their boundless egos and libidos.

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Three decades later, the results of this social revolution for each of the genders are clear enough: women have made great economic and cultural strides — a welcome development — but the opposite sex appears to have faltered. On a host of metrics, from educational achievement to economic performance and career advancement to life expectancy and cultural prestige, men are shown to be either falling behind women or underperforming relative to previous generations of men. Yet structural explanations and conventional policy prescriptions have little resonance among today’s “angry young men”. They have, instead, turned to far more radical answers.

Enter the rise of a revanchist masculine identity politics on the online Right, where “vitalist” movements call for the overthrow not just of liberalism but of the pre-modern Christian foundations of Western civilisation. Inspired by Nietzschean thought, they seek the revival of a pagan morality that glorifies primal ideals of strength, beauty and sensuality. The most prominent expositor of this view is the pseudonymous “Bronze Age Pervert” (BAP), later unmasked as one Costin Alamariu. They are distinguished by their fondness for bodybuilding, eccentric natural lifestyles and garish aesthetics, conveyed through homoerotic imagery and classical art. Throw in racist and misogynist “shitposting” that playfully straddles the line between irony and sincerity, and one gets a fuller picture of their sensibility.

Among competing narratives around male decline, this has garnered the most widespread following among a certain class of ambitious, educated, intellectually inclined and highly online professional young men. Scouring the ranks of Congressional staff offices, Ivy League schools, conservative think tanks, as well as the worlds of tech and finance, may reveal sizeable cadres of “Bronze Age” followers, who will reveal themselves when they are “in front of the control panel”, as one such devotee put it to The Atlantic’s Graeme Wood — that is, when they are ready to seize power.

For all their frightening and exotic “reactionary” flairs, however, these currents are best understood as inversions of the Sixties countercultural Left, sharing its militant subversive and anti-institutional dispositions. All that’s really happened is that it has come full circle: this sensibility began on the far-Left but has now migrated to and metastasised on the far-Right. And just as the original counterculture was easily co-opted to serve neoliberalism (“woke capitalism”), so too is the online Right — with even less resistance — being made to prop up the same, with the emergence of “based capitalism”. This is shown by Alamariu’s rambling endorsement of Javier Millei and his attempt to sell an ideology of Aryanised Reaganism on steroids to impressionable followers: by dressing it up with edgy memes, he has essentially found an ingenious way to make neoliberal policy attractive to discontented youths, who would otherwise have turned away from the GOP’s free market dogmas. (He is thus revealed to be little more than a “red-pilled” Paul Ryan.) BAP and the online Right now amount to a Millennial mirror image of Mailer-ism and the Boomer counterculture. It matters less that Mailer was an idiosyncratic Marxist or that Alamariu is a would-be race warrior, for the result is the same: hedonism plus markets.

Indeed, as adjacent influencer “Zero HP Lovecraft” admitted, they aspire to “a precise mirror of the world in which we live today”, only with all the progressive slogans and aesthetics swapped for reactionary ones, but with presumably the same malfunctioning economy and decaying infrastructure left in place. Such statements reveal the inherent limitations of this movement, which deals in memetic forms of discourse that discard all programmatic content in favour of pure subjectivism and impulse: a “vibes-only politics”. Consider BAP’s fixation on looks as a political criterion; or more troublingly, his giddy glamorisation of violence; or his disdain for family life, which supposedly dilutes the male spirit (all things he happens to, in varying degrees, share with Mailer). Vapidity, nihilism, and cruelty are the whole point. And for all their apparent dislike of legacy conservatism, this is what allows these reactionaries to be repeatedly co-opted into some variant of neoliberalism.

If today’s dissatisfied young men want to achieve greatness, they can do so not by trying to rehash the failed faux-radicalism of the Boomers, Mailer and Alamariu, with its degenerate libertinism and contempt for institutions, but rather by rediscovering the non-reactionary masculine ethos of the Eisenhower era. Far from being stale or parochially conservative, the Fifties were actually a time of great institutional creativity and innovation as embodied in post-war mixed-economy industrial capitalism (the antithesis of neoliberalism); this was, after all, the decade when the mass-middle class was forged, a status and standard of living which many Millennials and Gen Zs have been denied.

This will require rejecting romanticism and personal liberation in favour of a different value set for young men, one that: abides by the logic of institutions rather than that of aggressive individualism (even as they seek to reimagine and reform their institutions); realises the need for rational, long-term plans of mass coordination as a means of steering society at the level of both state and market; and accepts reasonable limits on personal autonomy in the name of these larger national goals and imperatives. This is, in other words, the same disciplined high modern ethos that made D-Day possible — that won the Second World War and built the greatest economy in all history — after the preceding era of institutional collapse in the Thirties necessitated renewal. For this generation, masculinity was forged within and through institutions rather than against them: the family, the army, the state, the corporation, the union, etc. The very things Mailer and his like have railed against as tyrannical and effeminising were in fact the bedrocks of American strength. To restore that order and dynamism that were Eisenhower’s legacies, young men must dam the “underground river” and re-establish boundaries between the mythic-aesthetic and material-political dimensions of civilisation, lest they be constantly seduced and intoxicated by the former, as they are now, while losing sight of the latter. For the true rebirth of vitality in the West will not come from a miserable narcissistic dictatorship of bohemians, dandies and aesthetes — of the kind that Mailer and BAP would revel in — but from practical feats. The matchless heroism of D-Day, when free men fought and triumphed against barbarism, stands as just such an example: one more encapsulation of what is missing in contemporary masculinity, and of what may yet be regained.

But though Talichad won the insurgency, could he still lose the peace? Young Taliban fighters, whose daily life has been transformed by victory, have been interviewed for a new report — and it turns out many don’t like it. Put to work in Kabul’s bureaucracy, they find office work dull and restrictive, and they miss the excitement, fellowship and lofty moral purpose they felt as insurgents. Not only do they loathe office work every bit as much as the West’s much-discussed “quiet quitters”, but peacetime urban life appears to be making them soft and, well, less Taliban-ish.

This, in turn, raises some questions for the online masculinist Right in the West: the men who made a totem of Talichad. For the Taliban’s predicament now offers a counterfactual to a doctrine from these circles, that’s now leaking into the mainstream: that every facet of modern male malaise is the fault of women, and especially of feminism.

This idea circulates, in condensed form, via the term “longhouse”. This originates with the now-notorious internet anon Bronze Age Pervert (BAP), author of the influential 2018 Bronze Age Mindset. Ironically, the term accepts wholesale a set of revisionist claims made by feminist archaeologists, such as Heide Göttner-Abendroth, who argue the very earliest societies lived in collective “longhouse” dwellings — and were matriarchal.

For Göttner-Abendroth and her fellow feminists, these longhouse-dwelling matriarchies were characterised by egalitarianism and sharing of resources and caring obligations, traits they viewed as positive and worthy of revival. From the perspective of Bronze Age Pervert and his online followers, though, such societies are beneath contempt, dragging the natural excellence of some into the feminised morass of the many.

And, contra the feminists, such matriarchy isn’t something we should revive — because it’s already here. For BAP, the modern world is already one huge metaphorical “longhouse”. In it, we are told, Western men have grown contemptibly soft, relinquishing a life of confident vitality in favour of a weak and resentful mass culture of collectivism. BAPists assert that under this suffocating order, masculine excellence is resentfully nipped in the bud at every turn by a stifling, safety-obsessed egalitarianism of the lowest common denominator, whose enforcers act like burrowing termites to hollow out everything good about our civilisation, leaving behind only crumbling ruins to be picked over by whiny, feeble, and increasingly asexual moral pygmies.

And this is all women’s fault. When the “longhouse” meme completed its transition to familiar jargon recently, in an explainer on the term published by First Things, the author ‘Lomez’ linked it explicitly with the growing prevalence of women in public life. In BAP’s view, “feminism and the liberation of women” is “both the proximate and the ultimate cause” of this nightmarish world, which Bronze Age Mindset characterises luridly as presided over by “some kind of half-human half-cockroach creature resplendent with horrid eggs like a big Amazon centipede…this seeks to re-absorb you”.

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As the “longhouse” concept has percolated out of group chats and Discord servers, so too has this correlation grown more accepted, between emotivism, safetyism, suffocating egalitarianism — and the rising prevalence of women in public life. Essays now come thick and fast: political scientist Richard Hanania tackled the relation between female-typical social patterns and changing norms of political debate and conflict, and the journalist Heather Mac Donald argued that the feminisation of American academia is now “almost complete”. She suggests that this has been accompanied by a transition away from norms of truth-seeking and open debate, toward a culture characterised by emotional volatility, anxiety and a fixation on vulnerability.

Conservative campaigner Christopher Rufo developed Mac Donald’s arguments to suggest that a public culture that over-emphasises “trait empathisation”, which is to say a more female-typical style of relating, has negative downstream consequences including normalising psychological disequilibrium, and leaving young people permanently infantilised. A consensus is emerging on the Right, then, that the feminisation of public life is causing (or at least linked to) a great many things the Right views as disagreeable. As these arguments bleed into mainstream discourse, though, few have the forthrightness of your average internet anon. The anti-woke activist James Lindsay may say “woke is a woman”, for example, but he’s lighter on what that implies in policy terms. Mac Donald and Rufo are likewise at pains to make clear that they aren’t saying female-typical traits and preferences are bad or in need of elimination.

Meanwhile, the anons mutter that surely the solution to a problem that started with the feminisation of public life is, well, defeminising it again — or just walking away to start something new. BAP advocates exiting the “longhouse” for life as a “Bronze Age pirate”; it’s not wholly clear what this means, but the overall impression is of all-male groups, perhaps mercenaries, or something not dissimilar to bands of Taliban insurgents. In any case, it’s clear enough that many cheered on the Taliban for evicting women from schools and workplaces, in no small part for achieving what they only fantasise about: a public square purged of women.

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But, speculating wildly, imagine the Talichad celebrators got their way and booted women out of public life. Would that result in a return of manliness? The first-person accounts of Taliban fighters now working in Kabul’s bureaucracy suggests: possibly not. For it appears that no matter how manly your mujahideen, when you transpose them to a high-tech metropolis and put them to work in Excel spreadsheets, they’ll begin to drift toward the social and psychological conditions deplored by BAPists in the West.

Bronze Age Mindset chafes against a sense of life lived in captivity, where all space is already “owned” and freedom of action always already circumscribed. And we find an echo of that same sense of constraint in the grumbles of Huzaifa, 24, about his post-victory loss of freedom: “The Taliban used to be free of restrictions, but now we sit in one place, behind a desk and a computer 24 hours a day seven days a week. Life’s become so wearisome; you do the same things every day.”

City life seems to drive alienation and moral degeneracy, too: several fighters lament how atomised everyone is there, and deplore the sight of their comrades succumbing to temptation: drug use, hot girls, material possessions. And cubicle-drone life is so boring and repetitive that many spend their days slacking on social media instead: “Many mujahedin, including me, are addicted to the internet, especially Twitter,” admits Abdul Nafi. Social media addiction thus completes the transition of these young men, from “Talichads” admired by alienated, underpaid, extremely online urban “quiet quitters” in the West into alienated, underpaid, extremely online urban “quiet quitters” in Kabul.

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And in this case, it’s indisputably not women’s fault. As is well-documented, to mainstream lamentations and 4chan glee, there are no Afghan women in these workplaces. For the Taliban, then, the exchange of masculine camaraderie and freedom for alienation, constraint and moral degradation has not involved the female HR managers, DEI administrators and the like whom the masculinist Right generally blame for their woes. And this suggests that at least some of the “longhouse” phenomena now being reflexively blamed on women may be less a malign byproduct of literal workplace feminisation than a consequence of working an office job in a high-tech, 21st-century urban environment.

The notorious anti-technology terrorist Ted Kaczynski made a version of this point in his manifesto, arguing that modern men and women are “oversocialised” into neurosis, powerlessness and anxiety as a byproduct of the distorting effect industrial society has on human nature. Today, “Uncle Ted” is himself a popular underground literary influence, and source of internet memes. But he was arrested before the mass spread of the internet, and to my knowledge has not commented on its contribution to the conditions he deplored. Yet perhaps the bitterest irony of all is that the internet acts as an accelerant on all the phenomena Kaczynski described. Thus, as the Taliban have taken to the internet — whether to promote recognition of their regime or just ease the boredom of cubicle life — they’ve been drawn, by degrees, into the most captivating “longhouse” of all.

The struggle sessions, cancel culture and purity spirals routinely blamed by the Hananias of this world on political feminisation happen among anonymous Right-wing body-builders too. And this is because, as I’ve argued before, social media itself forces even the most committedly masculinist groups into female-typical social patterns: covert aggression, public scolding, punishment via ostracism and so on. When your principal means of interaction incentivises endless talking, even as it forecloses physical confrontation, how is anyone meant to navigate disagreements except via stereotypically feminine social patterns such as “calling out”, backbiting, emotional drama or cancelling wrongdoers?

Things are rarely monocausal, and social and material feedback loops are complex. I don’t doubt that the presence of more women in the workplace makes some contribution to the tone of public life. Indeed, I’ve made that case myself, though needless to say I don’t think this is an argument for Taliban-style purges. But I suspect that for those very online males currently fantasising about making everything less longhouse-y, and wishing they could do so by just getting women to shut up, actually succeeding would make less difference than they imagined.

For probably the only way the online masculinist Right could exit the “longhouse” entirely would be by passing the Taliban in the opposite direction, and exiting the modern world. And, especially, exiting the internet. And it seems not even the Taliban is willing to do that.

War, the subject of Hemingway’s two most famous books, is perhaps the quintessential subject of such manly writing. From the Mahabharata to the Iliad, it’s the central theme in the ancient world’s most immortal works. But something has happened to war-lit: first, the industrialisation of fighting, which Hemingway himself lived through and documented; then, the development of war technologies so terrible that battle itself came to seem unthinkable.

The world that has emerged since is in many ways (or at least in many places) a safer and more peaceful one. But what has become of those men who actually like danger, and for whom warfare has always been a proving-ground?

Some are still running into danger. There was a surreal echo of Hemingway’s love of danger in a recent wave of young Americans joining a conflict overseas, and then (albeit with less positive consequences) documenting it.

Hemingway was among the thousands who travelled to Spain between 1936 and 1938, to support the Republican side against Franco in the Spanish Civil War. In February, Ukrainian president Zelenskyy issued a formal call to foreigners to join an “international brigade” fighting for the Ukrainian side against Putin’s invasion. At least according to Ukrainian reports, an estimated 20,000 have signed up to help — and many view what they’re doing as fightback against “a 21st-century version of fascism”.

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You would think the Weird Online Right, the contemporary subculture most concerned with masculinity would approve of this risk-taking. A recurring theme in such spaces is the perceived subjection of manliness to the shrunken, heroism-free horizons of modern life and the culture of “bugmen” it has produced. Perhaps the most influential sacred text of this subculture is Bronze Age Mindset, an unclassifiable “exhortation” written in 2018 and now immensely influential among disaffected young men.

Written by the pseudonymous Bronze Age Pervert, it blames modern comforts and the undue influence of women for the stifling and emasculating nature of modern life: “In fact everything that you hate about modern life and that makes it into an Iron Prison … represents a return of the endless sallow night of matriarchy.” BAP extols the virtues of pre-Christian heroes of antiquity, and predicts that “Leviathan will not be able to hold itself together” whereupon “the age of high piracy will return”, enabling the men capable of it to develop “their ability to wage war”.

But instead of lauding their bravery, the Very Online Right tends to dismiss Zelenskyy’s resistance as a “fight to the death for globalist oligarchs like Soros and Kolomoisky” and mock any evidence of fear, regret or incompetence displayed by the young foreigners flocking to help. This so-called “Reddit Battalion” has been widely mocked for having reportedly compromised operational security on the battlefield by continuing to post from their phones while in a warzone: their compulsion to document their experience emitting signals allowing their location to be pinpointed and shelled.

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What’s going on here? One response might be that simply proving oneself as a man isn’t the only consideration in battle, and if you are there in service of a despised political agenda, you’re still not one of the good guys. But there’s something deeper at work, too: an ambivalence about the idea of masculinity and writing as such that runs through the conflicted contemporary debates about men, warfare, heroism and propaganda that now orbit the conflict in Ukraine.

For while Hemingway is long since a byword for “masculine” writing, there’s also a tragic sense in which his work traces the Twentieth-century demise of an older, more warlike form of masculinity, at the hands not of the “endless sallow night of matriarchy” but of technology itself.

War literature prior to the Twentieth century is often unabashedly heroic, even as it documents horrors. Tennyson’s 1855 Charge of the Light Brigade describes an 1854 battlefield in the Crimea in terms both terrible and stirring, then asks:

When can their glory fade?
O the wild charge they made!
All the world wondered.

“When you go to war as a boy you have a great illusion of immortality,” Hemingway wrote in 1942, of his experiences as an ambulance driver in World War I when he was just 19. “Then, when you are badly wounded the first time, you lose that illusion.” The war that deprived Hemingway of his illusions about immortality also stripped many of confidence in military glory full stop.

Wilfred Owen’s Dulce et Decorum Est, published 1921, draws a contrast between the heroic motto about dying for one’s country, and the reality of dying of poison gas in the trenches. In 1935, Hemingway expressed the same sentiment in an Esquire essay, where he stated that “in modern war, there is nothing sweet nor fitting in your dying. You will die like a dog for no good reason”.

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Even so, to Hemingway the Spanish Civil War was a clear-cut moral issue: a battle between good and evil, man and machine, via the horrifying industrial technologies of Twentieth-century total war. And if, as some historians argue, this conflict was in fact the true start of the Second World War, what started as a battle between man and machine ended with the machine’s victory, in the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

A whole generation, slightly older than I am, grew up in the shadow of Mutually Assured Destruction: the fear that either (or both) sides in the Cold War might at any moment launch unstoppable nuclear-powered death through the air, obliterating millions in seconds.

Over the same period, conflict between nuclear powers avoided direct confrontation. Armies have shrunk, nationalism has been widely deprecated, and the world (unless you’re unlucky enough to live in a theatre of one of America’s or Russia’s proxy wars) is generally more peaceful than in Hemingway’s youth.

And while that has many upsides, it has also, paradoxically, created disaffected young men. For when national identity is infra dig, and open warfare is discouraged lest it set off nuclear Armageddon, what’s left for young men who thirst for danger and intensity?

Some find it anyway; some, too, also write about it, including my UnHerd colleague Aris Roussinos. As he said in 2014 of his experiences in Syria: “The hidden awful truth about war is how much fun it is.” But for those in the developed West, this is the exception rather than the rule. Most men remain in the “Iron Prison”. Many chafe at it, and seek to reclaim some form of masculinity, but few seem very certain as to how this might be done in practice.

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Some, too, write about the stultifying nature of the world in which they remain. Two realist writers emerging from the disaffected online Right are the short story writers “Delicious Tacos” and “Bad Billy Pratt”, both of whom document the nihilistic landscape of contemporary sex relations in an aggressively unsentimental style. And it’s hardly surprising that writers committed to (as Pratt put it to me) “the unfiltered truth” should focus on the sexual anomie of self-absorbed protagonists.

After all, modern life has become — in BAP’s words — “an economic zone arranged much like a work camp”, a regimented place “of incredible ugliness” and “hateful to the raising of boys”. It’s easy to see how, as Pratt himself might conclude, “the only fiction worth writing is incel fiction”. What, in that context, is left but the self, and the sexual warzone?

And with heroism, action or drama in short supply in everyday life, those hungry for intensity must resort to the world of computer gaming — or fantasy writers such as Mike Ma, described as “Chaotic 21st century pastiche of Hemingway, Kierkegaard, Kaczynski, and the guy in your econ class who wears combat boots”; or else the neo-reactionary sci-fi writer “Zero HP Lovecraft”, a “horrorist” whose self-published short story collection sold out in less than 24 hours.

Hemingway began his life in the shadow of Tennyson’s Light Brigade, and finished it in the shadow of Hiroshima. Over the same period, the raw, elemental struggles between man and man, or man and nature, so characteristic of Hemingway’s work, grew more attenuated. His literary career was both as a “masculine” writer, but also as an elegy for a world where the conventionally masculine virtues of courage, risk-taking, stoicism and heroism were easily celebrated and widely accepted as culturally essential.

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Since his time, the world has retreated steadily from conflict, toward mechanised and then mediated life; a process culminating in the radical safetyism and dematerialised common life of Covid lockdowns, and the online-first social life the pandemic ushered in. And now that we have virtualised social life to the point where any physical violence is foreclosed, even most arguments about masculinity now inevitably take place in the feminine key.

Young men, already restive, are growing mutinous under this regime. The lurid and angry literature emerging captures these men’s ambivalence: sickened by, but also usually still implicated in, the banality and perceived effeminacy of a modern world denuded of both danger and opportunity. We can only speculate on what may happen if (or when) such men leave behind the neutered disaffection off the internet, and start searching en masse for danger and heroism beyond the screen.

“The radical right is the true ‘other’ in our culture. Unlike the radical left, its authors are not found in university curricula, and sometimes not even in university libraries,” writes Rose, a scholar of modern religious thought. “We picture them in cabins in Idaho broadcasting over shortwave radio, not as scholars or artists who can read Sanskrit.” But this is a false image. Whether one supports or loathes their ideas, many such thinkers are indeed deeply erudite, devoting their lives to studying the human condition as they see it.

Reading A World After Liberalism, another radical-Right thinker came to my mind, a contemporary figure marginal to the public yet boasting a devoted following online: the pseudonymous online poster and author “Bronze Age Pervert”. Known as BAP for short, he has built a committed fan base of young men — including junior staffers in the Trump White House — and drawn the attention of some iconoclastic conservative intellectuals.

After reading Rose’s book, I decided to finally pick up Bronze Age Mindset, BAP’s self-published manifesto from 2018. I wanted to get a sense of the prospects of the radical Right in its fight with liberalism today. But on a personal note, I also wanted to see what it was that so many people, including young men of colour I know, find so radicalising about the book.

At its core, Bronze Age Mindset is about the promotion of masculine strength and virtue as a means of bringing about political change. The world at present, according to its author, is sunk in a form of decentralised tyranny, ruled over by “bugmen” (a rough approximation of the Nietzschean “Last Man”) as well as matriarchal tyrants empowered by feminism and democracy. Beauty has been effaced from human society and the natural world is being despoiled.

The hypocritical supporter of liberalism, a physical weakling with a bad conscience, “pretends to be motivated by compassion, but is instead motivated by a titanic hatred of the well-turned out and beautiful”. In a style influenced by the norms of online debate, BAP punctuates each of his philosophical arguments with insults, blaming “obese high-fructose-corn-syrup-guzzling beasts” for suppressing masculine energy and acting as bad stewards of Earth’s natural treasures.

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In the classical world, of which BAP is enamoured, he argues that a strong man could live to his full demonic potential. But under our modern Leviathan, no such greatness is possible. The liberal order suppresses the masculine will to power, using the dead weight of democracy to crush the true male elite of every Western society. In this degradation of strong men lies the degradation of society as whole. Over time, the entire culture of a liberal society becomes a gigantic monument to slave morality, exalting weakness and infirmity as its highest values. Falling deeper and deeper into decay, liberal civilisation simply lies prone for an external force to eventually deliver it the coup de grâce.

Bronze Age Mindset is funny and even surprisingly sentimental at times. In one memorably zany passage, it asks the reader to imagine a version of Mitt Romney “capable of acting like he looks” — one who becomes a piratical man of adventure who attempts to engineer a coup in the United States, sleeps with Vladimir Putin’s wife, and then dies fighting the US empire alongside wild tribesmen in Afghanistan. The thought-experiment is intended to make a serious point about a connection between physical ability and the will to power that has been lost in the modern world.

The book alternates between extreme disdain for people of other cultures and races and sympathy or even admiration for them; what’s constant is his extreme anti-feminism, which I suspect explains much of his appeal to young men. This is a book avowedly written by and for men, aimed at calling them to a particular conception of themselves and their role in the world. From an intellectual standpoint, simply accusing his work of being racist or misogynist does no good, even if those terms would probably stick in a public debate, because BAP self-consciously writes from the pre-liberal perspective of classical civilisation, where such terms had no meaning.

A more interesting question is whether BAP’s basic belief — that a resurgent masculinity will inevitably rise up and shatter the foundations of liberal society — makes sense in the 21st century. Upon reading him, one must conclude that it doesn’t. Trapped in its nostalgia for the “Bronze Age”, the book fails to take into account the most important variable driving human affairs: technology.

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In the past, as Bronze Age Mindset notes with relish, physical strength and masculine will were primary determinants of political outcomes. But in the modern world, the link between physical prowess and the ability to exercise power has been severed. No great strength or courage is required to press the fire button on a Reaper drone, the signature weapon of the 21st century. No masculine virtue will be needed to operate the armed ground-based robots of the near future. Even a basic unwillingness to take life can be overcome with technology that conceals the humanity of those targeted, or with new weapons that kill autonomously without the need for human input.

But the decline of men’s role in the world goes deeper than warfare. Even now, progressives are consciously planning for a future where men’s most basic procreative functions can be made obsolete through genetic engineering. Like the religious holdouts in Michel Houellebecq’s The Elementary Particles, I find such a possibility unsettling, and I expect that many others around the world will similarly recoil. But our discomfort will not stop the march of technology. BAP makes no attempt to grapple with any of these dynamics. He is an autodidactic student of history with so much contempt for the present that he barely even analyses it.

Bronze Age Mindset draws haphazardly from fields as diverse as environmental biology, political history, zoology, occultism, and theology, while evincing an underwhelming commitment to intellectual rigour. This is a book of “exhortation”, BAP tells his readers up front, which is clearly true. He ends his work with a call for revolution against the global Leviathan followed by an “era of high piracy” led by physically powerful and ruthless men.

BAP is roughly the white male equivalent of an African-American “hotep”, who uses a pick-and-choose version of ancient and modern history to further his primarily goal of boosting the morale of disillusioned young men in his target constituency. Though his book overwhelms the reader with superficially impressive facts and arguments, I found that many of them, upon closer inspection, were wildly reductive or simply untrue. On topics in religion and sociology with which I happened to be familiar, I came away mystified by many of his claims.

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The Leviathan opposed by BAP and the older radical-Right thinkers profiled by Rose is showing signs of senescence. Unlike in the late Soviet Union, however, today there is no plausible replacement on the horizon. Even Rome stumbled onwards for hundreds of years after Nero.

But while the thinkers of the radical Right may not pose a serious threat to liberalism, studying them does offer a tangible benefit: a deeper understanding of the human condition. The cult popularity of a book like Bronze Age Mindset, which calls young men back to an atavistic fantasy of themselves, also helps us see how adrift many of them feel in the modern world. The radical Right is not a movement to flirt with. But studying its thinkers can help us see the fault lines that exist deep beneath the world that we take for granted.