Manacled and its ilk are foundational texts that define the strange yearnings of hyper-online young women — women who have been yearning especially hard since AO3 crashed last Thursday. Its 11 million users are now withdrawing from their customary dose of steamy fanfic; the site is expected to remain closed for maintenance for a few weeks yet. To my male readers: now is a good time to go girlfriend-hunting in the supernatural section of your local bookshop. It’s Black Friday for maladjusted fantasy foids.

If you can find a copy of Manacled in an internet archive, it’s worth skimming — not because it’s good (it’s not), but because it can be considered a Rosetta Stone for the sexual and romantic hinterlands of Zoomettes. The unmet desires of Gen Z women, now squinting around the dusty stalls of the marriage market, are laid out in technicolor in this strange compendium of snarling villains, whimpering damsels, groaning lovers and smirking captors. The plot, in brief, is this: Hermione finds herself in a Handmaid’s Tale-style arrangement with peroxide-blond bad boy Draco after Voldemort wins the Wizarding War. The evil regime assigns her to be a surrogate for Draco; she is kidnapped and violated, but she thoroughly enjoys it. In the end, they have a baby. Things work out.

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Throughout, there is lots and lots of shagging. Often this comes with amusing Potter window-dressing, as if to reassure the reader that they are not simply perusing erotica. In one scene Hermione “cast a spell to unbutton his shirt and robes and then, with a practiced partial-levitation charm, she pulled him up so that he was leaning against her and pushed all the clothing down off his shoulders and arms”. There is endless throbbing and thrusting, lots of hot breath, a million “wolfish” smiles and pounding hearts, even the occasional appearance of a nipple or two. This is the bread and butter of AO3 and fanfic more broadly: torrid romance between an everywoman protagonist and a brutish but tender, misunderstood man. There is constant sexual risk on AO3 — themes of abduction abound, as do elaborate pretexts for gray-area sex like Manacled’s forced surrogacy plot. Dubious consent, known as “dub-con”, is probably the site’s most distinctive theme. 

Launched in 2009, AO3’s rise to prominence was driven by a bizarre wave of fandom around X-Factor band One Direction in the early 2010s, with “Larry Stylinson”, the romantic “shipping” (fantasy) of the apparently heterosexual members Harry Styles and Louis Tomlinson, becoming a key genre. But it wasn’t all gay. At one time, the internet was also brimming with stories about 1D, a mass-market teenaged boy band, kidnapping girls from concerts and turning them into (willing) slaves. Today, there are as many granular subgenres as you can think of: wingfic (essentially rutting with feathers); mpreg (male pregnancy); breeding kink; gay fanfic (yaoi) for the enjoyment of heterosexual women; RPF (real-person fiction) imagining sexual escapades between celebrities; even Drapple (stay with me: Draco Malfoy and a green apple he is shown eating in the third Harry Potter film). As you might have inferred, sex is often described in extremely graphic detail.

As niche and strange as these subcategories become, they can mostly be read as wish-fulfillment by young women cut adrift in a sexual culture which leaves them cold. The median age of AO3 users is 26. One 2022 study found 54% of them identified as female, while 41% identified as “non-cisgender”, a wildly disproportionate figure which I suspect comprises a healthy slice of AFAB enbys, he/theys and so on (basically the demographics of your local mask-mandated lesbian bar). Almost half of users not only read but write on the site. The writing is therefore abundant, fervent and often shit. But literary pretensions are not the site’s aim; instead, the most successful writers are there to quench their thirsty fans with escalating sexy scenarios. It is evident that posting is as exciting for the writers as for the readers; AO3 is a rare repository of free, non-visual pseudo-pornography in an online sex economy which prefers the most graphic, hardcore, and shareable material possible. For the site’s largely female constituents, this matters: these readers are in flight from the mainstream and in thrall to their own, quaintly analog nerd erotica. The very different private habits of the internet’s men and women is our riven sexual culture in miniature.

The curious thing about AO3 is that, as powerful and prolific a cultural institution as it may be, it is largely invisible to the public. Nevertheless, its sexual themes have long since bled out into the mainstream. The boom in fantasy smut — published novels about minotaur milking farms and other such nonsense — is a direct consequence of internet fanfiction. Fifty Shades of Grey began as Twilight fanfic; the new film Wicker, in which Alexander Skarsgård stars as a sexy man inexplicably made of rattan, is unmistakably AO3 in nature. Then there’s Heated Rivalry, the gay hockey romp which was adapted by HBO last year, which not only began as a series of posts on AO3 but has now inspired a whole new genre about sexual tension between competitive, horny men (again, to be clear, most of its readers are female). I suspect most young women today — even those who, like me, never read fanfic — are subconsciously honed by its sexual values: the valorization of taboo, secrecy, extraordinary emotional dramatics and undying loyalty. There are, of course, male-coded fandoms: edgelord X’s current obsession is “Malfoid”, a girl version of Draco who is blonde, evil, hot and from what I gather, mostly a meme. But none are as sincere, and as reliably twisted, as the female fanfic which Malfoid parodies. To read these stories is to peep through a window into a generation’s sexuality — and the view is frightening.

It is troubling for a feminist to realize that lots of her peers have spent years reading and fantasizing about submission, surrender, abduction, and sexual enslavement. Nevertheless, that is what AO3 is all about; the site reveals the furtive and unrealizable desires of girls unsatisfied by the modern sexual settlement. To see fanfic as a revolt against the gains of feminism is too easy, though; instead, we might consider its themes an uplifting consequence, if a slightly unsettling one, of those gains. In the West at least, institutionalized forced marriage, coercion and rape are so unimaginable as to be deemed fodder for fantasy; that women want to daydream about them is testament to how thoroughly they’ve been expunged, how remote they now seem. And like other corners of modern sexuality gatekept by women — heterosexual polyamory, for example — fanfiction is highly regulated. AO3 prides itself on almost never censoring any fiction, however egregious the content. This is justified by the extremely strict enforcement of tagging rules on the site; so it is that even rape content can remain if appropriately labeled. As with so many “queer” and/or feminine-coded sexual subcultures, taboo is permitted only within the most rigidly enforced rules imaginable. 

None of this makes for good writing. But AO3 is nevertheless an invaluable archive, an uncensored record of what women daydream about when no-one is watching. There is perhaps no more unflinching guide to “what women want” than the weird warrens of this website whose uninhibited readers share their desire to be kidnapped, romanced then wedded by a borderline abusive werewolf CEO. I won’t make the case that AO3 tells us how women secretly want to live; instead, it shows up the fault lines in real-world dating, which has been drained of romance by apathetic casual sex and sterile hookup apps. Women might not want to be kidnapped and forcibly impregnated by an erotically insatiable Draco Malfoy; really, it’s about them wanting to be overwhelmingly desired. The scenario is almost unimportant, the more far-fetched the better — the emotional payload it carries is what matters. To be pursued, to relinquish control, to experience and inspire unfettered passion: fanfiction’s underlying tenets are not so difficult to understand. We may deride the genre as weird, subterranean and obsessive — but really these girls’ yearnings are, upon closer inspection, universal.

The premise of the reality series is simple: is love really blind, or does physical attraction make or break a relationship? In the show, men and women from the same city — in this series, Boston — go on remote “dates” in separate pods, where they can only hear each others’ voices. They narrow down their options and, when they really hit it off, they get engaged. Only after the proposal can the couple meet in the flesh. The reveal is often disastrous because one party has exaggerated their hotness out of cunning or delusion (men and women alike). This delicious discomfort is exactly why this otherwise boring show of dense try-hards is popular. 

Our “Kennedy” is one such culprit. He had compared himself to a young Jude Law in the blind booths — but despite being conventionally good looking (tall, good hair etc.) did not clear that admittedly very high bar. After their in-person meeting, Jax informed producers that she would not be staying on the show. Asked about his appearance, she said she “didn’t want to be mean”. Oof. Stew was unceremoniously dumped by proxy, let down gently by a man from the production company. 

The clip quickly became a talking point online, further inflaming the mutual resentment among X’s embittered men and women. For one largely male camp, Stew had suffered the slings and arrows of what certain corners of the internet call “hoeflation” — the expectations of women rising far beyond their proportionate sexual market value. His being considered a “comically hideous man”, to echo one tweet, was the ultimate blackpill, evidence of the unrealistic expectations of shallow women who themselves routinely overestimate their own hotness. In reality, this group argued, Stew was at minimum “her looksmatch” — the looksmaxxing metric for partners in the same sexual league. Maybe he even mogged her; Jax, they spat, was in fact an “orange ogre”.

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For the other camp, mainly women, both Stew’s physicality and personality were unattractive. He was a “freak”; he resembled a frighteningly ugly cartoon character. They took issue with his apparently overabundant teeth, his supposedly dorky manner, his “crazy eyes”. It was all rather cruel. If we’re being reasonable, Stew Stewart is no Jude Law — but he’s no munter either. Many women would be happy to have him.

The clip comes at a time of mutual anxiety around the sexual status of men and women, with vast culture wars intruding on every candlelit dinner. The romantic chasm between the sexes yawns wider by the day. We are told that tumbling birth rates will soon spell the collapse of the West — and that this is the fault of the encroachment of “the manosphere”, or of feminists sabotaging the happiness of other women, depending on your favorite flavor of conspiracy theory. It is somehow never pointed out that this paranoia, enmity and constant squabbling is itself a central cause of the problem. A frank and respectful discussion about the nature of male and female desire does not rake in the clicks as much as scrumptious vitriol.

Instead of taking our culture’s romantic breakdown as a concatenation of factors — the gains and losses of liberal feminism, social-media echo chambers, political bifurcation, the vanishing of third spaces, the ineffectual premise of dating apps — a small-but-vocal proportion of men simply blame women for being picky. Which, of course, we are. In matters of the heart, everybody is choosy. Desire isn’t a sort of public utility, distributed like volts on the national grid. The only remotely common exception is the indiscriminate way in which some men scattergun casual sex — and that is hardly inspiring. 

Yet for some reason, women having physical preferences has this week come as a surprise. At least, it was a shock to an X poster called Ryan Lee, who gained a million views and counting with his huffing over a clip in which three charming Christian women yak about whether they’d turn a man down based on looks alone. “I’m telling you, I can look at a photo, and I will know,” says one, who Lee notes with disdain is single at 36. Lee posted: “All that matters is if you’re really attractive. THEN they’ll go on a date with you… they’re seeking Chad.” (Chad, for the uninitiated, is the best-looking masculine ideal originating from incel terminology.) If you’re not hot, Lee raged, “even these women in ministry will swipe left on you in an instant”. Christian women, he implied, should be less sexually superficial; they ought to overlook a weak chin or a hairline in retreat for a man well versed in Ephesians.

In reality, of course, they will not — just as most men will not express interest in an ugly woman simply because she is kind, or virtuous, or whatever. Lee was duly dogpiled for this logical lapse. It was the Kennedy fiasco all over again: men being horrified at the shallowness of women, posting about it, and being told off by other women online. Yet again, nobody wins. 

It should not surprise men that women are superficial. It is true that as a sex we have become pickier; changing mores have made partnership optional, and so women are now motivated by desire rather than duty. Women’s metrics have become, in other words, closer to those of men. If men balk at this, it is because they see an unflattering reflection of themselves. Increasingly today, women are the more educated, higher-earning party, and so implement stricter selection methods so as to conserve their self-made status. Yes, that can hurt. But judging women for exercising preferences — the realistic ones, at least — is pure hypocrisy. Modern male sexual culture is aggressively “lookist”, with men constantly ranking women out of 10. Yet hints of the same attitudes among the fairer sex are framed as evidence of a civilization in decline. 

Men are not shamed for preferring beauty — nor should they be. It is natural, after all… and aren’t we constantly reminded that male sexuality is “highly visual”? Yet when women express similar “visual” preferences, they are called picky. How’s that for a double standard? Castigating choosiness as a feminine pathology is naive. Nevertheless it’s all the rage. One popular meme at the moment plays on the idea of a state-mandated girlfriend, though clearly restricting choice will not furnish the way for true love — unless begrudging toleration is your thing.

The fate of Stew Stewart is what happens when we indulge the fantasy that love is blind. In the absence of ambient traditionalist pressure, women must have active incentives to date. Telling them they must suck it up and go for the kinds of men who look like they’ve been asked to leave several garden centers is not an attractive proposition. The sexes must find one another again; the romantic isolation of 2026 is depressing and unhealthy. But the solution isn’t to turn back the clock to a time when women had no other choice; instead, it’s to train for the league in which you want to play. In this, perhaps the looksmaxxers are right after all.

Social media would have us believe that this dynamic is now the norm in heterosexual relationships. Men err like bumbling toddlers; women manage and chastise and cajole them. These videos are fed to me continually on TikTok: women telling horror stories about terrible dates; women offering advice on harnessing “dark feminine energy” to manipulate love interests; women fresh out of breakups denying the value of romantic love at all. Associating with men, these videos tell us, is a matter of tragic compromise — an embarrassing slip into an enclosure of backwards baboons destined to disappoint us. The assumption, borrowed from the language of motherhood, is that girlfriends have a monopoly on reason and on perspective; their partners, on the other hand, are hopelessly in thrall to impulsive urges and emotions, base creatures reliant on sex and drink. In this dynamic, the woman’s celestial faculties have one major source: therapy culture.

The cult of the Therapy Girlfriend was thrown into relief last week in a skit which went viral on X. In it, a woman sits across from her date; she quizzes him on various attributes. Age? 28. Attachment style? Secure. Credit score? 780. Therapy? Once a week. So far, he passes muster. But then the guy scuppers the deal by asking her to “go to my place”; she weighs anchor.

Yet it wasn’t the woman’s skittishness about casual sex that summoned discourse; it was the fact that attending regular therapy was on her list of requirements — once a week being the bare minimum for dateability. Assessing it later, the commentator Colin Wright wrote that the requirement made sense because of “how thoroughly many Left-wing women view nearly every interaction through a kind of ‘therapy ideology’ with its own special language”. He went on to describe how such women conceive of therapy as a sort of “mental-health gymnasium” — part of the necessary upkeep of every healthy adult.

Rather than emerging fully fledged into the adult world, there to deal with the ups and downs of life, therapy culture has us with one wing dangling from the chrysalis — always ready to be bashed by a gust of wind. To go through life unscathed requires Joan Didion’s vision of self-centered psychological labor: “[We are] something to work at, work on, ‘make an effort’ for and subject to an hour a day of emotional nautilus training.” With all this self-discovering, who has any time for seduction?

Clearly, there are occasions when therapy serves a purpose. Men and women alike benefit from it when living with grave psychiatric disorders; in many cases, these interventions should be lifelong with otherwise disastrous consequences. But should all men, even those without troubling histories, be marched off to a headshrinker for the mere purpose of neutering defects, buffing out the bad before they are allowed near a relationship? Any reasonable dater would say no.

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And yet, increasingly, social media pins romantic disappointment on the sins of untherapized men. The language of relationship “attachment styles” is a nauseating example — a bullshit taxonomy of daters said to be doomed by early parental relationships and who, in a better world, would simply be called “desperate” (instead of “anxious”), “not into you” (instead of “avoidant”) and “normal” (instead of “secure”). The greatest trial sent a dater’s way seems to be to fall for an “avoidant” — those who run from intimacy because their mother didn’t rush in when they cried in the crib, or something — and advice on how to “handle” such partners is everywhere in the online femosphere. Such women would do better to avoid those who don’t like them back. Put that on a T-shirt. But the comforting delusion that this attachment-style discourse affords women is that it lets them avoid the horror of simply not being wanted; instead, they are free to meditate their way through an “avoidant discard” (when said partner ups and leaves out of nowhere) by a man whose inner child feels abandoned, and so is scared of intimacy, or whatever the rationale may be. As usual in the theater of hyperindividualism, everyone else is to blame. Easy to see how this flattering framework might have gained traction.

Equally, any amorous mishap can be palmed off on a partner who has failed to do “the work”: the usual, devastatingly reasonable causes of breakups — loss of feeling, wandering eyes, the contempt of familiarity — are traded for ego-friendly explanations: “He is frightened by his enormous passion for me”; “He wants to be with someone less emotionally challenging”; “He is afraid of replicating the mistakes of his parents’ marriage” and so on and so on. Let’s not face the fact that, sometimes, he’s just not that into you. Humility and resilience around this truth is an essential lesson of adulthood — far more valuable than any therapy package going.

This is not to say that the Therapy Girlfriend intentionally weaponizes counseling-speak in her romantic campaigns. In fact I’d contend that the assumptions of therapy — that we must continually enforce “boundaries”, manage “disclosures”, hold “dialogues” and seek “growth opportunities” — pervade Millennial and Gen Z dating culture to an extent that they no longer bear the antiseptic stench of their clinical birthplace. Therapy culture is hopelessly in bed with identity politics, and adherents of one are all but guaranteed to cleave to the other: its obsessions are the same, primarily the unimpeachable traumatized individual, whose needs and expectations supersede those of all others. Its emphasis on “empathy” always seems to go only one way: towards the therapy subject. Even in the context of couples’ therapy — something which, shockingly, I have known unmarried couples in their twenties to do in London (just end it!) — the “discoveries” of therapy seem far more likely to advantage the woman, who is encouraged by our culture to be more analytical, perfectionist and cautious in heterosexual dating. We go through our teens and twenties being told by TikTok dating gurus to fear and loathe men who are both guaranteed and determined to take advantage of, two-time and/or abandon us, such is the culture of fear around relationships; therapy culture is the peg with which we can hold our noses if we must associate with one. We women are encouraged to wield theories about personal growth and the emotional trigger as a sort of disinfectant: get with the program or be cast out — you’re a romantic biohazard.

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Now, don’t get me wrong — our exasperated kitchen-berator from the bed-puke breakup video can clearly do better: this man is an unsalvageable loser. The problem is that when women are encouraged to use the teacherly language of pop therapy (which, unlike real therapy, flatters the help-seeker rather than challenging them), they make losers of everyone they date. Yes, some men — like some women — are unstable to the point of being beyond saving; but a reasonable dating culture would tell us to avoid them, not to reconstruct them. But the Therapy Girlfriend necessarily turns the entire male dating pool into a shuffling army of bashful apologetics, self-flagellating for their criminal lack of “inner work” or suffering through ritual weeping sessions to show their emotional literacy.

And, critically, the Therapy Girlfriend avoids all fun. Love interests should not be cowed by a watchful therapist lingering in the background of all amorous encounters, like the forever-scowling HR team of a midsized corporate office. Men are right to be suspicious of women steeped in the language of “grounding” and “journeys”. These concepts are so often rigged towards things that do not a good relationship make: cautiousness, endless analysis and fragility. At the precious center is always the therapized person, cradling their own self-esteem. In striving to be perfect, placid and invulnerable beings, we miss out on the thrill of romantic risk; the pleasure of being around people who are perhaps not precisely like ourselves. Falling in love is by its nature “dysregulating”, a spinning blizzard, a waking dream. It very often ends in tears — but it’s always worth it. Therapy Girls reading this: send your inner child off to crèche. At some point the grown-ups have to do the talking. If not, you might just let the good times pass you by.

Dating Stateside is a far cry from London, where it is common to see hopefuls of either sex carrying rounds of pints through beer gardens to their suitor. Drinks, rather than a sit-down meal, are standard; in London, the post-match analysis does not open with an automatic “where did he take you”, and a man ordering for the table would be more likely met with a furrowed brow than a flutter of lashes. But all this goes beyond mere etiquette: the standards and expectations of young women in each of these cities betray a chasm in values. For any Londoner, New York’s old-fashioned rituals of financial courtship come as a mighty shock. And this week, I’ve found myself on the front line.

In young, feverish New York, old values hold sway. I quiz single women about their sex lives and their answers horrify me. One, who insists on men paying for everything as a matter of principle, tells me why: “At the very primitive level, this is a man and this is a woman. The role of a man is to protect and take care.” She sees the early stages of seduction in terms of deposits: the first date, all paid for with a gold Amex, is a downpayment on the second — my time, the logic goes, demands your money. To live the “soft life”, you must be decidedly hard-nosed. If he asks to split the bill, she takes it as a sign of disinterest. Little matter that most of these girls, living in one of the most expensive cities in the world, are already doing well for themselves.

To survey the young ladies of the New World is to encounter a peculiar struggle of choice-feminism empowerment logic and an impulse to tie your worth to numbers of Michelin stars. The absurd theory that any decision a woman makes is feminist has given them license to choose to behave as pedigree pets — and if you’re going to play that game, you must do your best, look your best, to win. Perhaps because of this, women here dress more nicely: on Thursday and Friday nights, dank subway platforms are filled with balayage blow-outs and vintage baguette bags, while kitten heels clatter up the piss-scented steps. There’s more flesh, more glitter; nails are longer and tops are tighter. On Saturdays, reserved for friends, gangs of girls march through the East Village in bandage dresses and moto boots; at bars, groups of men will ambush them to pay for their shots. Drinking culture, forever in arrested development because of the legal age of 21, is sloppy and manic but generally benign: girls get wasted on margaritas, boys struggle to hold their Millers. People kiss, vomit, grind; the sexes actually meet. Over in London, girls sulk in smoking areas while the stupefied talent inside nods to Berlioz in between bumps of ketamine.

And what of feminism? Well, what of it, the American girls reply. Many tell me, in queasy strains of Florence Given, that they are “empowered”. And they feel this power most when hooking up with men. Within this metric, achievement is about bagging the best man — he who hits the highest tax bracket and makes the most exclusive reservation; hypergamy on steroids. The sexual revolution of the Sixties gave New York women permission to have sex like men — coldly and without meaning. What this promise of liberation really meant, as Andrea Dworkin put it, was the freedom to do things “men think are sexy”. It did not give them more opportunity to have sex like women — which is not to say with candles and Milk Tray, but with a minimum expectation of some commitment. Untangling the strange blend of modernity and traditionalism in American metropolitan sex lives might then come down to this fact: a dating scene in which a woman can shag who she likes but can never ask him to care for or commit to her must offer her material comforts instead. A steak dinner is compensation for the fact that he will not text you back.

After the sexual revolution, the Eighties reinvented the New York woman all over again. This time she was shoulder-padded and permed, a career woman living a similar “executive lifestyle” as the men. She was a besuited “superbitch” — like Alexis Colby in Dynasty, fattened on Reaganist individualism and slenderised again by the Atkins. She knew women could “have it all”, as long as all they wanted was a lipsticked imitation of male corporate ascendancy. Her spiritual descendants are the polished, matcha-slurping marketing girlies of today; the difference is that instead of putting their best foot forward in the boardroom, their ambition is limited to negotiations over a candlelit dinner.

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If all this seems like a step backwards, that’s because it is. Long have men bemoaned the vanishing of the “feminine woman” — and long have dating coaches urged us to revive her by embracing our “black cat energy” — but the reality of a feminism which pays lip service to empowerment while demanding men pay for everything is that it can never be taken seriously. Put simply: you cannot demand equality in everything but pay; if you want parity, buy your own margaritas. Influencers like Shera Seven — whose “sprinkle sprinkle” method of extracting resources from men has become a depressing battle cry among young women — are setting us back. Earn your own bloody money. Seven’s romance-free lessons on bagging the best men extend the dynamic of the prize and her provider lurking behind the New York dinner-date hustler: how to make a man marry you? “Be the fantasy woman, even though it’s a lie.” Why do men go for gold diggers? “Because they make him look successful.” And perhaps the darkest lesson: paying for prostitutes is not a problem; the real issue is “tricking a woman out of free sex”. Strong stuff.

The American men I’ve grilled about the financial etiquette of dating have jokingly assented: yeah, women should pay their way, they grin, sometimes miming to an imaginary barkeeper for a beer courtesy of the lady. But in going Dutch, women buy something back from men, too: an unspoken obligation to represent value for money, to give in to the kiss, to get in the Uber to their place. Many of these girls are naturally horrified by “sex work”, believing the trade in flesh to be limited to a certain kind of woman. They don’t see the irony that hardliners like myself defend to the hilt: that putting a price tag on your company puts you on that very same continuum. Even if you don’t think so, he might — and will behave accordingly. Anything that gives women less power or confidence to say no is a bad thing.

The reality of affairs of the heart is that they are often cynical, selfish and dangerous: in this real world, it should be impressed upon every young woman that there is truly no such thing as a free lunch. Feminism is praxis: talk the talk, walk the walk, and pay your half of the bill. It’s a hard sell to ask men to take us seriously when we’re rinsing them for caviar on the first date, as one woman confessed to doing on TikTok last month. In the event, she was accused of texting other men during the date; her dinner companion slipped away in disgust, leaving her with a $1,000 bill. In a screenshot of her frantic messages after he escaped, she writes: “I don’t have shit on me!”

God knows I’m no expert, but I know this: the old married couple feeding pigeons on the park bench will not, upon being asked how they met, come back with: “He got a res at Balthazar.” The young women of London may be disgruntled to discover that their bronzed, brasher American cousins are relishing the fruits of chivalry — but do not despair completely. As many women of New York will discover in time, haute cuisine and high romance are not the same: the bill will always come due.

Welcome to renting in 2025. What did you think I was talking about?

The perils of modern dating are well documented, but the concurrent battle for housing — the uncanny tonal similarities, the vibe of existential uncertainty — is little discussed. For those between 25 and 34 — that Gen Z/Millennial crop now looking, in many ways, to settle down — the confluence of these twin concerns is not news. This group makes up a third of the UK rental pool; in the capital, the average age of the renter is rising. If the analogy of renting and dating is indulged a little, then marriage would be the logical equivalent of buying. The data here is what you’d expect, with the number of unmarried couples in Britain in the 25-35 age bracket doubling between 1991 and 2021.

The cost and uncertainty of the housing market is often cited as the keystone in the collapsing birth rate, a more sensible analysis, in my view, than blaming social vogues (or feminism) alone. It is understandable that couples looking to start a family would wait to first cobble together a deposit; it must be frightening to think of the site of your baby’s first few years being at the whim of a landlord, with creeping rents which threaten to outstrip pay rises. The marital custom of house then kids also makes financial sense: having children is expensive, so getting your ducks in a row by prioritizing a mortgage seems prudent. In this sense, falling birth rates is a policy failure — an unchecked housing system which has doomed Millennials to the status of tenant is a direct cause. But what of dating?

The game of seduction, in both the rental and romantic sense, has become more miserably cynical in recent years. Both are subject to a scarcity mindset; both have moved almost exclusively online. This was intended to provide the “customer” with a bounty of choice and customization — will I filter for a garden, or a dishwasher, or a brunette? — but the reality is a sense of fraught competitiveness. In London in particular, the restless urgency is exhausting.

I suspect Boomers forget, or have little sympathy for, how soul-destroying it is to queue up for viewings with your begging bowl, gazumping other young professionals with ever-higher security deposits, lugging your worldly possessions across the city to a borough you’ve never been to when your last landlord unexpectedly hikes the rent out of your price range. It is disconcerting, unnatural even, to form attachments to a street — even to get to know the shopkeepers, the barmaids, the postman — only to be booted into a different postcode a year on. Similarly, dating apps engender a dread of insecurity: it is peopled by the romantically homeless, sofa-surfing and subletting hearts in empty situationships. Settling down young is not, in a romantic sense at least, something my crowd has ever aspired to — but the alternative, the promised sexual freedom, takes its toll.

In both scenarios, the true villain is the timewaster; estate agents, like daters, have been known to ghost would-be tenants when a better offer comes along, while triggering the break clause is the instinctive get-out for bad Hingers (“we met on an app; you didn’t think it was serious, did you?”). Recently, my estate agent held a series of viewings in my flat; it occurred to me how similar that initial look-around really is to a first date. I watched as bashful viewers dutifully took their shoes off, gave the right compliments, asked tactical questions — do you get much noise?; do you get used to the stairs? — only to scurry off, as I have done after many a viewing and many a date, and debrief with a friend. Bit cramped, they say; definitely lied about his height. Needs doing up.

What does this grand theory amount to? The fate of daters and renters in modern Britain really boils down to one thing: casualization. I don’t believe young people desire marriage any less than they desire home ownership; while there is less social pressure, and certainly less religious imperative for wedlock, the fact remains that my generation has been conditioned to expect uncertainty and insecurity by an array of economic factors which have shaped a lifestyle of casual impermanence. A buoyant, optimistic generation — like our parents’ — is one that comes of age both socially and financially confident, which knows ease and ambition, and for whom the trappings of adulthood (a spouse, a car, a home) are not just appealing but within reach. Can we say the same for young people today?

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If those trappings are less fashionable among Gen Z, it is because we have been weaned on post-2008 bohemianism: the further into my twenties I get, the more I realize that the lifestyle we have been taught to accept as cool — bouncing around different living situations, gliding from moldy flat to ketamine-dusted warehouse to freezing-cold houseboat, all the while jumping from lover to lover too — is in fact “cope”. Nobody wants this. Our generation was promised a lifestyle of choice; what it got was instability; our low-low expectations of dating are colored by our expectations of how we have to live, the dire roommates we have to endure, the grim proximity to grimmer neighbors. We are used to being buffeted around, at the mercy of a hostile market, told to accept imperfection at great expense.

A perceptive joke flying about social media at the moment is that we are seeing the return of “recession indicators”. The theory goes that the return of Millennial pop culture — its fashion, its TV, its heavily filtered selfies — heralds an impending economic collapse. This month Trump’s tariffs threatened to plunge America and its trading partners into recession; the return of 2008’s economic headwinds seems less and less a joke. But I predict a stranger consequence of the return of Credit Crunch mores: a doubling down on its depressing romantic values, the injection of even more uncertainty, casualness and insecurity into the dating world, an even darker cloud of pessimism sailing over pub tables as Hinge voyagers steel themselves for summer. The consequence of miserable economics is miserable daters: romantic paralysis is the result of a culture in which commitment is framed as a luxury. Having the means to settle down, the confidence and security, seems almost quaint now — an echo of a different time. Nothing, and nobody, belongs to us. We are the recession-era precariat, and our sex lives suck.

The “rat boys” in this case can only be described as Hollywood’s scamps — Barry Keoghan, Timothée Chalamet, Josh O’Connor, Jeremy Allen White. The “rodent boyfriend” is a left-field choice of partner for the “hot girl” but has a certain something that mainstream beefcakes could never provide — an angular broodiness, a wiry weirdness.

Of course, we must remember that the trend is, at its heart, a joke. This is the phrase that has launched a thousand thinkpieces in the past two weeks; it would be a mistake to earnestly use it as a litmus test for “Gen-Z sexuality” or what not. But what it does provide is a fascinating framework to see how male bodies move within the romantic world. Are men tired of being categorised — or liberated by an alternative to rippling abs and broad shoulders?

Although it’s tempting to frame Rat Boy Summer as a baseless media invention, the concept does speak to many of my peers. One tells me she would “date Roddy the Rat” from Flushed Away if she could. “I exclusively like rat boys because they’re flawed and cheeky,” she says. “Most rat boys have a little sparkle in their eye. Alex Turner [the Arctic Monkeys frontman] is the original hot rat boy, and I won’t hear otherwise.” Throwing in another layer of complexity, however, she adds: “I’m disturbed however that no one is distinguishing between rat boys and bird boys. Jeremy Allen-White is definitely a bird. It’s a vibe thing.” Another friend says she prefers “more feminine” men; “I mean, they aren’t actually more feminine,” she qualifies. “But something tricks my brain into thinking they are.”

One committed rugby WAG isn’t convinced. She has just two words for me: “Thumbs only.” Another shares her sentiments: “I like to feel protected. I think for me I feel weakness when a man isn’t physically strong and doesn’t have much muscle definition. And I don’t like weakness in anyone I meet because I’m mentally strong, so I can’t relate to it.” She laughs, telling me she found her latest conquest at Soho House: “That cesspool is full of rodents but he’s a good guy, actually.”

This could all be easily dismissed as just another Gen-Z in-joke blown up by the desperate media. But desire matters — and holds a mirror up to the times.

There is a clear class element to physical preferences within heterosexuality: the ripped, tanned, Daz-white-toothed Love Islander and the lanky, princely rogues of Made in Chelsea are only the start of it. On Hinge, these two tribes are sure to pack out their profiles with class signifiers. One wears the Stüssy t-shirt, bumbag slung over the chest like a bandolier, Gucci belt glinting in the disco lights of a regional Pryzm. The other sports a Schoffel gilet (logo visible), skiing gear (cheery pint on a mountain) and, if you’re really lucky, an exotic holiday photo (Kenya or Sri Lanka) involving girls in floaty linen trousers. Body type, in this context, becomes another of these signifiers, with stocky muscularity and wispy ease tied in the cultural subconscious to ancient ideas of labour and leisure.

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While Rat Boy Summer is just the latest incarnation of this, one distinctive feature is its feminisation: Rat Boy Summer shows how male attractiveness is, for the first time, framed exclusively in ways (however weird or tongue-in-cheek) that relate to the female gaze. No straight men are describing each other as “boys”, least of all “hot rodent boys”: the giggly absurdity of the sleepover, the giddy solidarity of the club toilet, has crept into public lexicon. The primarily male-male signifiers of being sexually competitive have for now at least been shoved to the back of the cupboard (“alpha” behaviour, aggression, being a hustler) and have been displaced by camp fantasies which cast a sly glance at masculinity and make, for a brief summer at least, light of it all.

Think of the endless “types” women have forever been categorised into. “Girl next door”, “femme fatale” and “career woman” have done much for the way women perceive themselves (I cannot put on a cardigan or anything remotely “girl next door” without instantly subsuming the traits of Bridget Jones). “Jock” and “nerd” would be the only comparable stereotypes for men, but they are specifically American and not specifically about sex. Rat Boy Summer signals that men can now be dragged into such categories, as certain corners of online culture (TikTok in particular) are increasingly dominated by the dating stories of young women. This is not to assign it the power of a liberating force — that would be ridiculous — but suggests, if anything, that the power of the internet is inescapable for everyone, touching something as historically impenetrable as the male gaze.

Rat Boy Summer is also part of a wider project of making sense of the chaos of personality. The timing is important here: female tastes seem to be privileging unthreatening, low-testosterone men at a time when harmony between the sexes has hit a real low. While some women still certainly prefer hunks, it may be that less manly types — or “ectomorphs” — are associated with virtuous “feminine” qualities such as sensitivity and openness (this is, needless to say, a false equivalence). I myself have always found the “protective” vibe of hench lads instinctively offputting. There’s something about the performative alpha-ing, the “don’t worry babe, I’ll square up to him on the dancefloor”. A twinkle in the eye is infinitely more appealing than manly aggression. Of course, equating slender wrists and pretty faces with “being nice to women” is, as I have learned, a mistake.

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So, what do men themselves think? In 2021, Bony to Beastly, a bodybuilding website, conducted a survey of 423 straight women, showing them four male “body types” — ranging from, you guessed it, bony to very beastly indeed. Despite the website’s entire MO being the virtues of being really muscly, the most attractive type, according to the survey, was “athletic” — a tennis player-type build and the second skinniest, with no evidence of ‘roids or obsessive chicken breast consumption. Some 51% of women chose this, with 43% going for “strong”, a moderately muscly man.

The survey then goes on to poll respondents on particulars — preferences over leanness, neck size, “v-taper physiques”, whatever that means. The conclusion? “They [women] prefer men who are in much better shape than average but not as lean and strong as most men wish to be. Certainly not as muscular as most bodybuilders. Think of the bodies of soccer players, rugby players, and mixed martial artists.”

The comments under the article show us, albeit from a strange and small corner of the internet, how some men talk about their bodies with one another. “I wish this study could have ended with the participants getting scolded for their ableism and bigotry,” sniffs one. “A weird question: how big are those butts?” ask another, who goes on to enquire about specific measurements for the ideal behind. A third reads: “Skinny guys with fat wallets win in the end.” One can only imagine a bloke writing this in between gulps of Huel, forcing a smirk as a single tear rolls down his Gigachad cheek.

The frenzied defensiveness of these remarks tells us something: that many men, in an increasingly isolating world, are joining women in seeing bodies and conventional attractiveness as barriers to social fulfilment, even love. Of this, the greatest evidence is incel culture and “looksmaxxing”. Rat Boy Summer may be an ultimately empty TikTok invention, and the media’s recent obsession with it symptomatic of an unease about masculinity. But perhaps it can at least be a comfort to these men stalking the forums of bodybuilding websites, anxiously moulding their bodies to imagined female ideals. For it shows, if anything at all, the full range of human fanciability. Every dog has its day, and every rat its summer.

To find the roots of this catastrophic division, let’s take a look at what it’s like to be a young woman looking for men on a dating app. Dive in and you will there find that the feminisation of the public cultural sphere — a response to the cult of toxic masculinity — has divided many men in to defiant and defensive conservatives (bad) and a privileged club of sympathetic male faux-feminists (also bad). Apps have given women the power to shun those who hold the wrong views: “Never kissed a Tory” is a mainstay of girls’ Hinge profiles; “conservative” rarely is.

Let’s remember the reason young women have been handed the power to cancel: we are most meaningfully the victims of rape culture. This has resulted in a selection bias towards Left-wing men partly because we want something in common, but also, rightly or wrongly, because there is a hope that these men will be on board with all the sexual-social protections that come with feminism. In my experience, and in that of a lot of my friends, this has been a false equivalence — but can you really blame young women for going for people less likely to be a threat? Don’t forget that these men are all essentially strangers.

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Certainly, it remains the case that, as Margaret Atwood put it, while women fear rape and murder, men fear rejection and ridicule. Perhaps it is this, the bedrock of sex, which lies at the core of young people’s divided politics. But there are two important things to say: first, be warned that how someone votes might not have anything to do with how they will treat you as a woman. Second, a wish not to be cancelled cannot ever engender a harmony between the sexes that will last. Earlier this month, in fact, we heard that young men are no more likely to support the idea of gender equality than men in their 60s. Whatever my generation is doing, it ain’t working.

And, yet, women are setting the tone in dating culture even though it shouldn’t really be our job to educate men on how not to harass or discriminate. A friend and I gave one of the compulsory consent workshops in our second year of university, and part of the session was to go around with a show of hands asking things like “if she has passed out, can she still consent”. The mental gymnastics some freshers, not at uni for five minutes, went through to justify having sex with this hypothetical drunk woman — especially when the people holding the workshops were women — shows the unintended consequences of the politicisation of sex: desperate not be lumped in with nice-guy feminists, not raping someone, like other elements of being a “good lad”, became tied up into a wider question of beliefs, subjectivity, and free discourse.

One of the early hopes of MeToo was that the cultural complicity around rape would be replaced with a critical clarity and honesty. Now, we are at a point where the question “what if she’s lying?” has become the gotcha of choice to undermine the very idea of consent. The sexual divide has only been consolidated. As a result, we aren’t creating male feminists, just men schooled in the right things to say. This compulsory, superficial feminism is distracting us from the more critical, genuinely problematic elements of the men we go out with: whether they are sexually aggressive, whether they are unfaithful, creepy, have repugnant fantasies, or are addicted to porn.

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This should not be a zero-sum game: wanting a partner who aligns with your values and who also does not mistreat you should be doable. But we have created an avenue for men to wear the sheep’s clothing of someone who likes Greta Gerwig and listens to Mitski, while crooning platitudes about the female gaze. A new, no less grisly bogeyman has emerged from this medium: the feminised, declawed softboi, who wraps you in his Arcteryx jacket and confirms that “I really fuck with Woolf”. Once a harmless semi-progressive navel-gazer, he has mutated into a manipulator with a Mubi tote bag into a dating culture perfectly suited to him.

This politicisation of sex is producing unexpected outcomes. It has given us new frameworks which we use to “sort” men into acceptable and unacceptable categories which are not at all useful. And it has created new avenues for genuinely poisonous partners to reframe their past indiscretions as lifestyle choices (ethical non-monogamy has been a boon for all the worst blokes you know).

The new, warped framework divides male daters into two camps: the gruesome softboi and the 4chan cruiser. This second camp, though mostly exaggerated, is perhaps more interesting, as a rarer phenotype. What do they admire? What idea of womanhood do they cling to in defiance of a system which, they believe, is pushing blue-haired stick-and-poke tattoo artists with personality disorders into their arms?

The answer, or so columnists claim, is Sydney Sweeney. Much has been written about her appearance within sexual pop culture, which has variously revitalised the figure of the luscious, busty blonde or created a new rod with which Right-wing men can beat women, who in turn are just emerging bleary-eyed from years in the cave of body positivity. The answer to whether Sydney Sweeney’s breasts hold political power is probably “no”. But she does hold significance in terms of what she symbolises to the men who do politicise their attraction to her.

She represents the unfettering of a male sexuality that has been constricted by the demands of what some see as a man-hating modern bias towards all but a mysterious “top tier”. Women, we hear, no longer need to put the effort into being voluptuous, giggly, compliant, sexually ready and sufficiently made-up, but are no less expectant of ideal qualities in men.

Modern dating culture is a desperate bog haunted by ideological ghouls. Maybe it’s time we pushed them all aside, and stopped superimposing political fantasies people who are probably pretending anyway.

An earring does not indicate he is a good person. That Jeanette Winterson book in his tote bag does not indicate he won’t get sulky if you don’t give him head on the first date. He is as likely, at bottom, to be a prick as someone who writes in their bio that they want “a woman who isn’t crazy” (seen in the wild not a week ago). We must do something to rehabilitate relations between young men and women — or it will only spell doom further down the line. Failing that, bring back political lesbianism.

By 2013, the hostility had crystallised: when a man named Kevin Hoinsky set out to improve on existing pick-up artist strategies in a new book titled Above the Game, his project was subject to mass internet backlash and ultimately banned from Kickstarter for “glorifying violence against women”. And while some critics later and grudgingly admitted that this might have been overstating things a bit, a sense remained that any so-called seduction guide should be understood, essentially, as criminal in spirit if not in substance. The Cut warned: ​​”Hoinsky’s book may not be a rape manual, but it is a guide to exploiting the less-than-ideal conditions under which women have sex.”

A decade letter, I’m struck by the astonishing prescriptiveness of this line: the notion that any sexual encounter preceded by flirtation, negotiation, or indeed any assessment of a suitor’s desirability should be understood as “less-than-ideal” — and that any man who seeks to make himself desirable to an as-yet-uncertain woman is doing something inherently sleazy. Granted, the anti-Game backlash began in the form of reasonable scrutiny of controversial seduction techniques like “negging” (a slightly backhanded compliment deployed for the sake of flirtation).

But since then it has morphed into something much stranger: the idea that anything a man does to impress a woman, from basic grooming to speaking in complete sentences, should be viewed with suspicion. Behind this is the same low-trust mindset that leads women to treat every date as a hunt for the red flags that reveal her suitor as a secret monster. If he compliments you? That’s lovebombing, which means he’s an abuser. If he doesn’t compliment you, that’s withholding, which also means he’s an abuser. Other alleged “red flags” include oversharing, undersharing, paying for the date, not paying for the date, being too eager, being five minutes late, and drinking water — or worse, drinking water through a straw.

Today, the turn against pick-up artistry can be understood at least in part as a reaction against some of its more prominent contemporary practitioners, including men such as Andrew Tate, who makes Mystery look like a catch by comparison. But it is also no doubt an outgrowth of a culture in which male sexuality has effectively been characterised as inherently predatory, while female sexuality is seen as virtually non-existent. The question that seduction manuals once aimed to answer — “how do I, a shy young man, successfully and confidently approach women?” — is now, in itself, a red flag, one likely to provoke anything from squawking indignation to abject horror to bystanders wondering if they ought to call the police. That you are even thinking of approaching women just goes to show what a troglodyte you really are. What do women want? The contemporary answer appears to be: to be left alone, forever, until they die — or to meet someone in a safe and sanitised way, via dating app… although even that option is increasingly positioned as inherently dangerous.

Meanwhile, I was surprised upon revisiting The Game to realise that the strategies contained within the book are not just useful but mostly in keeping with more traditional dating and courtship advice, from “peacocking” (wearing something eye-catching or unusual that can act as a conversation starter), to passing “shit tests” (responding with humour and confidence when a woman teases you). Even the much-derided negging wasn’t originally designed with the goal of insulting or belittling women, but rather to teach men how to talk to them without fawning and drooling all over the place. In the end, the message of The Game is more or less identical to the one in popular women’s dating guides, like The Rules or He’s Just Not That Into You: that confidence is sexy, and naked desperation is a turnoff.

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And while this may just be a function of one too many viewings of the BBC’s Pride & Prejudice (featuring Mr Darcy, a man in possession of £50,000 a year and an absolutely legendary negging game), I wonder if the aim of seduction guides is, paradoxically, to restore our confidence in the tension, the mystery, and the playfulness of courtship in the age of the casual hookup. Even as we rightly rejoice in the fact that society no longer stigmatises women for desiring and pursuing sex, there is surely still something to be said for subtlety — and just because we aren’t consigned to the role of the passive damsel, dropping a handkerchief on the ground in the hope that the right man will pick it up, that doesn’t mean every woman wants to be horny on main. It’s not just that announcing your desire through a megaphone can seem uncouth; it’s also a lot less exciting than the dance of lingering glances, double entendres, and simmering chemistry that characterises a mutually-desired seduction in the making. Certain people might deride this brand of sexual encounter as “less-than-ideal” for its political incorrectness, but it’s wildly popular — in novels, in films, and in the fantasies of individual women — for a reason.

Meanwhile, the contemporary dating landscape is one in which the sheer fun of dating, courtship, and, yes, falling into bed together has been largely back-burnered in favour of something at once formal and immensely self-serious. In a world of handwringing over sexual consent — in which a man just talking to a woman at a coffeeshop can trigger an emergency response protocol — the stakes of sex itself come to seem unimaginably high, a breakneck gamble where one wrong move will result in a lifetime of trauma (or, if you’re a guy, a lifetime on a list of shitty men). Add to this the proliferation of dating apps, which makes the entire romantic enterprise feel more like a job search than a playground, and the whole thing begins to seem not just fraught but inherently adversarial — a negotiation between two parties whose interests are completely at odds, who cannot trust each other, and where there’s a very real risk of terrible and irreparable harm.

It’s no wonder that young people are both dating less and enjoying it less when they do. And when it comes to what women want, the writing on the wall suggests that it isn’t this. When they’re not hyperanalysing a man’s every move for the tell that reveals him as a serial killer, they’re languishing in unsatisfactory situationships — or opting out of dating entirely. In a recent newsletter series, “Good at Sex”, the writer known as Aella described a generation of women “sick of being clumsily seduced”, and a generation of men who desperately need to rediscover the value of being a persuasive flirt. “I’m belaboring the point here,” she wrote, “because people often have an aversion to deliberately attempting to be seductive. We equate being intentionally sexy to tricking a woman somehow.”

Indeed, somewhere in the course of trying to empower women to say no to unwanted advances, we’ve somehow arrived at a bizarre and toxic conclusion: that no advance is wanted, ever — and that a man who tries to make himself desirable to women must be some kind of weirdo, or worse.

And if the way out of this mindset doesn’t necessarily lie in The Game, as in the book, it might still lie in the idea of love and sex as a game, conceptually: not in the sense of a competition with a winner and loser, but in the sense of a shared activity that you do with someone you like, or that you might try to convince someone you like to do with you. Games can be playful, rather than adversarial; in the best cases, they’re so much fun that nobody knows or even cares if there’s a scoreboard.

And that doesn’t mean things never go wrong, as anyone who’s ever taken an elbow to the face during a round of Twister, a tennis match, or an energetic tango can attest. But if you imagine sex and seduction as an enjoyable, mutually desired dance, it means that when accidents happen, and someone treads on your toes — or feelings — it’s not the end of the world. Not a permanent violation, or a high-stakes trauma — just a chance for one person to say “ow” and the other person to say “I’m sorry”, and then maybe you try again. Because maybe you’ve begun to understand that sex isn’t just an act of nature but a skill, one that improves with practice, with confidence, and with knowledge that can only be gained through experience. And if some of those experiences are less enjoyable than others, they also represent an opportunity to learn what you need to know in order to do better next time.

His date (Sandra Bullock) recoils: “Ew! Disgusting! You mean…” — she can barely say it without gagging — “…fluid transfer?!”

This scene isn’t exactly pivotal to the movie, but with time it’s come to seem significant. “Rampant exchange of bodily fluids was one of the major reasons for the downfall of society,” Sandra Bullock says, explaining that the practice — which includes not only sex but kissing — has been outlawed in the name of safety. In our future, human touch has been deemed a luxury no enlightened society can afford.

Obviously, our own attempts at social engineering haven’t reached the point of outlawing physical contact, although the height of the Covid pandemic brought us remarkably and sometimes hilariously close. Remember when a Canadian Center for Disease Control recommended that couples have sex through glory holes to avoid breathing on each other? And yet, that instinct towards safetyism is one to which human beings have always been susceptible — and one that’s visible today in our ongoing attempts to streamline, organise, automate and make frictionless all the parts of life that used to be messy.

The vacuum left by the decline of old-fashioned dating and relationshipping, the kind that involved meeting someone in person and experiencing the exciting chemical process known as “hitting it off”, has been filled by a fair amount of explicitly anti-social behaviour as people eschew, or even fear, the possibility of making a connection without the intermediary of a screen. Meanwhile, the lure of the online world and its peculiar system of rewards has upended the etiquette surrounding romantic entanglements, particularly when it comes to being gracious with and about rejection. It is not frowned upon, for instance, to publicly share and mock the awkward messages men send to hopeful matches on dating apps.

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The more we delegate to the apps and the algorithms, the more we swipe and tap our screens, the less we ever actually touch anything else, including each other. In lieu of connection, what we increasingly have are services, which offer a safe, controlled facsimile of the real thing. A lot of these are also online: there are the camgirls who perform for a faceless crowd of observers, all competing for their attention through donations. There are the OnlyFans performers who offer the illusion of an intimate online connection in exchange for cash. There are virtual chatbots who will role-play as your girlfriend and talk to you for hours; some of them are even AI clones of real people.

But most interesting, and most controversial, are the services that simulate intimacy face-to-face and skin-to-skin. In the past, a person aching to be touched by another human being would make do with massage or having a stranger shampoo her hair; now, there’s a booming cottage industry of professional cuddlers who will hold you (or just hold your hand) for about $100 per hour. One, recently profiled in the New Yorker, has a menu of 80 different positions to choose from and says that the country is suffering from an epidemic of “skin hunger” in the wake of the pandemic — though he skirts the question of whether said hunger can truly be satisfied by this sort of transactional intimacy. All he knows is, his clients keep coming back.

A professional cuddle is safe and certified, but also explicitly non-sexual. For those who want more, who desire the intimacy but not the risks or vulnerability or self-doubt of a sexual relationship, there’s a whole new category of sex therapist, one who will not only discuss the physical act of love, but actually do it with you — at least sometimes, at least for a while. Their patients are people who struggle with physical intimacy, perhaps due to disability, military injury or gender transition. They call themselves “surrogate partners”.

A New York Times article about the practice is at pains to explain that they are not prostitutes, but nor are they just therapists. What they offer is something like psychology with a dash of sex work, with elements of self-improvement and skill-building. To me, they seem like a sort of sexual sensei, the equivalent of a fencing coach who has to spar with his client to help them improve their game. But also the word, surrogate, means substitute or replacement, and a central tenet of these relationships is that they’ll eventually end — that the surrogate partner will be replaced by a real one.

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Here, there seems to be something of a catch-22: how well do the teachings of a paid sexual sensei translate in real-world relationships? By the time you’ve hired one of these therapists to teach you how to have a normal sex life, don’t you sort of definitionally not have one? When you find a real partner, do you tell them about the sex therapy you’ve had, as you might discuss your sexual history — or keep it to yourself, as you might the intricacies of your medical one?

But the question of whether surrogate partners are effective is less interesting than the question of how they came to exist, what societal void they’re filling. Obviously, there’s always been a market for people who are willing to trade sex for money — but again, these are not prostitutes. (As one of the profiled therapists notes, sex workers do not generally require you to attend months of therapy before sleeping with you.) Their appeal, their purpose, must be something else. Maybe it’s this: they make formal and transactional what is, by nature, unpredictable and messy.

A surrogate partner will never ghost you, never blindside you with an “it’s not you it’s me” breakup; “sessions,” the New York Times notes, “are typically held weekly, in one to two-hour meetings until all three” — that is, the client, referring therapist, and surrogate —”agree that the therapy is complete.”

In this way, surrogate partners seem to be a product of a broad cultural desire to organise every emotionally risky endeavour into a rules-based framework that makes it safe — from refereeing the conflicts of children during their parent-organised playdates to making spontaneous flirtation taboo (“I didn’t consent to being asked out!”). We’re not quite at the point of finding the unbridled human experience revolting, or trying to make it illegal, but there does seem to be an emerging consensus that fumbling around in the sexual realm, be it literally or figuratively, is dangerous.

The controlled, controllable, bought-and-paid-for version of intimacy offered by professional cuddlers and surrogate partners is arguably one example of mitigating that danger. Another, perhaps, is the incursion into ordinary relationships of therapy-speak, which simultaneously obscures and exacerbates whatever actual conflicts a couple might have. A scroll through TikTok or Instagram reveals that normal dating and relationships have been all but pathologised, the conversation surrounding them rife with “red flags” and “triggers” and “boundaries” — the latter often used to describe things that might have once been called “preferences”.

In one recent and remarkable example, the actor Jonah Hill was accused of “coercive control” (note: still more therapy-speak) after his ex leaked a years-old text message in which he described his desire for her not to post bikini pictures on Instagram as one of his “boundaries”. On the one hand, the whole incident was just a piece of not-particularly-salacious celebrity gossip; on the other, it does reveal the mechanisms by which we try to protect ourselves from our own human messiness. To speak of boundaries in this context implies a sort of moral righteousness — the kind associated with the phrase “doing the work” — even as you seek to exert undue control over another person’s choices. It also implies that this is a high-stakes conflict in which the very integrity of one’s person is at risk. Yet scratch the surface of Hill’s so-called boundaries, and what do you find? Jealousy, plain and simple.

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Of course, it’s not hard to figure out why someone would prefer to frame this as a conversation about boundaries instead of one about jealousy. Boundaries are enlightened, elevated, therapeutic. Jealousy is ugly, and unpleasant, and ordinary.

And so is loneliness.

Here is where, I think, the worlds of therapy-speak and surrogate partners and professional cuddlers collide: people don’t want to feel bad. They especially don’t want to feel bad about themselves. And channeling our feelings of humiliation or loneliness or jealousy through a different framework, be it therapeutic or transactional, allows us to pretend that they’re something other than what they really are. To hold them at a clinical distance. To experience them as an inoffensive copy of a copy of a copy of the real thing.

It’s an understandable impulse, not to want to wade around in the mess. And maybe for some people, the ones who might never otherwise experience intimacy at all, the ones who fear losing control too much to ever allow themselves to be vulnerable, these risk-free relationships — or the illusion thereof — are as good as it gets. But it’s hard not to notice that, like the VR sex helmets in Demolition Man, the safe and transactional version of intimacy has a way of making everything a little bit less human — including ourselves.

This is where things got hairy: with each selection, the rejected partners would exit past the person doing the picking, who would see their faces for the first time. The point was torment, obviously: behold the sea of beautiful people you just canned for totally arbitrary reasons. The potential for regret in this moment was so powerful that the show eventually introduced a new gimmick, whereby the featured contestant had one “golden lifesaver” that could be used to save a passing reject.

In the era of dating apps, users are of course spared the anguish of a physical confrontation with all the people they’ve categorically rejected; the algorithm is the man behind the curtain, mercilessly dismissing everyone who doesn’t fit your preferences, out of sight, out of mind. We tell ourselves it is more efficient this way, ordering a human being via the same box-checking exercise we use to build a burrito bowl at Chipotle. We tell ourselves, more importantly, that not doing this is a risky proposition, maybe even a dangerous one. Without the algorithm, who knows what you might end up with? He could be short. Or a Nickelback fan. Or, gulp, a Republican.

Everything’s Fine, a new novel by Cecilia Rabess, seems like a cautionary tale about the dangers of too-indiscriminate, non-algorithmic dating. The relationship in this story is between two people who would never have matched on Tinder: Jess, a progressive and professionally ambitious black woman who works as a Wall Street trader, and Josh, a pragmatic fellow trader who describes himself as a moderate, but who Jess insists (sometimes to his face) is the personification of conservative cishet white male privilege. As a complicating factor, clues littered throughout the book suggest Josh might actually be Jewish — or rather, this would complicate things, if Jess had an iota of curiosity about it, but she doesn’t. Her obliviousness seems to be shared by Rabess herself: the only definitely Jewish character in this book, the main antagonist, happens to be a grasping, greedy, tax-dodging hedge fund manager.

Where other people see humans, Jess sees stereotypes. She is obsessed with voting habits as a proxy for character. If she had a dating app profile, she would emblazon it with one of those “Republicans swipe left” warnings. In this, of course, she would only be doing what the media has lately identified as the sole sensible strategy for selecting a romantic partner: in our obsession with “red flags”, political beliefs have become the ultimate dating dealbreaker. Everything’s Fine has already been cancelled on Goodreads by people arguing that a progressive black character dating a conservative white one is a way to “excuse racists”.

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A recent piece in the Atlantic reads out the writing on the wall, straightforwardly advising that politically heterogamous partnerships are a bad idea — “because research suggests that marriages across political or religious lines (when those things matter significantly to each partner) can be less happy, more conflicted, and more likely to end in divorce than marriages where spouses agree on religion and politics”. Note that the caveat appears only parenthetically, as if the eventuality that these things might not matter significantly to each partner is barely worth mentioning.

Indeed, to believe that politics is a mere drop in the bucket of multitudes that each human being contains is not only outré in elite circles, but often cited, contemptuously, as evidence in and of itself of a certain political affiliation. Jill Filipovic, in an essay responding to the Atlantic article, writes:

“There’s an impulse, especially among those on the moderate right, to talk about politics as simply a set of preferences, like what kind of shows you might select on Netflix. But politics, especially in the post-Trump era … reflect entirely different goals and certainly different values, as well as very different ideas about what our country and our world should be, and — perhaps most crucially for a marriage — very different ideas about the rights, rules, and opportunities for women, men, and children.”

It’s a bit of a Kafka trap: push back against the defining importance of politics, and ugh, that’s just what a Right-winger would say. Among progressives, it is increasingly an article of faith that the personal is, and always will be, political; if you don’t think so, well, you’re not one of us.

I suspect, though, that this extremism is less Trump’s fault than Tinder’s. Algorithmic dating is all about finding reasons to write off entire categories of people as undateable — and to be savage about it. If a certain type of human being doesn’t spark joy, then into the bin they go. For women, particularly, to be as discriminating as possible in one’s romantic life is positioned as an act of self-care: you are holding out for what you deserve, and what you deserve is a person who checks every box, meets every criteria. To give an unqualified man a chance represents a failure to respect yourself.

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And yet, I’m not sure that intentionally ensconcing oneself in a silo of perfect-on-paper people — and, by extension, seeing the values of everyone who thinks differently as an existential threat — is the best thing for any of us. Filipovic’s essay unwittingly demonstrates the hazards of entrenching oneself in this mindset: how intolerance gives rise to caricature, how stereotypes creep in to fill the empty spaces left by ignorance. Conservative men, in this view, are not just unsuitable partners but actual monsters: “With the demise of Roe v. Wade,” she writes, “a vote for a Republican politician is a vote to criminalise abortion, which is a vote to force women to risk their lives in pregnancy … If a man is willing to vote for that, why would you trust him with your body and your medical decisions? … Is he the man you want making medical decisions for your daughter, or teaching your son what masculinity looks like?

As visions of romance go, this one is absurdly catastrophic, not to mention dehumanising to everyone involved — the conservative men, obviously, but also the women who are depicted as brainwashed traitors to the sisterhood for even considering marrying one. (What of the fact that many of the most fervently pro-life voters are, themselves, women?) Its proponents might want to imagine how they’d feel if the tables were turned — if liberal women were being similarly caricatured and dismissed as amoral, unmarriageable ogres based on their voting patterns alone. In fact, this has happened within living memory: in 1992, the recently-deceased Pat Robertson decreed that feminism was “a socialist, anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians”. This was news to the happily married non-witchcraft-practising feminists of the world, who rightly roasted Robertson for his ridiculous pronouncement. Had the man ever even met a feminist?

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At the risk of stating the obvious, even couples who vote the same way still have differences, political or otherwise; they still disagree, fight, and get divorced. The Atlantic article frets that “fewer than half (47%) of politically mixed married couples report they are ‘completely satisfied with their family life,’ compared with ‘61% of couples in which both spouses are Republicans and 55% where both are Democrats’.” That’s one way to put it; the other way, of course, would be to note that your chances of marital satisfaction are roughly 50/50 whether you pair off within your own political tribe or not, making it a pretty impractical criterion for deciding who to marry.

Of course, this is the type of pragmatic take that Josh is always offering in Everything’s Fine, which inevitably infuriates Jess. “It’s just a hat,” he says, when she discovers a red MAGA baseball cap, a gag gift from a fishing trip, stuffed in a storage bin in the home they share. “It can’t hurt you.”

“But it’s not just a hat,” the book sombrely intones. “It makes Jess think of racism and hatred and systemic inequality, and the Ku Klux Klan, and plantation wedding Pinterest boards, and lynchings … and decades of propaganda and Fox News and conservative radio, and rabid evangelicals, and rape and pillage and plunder and plutocracy and money in politics and the dumbing down of civil discourse and domestic terrorism and white nationalists and school shootings—”

That paragraph continues for practically a full page — there is apparently no malady in the world for which the hat is not an avatar — but you get the idea. It’s all about going to extremes: your Republican vote is literally killing women, your feminist book club is full of lesbian witches, your little red hat might as well be a KKK hood. Josh, of course, is the bad guy for thinking that none of this makes any sense: he’s the oblivious toxic white male who not only brought the hat into the house, but is so blinded by his own privilege that he cannot sense its evil.

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Because this is how Jess sees Josh, she treats him terribly, not that she treats herself much better. Her perpetual sense of victimhood, her certainty that she is at a permanent disadvantage owing to her race and sex and middle-class background, leads her to both take advantage of others and to sabotage herself. And while the book ends on an ambiguous note, her relationship with Josh is almost certainly doomed — not because she’s black and he’s white, or because she’s a liberal and he’s a conservative, but because he views her as a person while she views him as a collection of labels. Jess sometimes says she loves Josh, but she doesn’t. She doesn’t even see him.

That inability to look past someone’s labels has always been with us, embodied by the concept of the dating dealbreaker. Sometimes it’s political (“I could never be with someone who votes Republican”), sometimes it’s practical (“I could never be with someone who hates dogs”), sometimes it’s utterly arbitrary (“I could never love a man who wears pants tighter than I do.”) But really, we have no idea who we could or couldn’t love. For all our attempts to plan and predict and control our romantic destinies, human beings have never been good at knowing what — or who — will make them happy. And god, isn’t that terrifying?

In a world where love makes fools of us all, red flags, political or otherwise, operate as a sort of fantasy: a story you tell yourself about what kind of person you are, or perhaps what kind of person you’d like to be, dressed up as a declaration about what kind of person you could never be with. The dealbreaker is a way of imposing order: I know where the line is. I’m in charge. These stories can be comforting. They can be exciting. But that doesn’t make them true.

Such is the message of Robyn Exton, CEO of lesbian dating app HER, mostly aimed at 20-to-30-somethings. Robyn is very enthusiastic about the cause of lesbianism for all. Last week, in honour of Lesbian Visibility Day, she wrote a combative statement on her business’s website, asserting that attempts to confine the category of lesbians to “only those assigned female at birth” involves a “twisted and erroneous” belief “about what being a lesbian can or cannot entail”. “The future of lesbian is trans”, she continued, before declaring: “we must all affirm trans and nonbinary lesbians… we must all become better informed and put in the work”. She concluded: “On Lesbian Visibility Day, let’s ensure that all lesbians are seen, celebrated, and embraced — regardless of their gender. There’s no such thing as a ‘real lesbian’.” Later, she sent out a message to all users to delete the HER app if they disagreed, and made a TikTok video to the same effect.

Based on an Ellen episode drawing on popular stereotypes about voracious lesbians stealing men’s wives, there’s a joke that whenever you recruit enough women to the sapphic cause, you win a toaster. Exton seems to think she can win a toaster for her preferred version of lesbianism by hurling insults at the unconvinced. If you fall into this category, she suggests, you are a “irrelevant has-been lez-bean”, a “fascist”, a “transphobic bigot full of hatred”, and a “sad, hateful clown”. As seduction techniques go, it’s a bold one.

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By redrawing the maps of womanhood and manhood, so fundamental to human life in numerous ways, transactivists such as Exton have redrawn several other maps. One of these represents sexual orientations — heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual — once understood as involving distinctive patterns of attraction between the biological sexes by definition, but now no longer. Ignoring everything that we know about human sexuality, primary and secondary sex characteristics are now treated as the negligibly important physical wrapping for the irresistibly hot gender identities pulsing away within.

According to this demented sexual metaphysics, if a male identifies as a woman and is also attracted to women, he counts as a “trans lesbian” — which also means he is a lesbian, and you had better not object to him popping up in the app you just paid for. The head of Stonewall, Nancy Kelley, agrees; the difference between female and male “lesbians” is now treated by LGBTQ+ authority figures as no more important than the difference between Scottish and English ones.

Queer culture still allows you, a hapless female seeking females, the right to reject any given “trans lesbian” purely on individual grounds of preference or taste. Maybe you don’t like his politics, or shade of lipstick, or something. This is treated as a straightforward matter of consent. But woe betide you if you reject him on the grounds that he is the wrong sex, or otherwise indicate on your dating profile that you only want to have sex with females, accurately construed. In the latter case, you are likely to get banned from whatever queer app you are using — as you also would be for using the pronouns I just used, for the sake of clarity.

In theory, the map of sexual orientations should get redrawn for each orientation equally, but in practice it has been altered for lesbians most of all. Swiping through the apps and looking for love, you are now bound to come across photos of what are obviously adult human males, dressed extravagantly in florals and hairclips, adopting the sort of girlish head-tilts last seen on Shirley Temple in the Forties. “Putting in the work” to “affirm” these people, as Exton grimly urges lesbians to do, mostly involves dating and sleeping with them.

Many “trans lesbians” are autogynephiles, for whom the adoption of a lesbian identity can be added to a long list of fetishised pleasures about womanhood. To those who are not chronically naïve, there’s no mystery as to why fetishists would do this; but it is a mystery why so many lesbians, in the old-fashioned sense, seem delighted to collude with them. Why are they so keen to try to bully and shame female peers into sleeping with males with the right pronouns? The number of people who identify as “LGBTQ+ women” vastly outnumbers that of same-sex-attracted females, so it probably makes sense for a business like a dating app to cast its net as widely as possible in order to maximise the number of potential consumers. But this can’t be the explanation for everyone.

One underappreciated strand of the current discourse about lesbianism seems to be the weird idea floating about that committing yourself to loving females, as a female yourself, is some sort of moral vocation. Effectively, Exton and Kelley are acting as if, once you have come out as a lesbian (however that’s defined), you then have some moral duty not to sexually reject any woman (or “woman”), simply on the grounds of her womanhood. If you can appeal to some other less sweeping and more individual personal preference to get yourself off the hook, that’s different.

Now, you can argue with their underlying account of womanhood — and I do — but you can also disagree with the implication that being a lesbian ethically commits you to a “no woman left behind” attitude, at least in theory. In fact, morality has nothing to do with it. If, as a woman yourself, you do ever end up sexually rejecting another woman simply because she is a woman — and for no other reason — then you haven’t failed morally, though you might have just ceased to be a lesbian.

To conceive of your sexual orientation as a kind of missionary work may seem strange — and perhaps especially so to many heterosexuals — but it is also shored up by a popular contemporary conception of desire. In this view, sexual desires can be morally criticised and potentially perfected. This is not the mundane claim that you can choose not to act on deviant fantasies. Rather, it’s the idea that, simply on ethical grounds, you can work hard to breathe fire into your loins where there was none previously; or alternatively, extinguish it altogether. As a result, gay men should stop wanting “no fats, no femmes” on Grindr; black men should desire black women more often; it is wrong to feel sexual repulsion simply on grounds of weight; and so on.

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Ironically, early adopters of the idea that desire could answer directly to one’s conscience were so-called “political lesbians”, arguing that any woman could become a lesbian in theory, and urging straight women to do so on the ethical grounds of fighting the patriarchy. Popularly understood as the idea that you could choose to feel aroused by a woman on political grounds, this is daft. Generally speaking, you can’t berate yourself into feeling turned on by something or someone that would otherwise leave you cold — unless, of course, berating yourself is already your kink.

In often conflict-filled discussions of the validity of political lesbianism, it’s sometimes assumed that there are only two choices — “born this way” or choice – and if the idea of a single genetic determinant is false, then your sexuality must be freely chosen. But that’s a false alternative. There is no single gay gene, and sexuality can and obviously does have environmental causes. But it doesn’t follow that you can choose what to like or not like in bed. You can’t choose your environment, and you can’t choose its complex effects on you. Yes, you might decide to leave your husband and shack up with a woman in order to stick it to the patriarchy. But you can’t choose what you’ll feel when she touches you.

Such points seem lost on the likes of Exton and Kelley, pointlessly and destructively intent on converting lesbians out of their homosexuality by shaming them into sleeping with males as a form of charity work. I’ve no doubt that, as a result of such pressure tactics, some lesbians will end up in bed with males. But they won’t like it. That fact of them not liking it is neither a moral victory for lesbianism, nor is it a defeat. It’s a simple description of lesbian sexuality. And if they do end up liking it, they probably aren’t lesbians.

Into this swamp of heteropessimism wades Curtis Sittenfeld, with the new novel, Romantic Comedy. Her protagonist, Sally, a writer for a late-night comedy show, invents the “Danny Horst Rule” — to describe the propensity of her male colleagues to date out of their league. (The character after which it is named is a thinly-veiled avatar for Pete Davidson; Night Owls, the comedy show, for Saturday Night Live.) Women in the industry, Sally notes, never manage to do the same.

“Enter Noah Brewster, a pop music sensation with a reputation for dating models,” reads the blurb. He and Sally hit it off “instantly, and as they collaborate on one sketch after another, she begins to wonder if there might actually be sparks flying. But this isn’t a romantic comedy — it’s real life. And in real life, someone like him would never date someone like her… right?”

“… right?”, as they say, is doing a lot of work here. The entire plot of Romantic Comedy hinges on Sally’s supposedly unshakeable belief in her own unworthiness, which makes it very now; the insecure, self-sabotaging heroine is to the 2023 romance what the adorably clumsy girl was to the rom-coms of the Nineties. But what’s more remarkable about the novel is how it straddles two different worlds, and worldviews, when it comes to love: here we have the age-old yearning for a happy ending, right alongside the current vogue for being ashamed of wanting one. Sittenfeld somehow captures not just the current state of the romantic comedy, but of heterosexual romance more broadly — and in doing so, reveals that there is nothing funny about it.

It has been a quarter of a century since a girl stood in front of a boy and asked for him to love her, and 35 years since Harry met Sally. Now, we have Sittenfeld’s Sally, glumly deciding not to break off her tepid occasional relationship with a guy she met online, because “doing so would result in my needing to find another sexual outlet, meaning I’d have to resubscribe to a hookup app and meet enough strangers at enough bars to determine which one probably wouldn’t kill me if we went back to my apartment”.

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Sally inhabits the same world, and worldview, as Sittenfeld’s professional, liberal, millennial target reader; their anxieties and preoccupations are also hers, as is their unifying conviction that men will inevitably disappoint you. It is only a matter of when and how. The outing of bad men has come to function as a sort of single woman’s spectator sport, as if the inevitable unmasking of a boyfriend as a liar, a cheater, a serial killer, or (worst of all) a Republican is not just fun in its own right but actually the whole point.

It’s not difficult to tease out the contributing factors that led us here. The highly individualised notion that relationships should be first and foremost about self-fulfilment. The devaluation of loyalty and companionship. A therapised culture that treats the process of falling in love and establishing intimacy as something sinister and pathological. And of course, the pervasive (and not incorrect) sense that someone new is only ever a Tinder swipe away. It’s not a coincidence, in this cynical moment, that our most viral relationship stories are not about falling in love, but breaking up, giving rise to a genre of personal essay that is ostensibly about female empowerment but works much more like something akin to revenge porn.

To air your ex’s dirty laundry in the pages of a national publication is increasingly presented as a radical act of self-care, sisterhood, even social justice. As one refreshingly critical response put it: “Do this and you will be met with a huge wave of sympathy from strangers on the internet. They will applaud you as a brave truth teller, commendably taking a strike for women everywhere, against the common enemy.”

The ex-boyfriends in these essays are liars, cheaters, hypocrites. They are threatened and resentful when a woman succeeds. They are sexually entitled and emotionally withholding. But most of all, they are ordinary. It is understood that what they did to their long-suffering girlfriends is simply what men do to women — or, more to the point, what they make women do to themselves. “The ability to bend an inch at a time while seeming to stand up straight is a useful and gendered skill. Most women I know do it regularly,” wrote one such author in the Guardian. “They bend until they’re pretzeled and then blame themselves for the body aches.”

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Sally’s failed starter marriage (already over by the time the book begins) could be ripped from one of the aforementioned viral essays: when she flies to New York for her Night Owls interview and gets offered the gig on the spot, her husband, a lawyer, not only assumes she’ll decline, but confesses that he only indulged her repeatedly auditioning for the job because he assumed she’d never get it. Sally, of course, cites this as evidence that her ex “didn’t think I was funny or talented” — as opposed to, say, an awareness of the statistical likelihood of a non-industry professional becoming a literal overnight success in the most elite comedy writers’ room in the country. This penchant for taking things personally rears its head in her new relationship, too: “If I were a hot twenty-five-year-old actress, would you have dropped my hand like that?” she snipes at Noah, after the two are ambushed by paparazzi.

Sittenfeld, surely, could not have imagined how perfectly this book would slot into our current cultural obsession with the shortcomings of heterosexual men. A dim view of romance, of men, and of the women who want them, is ubiquitous enough that it permeates the New York Times review of Romantic Comedy, in which writer Scaachi Koul scathingly describes Sally’s pop star suitor as “a manic pixie dream boy for straight white women of a certain age”. (As opposed to the manic pixie dream girl who populated the turn-of-the-century rom-com.) These men, it’s understood, do not exist in real life.

And yet, a recent, much-discussed break-up piece by poet Maggie Smith gave rise to the fascinating spectacle of, well, straight white men of a certain age, violently competing for the role of real life manic pixie dream boy. “Can you imagine being partnered with a writer as successful as Maggie Smith — MAGGIE SMITH — and you’re pissed off that she’s not doing the dishes enough or isn’t folding the laundry or running the vacuum or doing bath time as much as you are sometimes,” read one representative thread — from a man whose Bumble profile almost certainly includes a photograph of himself in a This Is What a Feminist Looks Like T-shirt. “[Come] on man your partner is living the dream, and even if she toiled in obscurity, fuck, support her with your every effort.”

What are we to make of the notion that even in this hypothetical paradise of gender equity, a woman is not respected for her status as an equal contributor to the household, but rather indulged, on the basis of her sex, in a way that we categorically do not associate with adults?

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We can only look back with chagrin, much like the protagonist of one of those Nineties movies. But the sad-verging-on-nonexistent state of the rom-com in 2023 surely stems, at least in part, from the conflicted relationship we have with the love stories we tell inside the confines of our own heads. A book like Romantic Comedy is the product of a world full of generalised complaints about the glut of exceptional women for whom no man can possibly be good enough: these are not stories about men, but about women, and how we wish to see ourselves in the narrative of our own lives. If the novel is a mirror for young women’s anxieties, it’s not an ordinary one, but more like one of those fairy-tale looking glasses that is more likely to tell you flattering lies than the truth.

Of course, we already have love stories about people (men, usually) whose desire for someone (not always a woman) is inextricably intertwined with shame and contempt: Pretty Woman, Brokeback Mountain, Ever After. The idea that the shame and contempt is valid, though, or that the person who feels it can be the hero without ever confronting her hubris: that’s new. When we start out ashamed of who and what we want — and what we want is an entire category of person pre-labelled as “trash” — what kind of stories do we tell to justify wanting it anyway? To get it without loosening our grip on our sense of superiority?

The answer, at least sometimes, seems to be that we retreat into helplessness. Women relinquish their agency in favour of vague mumblings about how we can hardly be blamed for our poor romantic outcomes. As in Romantic Comedy, this defeatism sometimes masks itself as vulnerability. It’s not, though. Sally doesn’t believe she’s unworthy of love. It’s more cynical than that. She just doesn’t really believe in love, full stop. What with all this male power, privilege, and patriarchy swirling like a miasma over our lives, there’s no hope of it. And if the old avatar for romantic regret was Joan Jett snarling, “I hate myself for loving you,” our new one looks more like Taylor Swift moaning, “Look what you made me do” — as she carefully, deliberately shreds the reputation of every man who broke her heart.

“I may not be the woman you marry,” it says, “but I’ll be the woman you think about when your boring wife lays starfish for the entire *2 minutes* before going to sleep facing the opposite direction.”

This video is not the only one of its kind, although it is one of the weirder ones. For the past several weeks, TikTok has been replete with videos from young women proudly announcing themselves to be the opposite of wife material — and not-so-subtly labelling those who are as sexually non-adventurous. These ladies — the kitchen counter yogi, the one dancing in the driver’s seat of her car, the one wearing an oversized T-shirt and a decidedly sinister smile — are happy to declare that they will not be the one with whom you settle down. But oh, when you do, you’ll think about them.

It’s hard to trace the evolution of “wife” from an aspirational role to a reviled one, but it’s a fair bet that the broader contemporary distaste for female heterosexuality has something to do with it. In an age in which women are tying themselves into knots to identify as anything but straight, desiring men is bad enough; to marry one surely denotes you as terminally basic, possessed of the worst possible taste.

At the same time, the rise of the lifestyle influencer has breathed new life into the Madonna-Whore complex of yore, which now plays out in the form of an ongoing beef between the tradwives of the political Right and their convention-eschewing progressive counterparts. That many of said progressives are engaged in polyamorous relationships, which are often indistinguishable in all but name from an old-school harem, is a complicating factor, but also a very funny one — much like the conservative sexual mores that somehow become “queer” under the banner of demisexuality.

Perhaps it’s the classic lines of this conflict that brought the following cultural analogy to mind: what I thought of upon encountering these videos, immediately, was Iain Softley’s 1997 film adaptation of the Henry James novel, The Wings of the Dove. For the uninitiated, the story tells of a love triangle between an enamored but impoverished British couple, Kate Croy and Merton Densher, and a rich American orphan named Millie Theale who presents both complication and opportunity. Millie is dying; she’s also unmarried, and quite taken with Merton. Kate, observing this, persuades Merton to seduce Millie, so that he can inherit her fortune — and then, newly widowed and flush with cash, marry Kate.

Softley’s take on this story leans into its sexual elements, making explicit (and fully, frontally naked) what James’s novel only ever insinuates. Kate, in this imagining, is the quintessential femme fatale. Millie, pious and beautiful and doomed, is the starfish wife, albeit with an expiration date. Utterly assured of her own appeal, Kate never imagines that Millie could present a threat: when she sends Merton off to marry another woman, it’s in complete confidence that she (Kate) will be the one he thinks about. But — spoiler alert — when Millie does die, leaving Merton her fortune, he doesn’t want it. And worse, he doesn’t really want Kate, either. Not anymore. Not after everything.

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Conservatives might be inclined to see this story as a cautionary tale about the dangers of being a trollop; to me, the more interesting lesson to be taken from both James’s classic and the TikTok #notvanilla hashtag is that sex will only take you so far. In both cases, the woman’s error is putting far much stock in the allure of her sexual availability, and in the power this will forever exert over the men she shtupped but didn’t settle down with. It is, in some ways, a fantasy of immortality: “I won’t be the girl you marry”, but of course in this imagined future, the girl won’t be a girl anymore. She is just hoping that somebody remembers her that way.

Maybe there are worse ways to stay forever young, but it strikes me that this is a scenario that grows less appealing the further one gets from one’s sexual salad days. The idea of your recent ex being tormented by memories of your relationship is titillating when you’re 20; at 40, the idea of a balding, paunchy, middle-aged dad thinking of your younger self while he’s in flagrante with his wife seems not just unappealing, but a little repulsive. (Far from being titillated by the idea, I rather desperately hope that none of my former boyfriends — all of whom are now at least 40 years old — are still thinking about me at all, let alone thinking about me like that.)

Certainly, it requires an interesting view of marriage to decide one would rather be the ghost that haunts someone else’s husband than be a wife herself. If anything, the contempt these young women hold for the imagined, eventual spouse of their ex-paramours exceeds that even for the man who married her; as with so many revenge fantasies, this one centres less on one’s own happiness or success, and more on the idea that someone who once hurt you will have a miserable life.

But where are these women, in this imagined future? If you’re the one who got away, where did you get away to, and with whom? It’s hard to say if these women also, separately, imagine themselves happily coupled with someone else in the future where their exes are eternally disgruntled and pining. But surely being remembered as some former hookup’s Best Blowjob Ever is cold comfort if the best thing you can say about your life is that you were hot once upon a time.

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Do men love bitches?

By Louise Perry

It’s an interesting sort of self-mythologising, an attempt to be the architect of your own legacy through the medium of somebody else’s memory, in which your own persistence is hardly guaranteed. Kate Croy learns too late that men have their own ideas about who constitutes “the one who got away”; in the end, it’s sweet vanilla Milly whose memory becomes a torment. Similarly, the self-proclaimed unmarriageable women of TikTok might want to consider that men do tend to love the person they choose to marry — and to be with her because they love her, the wild (or weird) sex they had with some other girl once upon a time notwithstanding. This is one area in which the Madonna-Whore dichotomy, classic though it is, no longer quite captures the reality of romantic entanglements. The gold standard for choosing a life partner in 2023 is not sexual purity, but sexual compatibility, which is to say that if a guy has a vanilla wife, it’s probably because he likes vanilla.

In 1959, James Thurber wrote a sprawling consideration in the New Yorker of James’s story and the various efforts (and, frequently, subsequent failures) to adapt it for stage and screen. (I am desperate to know what he would have made of Softley’s lascivious take on the material, but alas, he died in 1961.) Among the lines from this remarkable piece is a beautiful observation of how Kate and Merton end, miserably, in a miasma of survivor’s guilt and regret: “They are shadowed and separated forever by the wings of the dead dove, by the presence of a girl who is gone but everlastingly there.”

The anti-wives want to have it both ways. They want the cachet of the sexually adventurous temptress, and they also want to be the dead dove who ruined you for every woman who came after. But they will be disappointed: that ex-boyfriend, cocooned in the arms of his starfish wife, is probably not thinking of them at all.

“I just heard about demisexuality a few days ago,” read the first letter I received on the topic. “When I read the description of it, I thought to myself ‘That is definitely me, wow!’”

For those not in the know, demisexuality refers to the state of not experiencing sexual attraction or desire without a strong emotional bond. The term originated on a role-playing forum back in the early Noughties, where a teenage girl assigned it to one of her fictional characters. But after it migrated onto Tumblr in 2011, it was adopted in earnest by extremely young and terminally online users who collected identity markers like they were baseball cards. Outside Tumblr, the reaction was largely sceptical; as many a snarky commenter pointed out in the moment, the whole idea of demisexuality also described the normal sexual experience of, if not everyone, then an awful lot of people, most of whom never felt the need or desire to append a label to their sexual preferences. The delighted self-discovery of the teen who wrote the aforementioned letter was only slightly tempered by this concern: “[Some] people are saying it’s people trying to be ‘special snowflakes’ by putting a label on this kind of attraction,” she wrote.

But if the whole thing seemed frankly silly and, okay, snowflakey, it also seemed pretty harmless. Gender and sexuality were just the latest lens through which young people were trying to understand their place in the world; “demisexuality” was to 2013 what being a little goth-curious was for a teen in 1995, more or less — except that with so much of life happening online, this identity was less about how you moved through the world than about finding just the right flag to affix to your social media profile. But unlike shopping at Claire’s Accessories, demisexuality didn’t stay a teenage conceit; a combination of creeping identitarianism in mainstream culture plus a general obsession with What The Youths Are Into eventually made the concept irresistible to adult millennial women.

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“IT HAPPENED TO ME: I’m A Demisexual,” read the headline on a 2015 essay on the site XOJane, where the author boldly proclaimed that her inability to feel sexual attraction toward strangers made her “not quite heterosexual”.

The essay was met with a fair amount of ridicule, for all the obvious reasons — “they want to be oppressed so bad” was the unkind but not entirely untrue thrust of the critiques — but there was something about the way it lamented “the many struggles of living in such a sexually charged culture” that spoke to the anxieties of digital natives trying to navigate a post-sexual revolution dating scene. Hookup culture, dating apps, the endless sorting and filtering of potential suitors in a manner that resembled online shopping more than human connection: it’s no surprise that people struggling in this system jumped on a term, a hard-wired identity, that offered an explanation as to why. The young women who adopted a “demisexual” label as a means of opting out were less angry than their closest analogue, the young male incel, but both shared a sense that the system was broken. If male incels were made miserable by the spectre of the sex they wanted but could have, the demisexuals were perhaps equally tormented by the pressure to want, full stop.

Seven years after the XOJane essay, demisexuality remains a contested notion but also a far more visible one, in everything from beer marketing to dating guides, as with this recent dispatch from the dating app Hinge. A hypothetical demisexual dater asks, “What’s the best way to set expectations around waiting to get sexual?”, prompting a supportive but altogether unintelligible response from the app’s resident therapist that is short on actionable information and long on inscrutable axioms like: “Boundaries are bridges, not fences.” (Are they, though?)

Demisexual visibility seems to have less to do with a grassroots shift in human sexuality, and more to do with its corporate profitability. In a world of identity-driven marketing, a massive piece of the pie awaited any advertiser who figured out how to make young, male-attracted women (the group that includes most demisexuals) feel special and seen — and, of course, not quite heterosexual, thus saving them from the curse of being just another basic cishet bitch.

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At the same time, the allure of demisexuality as a label clearly reveals something about the inadequacies of the contemporary dating landscape, particularly as experienced by young women. Taking it slow, assessing your feelings, and perhaps requiring a commitment before sex enters the picture: the tenets of demisexuality are fundamentally conservative, and more or less indistinguishable from the advice your grandmother would have given you about when and whether to have sex. But affixing the demisexual label dresses up these traditional values as a form of queerness, making them not just more palatable to younger folks but rhetorically unassailable. “I don’t want to have sex unless we’re emotionally connected” is a statement open to criticism; demisexuality is an identity that cannot be questioned.

This was clearly part of the allure for the teens who first gravitated toward the term. Demisexual may have been a snowflakey word but there was safety in it, especially if you were young, inexperienced, and a little afraid of sex. The kids who wrote into my advice column not only constructed elaborate identities around the type of sex they didn’t want to have, but also an elaborate consent framework in which any negotiation of one’s sexual boundaries constituted a violation of consent. The notion of pushing the limits of one’s own comfort in the spirit of experimentation, let alone for the sake of a partner’s pleasure, was horrifying to them, even if that meant (to use a provocative example) letting young men off the hook for being serial non-reciprocators of oral sex. When I suggested in one such scenario that a couple in a committed relationship might revisit and revise their boundaries, and even compromise them in the name of mutual satisfaction, the response was outrage. To these teenagers, a no in one context was meant to be understood as a no forever, and any further discussion or negotiation was, if not rape, then somewhere on the same spectrum.

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Identifying as demisexual may offer a coveted membership in the “queer” community (although even this remains a subject of some debate), but it does nothing to forestall the consensual-but-not-desired encounters that so many young women find themselves engaging in, the kind of bad sex that was so vividly and memorably depicted in Kristen Roupenian’s viral short story, “Cat Person”. And more than that, it elides certain truths about when and why and with whom we choose to be intimate, truths that clash with the contemporary notion of sexual desire as a thing that either exists or doesn’t, organically and entirely out of context.

To posit the possibility of seduction, of a no that becomes a yes, is seen as akin to rape apologism. We don’t like to talk about the complex alchemy whereby indifference might give way to fondness, even lust — or how the flattering, exciting sense of one’s own desirability can sometimes stand in so fully for desire itself that it’s impossible to tell the difference. The protagonist of “Cat Person” doesn’t want the man who wants her, but oh, the thrill of being wanted: “Imagining how excited he would be, how hungry and eager to impress her, she felt a twinge of desire pluck at her belly, as distinct and painful as the snap of an elastic band against her skin.”

Instead, we instruct young people that sexuality is mainly a matter of identity, one in which the main concern is choosing not a partner but a label. Indeed, adopting a term like demisexual is a way to sidestep the question of desire entirely, along with the fraught and frightening process of learning by experience what kind of sex you want (which, inevitably, requires stumbling uncomfortably against the kind you don’t). But the result is less safe than it is strange, a funhouse-mirror version of sexuality that has very little to do with the physical act itself, or the good things associated with it. And what’s under the surface of this label? Not self-knowledge, but fear: of intimacy, of heartbreak, and of being naked.

Its tone was that of a short, sharp, necessary telling off for lovelorn American women: you may have lost your way, it said, but we can get you back on track. And the reason women had fallen from the path to true romance? Feminism. Feminism, which was supposedly telling women they didn’t need a man, even though many women very much wanted to make a life with one. Feminism, which had separated women from the old wisdom of the chase.

Was feminism really so strong at this time? The proposed Equal Rights Amendment to the US constitution had been dead for more than a decade at this point, so possibly not, but facts never tended to trouble the narrative. You might need to be assertive at the office, but when it came to romance, the book was clear: only by playing the passive, feminine role could women make the right match.

Authors Ellen Fein and Sherrie Schneider were uncompromising in their instructions. Their method worked, they said, but only if you followed every detail. That included: “don’t talk to a man first”, “don’t rush into sex”, “let him take the lead” and “don’t expect a man to change”. In the worldview of The Rules, all feminism’s successes had left women lonely. “We didn’t want to give up our liberation,” wrote Fein and Schneider, “but neither did we want to come home to empty apartments. Why couldn’t we have it all?”

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Of course, when I say The Rules was successful, I mean that in the commercial sense. A cynic might point out that if self-help was successful in bringing out all the personal improvements it promised, its vendors would rapidly go out of business. And yet, the market is still going strong, with new purveyors rising up to solve the same old problems.

Today, feminism isn’t just failing to progress — with Roe vs Wade in danger of imminent collapse in the US, and sexual equality law in the UK threatened by the dissolution of the very concept of sex, it seems to be in retreat. And yet, it’s still getting the blame from a new generation of relationship gurus who want women to reclaim their “feminine energy”.

If you’re a straight woman who feels like you’re caught in a romance dead-end, never able to get a man to actually commit, the problem might just be you. This is the argument of “femininity coaches” Persia Lawson and Sami Wunder, who were both recently profiled in the Daily Mail. Women, they argue, are bringing the macho values of the workplace to the bedroom, and they’re paying for it with loneliness.

The first “macho” mistake a woman might make is to jump into bed with a man. Playing it casual, says Lawson, just means you get treated casually. If women want to be valued, they have to play hard to get: “In days gone by, when we understood the importance of femininity, men wooed women and, if they were successful in their pursuit, considered these girlfriends a great prize,” she told the Mail.

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The second mistake is that, even if a woman does manage to get a man to stick around after she’s flopped into bed with him, she’s still liable to sabotage herself by acting like the boss of the couple. Women who are used to being in control at work feel like they need to be in control at home as well, and men are happy to sit back and allow it. Wunder calls this impulse “mothering”, and according to Lawson, it creates “all kinds of tensions and resentments” which ultimately doom the relationship.

Fortunately, and by a stunning coincidence, these gurus can not only tell you where you’re going wrong — they can also sell you the solution. That is, assuming you have deep pockets (and assuming feminine energy is compatible with having pockets). Both Lawson and Wunder command up to £10,000 for one-to-one “femininity coaching”. In this, clients can learn vital womanly lore like “leave the man to do the running”, “resist the urge to plan” and “listen instead of talk, and smile”.

There are clearly women out there who are eager to pay for this advice, according to the testimonials on Lawson and Wunder’s websites. But it’s not obvious that they’re getting anything new: all this, pretty much, can be found in The Rules. Both are the perfect self-help formula: simple, yet complex. Catch a man with this one trick: all you have to do is change everything about yourself. Because for all that “feminine energy” is supposedly innate, it seems to take an awful lot of effort to harness it.

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The relentless self-command and artifice these systems require must be exhausting. But then, the essence of femininity is pretence. In A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Mary Wollstonecraft wrote of how young women were deformed into artifice by a middle-class education:

“while enervated by confinement and false notions of modesty, the body is prevented from attaining that grace and beauty which relaxed half-formed limbs never exhibit… and having no serious scientific study, if they have natural sagacity it is turned too soon on life and manners.”

Women, in other words, have always expended a great deal of energy on holding themselves back.

Almost two centuries later, we had the vote and the second wave was taking oppression to task at the social, sexual and economic levels; still, the definition of “woman” was something phoney and cultivated. In The Female Eunuch, Germaine Greer railed against all this:

“I’m sick of the masquerade. I’m sick of pretending eternal youth. I’m sick of belying my own intelligence, my own will, my own sex. I’m sick of peering at the world through false eyelashes, so everything I see is mixed with a shadow of bought hairs; I’m sick of weighting my head with a dead mane, unable to move my neck freely, terrified of rain, of wind, of dancing too vigorously in case I sweat into my lacquered curls. I’m sick of the Powder Room … I refuse to be a female impersonator. I am a woman, not a castrate.”

In 2021, the ways in which women are expected to impersonate femininity are as creative — and as punishing — as ever. The (horrifyingly dangerous) Brazilian butt lift, to craft outrageous curves of provocation. Lavish lip fillers, which turn female mouths into voluptuous doughnuts clearly meant for kissing and sucking rather than talking. And what can’t be changed on the body can be dealt with using photo editors. The epitome of femininity is a look that no unaltered female body could achieve.

The most depressing take on the modern crop of femininity coaches is that these are women simply doing what savvy members of their sex have done forever: finding a way to monetise sexism, rather than challenge it. From one perspective, it takes an almighty level of neck to make a business of telling other women to pretend to be something they’re not. You don’t need to resolve your conflicts with the man in your life if instead you can remake yourself as the perfect, passive girlfriend.

But, however much I squirm at the political set-dressing of femininity coaches, I cannot — hand on heart — say that all the advice is bad. Smuggled in under the feminism-blaming, you’ll find some stuff that would make even the most devoted second waver give a hearty cheer. Take Lawson’s command that women should eschew “faux casual indifference” towards men. She’s right that, if you’re looking for commitment, it is deranged to pretend that you aren’t, and then be disappointed that men aren’t looking to commit to you. Be clear about what you want, and you’ll attract men who want the same.

Or there’s the rule about not “mothering” a man. The imbalance of housework in heterosexual domesticity is an exhausting statistical truth. That’s not because women are misguidedly wearing the trousers at home, but because despite feminism’s cajoling, men have still not been inspired to pick up the pinny. If you want a relationship where you aren’t doing all the drudgework, don’t start out by doing it. The men you deter would only have been a drain on you anyway.

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All this points to the idea that men can’t be reformed. All you can do is avoid the bad ones. Even the hoary old Rules has a chapter titled: “Don’t Expect a Man to Change or Try to Change Him”. This isn’t a supine injunction for women to fit themselves around a man. Instead, it’s an order for women to stop kidding themselves that their self-sacrifice can turn a deficient man into a decent one: if he sucks when you’re dating, he’s not going to un-suck just because he puts a ring on it. If anything, he’ll probably suck harder once the doors are bolted.

Look at this another way. The “femininity coaches” aren’t solving problems created by feminism. They’re solving problems created by femininity itself — the sex role that puts women in the role of universal caregiver. To reconstitute yourself around someone else’s needs, to never asking for more than the almighty man has signalled that he is willing to give — these are very, very feminine ways to behave, and all part of the mass transfer of labour (both the emotional and the physical kinds) from women, to men. A hefty chunk of the femininity coaches’ advice is actually telling women to be less feminine, while giving the appearance of selling a hyper traditional model of gender.

But no one ever lost money by pinning the blame on women. Think of the safety advice doled out to women after the murder of Sarah Everard: don’t put your hair in a ponytail; don’t go out after dark; even, astonishingly, don’t allow a police officer to arrest you. Not one of these things is practical defence against male violence, but they all came more easily to people’s minds than anything which would actually help. But ludicrous as this stuff is, women find reassurance in it. It gives a feeling of power and security, however illusory: if I can follow these rules, I can make it home safe.

There has always been a voracious female market for news of our own deficiencies. Some women sign up to be told they aren’t “leaning in” enough at work. Some pay through the nose to be berated for the sins of their race. And some simply want to hear that love is obtainable if they can get beyond their unappealing, masculine habits. Talk less, smile more. It might take all your powers to reinvent yourself as someone new and amenable, but it’s still less effort than trying to reinvent the world to be fair to women.

Intriguingly, while reporting on the sexist horrors of Tinderland, Sales was using the app herself, by her own admission addicted to it. In her compulsive new memoir, Nothing Personal, she admits that as the proofs of her Vanity Fair article arrived in her inbox, she was messaging the young Abel, an exchange that would lead to his appearance at her Manhattan apartment a few days later — and a multi-year involvement that friends came to call a “situationship”. This description wasn’t to do with the age gap, but with the “casualisation” of dating. As Sales stresses, the barrage of choice offered by internet dating has “made marriage and committed relationships look less attractive and less necessary, especially for straight men”. Her entanglement with Abel was never going to be a relationship, then, to the dismay of a smitten-but-realistic Sales.

It’s become received wisdom that apps — the delivery devices of hook-up culture — encourage a kind of callousness that is particularly damaging to women, for whom purely transactional sex is more likely to be a downer. Tinder’s founders are archetypes of the Silicon Valley “tech bro”, who dress up poor treatment of women as sexual revolution. But despite this, something surprising is happening: the inversion of powerful truisms about women’s age and sexual desirability.

Until recently, it was a basic assumption that women age out of the fray, our peak time of sexual desirability being our late teens and twenties. This idea was sharpened by a raft of inaccurate studies in the 1980s suggesting that after 30, women’s fertility sinks like a stone. In Bridget Jones, published in 1996, the heroine ­is a “spinster” at 32. Even in 2014, dating and relationship “expert” Katy Horwood wrote that women in their thirties must “either compromise or dust down your spot on that shelf”. Just last year, Made in Chelsea star Ashley James told how she had a “meltdown” on the eve of her 30th: “I didn’t feel old enough to be… well, old. I wasn’t married, I wasn’t even in a relationship.”

James felt she had “run out of time” and remembered hearing people talk about women who were single at 30 as being “left on the shelf”, their “looks fading”. Part of the problem, perhaps, is the fact that older men have continued pursuing younger women.

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Now, however, the middle-aged woman has become a prime target for younger men, not only for sex but in some rarer cases for relationships too. Sales never has trouble getting matches on Tinder, and the age difference between her and her lovers was dramatic: about 25 years. She’s not the only one. High profile examples include Kate Beckinsale, who at 43 was caught kissing 21-year-old comedian Matt Rife; at 45, she dated 25-year-old comedian Pete Davidson. This reshuffle has also become a trend among ordinary folk.

Why have young men switched the focus of their sexual energy on to middle-aged women? The most obvious explanation is that life is imitating porn, where the Milf (“Mother I’d like to fuck”) has seen a stratospheric rise. In 2018, Milf porn was the third most searched for category. As Sales writes, this is in part thanks to the “megastardom” of Lisa Ann, the 49-year-old porn actress who became “the world’s most famous Milf” after the release of her 2008 satirical video about Sarah Palin: Who’s Nailin’ Paylin? Lisa Ann combined character with beauty, and an upbeat image of the pornographic potential of mature female sexuality.

There is, of course, something empowering — even thrilling — in the age reversal; the sudden realisation that being a woman in your late 30s, 40s or 50s does not mean sexual invisibility, but rather its opposite. “It wasn’t only the swiping I was getting addicted to, but the attention of all these excited young men,” Sales writes. But when I interviewed her recently for a radio documentary I’m making about singleness, she was keen to stress that however many young men were desperate for sex with her, the experience should still be seen in terms of an overarching misogyny.

The examples offered in Nothing Personal certainly chronicle some appalling behaviour, from the rude to the threatening. As well as more respectful missives, men routinely sent messages — “I’m thinking we do a few tequila shots, I do some coke on your ass, pull your hair back and bend you over while listening to Zeppelin IV on vinyl” — and, even worse, desires — including for rape simulation — clearly influenced by porn.

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Of course, older women have many obvious attractions: they are more likely to be confident and solvent, for instance. But the Milf idea thrives because it links to a kind of power-play integral to BDSM, which has become one of the most popular genres of sex. Older women are more likely to initiate sex, and in a kink-mad era in which the more transgressive something is the better, this role reversal no longer seems to challenge traditional masculinity. Instead, it is simply shifted into the category of “hot”.

The Milf figure also caters to complexes born of the chaotic conditions of the contemporary erotic-romantic landscape. Justin Lehmiller, who has researched the sexual fantasies of American men, found that men keen on Milf porn often suffer from relationship and attachment anxieties, and see a sexualised maternal figure as a source of comfort. “They’re worried that their partner might leave and they need quite a lot of reassurance,” says Lehmiller. Most young men on dating apps do not appear to be thirsting for a “partner”, but for men frightened of sexual rejection, which can be immediate, it’s not hard to see why an older woman — and especially a mother — might seem more sympathetic and more attractive.

When it comes to men their own age, then, young women seem to be drawing the short straw sexually (older men still prefer younger women). Their relative immaturity and inexperience seems to be held against them, and they are perceived as more likely to put the pressure on long-term commitment. Older women are (misleadingly) seen as lower-maintenance and more straightforward — or, Sales might add, as easier punching-bags. But if 20-something men are turning away from 20-something women, the feeling may well be mutual: young women are deeply frustrated with their counterparts, and seem to be looking to date older men instead.

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There is nothing romantic, or particularly feminist, then, about the sudden emergence of middle-aged women as sexual hot property on dating apps; older women are treated no better than the young. And all women are struggling to find long-term partners in the current landscape. Still, as an alternative to the complete invisibility, or worse, mockery, that used to surround single women over 35, being a 43 or 53-year-old with the option to be inundated with sexual attention from gorgeous 25-year-olds is surely preferable.

It makes a nice change from being pummelled by narratives about decline. In the Eighties, for instance, the apparent cliff-dropping of fertility was used as a way to jab at women pursuing careers. After the feminist gains of the Seventies, as Susan Faludi argued in 1991, the following decade saw a “firebombing” of women, and the “backlash” continued, more subtly, for decades. In the media, everything from the burned-out “superwoman” to “the spinster boom” and “the infertility epidemic” were, Faludi pointed out, held in opposition to the virtuous, happy, stay-at-home, married Mom.

Nobody much, at least on the apps, seems to be thirsting for a virtuous Mom now. And Milfs, especially older Milfs, are past their fertility peak, and in some cases their window altogether. This suits today’s young men, who, as well  being unschooled and uninterested in commitment, seem oblivious to women as potential mothers of their children.

Flexibility and the ability to move frictionlessly through the world have come to be prized in all areas of life. The direction of travel in romanceland, to some extent, reflects this — dating has evolved to offer maximum freedom and minimal cramping of style. In this sense it suits the Milf as much as the younger man. Many 50-something women, including Sales, are busy, with parenting commitments and demanding jobs. Young whippersnappers who can deliver sex on a plate and nothing more might therefore appeal.

The trouble is, sex gets complicated. Sales isn’t the first woman to catch feelings during a fling; as Erica Jong realised back in the Seventies, there is — for women anyway — no such thing as the truly zipless fuck. Today’s dating scene may be convenient but, like the fast food hurried to your door by Deliveroo, it’s also often unhealthy.

One such example was in 2018, when one of the housemates, India Willoughby, a TV journalist who was once a man but had transitioned into a transwoman, asked her fellow housemates whether they would go out with a transwoman.

“I believe it’s your choice… I would choose not to,” replied the RnB singer Ginuwine. Willoughby then asked: “You would go out with a woman?” “Yes,” Ginuwine replied. “But you wouldn’t go out with a transsexual woman?” Willoughby hit back. “No,” replied Ginuwine. As the awkward conversation rumbled on, Willoughby suggested that Ginuwine give her a kiss, but he leaned back and said “no”.

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This encounter provoked a social media storm at the time. Some believed Ginuwine was transphobic for rejecting Willoughby. Others insisted he had a right to his preferences. Some even suggested that Willoughby was sexually harassing Ginuwine, by stepping over boundaries he made clear.

Unfortunately, two years on, the ethics of refusing transsexual people as dating partners remains a fraught subject: questions such as “Is it transphobic for lesbians not to date trans women?” are being discussed online. Again, they tend to arouse strong reactions. Some lesbians, for instance, have expressed concerns that raising the question of whether they ‘should’ be attracted to trans women is a surreptitious attempt to pressure, manipulate and guilt trip them into shifting their sexual boundaries into unwanted sex in the name of being more ‘open’.

Of course, there are lesbians who are reluctant to date trans women because they believe they are not actually women (or at least not women in the same way biologically born women are) . But it’s worth remembering that lesbians have endured a long history of attempts to control their sexuality, whether through hideous practices such as religious indoctrination, conversion therapy or ‘corrective’ rape to “make them straight”. And why focus the attack on lesbians, when many straight men would also reject trans women as a potential mate?

This obviously provokes a wider question: when does a preference become a convenient cover for bigotry and prejudice? On some level, as this tweet declares, “dating is discrimination”. But the question provoked by that Big Brother episode was: when is discrimination acceptable, and when is it unacceptable?

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No one should dictate to others who they can or can’t date, love or sleep with. Historic attempts to do so  —  whether through slavery, arcane patriarchal customs or socially and religiously enforced ‘lifelong’ monogamous marriage  —  have led to oppression, trauma, unhappiness and neurosis. Think of the countless unhappy marriages many closeted gay people have had to endure — because they could not be honest about who they really wanted to love, because of the intense social stigma and shame attached to their sexuality. Without the freedom to choose who you date, the modern achievements of personal autonomy and individual liberty are negated.

That said, the question must be asked: are our dating and sexual preferences innocent? Where do they come from? Attraction is a biological impulse, but what lies behind it? Darwinists would say they grow out of our evolutionary origins. Since women are supposedly the ‘choosier’ of the sexes, they choose men who can ‘provide’ for them and protect them. Freudians would say our preferences originate from our childhood. According to the Oedipus complex, men unconsciously choose partners who reflect the most attractive qualities of their mothers (the Electra complex makes the same case about women and fathers.)

Frantz Fanon, meanwhile, would say that forces such as racism and colonialism play a big part in influencing people’s desires and attraction. A racist society constructs certain standards of beauty based on ‘whiteness’, which racial subordinates must conform to if they want to be respected as having any erotic worth. Whiteness equals desirability, so blacks must assimilate to gain recognition and respect. Historically, black women have bleached their skin and relaxed their hair to fit a Eurocentric image — which black men, in turn, have coveted it. As Fanon wrote in Black Skin White Masks:

I want to be recognized not as Black but as White. … who better than the white woman to bring this about? By loving me she proves to me that I am worthy of a white love. I am loved like a white man. I am a white man…Between these white breasts that my wandering hands fondle, white civilization and worthiness become mine.

Few people would need to read these theories to know that many of us have a ‘type’. You might prefer partners of a certain height, status, hair colour, body shape, and so on (there is even data to suggest that some people are attracted to those who look similar to them.) Such preferences may be oddly specific, and rather superficial, but they are mostly innocuous.

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Some people seek a partner from a similar religious or cultural background — in the hope that this will make it easier for them to relate to one another, or out of a desire to pass on their heritage, traditions and values to future children. This is technically exclusionary for potential partners who lay outside this category — and may even be narrow minded — but such preference is not especially egregious. Still, can predilections mutate into something more sinister?

Because of globalisation, migration, social liberalisation and the rise of online dating, interracial dating has never been more prevalent; the stigma attached to it has mostly dissipated. In 2011 —  the last time such statistics were recorded — it was found that nearly 9% of people in England and Wales were living as part of an interracial relationship (up from 7% in 2001). Moreover, there is data to suggest a correlation between the rise of online dating apps and an increase in interracial relationships.

Yet, there is a paradox. Christian Rudder, co-founder of the dating site OkCupid and author of the 2014 book Dataclysm, which uses data trends to analyse human behaviour, has argued people’s use of online apps doesn’t match up with their professed attitudes. Most people will say, when surveyed, that they are open to dating someone from a different ‘race’; in reality, they tend not to be. According to Rudder’s data, collected between 2009 and 2014 from DateHookup ‘Let’s Meet scores’, women in particular generally preferred men of their own ‘race’.

More brazen are those who, on dating apps such as Grindr, Tinder and Bumble, nonchalantly state their racial preferences on their profile. It’s not uncommon to see caveats like, “Not attracted to Asian men”, “ I don’t date black women”, “I only date white girls” — and it’s difficult to argue that this has nothing to do with racism, which has historically played a role in influencing ideas of who is desirable and who is not.

White women  —  or a particular image of white women  —  have been placed at the top of this aesthetic hierarchy as the paragon of human beauty, with black women languishing at the bottom, portrayed as ugly, unattractive and overweight, and Asian men stereotyped as ‘sexless’, meek and less endowed compared to other ‘races’. American research seems to confirm this, indicating that Asian men and black women are more likely to be excluded than their opposite-sex counterparts as potential dating partners on dating apps.

Suggested reading

The ruthlessness of the sexual marketplace

By James Bloodworth

Herein lies the uncomfortable truth about our so called ‘dating economy’: discrimination is the name of the game. If you are considered attractive or ‘high value’ according to dating market logic, then you have myriad opportunities to meet new people, pursue novel erotic experiences and find romantic fulfilment. You don’t have to be restricted to people within your ‘community’. You can make your own choices and exercise your sexual autonomy to the fullest extent you desire.

But if you are considered unattractive and ‘low value’ then you will be excluded from what Henry Miller called ‘The World of Sex”, a place of freedom and adventure, erotic fufillment and pleasure, and love and companionship. To be deemed undesireable and ‘unfuckable’, of having no erotic worth at all is painful and soul crushing. This shouldn’t merely be sneered at as the delusional whining of losers drunk on entitlement. Human beings need to be loved by others, to pleasure and be pleasured by others, to develop intimate connections with others, to have fun with others. Being the social species we are it demands it. People are not wrong to want it and feel alienated when it proves extremely hard to achieve, because they are not desired by others for being who they are.

In modern society, our erotic selves and sexuality and our innate need for companionship are so intertwined with our personality that to not have the opportunity to fulfil them because you are a sexual minority rejected by the dominant culture, a racially stereotyped, or a socially awkward person is immensely alienating. These conditions will only be heightened even more with the economic decline and further atomisation resulting from Covid-19 and the restrictions meant to contain it.

Yet, discrimination is simply a fact of dating. It doesn’t matter if you are solidly monogamous, polyamorous or a promiscuous nymphomaniac: distinctions are made between those they are attracted to and those they are not attracted to. Dating is not a democracy and nor should it be. This is because choosing potential romantic and sexual partners is rather different from making friends or acquaintances, since these are people who become part of our intimate space, who we may share our bodies and the most personal aspect of our lives with. But, while we have a right to our preferences, we should also be able to critically reflect on why we desire what we desire and what influences it.

That is the problem identified by Olivia Fane, author of a new, furiously anti-sex polemic, Why Sex Doesn’t Matter. Her rage — directed at the state and status of sex today, as well as at those who she blames for getting us here — is both deep and wide-ranging. While her targets constantly rotate and multiply, the overriding beef is this: we care too much about sex, and know too little about love, and this has corroded our moral and psychological relationship to the world.

Using Pride and Prejudice as a reference, she describes how Elizabeth Bennett and Darcy, who lived in “unsexualised times” would have “married in Church”, and “lived in utter devotion to one another and to God”. But we, in “the modern era”, have “successfully managed to turn everything inside out. We cheer the brute beast in us. We egg it on, the brute beast is the ‘inner me’.”

For Fane, this belief that sex is great and important, interesting and powerful, is the biggest mis-selling scandal of the 20^th century. “Sex is neither moral or immoral,” she states, “it is a mere psychological drive which most of us have, and some more than others. Intellectually, it is utterly tedious and barren.” As she repeatedly asserts with reference to her dog Hector (to whom the book is dedicated), human sex is no different, really, from an animal humping a lamp-post.

However, humans are worse than dogs, because we pretend sex is something special. In so doing we turn our back on love, “the respect of another human being with the emphasis being on tenderness rather than desire”.

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Why the young are falling out of love with sex

By Zoe Strimpel

There is much that is incoherent and offputtingly reactionary about this book. But it also gets some things right. It is right, to start with, to say that sex is everywhere, and that the “dominant ideology of the day … that sex is important and profound and you are obliged to join in” can be oppressive, psychologically damaging and, ironically, bad for intimacy.

Indeed, what sensate Bumble dater hasn’t felt the deadening anti-eroticism and anti-romanticism of the dating landscape? Transactional casual sex is certainly attainable — a third of 25-34 year olds report having had a one night stand with someone they met online — but it often feels like the only kind of offer. Codes governing male-female interactions have been scrambled, replaced by nasty, cold new practices such as ghosting, benching, haunting and the slow fade, all designed to aid in treating sexual partners like ad-hoc service-providers. Technology is to blame for some of this, but the root cause of the rot is, as Fane identifies, an overemphasis on sex for sex’s sake.

There’s nothing new about this disgust with a modern sexual ideology that equates sex with self. In The Sexual Fix, published in 1982, Cambridge literary scholar Stephen Heath expressed a yowl of frustration not dissimilar to Fane’s. “I’ve suffered and suffer and I think others must too — it’s difficult not to in our society — from ‘sexuality’, the whole sexual fix. To the point of nausea,” he wrote.

Unlike Fane, Heath also offered a rigorous analysis of the cultural and sexual-scientific landscape. Modern sexology had regrettably made “sexuality [the] key to our being…the grounds for our judgement for ourselves, our lives, our worth”. The result, as obvious to Heath 37 years ago as it is to Fane now, was a miserable emptying-out and dumbing down of what it means to be human.

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Why arranged marriages make sense

By Ed West

Attention to historical detail is handy when making arguments about sex and society — and would have helped Fane’s case a great deal. In particular, social history, the study of everyday life and experience, reminds us that prevailing ideologies are one thing, and how individuals navigate their private lives is another.

As the historians Kate Fisher and Simon Szreter found after interviewing people who got married in the 1920s and 1930s, new and ubiquitous external pressures to prioritise sex in marriage — trumpeted from women’s magazines, marriage experts and doctors — simply didn’t affect most interviewees, who barely mentioned orgasm or the drive for pleasure. Many saw “love as the primary purpose of sex”, indeed “the desire for orgasm was sometimes represented as a destabilising force in marital relations”.

One of the canards of Fane’s argument is that, where sex was concerned, the olden-days were ‘gentler’, wiser and more orderly, because thinking about male-female relationships was firmly rooted in edifying theology and men and women knew their roles. This is an idea that surfaces in much conservative thinking about gender and sexuality, usually to lambast feminism. But it is usually advanced without appreciation of the downsides. If sex in 19^th century Britain looks orderly to us now, that is because it was policed heavily; the threat of public humiliation and private punishment was terrifying, as were the physical horrors of unwanted pregnancy or sexually transmitted disease.

It’s easy to rage at the shameless slathering over sexual pleasure of us moderns, but doing so without considering the fear and brutality used to enforce anything else is noxious. By all means call for a less sexually liberal society, but don’t forget that keeping sexuality in its box almost always involves violence.

Middle class parents in the 1930s, suspecting their children of masturbation, beat them. Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy, in his study of nannies, recorded the testimony of a retired female doctor who described the approach of an “indomitable Lancashire” nanny she had before WW1. The nanny believed that ‘“self abuse was the evil rotting the world” and, according to the doctor, “‘insisted on supervision in the lavatory, and put us to bed with our hands tied, sometimes too tightly. I remember my piano teacher commenting on my scarred wrists’”.

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Do men want sex more than women?

By Tom Chivers

If, for girls in that ‘gentler era’, sex was polluted by the potential for punishment, shame and physical suffering, it was also an area of extreme ignorance. Information was not available, hard or perilous to find — and was often inaccurate.

We have gone too far in the other direction now, using sex education classes to promote ideological positions on matters such as consent and sexual identity, and normalising porn. Sex education organisations like Sexplain teach Year 8 “what LGQTIA+ means and why it’s important”; by Year 11 it’s “analysis of mainstream porn; framework of power”; “intersectionality and queer theory”.

But in those halcyon days of repression, long before any sex education at all, there was, as Fisher and Szreter found, a “pervasive culture of ignorance”. Knowing about sex, discussion or even mentioning sexual matters as late as the 1930s and 1940s was “lacking in respectability” and “verging on the immoral”. The result was that many women did not know that intercourse led to pregnancy; the belief that female genitalia were ‘dirty’ led to a dislike of one’s body, a reluctance to seek medical advice, maltreatment by doctors, and problems inserting tampons and diaphragms.

Most scholars agree that over the course of the 20^th century, Western societies swung from a repressive, phobic obsession with sex, to the more narcissistic idea that sex is key for self-development and merits constant attention. But by focusing too narrowly on this narrative, one risks overlooking equally important developments.

The rise of the ‘companionate ideal’ of marriage, for instance, was championed with particular vigour by sociologists and politicians after the First World War. Generally, sex was not a central component of this ‘ideal’, which focused on mutual understanding and true friendship. Rooted in the traditional separation of gendered roles, where the man peacefully won the bread, and the woman ran the domestic sphere, it was very like the idyllic life Fane herself describes as the home-maker wife of a consultant surgeon. One can, therefore, look at the 20^th century as the century in which love, not sex, got top billing.

Indeed, I’m often inclined to believe that it is in fact romantic love, not sex, that is the big mis-selling scandal of the 20^th century. But in the end, trying to parse where love ends and sex begins is fruitless. The two can and very often do go hand in hand. Insisting they have nothing to do with each other makes for a spirited provocation, but is not convincing. Love matters, and so does sex.

My yuletide impulse to latch on to the nearest warm body is, in fact, utterly par for the course. There is even a term for it: ‘cuffing’, defined by the Urban Dictionary as the season in which people look relationships, not just casual flings. The idea of cuffing isn’t rooted in empirical evidence, exactly, but it does capture a mood: according to Brand Watch, a social media monitoring firm, references to ‘cuffing season’ on social media sites begin to rocket as early as October.

The wintry urge to ‘cuff’ is partly associated with being actually cold, and wanting to stay in and cuddle rather than go out (see above). But just as important are the pressures of Christmas, and the dismal sense of failure that traipsing solo round festive parties and family events can bring. This, combined with the fear of facing a solitary and possibly dry January alone means dating sites are at their busiest between Boxing Day and Valentine’s Day, with 7 January — next Tuesday — said to be the busiest day of all. Match.com says 50 million messages are sent yielding 1 million dates during this peak season.

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Why the young are falling out of love with sex

By Zoe Strimpel

The seasonal rush for intimacy gives pause for thought. What exactly are we doing? After all, we live in an age of plunging marriage and birth rates. Individualism and choice has taught us to pursue our own ends, making love hard and romantic relationships complex at best,  and often exhausting and disorienting. In their 1995 book The Normal Chaos of Love, the classic study of modern love in the West, the German sociologists Beck and Beck-Gernsheim captured this perfectly. “In the New Era, everything [is] a matter of choice…one of [modern life’s] main features is a collision of interest between love, family and personal freedom.”

As the Becks saw, the rise of choice in all aspects of life drastically reshaped the romantic plane. But if choice was already a way of life in 1995, today it has been encoded and enshrined in our intimate lives on a whole new scale. Being accustomed to rifling through thousands of faces, as dating apps allow, gives us the sense that we have infinite romantic and sexual options. But this has negated the very kinds of outcomes those caught up in cuffing season may think they want. Finding true connection and commitment in a sea of callous shopping is extremely hard.

But even if the governing effect of dating apps seems to be coldness, and a blithe sense of expendability, their popularity has normalised a kind of romantic quest and pointed to a big hole in the market for some kind of affection. There is the basic mammalian element to the search; the pleasure to be had in a familiar body who is also a companion.  But the Christmas scramble for relationships is the tip of an iceberg which it seems all the distractions and connections of digital life do not assuage: loneliness. Loneliness is not only unpleasant, it could be lethal: some studies suggest that those without long-term relationships are far more likely to die in middle age. Singleness is expensive, too: according to the Office for National Statistics, the 7.7 million people living alone in the UK spent on average £21 a week more than couples. There’s nobody to share the mortgage with, or the cost of holidays.

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Marriage is a uniquely stabilising force: are liberals finally getting the message?

By James Bloodworth

There is nothing new about the loneliness of the modern single driven on to a frantic search for a partner. Indeed the solitary malaise of the modern and usually urban solo is a potent image that evolved along with the city itself after the Industrial Revolution. As cities became clearinghouses for an ever-widening assortment of people looking for work as typists, clerks, civil servants, railways workers and so on, they attracted those who — in seeking work — had moved away from their home towns and communities and wound up disconnected, untethered and alone.

In this way, the lonely partner-hunter became a symbol of an age of modernity and anatomisation. Commercial matchmaking, singleness and urban alienation have been linked since the nineteenth century. London had long been known as a lonely place; what WT Stead called ‘the city of dreadful solitude’. In 1890, General Booth, advocate of marriage bureaux, decried the impossibility of provincial courtship rituals in London, where “many hundreds, nay thousands, of young men and young women who are living in lodgings, are practically without any opportunity of making the acquaintance of each other, or of any one of the other sex!” But in the late 20th century loneliness, a ‘disease’ seen to face singles above all, extended far beyond the capital, sometimes even reaching a national platform. In the Crosby by-election of 1981, from an eclectic party mix, Donald Potter — the founder of a Young Conservatives lonely hearts group called Close Encounters — wanted to install a phone line for lonely people for The Humanitarian Party.

For the writer Jonathan Raban, the proliferation of dating services was a central image of the isolating experience of 1970s urban life. He noted that “coming out of the fog, making oneself visible and available, is prickly and difficult” but that “one can, if one is sufficiently bold or desperate, advertise one’s loneliness in the newspaper… Here loneliness has a solidarity, even a kind of respectability; fellow isolates are stacked neatly in columns of fine type.”

The launch and subsequent success of Singles Magazine (1977-1993), a lifestyle magazine for the unattached run by the owner of Dateline, the computer dating agency, testified to a new fascination with the psychological aspects of single life. The magazine was divided between the testimonies of people railing against what one called ‘couples’ society’ and attempting to bring about a kind of Singles’ Pride, and a more dominant strain concerned with the deprivations of going it alone.

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How motherhood put an end to my liberalism

By Mary Harrington

Isolation could be seen on the physical features of particularly unsuccessful singles such as case study Bernard. The magazine’s in-house psychologist wrote in 1977 that: “One only has to look at Bernard to see the disturbed nature of his body movements during communication to realize … Bernard has [never] been loved . . . he wants to be married, but seems to be an entirely sexless person.” The evidence of a lonely life was etched into his visage: “He takes no pride in his face. Only the mouth moves when he talks. The muscles at the side of his mouth are still and short of exercise. He does not gesture… His tone of voice is monotonous.”

The psychologist was clear that social isolation was bad, but romantic isolation could be even worse: the deprivation of intimacy had long-term and short-term consequences. “In the chronic cases sexuality can become so badly damaged by ill-use or lack of use that it is permanently destroyed, and the person has no will left to live socially,” he concluded.

All this sounds pretty grim and worrying in a rather 1970s way. But while ‘cuffing season’ has a jaunty ring to it, those who find themselves single at Christmas often feel like they’re the one left without a chair when the music stops and this can be very painful indeed. Though, I would wager, probably not bad enough to leave one’s sexuality ‘permanently destroyed’ — if there’s one thing the internet has done, it ensures nobody ever has to feel entirely, totally alone. The Bernards of 2019 can at least find people to chat to online and an array of therapists and therapies offering to help too.

A relaxing in expectations around marriage and family have also helped disperse some of the most concentrated aspects of singles’ suffering. And yet as cuffing season makes clear, along with the dating site frenzy around Christmas and the New Year, the well of loneliness continues to rises up and threatens to engulf. It seems there’s (still) no connection like a physical one.