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”.

More from this author

Why alt-Right women are wrong about Cornell

By Poppy Sowerby

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.

Just as with the British dating scene itself, our reality shows struggle to take the search for love particularly seriously. We prefer to titter and infer than earnestly and explicitly push it all to its limits. On Love Island, it is enough to consecrate your affinity by becoming girlfriend and boyfriend. Not so in America. In the land that invented modern dating and most of the romantic trappings that surround it, the quest for love is still a serious and rather formal business.

On TV, it also tends to be a pretty conservative business, where traditional ideas of marriage and family — and the gender roles to go with them — hold firm. Nearly 20 years after the original US marriage show The Bachelor first aired, American ingenuity unleashed to the world Netflix’s Love Is Blind, which saw pairs blind date their way to marriage proposals, talking through walls from respective isolation booths about their yearning for commitment and love and family. A number of them stressed their Christianity.

Suggested reading

No sex please, we're brutish

By Louise Perry

But as they continue to capitalise on the enduring hankering to say ‘I do’, American dating shows seem to also be cottoning onto, and even taking seriously, a reality that has long been lurking below the gloss of sugar-coated, youth-drenched romance: a steadily rising number of women pushing 40 are single, look fantastic, and want to start a family, with a man as a desired but optional partner in the enterprise. Love is Blind rejected the idea that — pace The Bachelor, The Bachelorette and Love Island — only women in their 20s are worth offering up for love on TV by giving us the spectacle of Jessica, 34, wrestling with whether to tie the knot with a man 10 years her junior and infinitely less successful than her.

But now there’s Fox’s Labor of Love (a UK airdate is expected soon) which is both deeply conservative at its core and — amazingly — properly radical in its practice. Indeed, in refuting the mouldy but persistent cultural idea that women over 40 are dried-up goods romantically and reproductively, I’d call it something of a feminist masterpiece.

The premise is that 15 men in their 30s and early 40s compete to be chosen as sperm donor, co-parent and — if all goes well — husband by the programmes’s star, one 41-year-old Kristy Katzmann. Through a variety of ‘drills’, which include responding to a grizzly bear at a campfire and hosting a kids’ party, the men demonstrate their instincts as potential fathers and partners.

There’s nothing flashily politically radical about this show: it progresses with staid civility, plenty of scented candles and glasses of red wine, with traditional values firmly in place. And yet in taking a single woman over 40 seriously as a potential mother and attractive wife, it is revolutionary.

More from this author

Is this how normal people have sex?

By Zoe Strimpel

For despite the advance of feminism since the 1970s, ideas about women, age, fertility and sexual appeal have remained strangely rigid. At nearly 38, I cannot count the number of times well-meaning people from all walks of life have told me about the many cliff-edges my fertility faces — at 30, at 35, at 37 and of course at 40. Fertility certainly declines in the course of our 30s, but not in the simplistic cliff-edges and sudden perilous wastages women are warned of; indeed much of the science of cliff-edges has been based on outdated studies (including a French study from the18th century). Few advance the flipside to older motherhood: true readiness, more self-knowledge, more money and know-how, better skills for coping with challenges.

Which is why it was so refreshing and soothing to watch Kristy in action: measured, polite, kindly, and serene with the authority of an older woman’s self-knowledge. It is a pleasure to watch her and presenter Kristin Davis, 55 (Charlotte on Sex and the City), an unmarried adoptive mother of two, calmly navigate Kristy’s options. Kristy is uninterested in garish shows of masculine bravado, or temper, or selfishness; she naturally and genuinely prioritises feelings of friendship over lust. The scene in which she dismisses the hunkiest suitor Alan, a writer from South Africa, for his subtle but significant tendency to put the other men before her, was impressive. As she noted: “20-year old Kristy would be chasing Alan,” but 41-year old Kristy wants something else.

For once, the idea of male fertility decline over age is taken seriously too. The programme is amazingly progressive (and accurate) in focusing on the fitness of sperm rather than of eggs. As soon as the suitors walk in they are asked to produce sperm samples to be counted and ranked. Kristy, after all, has gone to some trouble to preserve her own fertility, and will want to make sure any prospective father has the goods to follow through too, particularly in an age of declining sperm viability. Throughout the programme, too, there is rightful reference to the men’s ‘biological man clock’.

Suggested reading

Do men want sex more than women?

By Tom Chivers

Perhaps what I liked most was that Labor of Love does not ask us to laugh at Kristy’s pickiness. On the contrary it is presented not as a prompt to think ‘no wonder she’s single and childless at 41’ but as commendable and wise realism. For as one gets older, the task of finding someone to partner with is more and more complex. It is particularly complex for women, who are better educated on average than men, and, particularly if they have not taken time out for childrearing, may be more successful too.

It is by now well documented that it is hard for women to find single men in their own age bracket who are both equally successful and supportive of her career. The pool shrinks further for women in their late 30s and early 40s since their male peers are more likely to pursue younger women — Kristy-aged women are seen as either too old to have babies or desperate for them. It is a tricky bottleneck. As Kristy says to Kristin over one elimination session: “suddenly I was in my late 30s [after a divorce] and it felt dark”. She sheds some tears as she makes this admission: I felt a surge of sympathy.

And there’s more radical realism from Labor of Love: having frozen her eggs, if none of the men end up suiting Kristy, she will go it alone. A husband would be nice, but as Kristy and an increasing number of single women know, he is not an essential part of the dream. The US fertility industry will be worth $15.4bn by 2023, up from $7bn in 2017. Pitted against each other, the competing ideologies of romance and motherhood tussle hard, with motherhood increasingly winning out, and so looking like empowerment with it.