Last February, a group of young conservatives in Washington hosted an open-invitation Valentine’s Day debate party. There, a month after the inauguration, dozens of young men in or around Trump’s new administration gathered to discuss not the great man in the White House, not political revolution, but love.
This is an era of good feelings for these young men, and the theme would seem to reflect the mood. It is also promisingly uncontroversial, and thus more welcoming: more women have come to this event than most conservative mixers, raising their average attendance from the single digits to tentative double digits. For a generation of young men increasingly politically divorced from women their age, who make up the most anti-GOP and anti-Trump demographic, the idea that love could overcome any obstacle is a hopeful premise.
But in the debate that ensues, nearly every speech is against romance. The arguments detail the dangers of infatuation, and amid the laudations of reason over passion, logic over love, are explicit and implicit warnings against being a “simp” or a “sucker.” Some wonder aloud whether one should ask out women at all, who, in the age of dating apps, receive far too much male attention, and as a result have become too picky, exacting and fickle. Eventually, a quip about women’s suffrage comes from the audience, prompting a jocular back-and-forth. I ask a friend why they are suddenly discussing whether women should vote. He looks at me and sighs. “Women’s suffrage always comes up.” By night’s end, almost nobody has asked out any of the women present in the room; the only man who ventures to do so is summarily rejected.
Afterwards, at a nearby bar, I find again a lot of single young men talking about women, rather than to women. One tells me that his friend, who is not here tonight, recently found a girlfriend: “I’m really happy for him. But now he texts our group chat advice, acting like he’s got the key to life, like he’s got it all figured out. And sometimes I’m not sure what to talk about with him anymore. We used to bond over not having a girl.” I think of my own “girlfriends,” who’ve told me to break up with previous boyfriends over their greater or lesser faults, imploring me to think of “how fun it would be to be single together.”
In another corner of the bar, I encounter a group of three twentysomething young men. The young, right-leaning women who had shown up hopeful have gone home. These men are now here alone on a Saturday night, in hour one of a five-hour debate about the nature of love. They are lonely experts, armed with elaborate theories of the female mind. The discussants go around in circles for hours, discussing what men truly want, what women truly want. Theses abound: “Men want respect; women want to be desired”; “Men are easily satisfied, but women are always afraid of making the wrong choice and not maximizing their options”; “Men are the only true romantics.” And questions remain:
How many past sexual partners is too many? How many is too few? Does she need to share your interests, or is femininity more important than intellectual compatibility? Is it a red flag if she’s unmarried after 25? Is it a red flag if she’s single? What if we just assigned girlfriends and boyfriends randomly, wouldn’t they be happier than if we let them choose?
These single men talk amongst themselves about how many kids they want, out of an earnest aspiration but also, at times, as if in competition to prove their traditional virility. It is easier to talk about wanting ten kids while unattached and 24 than to raise ten kids with one’s wife, but tonight the effect is the same: here, you are based. One asks me how many I want. “I don’t know yet; I have to find someone first. Three, four?” He gives me a look. “Those are
liberal numbers.”
A few weeks later I attend another party in similar circles. It is almost midnight, ten minutes until my 27th birthday. I want to go home. As I walk out I encounter two young men, staffers in Trump’s administration, talking on the sidewalk in their suits and loosened ties, smoking cigarettes. Hesitantly, I say hello. I am exhausted by the theories I’ve heard over the last few weeks about women’s virtues and faults and nearly wince, expecting more to come. Behind me, I recognize two college-aged guys from recent media exposés; they work for DOGE and are evaluating some absent girl’s Instagram page.
I exchange a few pleasantries and introductions with the two men in front of me instead. Midway through the conversation, I mention that I ought to go home soon, but a friend walks past and wishes me a happy birthday. One of my new acquaintances walks abruptly toward a flowering dogwood tree, picks a flower from a branch, and comes back to present it to me without a word. I hold it in my hand, shy and elated. The DOGE boys call him a simp.
One thing I and other young women in D.C. have observed since the election is a shift in how young men speak to and appraise us. Passing through conservative mixers, parties and young-professional networks in Trump’s Washington, we’ve increasingly felt like we’re working against an assumption that women are tainted and guilty until proven otherwise. “Among all the young men I’ve met on the right, especially on the far right, I would guess that 10 to 20 percent of them hate all women,” my acquaintance Oliver, someone familiar with these circles, tells me somewhat sarcastically. I share Oliver’s estimate with a twentysomething right-wing influencer. He widens his eyes and laughs, but concedes there’s truth to it. “Look, lots of these guys, they just consider you less reliable if you talk to women. You’re compromised, in a real way.”
I later tell Jake,* the Trump staffer who picked me the flower, about the statistic. He is a former fraternity president and hardly uses X. He looks bewildered. “Where do you find these guys?” He shakes his head. “Whoever they are, they don’t talk to me.” Jake seems to be as-yet uncontaminated by the culture on the right that views women as saboteurs of right-wing ideological purity and hen-pecking nuisances to be avoided. He suggests to me that, as a 27-year-old, he’s already older than the demographic that received their intellectual and social formation online. His romantic imagination was shaped more by fraternity mixers and reading physical books. Jake quotes Gerard Manley Hopkins and Goethe’s
Faust, revealing a talent I suspect will bode better for his own fertility than that of the young men studying tweets about female fertility.
The three of us meet again for drinks, and the other young staffer I met on my birthday, James,* offers his own explanation for his peers: “My working thesis is that all of these stupid, these ridiculous rules—they come from a sense of anxiety. People feel very anxious that the normal rules have broken down.” He references not just the disappearance of in-person dating scripts, or our confusion about gender roles, but the widespread anxiety around expressing desire toward women, even verbally approaching women without clear permission, in the wake of #MeToo. “They [young men] think, ‘I have to make my own new rules.’ But people’s new rules are worse. Much worse. Real life has been so eroded” by social media, COVID lockdowns and dating apps “that people are forced to retreat into this kind of categorical thinking. Because opportunities to casually meet people as they actually come, as entire people and not checklists, are no longer available to most people. It’s all first principles. Yeah, right. Like, what’s the ‘first principles’ wife? ‘Doesn’t have too many tattoos.’ ‘I just want a woman who dresses modestly.’ Where are we, fucking Qatar?”
“For most young men, their lives are consumed by thinking about these categories,” he continues, “because real life is degraded for most people, and they can’t exit out of these imagined categories and just meet human beings. Real life is not degraded for me, because I’m relatively good-looking and charming and rich.” He pauses and gives me a smile. “But I can understand it. We’ve outsourced opportunities for normal connection. You go to bars today and it’s literally groups of guys in three and groups of women in three, and none of them talk to each other. That was not how it was fifty years ago. If you’re just a well-meaning young person who is not extraordinary in any way, what are you supposed to do?”
I think of his peers, the young right-wing men at parties around the city, surrounded by young women who share their values. Amid a post-election renaissance of right-wing social life in D.C., they’ve had all summer to pursue opportunities in real life, but the forms of gender-specific discourse that had given them consolation were more gratifying, or familiar, than the opportunity to encounter real and receptive women. Instead, they talked about the abstract women, archetypes they’d read about online, who would always hurt them.
by Mana Afsari, The Point |
Read more:
Image: via[ed. Maybe it's because these guys don't have fully formed personalities and rely too heavily on being told what to think, be, expect by dumb macho podcasters.]
