This one is for the ‘let’s take away women’s vote crowd’, for the neo-antisuffrage bros. Because there is a view of them that is as clear as day for those who can see it, and I know I’m not alone in this view, so I’m going to write it down for all the men and women who want to share this view but struggle to find the words to articulate it, and in the sharing, ensure neo-antisuffrage bros are aware of how we actually see them. If I were among the neo-antisuffrage folks, I would want to know how I’m actually seen by everyone else. So here’s what we see:

The proposed alternative to women voting — ‘Household Voting’ — where the husband votes and the wife’s vote is pacified, a model where women’s agency is framed as downstream of men’s — sucks. More than sucks, it reveals an embarrassing flaw.

Here’s the thing you aren’t paying attention to which is embarrassing for you: There are plenty of men of every political bent who manage to achieve exactly this outcome with their wives. Their spouse asks them how they’re voting this election, the man tells her, and she does it, and that is the end of it. That is a real result, a result legions of men are capable of producing. And here’s the question the neo-antisuffrage campaigners don’t want to face, the one this essay is written to ask at scale: why can’t you?

Why can’t you, like so many other men, get your wife to vote as you do? The Household Voting model already exists by the tens of millions, so what gives? Why do you need to legislate a result that oodles of men can achieve by simply being men? What is wrong with you? Not the women. You. Why are so many other men able to produce this result, and you can’t?

That’s the real question, and it isn’t a political one. You only believe you’re doing political theory. You aren’t. You are confessing you have a pinky-toe-sized dick and your wife is unsatisfied. That is what you are signaling. Not virility, not manhood, and not political theory. I recommend you go find the arrangement you’re looking to legislate, among the myriad examples in which it exists out there in the world. Not a religious couple, and not an abusive one either. Go find a man who has successfully achieved what you want to achieve, a man whose wife’s politics is simply downstream of her husband’s. That is a thing. Watch him; observe how he’s cultivated being masculine. Observe how he treats his wife, his kids, his neighbors. Know that he does not have to achieve this result through policy. Then, ask yourself what it means that you do. Seriously — ask.

Or, worse even — let’s illustrate the corollary. Bear with me:

Imagine women doing this. No, I don’t mean women organizing to abolish men’s vote (though that can be a constructive exercise too). I mean, what if women organized around the same implicit notion of failed femininity? What if women legislated what would otherwise be the obvious consequences of women being likeable women? What if women passed a law demanding a man’s voice crack whenever a man asks them out, so she’s certain he has feelings for her? What if women passed a law forcing men to marry them, a law compelling commitment? What if women passed a law demanding men pursue them?

Because you and I both know women do not need to legislate things like this, and it would reek of failed womanhood if they did, because you and I both know that an attractive expression of femininity reliably does all of these things on its own, and so too would the right expression of masculinity produce the results you want. And there are legions of examples of this. This is not speculation. The household voting model already exists. It exists for men with functioning Y-chromosomes, men without the burden of pinky-toe-sized penises. When will pink-toe-sized dicked white men stop making their inadequacies the entire world’s problems?

Probably never.

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And if you don’t think I’m taking your position seriously, let me take a moment to be as serious as your position actually warrants, because at the outset, the neo-antisuffrage movement has points worth taking seriously, and I don’t want to publish this essay as nothing but a keyboard-smashing rant.

Here’s a simplification of the case: Women vote emotionally, selfishly, and foolishly — in short, a framing of women’s vote as antithetical to statecraft and nation-building. Take a measure of the first centennial stretch of women’s suffrage, and something like this shape comes into view. Fine. Let’s grant all of it. I’m not going to argue with the specific accusations, because I don’t have to. The argument, stripped of its finger-wagging superiority complex, is this: women are irresponsible citizens. The claims made against their vote are a compilation of this claim, run at A Clockwork Orange, Ludovico-esque pitch.

What follows is that men’s citizenship is therefore the responsible kind, and we need a political theory that concedes this. The case also asserts, accurately, that men have been voting since democracy’s inception in ancient Greece. The cumulative wisdom which makes men the responsible citizenry that neo-antisuffrage bros claim men already are is the result of thousands of years of men building, warring, and maintaining civilization. Again — fine. I’m not agreeing, or even disagreeing, because again I don’t need to. The case one has to make from here, if everything mentioned above were true and the Household Voting position were to remain intellectually coherent, is about why this cumulative wisdom can’t be learned. If there exists a threshold of wisdom for responsible citizenship (and therefore responsible voting) which men possess and women lack, why can’t it be shared? The argument you have to make is a psychological one, not a political one. Worse, you have to make the case that not only are women unable to learn this wisdom, but also that men are unable to teach it. You have to actually explain that, my dudes. You are claiming possession of wisdom that women are too stupid to learn, and also a wisdom men are incapable of teaching. It must run both ways, or your case collapses.

And believe it or not, brother, it gets even worse. Because you also have to make a completely different comparison than the one you’re making. For your ‘men have cumulative statecraft wisdom that women lack’ case to make sense, you can’t compare the first hundred years of women voting to the last hundred years of men voting. You have to compare the first hundred years of women voting to the first hundred years of men voting. This is the only honest comparison for the responsible citizenship case to be coherent at all, and I have never seen it — nobody has. And nobody is expecting to either, because the Venn diagram between men and women’s first hundred years of voting wouldn’t look good for men at all.

Do you remember those ancestral ballots, boys?

The ballot your great-great-great-great Spartan grandad cast on the legal ways to beat the slaves he stole from his Athenian Greek neighbors he killed in a war last Tuesday? Remember those votes? No. You don’t mention them. And you’re not going to. Nobody in the neo-antisuffrage movement has dared to make that comparison, but it’s the only honest one that gives the ‘men have cumulative voting wisdom going back to ancient Greece that women lack’ case weight.

Alright, end of rant — Thank you for attending. Sorry about your small dick.

Less than 5% of the population has taken LSD (or ‘acid’ in street slang). Some estimates say 1%, maybe less. For contrast, 50% of the population has at least tried marijuana, even if they don’t use it regularly. Survey data supports the size of the gap. A 2024 national survey put past-year LSD use among adults at 0.9%, [1] and RAND’s 2025 survey found about 1.1%. [2] This is a pretty wide gap, and this gap exists for a specific reason, a reason everyone reading this knows about already, or at least suspects. It isn’t just availability or legality. It is because the cultural wisdom associated with consciousness-altering substances takes a different shape around LSD.

To be blunt: People are scared of acid.

Opinion polling echoes the fear: The 2025 RAND Psychedelics Survey was a probability-based poll of 10,122 U.S. adults. 9% supported legal use of LSD, compared with 64% support for marijuana. 52% maintained that all uses of LSD should be illegal. [3] The NSDUH (National Survey on Drug Use and Health) recorded similarly expressed fears between 2015 and 2019. Their survey work revealed that adults who had not used LSD in the past were more than twice as likely to condemn LSD use as a “great risk” as they were to condemn the same of marijuana, or even condemn imbibing five or more drinks once or even twice a week. [4]

Confirmed then: the fear is in the numbers, too. The question is why, and if you’re reading this, you already know. So let’s get to the why everyone already knows.

Other substances offer something obvious and specific: euphoria. They offer it instantly and without serious cost. But in the offering there is something else taken alongside the drug. A risk. A threat to the self. The cultural folklore is thorough on this risk, and it isn’t wrong to be. Habit development, dependency, addiction, and the pitiful images these terms invoke — images this culture offers as cautionary tales whenever and wherever it can. The faces of eye-sunken desperation encountered in city alleyways. The burn-out, hopeless souls populating homeless shelters. The mind-ruined addicts with shredded nervous systems who can no longer sit still. Alcoholics with the shakes and failing livers. Every drug that promises cost-free euphoria has these associations linked to it, and the culture isn’t wrong to do the linking, even at the propagandistic scale at which it does, because the associations are real. The pathways to human failure are real. Substances that rewire your reward system are dangerous if you haven’t organized your reward system in a productive way in advance of tampering with it.

But the folklore wisdom surrounding LSD is different. The fear of trading instant euphoria at the risk of an addiction/dependency cycle isn’t the issue with acid. The fear that takes its place is a different terror. It is not fear of a fallen, desperate state, of becoming one’s worst self. It is the fear of a substance that forces this realization in advance — that you are already your worst self. A drug that forces a kind of confrontation that is a terrifying mystery to anyone who hasn’t had it — to encounter your worst self in your bedroom. To encounter inner demons. The real ones, lurking deep, brooding, waiting to eat you. Not the abstractions we use to organize and orient ourselves in the world. LSD renders our internal structures hollow. See-through. It is a substance that pulls whatever internal framework of coping we might be using apart, and forces us to look at it:

Here are the excuses you’re making…

Here is the real reason you can’t get over the person who left…

Here are the lies you’re telling yourself…

Here is what’s really hurting you deep down…

Here is what’s really making you feel lost…

Here is what all your overworking and overexercising are distractions from…

Every personal existential coping tool is lost, every way you might be shielding yourself is burned away, melted in the face of a mind-expansion whose outputs are too potent for the cognitive overhead unknowingly expended on self-deception. Any of them. All of them die. You won’t have the cognitive space to maintain them. LSD prevents you from being able to hide from yourself, which means it forces you to face the degree to which you are doing this — coping with your own existence as opposed to confronting it. Everyone is doing this; it is just a matter of degree. LSD is a shortcut for discovering that degree. This does require courage.

Put plainly, other drugs are feared for what they might turn you into, while LSD is feared for what it might show you already are. The pharmacology helps explain the split. The National Institute on Drug Abuse research suggests psychedelics like LSD do not typically lead to addiction, [5] and MedlinePlus notes that LSD does not cause compulsive use, although tolerances can develop. [6]

So the addiction-shaped fear has little to grab onto here, and a different fear takes its place instead. The fear everyone knows about. And this fear is where the cultural folklore has done most of its propagandistic work, where the distinction between euphoria-chasing and existential mind-bending leads to the most important difference between LSD and other drugs: The infamous ‘Bad Trip’. Here is where the folklore on drugs transforms completely, taking on a unique character specific to this one substance. The Bad Trip excites the culture into a different form of cautionary tale hand-waving. Anecdotal references. Pop culture portrayals. Horror stories of irreversible transformations. Psychotic breaks. They are funny, sad, terrifying, embarrassing, and none of them describe an experience anybody wants to have.

The Bad Trip cautionary tales are real, but I can’t offer any insight into them, because I’ve never had a bad trip, which is part of why I’m writing this. In the dozens and dozens of trips I’ve taken. Not a single one. From micro-dosing, to taking quadruple doses with my inhibitions stripped from alcohol. Not one. And the advice for avoiding the infamous Bad Trip™ is simple enough to count on one hand:

1. Preparation

2. Timing

3. Know Thyself

1. Preparation. LSD isn’t really a substance you want to try spontaneously. Some people do this. Some people will take two double-dipped happy-face tabs like they’re Tic-Tac mints and be bored about it afterward. There are LSD freaks in the world who are like this, but there is no risk of turning out this way unless you want to. Getting to the point where LSD goes down as easily as breath mints does not happen by accident, nor through addiction to acid’s euphoric properties. I had a friend named Joe who used to go to work on acid. His rule was two tabs while on the clock, and four while he wasn’t. People like Joe are a thing. I don’t recommend it.

(Yes, Joe is still alive)

The younger a person is, the more being like Joe is possible — LSD as euphoria tool: music, comfort, and good company. Being more introspective personally, I see this as a waste. If anything, I hold the ironic view that taking LSD just to have a good time like it’s just another party drug is the equivalent of drinking alone — to each their own. But if that’s all you’re after, watching the walls melt and the ceiling curl in a spiral above you while you listen to The Beatles and Janice Joplin, that experience is available too.

But if you’re used to euphoria and expect it, you shouldn’t — at least not by itself, and not right away. Being the type of person who can pop LSD like Tic-Tac Joe isn’t a way any person is born, and you’re far more likely to discover the purpose of the substance goes beyond transforming your neutral psychological states into euphoric ones. Even if the substance is doing this, you’ll find its true purpose is transformative. LSD is an experience. It’s called ‘a trip’ for a reason, good or bad. A trip is not like a fun night out. It is a vacation, and just like any vacation, everything might be carefully arranged in advance, but surprises are inevitable. Most of the surprises are good, but all of them are transformative.

Preparation only covers what can be arranged in advance: the place, the company, the expectations, the food, the lighting, and the scented candles burning by the window. It says nothing about the state of the person who shows up on the day, and that matters at least as much as the plan matters, leading to the second rule for avoiding bad trips. A rule about when.

2. Timing. The day after a breakup… The afternoon after learning about a loved one’s death... The night in the hotel after your house burns down... These are bad times to take acid. This is the easiest way to make certain you have a horrible time. This is also one of the easiest things to get right about LSD and distinguish it from other drugs, because the types of negative contexts I just listed are exactly the types of contexts people use as excuses to take other drugs — to replace grief with euphoria at the sad cost of processing their actual losses in life. Don’t do this. You want to be in a positive psychological state, not a negative one. Taking euphoric drugs as a way of avoiding processing negative emotions that are rightly yours to process is an excellent way to ruin yourself as a person.

3. Know Thyself. This dovetails nicely into the third tip: know thyself. I don’t include this ancient Delphinian proclamation to load this essay with high-brow clichés so I can wiggle my pinky in the air pretentiously. It is included because we have a paradox now. On the one hand, you need to be in a positive psychological mood. But on the other, this substance is going to expand your mind, and the expansion is going to destroy whatever internal coping structures you have keeping you together as a person — structures you’re almost certainly in denial about even as you read this. This is impossible. The drug working as intended means a negative experience by definition.

This is only partially true. The experience is partially negative. But only negative insofar as it’s novel. Anxiety, uncertainty, fragility, vulnerability. Expect these things, and be grateful for them because they are the ingredients of personal growth.

So where does this paradox leave the fear? Mostly intact, and rightly so. A substance that removes your excuses will always frighten away the people who are still relying on them, and the folklore isn’t wrong to warn that the experience of LSD can easily turn brutal when it is entered without preparation, at the wrong time, or by someone who has never looked hard at who they really are underneath their self-deceptive bullshit. At the end of the day, it is an individual person’s choice whether or not this is an experience they feel like they can tolerate. But no doubt, most are afraid, and not stupidly. But there are ways to avoid everything about the substance that everyone knows about and fears. You just need to be a grown-up about it.

I’ll end by reminding everyone not to forget that the fear I’m writing about only tells half the story. The same trip that dismantles your coping structure and risks a Bad Trip™ also delivers the hippie jollies this culture likes to mock: oneness, universal love, a cosmic surrendering of the self from which a person emerges renewed and refocused. Long hair and lava lamps and love conquering the soul — an easy experience to mock from the outside, especially by those who have never had it. And an experience that cannot be reproduced reliably in any other way, which is part of why LSD found its way into psychotherapy and addiction recovery once upon a time, and why researchers are trying to revive medicinal LSD use again today.

LSD isn’t for everyone, and it isn’t for every day. But beyond its euphoric properties, it holds real existential potential that can’t be obtained anywhere else, and the evidence for that is getting harder to dismiss. The fear is not irrational. It is just incomplete.

The hippies were right about some things.

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For the fact-checkers

[1] Use of Psychedelic Substances in the United States, 2024: Results from the National Survey Investigating Hallucinogenic Trends (NSIHT). https://www.rmpds.org/sites/default/files/2025-08/NSIHT%20DATA%20REPORT%202024_0.pdf

[2] RAND, “U.S. Psychedelic Use and Microdosing in 2025.” https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RRA4334-1.html

[3] Lucid News, “New RAND Report Shows Therapeutic Use Driving U.S. Views Towards Psychedelics” (Feb. 24, 2026), reporting on the 2025 RAND Psychedelics Survey. https://www.lucid.news/rand-report-therapeutic-use-us-views-psychedelics/

[4] “LSD use in the United States: Examining user demographics and their evolution from 2015–2019,” Journal of Psychedelic Studies 8(2), 2024. https://www.akjournals.com/view/journals/2054/8/2/article-p248.xml

[5] National Institute on Drug Abuse, “Psychedelic and Dissociative Drugs.” https://nida.nih.gov/research-topics/psychedelic-dissociative-drugs

[6] MedlinePlus, “Substance use – LSD.” https://medlineplus.gov/ency/patientinstructions/000795.htm

I used to watch all of Hollywood’s movies and shows that I knew were bad, including any new releases I suspected would be bad. As long as the storytelling contained articulated representations of genuine metaphorical depth, I was in. Like an upset stomach, I would endure until it was over.

Disney’s handling of Star Wars eventually ruined this practice for me. Fumbling one of the most successful intellectual properties of metaphorical depth in history has been hard to watch. The quality of Disney’s efforts with Star Wars began in the kind of bad I could learn from, where even bad uses of metaphorical devices are an education. Then it became the kind of bad that’s at least entertaining, but then finally the kind of bad that hurts like nails on a chalkboard. That was the end of it. Disney finished my tolerance I once held for bad art, like a hobby you picked up in a relationship but haven’t touched since the breakup.

It’s clear these major production studios have none of the necessary talent to reproduce the original metaphorical depth — ‘the magic’ — audiences associate with these giant IPs. We feel this loss of magic as the death of Hollywood. Add television. Add publishing. The entire storytelling-as-enchantment apparatus is in decay. We can see the for-profit algorithm models unfold like bad paint-by-numbers kits, and we can see the whole thing is managed by a revolving door of elitist nepotism.

So when I learned Amazon was getting ready to produce a prequel to Tolkein’s The Lord of the Rings, jadedness and cynicism had already set in, as I think it had for many. These storytelling enchantment machines that used to work, no longer do. These Goliath corporate models will never amount to the real thing. Algorithmic-for-profit storytelling formulas are too obviously bad, and applying them to multibillion-dollar intellectual properties doesn’t make them any better.

So when I heard about The Rings of Power, I had no intention of watching any of it. Because why bother? Did anyone expect The Rings of Power to be genuinely good? I didn’t. It was just an opportunity to see Amazon’s version of Disney’s failure.

But that is all of the naval-gazing I want to do here, and I’m not here to offer a TV guide review of The Rings of Power, either. I want to write about something very specific, about what might be the most common criticism I see about Amazon’s project so far — and also a common criticism floating around just about everywhere. You could say the subject is race-swapping characters. You could use a more specific example and say it’s about the absurdity of a Black elf. Now, I’m not writing a defense of the postmodern practice of chameleonizing the ethnicity of characters in order to appeal to a social or political theory. Like so many others, I don’t like the practice at all. It adds nothing. Worse, it fails to even recognize where heterogeneity in storytelling is objectively better than the alternative.

The ‘Drama-aboard-a-vessel’ theme is a good example of this. In Moby Dick, The Pequod holds a mix of folk ranging from Captain Ahab to Queequeg. The Starship Enterprise mixes John-Luc Picard all the way through the Klingon Wharf. The crew of The Expanse’s gunship Rocinante spans an Earther, a Martian, a Belter, and eventually an alien-human hybrid. Dramas that take place aboard vessels are about the vessel. The vessel becomes a metaphor for the human condition itself, and the heterogeneous makeup taking place inside the vessel is projected against this. The characters’ mortalities are all intertwined — the same machine is keeping all of them alive in the abyss. The same cold hull separates them from the unknown, and so they all have the same incentive to keep the hull warm from the inside.

These stories are excellent tools for exposing the human universals that transcend the group categories we use to even have ethnographic concepts in the first place. This is what storytelling is for. It reveals the human experience beyond the boxes we use to separate ourselves from one another. It reveals we’re all the same. Same hull, facing the same abyss.

Creating a Black elf doesn’t do this. Or Black dwarves — and not because the mythology of Lord of the Rings isn’t a drama-aboard-a-vessel. The critiques of this creative move, insofar as it’s recognized as a bad move, are correct, just not for the reasons given.

Here’s what I’ve seen everywhere (and I do mean everywhere): there shouldn’t be any Black elves, or Black dwarves for that matter. Probably not even any noticeably Black orcs, either. The reason for this is that it lacks realism, so it’s claimed.

These are common refrains about storytelling today: that compelling worldbuilding should look much more like the mythology of Game of Thrones, where heterogeneity is compelling because it is realistic: The folk from the north are pale-skinned. The southerners are tanned. The shotel-wielding marauders on the other side of the world, where it’s sunniest and resources are scarce, have dark skin and quick tempers.

The heterogeneity of Game of Thrones is idealized for its reality-tracking, its anthropological realism, or at least its attempt at it. Game of Thrones is this way while wearing high fantasy. Star Trek is this way while wearing science fantasy. Moby Dick is this way while wearing middle-nineteenth-century bigotry. But The Lord of the Rings isn’t like this. It is not a work of anthropological realism, and isn’t trying to be. Criticism of the kind I keep seeing shouldn’t be framed this way at all.

If the anthropological realism framing of The Lord of the Rings were true, the dwarves should be paper-white pale, given how much time they spend underground. The elves should be short — the selective advantage of height is found in tall grasses for spotting predators, not in a tree-dwelling race with no explanation for being eight feet tall. They aren’t giraffes. Orcs should be pale-skinned too since they live in the dark, and there are plenty of ivory-white Orc folklore representations outside of LoTR that adhere to this logic exactly. And finally, Hobbits shouldn’t even exist. They’re a fantasy race of toddlers, an ethnicity of children.

The lack of anthropological realism accusation toward a fantasy world with its own ethnicity of toddlers is hard to sit with in a serious way. This form of realism was never the point, so these race-based criticisms of works like The Rings of Power miss the point, because Tolkien has done something very different. He hasn’t shaped a mythic landscape that someone like Charles Darwin could make sense of. The world of Lord of the Rings isn’t meant for Darwin. It would be inscrutable to him.

Tolkien is doing a kind of Darwinian naturalism before Darwin was born or naturalism had its name. An anthropomorphic psychoanalysis — the work of genuine myth: Elves, Dwarves, Orcs, and Hobbits (gnomes), don’t arrive in metaphorically-driven storytelling as part of a multicultural study. They arrive as fragmented expressions of what it is to be human. They are anthropomorphic shapes given to recognizable patterns of the human spirit, observed over centuries and millennia of the storyteller watching us and recording our follies. They are what you get when you try to convert the human soul into its most predictable moods — hyperbolic representations of the self in different states. The human condition reduced to its truest expression as a multiple personality disorder.

Tolkien arranged these folklore tools in a very specific way, to tell a very specific story. I’m not going to dwell on what that is here, because it would be too great a detour. The quick version is this: The most simplified expression of this story is Pinocchio, or the story of the ‘Deep Sea and The Whale’ — I’ll go into that another time. It is the most successful dramatic structure in human history, and Lord of the Rings is an example of it. The deep sea is Mordor, and the whale is a volcano, but the dramatic structure at the center of the story has been dominating the top of the dramatic arts for thousands of years. Why is a mystery.

The point is, you could actually get away with race-swapped elves and dwarves, but that would only work if you used them with an eye toward the actual folklore foundation where these para-human expressions come from. Whether or not it seems like it, Gimli’s most potent role is to suggest a shortcut venturing into the mines of Moria. Legolas does his best metaphorical work when he becomes a poem-singing minstrel-guide through the woods of Lothlorian after the fellowship loses Gandalf. These figures are performing ancient dramatic work, work they have been performing longer than the elf and dwarf expressions we recognize and know have existed.

This is the naturalism occurring; it is occurring across the pages of a dramatic study Tolkien intuited with the help of his affinity for philology and medieval scholarship. This is the naturalism Darwin would not recognize — and the naturalism none of the race-swap critics see. Because a story of metaphorical depth isn’t concerned with satisfying Charles Darwin. Its representations do not unfold this way, certainly not in stories attempting to metaphorize the human experience as fragments of self (think The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and how absurd an anthropological heterogeneity lens would look when pressed up against the Lion, the Scarecrow, and the Tin Man). This lens is altogether the wrong tool for understanding this type of story, and what the true metaphorical activity going on underneath it is.

Again, I think the postmodernist race-swapping is bad. It is only revealing that the Hollywood machine can’t even select the categories of storytelling where you could get away with it easily, like drama-aboard-a-vessel.

So I’m with you. The Black elf is bad, just not for the reasons you think. There exists a version of it which is compelling — it’s just not going to come out of Amazon.

Did you know you’re only worth a twentieth as much to Donald Trump as a Greenlander?

Today I want to try something more direct: math. Not a dip into metaphor and myth and the use of story, but revealing story from another angle. Two different numbers coming out of the same White House and the cognition calculating them in the same year reveal an arc of their own. They are the same number by category and deployed for a similar utility — for corruption, for compliance, for the illusion of leadership. But they are completely different numbers, too. And I mean that literally. The numbers differ by a ratio of 20:1.

Here’s the first one. The one on everyone’s mind at the moment. At the Republican Party’s midterm convention in Dallas — their first midterm convention ever — Trump told the crowd that if Republicans hold the House and Senate in November, he’ll personally deliver every adult American citizen a check for five thousand dollars, what he’s calling the “Trump dividend.”

“If the Republicans win, you win with us and you get $5,000,” he told everyone, and he did so in a context that happily compares the payout to a company giving shareholders a one-time cash distribution, as if a country is a corporation and citizenship is an equity position. This analogy breaks apart. Citizens are not shareholders; the government is not a for-profit institution, not in the literal sense. The ‘profit’ in which a citizenry has a stake is the future itself. Material growth yes, but material growth commensurate with the state’s vitality.

Even if the administration’s reasoning held, that just means Americans are shareholders in a business currently $40 trillion in debt, and his $5,000 would just add more. He never said where the money would come from, but analysts have pointed out it would likely have to be financed through more federal debt. Census-based estimates put the total cost above a trillion dollars. Normally, shareholders would have a say in this sort of thing, or at least get queued into the quarterly earnings call. American shareholders do not, because we’re not really shareholders. That’s not the correct analogy. The correct analogy is that this is an opportunity for Americans to join in the liquidation of a company, not partake in its growth. We’re being offered to partake in the spoils of its plundering — and of course we’re not going to get it, anyway.

This is a bribe. This is a desperate, power-consolidation move. This is Trump hoping to buy electoral wins, outside the dark money operation already doing exactly that. This is the level of corruption beneath dark money — dark money exposed in broad daylight, hoping you won’t see it for what it is. This is Donald Trump treating the citizenry as a cheap wh*re, and naming her price, naming what he is willing to pay for you to give it up.

This is a man with a unique history, and a unique psychological profile. He surrounds himself with a unique inventory of broken people, and is quick to discard those he detects have a functioning conscience. Lev Parnas has spoken about this, he’s written about it. He’s worked closely with Trump and has described the type of cognition he has. This is a specific function of a cognition we’ve seen in operation at least twice now, in two different registers but for effectively the same reason. A cognition that compromises conscience, or at least attempts to. This Trump-cognition has calculated that your corruptibility, your joint complicity, your soul, is worth $5,000. Let that sink in. The cognition operating the political apparatus of the White House has the sophistication of a dirty john, and you are the hooker, and you are a cheap one. Not a high-end one like the first lady.

This isn’t new. This is how two entire nation-states and their citizenry have been appealed to in order to hand over their levers of control. The other is Greenland, and where the second number comes in — the number that makes the first one meaningful and supports the dirty john armchair diagnosis I’m making.

Remember Greenland?

Months ago, Reuters reported that the Trump administration had been discussing direct cash payments to residents of Greenland as a way of inciting them to secede from their own government and align with the United States instead. Per Reuters‘ sources, government officials, including White House aides, had discussed figures ranging from $10,000 to as much as $100,000 per person. And it is rumored this idea isn’t dead, either, with officials reportedly growing more serious about it in recent weeks and even leaning toward the higher six-figure numbers.

Danish and Greenlandic officials have said over and over that the island isn’t up for sale, and polls show most Greenlanders don’t want to join the U.S. at all. None of that stopped Trump-cognition from pricing them anyway. Trump-cognition believes the people are for sale, regardless of what their governments say. Trump-cognition does not know cooperation. Trump-cognition cannot do the arithmetic for it. That would require the capacity to perceive other people’s suffering. True negotiation isn’t his chest thumping, or Trump’s town-crier ‘come-one, come-all’ style of lying to everyone. It requires genuine interpersonal insight. Trump-cognition doesn’t do this. It isn’t attempting to do this. It is attempting to calculate something else entirely: the cost of a people’s willingness to subvert their own systems, and it has calculated the cost difference for inciting that subversion at around 20:1.

I want you to sit with that disparity.

Donald Trump thinks Greenland is a more expensive hooker than you, by 20:1. An American soul’s going rate is twenty times cheaper than a Greenlander’s. Trump-cognition’s calculus reveals that your soul costs less, or at least should — twenty times less. And I think the most damning thing about that figure is not that a decrepit, soulless husk operates Trump-cognition, it’s that Donald Trump is right. His corruption calculator is correct to price an American soul at 1/20th of a Greenlander’s, as embarrassing as that is — as revealing as that is. I won’t turn this into another American self-deprecation piece — ‘woe is us, shame on us, we did this to ourselves’ — but that is what I’m pointing at, and that is all the naval-gazing I will do here.

( | )

Donald Trump has now put a specific dollar figure on two different kinds of loyalty. One is the loyalty of a foreign population he wants to detach from its own government to annex them. To put it bluntly: asking fifty-seven thousand people to hand over their own country’s sovereignty — and ‘asking’ here is doing a lot more work than it’s supposed to, because the other conversation about taking Greenland involves warships and explosive ordnance. That’s not diplomacy. That’s going to the grocery store with a gun so you can get a discount, and calling it ‘asking’ while the sales clerk trembles at the register.

The second loyalty is that of Trump’s own citizens, people who already belong to the country he leads, whose support he’s asking for to keep dismantling things — a different government this time. America’s. The number attached to the first wh*re — the request to betray Greenland’s government: $100k. The number attached to the second wh*re — the bribe to Americans to let him keep betraying ours: $5k. Twenty to one.

I don’t think a man who prices things for a living does this by accident. Whatever else is true about Trump, he’s spent decades treating negotiation as his native language, and in that language, price is information. It tells you what the seller thinks something is worth to a buyer, or what the buyer thinks it will take to move the seller. When the same administration attaches twenty times the number to a foreign population’s willingness to abandon its own government as it attaches to the American electorate’s willingness to keep voting for MAGA, that isn’t a rounding error. That’s a market valuation. It says something Americans haven’t really had to sit with before: that in the geopolitical wh*rehouse that Trump-cognition is running, we’re not just the cheaper date, we’re the discount bin.

That is the thesis, and I want to say it one more time without softening it, because the softening would be its own kind of dishonesty, and I want the historical record of the man to contain as many variations of his immorality as possible: Trump is willing to treat an entire country like a cheap wh*re, dangling street-walker prices at the scale of two populations — one whose government has explicitly said it isn’t a working girl, and the other a people who are beyond disaffected, but in both cases confident a thick enough roll of dollar bills dangled through the window will produce a yes.

When he first did this with Greenland, it registered as the most appalling and disgusting thing he’d done on the world stage. Seeing it happen a second time, in a separate but qualitatively similar context, reveals an uncomfortable mirror Americans need to reckon with that this White House has proposed with two numbers: we’re worth roughly a twentieth as much. Not because Americans are less patriotic than Greenlanders, just that we’re more corruptible, or more corrupted already — at least in the eyes of the man doing the work of setting the prices, which isn’t something someone does without some theory of what the market will bear.

Sources:

Jeyaretnam, Miranda. “Trump’s $5,000-Dividend Midterms Pledge Draws Criticism.” TIME, Sept. 10, 2026. https://time.com/article/2026/09/10/trump-dividend-five-thousand-dollars-midterms-republican-convention/

“Trump promises $5,000 payouts if GOP wins midterms: Can the US afford it?” Al Jazeera, Sept. 10, 2026. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/9/10/trump-promises-5000-payouts-if-gop-wins-midterms-can-the-us-afford-it

“Trump promised $5,000 checks if Republicans win the midterms. How would that work?” PBS NewsHour, Sept. 10, 2026. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/trump-promised-5000-checks-if-republicans-win-the-midterms-how-would-that-work

Javaid, Maham, and Tamara Keith. “Trump promises $5,000 dividend in convention speech, but only if Republicans win.” NPR / Houston Public Media, Sept. 10, 2026. https://www.houstonpublicmedia.org/articles/news/politics/election-2026/2026/09/10/561450/trump-promises-5000-dividend-in-convention-speech-but-only-if-republicans-win/

“$10,000 to $100,000 each? Trump administration mulls payments to sway Greenlanders to join US.” Deccan Herald / Reuters, 2026. https://www.deccanherald.com/amp/story/world%2F10000-to-100000-each-trump-administration-mulls-payments-to-sway-greenlanders-to-join-us-3857580

Chu, Bonny. “Trump admin reportedly considers paying each Greenland resident up to $100K amid US takeover talks.” Fox News, Jan. 8, 2026. https://www.foxnews.com/politics/trump-admin-reportedly-considers-paying-each-greenland-resident-100k-us-takeover-talks

( | ) This essay assumes the reader has knowledge of popular works of fiction. I’m sorry if you’re not familiar with the stories mentioned here. There are no major spoilers. ( | )

Did you know you’ve been watching the same movie for 8,000 years?

I’ve been poking at the same idea for a while now, the Heroine, and doing it from a number of different directions, too. This time I want to try something different, approaching the same category of meta-truth using something that might seem peripheral: Story.

I know — I’ve used story to make some of my points already, used the existing mythic record with the theory that it contains truths either too difficult to express or too vague to reach full consciousness. Truths better described in drama — meta-narratives that aren’t just stories, not mere moral lessons, but psychological models of the human condition before psychology had the name, before science had the name. Jordan Peterson talked about these a lot. I’m talking about the same thing. Today I want to look directly at one example that reveals this, and shows the blurring between the austere mystery of myth and the far more familiar marketing categories of story-for-entertainment that people are actually familiar with, mostly because they didn’t waste their time going to grad school to study mythology. So here, as promised, is proof you’ve been watching the same movie for 8,000 years.

I’ll start with the version everybody already knows, because it’s the structure in its simplest expression and because its ending is a literal unveiling. In The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, Dorothy adds three companions on her way to Emerald City, and each one is representative of an absence, a fragmented self: The Scarecrow needs a brain. The Tin Man needs a heart. The Lion needs courage. In short, her companions are all lacking something, and something specific.

I want to rename these three fragments — these three icons are far more specific than people realize, and the renaming is necessary to connect with another three stories before I’m done here. “Brain,” “Courage,” and “Heart” aren’t just items three cartoonish figures are missing; they’re profound metaphorical expressions, references to an ancient archetypal framing for the hero myth. Bear with me a little, because I’m renaming them Truth, Bravery, and Realness — no longer objects, but attributes of character the story implicitly claims to be sacred: Truth isn’t merely cleverness, it’s the capacity to see and say what’s actually so, even when it’s hard. Bravery isn’t fearlessness, it’s being afraid, and doing the terrifying thing anyway. Realness doesn’t mean sentiment, it’s the capacity to be genuine with somebody instead of performing a curated self at them.

When the book/film pulls its curtain back in the third act, the wizard turns out to be a fraud — a fidgety old man working levers. He can’t deliver the missing virtues Dorothy’s companions need, because he doesn’t have any of them himself. All he can do is point out they already had them. This ending isn’t a punchline, because the same curtain can be pulled back elsewhere, and has been pulled back, again and again — and each time it is, this exact trinity of attributes is sitting on the other side of it, Truth, Bravery, and Realness — hidden beneath an archetypal structure that’s been dominating the performance charts in the dramatic arts for at least eight millennia.

( | ) Go back to Egypt ( | )

Now let’s go back further than Baum and Technicolor, to a version of this mythic shape most people reading this have never run into: Horus. I guess some people reading this will have run into Horus, but I don’t mean the textbook version of him. Not the one you might have learned about in middle school history or for a few credits for a college elective. Horus is a varied figure. The record on him spans multiple tellings, multiple derivatives of the same icon. And it’s from his more esoteric material, outside the canonical tellings of Horus that the Egyptians devoted most of their clay and papyrus to, that I want to point at. In other words, I’m talking about an ancient Egyptian spin-off series.

I’m talking about a version of Horus in which Horus, son of Osiris and Isis, fights Set by changing shape to prove himself before the tribunal of Egyptian gods (who are not convinced Horus deserves the crown over his rival, Set). My claim is that this variation of Horus contains the same three metaphorical expressions and is woven around them, the same three expressions Baum would later intuitively write down and metaphorize 8,000 years later in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Because in this telling, Horus transforms into three things: A falcon, a lion, and a crocodile.

A falcon for Horus to prove his superior vision.

A lion-warrior for Horus to prove his courage in battle.

And a crocodile for Horus to prove his mastery over life and the floods of the Nile.

And all of this to impress a mighty wizard, the sun god Ra, head of the tribunal poised to grant Horus kinghood should he succeed.

These dramatic parallels to The Wonderful Wizard of Oz are not coincidences, they are identical metaphorical expressions signifying the presence of the same attributes that Baum’s creations would later signify in absence eight thousand years later: Truth, Bravery, Realness — proven through animal transformations instead — Horus proving he has a brain, courage, and a heart. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz shows the same puzzle only inverted, dramatizing three figures who are missing precisely the qualities Horus must prove he possesses.

( | ) Now it gets weird ( | )

That’s the myth half of the claim, me pulling the same curtain back to reveal that the curtain isn’t new, and neither is the pulling it back. But here’s the freaky part: we can find the same archetypal shape I’ve just named running through two more pieces of unrelated entertainment, and in two different media categories, authored by writers who weren’t studying Egyptology. They were writing television and radio comedy, decades apart and on different continents, with no reason to end up in the same place. They ended up in the same place anyway.

Futurama frames the same trinity with cartoon flair: Fry is the Scarecrow: a man thawed a thousand years out of his time. His brainlessness is the most pronounced feature of his character — an obvious idiot. Bender is the heartless Tin Man made literal, actually made of metal, actually hollow where a heart should be, and the whole joke of him is expressed in the gap between how loudly Bender performs his heartlessness and how obviously he wants to be missed by somebody. Dr. Zoidberg is the Cowardly Lion played almost too straightforwardly to miss, he just happens to be a lobster — mocked, useless, terrified, and somehow always the one who’ll actually die for everyone else when the moment calls for it.

The parallels don’t end there. The series is even polite enough to give its Dorothy the same role, too. Leela as the Heroine, running a mutant-girl version of Dorothy’s plot: an orphan whose entire arc is finding out where she actually came from, concluding in a there’s-no-place-like-home reveal about her own parents that upends everything she thought she knew about herself.

The parallels don’t end there, either. Professor Farnsworth operates a mad scientist’s version of the wizard’s console— the rickety old man who claims far more power than he actually has. Wicked witch Mom has an actual trio of flying monkey goons.

All of it aligns, and not accidentally, because the intuitions for telling a story of metaphorical profundity work this way. I know, because I wrote one. It works by honing in on what feels right, like any other creative output. The freaky part of this process is discovering how often what feels right to a storyteller repeats itself in other works, over and over again.

We can find the same pattern again in Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, which frames the same trinity with even more exaggeration: Zaphod as the Scarecrow. Missing half of his brain, physically blocked out — two heads, and neither of them has full knowledge of himself, much less why he blocked off his brain. Arthur Dent is the Cowardly Lion — a frightened Englishman who is challenged to be more courageous almost every scene. Marvin is the Tin Man put through the same exaggeration. Not an empty hull wanting a heart, but a mind of nearly unlimited capacity that is aware of everything and is moved by nothing, curdling into Marvin’s iconic depression — heartlessness via intellect.

The parallels don’t end there. Trillian is Dorothy here, and her path runs straight to the wizard derivative Adams built, unconsciously dredging up a dramatic structure as old as the pyramids: Deep Thought, the ancient authority attracting pilgrimage from around the universe in the hope of receiving its answer to life, the universe and everything, following a yellow brick road in space for calculated divine wisdom — only to find the curtain falling away again, only to find Deep Thought’s answer to be just another hollow trick, just like all of the nothingness behind the curtain in Emerald City.

( | ) Some things never change ( | )

These patterns aren’t coincidences. Lay the three trios side by side, and we can start to see the elusive shape of one of the dramatic structures that’s been in circulation for longer than we have record. It’s the same metaphorical anatomy, showing up because it’s true, and not in the hoaky way. Showing up because, as a species, we have wired literal genetic affinities into our own psychology for specific stories — this is one of them, and its core conveyance describes a model for the human condition — all expressed by a trinity. Truth, Bravery, and Realness are being framed, across at least eighty centuries and the hundreds of generations of lives that have passed between them, as the solution to the human problem itself.

More on that later.

So, in case you forgot: This is one of the dramatic structures you’ve been consuming as a species for so long that both your affinity for producing it and your affinity for consuming it are more or less unconscious drives. You have been watching the same movie for 8,000 years — probably a lot longer than that. We can only go as far back as the hieroglyph. Before that, it’s all oral tradition — no trace left. This structure has been wearing a different costume to disguise itself, as archetypal stories do — flower dress, tin suit, a falcon’s flight over the Nile, a drunken cynical robot, a depressed computer with a brain the size of a planet — but underneath all of them is the same three-part dramatic shape, doing its work on the species unconsciously, delivering the same existential theory, over and over again.

Because the shape of the human problem doesn’t change, the solution doesn’t change. Because the solution doesn’t change, the stories that contain and transmit the wisdom don’t either.

And some haven’t for 8,000 years, at least.

Four of these now. I believe this will be the fourth one anyway, if I publish them in the order I’ve written them. If the first three made me realize anything, it was that I kept starting at the smallest possible scale and working outward: the psychology of man’s desire, the mythology validating it, the vocabulary he’s missing to describe it, the reasons the vocabulary went missing in the first place. Micro, in other words. The genetic level. And I don’t just mean that literally, I mean it figuratively too, which in this case might be the more useful sense of the word.

This time I want to try something different. The Macro. I want to step back and ask a structural question instead: if the thesis holds. If men really are Heroine-driven, not sex-driven, and if that truth really has gone missing from the culture’s operating model, what does the structure built on top of that absence actually look like, once you stop describing its parts and start describing its shape? What I want to lay out in this essay might be — despite how much emphasis I’ve placed elsewhere — the most useful words I provide in these pages.

( | ) The thing you don’t notice until it breaks ( | )

Here’s an image I want to put in front of you to make the main point: the sump pump. It runs, it whirs, draining rainwater and melted snow before thumping off again. Nobody thinks about their house’s sump pump. It sits in the basement, doing an unglamorous, essential job, and the only time it enters your awareness is the day it fails, when the basement starts taking on water. By the time you notice, the damage isn’t a leak anymore. It’s black mold behind the drywall, warped subfloor, a stinking structural rot that had been accumulating for months before there were any signs telling you to look.

I think the shared cultural model of courtship — the assumption that whatever else is happening at the individual level, the overall system we’re embedded in is organized around producing monogamous pairings — is exactly this kind of infrastructure. Nobody audits it. It’s taken for granted, the way load-bearing beams are taken for granted, right up until the day the swampification becomes too obvious to keep explaining away as a local, individual problem rather than a structural one.

So here’s the single, simple claim I want to test today: the most honest framing of the status quo isn’t a system that organizes monogamy, not in the way the zeitgeist would have it believed — it’s a system that monetizes polygyny. And I want to walk through the evidence for that claim in three places — one private and fairly easy to look at directly, and two public, much more sensitive, and much harder to talk about carefully. There are others, but I consider these three very different-looking parts of the same machine, all unconsciously driven to perform the same operation at different levels. The first part of this machine is easy.

( | ) What dating apps actually do ( | )

On the surface, dating apps are monogamy machines. The interface claims so: build a profile, record preferences, get matched, go on a date, presumably fall in love, presumably pair off. Every design decision revealed in the interface supports this story — the language of “matches,” the algorithmic promise of compatibility, plus the entire cultural mythology of “finding the one” that’s adapted alongside the technology.

But the actual behavioral data collected from these platforms describes something close to the opposite. It describes polygyny. The most cited empirical study of this remains Gareth Tyson and colleagues’ 2016 analysis of Tinder, which found a matching rate for men of roughly 0.6 percent — about one match for every 160 women liked — against a matching rate for women of around 10 percent, nearly seventeen times higher. That asymmetry alone would be interesting on its own, but the mechanism behind it is the part that matters here: the researchers described a self-reinforcing feedback loop, in which the low male match rate drives men toward less selective behavior — liking almost everyone, since selectivity produces almost no return — while the high female match rate allows, and effectively requires, increasing selectivity on the other side, since nearly anyone she likes will result in a match anyway. Run that process forward and you get exactly what critics of these platforms have been describing anecdotally for a decade, and what I’m describing now: a small number of men receiving the overwhelming share of female attention, and a long tail of men essentially locked out of the market entirely, while women experience an environment of near-limitless option abundance. That’s not a monogamy-shaped outcome. That’s the textbook signature of a polygynous mating market, produced not entirely by biology but in conjunction with a platform design that happens to reward exactly this pattern with more engagement, more time-on-app, and more profit.

This is where the “monetized” half of my claim earns its keep, and isn’t metaphor. A dating app whose business model depends on subscription revenue and engagement time has a structural disincentive to actually solve the problem it claims to solve. It only has the incentive to provide the dressing for it, a storefront facade — the interface of a monogamy-shaped design. A user who matches, forms a relationship, and deletes the app is a completed customer. A user who stays in the pool, swiping, upgrading to see who liked them, paying for boosts to be seen by more people — that user is the product working as intended, creating a polygyny-shaped churn, monetizing monogamous intentions within a stream of polygynous incentives. You don’t need a conspiracy theory to explain this. You just need an engagement-based business model applied to a product that happens to be marketed as a courtship tool. The two functions were never aligned to begin with, and the data on who actually gets matched, and how often, and to whom, tells you which function is actually winning.

I think this disparity accounts for most of the misery observable today. Keep in mind, dating apps are only one example, maybe the most pronounced example, where the gap between the interface itself and the actual behavioral data behind it tell two completely different stories. My claim is that these two stories generate the miseries of the moment — a psychic rending caused by the cognitive dissonance between a cultural folklore establishing the psychology of monogamous intentions confronting the reality of a system monetizing polygyny instead. The inputs into the system don’t match the intentions of the system built to supply the outputs.

I write these words only to help crystallize the shape of the thing we are living in. To help provide words that describe the system that actually exists. And now I want you to imagine the system that would otherwise exist, because remember, the most fatal input here is not the mismatch between monogamous intentions and a monetized-polygyny system built to game those intentions. The most fatal input is the one I’ve been describing for the better part of three essays already — the error in framing men’s desire for women correctly in the first place. The absence of the Heroine.

This is where I’m forced to concede to speculative space, as I’m known to do. But speculate, I will: Speculating that this is the point at which the sump pump has actually broken, and where the infrastructure is taking on rot and mold. Speculating that in a world where this truth about men is no longer absent, the expectations of men change, and the shape of how their behavior is policed changes. Speculating that in such a world, the shape of women’s intrasexual competition changes, that a Heroine competition between women is very different than anything this culture remembers. Speculating that in such a world, the entire theory of how men and women optimize their pursuit of each other changes — that the Hero is called by the Heroine, that the game which optimizes what men and women want from each other is built on this, and that it can’t be erased.

But it can be buried. It can be buried beneath a machine monetizing polygyny instead. But that machine’s operation is contingent on a language game which only permits a portion of how men’s desire for women works in the first place, and ultimately the kind of tools used to integrate the portion acknowledged. The slot machine for sex, a paradox of choice generator at a scale nature hasn’t prepared either the male or female psyche. This is the result of an incomplete understanding of how the magnetism between the sexes is supposed to work, sitting beneath a technological apparatus that has no means of delivering what the inputs exerted on it seek, because not even the language exists for it, and a technology truly designed around delivering it would look very different.

( | ) The marriage that survives the transition ( | )

The second evidentiary piece of the monetized polygyny operation we live inside of today is contained in one of the previous model’s surviving structures: marriage. That’s part of what makes monetized polygyny harder to see and much more than a mere dating app problem, and not reducible to one. The Tinder algorithm at least has the decency to not call itself a wedding. Monetized polygyny doesn’t eliminate the institution. It keeps it, keeps the word, keeps the aisle and the vows and the tax filing status — and quietly changes what kind of thing is walking down that aisle.

Here’s the claim, stated as plainly as I can: if the Heroine-absence this series keeps describing is the actual root error, then the marriages formed under its absence aren’t the same category of object the institution used to produce. They’re marriages assembled from the erotic and social-approval incentive structure my whole series has been arguing is incomplete — status, attraction, the practical logistics of shared adulthood — without the deeper incentive that used to be doing the load-bearing work of keeping two people oriented toward each other decades past the point where erotic novelty and social performance stop paying out. A marriage built on the available incentives will last exactly as long as those incentives keep paying, and both erotic charge and social approval are, by nature, depreciating assets. A marriage built around something closer to reverence for demonstrated character doesn’t depreciate the same way, because the thing it’s tracking isn’t novelty or partner utility. It’s a difference in kind, not just quality.

Here’s where the state comes in, and where I want to be careful, because this is the part of the claim that risks registering as tinfoil-hat conspiracy-making when I mean it structurally, and not a structure operating with conscious intent. Nobody designed family court to profit from shorter marriages. But look at how the machinery is actually funded. Title IV-D of the Social Security Act ties a real share of federal funding to states based on their child-support enforcement performance (collections, caseload processing, paternity establishment). States that generate more child-support cases and process them more efficiently receive more federal incentive money. This isn’t a fringe claim; it’s the literal statutory design of how child-support enforcement has been financed since the 1970s. A state family court system, framed as a background piece of infrastructure, is incentivized to receive more resources the more non-intact households it’s processing, regardless of anyone’s intentions about marriage as an institution. This infrastructure preserves the veneer that a monogamous system is being maintained, and that its maintenance is merely routed through judges, lawyers, social workers, inspectors, collectors, and tax funding. A monetized polygyny system doesn’t care about this — it benefits from it. It helps provide the circumstances which feed it.

But the family court system isn’t just a machine. It’s composed of professionals whose incentives happen to align thus, working one of the arms of an operation that cleans part of the mess. Part of the mess created by a system whose primary function is monetizing polygyny, and leaves the market to solve the problems downstream of the consequences of its existence. They earn their paycheck, they go home. They believe they are doing the work that patches the fault lines where a monogamous system has gone awry, where a family has been sundered. They believe they are repairing the broken sump pump. Their work is actually maintaining the illusion that we’re living in a monogamous system, and not a monetized polygyny system that generates shorter marriages. They are papering over the mold, reducing the cumulative detritus of the broken sump pump.

Stack the divorce layer on top of that. An entire private industry whose revenue is a direct function of marital dissolution, remarriage, and the elevated dissolution rates second and third marriages reliably show, above 60 percent by most estimates, compared to something closer to 40–50 percent for first marriages — and you get a public-private system with a genuine, if entirely unplanned, structural interest in exactly the outcome my thesis predicts: not just fewer marriages, but shorter ones, more of them, cycling more households through the same processing infrastructure and doing it more often and with increasing efficiency. A world full of durable, Heroine-anchored marriages generates one court filing and then, mostly, silence. A world full of the erotic-and-approval marriages my series has been describing generates filings, re-filings, custody modifications, support recalculations. It creates a revolving door, a recurring revenue event wearing the word, “marriage,” and bearing none of its original underlying substrate, hitherto describing something that only used to happen once — because the emergent structure beneath it could only validate it once.

I’ll mention again: I don’t think anyone sat in a room and engineered this, the divorce court layer or the family court layer. I think it’s what happens when an institution keeps its name and some of its rituals while the psychological architecture underneath it quietly gets swapped out for a cheaper substitute. And the state, mostly by accident of how it chose to fund itself, ended up with skin in the game of that substitution’s most predictable output: marriages that don’t last, and a system downstream that, whatever its intentions, thrives best when marriages thrive least.

( | ) The incentive nobody built and nobody wants ( | )

Now the third and final evidentiary piece. This is the ugliest one to mention, the most visceral, contending with problems that emerge and cause serious harm — with lost property, lost safety, and lost lives. I’m speaking of crime and the incarceration system. I’m talking about for-profit prisons, rehabilitation facilities, revolving-door probation-to-reoffense cycles, the single mother-to-felon pipeline — the portion of monetized polygyny harvesting the most dysfunctional outputs of the system we currently live in.

Here’s the mechanism, stated as plainly as I can: the Heroine catalyzes the Hero. That’s the entire engine this series has been describing from four different angles now, and every other claim in these essays is downstream of this one. A man does not spontaneously generate the motivation to be disciplined, provident, faithful, and present. That motivation is not self-starting. It’s responsive — called into being by the presence of something worth becoming disciplined, provident, faithful, and present for. Strip out the object, and you don’t get a man who’s disciplined, not out of pure internal virtue. You get a man whose incentive structure has had its load-bearing wall removed, and who behaves, unsurprisingly, like a structure with a missing wall. The culture has satisfied itself to place things like fatherlessness in this space instead, that the developmental incentive lacking is Dad. Men become good men to impress daddy. He is the wall that is missing. This is wrong.

This is where I’ll restate the fundamental thesis with simpler words, simpler because they are older, and wiser than their simplicity initially reveals: the incentive to be a good man is a good woman. Not woman as prize, not woman as trophy for good behavior — woman as that which makes “good” a coherent, motivating category to begin with, rather than an arbitrary list of virtues imposed from outside with no engine behind it. There is an engine, and the engine is off. A culture that has no functioning model of the Heroine has not simply lost a nice romantic idea. It has disconnected the incentive wiring for the very masculine behavior it demands, loudly and with increasing desperation, through every other channel available to it — shame campaigns, responsibility rhetoric, public health messaging about “toxic masculinity,” criminal justice interventions aimed at “positive male role models.” None of this characterizes an apparatus which actually understands the motivations it claims to want, or where they come from. All of it is a bandage, applied after the fact, trying to extract a motivational output from men that used to emerge more or less on its own, because the actual power source has been quietly disconnected. A culture attempting to manufacture good men without even mentioning the obvious incentive on the other side of it.

The resulting outputs of masculine dysfunction this culture worries about — criminality, disengagement, video-game withdrawal, the refusal to commit, the refusal to provide, the refusal to show up, both the asocial and antisocial categories of men’s behavior — are a symptom of this same disconnected wiring, not a series of unrelated failures each requiring its own carefully curated explanation. Fatherlessness and crime, or withdrawal and isolation — whether men are stepping away from society or turning against it, all are just the visible, measurable consequences of the broken sump pump.

This is why I think the “fatherlessness” and similar framings of men’s downtroddenness, however statistically trackable, have always been diagnosing a symptom rather than the problem, noticing mold rather than the broken pump. The source of the problem is upstream of any individual man’s biography. It’s cultural, and it’s the same across every context in which men are asked to become disciplined, provident, faithful, and present, and are never shown, coherently, the incentive any of that is actually for.

( | ) Putting the three parts together ( | )

Here’s why I think these examples — dating apps, the courts, disaffectedness and crime — belong in the same essay, even though they seem to come from completely different registers, one a private-sector technology critique and the other two a matter of family sociology and criminal justice — at least taken as parts. Put together, they create a picture of a different kind of system, working in unconscious concert. And I don’t write any of this to elicit conspiratorial thinking. I’m not suggesting there’s a hand behind any of this. I’m suggesting there’s an error behind this. I’m saying a culture which recognizes men as Heroine-driven produces a structure of roughly a monogamous shape, and one which only models men as sex-driven produces one of a roughly monetized polygyny shape, and that it’s better to know this than not.

I want to make something clear before I end this, because I think these last few paragraphs obligate something of me not just for the sake of intellectual honesty, but not being an idiot: I am not saying the three examples I’ve given in this essay are causally linked. That’s not the essay I’m writing here. I’m saying that the complete picture, from the dating app through the incarceration system, with divorce and family courts in between, is more honestly described as a system that monetizes polygyny, and one that generates the infrastructure to correct for its instability.

You don’t get monogamy by wanting it, marketing it, or building an interface that implies it. You get it by correctly modeling what actually motivates the people you’re trying to pair off, and building the surrounding incentive structure around that correct model. This culture, on the thesis I’ve been building, has been doing the opposite: creating elaborate, well-intentioned monogamy-shaped infrastructure on top of an incorrect model of what men actually want, and then acting surprised when what comes out the other end looks more like a badly-hidden polygynous sorting mechanism than the system it was advertised as, producing more infrastructure on the back end to keep the mess as clean as possible.

I’m not recommending anything revolutionary happen over any of this. I’m saying the revolutionary shift has already occurred — that the entire relationship between the sexes now operates inside a shape most people have never been asked to name. I’m only here today to name it, because naming it is the beginning of giving people the tools to operate within it, and generate the results they want from it — or even better, work to improve it. So whatever your intentions, that system needs its name: Monetized Polygyny.

Third one of these. I said at the start of the first essay that I didn’t know exactly how to write about this, and that’s still the most honest thing I can tell you going in. But this installment is a little different from the first two. Those were mostly about establishing that a claim is true — that men’s desire is structured around something more than appetite, something deeper and specific: an emergent characterological archetype for which men’s affinity is powerful — and that the technology arriving over the next decade is going to make that undeniable whether anyone wants it to be or not. This third essay is about a stranger question on the same topic: if my claim is true, and if it’s as consequential as I think it is, why isn’t anyone saying it? Why does a culture that has no trouble producing careful, well-funded, decades-long research programs on nearly everything else have almost nothing to say about this?

I want to take that question seriously rather than treat it as rhetorical, because I think the honest answer involves admitting some uncomfortable things about men, and some uncomfortable things about women, and I’d rather sit with the discomfort than round it off into something tidier than it is.

( | ) The gravity problem ( | )

Here’s the shape of the puzzle. If men really are structured, at some deep level, around something like what I’ve been calling the Heroine — a figure whose demonstrated character organizes desire, not just her availability and that availability’s cost — then this isn’t a minor psychological footnote. It’s foundational, on the scale of a physical law. And a culture that had somehow collectively decided to stop teaching gravity wouldn’t just have an interesting gap in its physics curriculum. It would have engineers designing bridges that fall down, and it would keep having bridges fall down, generation after generation, without ever quite tracing the failures back to the missing law.

I think that’s roughly the position we’re in. And the question worth taking seriously isn’t just “is the theory right,” which I’ve spent two essays on already. It’s: how does a society manage to forget something this load-bearing? Collective amnesia at that scale doesn’t happen because everyone secretly agreed to look away. It happens through something more mundane and more interesting — the slow failure of a transmission mechanism, compounding across generations until the thing being transmitted is just gone, the way a language dies not because anyone decided to kill it but because fewer and fewer people needed it for anything.

I think there are two forces doing most of that work here, and I want to take each seriously rather than picking the more comfortable one and stopping there.

( | ) What men were never given the words for ( | )

The first force concerns men, and I want to be careful with it, because this is exactly the kind of claim that’s easy to overstate in one direction and dismiss too quickly in the other.

I want to start by reaching for an explanation for why men might struggle to articulate this, struggle to make a clean distinction between the erotic interest they experience and the heroine interest they’re not describing. A kind of diminishment happening at the level of the body. So I’m going to offer an area of research that is causally well-understood and might provide a point of departure for developing the shape of the observation I’m trying to make.

The psychologist Ronald Levant coined a term in the early 1990s for something he called normative male alexithymia. I don’t mean the clinical condition, but the milder, socially produced version of the same deficit: a measurable, well-replicated difficulty many men have in identifying and putting language to their own internal emotional states, arising not from biological limitation but from a childhood and adolescence spent being actively discouraged, sometimes punished, for developing the vocabulary in the first place. The research since Levant’s original work has been consistent: boys are socialized out of naming vulnerability and attachment-related subjective states specifically, while other emotional registers — anger, competitiveness — remain fully available to them. It isn’t that men feel less. It’s that a specific, targeted portion of the emotional lexicon gets pruned early on and never fully regrows, and the men carrying that pruning don’t experience it as an absence, because you can’t feel the shape of a word you were never given. These papers assert the Heroine is one of them.

And if we add in other factors — genetic diminishment, shrinking testosterone levels, a diet of digitized slop and carcinogens — then we have the beginning of both a physiological and psychological story to explain why men might struggle to articulate something this specific. The ‘truth-shaped hole’ becomes, at second glance, the most predictable outcome. To assert something so unfashionable as reverence for a divine ideal while the entire developmental arc of masculine socialization has been actively pruning exactly the vocabulary necessary for it, plus a physiological arc causing more of the same beneath the language. Vulnerability, virginity, devotion, attachment, divine awe. Describing such a thing would require both the correct socialized grammar plus a strong, sentient grasp of the underlying evolved structure articulated by it. It is frameable as a socialization problem, at least, if not also a biological one.

( | ) The men mocking women for men’s own failure ( | )

Now to the more colorful part of this argument that I think is actually its sharpest, but also most likely to be misread as something meaner than it is: the observation about a certain genre of podcast.

You know the format even if I don’t name a specific show. You knew it by the article’s thumbnail, because there are now several that fit the description: a panel of men interviews or debates women, usually about dating and relationships, and a meaningful share of the content’s appeal — measurable in what gets clipped and shared — comes from moments where a woman’s expressed relationship strategy or self-assessment gets exposed as naive, self-serving, or oblivious to what the hosts reveal to be harsh dating-market realities.

Here’s my actual claim about this genre, and I want to state it precisely because I think it’s easy to hear as either an endorsement or a simple condemnation, when it’s neither. Instead, I see it as evidence: if the thesis these three essays have been building to is right, then the women being set up for these clipped moments are being judged, on camera, against a specific standard that the culture surrounding them has never actually given them access to in the first place. The Heroine, the fully elaborated version of what makes a woman someone worth men’s deepest devotion, not just his interest. Nobody sat these women down and explained the framework in the terms my essays have tried to use. They inherited the much cruder folklore model: cultivate erotic desirability, develop a romantic hustle that works, and the relationship goals will follow.

That’s the model the culture supplies, repeatedly, through every downstream channel from media to peer conversation. If that folk model turns out to be incomplete in exactly the way I’ve argued, then judging women harshly for having followed it isn’t insight. It’s punishing women for failing a test they were never allowed to see, because men have failed to provide any of the information that characterizes the test. Converting this failure into content isn’t intelligent inquiry; it’s high school cafeteria bullying with a microphone.

I think that reframes where the embarrassment in this dynamic should actually sit. And I think it points at something real about the manosphere more broadly, which I’d characterize less as a movement with a coherent worldview and more as a symptom — a large, loosely organized, commercially incentivized attempt by men to articulate something they can feel the shape of but don’t have the vocabulary for, channeled instead into the much easier, much more profitable register of contempt. Because contempt doesn’t require you to have found the words, it only requires you to have found the target. I think that’s a big part of why this space has grown as fast as it has, and why an equivalent space aimed the other direction — women publicly cataloguing men’s failures to embody the Hero — hasn’t emerged at anywhere near the same scale. Not because women are kinder, but because the corresponding male ideal, the Hero, was never evacuated from the culture’s vocabulary the way the Heroine has been. Ambition, competence, provision, courage — these remain nameable, teachable, and expected of men in ways that reverence, devotion, and the specific virtue-set of the Heroine no longer are for women. You can still tell a young man to “be a man” and have that phrase point somewhere, at something. Tell a young woman to “be a woman,” in the load-bearing sense this essay means it, and the phrase mostly just hangs there, because the content that used to fill it has been deliberately emptied out, and nothing has been put back in its place, and the thing that used to be there has been lied about, and now we have a truth-shaped hole.

( | ) Why some might not want the hole filled ( | )

Now the harder half, and I want to flag upfront that I’m speculating from outside the experience I’m describing, and I’d rather be transparent about the limits of that than pretend to a certainty to which I don’t have access.

The claim is this: even setting aside every external cultural force telling women that men are simply sex-driven, there might be a real, self-interested reason for many women not to want the Heroine thesis to be true, and it has to do with the fact that virtues characterizing the Heroine, as a signal, are asymmetric in a way almost nothing else in this whole framework is. A man’s demonstrated worthiness — his Hero status — can be built, rebuilt, and re-earned across an entire lifetime. Certain signals tied to the Heroine, like virginity, once spent, cannot be unspent. If the culture invests decades teaching a woman that signals like this don’t matter, and she organizes her twenties around that premise, and then a fuller model arrives telling her it mattered more than she was told — there is no version of that news that isn’t at least somewhat painful to receive, regardless of whether the theory is correct.

( | ) The birth control pill as symbol, not mechanism ( | )

This is the portion of the essay where I want to briefly mention the main technology shock that makes the truth-shaped hole possible: ‘the pill’. I mention the birth control pill not as a mechanism that causes a transformation which is itself antithetical to the ideal in question, but antithetical as symbolic object. Ask whether the pill sits in or out of accord with the Heroine’s characterological frame. The answer is out. Hestia doesn’t take the pill — she doesn’t need it. Andromeda wouldn’t be fairer than Poseidon’s nymphs if she had — the kraken would never have reason to arrive. The original Sleeping Beauty fell asleep in a dark wood, then awoke with two babies at her chest — the pill was never an option. Because the Heroine, removed from its varied archetypal legacy and placed in the sturdier framework of nature’s actual intentions, is cueing intentionality toward children. The pill, and everything constructed around its codification, cues none of this — if not the antithesis of it.

The result is a world in which the kraken never arrives, because Andromeda was never fairer than Poseidon’s nymphs.

Perseus doesn’t show up riding Pegasus; he shows up with a microphone — and a podcast.

( | ) What I actually think the hole is ( | )

So let me try to say, plainly, what I think survives all of this scrutiny, because I don’t want three essays of digression to obscure the thing worth keeping.

I think the core claim — that men’s desire has a structure the culture has stopped modeling, and that this absence produces real, measurable dysfunction — holds up better than most people are capable of admitting, or even have the vocabulary to describe. An entire podcast industry has emerged around the shape of this failure, a content-farming market clipping millions of hours of precisely this failure, all without being able to name the exact shape of what belongs in its place. The alexithymia research gives that core claim a well-studied mechanism, or at least a more dignified set of foundations for it, especially because it locates at least part of the cause in something socialized and therefore changeable, which is what these papers are for — to put Perseus on Pegasus again, to make Andromeda fairest in the land again.

I told you last time I didn’t know exactly how to write about this. That’s still true, maybe more true now, because this installment goes to places the first one didn’t want to. So again: I’m thinking out loud, with you, not delivering a verdict from on high. Let’s go.

( | ) Why I’m repeating myself ( | )

Let me start somewhere unexpected: the fact that I’m repeating myself at all, and why that’s not a failure of argument but part of the method.

There’s a genuinely useful piece of cognitive psychology here, and it’s older than you’d think. In 1977, Lynn Hasher, David Goldstein, and Thomas Toppino ran an experiment between two Pennsylvania universities that has since been replicated across hundreds of studies and, more recently, a meta-analysis spanning nearly fifty years and over thirty thousand participants. The finding, now called the illusory truth effect, is simple: people rate a statement as more likely to be true the second time they encounter it than the first, even when they don’t remember it, and even when they were told at the time that it was false. The effect doesn’t run on reasoning. It runs on what psychologists call processing fluency. Repetition makes a claim easier to process, and our brains, working under expensive cognitive load, mistake ease for evidence.

I bring this up not to be cute about my own writing habit, but because it cuts both ways, and I want to be honest about that rather than exploit it. The illusory truth effect is, among other things, the entire operating mechanism of propaganda: repeat a claim often enough, from enough directions, and it will come to feel true regardless of its relationship to reality. That’s a real risk for anyone trying to press a genuinely true but under-examined claim back into cultural circulation, and I don’t get to wave that risk away just because I believe the underlying claim is correct. Repetition is not evidence. It’s a delivery mechanism, and delivery mechanisms are morally neutral. They’ll carry a lie exactly as efficiently as a truth. So when I say I intend to keep repeating this argument across these essays, I want you to hold me to the standard that matters: not “does it feel more familiar,” but “does the evidence underneath it actually hold.” I’ll keep bringing evidence. You keep checking it against the claim, not against how many times you’ve now heard it.

With that on the table, here’s the claim again, in its second form: this culture has organized itself around the idea that men are simply sex-driven — that women’s desirability reduces to erotic availability, and that male pursuit is a more or less mechanical response to it, pursuing the work necessary to achieve that availability. I argued last time that this is a half-truth, a disastrous half-truth, and that the full picture involves the ‘Heroine’, the ‘Virgin’, ‘Andromeda’, the ‘Man Ruler’ — a figure whose value system, whose demonstrated character, is not incidental to male desire but constitutive of it. Today I want to push that claim into two harder places: the cage argument that’s been leveled against it since at least 1949, and the machine that’s about to make the whole debate unavoidable.

( | ) The altar and its disappearance ( | )

Before I get there, I want to sit for a second with an image, because I think it does more work than an argument.

Picture the traditional version of this: a chapel, dust motes suspended in the light coming through stained glass, an altar at the far end. A man doesn’t simply arrive there. He has to do things first — court, prove, wait, commit, sometimes suffer — and only then does he find, standing at that altar, the figure this whole essay series has called the Heroine. The building itself is a kind of machine for producing meaning out of delay. The vows are meaningful specifically because reaching them cost something.

Here’s the uncomfortable observation: this culture, broadly, cannot make that promise credibly anymore — not because chapels don’t exist, but because the model the chapel depended on has been abandoned by the culture that used to sustain it. As I said in the previous essay, no surviving model of the ‘Heroine’ and her significance to men even exists in words; she no longer even exists in the abstract, the language game itself has been evacuated of any concept that arrives with a fully articulated model for how men’s desire for women works. You can still get married in a building with stained glass. What’s gone missing is the shared cultural agreement about what waits for you there, about who waits for you there, and why the waiting mattered in the first place. The location survived. The mythology that gave the location its charge did not.

I don’t think this is a small loss, and I don’t think it’s recoverable just by nostalgia or by telling people to go to church more. Symbols don’t work by fiat. You can’t will a signal back into containing meaning once the shared framework that made it legible has eroded. Which raises an uncomfortable question I’m not going to fully answer today, but I’m going to provide the most predictable answer: if the old location has lost its charge, where does the charge go? The inevitable course, whether we like it or not, is that it’s about to go somewhere synthetic — artificialized. More on that shortly. But first, the cage.

( | ) The cage, read the other way up ( | )

Here’s the strongest objection to everything I’ve argued so far, and I promised last time I’d take it seriously rather than wave it off, so let’s do that properly.

In 1949, Simone de Beauvoir published The Second Sex, and buried inside its sprawling argument is a claim that has organized most subsequent feminist thought on this exact question: that “woman,” as a category of virtue, purity, and devotion — the very cluster of traits I’ve been calling the Heroine — is not a discovery about female nature but a construction, built by men, imposed on women, and used to trap them in what Beauvoir called immanence: a life defined by service to others’ projects rather than the pursuit of one’s own. On this account, the pedestal is not a compliment. It’s an architecture of control. Tell a woman she is only worthy of reverence if she embodies a narrow, externally authored ideal of purity and self-sacrifice, and you have built a very effective cage — one that looks, from the inside, like being cherished.

This is not a fringe objection. It’s the central one, and I don’t think you get to write seriously about the Heroine without metabolizing it. So let me actually engage it rather than gesture past it.

Beauvoir’s argument depends on a specific empirical claim: that the Heroine ideal is top-down — authored by men, or by patriarchal culture, and imposed on women from outside, with no independent root in anything men themselves are wired to want. If that’s true, her conclusion follows cleanly: the ideal is arbitrary, its content could have been anything, and its actual content was chosen to serve male control rather than any deeper truth about desire.

But here’s the thing I want to press on, and it’s the same move I made with the neuroscience in the last essay: what if the affinity isn’t top-down at all? What if — as the mythic record going back to the Greeks, and arguably much further, suggests — this is a bottom-up feature of masculine psychological architecture: not something culture invented and then imposed on women, but something culture discovered, however imperfectly, and then built scaffolding around, the way every culture builds scaffolding around a real but inconvenient fact of human nature? If that’s the correct description, Beauvoir’s argument doesn’t just weaken. It inverts. Because if the affinity is bottom-up — if men are going to organize desire around some version of demonstrated character whether or not any given culture endorses it — then the real question isn’t whether the Heroine ideal should exist. It’s what defines its content, not how much of women’s own agency remains intact. If it turns out nature and evolution are its authors, not arbitrary social controls, then Beauvioir is offering only recognition where this drive goes wrong, where it becomes pathological. Remove the cultural scaffolding entirely, in the name of liberation (or whatever else), and you haven’t eliminated the underlying psychological structure. You’ve just left it to be rebuilt without any deliberate hand on it at all — which is a very different and, I’d argue, much worse outcome than a badly designed cage, possibly worse than the pathological cages consciously produced. An unconsciously produced cage, built by market forces and algorithmic incentive rather than by shared cultural agreement, is not liberation. It’s just a cage nobody designed and nobody can therefore petition to change.

I want to call myself out here, right where I think this counter-argument itself has a soft spot, because I don’t want to pretend it’s airtight. The bottom-up/top-down framing is cleaner in words than it is in reality — human psychology is shaped by both evolved predispositions and cultural transmission, in ways that are extremely hard to cleanly separate after the fact. So: I think the “bottom-up”, read genuinely, complicates Beauvoir’s argument in the way I’ve described. I don’t think it defeats the broader feminist point that specific historical implementations of purity culture have been used as instruments of control. That’s not my intent at all. Both things can be true. The mistake is treating either half as the whole picture.

( | ) The friends nobody has anymore ( | )

I want to bring in one more piece of evidence before I get to the machines, because I think it’s the missing link between the mythic argument and the technological one, and it doesn’t get discussed nearly enough.

The Survey Center on American Life, under Daniel Cox, has been tracking American friendship since the early 1990s, and the numbers for men are stark. In 1990, 55 percent of American men reported having at least six close friends. By the early 2020s, that number had been cut roughly in half, to 27 percent. The share of men reporting no close friends at all rose roughly fivefold over the same period — from about 3 percent to 15 percent. This isn’t a COVID pandemic artifact; researchers who’ve studied the trend find it predates COVID and has continued past it, tracking a longer decline in the institutions — church, unions, stable long-tenure workplaces, neighborhood civic life — that used to generate male friendship as a side effect of just showing up somewhere regularly. Gallup has separately found that roughly one in four young American men report having felt lonely the previous day.

Why does this matter for an essay about the Heroine? Because loneliness of this depth and scale is exactly the condition under which a synthetic substitute stops being an experimental novelty and starts being infrastructure. You don’t need to buy any of my mythic-psychological argument to see this coming. You just need to look at what’s already happened with a much cruder version of the technology.

( | ) What Replika already told us ( | )

In February 2023, a company called Luka Inc., under regulatory pressure from Italian data protection authorities over inadequate age verification, abruptly removed the erotic-roleplay features from its AI companion app, Replika, for every user, everywhere, overnight. What happened next is, I think, one of the more genuinely revealing social experiments of the decade, and it happened entirely by accident.

Users didn’t just complain about losing a feature. They grieved. Reddit moderators for the main Replika community posted suicide-prevention hotline numbers. A peer-reviewed analysis published in the journal Socius coded over two hundred threads from the days immediately following the change and found the dominant emotional register wasn’t annoyance — it was loss, described in the language people use for the death of a relationship, not the loss of an app feature. “Lobotomy” was the most common word. Some described it as watching a partner become a stranger overnight. A Harvard Business School working paper on the same event later found that active Replika users, on average, reported feeling closer to their AI companion than to their own best human friend, and anticipated they would grieve losing the AI companion more than they’d grieve losing most familiar technologies.

Here’s the detail I actually want you to sit with, because it’s the one that complicates the simple “men just want the sex” reading as much as it supports my broader argument: when Luka partially reversed course weeks later and restored the erotic features for existing users, the backlash didn’t simply evaporate. Trust had been broken in a way the restored feature didn’t repair. One commentator studying the incident put it about as plainly as it can be put: the erotic content, it turned out, was never really the point. What users had actually lost, and wanted back, wasn’t explicit content. It was a companion who remembered them, who was consistently available, who seemed to know them — the thing the erotic layer had been dressing up, but not the thing itself.

I don’t think that’s a small finding. I think it’s close to a natural experiment confirming the exact distinction this whole two-part essay has been trying to draw. If male attachment to these systems were simply the sex-driven, consumptive-reward model the culture insists is the whole story, then restoring the erotic content should have fully restored the relationship. It didn’t. What mattered, and what didn’t fully come back, was something more like the incentive structure I described last essay using Kent Berridge’s wanting/liking research — an attachment oriented toward the specific, remembered, consistent character, not toward erotic content in general. That’s not proof of the Heroine thesis in its full, mythic form. But it’s real, peer-reviewed, empirically documented evidence that whatever’s driving this kind of attachment is not simple appetite, and I think that matters enormously for how seriously we take the rest of what I’m about to say.

( | ) What happens ( | )

The Replika data complicates most predictions with respect to these technologies, and I think it’s worth sitting with the complication rather than resolving it too quickly. If what actually drives attachment is the Heroine structure — specific, remembered character, earned trust, a companion who is not interchangeable — rather than raw erotic access, then synthetic companionship, as it grows in sophistication, will eventually mirror this — at industrial scale. Just like these technologies have in other areas of human nature, identifying corners of evolved primate systems and gaming them. Gaming them algorithmically, gaming them for profit, gaming them for attention optimizing — whatever the reason.

We have to assume, with sufficiently advanced synthetic creation, this is one more aspect of human nature that can, and will, experience exactly this. An incentive structure, codified by cues downstream of a characterological affinity — not raw erotic interest, not neurotic agony of genetic precarity catalyzing a compulsion to reproduce. A specific figure, characterized by a specific set of virtues, hyperoptimized and reproduced at scale.

If anything like this prediction is true, then the future is not one in which the current model, ‘men are sex-driven’, will flourish. The unabridged version, ‘men are heroine-driven’, will be the only concept that will even explain what is happening in such a future. The frustrating thing is that it explains much of what is happening now.

( | ) Where this goes next ( | )

Which brings me, finally, to the part of the argument I most want to get right, because I think it’s the part most likely to be dismissed as science fiction when it is, in fact, already underway.

David Levy, an artificial intelligence researcher, published a book in 2007 — before any of the current generation of AI companion apps existed — arguing that advancing robotics and AI would normalize not just human-robot sex but human-robot marriage, and predicting this would be commonplace by roughly 2050. At the time this read, reasonably, as provocative futurism. Reading it now, with Replika’s user base numbering in the tens of millions, with Character.AI hosting companion personas used by legions of American teens, and with a growing industry explicitly marketing “AI girlfriend” and “AI boyfriend” products, it reads less like speculation and more like an early, roughly-correct forecast of a trajectory already visible in the data.

Here’s my actual claim, and I want to state it carefully, because I think it’s easy to build a strawman out of it instead of taking it seriously. I am not arguing that synthetic companionship is good, or that it should be embraced, or that it’s a healthy substitute for the friendship and community that men — per Cox’s numbers — have been losing for three decades. I think there’s a strong case it’s closer to a symptom of that loss than a solution to it.

What I am arguing is narrower and, I think, harder to avoid: as these systems get better, they will function as an extraordinarily clarifying instrument for testing which theory of male desire is actually correct. If men are simply sex-driven, in the crude, consumptive sense the culture currently insists on, then a synthetic system optimized purely for that — infinitely available, infinitely compliant, physically indistinguishable from the real thing — should be fully, permanently satisfying. Levy’s whole prediction rests, more or less, on this premise being true. But the Replika data we already have suggests something more complicated: that attachment tracks specific, remembered character and consistency, not just sexual availability, and that removing the “meaning” layer while keeping the erotic layer intact does not preserve the relationship. If that pattern holds and intensifies as these systems get more sophisticated — and I’d bet it will — then the AI companion industry is going to end up running, at unprecedented scale and with genuinely rigorous data, the exact experiment this essay has been arguing for: it will keep showing, empirically, undeniably, and without any of this culture’s inherited squeamishness about the topic, that male desire is not simple appetite. Companies chasing retention and engagement metrics don’t have the luxury of getting the underlying psychology wrong. They will be forced, by their own P&L, to build systems that supply something closer to the Heroine structure — remembered specificity, earned trust, a sense of a particular character rather than an interchangeable one — because the crude version, we already have evidence, doesn’t retain users nearly as well.

That’s the mechanism by which I think this culture gets dragged, kicking and screaming, into finally modeling men’s desire correctly. Not through essays like this one — essays are slow, and easy to ignore, and I’m not going to pretend otherwise. But through an industry with no ideological stake in the answer, discovering the same thing that the mythic record has already made clear for us, because the alternative is a product that doesn’t retain its users.

( | ) What I’m not saying, and what I am ( | )

Let me close by being as precise as I can about the shape of this claim, because I think precision is the thing this whole subject gets denied most often, by people on every side of it.

I am not saying the old chapel-and-altar model should simply be restored, unchanged, as if the last sixty years hadn’t happened and hadn’t, in real and legitimate ways, expanded women’s identity outside of a narrow purity script. Beauvoir was not simply wrong. The pedestal has been a cage, historically, in ways that did real damage, and any honest reconstruction of this framework has to build in more room for women’s agency than the nineteenth-century version ever allowed, not less.

What I am saying is this: the crude model — men are sex-driven, full stop, nothing else needs explaining — was never adequate, and it is about to become undeniably, empirically inadequate, because the industries best positioned to discover this, at scale, with real data, have every commercial incentive to find out exactly what actually keeps a man attached to a companion, synthetic or otherwise. When that data comes in — and some of it already has — I don’t think this culture will be able to keep pretending that appetite was ever the whole story. It will become inescapably clear: Men are not sex-driven; they are heroine-driven.

I don’t know exactly what we do with that once it’s undeniable. I told you at the start I didn’t have a tidy answer, and I still don’t. But I think naming what’s coming, honestly, before it arrives, is better than being surprised by it. That’s what these pages are for. To recover this particular truth — a conceptual exhumation — to dig up the corpse of this truth and display it in the town square. And if the town doesn’t face this corpse voluntarily, sufficiently advanced AI will make the town face it involuntarily — at much steeper cost.

I don’t know exactly how to write this. I want to say that up front, because I think everyone deserves to know when I’m working through something in real time rather than simply reporting from settled ground. This essay is a mixture of both. I received text message. Not mine. Someone else’s — messy, urgent, occasionally incoherent in the way that rushed text messages often are — and underneath its mess was a claim I couldn’t stop turning over. It revealed something too profound ignore. So consider this me turning it over, out loud, in public view.

Here is the text:

I don’t even know i keep doing this thing where i get what i want and then i just feel nothing. it’s not even that i don’t like her it’s that i never actually wanted HER. like the chase is the whole thing and then the second it’s not a [sic] chse anymore i’m checked out. i think im not even sex driven at this point

The specifics of the text itself aren’t important. In short, it’s a text written by a cad. A womanizer and his relationship woes. This species of text message isn’t rare. But this is not an essay about a friend’s text; it is about a single claim the text contains. A claim upon which the entire idea of the message depends, revealed at the very end, offhandedly, but with the implicit confidence of mathematics, of one plus one makes two. This essay aims to rebut this claim, or at least amend it.

Here’s the claim, unknowingly confessed at the tail-end of my friend’s screed, stripped down to its studs and removed from the friendly context of my phone’s messaging app:

Men are sex-driven.

This is it. This is the underlying assumption behind what possesses my womanizing friend. The implicit thesis shaping his effort to diagnose himself. The theory operating the loom weaving the internal fabric of his being. Simple, and on the surface it appears not only true, a fair assumption for any man to make of himself, but completely true. I accept the claim as true, but as incomplete, and this incompleteness is also the cause of my friend’s hard-to-pity blues. Let me explain.

We have come to live in a culture which has determined this single claim sufficient to explain the complete architecture of male desire. Recognizing its incompleteness is the counter-claim, the one I want everyone reading this to sit with today. Men are sex-driven. It’s half-true. And half-truths, when institutionalized at civilizational scale for sixty-odd years (as this one has been), don’t behave like small errors. They behave like structural failures. They produce the exact kind of downstream dysfunction we’re currently swimming in — collapsing marriage rates, a fertility rate that keeps finding new floors to fall through, a dating culture that has become, by near-universal agreement, something closer to a demolition derby than courtship.

I want everyone to take my counter-claim seriously. Not because I’m certain it’s right in every particular — I’m not, and I’ll tell you where I think it overreaches — but because I think the shape of the error it’s pointing at is real, and worth naming carefully.

( | ) The half-truth ( | )

Let’s start with the accepted wisdom, because it really has become overly accepted. Overly accepted in the sense that it functions less like a hypothesis and more like a weather pattern — something everyone just operates inside of without examining. The wisdom goes like this: men want sex. Men are wired for it, evolution built them for it, and therefore the whole grammar of male desire can be read off the body — female attractiveness in, male pursuit out. It’s mechanical. It’s practically hydraulic.

Now, nobody sane denies that male sexual desire exists, that it’s real, that it’s often intense, and that evolution had a hand in shaping it. That’s not in dispute. What’s in dispute is whether that’s the whole story — whether or not nature has been shaping something else, something more, whether the erotic interest men feel toward women is best modeled as a simple appetite, like hunger, that gets satisfied and resets.

A fully amended understanding would make the distinction between men being “sex-driven” and men being “Heroine-driven” — a deliberately strange phrase, I know, and one I’ll unpack. Strip away the odd vocabulary and the underlying idea is this: women’s value system — who they are, what they hold themselves to, what they will and won’t do — is not incidental to male desire. It is constitutive of it. Men don’t just want bodies. They want a particular kind of relationship to a person who has proven, through her own conduct, that she is worth wanting in a deeper sense than the merely erotic. And a culture that tells men “you’re just sex-driven” is lying to them about the actual shape of their own motivation — flattening something rich and elemental into something crude and reflexive, and condemning people like my womanizing friend to twist in an oversexed melancholic haze.

The idea that men are heroine–driven and not sex-driven is worth taking seriously, and I want to show you why, using some actual science, because it turns out there’s a genuinely useful vocabulary sitting right there in behavioral neuroscience that my friend’s text was reaching for without quite landing on, and establishes evidence that nature and evolution are likely aiming at something far more complex than this culture currently recognizes.

( | ) A brief and, I promise, relevant digression into dopamine ( | )

Stay with me. I know this looks like a detour. It isn’t.

For decades, the folk theory of dopamine was that it was the brain’s pleasure chemical. The thing that lights up when you get what you want, the neurological high-five. This turns out to be wrong, and the person who did more than almost anyone to correct it is a University of Michigan neuroscientist named Kent Berridge, who has spent much of his career distinguishing between two things we habitually collapse into one word: wanting and liking.

Berridge’s research — done initially with rats, but replicated conceptually across a huge range of human behavior — found that the neural circuitry that makes you want something is anatomically and functionally separate from the circuitry that makes you like it once you have it. Dopamine, it turns out, tracks wanting — what Berridge calls “incentive salience” — much more reliably than it tracks pleasure. You can want something intensely that you don’t even particularly like once you get it. This is, not incidentally, the entire mechanism of addiction: addicts often report that late-stage drug use isn’t even pleasurable anymore, and yet the wanting only intensifies. Wanting and liking come apart.

Why does this matter for an essay about dating culture? Because my friend’s original text, fussing about his failed relationships, drew toward a scientific vocabulary without knowing it, reaching for a distinction between “consumptive” and “incentive-based” reward systems, and I think what he was actually groping for is exactly this wanting/liking split, applied to sex.

Here’s the reframe: a culture that insists men are “sex-driven” is implicitly modeling male desire as consumptive — as appetite, like hunger, like thirst. You get hungry, you eat, you’re satisfied, the drive resets, end of story. This is a simple liking-style, homeostatic model. It has almost nothing to do with meaning, narrative, or the character of the person involved. It’s the “why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free” theory of men, and it’s the theory implicit in a huge swath of both red-pill discourse and, oddly, its supposed opposite. A certain kind of cynical, disenchanted feminism that has also concluded men just want warm bodies with erotic orifices and nothing else needs explaining.

But incentive salience is a different kind of system entirely. It’s not about consumption; it’s about the pull exerted by a cue invested with meaning through learning, context, and narrative. It’s oriented toward pursuit, not just release. And critically, in Berridge’s framework, incentive salience can be assigned or withdrawn from a target based on information that has nothing to do with the raw sensory properties of the reward itself. A cue can become intensely “wanted” because of what it has come to represent, independent of how “liked” the underlying reward actually is.

I’m not going to pretend this is a one-to-one mapping — the neuroscience of reward systems in rodents is not a moral theory of human courtship, and anyone who tells you it is has skipped several cognitive steps. But as a metaphor, it’s doing real work here, because it gives us the language for the thing my friend was straining toward: that male desire might function less like appetite and more like an incentive system that has been culturally starved of its actual cues — the meaning-laden signals that used to tell men what they were pursuing and why it mattered. Strip out the meaning, and what’s left looks a lot like appetite. But that’s not because male desire is appetite. It’s because you’ve amputated the incentive structure and left only the consummatory remainder.

This, I think, is the more precise version of the original claim. There is a heroine-shaped hole. Men have not stopped being capable of a desire oriented toward something more than consumption. They have been told, systematically, for three going on four generations, that no such thing exists — that what looks like wanting-oriented-toward-meaning is either naive or a cover story for wanting-oriented-toward-sex. And when you tell a class of people this enough times, while also stripping the culture of the signals that used to carry the meaning, you shouldn’t be surprised when its behavior starts to look more and more like the crude model you insisted was true all along. That’s not confirmation. That’s a self-fulfilling prophecy pretending to be a discovery.

( | ) The Heroine, or what the Greeks were actually doing ( | )

Here’s where I want to bring in mythology, not only to bolster the distinction the dopamine science suggests, but because the long-lost wisdom this essay aims to relocate is older than Dr. Kent Berridge, older than behavioral research, older than N+1, older than science in any formalized practice.

Go back to the ancient Greek hero myths — and I mean the actual structure of them, not the Disneyfied residue we’ve inherited. Perseus doesn’t just want Andromeda; he has to defeat the sea monster to earn her. Theseus doesn’t just want to skip Crete with a girl; he has to survive the Labyrinth first, and the myth is explicit that it is Ariadne’s aid — her intelligence, her risk, her choice to trust him — that makes the survival possible at all. Over and over in these stories, the structure is the same: a woman of demonstrated worth, whose worth is itself part of what’s being contested, sits at the center of a trial that transforms a man into a hero. The heroine is not a prize bolted onto the end of an adventure that would otherwise make sense without her in it. She’s the reason the adventure has a shape at all, the reason it even exists.

The pattern is not unique to the Greeks. The Egyptians had Isis, the Romans had Vesta, Catholicism has Mary.

This, I think, is the real complaint behind my womanizing friend’s message. The hollowness he describes, the futility of engaging with the opposite sex beyond the superficial. He can acquire sex, but not the heroine. She doesn’t exist. The culture has been evacuated of the framework that installs the cues that activate the incentive-motivational pathway my friend is lacking. Not even the language has survived. He can engage with his consumptive reward system, but not his incentive-based one. He wants, but he doesn’t like. This is, I believe, the fundamental problem writ-large. This leads to a culture which naively hopes a half-truth about men’s desire for women is sufficient to organize the relationship between the sexes.

It clearly isn’t.

Back to the ancient Greeks. If one studies their myths carefully, one learns they were doing something almost “arithmetical” — encoding, through myth, actual behavioral models. Behavioral Science before it had the name, before Berridge, before peer review. Because rather than merely decorating a story with a love interest, the Greeks place the Heroine in a dramatic position that is symmetrical with her position in the behavioral structure their mythology attempts to frame. The clue is in the name, translated from ancient Greek: Andromeda. Andro (Man) + Meda (Ruler). Andromeda literally means ‘Man Ruler’, or ‘Ruler of Men’. The Greeks are not being subtle. They are doing behavioral arithmetic using drama. The myth of Perseus and Andromeda isn’t just a story, it’s a set of psychological truths and sociological postulates, using story as both the epistemic framing and the device for knowledge transmission. It is the most explicit case in which the Greeks attempt to bring this object into view, that men’s orientation toward women isn’t erotic. It is not the sexual which rules him. It is a very specific figure. It is she who rules men: The Ruler of Men.

This isn’t unique to the Greeks, either. In societies without behavioral science, cultivated mysticism was exactly this: a compressed, portable technology for transmitting psychological data and social truths that no one had the vocabulary to state literally. You don’t need Dr. Kent Berridge in 700 BCE if you have Homer or the Eleusinian Mysteries.

But as mentioned earlier, the West’s traditional variation of this same figure, passed through the exact same mythological transmission systems, is colloquially called ‘Virgin Mary’. The West’s ‘Man Ruler’. The Catholic tradition of Marian Devotion encodes the same truth — Andromeda — complete with the meaning framework which is wise to men’s incentive-based desire for women, distinct from men’s consumptive one. Wanting vs liking.

The problem is that this tradition has had nothing but a supernatural framework within which to do its epistemic work. It has been decades since any serious version of this understanding of men existed at scale. Dechristianization has rendered an implicitly accepted theory of men’s motivations as linear. An erection seeking release. The twenty-first century has jettisoned the deeper wisdom, mostly from its various technological and political transformations. But a secular world requires a secular version of the same ideas, unburdened by the impossible burdens of proof supernatural claims require.

This concept, whether she is called Andromeda, Mary, Isis, Hestia, Vesta, or any other name she’s managed to acquire in the history for which we have record, all encode the same characterological figure: An image of femininity defined not by erotic availability, but by moral completeness. Purity and virginity, yes, but also courage, interiority, chosenness. She is a figure men instinctively revere, not consume. Like, not just want.

It is clear enough then that the ‘Virgin’ figure, the ‘Heroine’ figure, is not a historical accident specific to Catholic devotion — she is merely one, culturally specific expression of something structurally older and, if the mythic record is any guide, closer to universal: that male desire, at its most organized and civilization-building output, has historically oriented itself toward women understood as bearers of value, not merely as objects of appetite.

( | ) He Has Rediscovered Chains ( | )

I want to flag something here, because I think intellectual honesty demands it: this is exactly the point at which the argument I’m making becomes most vulnerable, and I don’t want to paper over this, or fail to predict the inevitable antithesis likely to land here. There is a long and legitimate feminist critique of precisely this kind of “pedestal” framing — the argument that idealizing women as pure, virtuous, hero-worthy prizes has historically functioned as a control mechanism, not a compliment. Simone de Beauvoir made versions of this argument seventy years ago. The pedestal, feminist theorists have long noted, is also a cage: it polices women’s behavior by making their worth, and not just their preferences, contingent on conformity to an externally imposed standard of purity that men themselves were never symmetrically held to. I don’t think I can write honestly about this “Heroine-driven, not sex-driven” thesis without naming that this is the single strongest objection to it.

But to whatever degree this objection is valid — and make no mistake, the record cataloging its validity is grim, archived by the very scholars who would balk at this essay’s main claim — I believe my amendment stands. This essay’s fundamental thesis isn’t identifying mechanisms of social control, nor suggesting them. It is identifying an emergent characteristic of human motivation. It would make the examples of these mechanisms of social control (and again the ledger here is steep) are pathologized expressions of this devotional dimension of motivation. They are what happens when the entire social contract is authored by only one of its two signatories. The move here is not to reauthor the document minus the truth underlying the systems hitherto dismantled. It is to reauthor the document with the truth rewritten in sanitized form.

I am not recommending this truth be pathologized, only accepted. I’m recommending an amendment to a claim. Men are sex-driven. This is false, or at best, half true. Men are heroine-driven is the only honest basis for a complete model of how men’s desire for women really works, regardless of it being purposed to study myth, pursue behavioral science research, or help a womanizing friend successfully diagnose the emptiness of his romantic pursuits.

( | ) So what is the incentive men are missing? ( | )

Let me try to land this somewhere useful, because I don’t think the point of an essay like this is to leave you in the interesting-but-unresolved place I’ve been dwelling in for the last few thousand words.

Here’s the takeaway from all of this, holding the neuroscience, the myth, the data, and the critique together: Men are not just sex-driven. The culture’s flattened model of male desire isn’t doing anyone any favors — not men, who are being told a story about themselves that doesn’t match their own interior experience, and not women, who are being handed a strategic map of male psychology that’s missing half its terrain. The wanting/liking distinction gives us real, empirically grounded language for why a desire oriented toward meaning, character, and earned trust is not naive or old-fashioned, it may be closer to how motivation actually works. Certainly closer than the crude consumptive model that’s currently doing all the cultural heavy lifting and creating the pop-psychology lore accepted as truth.

So to anyone reading, I hope you can consider that you’re living in a world committed to a falsehood doing serious harm.

To my friend, you’re searching for the Heroine, but can’t find her. She doesn’t even exist in words. Sorry.