Maybe He’s Just Not That Into You

It will take a lot more to re-establish men’s trust in women than the standard diagnoses and promises

The question of where men have gone, in the title of Rachel Drucker’s New York Times op/ed, is surely disingenuous. Drucker thinks she knows: men have disappeared into social media posting, digital lurking, uncommitted sexting, and porn. Allegedly afraid of emotional intimacy, they are no longer “showing up” for women. Drucker addresses men directly, diagnosing their feelings: “You’ve retreated—not into malice, but into something softer and harder all at once: Avoidance. Exhaustion. Disrepair.”

Well, maybe. Maybe not.

Drucker’s article is part social lament, part personal ad, and like many statements by modern women about men, it is notable for its presumption. Drucker seems to think she can call off the sex war simply by saying she’s had enough. Men were never supposed to stop being available to women. Drucker mourns a lost time when men “asked questions and waited for the answers,” when they “listened—really listened—when a woman spoke.” It doesn’t seem to occur that men have been listening and have heard women’s messages, loud and clear.

Drucker goes so far as to express nostalgia for a time of male sexual pursuit, when having a woman on one’s arm was a way for a man to prove himself and impress other men. “It wasn’t always healthy,” she says in one of her many massive understatements (ignoring the barrage of condemnation leveled against such men) “but it meant that men had to show up and put in some effort.”

Drucker produces no evidence of men’s lack of effort, and it is not clear that her personal anecdotes—all culled, it seems, from her monied Chicago milieu—are representative. I know many men, including young men, who are still willing to pursue romantic relationships with women; many put in a lot of time and thought. But it does ring true that at least some portion of men are far more wary than in previous eras, unwilling to risk the potential hell of divorce or of a false accusation in a culture that believes women and belittles men.

Some men have simply come to the conclusion that modern women aren’t, in general, all that likable—neither marriage material nor viable candidates for motherhood.

As far as female pronouncements about men go, Drucker’s piece is not the worst. It does not hector or accuse (at least, not much), and Drucker expresses some genuine liking for men. But it’s not clear how much that is worth when she is so oblivious to men’s points of view and unaware that at least some of the onus for re-engaging men must fall on women. Drucker’s blind spots and unearned certainty turn her wistful dirge into a tone-deaf commentary on contemporary sexual politics.

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Rachel Drucker

The article begins with a restaurant, where Drucker notes the absence of men. There are women together, doing what women do, but almost no coupled men. And in her own life, Drucker notes, there has been retreat. It isn’t just her, she’s sure: it’s a collective act in which men are removing themselves from women’s lives, no longer “trying to connect.”

Drucker is part of the problem, though she doesn’t seem to recognize it. She admits that she “spent over a decade” working for Playboy and more hardcore sites to get men addicted to digital pornography. Part of her job was “to understand exactly what it took to get a man to pay for content he could easily find for free.” She does not seem to regret this work or recognize its damage; on the contrary, she exults that it helped her understand men’s deepest selves.

Her characterization is simplistic and contemptuous: “We knew what worked,” she boasts. “It wasn’t intimacy. It wasn’t mutuality. It was access to stimulation—clean, fast and frictionless. In that world, there’s no need for conversation. No effort. No curiosity. No reciprocity.”

If this is what men fundamentally are to Drucker—sex bots without emotion or desire for reciprocity—why is she so disappointed that they are no longer around?

Drucker doesn’t seem to consider that her certainties about male sexuality might be apparent to some of the men she meets, and might be a turnoff. Most men, I would wager, don’t seek intimacy with a woman who thinks she is doing them a big favor by educating them, sexually, out of their bovine inclinations.

She also tells us that, at age 54, she has a mass of abandoned or failed relationships behind her: “I’ve been dating since the mid-80s,” she notes casually, “been married, been a mother, gotten divorced, had many relationships long and short.” She thinks that this experience qualifies her to pronounce on men with a hard expertise, even telling us of the bygone etiquette of one-night stands. I hate to say it, but age and mileage may well be less attractive than Drucker seems to realize.

The key to her argument is refusal to admit that in any instance or manner, a woman might be responsible for anything. Certainly Drucker is determined not to be. She mentions more than once that what she’s naming is not “personal failure.” Of course not!

In her account, men are simply “disappearing behind firewalls, filters and curated personas.” They are engaging in “directionless orbiting.” She recounts how she reached out to a man she had met on a dating app, telling him clearly that she was interested. He never responded, and now she alleges that there are “thousands” just like him: men giving up on the chance for a gratifying relationship. According to Drucker, the phenomenon is exclusively male. Women never ghost or play the field, teasing with lack of commitment. Women are not entitled or untrustworthy. They are never mercenary or unworthy; not liars or cheats. Women’s emotional lives and behaviors are above reproach. (In reality, plenty of research suggests otherwise.)

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Drucker claims that her article has nothing to do with “blaming men,” but every omission and assumption reinforces a logic of female moral superiority and male inadequacy. In her telling, women are the good ones, the ones who “haven’t stopped hoping.” Her few explanations of men’s experiences and state of mind are laughable and trite. “Maybe no one taught you how to stay,” she offers (thinking of dog training?), “Maybe you tried once, and it hurt. Maybe the world told you your role was to provide, to perform, to protect—and never to feel.”

We’ve heard this talk about male emotional immaturity many times before, and it takes us nowhere but into the achingly familiar territory of anti-male contempt. Who makes up this “world” that allegedly told men how to be? Are women not part of it? Does Drucker have any inkling of the kinds of “hurt” men have experienced: not because of a failed love affair, the least of their problems, but in the family courts and everywhere that men have been falsely accused, discriminated against, wrongfully convicted, defamed, financially destroyed, imprisoned for debt, deprived of their children, and robbed of their dignity?

It is extraordinary that a woman who grew up in the 1970s can write a substantial reflection on the fracturing of trust and affection between the sexes without once mentioning the change in women’s declared attitudes towards men, attitudes that have grown louder and more vicious with every passing decade. She claims near her conclusion that “We never needed you to be perfect. We needed you to be with us.”

But this is monumentally untrue and is contradicted by masses of feminist and anti-male punditry so voluminous and unrelenting over the past 50 years that Drucker must surely be aware of at least some of it: the encouragement to female rage, the celebration of women-only communities, the calls for violence against men, the remorseless denunciations and unashamed expressions of anti-male hatred, the itemization of every way men have failed, persecuted, and terrorized women, the weaponization of HR, of DEI, of the APA, of #MeToo; and the endless demonization of men in popular culture.

Is Drucker truly unaware of “A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle,” “The Future is Female,” “Yes, All Men,” “Men Are Obsolete,” “Women Make Better Leaders,” and “Women Don’t Owe You Shit” For years, women have told men that everything is wrong and damaging about the way they are with women, from their pickup techniques to their creepy ways, from their “benevolent sexism” to their alleged inability to cry, from their paucity of strong friendships to their tendency to use power and control in relationships, from their mansplaining and manspreading to their alleged emotional neediness, and everything in between.

Decades of feminist theory, advocacy, and biased studies have convinced lawmakers, police, prosecutors, researchers, therapists, social workers, and policy makers that only men are violent, women their primary victims. In divorce, men are stripped of their assets, criminalized, and have their children judicially stolen.

The surprise is not that some men have pulled back, but that they haven’t done so far more definitively and bitterly.

Drucker addresses none of these. She doesn’t even signal a remote awareness of the legitimate reasons for some men’s wariness and dislike of women, neither of which will change while anti-male laws remain in place and anti-male bigotry is respectable. Of course, not all women are on board with feminist hatred; some even oppose it. But in general, women have remained indifferent to the millions of men run over by the feminist machine, harried out of jobs, denied opportunities, discriminated against in law, and made to feel toxic and inferior. More precisely, most women haven’t even noticed.

Fifty years in, it’s not enough for a few surprised women to claim, quoting Drucker again, that “We are not impossible to please.” It has certainly seemed that way for well over half a century. Like the vast majority of women who comment on the current relationship climate, Drucker tells men that the way to repair the breach is to do what women say they want, regardless of how self-contradictory and destructive their demands. What about what men want? Perhaps it’s time for women to ask questions and “really listen” (and act) when men speak. Barring that, invitations and promises like Drucker’s deserve to fall on deaf ears—and largely will.