Two Women Weigh in on Male Loneliness, Porn, and Sex Dolls

Some of the usual male-bashing ensues

Rafaela Siefert (left) and Debra Soh (right) in conversation about modern relationships

It’s a version of the standard Jewish joke:

Woman #1: “Men in this country are TERRIBLE!”

Woman #2: “And there are so few of them to date!”

The Free Press Interview

Dr. Debra Soh is the author of Sextinction: The Decline of Sex and the Future of Intimacy (2026). Last month, she discussed her findings with Rafaela Siefert of The Free Press in a wide-ranging interview that touched on men’s and women’s experiences of dating apps, social media, AI companions, OnlyFans, online pornography, and sex dolls.

The conversation begins as a general discussion of what Soh calls the sex recession.

Rather quickly, however, a predictable bias begins to show: the main focus is male romantic and sexual failure, and what this means for women. Almost nothing is said about female behaviors and feminist policies that have affected men.

Neither Soh nor Siefert seems consciously or heartlessly anti-male. Aside from a few giggles at men’s expense, both women express some sympathy for men’s dating plight. But both women are so much more comfortable talking about male inadequacies than female ones that the conversation can do little more than rehearse a familiar catalogue of complaints about modern guys, who are allegedly taking the easy route to sexual release. Their silence on the subject of women is deafening.

The Sex Recession

The discussion begins from two rather tenuous premises. The first is that both men and women are having less sex than in previous times (though men significantly less than women), a decline that is causing loneliness, depression, and social anomie. The second premise is that the sex drought has come about unintentionally because of new technologies and circumstances. Soh explains that men have been discouraged by the experience of dating app rejection. In consequence, they have turned to various substitutes, all of them potentially harmful.

But are people really having less sex than in the past, and how could such a contention be measured? It’s certainly true that a number of feminist commentators have, often censoriously and smugly, warned that men should have less (lustful, degrading, and coercive) sex. But do we know how much sex people had one hundred, or two hundred, years ago? Roy Baumeister, for one, has argued that it was the norm for most men of the past to lack sexual opportunity and that modern men generally are better off than their (sex-starved) forefathers (Is There Anything Good About Men? pp. 268-269).

Further, Soh draws a straight line between sex and intimacy. Does more or less sex necessarily correlate to more or less intimacy? Given the great difficulty in knowing the sexual experiences of ordinary people even in the fairly recent past, let alone centuries ago, it’s a large claim without substantial support. In the end, though, it probably doesn’t matter: it’s enough that some people feel the lack.

The second contention, however, about the deep reasons for modern loneliness and social isolation, is more consequential. For Soh and Seifert—and for many other pundits across the ideological spectrum—what has happened in the past few decades has involved structural changes in the economy and society for which no one is to blame, and which no one would think of trying to change.

DEI hiring and the advancement of women into corporate, academic, and professional positions have put men at an economic disadvantage in relation to women, who continue to seek successful and wealthy men for mates. Too many men find themselves largely shut out of opportunities for sex with choosy, high-status women, and these men have withdrawn into hopelessness and, in some cases, misogynistic bitterness or laziness.

Male laziness, in fact, is a frequently sounded theme in the discussion, often with the claim that it is bad for women. As Soh phrases it, “If you’re watching porn regularly, especially as a man, it’s going to affect how you view women.”

This is a standard feminist charge that has never been, to my knowledge, satisfactorily proven. More importantly, the entire causal explanation is inadequate—though useful in mentioning the rank unfairness of DEI hiring (something feminists denied for decades). Not a word is said about the massive feminist assault on the male psyche that has been ongoing for the past century, increasing in tempo and viciousness in the past sixty years: fishes and bicycles, bathing in male tears, men not dying fast enough from Covid, heterofatalism, and many more. To rephrase Soh, if you’re consuming feminist propaganda regularly, especially as a woman, it’s going to affect how you view men.

Consequences of Feminist Revolution

Silly women pretending to be imperilled

It’s not just attitudes that have undergone a tectonic shift. Laws and policies have profoundly changed relations between the sexes. The meaning of sexuality itself has been altered by feminist theory and legal practice. To a degree never possible before, sexual relations—whether casual or marriage-traditional—have become fraught with existential danger for men, potentially involving social ostracism, job loss, intolerable financial burden, the judicial theft of one’s children, and incarceration.

A woman can put a pin in a condom (or collect sperm from a discarded one) and force an unsuspecting man to pay support for a child he never intended to father and whom he may barely be allowed to know (if at all). Many men end up financially supporting children who aren’t theirs as a result of a paternity fraud colluded in by state governments. They can and do regularly have their children taken from them, as Stephen Baskerville has eloquently explained, through no fault of their own. They can be and regularly are fired from their jobs or expelled from college for vague or non-existent gendered transgressions. Despite all this, they are expected to “acknowledge” their privilege and make amends by contributing their tax dollars to more and more programs to advantage and empower women.

These conditions did not appear out of nowhere. They were driven by the so-called women’s movement, implemented and enforced by western governments, harped on ad nauseum by feminist journalists, and accepted as necessary and good by large numbers of people.

#MeToo demonstrated the willingness of millions of women (and men) to watch men’s lives destroyed on the basis of (often decades-old) accusations. The Brett Kavanagh hearings showed how a vaguely-remembered or hallucinated long-ago teenage escapade could be turned into a reputation- and career-imperiling slander. The Harvey Weinstein scandal showed how women can turn on a man once he is no longer useful to their careers.

Democratic Senator Al Franken, who was forced to resign his seat after allegations of sexual misconduct

Countless other high-profile allegations have demonstrated how easy it is for a woman to destroy a man’s reputation by accusing him of harassment, assault, or rape. The cases are constantly before our eyes while, at the same time, women lament their lack of power and demand that men be held more stringently to account for their alleged misdeeds.

Whether powerful or powerless, rich or poor, married or single, celibate or playboy, any man who has been paying attention knows that his life is not his own. If a woman wishes, she can summon the power of the state to interrogate, investigate, arrest, hold, charge, try, convict, and imprison him, and there is very little he can do to save himself. Due process of law, bodily autonomy, and parental rights have all been eroded by the feminist juggernaut in a world in which male sexuality is assumed to be abusive; and female malfeasance is both denied and encouraged.

No wonder some men are wary of sexual or even friendly involvement.

Lazy Men and the Dolls Who Love Them

But such issues are barely addressed or even acknowledged by Siefert and Soh. The main import of the Free Press interview is the failure of men: their hapless loss of status and, it seems, of will. The thing that women demanded men offer—to work with women as equals, to assist women to enter and rise in various professions—is now pointed to as men’s undoing: unfortunate but irreversible. The modern woman finds, understandably according to Soh, that low-income men have little to offer in terms of material and emotional security.

At the same time, men are retreating from women, failing to make the required effort, falling back on the alternatives possible in a technologically-sophisticated, sex-saturated culture. They masturbate to porn rather than try to find a girlfriend. They pay for OnlyFans access or for an (alarmingly realistic) AI companion.

Such artificial outlets offer the man everything he wants, according to Soh, with no effort required: he need not get a good job, keep himself clean, learn the social graces and other behaviors that are pleasing to women. Moreover, looking at naked women online makes his view of women unrealistic. He expects too much of potential female mates and offers too little himself.

On the subject of women’s behaviors, we learn little. What about women who use sex toys that mimic the shape and action of a penis? Are they not also getting what they want without putting in the work of being a good partner? What about women who allow themselves to become grotesquely obese? What about women who refuse sex to their husbands or boyfriends? Are they also selfish and lazy?

As usual, men are the ones criticized in the discussion, the ones whose behaviors are named as ill-advised, damaging, or dangerous to women. Female porn consumption—not to mention female porn creation—never comes up. From the discussion, one would hardly know that women too are interested in viewing pornography or in AI companions or sexual aids. Women are not criticized for any failures, sexual manipulation, or mercenary desires. They want what they want, and that’s the end of it.

To be fair, Siefert and Soh are less condemnatory of men than many other pundits. They recognize some men’s lack of options. But they have difficulty maintaining a focus on men’s needs and desires; women’s needs and demands keep moving to the fore. Men’s choices are repeatedly discussed not as evidence of male pain or of their rational decision-making, but as signs of male irresponsibility, or worse.

On the subject of sex dolls, Soh claims that research shows that a man who imagines a relationship with his doll is a public safety risk, with a significant likelihood of participating in “violence against women and girls.” I have no idea how evidence could possibly confirm this thesis.

What is clear is that a conversation that seemed to begin as an unbiased attempt to understand how sexual intimacy is changing for men and women quickly drifted into a standard series of criticisms of male behavior in which everything men do is potentially damnable.

It’s not hard to think of reforms that would make work life, dating, marriage, and parenting less hazardous for men and could contribute to a renaissance of male-female trust: an immediate end to all DEI measures; a public reckoning around #MeToo’s ongoing witch-hunts; the dismantling of weaponizable sexual harassment policies in the workplace and universities; the return of due process and the presumption of innocence to claims of sexual assault; the reform of divorce and child custody to remove bias against men and fathers; the removal of feminist propaganda and advocacy from all schools, universities, newsrooms, and media, to be replaced by rational discussions of sexual etiquette and female accountability; and the encouragement of a culture of love and respect for men both in the bedroom and at large.

But that would be an entirely different kind of conversation.

Siefert and Soh don’t have any of the foregoing on their radar not because they are anti-male—I assume they like men generally—but because woman-centered and feminist-compliant assumptions are deeply embedded in mainstream thought. Until that changes, men are right to protect themselves and seek their best interests in whatever way they see fit.