Ending the Gender Wars

From a competitive to a collaborative paradigm

Men Go Into Hiding

"You are not gone, but your presence is thinning," Rachel Drucker wrote in The New York Times last month. “You've retreated—not into malice, but into something softer and harder all at once: Avoidance. Exhaustion. Disrepair.”

Drucker's essay, “Men, Where Have You Gone? Please Come Back,” struck a nerve among women in my social circle. They recognized something essential in her diagnosis: heterosexual men's retreat from intimacy, vulnerability, and relational effort. Men increasingly replace presence and reciprocity with digital habits of scrolling, lurking, and passive engagement. Mourning the erosion of male presence in real-life connection, she calls for a return to “slow rituals of romantic emergence”—lingering after one-night stands, asking real questions, staying at the table and listening. “We are asking for presence," she writes. “For courage. For breath and eye contact and the ability to say, ‘I'm here. I don't know how to do this perfectly, but I want to try.’”

What's missing from Drucker's analysis, I find, is a deeper, systemic understanding of why this male withdrawal is happening—and how it connects to forces far beyond urban dating culture or social media addiction. The retreat of men from intimate presence isn't merely an individual or ambient romantic crisis. It's feeding something much darker: the rise of violent neoreactionary movements that threaten the foundations of democratic society.

This crisis demands we ask a more radical question: What if the path to planetary peace requires ending the war between the genders entirely? Could it be done? How could it be done?

What follows is a thought experiment, a hypothesis I'm not entirely sure I believe myself. As Samuel Beckett put it: “Try. Fail. Try again. Fail better.” What I'm proposing might be crucial—the clue to "saving" humanity, if such a thing remains possible—or it might be pie-in-the-sky nonsense.

My thesis: To establish a peaceful planetary culture, we need to move from a competitive to a deeply collaborative and cooperative erotic paradigm—comprehensively, on a societal level. As Allen Ginsberg told Playboy Magazine in 1969: “Life should be ecstasy. We need life styles of ecstasy and social forms appropriate to whatever ecstasy is available for whoever wants it.” This would demand profound conscious reflection from both men and women, different kinds of sacrifice and hard work from both genders, transforming how people behave in their daily lives and how they understand and express, love, intimacy, and eroticism.

Symptoms of Collapse

Perhaps the current crisis of male identity is best symbolized by ICE agents: We’re seeing faceless vigilantes without identifying badges swoop down on unsuspecting immigrants (and others, including naturalized citizens), loading them into unmarked vans for lawless deportation. These men have embraced depersonalization and dehumanization. They have chosen to them themselves into iconic caricatures of cruelty and hate. This may sound ridiculous to say, but perhaps, with ICE, we are seeing an archetype of male rage and pain that has deep psychosocial roots, requiring objective and systemic analysis.

Current statistics on gender disparity reveal increasing imbalances. Across the U.S., women have achieved major gains — which is great — while men experience severe status and financial declines. In higher education, women consistently outpace men—earning 1.5 million bachelor's degrees in 2020-2021 compared to men's 1 million. Women held 42.7% of management positions in 2023, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Women are also becoming far more liberal than men.

Meanwhile, male indicators reveal concerning patterns. Men are nearly four times more likely to die by suicide, according to the CDC. Young men increasingly live at home into adulthood. The Brookings Institution documents long-term decline in male labor force participation, particularly among those without college degrees. We see growing male disengagement from traditional career and educational pathways, causing frustration and disconnection that leads to radicalization.

The NeoReactionary Right's rise is powered by straight white male mass disaffection. Large numbers of American men feel the progressive “woke” world has turned against them while women are rejecting them. This fuels Incel culture, sometimes unleashing “stochastic terrorism.” Violent extremism proliferates on platforms like Rumble and 4chan, where fantasies of mass violence against urban elites and liberals becomes normalized discourse.

America's political divide increasingly maps onto a gender divide. The Republican Right is “coded” masculine while Democrats/Left are coded feminine. More precisely, the Right expresses itself like a teenage boy in total rebellion against care, conscience, and social norms. Democrats fall under a maternal archetype, receiving the psychological attacks a rebellious teenager might project onto their mother. To take just one example, the establishment media once attacked Obama relentlessly for wearing a tan suit, yet barely challenges Trump personally making billions from a corrupt meme coin—pure grift and corruption.

Warren Farrell, author of The Boy Crisis and The Myth of Male Power, would interpret male withdrawal from intimacy as a result of long-building cultural shifts where men feel increasingly disposable, distrusted, and directionless as culture becomes more “feminized.” He argues that movements like #MeToo—which performed a necessary social function in exposing real abuse, but also overstepped in destroying careers over relatively minor moral infractions—have created atmospheres of fear and confusion for many men, particularly around dating and intimacy. Cancel culture reinforces the narrative that masculinity is inherently toxic, leaving men uncertain how to engage without getting attacked or misunderstood.

Over recent decades, women have formed emotionally rich communities and supportive networks, increasingly exploring love, purpose, and parenting without expecting male involvement. While “men's movements” exist, men feel increasingly adrift. From early childhood, men aren't given social permission for emotional expression or vulnerability—they're still supposed to “suck it up” and “take the pain.” Without systemic efforts to help boys and men redefine their roles, this retreat will deepen, feeding the fascist, patriarchal beast.

The Historical Context: Eros Under Siege

To understand how we arrived here requires examining the deeper relationship between sexuality, power, and civilization.