A woman in her late thirties posts a simple complaint online: “Men can have kids into their seventies. I’ve only got a few years left. That’s so unfair.”
Within hours, her mentions are a war zone. Some men sneer about “geriatric eggs.” Others write manifestos about feminism and hypergamy. A few women defend her, but the thread collapses into the same argument we’ve been having for decades.
Another story: In Britain, a thirty-four-year-old woman recently sued her ex-boyfriend, claiming he had “stolen her childbearing years.” After ten years together, he ended the relationship without fulfilling his promises of marriage and children. Now, she’s demanding enough compensation to pay for in vitro fertilization, arguing that at her age, the damage is irreversible. The story, which may or may not be apocryphal, made international headlines (New York Post, Nov. 9, 2025).
None of this is about fairness. It’s about biology.
Both scenes expose the same raw truth: the difference between men and women starts in the body. Women face a narrow reproductive window and carry the heavier cost of sex and childbearing. Men can father children for decades and are built to compete for access. That single asymmetry — who can bear life, and when — shapes everything that follows.
Feminism can deny it, but it can’t erase it. The entire struggle between men and women — resentment, rivalry, dependency, love — traces back to unyielding biological facts.
Biology and the Social Machinery
Men and women were never designed for identical roles. Men are stronger and more expendable. Women are fertile for a brief span and pay a higher price for reproduction. Left unmanaged, that imbalance leads to chaos: predation, jealousy, neglect. Civilizations that survived learned to harness male aggression into protection and tie sexual access to responsibility.
That is where social machinery began.
From the moment humans began living in tribes and towns, every culture crafted rules to manage what biology had set in motion. Men’s strength made them protectors and potential predators. Women’s fertility made them precious and vulnerable. The solution was a web of customs meant to civilize the exchange between them.
Marriage became the contract. It tied a man’s sexual rights to his duties to provide and protect. A woman’s fidelity secured legitimacy for his heirs and stability for the household. Sex, property, and inheritance were bound together. Monogamy became the preferred arrangement not from sentimentality but necessity: when a few powerful men monopolize women, the surplus of unattached males turns violent. Pairing one man with one woman spread stability and tied even ordinary men to home, work, and community.
Virginity was a form of capital. Before modern contraception, a woman’s virtue was proof of exclusivity, a guarantee of paternity, and a ticket to honorable marriage. Families guarded that value carefully, not from prudery but protection. Chaperonage systems and social supervision preserved reputation, which was both moral currency and practical security for the woman and her family. A compromised woman could lose her future. Communities took that seriously because it affected everyone; women having children out of wedlock were a potential drain on a community’s limited resources.
The dowry and the dower anchored this balance in material form. The dowry, a portion of the bride’s family wealth, was her insurance against misfortune. The dower, her claim on her husband’s estate, made sure she and her children wouldn’t starve if he died, and that she would be protected against impoverishment if he mismanaged the household money. It also often helped secure houses, businesses, or property that would enable the family as a whole to thrive. These were early social safety nets recognizing that women bore biological risk while men bore economic duty.
Breach-of-promise laws reinforced the moral order. A man who courted, seduced, and abandoned a woman could be sued, not because her feelings were hurt but because her prospects were damaged. Law turned moral obligation into accountability. This was codified into law, which was only eliminated in the West between 1935 and 1970.
Together, these customs formed a biological covenant: a structure that married sex to consequence, bound men’s power to women’s vulnerability, and made both serve something larger than desire: the survival of the family line and ultimately the human race.
Feminism and the Great Trade-Off
The collapse didn’t start in courtrooms or legislatures. It began in the bedroom.
Late-nineteenth-century “free love” advocates preached sexual expression without consequence. They were helped later by the rise of scientific contraception and Planned Parenthood, which promised that sex could finally be separated from its biological consequence, procreation.
For centuries, sex had driven marriage. It created life and therefore demanded protection for both woman and child. Reliable birth control and legal abortion made that framework seem unnecessary. The biological covenant could be bypassed.
Sex became recreation instead of creation. Marriage became romance instead of duty.
A union once grounded in practical realities — property, inheritance, children — was reimagined as a path to personal happiness. “Unhappy” marriages, once seen as hardships to be endured, were redefined as moral failings.
At first, men saw this as a good deal. They were freed from the expectation of lifelong responsibility and enjoyed unprecedented access to sex. The idea of intimacy after a few dates became standard. Women, unchaperoned and unprotected, found themselves pressured to do what their grandmothers never had to justify. There had always been premarital sex, but now it was assumed rather than transgressive.
Without dowries to safeguard women’s futures and with children reframed as optional, divorce began to look like liberation. No-fault divorce simply codified what culture had already decided: that duty to family and society was secondary to personal satisfaction.
Feminism supplied the language to make this permanent. Protection became oppression; dependence became disgrace. Women gained autonomy but lost security. Men gained access but lost responsibility. The ancient balance was gone.
Cultural Denial
Once the covenant collapsed, society had to invent a story that made the new chaos sound noble. It chose denial.
The new orthodoxy declared that men and women were identical in nature. Fertility timelines, emotional wiring, physical strength, everything was said to be a social construction. Biology became an inconvenience to be managed, not a truth to be honored.
Women were told they could delay marriage and motherhood indefinitely, that careers would fulfill them if they chose to completely eschew motherhood, and that science would step in later if they wanted children. Men were told that commitment was optional and fatherhood incidental.
None of it reconciled with what human beings actually are. Men and women are complementary. They need one another. Each fills the gaps the other leaves. Traditional monogamous marriage, mocked as dull or repressive, is civilization’s first and greatest solution to nearly every conflict between the sexes. It balanced strength and nurture, aggression and tenderness, desire and security. It gave women protection and men purpose, bound both to the next generation, and built enduring peace.
The sexual marketplace that replaced it became a brutal sorting machine. A small number of men captured most of the attention; the rest dropped out. Women, free but anxious, measured worth by beauty and youth, chasing approval from men who would never stay.
Yet the culture doubled down. Instead of admitting the experiment had failed, it blamed “toxic masculinity,” “internalized misogyny,” or “the patriarchy” for the loneliness and collapsing birthrates. It was easier to pathologize human nature than to admit that the old constraints had served a purpose.
Meanwhile, marriage becomes meaningless, and women and children suffer without really understanding why.
The Backlash Economy
Every social order must find something productive to do with its surplus men. When large numbers can’t marry, can’t earn respect, and can’t find purpose, they don’t vanish. They react.
In the old world, that energy was absorbed. Men who couldn’t find wives joined armies, cleared frontiers, built roads, or entered the priesthood. They were given missions that redirected aggression outward.
Today, there are no such outlets large enough to accommodate the number of men who need them. Men who drop out have nowhere to go. Some stew in bitterness, some drift into crime, others vanish into digital worlds that reward withdrawal. The incel movement, and its Japanese counterpart hikikomori, is only the visible symptom: millions of men who feel unwanted, unnecessary, and angry about it.
The modern sexual order created exactly what the old one prevented. When monogamy breaks down, a minority of dominant men monopolize women while the rest live in frustration. That’s the same pattern that produced ancient warbands and creates modern gangs, unattached men searching for meaning through violence.
Civilizations that survive don’t ignore that danger; they account for it. They bind men into duty, marriage, or service. Our culture tells them to “find themselves,” then acts surprised when what they find is rage.
The Missing Covenant
Civilization depends on a balance between freedom and duty. For millennia, that balance was struck through marriage and the moral order surrounding it, a social covenant that bound male strength to female vulnerability and both to the future. When that covenant broke, what replaced it wasn’t liberation. It was drift.
Men and women still need what they have always needed: belonging, purpose, protection, continuity. Without a framework that acknowledges their differences, neither sex can thrive. Men without duty grow reckless; women without protection grow anxious; children born into that instability inherit confusion.
We keep mistaking liberty for freedom. Freedom requires order, boundaries, and meaning. Liberty without those things is only license, movement without direction. A quarter of all women living on SSRIs isn’t freedom. It’s misery masked by medication. Millions of young men trapped in loneliness, cut off from the sexual and emotional growth that makes them men, isn’t freedom. It’s a quiet form of torture, a slavery to appetite and despair.
We have mistaken movement for progress, as progressivism always does. The old system was imperfect, but it addressed problems. It acknowledged biological reality and tried to balance it with moral structure. The new system smashed that structure in the name of freedom and created a different kind of bondage, one of isolation, addiction, and fear.
And the people who profit from chaos have no reason to mend it. A population divided by sex, medicated for misery, and desperate for validation is easy to rule. Both men and women have become pawns in a game that feeds on their unhappiness. The solution must start in the homes and churches, not with the government.
Until we rebuild a covenant worthy of the name, one that binds freedom to responsibility and desire to duty, the cycle will continue.
Editor’s Note: Here at PJ Media, we like to talk about the culture and how we got here. We think you like it too.
