The New York Times has a bizarre query for half the population.
“Men, where have you gone?” asks Rachel Drucker for The New York Times’ Modern Love column. “Please come back.” Drucker is a divorced 54-year-old “intellectual property professional” with roughly forty years of dating experience, per her admission. That’s the rare form of experience that declines in value as it accumulates. (RELATED: There’s Another Gender Gap Nobody Is Talking About – And It Just Might Doom Democrats)
Out on a date with herself after a last minute cancellation, Drucker observes a “a noticeable absence of men — at least of men seated in what looked like dates.” She laments a “collective shift” in male behavior: “A sense that what I’d been experiencing wasn’t just personal misalignment. It was something broader. Cultural. A slow vanishing of presence.”
This is the Mount Everest of unintentional New York Times Op-Ed humor. Pure hilarity
Men, Where Have You Gone? Please Come Back. – The New York Times
— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) June 21, 2025
Let’s take Drucker at her word and assume she’s not just experiencing the natural decline in male attention that comes with aging. Why might men make reluctant dates?
“I remember when part of heterosexual male culture involved showing up with a woman to signal something — status, success, desirability,” Drucker writes. “Women were once signifiers of value, even to other men. It wasn’t always healthy, but it meant that men had to show up and put in some effort.”
Drucker makes a poor detective. Women have worked extraordinarily hard to devalue themselves as women. Women shoved themselves into the workplace, the military, and higher education. Women were to have all the privileges men enjoyed (responsibilities à la carte). At the height of #MeToo, men were warned that merely holding a door open for a woman might be a chivalric slight to female independence. Is it any wonder men might be disinclined to “put in some effort”?
Drucker castigates “that thing so many men now seem to mistake for connection: the perpetual maybe. The emoji check-ins. The casual ‘seeing where it goes’ without ever going anywhere. We call it a situationship. But mostly, it’s avoidance. An abdication of ownership — of feeling, of behavior, of sex that isn’t a means to an end, but is communion.”
“Situationship” is one of the more disgusting neologisms birthed by modern courtship. It signals a widespread female dissatisfaction with new sexual norms. There’s a tried and true solution which negotiates conflicting male/female desires: marriage at a relatively young age between two individuals prepared to commit to each other for life.
Drucker considers no such solution. Her lament is not for the nuclear family, but for the traditional late 20th century practice of one night stands. “There was a time, not so long ago, when even a one-night stand might end with tangled limbs and a shared breakfast,” she writes. “When the act of staying the night didn’t announce a relationship, just a willingness to be human for a few more hours. Now, even that kind of unscripted contact feels rare. We’ve built so many boundaries that we’ve walled off the very moments that make connection memorable.”
This is ironic.
The New York Times has led the massive mainstream media campaign to disparage and persecute men for the last 40 years, and promote women’s supremacy.
Not how they imply that there is something wrong with men (hiding etc.) because men have walked away. pic.twitter.com/wVBnedIKEA
— Gender Studies for Men (@JohnDavisJDLLM) June 21, 2025
Ah, the old, “I’ve eaten my cake and am shocked and upset to see I no longer have it.” The “sexual revolution” of the 1960s promised pleasure without end. It delivered a reality in which the majority of both sexes are more dissatisfied, and more antagonistic to one another, than ever. (RELATED: Gen Z Influencers Have A Plan To Save Young Men From Themselves)
But Drucker has a different hypothesis on the matter. “Maybe the world told you your role was to provide, to perform, to protect — and never to feel,” she considers. If masculinity has been growing progressively less “toxic,” and the sexes progressively more equal, shouldn’t men be feeling more than ever?
She goes on to mourn men “that listened — really listened — when a woman spoke.”
No doubt plenty of husbands still listen with rapt attention when their wife asks them what sort of sandwich they’d like. But Drucker’s given her piece. She, and others of her ilk, could bear to listen a little more themselves.
Follow Natalie Sandoval on X: @NatalieIrene03
