There are few things in the post sexual revolution world more scorned than unattractive men. It has become nearly impossible to discuss rising loneliness, declining pair bonding, or falling birthrates without being met by reflexive responses insisting that men are not “entitled to sex.” With the specter of the incel haunting contemporary dating discourse, unrequited male sexual desire has been reclassified as a moral transgression. The man is not merely unsuccessful; he is entitled. His personality is not merely unattractive; it is immoral.
For men, this moralized, quasi-social-Darwinian interpretation of romantic failure functions as a social straitjacket. No man with any degree of social awareness can voice frustration with dating without inviting condemnation, nor can he expect sympathy if he does. The same is not true for women. When women express dissatisfaction with dating, the response is often inverted. Rather than being faulted for failing to meet men’s standards, men are accused of being “shallow” or of enforcing “unrealistic” beauty norms.
This asymmetry exposes a central irony in contemporary discourse about sexual entitlement. The moral force governing public conversation, its contempt for sexually unsuccessful men, rests on an unspoken assumption: that women are, in fact, entitled to sex with their preferred partners. This assumption is rarely stated outright, yet it animates institutional feminism. Obscured by women’s comparatively passive role in courtship, it has nevertheless reshaped law, policy, and social expectations.
The Womb as Moral Arbiter
Being unattractive to women is no longer merely a social liability; it increasingly carries institutional consequences. The censure attached to provoking female sexual discomfort is not simply cultural. It is downstream from law and policy. As women entered the workforce, sexual harassment emerged not only as a moral norm but as a formal legal category with expansive institutional reach.
Few would dispute that a superior using positional power to extract sexual access is abusive. Yet the definition of sexual harassment rapidly expanded beyond coercion to include subjective discomfort, ambiguous interactions, and perceived impropriety. In practice, this expansion granted employers, universities, and the state broad authority to regulate ordinary heterosexual interactions wherever professional hierarchies exist. When a woman reports discomfort, institutions are compelled to act under threat of legal and financial liability.
This is not a system designed to adjudicate intent or reciprocity. It treats female sexual aversion as presumptively legitimate and male sexual interest as inherently suspect. The unattractive man is not merely unsuccessful; he is a liability. His presence alone can trigger investigation, sanction, or removal.
In this way, female sexual preference is elevated into a moral and legal signal. Shielded by the language of safety, rights, and protection, the female sex drive becomes a mechanism for institutional risk management. Professional environments increasingly reward male attractiveness implicitly, not by policy, but by avoidance. The result is not formal discrimination, but a quiet sorting process in which desirability functions as a proxy for safety, and unattractiveness becomes grounds for exclusion.
It is within this institutional environment that the figure of the “incel” emerges: a man rendered socially undesirable, institutionally risky, and morally suspect, then condemned for reacting to the conditions that produced him.
This dynamic was captured succinctly in a widely circulated tweet by Ellen Pao, a prominent tech executive, who argued publicly for the firing of “incels.” The significance of such statements lies not in literal policy intent, but in what they reveal about elite moral intuition. Male sexual failure is no longer merely unfortunate or pitiable, but grounds for professional exclusion.
The Manosphere as Heresy
In recent years, the Red Pill or Manosphere has gained traction among young men. While it offers some analysis of shifting gender expectations, women’s political participation, and male self improvement, it evolved from and largely remains centered on pick up artistry. In a world where male virginity and involuntary celibacy are rising simultaneously, the emergence of such a movement should surprise no one.
Yet when the Manosphere appears in mainstream discourse, it is immediately derided as misogynistic, a curious charge for a movement largely concerned with forming relationships with women. This response reflects a broader need to moralize society’s growing contempt for underperforming men. Excluded from most public forums, their communications are relentlessly scrutinized for evidence of resentment or hostility. Articles routinely include guides advising women on how to avoid accidentally dating such men, often accompanied by open mockery.
The advice offered to men is always the same: abandon entitlement, stop hating women, and simply become a “decent person.” Embedded in this advice is a largely unexamined belief: that male unattractiveness is a character defect, and that the female sex drive serves as an effective judge of moral worth. Sexual attraction is framed as something women bestow upon the deserving.
The female sex drive, in this framework, anoints and baptizes men, granting them social legitimacy. It also does the inverse. It excommunicates and damns them. Every modern man lives with the unspoken knowledge that his social standing and credibility are contingent on whether women desire him.
Our reflexive disgust toward the Manosphere reflects a society that has elevated the female sex drive to the sacred. The Manosphere’s real offense is not misogyny, but its attempt to treat female sexual selection as a biological process responsive to status, power, and attraction rather than morality. Pick up artistry, in this context, is treated not as crude or misguided, but as sacrilege. A belief naturally follows: if women are entitled to sex, then the womb becomes the final arbiter of moral value.
Political Feminism and Reproductive Rights
Political movements, by necessity, attract broad coalitions, granting leaders and adherents latitude to avoid accountability for unintended consequences. Feminism is no exception. For that reason, I will not attempt a comprehensive definition. Instead, I will point out something that should not be controversial: the flagship issue of modern feminism is abortion, euphemistically termed “reproductive rights.”
During elections, reproductive rights are presented alongside the economy and healthcare as a central mobilizing issue. This framing allows advocates to sidestep moral questions surrounding fetal life, but it introduces another problem entirely.
Consider the terms:
Entitlement: the fact of having a right to something
Reproductive: relating to or affecting reproduction
The defining political issue of women’s liberation is thus framed, quite literally, as entitlement to sex. This is not merely semantic. Institutional policies governing sexual autonomy, reproduction, and family formation are constructed around the primacy of female desire and choice. Male reproductive interests, fatherhood, sexual access, and paternal authority are subordinated or ignored.
While feminism simultaneously endorses and condemns many things, one throughline remains consistent: the normalization and institutional protection of female sexual entitlement.
Body Positivity and Entitlement to Desirability
Sex sells. What is notable is how feminist discourse has responded to this. Rather than challenging sexual commodification, modern feminism has sought to universalize access to its rewards.
Body positivity has evolved from a call for dignity into a moral claim that all women are entitled to be perceived as sexually desirable. Conventionally attractive women are no longer aspirational, but indictments of the heterosexual male sex drive. Male preference itself becomes the offense.
Infographics cataloging the “average” female body do not exist to educate men, who already understand variance, but to shame male desire. The problem is not that most women lack idealized traits; it is that men have preferences at all. Media criticism of the “male gaze” follows the same logic. As entertainment responds by desexualizing female characters, the implication becomes clear: what pleases the male sex drive is immoral.
Female sexual entitlement thus requires the demonization of male desire. Female attraction is framed as evidence of moral discernment; male attraction is framed as pathology. While the female sex drive sorts men into worthy and unworthy, the male sex drive is denied even the capacity to judge. A good man, we are told, finds all women attractive, or none legitimately so.
Hookup Culture: The Flipside of Inceldom
Incels and women who fail to secure commitment from sexually successful men are failures in the same sexual marketplace. The difference lies entirely in moral framing. The incel is condemned as entitled and dangerous. The woman is portrayed as a victim of male manipulation.
Hookup culture is routinely criticized as exploitative of women, yet its fundamental structure reveals a different dynamic. Women concentrate sexual access among a small subset of highly attractive men. Those men enjoy sexual abundance without obligation. Women who expect these encounters to convert into committed relationships are framed as having been misled or used. Men excluded from sexual access entirely are framed as entitled for expecting reciprocity.
The critique of hookup culture implicitly assumes that women are entitled not only to sexual access with their preferred partners, but to commitment from those same men on their preferred terms. When highly attractive men decline to provide relationships, this is moralized as exploitation or emotional manipulation. When less attractive men express frustration at their exclusion from sexual access altogether, this is moralized as entitlement and misogyny.
The parallel is precise: both the woman spurned after casual sex and the incel denied access entirely have failed to secure their desired outcome in the sexual marketplace. Yet only one is granted social sympathy. The woman is painted as a victim of hookup culture; the incel is painted as its villain.
This reveals the underlying assumption governing contemporary sexual discourse. Women are presumed to deserve both sexual access to their preferred partners and commitment from those partners. Men are presumed to deserve neither. Female sexual strategy is naturalized and protected; male sexual strategy is pathologized and condemned.
Incels are not an aberration of hookup culture. They are its necessary byproduct: the men rendered invisible by the same concentration of female sexual attention that produces the "fuckboy" and the spurned woman. For every woman who laments being unable to convert casual sex into commitment, there exists an incel who cannot secure even initial sexual access. The sexual marketplace produces both outcomes simultaneously, yet only one is granted moral legitimacy.
The Normalization of Sex Work
In recent years, a curious asymmetry has emerged in the discourse surrounding sex work. The industry itself is being normalized, reframed as legitimate labor deserving of destigmatization and legal protection. Yet the men who patronize sex workers remain objects of contempt. This is the only commercial transaction, legal or otherwise, where society depicts the seller as victim and the buyer as predator.
The Nordic model, widely praised by sex work advocates, criminalizes purchasing sex while decriminalizing its sale. The policy rests on an assumption: women selling sex are victims of circumstance or coercion; men buying it are exploiters. This framing persists even when sex work is demonstrably voluntary. Men who purchase sexual services are not merely stigmatized but mocked as losers, their recourse to prostitution treated as evidence of personal failure rather than market reality.
In a sexual marketplace where most men lack viable options, this leaves vast numbers without socially acceptable outlets for basic biological needs. The alternative offered is online sex work: cam girls, OnlyFans, parasocial relationships commodified and sold as intimacy. Yet men drawn to these services are even more vulnerable than traditional johns, and the women who profit from them know it.
Andrew Tate, before becoming infamous for other reasons, openly described his business model: exploit lonely men by creating the illusion of genuine connection. This is not an aberration. It is the industry standard. Sex workers make their real income not from explicit content, which is abundant and free online, but from cultivating emotional dependency. They actively seek out isolated, emotionally starved men and engineer attachments that can be monetized indefinitely.
Many sex workers express open contempt for their customers. Social media is replete with sex workers bragging about manipulating "simps," mocking the men who subsidize their lifestyles, and celebrating their ability to extract resources while offering nothing genuine in return. When customers develop genuine attachments, as they are designed to do, sex workers frequently mock these feelings publicly, treating male emotional vulnerability as both pathetic and exploitable.
The comparison to traditional pimping is direct. Pimps manipulate sex workers through false intimacy, emotional dependency, and exploitation of vulnerability. Sex workers, in turn, deploy identical tactics against their customers. The difference is that when sex workers are exploited, they are victims. When they exploit, they are entrepreneurs.
Some sex workers actively seek out pimps not for protection but for knowledge, for what they call "the ism": psychological techniques for manipulating male attachment and extracting maximum resources. Yet when these same pimps exploit them, the sex workers are framed as hapless victims rather than willing participants in a predatory industry who happened to lose their own game.
The narrative surrounding sex work is schizophrenic. A woman who willingly enters sex work is empowered and beyond criticism. If she later expresses regret, she becomes a victim, but only of what was done to her, never of what she did to others. The harm she inflicted on vulnerable men evaporates from consideration. Female sexual behavior, no matter how predatory or exploitative, remains insulated from moral judgment.
Online sex workers frequently target underage boys, cultivating future customers by normalizing parasocial relationships and conditioning adolescents to associate intimacy with financial transaction. Yet these women, adults engaging with minors in explicitly sexual contexts, are rarely framed as having power or agency. The predatory dynamic is ignored because acknowledging it would require admitting that female sexuality can be weaponized, that women can exploit men, and that sexual commerce is not empowerment but extraction.
The push to normalize sex work while maintaining contempt for its customers reveals the underlying principle at work. Women are entitled to monetize male sexual desire without stigma. Men are entitled to nothing, not even the transaction they pay for. The sex worker extracts resources while offering simulation; the customer receives shame for his biology and mockery for his loneliness. One party is celebrated for entrepreneurship; the other is condemned for desperation.
This is female sexual entitlement in its purest commercial form: the right to profit from male desire while despising the men who feel it.
Family Law: The Abortion Paradox
The intervention into a woman's normal reproductive function through abortion is treated as sacrosanct. Roughly one-third of pregnancies in some generational cohorts have ended in abortion. The scale of this practice exceeds the cumulative deaths from most wars in human history. Yet abortion has been elevated to a sacred right, enshrined in political platforms as the cornerstone of female autonomy. The principle is absolute: consent to sex is not consent to pregnancy or motherhood.
Once a child is born, however, this principle of reproductive autonomy collapses entirely, but only for men. The father has no reciprocal escape from parental obligation. All appeals to consent and bodily autonomy vanish when the question becomes male financial liability. Biology becomes destiny, but only when it constrains men.
The inconsistency is revealing. When determining financial obligation, we invoke biological determinism: the man created the child; therefore, he must pay. When determining custody, we invoke biological essentialism of a different kind: women's nature automatically makes them superior caregivers. Mothers are privileged in custody arrangements even when empirical evidence consistently demonstrates that single motherhood produces some of the worst developmental outcomes for children.
Men cannot legally reject fatherhood the way women can reject motherhood. Even when men want to participate actively in raising their children, they face systematic barriers in custody proceedings. The definition of abuse has expanded to include concepts like "financial abuse," which implicitly asserts that women are entitled to the material provisions traditionally associated with male partnership—yet men retain no corresponding legal protection for their interests in the relationship.
This expansion is significant. Adult romantic relationships are fundamentally defined by their sexual dimension: this is what distinguishes them from other forms of intimate partnership. When we speak of "adult content," we refer specifically to sexually explicit material. Yet women are legally free to withhold affection, intimacy, and sex without consequence, while men face legal sanction for withholding financial support. The asymmetry is stark: requiring men to fulfill traditional provider roles by court order means that men are not permitted to negotiate the terms of their relationships, while women retain full autonomy over the sexual and emotional dimensions of the relationship.
Perhaps most tellingly, paternity fraud is not treated as a criminal offense in most jurisdictions. In many cases, courts have ordered men to continue providing child support for children proven not to be biologically theirs. The legal reasoning often invokes "the best interests of the child," but the practical effect is clear: women are entitled to optimize their reproductive strategy (securing genetic fitness through one man while extracting resources from another) and to have this optimization legally enforced regardless of deception.
The abortion debate is typically framed as a question of bodily autonomy versus fetal life. But the broader legal architecture reveals a different principle at work: female reproductive sovereignty extends not merely to control over her own body, but to control over male reproductive obligations, male financial resources, and even the definition of paternity itself.
Entitlement Programs and Demographics
Single mothers represent a disproportionate share of users of government entitlement programs. These programs are funded primarily by taxes paid by working-age men, the same demographic experiencing rising rates of involuntary celibacy and social disconnection. The fiscal sustainability of these programs depends on a growing tax base, requiring either immigration or increased birthrates among the native population.
Yet fertility rates across the developed world have collapsed below replacement level. The demographic crisis is openly acknowledged by economists and policymakers, yet proposed solutions studiously avoid confronting the tensions at its core. Women use entitlement programs at higher rates than men, particularly mothers and elderly women who live longer. Yet birthrates are treated as a crisis that must be solved without reference to female reproductive choices or sexual selection patterns.
The contradiction is fundamental: we need new babies to support the entitlement programs used primarily by women, yet women demand the absolute right to abort those babies. Any suggestion that birthrates should influence reproductive rights is dismissed as sexist. Female sexual autonomy is non-negotiable, even when it threatens the demographic and fiscal foundation of the society that guarantees it.
Men, meanwhile, are shamed for using the same entitlement programs that women access freely. Disability, unemployment assistance, and housing support are framed as evidence of male failure when men use them, but as necessary support when women do. Men constitute the majority of the homeless population, yet efforts to help the most vulnerable frequently prioritize women and children, treating male homelessness as less worthy of intervention.
The pattern reveals itself clearly: female sexual and reproductive autonomy takes precedence over fiscal solvency, demographic sustainability, and even civilization continuity. We have constructed a system that depends on male productivity to fund female reproductive choices, then condemns men who fail to thrive within it as entitled and dangerous.
The incel exists at the intersection of these contradictions. He is needed as a productive worker to fund the system, yet excluded from the reproductive and social rewards that might motivate his participation. He is expected to subsidize the choices of women who have selected other men, to pay for programs that support children he did not father, and to accept his exclusion with grace and gratitude.
Conclusion: Female Sexual Entitlement and the Erosion of Institutional Function
Every man in every mixed-sex institutional setting has felt this reality, though few can articulate it clearly: acceptance, credibility, and social standing are contingent on female approval. Since attractiveness among men is relative and hierarchical, this dynamic inevitably produces extreme intrasexual competition that distracts from the stated purpose of virtually every organization.
Workplaces, universities, social organizations, and even political movements become stages for perpetual courtship displays. Men compete not merely to perform their designated roles, but to secure female validation. Those who succeed gain social capital that extends far beyond romantic or sexual success. They are taken more seriously, granted more latitude, and given more opportunities. Those who fail become invisible at best, institutional liabilities at worst.
This is not a formal policy but an emergent property of elevating female sexual preference to moral authority. When female comfort becomes the metric by which male behavior is judged, when female attraction serves as evidence of male worthiness, and when institutions are legally compelled to regulate male behavior according to female subjective experience, the result is predictable: female sexual preference becomes the organizing principle of social life.
The consequences extend beyond dating or relationships. When a society treats the female sex drive as a moral arbiter (when it grants women absolute autonomy over reproduction while binding men to the consequences, when it condemns male sexual strategy while protecting female sexual strategy, when it frames male desire as inherently suspect while treating female desire as inherently legitimate) it creates a system that cannot acknowledge its own logic.
We cannot simultaneously maintain that women are entitled to sex with their preferred partners, relationships with those partners on their preferred terms, abortion without consequence, child support without reciprocity, custody without scrutiny, and institutional protection from uncomfortable male attention, while also maintaining that men are not entitled to anything at all. One of these positions must give way.
The sexual revolution promised liberation from traditional constraints on sexuality. What it delivered was a new system of sexual regulation, one that grants women unprecedented autonomy while providing men unprecedented precarity. The incel is not an aberration of this system but its most honest expression; a man who has internalized the rules completely, who understands his lack of value in the only currency that matters, and who is condemned for acknowledging what everyone already knows.
Until we can discuss female sexual entitlement with the same frankness we discuss male sexual entitlement, until we can acknowledge that the female sex drive is not a moral force but a biological one, and until we can recognize that a civilization cannot sustain itself by privileging female reproductive choice over every other consideration; we will continue to produce incels, and we will continue to condemn them for existing.
The alternative is not a return to traditional sexual arrangements, nor is it the elimination of female autonomy. It is simply honesty: an acknowledgment that entitlement flows in both directions, that sexual marketplaces produce winners and losers of both sexes, and that the male failures of this system deserve the same sympathy we reflexively grant to its female casualties.