Chronicling the ongoing intersectional struggle to liberate women — inclusively defined as the legacy kind and the transgenders — from The Patriarchy™, one microaggression at a time.
Psychobabble mongers invent new ideological enemy
What does the plummeting courtship rate among young adults have to do with… neoconservatism?
Related: The RESTOR Act to Repeal the 19th Amendment
Dr. Lisa Portolan (not a real doctor; she got her PhD in “digital intimacy + dating apps”) explains in quintessential feminist psychobabble that only a liberal arts graduate — a tiny subset of the population that, for whatever reason, is the only one that these outlets seem interested in catering to — could appreciate.
Via The Guardian (emphasis added):
In 2025, the romance plot appears to be fraying at the edges. Vogue recently asked in a viral headline: Is having a boyfriend now embarrassing? It argued that, across social media, the term “boyfriend” was taking on a strangely dated, even cringe, tone, not unlike the way “Facebook official” now sounds quaint. The idea of centring your identity around a relationship feels, to many, passé.
Platforms like TikTok are teeming with young women publicly declaring themselves “#boysober” – a rapidly growing movement rejecting dating, hookup culture, exes and even the idea of emotional dependence on men. What began as a meme has become a global conversation about boundaries, burnout and bodily autonomy.
In my research into the #boysober trend, I found that it’s far more than a viral challenge. It’s a collective experiment in feminist renegotiation. Women are reframing abstention not as moral purity but as self-preservation, a deliberate refusal to participate in a dating economy that too often leaves them exhausted, unsafe, or digitally surveilled. Many #boysober creators speak openly about the cumulative fatigue of dating apps, the relentless emotional labour of managing male fragility and the omnipresence of technologically facilitated abuse.
The numbers bear this out: reports of tech-facilitated violence have soared globally. Women describe partners installing spyware, using GPS tracking, or threatening to leak intimate images, all forms of coercive control adapted to the digital age. In this context, stepping away from the dating marketplace isn’t about prudishness; it’s an act of survival.
Yet, as with any online feminist movement, #boysober exists in tension. Some critics see echoes of neoconservatism*, a regression to individualism and purity culture dressed in feminist language. Others view it as a radical refusal of male-centred validation, a way of reclaiming emotional bandwidth and self-worth. As I’ve argued elsewhere, the truth likely lies somewhere in between. It’s both a response to patriarchy and a product of it: a movement shaped by the very digital architectures that commodify desire.
*So, normally, I can approximate some vague understanding of this kind of progressive psychobabble, having been steeped in it my whole life. However, I literally had no idea what, if any, connection could be made between third-wave feminism and neoconservatism, which, in my understanding and in popular discourse, is primarily fixated on American foreign policy.
Related: Physician: Libs Experiencing ‘9/11-Style’ Trauma After MAGA Takeover
So I consulted the academic literature and discovered that neoconservatism subverts feminism by denying the Marxist class struggle, which underpins the feminist struggle, in the service of promoting capitalism — or something to that effect.
The details don’t really have to matter as much as a trendy label to glom onto your opponents.
Via Nature (emphasis added):
Contemporary feminism is currently at a crossroads, facing a concerted onslaught from both neoliberal and neoconservative ideologies. While these ideologies are inherently different—neoliberalism often appropriates feminist language to serve capitalist ends, and neoconservatism typically attacks feminist principles—they similarly reinforce the traditional role of families as providers of welfare. This crisis of alienation in feminism is characterized by three key factors: the gender divisions brought about by feminism’s shift to identity politics, the obscuring of feminist critique of capitalism by the spread of commercialization, and the instrumentalization of feminism in politics. These challenges have resulted in increased class antagonism and the further marginalization of lower-income women, reinforcing one another. To address this multifaceted crisis, a return to Marxist thought is deemed necessary for women’s liberation. The historical foundation of women’s issues can be traced back to class oppression, which stems from the primacy of material production over reproductive labor. In this context, gender oppression becomes an instrument that perpetuates class oppression. Only by interpreting women’s bodily autonomy and power from the perspective of material life and class reproduction, and by uniting various social forces against capitalism with practical actions, can feminism regain its vitality.
To my mind, this is what happens when over-educated ditzes are given a virtually unlimited font of government grant money to write masturbatory navel-gazing articles — destined, again, to be read only by an extremely tiny minority of the population, albeit one that has enjoyed outsize influence over the culture for many, many decades.
Indeed, as you can only rejigger the same talking points to promulgate your very narrowly-focused niche ideology, and when getting your “work” published is necessary to remain in good standing in your profession and to justify the continued influx of cash for your state-sponsored enterprise, manufacturing new angles, no matter how far-fetched, is essential.
