“I don’t even want to go on any dates anymore. They just feel like a chore.” I heard this from my twenty-four-year-old male patient this week. I hear it frequently from men everywhere. I hear it in bars, at professional conferences, over coffee at lunch. I hear it because American women have become undatable.

American women today suffer from a combination of emotional and characterologic pathology that renders them unfit to be romantic partners to men. On the emotional side, they are angry, anxious, and dysregulated. Men find them exhausting and not at all fun to be around. In addition to their unpleasant emotions, men must also contend with their toxic personality traits: narcissism, ingratitude, and an overbearing and judgmental attitude that appears to be constant. American women approach dating as a fact and fault-finding mission, with a degree of arrogance that can only come from a profound absence of self-awareness. They have no idea what their role is in the encounter or how to properly support the man who is leading the date. They act as saboteurs rather than facilitators. Most men have tired of this.

Certainly, the failings of men play their own role in the dating disaster of today’s America. I have written about these failings extensively here and in my first book, United States of Fear. Masculinity is in decline in the West; without it, dating cannot be successful. Strength, courage, mastery, and honor are the essential traits of masculinity, according to Jack Donovan, author of The Way of Men, and few men display those traits today. Yet equally few women display the essential traits of femininity, either. Donovan explains that to find a woman desirable, a man requires nothing more than for her to be pretty, carefree, and charming. Today’s American women cannot even meet that expectation.

I went to dinner recently at a restaurant in Westwood, near the UCLA campus. Every customer appeared to be a university student. I noticed a group of girls walk past me as they got up from their table. They all looked and dressed alike: oversized tee shirts, baggy jeans, non-styled hair, no make-up. They appeared to be poorly dressed boys. I turned to the woman I was with and commented, “They don’t look attractive at all.” She replied, “That’s the current style. I don’t think they’re trying to look attractive.” Observing the rest of the young women around me, I saw that she was right. Most of the others resembled them. Appearance, though, is not the only way in which American women are not trying to be attractive.

The typical American woman today projects limitless entitlement, ruthless competitiveness, and advanced emotional incontinence that makes it all but impossible for a man to tolerate her, much less enjoy her company. A recent Instagram video that went viral showed a French man walking the streets of Los Angeles explaining how he had just walked out on his first date at a restaurant with a local woman after observing that her lengthy food restrictions and preferences eliminated nearly every option on the menu. “Au revoir, Jennifer,” he concluded. An American woman living in Russia posted a thread of complaints on social media after failing to get to a second date with any local man after six months in Moscow. “One man told me at the end of the first date that I wasn’t attractive enough for him to go out with a second time. I reminded him that I earn more money than him and have a better apartment—an apartment that I pay for with my own income.” Additional comments made it clear that she was entirely unaware of the expectations of local men regarding both feminine dress and body habitus, and that Russian men couldn’t care less what she makes or how nice her apartment is. They want a pretty, charming, carefree woman and aren’t hesitant to say so to her face. American men want the same thing but don’t have the clarity of mind or the courage to say so. They have become pussified.

I believe the root cause of this problem in American women is environmental. It is a problem of bad values. Women in this country have been taught that looks don’t matter, that career is more important than family, that men are either dangerous or weak and incapable, and that the world would be a better place if only women were in charge. Everything they are taught is wrong. Everything they are taught is a lie. And the fault lies with schools, media, feminism, and parents. These institutions and individuals have corrupted their minds, their emotions, and their characters. They have trained women to live in a fantasy world of us vs them, where the “me” is more important than the “we,” where one’s feelings dictate truth and goodness, and even virtue itself. These toxic teachings have rendered women developmentally arrested and incapable of adult partnerships with men.

This tragedy harms not only men but women. Men need women, but so do women need men, despite what feminism has taught. American men today have largely decided they would simply rather be alone than continue to feel battered and exhausted by an unending stream of bad dates with unpleasant women. No healthy person wants to play with a porcupine. 

Mark McDonald, M.D.

Psychiatrist and author of United States of Fear: How America Fell Victim to a Mass Delusional Psychosis and Freedom From Fear: A 12 Step Guide to Personal and National Recovery