One half of a Generation Uncoupled

Generation Uncoupled: America’s New Gender Divide and the Crisis of Human Connection

Author: Daniel Cox

Harmony (2026). $28 (hardcover) $13.99 (eBook)

***

Americans presently coupled have been known to compare their situation to that of the refugees on the last helicopter out of the U.S. Embassy in Saigon in 1975. In his Generation Uncoupled, Daniel Cox, a survey researcher at the American Enterprise Institute who is married with children, looks down from the chopper upon American inter-sex relations, especially young people dating. It is hard to avoid despair.

The book is not perfect. It focuses much more on social problems caused by men and boys than by women and girls, perhaps as a simple consequence of human biology. Men are physically capable of inflicting greater and more visible injury on women than women are on men, and criminal conviction statistics indicate that male-inflicted harms are vastly more likely to rise to the level of punishable public concern than the reverse.

This isn’t to say Cox’s analyses are not useful or not an important addition to the debate over young men and women in America. Indeed, I would probably recommend the book to young men who want a greater intellectual understanding of their female fellows. But I fear young women hoping to discover the reverse will be disappointed.

Half a tango

Social media comes in for much of the blame for why American youths came to slouch toward Seoul. (South Korea’s political war of the sexes is infamous and gave birth to the “4B Movement” in which women pledge not to have relations with men or mother children.) Podcasts (Whatever and Fresh & Fit are criticized by name) are identified as serving up anti-woman material. And the decline of male-only real-world spaces (which, the author is at pains to explain, is not exclusively the fault of feminism), sends young men with few social connections spiraling into an internet milieu designed to turn them into misogynists.

I waited eagerly to discover what forces might have played into women’s part in the sex-separation tango; after all, politically the evidence is that young (overwhelmingly single) women have rocketed toward the left rather than young men having moved at all toward the political right (except perhaps to select Donald Trump as the lesser of two evils in the 2024 U.S. presidential election). I was disappointed in that I found little more than endorsements for institutional progressivism; for instance, I do not believe the name Alex Cooper (host of the female-focused Call Her Daddy podcast, which is notorious for its anti-male rhetoric and on which then-Vice President Kamala Harris appeared in 2024) appears in the text.

Thus, men defending themselves online against the accusation they were predators implied by the meme that women would rather be alone with a bear than a male human becomes problematic, especially since some men reacted most inappropriately. Likewise, #MeToo is remembered as a heroic coming-together of violated women: “a clear and positive vision for change.”

Men’s concerns about how it translated into policy, especially infringements on due process and social-media driven destruction of reputations, are dismissed. “Instead of coalescing around a shared vision, many young men sought to distance themselves from the movement,” wrote Cox, as if a shared vision were on offer, which I find not in evidence.

And women’s increasing desire to “Shout Your Abortion” is stated as a sort of inevitable consequence of conservatives’ refusal to accede to institutional progressivism’s demand for ever looser regulation of the practice. Perhaps, since Cox is a pollster, this is a case of the pollster’s fallacy that “vox populi, vox dei”; since public opinion moved, it must be correct. Or perhaps, as the chapter title “Imperiled Progress” seems to suggest, the project is capital-P Progressive.

Institutional decline

Consider the question of institutions. Like his AEI colleague Yuval Levin, Cox presents the decline of institutions as among the principal causes of our present discontent. And like Levin, he is right to do so, though it raises as many questions as it answers.

Consider the decline of “union halls,” which Cox explicitly mentions as a formerly male-dominated space that has retreated alongside veterans’ organizations and the former Boy Scouts. I will certainly not dispute that economic change drove the Long Decline in union membership, but unions themselves do bear some of the responsibility for making the institutions less hospitable to more nonideological (or, heaven forefend, conservative) men.

Following the rise of the New Left, a movement once dominated by private-sector tradesmen (some of whom were very progressive for their times) was increasingly dominated by government-sector workers, who are increasingly college-educated women. Of course the union hall, the representative center of the union movement, would stop being a (mostly) male refuge when unionism itself chose to feminize, even if that choice was somewhat enforced. As unions have become just another Everything Leftist nonprofit faction, it makes them even worse as male refuges because Everything Leftism privileges women’s interests (as interpreted by Everything Leftism). It’s a vicious spiral.

Likewise, it will be hard to rebuild religious institutions since so many of them had such massive misconduct scandals in the late 20th and early 21st century and because openness to religious belief itself has declined, in part because the scandals revealed the religious institutions to have been perhaps less than honest in their expressed beliefs. Without belief, which no one has figured out how to revive on a mass scale, the church community is hollow.

Pairing, or not

So in closing one turns to the “uncoupled” half of Generation Uncoupled. I have criticized Cox for (perhaps understandably, and perhaps reasonably) focusing on the progressive-friendly story that young men are the drivers of inter-sexual troubles in the face of young women’s desires only for personal safety and social progressivism. But he does transgress one major left-wing sacred cow and deserves credit for it: he openly and explicitly questions the sufficiency of consent as “the primary rule of America’s sexual ethic.” (In philosophy, a “sufficient” condition guarantees the truth of an outcome; in this case, America’s sexual ethic contends that consent alone is sufficient to make an act moral, rather than merely necessary to make it legal.)

It is about time someone tried to express, in print, where elite liberals might read it, that consent alone is an insufficient basis on which to build a culture around sexuality, which is an inherently dangerous thing. What passes for sexual ethics driven by major post-sexual revolution progressive institutions like SIECUS: Sex Ed for Social Change (or, more problematically, elite universities where young men and young women are first living away from adult supervision and in the presence of alcohol and other drugs) hangs more on consent than consent can reasonably be expected to uphold.

Cox might have understood young men’s worries about the post-#MeToo policy changes as a consequence of men recognizing the insufficiency of momentary, immediately revocable consent as a guidepost for proper sexual behavior but lacking the personal will or intellectual armaments to derive for themselves a better one. A firmer, more unchanging moral ground—perhaps God for the religious, or perhaps lasting commitment for the secularist, is needed.

Cox proposes new ethics, which he calls “socially integrated courtship,” based on mutual obligations between men and women, built from social groups and real-world interactions rather than algorithms. For that he should be commended, especially by those of us who like Cox himself used those social groups and real-world interactions in our own lives. Likewise and also commendably, he calls upon men to conduct themselves more respectably, especially in their online interactions.

In essence, and this current runs throughout the book, Cox suggests men and women would do better to act towards women and men as if they liked and respected them. It’s a good place to start, even if the focus falls too heavily on one side of the ledger.

Source: https://capitalresearch.org/article/one-half-of-a-generation-uncoupled/