Do Men Still Need Women?: Part Two - The Lure of AI Girlfriends and Other Proxies
This is Part 2 of a three-part series on the tragic breakdown between the sexes. Part 1 can be found here.
Beyond the MGTOW movement, which stands for “Men Going Their Own Way” (away from women), that we explored in the first article of this series, technology is also increasingly and frighteningly pulling men away from forming healthy relationships with women. And the implications of these distracting lures — porn, virtual girlfriends and customizable female sex robots — spells disaster, not only for hope of a potential and productive truce in the war between the sexes — one that could lead to a revival of marriage — but perhaps also for the future of humanity.
Increasingly, men are being lured away from potential life-long marriage partners — flesh and blood women — by lifelike AI-based substitutes. This invariably begins with online porn and sex dolls and then graduates to AI-enhanced virtual girlfriends and newly customizable AI-enabled female sex robots. If the latter sounds like absurd science fiction, wake up. They are already here and becoming extremely sophisticated by the day, thanks to overwhelming market demand (more on that later).
Simply put, if a man can create the enticing woman of his dreams — preferred body proportions, hair and eye color; a soothing voice; a submissive attitude that is forever complimentary (fawning even), that never argues or nags, that is eternally young and always ready for sex, and that will never leave him or cost him a penny in alimony or child support — what chance will real women have?
That’s the question that society will soon be grappling with, ready or not.
According to MGTOW men, women have themselves to blame for it all — especially after 60 years of radical feminism’s push to slander men as toxic, and after being dragged through divorce courts that overwhelmingly favor women and that have consequently left too many men penniless and lonely.
This YouTube video, which includes the feminist battle cry of “24/7 baby machines so that men can live out their picket fence dreams” is just one among hundreds of similarly themed ones MGTOW men routinely roast online to make their point about women and grow their movement.
Young men, too, have been traumatized by the recent #MeToo movement. Many who were coddled by helicopter parents suffer from crippling confidence issues, leading to a failure to launch. Thanks to Bidenomics, 46.5 percent of young adults in the United States between the ages of 18 and 29 are living with their parents. In fact, a 2022 Pew Research Center study found that student debt and rising housing costs among the reasons why young Americans are far more likely to live in multigenerational households than 50 years ago.
Many of these are young men mostly living with their single moms, sleeping in their childhood bedrooms or dwelling in makeshift basement apartments that provide them some illusion of “adulting.”
Even if this weren’t the case, the isolation born of the smartphone era, followed by the COVID-19 pandemic that resulted in the expansion of remote learning and remote work, has left so many of these young men lacking proper social skills. A recent viral video shared on X illustrated the painful dilemma today’s young men face when asking a woman on a date in comparison to a previous, more confident generation of men. In short, today’s young men don’t have the first clue.
man… pic.twitter.com/Ht9zONHLok
— shoe (@shoe0nhead) December 13, 2023
Porn and Virtual Girlfriends
An overwhelming amount of evidence reveals that Millennials and Gen Z are the two loneliest generations to date. The latter, who were raised mostly in isolationism and with an emphasis on convenience enabled by tech, occupy too much of their basement-dwelling time playing online video games, watching porn or spending time on dating apps, where they are frustrated by women who reject them at far higher rates than vice versa.
In fact, 2024 Tinder statistics show that the majority of women swipe right (in approval of a male), about 1 in 20 times (5 percent), while men swipe right at a rate of every second woman (53 percent). So 95 percent of men are routinely passed over — many of them good men who are left to their own devices.
Is it any wonder, then, that so many turn to porn, the gateway to more sophisticated virtual AI female proxies? Currently, 35 percent of all downloads from the internet in the United States are pornographic and the issue is growing, according to the site Earthweb. This highly problematic since, among other social ills, porn is associated with a 30 percent decrease in commitment, lower relationship quality and double the divorce rates in marriage.
Furthermore, according to data from Pew Research, in 2022, 63 percent of men were single compared to just 34 percent of women. The report also revealed that men had fewer close friends than women.
All of this makes them ripe for the picking by companies peddling porn, virtual AI girlfriends and all manner of unnatural ungodly proxies. It’s no wonder, for instance, that next-level substitutions like Replika, a popular app that allows men to design perfect virtual girlfriends, have become obscenely successful.
According to NDTV, Replika has more than 10 million users currently. The app saw a 35 percent increase in users during the COVID-19 pandemic, and a Replika-compiled report revealed that users have admitted to falling in love, engaged in “relationships,” and have even “married” their AI partners. The report also noted that men have admitted to feeling less attractive, more self-conscious and lonely.
This YouTube video makes clear that, “Socially, the increasing reliance on AI for companionship can impact traditional human relationships and societal norms.”
Sex Robots Ready to Fill the Void
Jeanette Winterson has spent a great deal of time researching and writing about just these kinds of issues. Her most recent book, “12 Bytes: How We Got Here. Where We Might Go Next,” pools that research into 12 short essays that demonstrate the impact of AI on the way we live.
According to Salvo Magazine, “The book’s most significant contribution comes from Winterson’s research into the burgeoning field of sexual robotics.” Tragically, the physical AI robots that companies are developing and marketing to men today are being offered as an endgame solution, one where men no longer need women for the basic fundamentals but can nevertheless feel loved, accepted and emotionally supported.
The takeaway for feminists here is that while they were busy fighting and demonizing men, men have adapted tech to fill a void that, in essence, will increasingly make women mostly irrelevant.
Liberty Vittert, a data science professor at Washington University-St. Louis, has based her work on this phenomenon. She is of the mindset that highly sophisticated physical AI robots that go beyond today’s models and that are capable of satiating every male need will be available within just 10 years, according to a report in the U.K.’s Guardian.
Winterson told The Western Journal that these robots, “who never have a bad day” and are conveniently tailored to the whims of men, are also customizable for optimal sexual pleasure. They will also look and feel like real women, warm to the touch and virtually indistinguishable from flesh-and-blood women.
If that reality doesn’t send you into a panic, this fact just might: a growing lucrative rental market in Europe, China and Japan already exists for men who desire one-night stands with these robots.
In other words, tomorrow is already here.
“The proof that physical AI robots will ultimately be normalized in our society successfully comes from the successful normalization of dating sites and apps today. Where it used to be that no one wanted to admit to meeting their partner online, now everybody does,” Vittert emphasized. “The embarrassing element is gone for good. You can expect the same thing to happen with these robots.
Where once these robots were meant to be an interim solution, men are actually transitioning them into being the endgame.”
The Fate of Our Species
As frightening as all of that sounds, keep in mind that these female proxies are only the latest threat to the perpetuation of our species. Birth rates have been plummeting since 2014, down an average of 2 percent per year, according to The National Center Of Health Statistics. By 2018, the expected number of births per woman in the United States fell to 1.73.
Declining birthrate spells disaster. pic.twitter.com/SHj0GBIbQk
— Laura J Wellington (@TheFourStarDiet) May 8, 2024
A recent CDC report revealed that the fertility rate of women in our nation has now hit its lowest in 100 years at 1.6 children per every 1,000 females, ages 15-44, per provisional data.
That falls well below the required replacement rate of 2.1. According to the National Library of Medicine, “female infertility contributes to only 35% of overall infertility cases.” Poor diets, environmental factors, stress and parabens are some of the stand-out contributors to female infertility.
At the same time, sperm quality in U.S. men has been falling for decades. A landmark study and paper released in 1992 by the British Medical Journal revealed that average sperm counts had halved in men without a history of infertility between 1940 and 1990.
A more recent study conducted by the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City picked up where that study left off. As reported by Newsweek, the new study, which took place between January 2005 and April 2021, showed that while sperm count is decreasing in men, so is its general quality in terms of “ejaculate volume, average concentration, motility — the ability of sperm to swim the right way — and total motile count.”
That study was based on 176,706 sperm samples from 3,532 men aged between 19 and 38 from Palo Alto, Los Angeles, Westwood, International Nordic Cryo Bank Denmark, Indianapolis, Cambridge, New York, Houston and Spokane.
The trajectory that we are on may result in zero sperm production in men by 2045, according to Shanna Swan, an environmental and reproductive epidemiologist at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York. In other words, no more children will be born to the human race. Swan penned in her book, “Countdown,” the following warning, “The current state of reproductive affairs can’t continue much longer without threatening human survival.”
The Way Forward Is Backward
“Gen Z is expected to have the lowest marriage rate overall. And yet, God created us to be social creatures. Gen Z is suffering and they are doing it alone because they mistakenly view suffering as part of marriage when it is really just a part of life, of which a good marriage can bring comfort,” JP De Gance, the founder and president of Communio, told The Western Journal. He is also co-author of the book, “Endgame: The Church’s Strategic Move to Save Faith and Family in America.”
De Gance argued that we need to reframe relationships between men and women properly in obedience to God’s true intention. “Men and women aren’t each other’s enemies and in displacing the blame wrongly [Feminism vs. MGTOW], it is working out for neither,” De Gance said. “We need to bring them back together. We need to put marriage back together.”
De Gance ultimately correlates the collapse of faith in the United States with the collapse of marriage. He told The Christian Post that “Research from The Marriage and Religion Research Initiative shows most adults under 35 today were not raised in a household with married parents. In contrast, the 1970 US Census shows 40% of U.S. households were married with children under 18 living in the home. As of 2023, that number dropped to 17.9%.
“This tragic collapse in marital love fuels a legion of other social ills — from shorter life spans to generational poverty to increased mental illness and the epidemic of loneliness,” according to De Gance in ChurchLeaders. The impact builds on itself, harboring longstanding implications.
Relying on men to fly solo, without devoted women and helpmates by their sides as God intended (Genesis 2:18-22), ensures they fly wrongly — and into a perfect storm of their own making. It’s the one gathering as grim circumstances are met by soulless tech solutions, a deadly combination that may ultimately lead to a completely new and frightening reality for human beings.
The choice before us — men and women together — is whether we head back down the healthy, Godly path or a destructive Godless one. At present, we are teetering on the brink of the latter. But we ultimately must turn back to go forward.
Click here to read Part 3.
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