The Social World

Category: Family

  • Eclipse of the boomers

    Eclipse of the boomers

    Shortly after Christmas, the oldest baby boomer will turn 80. The 75 million people born between 1946 and 1964 who have dominated the American political imagination since the Eisenhower administration are starting to fade from the scene.

    Anyone who has felt oppressed by the baby boom – and this includes virtually every non-senior citizen in the country – will complain that it’s about frickin’ time. If the boomers are only now losing their influence, they long ago lost their marbles. What was the archetypal boomer moment of recent years? Probably Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign. But maybe it was the indignant boycott of Spotify by Neil Young and Joni Mitchell over the Covid “misinformation” to which Joe Rogan allegedly gave vent in 2022. Although this pair of Woodstock-era Canadian singer-songwriters are slightly too old to belong to the baby boom proper, the crusade to which they were summoning their fans was a perfect example of the boomer style, with its sanctimony, its performative dudgeon, its imputation of ignorance and immorality to anyone who disagrees – all in the service of a questionable proposition.

    Spotify executives must have agonized for nanoseconds over how to respond to this “either-he-goes-or-we-go” ultimatum. Should they cut loose Rogan, the most listened-to talker in the fastest-growing audio-streaming genre, with a political influence to match? Or should they part with two folk singers whose Spotify fanbase (however numerous their listeners elsewhere) probably consists of 11 septuagenarians sniffling in front of their toasters in retirement communities across Arizona? Hmm. The Spotify execs didn’t need a weatherman to know the way the wind blows.

    Looking at the boomers these days, it is natural to ask how anybody could ever have been pushed around by such a feckless and unconvincing bunch. The answer is an actuarial one. It wasn’t the boomers’ powers of persuasion that enabled them to rally the country behind a succession of dim ideas, from complex derivatives to the Iraq war. It’s just that they were numerous enough to be demographically invincible. If the boomers wanted something, they got it, by force of numbers, and this was as true when they were six as it was when they were 60.

    Before they could even talk, society was being reconfigured around them, for better and for worse. By 1964, all 75 million boomers had been born – and the United States had only 191 million people in it. Boomers made up about 40 percent of the country. What sort of parents wouldn’t have voted for a vast expansion of secondary and university education to speed their kids’ way into the upper-middle class? On the other hand, a bumper crop of 18-year-olds stretching as far as the eye can see did nothing to reduce Lyndon Johnson’s crazy ambition to fight a war in Vietnam, where tens of thousands of boomers would die.

    Although no one ever sat down and calculated it, this critical number – 40 percent – would give a rough idea of baby-boom power as the generation passed through the various stages of life. Boomers started voting in the 1966 elections, and by the time Ronald Reagan chased Jimmy Carter from the White House in 1980, they were casting 40 percent of the votes. Two years later they were at 43 percent.

    The boomers were sometimes polarized on major issues, it is true. But on any matter that united them, it required a near-unanimous resistance movement to stop them. That is why politicians made the country liberal on sex in the 1970s, when the boomers were mostly in their twenties; business-friendly in the 1980s, when the boomers were mostly in their thirties; and investment-friendly – starting with Bill Clinton’s second term – in the 1990s, when the oldest boomers were entering their fifties.

    This was important, because the boomers’ command over the economy would wind up more impressive than their command over the political system. When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, the boomers were between 25 and 43, entering their most energetic adult years just as America was being called on to write the rules for the global economy. When they were in their prime, in the prosperous 1990s, they made up well over half the workforce.

    But now the boomers, submerged beneath immigration and colliding with mortality, make up only about 20 percent of the population. Each year, 1.8 million of them die, and that number is set to rise steeply.

    This is going to have a startling consequence. The baby-boom vision of what American society is about has been embraced almost unanimously by all society’s institutions since about 1968, when the oldest boomers were graduating from college. Boomers quarrel over the details of this vision, but not over its basic tenets, which seem to be: 1) The main thing that happened in American history is slavery; 2) There is not much difference between men and women; 3) Youth is the best part of life.

    Through their preponderance in the marketplace and the voting booth, boomers have been able to sell these propositions to the American public as the merest common sense. But they are no such thing. For most of American history they were considered outright untruths, and most non-boomers probably think of them as such today.

    There is going to come a moment when the boomers’ political power falls below the threshold necessary to prop up this vision of things. It could happen before the next election. And then something is going to happen that no one has given much thought to: control over our politics and our culture is going to pass to a non-baby boom generation – perhaps a much younger one – that looks at the world in its own, totally different way.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s December 8, 2025 World edition.

  • The science of marriage

    “Those whom God hath joined together, let no man put asunder.” With this stern admonition, the Church has long been a fervent defender of marriage. But as religion has faded as a social force, so too has marriage. 

    Does it much matter if people choose to shack up together instead of tying the knot? What is lost if some men want to be incels or some women decide a husband is a bothersome surplus to their needs? The problem is that all lifestyles alternative to marriage serve to undermine it. And like other major social institutions, marriage is not some arbitrary cultural construct like a federal holiday. Rather, it rests on genetically shaped behaviors that evolution has written into the human genome because of their survival value. Suppress or subvert these behaviors and you risk consequences.

    Evolution’s imperatives are deeply laid. Step back just a few beats in evolutionary time, to when early humans were exploring the African savannahs, using their wits to evade stronger predators. The human skull needed to expand, but the mother’s pelvis was a limitation. To pass through it, babies had to be born with their heads still small, which meant prematurely. These helpless infants were more likely to survive if two parents were around, unlike with the other great apes where the mother alone raises the offspring. Evolution supported the human family unit with two clever biological innovations, also unknown among other apes. Female chimpanzees sport visible swellings when they are ready to conceive but ovulation in humans became largely concealed, so a man wanting to ensure his paternity had to stick around until the first signs of pregnancy. And to encourage further association, evolution arranged for women to be sexually receptive all the time, not just at estrus.

    The pair bond between man and woman induces both partners to share in the arduous task of raising children. It’s this set of genetically shaped behaviors that is formalized in the cultural institution of marriage. The nature of the pair bond was somewhat modified with the advent of polygamy in tribal and successor societies, where powerful men were able to accrue many wives. Genghis Khan, the world champion in this pursuit, labored prodigiously in the large harems he assembled throughout the lands he conquered – and some 16 million men today carry his Y chromosome. But polygamy is destabilizing. For some men to have many wives means that many men have none. Large numbers of wifeless young men, with no stake in society, create problems. The usual solution was to march them off to war with neighboring states. But warfare doesn’t always turn out as expected.

    Monogamy first came to prominence in ancient Greece and Rome, and was spread by the Church throughout the Roman empire. So successful was the one man/one woman principle to the formation of stable polities that it eventually became the custom across most of the world. Marriage and monogamy are both stabilizing measures developed by culture in support of the behaviors prescribed by evolution. The human family is the best social structure that evolution could contrive for raising children. What happens when we mess with this structure and the institution of marriage that supports it?

    The answer, not to be overdramatic, is extinction – or at least a road that leads directly there. In almost all countries outside of Africa, fertility is in rapid decline. The total fertility rate in both the US and UK has dropped more than 20 percent since 2010 and last year reached all-time lows of 1.60 children per woman’s lifetime (US) and 1.41 for British women. For a population to sustain itself at constant size, a fertility rate of 2.1 is required.

    Bad things happen to declining populations. A dwindling workforce has to support an ever-heavier burden of retirees. Tax rates rise, hope for the future falls. Defense is imperiled if the army cannot meet its recruitment goals. Once a population slips below a fertility rate of about 1.4 for 20 years or so, it reaches a point of no return: retirees consume the resources young families would need to raise more children. Marriage is the context in which people have children. Some 80 percent of children born in the US and UK are born to married parents. People who cohabit have far fewer children. Children fare best when both a mother and father share in their upbringing. The declining rate of marriage is one of a nexus of factors that have depressed fertility. People are starting families later, or stopping at one child. One reason is the expense of raising children. Another is that women are now better educated than men and can easily find jobs, often choosing careers over childcare.

    In World War One, women handed out white feathers on the street to men presumed too cowardly to risk their lives on the front line. Should men now be distributing white feathers to women who decline to bear children, a social duty just as crucial for society’s survival as is military service? Well, no. Women cannot ethically be dragooned into bearing more children than they want. But the obvious incentives just don’t seem to work. South Korea has put in place every pro-natalist policy you can think of, from direct cash payments to housing subsidies and government-funded matchmaking. Its fertility rate hit 0.72 in 2023 and is projected to fall as low as 0.65 this year. Last year, 150 schools in South Korea reported that they had no new first-year children. Unless childbearing is somehow made a more welcome choice for women, and marriage comes back into popularity, each future generation will be smaller than its predecessor.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s December 8, 2025 World edition.

  • Beautiful interiors can’t guarantee a beautiful marriage

    Beautiful interiors can’t guarantee a beautiful marriage

    I remember poring over the photos when they first appeared in Architectural Digest in early 2023. Even back then, before Lily Allen wrote what Rolling Stone called “the most brutal album of the year,” I knew in my gut that her marriage to that actor guy she met on Raya – whatshisface? David Strangerbeard? – wouldn’t last. Because looking at the pictures of their house made me feel queasy. There was something off about it. It just wasn’t right. It didn’t bode well.

    It’s not that the house wasn’t gorgeous. It was – and still is – spectacular. A double-width brownstone in the slouchiest artisanal urban village on Earth: Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn. A house which was put back on the market for just under $8 million the same week as Allen’s new album West End Girl’s release in October.

    Those vast double-aspect Georgian-paned windows. And that’s all before we even get to the inside. There’s a green velvet-tufted-gay-hairdresser-orgy-sofa, a pick ‘n’ mix clash of patterns, the patterned wallpaper, the floors. Carpet in the bathroom! Wall-to-wall plush! The absolute cheek of it.

    The house is an exercise in trans-Atlantic retro-maximalism at the aesthetic’s peak-bling phase. It’s Edith Wharton meets Claus Von Bülow’s dead wife with insouciant accents of Disney-princess bordello. It’s an object of beauty specific to its time and place, which was 2023. But no one who saw that house in print ever forgot it. Seriously, I’ve done a vast survey using a sample group of six women at a dinner party.

    But let me get to the heart of the matter. There was always something wrong about the house. Something dead behind the eyes. I felt queasy looking at the pictures. Didn’t you? I thought, “Eeeesh.” Human suffering radiated from the pictures on the page. The writing was on the wallpaper.

    The Lily Allen/David Harbour saga is not about a break-up, nonmonogamy, the state of marriage, female outrage or male selfishness. It’s not even really about the songs on Allen’s album, which are catchy but only in the way that an entertaining musical is. Once the story – that Harbour sought an open marriage Allen didn’t really want – ceases to matter, the songs won’t seem so brilliant. The real story is that brownstone: the unhappy marital home that became a haunting piece of art and an object lesson for the (desperate?) housewives of America.

    What the story of that house reveals about the rise of interiors porn is fascinating in a broader cultural sense. In London, the city where I live, just as much as in New York City, the house-beautiful cult is like a virus. It seems to grow in inverse proportion to the eternally dismal economic forecast. The house obsession never stops. For example, it has become commonplace for people where I live to regard their homes as set pieces and brand extensions rather than places where they live with their families. In my neighborhood, middle-class professionals think nothing of spending several years searching out, buying, gutting and meticulously doing up houses at enormous expense, not just to their bank balances but to their sanity and happiness. I have known not just one but several intelligent, educated women (always, always women, invariably mothers) who have abandoned and/or put on hold hard-won careers in order to “project manage” epic back-to-the-studs renovations that stretch on like Russian novels.

    These women suffer and starve for periods of four to six years, sometimes more, because during these gut-jobs they lose their minds and become boring to everyone around them – including themselves. They cannot think or talk about anything of substance: it’s all weighted drawers, cornices, granite grain and light fixtures. They begin to believe these things are, genuinely, a matter of life or death. Renovation brain is like baby brain but so much worse, for the obvious reason there’s no baby involved. I have seen the best minds of my generation lost to kitchen extensions. Truly! Did we all actually go to university to become volunteer construction project mangers in middle age? It’s insane.

    But surely no one actually believes that doing up a house is a substitute for meaningful work? Or that a perfect house makes for a perfect and harmonious family life? And yet, we do. Every generation falls for the same trick. Why?

    There’s something else driving the perfect-house obsession. It’s the same pernicious fallacy that made women of previous generations obsessed with cleanliness and germ-killing, and before that flower arranging and needlepoint. It’s the delusion that if you can just focus on the details, fuss and fuss and fuss, eventually you make everything perfectly perfect and shiny on the outside. The inside will naturally follow suit. But life and human relationships don’t work like that. As Allen found out.

    Having been through the wringer of divorce as both a child and an adult, I have moved house countless times and also been trapped in the marital home. I’ve done my fair share of renovating and agonizing over cabinet knobs, and here is what I have learned: beyond a modicum of comfort and space, the state of the family home is basically irrelevant to the state of the relationships that exist within it. Aesthetics are accessories to life, they are not love or art. They are not even water or food.

    What divorce forces you to acknowledge is that your perfect house won’t save you. It didn’t save me as a child any more than it did as a middle-aged woman who made the same mistake my mother did. Allen’s album is a hit because it’s a reckoning with this universal thought-trap. The cautionary tale of the perfect house. New furnishings, same blunder. Having said that, I’m all for wall-to-wall patterned carpet in the bathroom.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s November 24, 2025 World edition.

  • The elimination of motherhood

    The elimination of motherhood

    Scientists at the Oregon Health and Science University have created the beginnings of a baby using not human eggs, but skin cells. My reaction upon reading this news was to try to fold it up and tuck it away deep in some mental crevasse where I’d be sure never to see it again, because the implications are just too grim, the potential for suffering too much to bear.

    To create children who have never had a mother of any sort is to conjure Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World

    What the lab has done is devise a way to persuade human skin cells to behave like sex cells (eggs and sperm) and to divide using not only mitosis, which replicates all 46 chromosomes, but meiosis, which results in just 23. Once they’ve discarded half their chromosomes, the skin cells can then be fertilized with sperm, just as if they were human eggs. The scientists created 82 potential little skin cell babies this way and seven survived, dividing and developing, dutifully becoming embryos.

    A few days later, in accordance with embryo ethics, they were discarded and everyone involved proclaimed themselves satisfied, excited for the future. “We achieved something that was thought to be impossible,” said Professor Shoukhrat Mitalipov. “Exciting proof of concept!” said scientists around the world. According to the Economist, the future market for these skin cell eggs is so big and so potentially lucrative that already a great egg race has begun between different rival start-ups.

    From one perspective this is exciting news. If you can’t conceive using your own eggs, Mitalipov’s breakthrough means that one day you might still be able to have a biological baby of your own, however ancient you are, however unwell. It doesn’t have to be a skin cell you use to make your baby, as it happens: any cell will do. You could have a child born of your liver cells, or a pair of eyeball twins, why not? What it also means is that quite soon, and without any doubt, any two humans of the same biological sex will be able to make a baby out of their combined genetic material. Two men will be able to have their own genetic child, one of them donating a cell that cosplays as egg and is fertilized by the other’s sperm.

    And what this means then is that we’re on the verge of eliminating motherhood, quite breezily and easily and without much thought. In a few decades there might well be a rising tide of motherless children. I don’t just feel sentimentally sad about this, I feel dread and grief.

    From our very earliest days, humans have celebrated motherhood. The earliest known sculptures are “Venus figures,” often pregnant, all hips and breasts. The Venus of Hohle Fels, a pregnant female form carved from a mammoth tusk in Germany some 40,000 years ago, is the oldest known work of human art. Think of the mothers in literature, in lullabies, in paintings, in films. Now imagine a child born of a skin cell becoming gradually aware of mothers and the celebration of motherhood all around.

    “Where’s my mother?”

    “You never had one.”

    They say you can’t miss what you never had. I wish that were true. Samantha Weissing, an American woman who grew up with two decent fathers but no mother, has written: “I felt the loss. I felt the hole. As I grew, I tried to fill that hole with aunts, my dads’ lesbian friends and teachers. I remember asking my first-grade teacher if I could call her mom. I asked that question of any woman who showed me any amount of love and affection. It was instinctive. I craved a mother’s love even though I was well-loved.”

    But at least children who grow up apart from their biological mothers can go in search of them. At least they have mothers to find. To create children who have never had a mother of any sort is to conjure Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World:

    “In brief,” the Director summed up, “the parents were the father and the mother.” The smut that was really science fell with a crash into the boys’ eye-avoiding silence. “Mother,” he repeated loudly rubbing in the science; and, leaning back in his chair, “These,” he said gravely, “are unpleasant facts; I know it. But then most historical facts are unpleasant.”

    I recently heard a professor at the London School of Economics, Emily Jackson, speak about how rapidly embryo science is advancing. Professor Jackson had none of my qualms, but even she thought how strange it is that no one in Britain or in America seems to realize the significance of what’s being cooked up in labs, and how very serious the ethical, cultural and legal implications are. “My claim would be that developmental biology is raising issues that are just as significant as AI,” said Jackson. “We need people to be thinking about this.”

    Yes, we do. And I’ve been casting about trying to figure out who might best lead the way. It seems to me that it’s for Christians to fight this battle. Who cares more about motherhood than believers in a God who was born as a baby to a human mother? The Catholic Church, with Mary at its heart, should have spoken up at the first whisper of Mitalipov’s success. But to date there’s been no stirring message from Pope Leo or any comment from our Archbishop of Westminster. The Catholic Herald reported the story only as a “scientific breakthrough.”

    So, perhaps just because she’s in the news, I’ve unexpectedly, desperately, lit on the incoming Archbishop of Canterbury, Sarah Mullally, as my great hope. It’s a mistake to look for moral leadership from the muddled, anxious Church of England, I know, but Mullally has already spoken up against the assisted dying bill. She understands the speed with which a policy intended to benefit a suffering few can become a national tragedy. And more to the point, just as motherhood itself comes under threat, she will become the first mother ever to lead the C of E.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s October 27, 2025 World edition.

  • ‘Gender-affirming care’ is never justified

    ‘Gender-affirming care’ is never justified

    Even now, hundreds of thousands of ordinary Americans just assume that there is a vast and vulnerable cohort of kids who are born “trans” and need so-called “gender-affirming care.” They look at the protests and listen to progressive politicians and assume that there must be at least some evidence that pediatric medical transition helps children in distress.

    It would be unthinkable to have put children through all this for nothing, and for American medics to have gone along with it all. But the awful truth is that there is no evidence that allowing children to transition actually works in any meaningful sense. An analysis recently published in the Journal of Sex and Marital Therapy has finally cut through the noise with a simple but devastating tool: a calculator.

    And as you read the evidence and absorb its implications, consider also that the European Commission is about to propose new legislation that would allow any European citizen, of any age, to legally change gender without consulting a physician or getting their parents’ permission and support. And under the proposed legislation, any nation that objects would be subject to having all its EU funding cut off.

    The paper, by my colleague, Lauren Schwartz, a senior fellow at the non-profit Do No Harm, and M. Lal, uses the medical establishment’s own numbers to check its work. The conclusion is disturbing, suggesting that a medical scandal is unfolding on a scale that has been dangerously underappreciated.

    In short, the article shows that, even according to the standards of those who would help children to transition, there is simply no justification for the mass medicalization of healthy children under the guise of “gender-affirming care.”

    The harms are significant, including diminished bone density, cardiovascular disease and infertility

    The authors’ method is simple. First, they establish a clear baseline for the number of adolescents who meet gender activists’ own “clinical” criteria for gender dysphoria. They do this by synthesizing three major reviews co-authored by ten of the key figures behind the most recent World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) standards of care – the very guidelines cited by proponents of medical transition. These WPATH-aligned professionals estimate the prevalence of the clinical population to be around 4.6 to 7.5 per 100,000 individuals.

    Next, the authors compare these numbers with recent data on how many adolescents are actually being diagnosed and treated. They cite a study from this year in the journal JAMA Pediatrics which found that approximately 100 out of every 100,000 American adolescents received puberty blockers or cross-sex hormones between 2018 and 2022.

    The discrepancy between the clinical population and those receiving treatment is staggering – a gap greater than one order of magnitude. According to the field’s own standards, more than 92 percent of kids receiving these interventions fall outside the clinical threshold for severe gender-related distress. Yet these are also vulnerable, confused kids, often struggling with a multitude of behavioral health challenges.

    Lisa Littman was among the first researchers to observe such a troubling trend beyond baseline prevalence: a surge of adolescent girls suddenly identifying as transgender despite no earlier signs of gender-related distress.

    In 2018, she published a study based on parent reports, introducing the term “rapid-onset gender dysphoria.” Rather than sparking thoughtful inquiry within the field, her work was met with intense backlash.

    But Littman was on to something. Her early observations pointed to a powerful influence: the role of social contagion and online communities. These platforms often amplify certain narratives, contributing to a surge in self-identification that far exceeds the true clinical population.

    Moreover, this troubling trend isn’t just confined to the United States. Britain has seen a similar phenomenon with a rapid rise in diagnoses beyond any prior prediction. Another study from this year found a 50-fold increase in gender dysphoria diagnoses in UK primary care for children and young people between 2011 and 2021.

    The Schwartz and Lal analysis provides the chilling answer to what this really means: a profound shift from treating a small, well-defined clinical group to medicalizing a much larger, overwhelmingly non-clinical population. It’s no longer a vague feeling that “too many kids are being medicalized.” It is a specific, quantifiable crisis.

    Yet even among the minority of children who do fall within the clinical population, puberty blockers and hormones aren’t the answer. Multiple systematic reviews reveal no reliable evidence of benefit. The harms, however, are significant, including diminished bone density, cardiovascular disease and infertility – to name just a few.

    What these struggling kids need is psychosocial support and psychotherapy. In that regard, countries such as England, Finland and Sweden are now leading the way in restricting medicalization and focusing on psychological and psychiatric care, while around them many in the EU double down.

    Simply put, subjecting children to dangerous medical interventions in the name of “gender-affirming care” is never justified.

    The scale of the problem is no longer a matter of opinion; it’s a number. We now have the data to demand accountability and we must do just that. We must use this new evidence to ensure that we protect vulnerable children by returning to a standard of care that is cautious, ethical and, above all, evidence-based.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s October 27, 2025 World edition.

  • The reality of raising an autistic child

    The reality of raising an autistic child

    Although I disagree with Donald Trump’s and Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s suggestion that mothers who took Tylenol during pregnancy may have caused the huge rise of children born with autism in the US, I also can’t agree with the spate of articles and interviews that have followed – several by high-functioning autistic adults, others by parents of autistic children – basically saying it is great to be autistic. I understand that they are fearful that Trump’s idea of a “cure” could result in anyone with special needs being regarded as subnormal and a second-class citizen, but it’s not helpful, either, to pretend that autism is without its many frightful drawbacks.

    My son, 42, was diagnosed with Asperger syndrome on his 13th birthday in 1996. Then, not so much was known about the condition, and my ex-husband, my daughter and I went through hell wondering why my son was so difficult – and then dealing with his strange, often explosive behavior. I would invite children over to play with him and his older sister, but he seemed to regard them as an alien species and she would end up playing with both visiting children.

    When he went to kindergarten, in the room with all his peers, he would often put his hands over his ears and scream. He preferred to be alone in the corridor. When I asked why he didn’t like his companions he said: “They have squeaky voices” and imitated them. Instead of toys, he had his obsessions – balloons, then houseplants, the cartoon film Robin Hood, tarantulas. The obsessions seemed to give him as much pain as pleasure. The balloons burst or flew away or weren’t the right type. (One category he called “All March Down the Room Balloons.”) He would think a houseplant was dying when it wasn’t and scream with frustration, even grief, and throw the plant and its pot down.

    Aged 11, he announced: “My obsessions have ruined my life!” Years later, I recall his only real friend Peter, then 31, who also had Asperger’s, waiting with me in a car park for my son to turn up. Peter turned to me and said seriously: “We don’t want to have our obsessions. We’d rather not have them.”

    Their obsessions, their high anxiety, their misunderstanding of others’ talk and gestures and their inability to hold conversations, make even high-functioning autistic people isolated and unable to lead a calm, fulfilling life.

    My son’s condition causes him to reiterate the same obsessive stories going round and round in his head

    My son has tried several simple jobs such as cleaning in a supermarket, being a night porter in a hotel, working in a care home for the elderly, but has failed through misunderstanding the social behavior of his coworkers. (In the care home he was intimidated by the advances of what he called “yee-ha girls” – forward young female workers.)

    Much is made now of special interests and the genius of certain people with autism being able to concentrate on their great skills, but I wonder which of them wouldn’t sacrifice these just to have one proper friend. Peter no longer lives near my son, so he is mostly reliant on part-time carers, tolerant women of my age and his father’s elderly relatives. The overtures of a sweet local artist of his age were rejected.

    To be blunt, he is no further on with his contemporaries than he was as a child. His autism causes him to reiterate the same obsessive stories going round and round in his head, often about the past, even about dead relatives – such as my father – whom he has never met. How can most people relate to this? My son wants to marry and have a family but does not know how to go about it and says if the children don’t fit his criteria he won’t like them.

    And would anyone wish to live, as he does, with a terror of dragonflies, convinced they bite? Or with an exaggerated fear of certain local areas, making travel difficult because of a past misunderstanding with a bus driver or passenger? (Actually it is my son, over 6ft, sometimes shouting on a bus, who probably frightens other passengers.)

    And what about us mothers and fathers? In my experience, there are constant discussions and often blame between the parents of these children on how best to treat them. Studies show that 80 percent of parents of autistic children split up. The financial strain – difficulties getting funding for them – stress and emotional toll associated with raising any child with a disability are all contributing factors. There’s also the frequent problem of physical aggression, surely a manifestation of extreme frustration and surging hormones, when the autistic child reaches adolescence. At 14, my son would would often lash out at me, his father – we split up when he was eight – and his sister.

    And it can continue into adulthood. A friend’s nonverbal autistic adult son caused a knee injury to a carer which will never properly heal. Another friend’s adult autistic son, intelligent and articulate as my son also can be, smashed up his parents’ house during lockdown. My son once destroyed the staircase of a rented apartment and the police have been called because of his behavior. At 17 he was involuntarily hospitalized for 28 days and in his twenties was in a psychiatric unit. And what about nonverbal autistic adults who need the physical care normally given to babies? How much I admire parents and carers who have to deal with that.

    On the plus side, my son is a good artist who has sold paintings to strangers, he is an excellent cook and can perform hilarious imitations of people and situations. He likes to make meals for his three young nephews and has given them many well-thought-out gifts. He is in some ways more compassionate than I am to people who are bereaved.

    I will let him have the last word: “Some people with Asperger’s can do extremely well and have successful jobs. But autism, OCD and ADHD get in the way of learning and living life.”

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s October 13, 2025 World edition.

  • The decline of sex and the alpha male

    The decline of sex and the alpha male

    Not long ago, early in the morning in Washington DC, I walked past a construction site and a man in a yellow vest whistled at me. I laughed but what really struck me was how rare catcalling has become. Even construction workers, the cliché of crude male attention, have fallen silent as have, it turns out, moans of passion in bedrooms across America. According to new research, Americans have lost their libido – and not by a little.

    Only 37 percent of American adults reported having sex once a week or more, down from 55 percent in 1990. Across generations the pattern holds the same. Even within marriage, sex is increasingly confined to holidays. Weekly sex rates for married couples have fallen from 59 percent in the 1990s to below 49 percent today. Among young adults, the story is even grimmer: nearly a quarter of Americans aged 18 to 29 say they had no sex at all in the past year, double the rate of a decade ago.

    Bourgeois boredom, once the great engine of romance, has been numbed by endless scrolling. In the 19th century, Anna Karenina and Emma Bovary blew up their lives for affairs and a century later, Catherine Deneuve’s in Belle De Jour fled her perfect marriage by slipping into a brothel. They fled ennui, turning sex into a rebellion against the social norms and institutions. Over the years, sex was normalized and even adultery no longer shocked the parish priest. Today, middle-class boredom in American cities produces nothing but clicks. Modern Anna does not take reputational, emotional, digital risks by going out and meeting someone, nor does she leap onto the tracks for a lost love, she streams Netflix and chills.

    And can you blame her? Over the past decades, women’s emancipation went ahead, while men’s opportunities and success declined. The evidence is everywhere, starting with education, where boys’ academic performance has worsened at every level. Romantic relationships have always been asymmetric, typically a higher-status man with a lower-status woman. The reverse has never been the norm and exceptions only prove the rule. With emancipation, many women have climbed higher up the social ladder. Men, over the same period, have not only failed to keep pace but have slipped downward. The result is a dating market with too many successful women, too many failing men, and a crisis. If modern Anna’s options look like Tim from Tinder, why bother losing a night’s sleep?

    The crisis isn’t only in the statistics. It’s visible in the disappearance of small, if imperfect, social rituals that once signaled desire in public space, such as buying someone a drink at a bar. The old moral codes are gone, but they are being replaced with new ones: the parish priest has given way to HR, sexual harassment trainings and viral tweets. Rules have multiplied around sex from verbal consent protocols to workplace regulations. The result is that people grow afraid of the consequences, and sex hardly feels casual, any longer.

    The me-too movement that started with a noble aim to prevent sexual abuse, assault and discrimination against women, predictably overreached into structuring desire. The courts of public opinion declare people guilty and turn them into enemies of the society without giving them a fair trial. Some in America have forgotten that everyone is innocent until proven guilty. If in the Soviet Union it was your neighbor who brought up your careless word or unapproved behavior to the authorities, now it can be a girl you met at a party ten years ago posting on X.

    Not only have politics around sex gone wrong but so have my friends. They’ve organized the search for partners instead of leaving it to chance. A few went full Fiddler on the Roof and hired matchmakers, spending enough to buy a village in a developing country. Another treats a first coffee date like a meeting with the Soviet Central Committee, laying out conditions like where to live, when to have children, what the five-year plan should be. I once saw a girl arrive at a Halloween party dressed as a mummy, wrapped in toilet paper, and joked that nobody would sleep with her because it would be too much paperwork. Same thought comes to mind about sex today, lots of red tape.

    A romantic relationship needs ordinary interaction before it can grow into anything deeper. If you don’t know your neighbors, do not go to bars nor appear for benediction on the weekends and have few friends, you are far less likely to meet anyone. I feel exhausted coaxing friends out of their flats, the ones I’ve already half-lost to Netflix. I have been silently punishing them by going alone to the movies. Parties themselves have all but vanished. People used to throw them for no reason at all, now even that chance has disappeared.

    But is the situation as bad as we make it out? One may argue there is nothing wrong with less sex. After all, fewer meaningless flings hardly rank as a national crisis. Except less sex is only a symptom of something larger: less life. Along with it comes what has been called an “epidemic of loneliness” and erosion of social life.

    What made life tempting is slowly disappearing. A few too many drinks at a bar, a walk with a friend that turned into an unexpected introduction, or an evening that stretched just long enough for bad decisions to look like good ones. Now, instead of calling a girlfriend to wonder if a guy deserves a second date, you get lost in Tik-Tok videos diagnosing him as a walking red flag. Gone are serendipity and spontaneity along with sex.

    The fewer casual encounters we have, the fewer chances there are not only for lasting intimacy but even for the brief, reckless kind that leaves you walking home in yesterday’s clothes. And that’s a shame.

  • How Gen Z gender wars are reshaping America

    How Gen Z gender wars are reshaping America

    The colossal divide, long suspected, between men and women of Gen Z – those aged 18 to 29 – has been confirmed by a recent NBC News Decision Desk poll. Beyond just a political split, young men and women have completely different ideas of what makes a successful life. From marriage and having children to prioritizing a lucrative career, they are further apart than ever. And this has enormous implications for the country.

    A dizzying number of articles and think-pieces have been devoted to the enormous voting gap between young men and women in the 2024 election. Gen Z men overwhelmingly pulled for Donald Trump, women for Kamala Harris. The “podcast election,” as some dubbed it, reflects Trump’s multi-month media blitzkrieg wherein he appeared on some of the top, male-oriented podcasts in the nation. Trump proved he was relatable and one of the guys. Harris couldn’t get a male voter even if she bought them new F-150s.

    Men’s top issues leading up to the 2024 election were typically jobs and the economy, while women’s were often inflation and abortion. As the sexes siphon off into different media spheres, competing narratives are shaping their worldview. Republicans are portrayed by left-leaning media as ruthlessly out to snatch away women’s “reproductive rights,” while the Right calls every Democrat a Bolshevik out to smash capitalism.

    The aforementioned NBC News poll asked Trump and Harris-voting young men and women a series of questions to determine their hierarchy of values. Values such as “Having a job or career you find fulfilling,” “Having enough money to do the things you want to do,” and “Being married” were among the 13 they ranked.

    The split could not be starker. “Having children” came in as the #1 priority for men who voted Trump, but nearly last for women who voted Harris. For young men on the Right, family is still the gold standard – the fulfillment of adulthood and the marker of purpose. For young women on the Left, children barely register, buried beneath goals like career, financial independence and self-fulfillment.

    We see this split played out before us, too. Ella Emhoff, Kamala Harris’s stepdaughter, is the living caricature of the liberal Gen-Z girl. The artsy, boyish dog-mom is routinely fawned over in the pages of The New York Times and even has her new back tattoo gushed over by the press (it’s a big swan). At risk of sounding prejudiced, Ella Emhoff is probably not ranking marriage and children very highly.

    Young conservatives like Charlie Kirk and freshman Congressman Brandon Gill point to a different path. Both are young fathers, modeling a successful life that cuts against the grain of a culture obsessed with chasing cash and status, though both men have an abundance of the two. The difference is that they advocate for and recognize marriage and family as being the highest, most fulfilling pursuits.

    Not all conservatives are convinced of this, however. Even Trump-voting women did not rank marriage and children particularly highly. This may just reflect decades of feminist propaganda (a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle) – a cultural diet that convinced women that motherhood is drudgery and self-realization found only in doing spreadsheets in a cold high-rise. The poison took root, for generations.

    The poll tells us what many already sense: money has replaced family as the central aspiration. Inverting the natural order carries consequences. When meaning is sought first in wealth, many will learn that the economic system, and in truth, no economic system, can deliver what they demand.

    This is why young Americans now favor socialism more than capitalism. A recent survey found that over 60 percent of Gen Z has a positive view of socialism, and one-in-three have the same opinion about communism. In turn, half of all Americans disapprove of capitalism. The socialists are tigers crouching at the door. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Zohran Mamdani, and the like are one market crash away from sweeping into power.

    Even young voters who once backed Trump may, in time, sour on the economic system he champions. A growing number of nationalists already argue that unfettered capitalism undermines the common good. The European model – free markets coupled with expansive social programs – may not be far off, embraced by both the Left and the Right.

    When family is treated as an optional lifestyle choice rather than that which gives life its purpose, the results are predictable: a surrender to the loneliness of life, expecting it to be placated by a slightly bigger apartment or that extra vacation to Europe. The pursuit of career and financial security fills the gap only briefly, and when it fails to deliver the deeper meaning provided by family, faith and community, the disappointment curdles into political anger.
    In that sense, the poll is a reflection of the deeper disintegration of American life. A nation can recover from bad leaders or economic downturns, but it cannot survive eternal childlessness. Just ask Russia or South Korea.

    If marriage and children remain afterthoughts, then the story of our time will not be one of renewal or making anything great again, but of decline, with politics reduced to fulfilling a spiritual void in a culture that has lost the will to carry itself forward.






  • The $1,000 LEGO set and the infantilization of America

    The $1,000 LEGO set and the infantilization of America

    What can you buy for $1,000 these days? The latest smartphone? A discounted laptop? A nice trip to Mexico? Or what about a 9,000 piece LEGO set of the Death Star? The toy firm’s most expensive model yet.

    That’s right, a toy for $1,000 – the same as 35 Labubus (if you can find them), 150 packs of Pokémon cards or 80 Hot Wheels cars. It’s more pocket money than most boys and girls can afford. And as the fully built model is only a cross section of the spherical spacecraft from Star Wars, they won’t actually be able to play with it, even if they do rustle up enough cash to buy it. Really, the gigantic diorama is designed to sit on an adult’s shelf – a 31-inch wide symbol of LEGO’s shift toward an older demographic.

    Danish carpenter Ole Kirk Christiansen, who founded the LEGO Group in 1932, must be turning in his grave. The name was derived from the Danish words “Leg godt,” which means “play well” in English. The company initially got started making simple wooden toys for Great Depression-era children, but later developed its famous interlocking bricks. After injection molding became available in Denmark in 1947, the company began focusing on plastic toys and later ceased production of wooden products completely in 1960 following a warehouse fire. The iconic shape of the LEGO brick has remained largely unchanged since its updated patent in 1958 with thousands of sets using the same fundamental building system.

    Older adults will likely remember LEGO for more generic themes like cities, outer space, pirates and medieval knights. Not relying on distinguishable IP meant that costs could be kept down so even families with lower income could take part. Sets came with printed instructions to build the models, but the real fun came when you constructed your own sets. Some of the best selling LEGO products are large tubs containing a random assortment of bricks and other parts, with the only true limits being the imagination of the builder.

    Unfortunately for the LEGO Group, something eventually became rotten in the state of Denmark. By the 1990s, profits were in serious decline and there was a growing sentiment among the public that the product was old hat. Realizing that something had to be done, LEGO introduced licensed properties. Instead of some nondescript spaceship, you could now actually play with an X-wing from Star Wars and bring home a plastic minifigure of Luke Skywalker. Say goodbye to bland castles and nameless wizards; build Hogwarts instead and recreate the adventures of Harry Potter. 

    LEGO has become explicit with their attempts to court an older audience in the last few years. The company proudly displays an “Adults Welcome” section on their official website which sells everything from Formula 1 cars to van Gogh paintings all built in LEGO, and the more high-end sets cost hundreds of dollars.

    The firm is capitalizing on the infantilization of modern America. Approximately 1 in 3 U.S. adults is still living with their parents – and that’s even after the pandemic. Citing rising costs of living, Millennials and Gen Z believe that major life milestones like marriage, children and home ownership will be impossible to achieve for them. From their perspective, it’s more logical to instead use whatever disposable income they do have on hobbies which provide immediate gratification. Companies like LEGO are only happy to oblige, which is why they have the chutzpah to sell a $1000 Death Star that really isn’t worth the money.

    And there are also fewer kids for LEGO to market to.The latest CDC data reported that the fertility rate in the United States dropped to an all-time low in 2024 with less than 1.6 children being born per woman. Pivoting to selling to adults is a business necessity to stay profitable. 

    I don’t believe there’s anything inherently wrong with adults buying LEGO and while I’m sympathetic to the economic woes of my generation, the argument that having kids is too expensive holds little water if you can blow a grand on a single LEGO set. 

    The company has clearly gone a bridge or, ahem, a brick too far this time, even for childless millennials. If it’s a choice between LEGO’s $1,000 take on the Empire’s planet killer or a nice holiday with the wife, it’s not really a choice.


  • The new eugenics dilemma

    The new eugenics dilemma

    What comes to mind when you think about the maximum amount of love a parent can have for their child?

    For me, I think of Dick Hoyt pushing his son Rick, who had cerebral palsy, in a wheelchair through the Ironman World Championship course. I think of the parents of Nick Vujicic, born without arms or legs, raising Nick with confidence, and cheering him on as he became an international motivational speaker. I think of the mother of a child with Down Syndrome, choosing each day to recognize the absolute gift of their child. I think of the parent at the dinner table comforting a child upset by a ‘C’ on their report card.

    Noor Siddiqui, founder of Orchid Biosciences, sees things differently. In a recent interview with The New York Times, Siddiqui made it clear that the “maximum amount of love and care” a parent can have for their child comes in the form of choosing which child they would like to bring into the world prior to their birth – a choice that is now possible through genetic selection technologies that screen for traits like susceptibility to disease, height and even IQ.

    Genetic selection technology is becoming more advanced and widely available. Orchid Biosciences, as well as other companies like Herasight, Nucleus Genomics and Genomic Prediction each offer services that take cells from IVF-created embryos, and run the DNA of those cells through databases that link gene patterns to certain outcomes. Each embryo is given a “polygenic score,” which is basically a probability estimate for different traits. Parents are then shown a chart giving them information like “Embryo A will likely be the tallest, Embryo B has the highest predicted IQ…” and so on. After this, parents choose which embryo to implant based on these scores.

    At the societal level, what can we expect as this technology becomes more mainstream? To start, we must consider the quasi-eugenic consequences of genetic selection – how choosing certain traits could, over time, reshape the population. As parents begin to choose only those embryos who will have higher IQs, other parents will fear their children will be left behind, gradually creating social pressure to select for higher IQs, and marginalizing children with lower scores. Genetic selection advocates argue that screening for these traits is a matter of parental autonomy, not a matter of government control. Thus, the improvement in the intelligence of the human race would resemble governmental eugenicist experiments, but because the motive is private rather than state-directed, it resembles eugenics in effect, if not in intent.

    Even if genetic selection remains voluntary, the cost – ranging from $6,000 to $50,000 – means that only the wealthy could afford these advantages. Over time, this economic barrier could turn into a genetic divide, with the rich consolidating genetically superior traits like IQ, creating a new type of caste system in which the less affluent fall behind, with little chance of rising the ranks with the passing of each generation. Any dwindling form of meritocracy would thus transform into an aristocracy. When asked about these implications, Siddiqui does not shy away from the concern: she hopes that “we’ll be able to mobilize enough excitement… so that it’s something that’s going to be covered for everyone.”

    In other words, widespread genetic selection could very well create a new caste system – unless society mandates universal access through government programs mimicking socialism.
    But let’s say the government did decide to step in and pay for genetic selection for all. And let’s even say that this goes economically and politically well. Where does this leave the family unit? Where does it leave each individual child?

    Sophocles once said that “no one loves the child for what he will become, but because he is already theirs.” Parental love is unconditional affection, protection, sacrifice and commitment. Genetic selection, however, brings a child into the world with a set of conditions and expectations. If a parent selects an Embryo B because of Embryo B’s predicted IQ, what happens if Embryo B turns out to be not so smart after all? It’s hard to comprehend how immense the psychological pressure will be for a child to live up to the person his parents chose him to be.

    When a child is chosen through control rather than accepted as a gift given through love, children become commodities and a means to an end for their parents. Love is characterized by service to another, but by allowing only those children we choose to come into the world, we risk treating children more as extensions of our will than as gifts to be loved.

    Even if we screen for certain attractive characteristics, we cannot select for the very qualities that make someone a force for good or evil in the world. We cannot screen out traits like pride, greed, cruelty, apathy and delusion. We cannot choose traits like kindness, integrity, humility, perseverance, hope and courage.

    We can select embryos predicted to be the healthiest, strongest or smartest – but can the parents, who feel compelled to screen their children, truly raise them to use those gifts for the flourishing of humanity?