rich people aren't getting laid: a theory

what if the "puriteens" were the billionaires all along

There’s considerable evidence that Gen Z isn’t fucking. They prefer to watch images fuck, magazines tell us, or to be comforted by AI girlfriends. I’m always a bit skeptical about these kinds of narratives, because they fall in line with traditional panics over the sex lives of young people—the kids are always having too much sex or too little, or not enough sex with the “right” people. Nonetheless, the numbers seem to be there: according to reported data, young people aren’t having as much sex as their previous generational cohorts. This is sad for them, and scary for the “birth rate” freaks: the much-fretted over decline in the national birth rate is largely attributable to a dramatic drop in teen pregnancies. (I’m old enough to remember when teen pregnancy was the subject of a different moral panic; I was a teen girl myself at the time, and was constantly informed that teen girls were too damn slutty!!!)

Whether moral panics have any factual basis or not, they’re generally a top-down phenomenon. They don’t arise from inside a given population, or from real concern about a group, even if there is—at times—actual cause to be concerned that people are struggling and need help. And since moral panics tend to run top to bottom, outgroup to ingroup, they usually reflect the top group’s concerns about themselves, rather than the people they profess to be so worried about. In short, when the wealthy and powerful take to the megaphone to blare about how people (especially attractive young people) aren’t getting laid and having babies and how that’s so bad for society, they’re not actually speaking in reference to young people (even though in this case it’s actually somewhat true that young people aren’t getting laid and having babies). An elite panic is just that: an elite panic.

Of course there are plenty of rich people in this world who are having sex and having babies. But the socially influential set are extremely worried about sex and babies: they talk about it all time. The right (and center-liberal’s) anti-immigration push and “Great Replacement Theory” are, at their root, an anxiety about sex and babies, a fear of whiteness destroyed by an onrushing wave of people of color moving to western countries and having children there. This is why there’s been a tremendous effort in the U.S. and Europe to create a narrative in which it’s imperative for immigration to be stopped and for (white) women to embrace tradwifery, while men embrace traditionally masculine virtues of providing for households and dying in factories or something. Now, when surveyed, few people actually want to work in factories: they want somebody else to work in factories. All of this is sort of the point. Tradwifery and traditional masculinity (and even arguably whiteness) are fantasies about other people. They’re dreams for the comfortable, people who are better off and who wouldn’t have to suffer the actual hardships of “traditional” lifestyles. Tradwife influencers have often turned out to be fetish content for men rather than serious, intentional influences on women—of course they have. This is all just porn. Somebody else’s sex life; somebody else’s fetishized fertility.

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No one wants to work anymore; no one wants to fuck anymore. To be clear, I don’t think either of the above clauses are literally true—plenty of people are still working and/or fucking, sometimes both at once. But I think these statements are at least somewhat true of a certain segment of the rich and powerful, the type that wants to influence society. Certainly they’re not working. An astonishing article in Semafor back in April revealed just how much time billionaire investor Marc Andreesen has spent in group chats trying to spread his stupid ideas and destroy U.S. democracy. It’s a lot! He definitely wasn’t spending too many hours on the business and investment stuff that he’s technically supposed to be doing to justify all the income he’s making. He doesn’t work the way that you or I work. And is he getting laid? When? I don’t like to imagine it either (where does that egghead go? Ickkkkkkk)¹ but also, simply, literally…when? When would he have the time?

Relatedly, we’ve all had a lot of fun lately with the news that Elon Musk took Stephen Miller’s wife with him when he left the White House, but that doesn’t mean that anyone in this scenario is having sex. Still, it’s amusing to speculate: are they a throuple? Is Stephen Miller a cuckold? Are we going to get a lucky murder-suicide that rids us of two turbulent ministers at once? No such luck, probably. Katie Miller might have left to work at Tesla because she wanted to;² maybe she’s actually sleeping with Musk, whatever. If she and Musk are having a real affair, then it would be something of a departure for him of late. Musk has fathered a confusing number of sons with an unclear number of women: sons only. He uses artificial insemination—probably not, as the popular joke goes, because he has a weird dick thanks to a penile enlargement accident, but because he wants only male offspring. And having sex the natural, fun way, with women who are apparently willing for some unfathomable reason, might result in girl babies, which can’t be allowed. This is why Musk is so angry at his trans daughter, who defied his desire to see himself mirrored everywhere, in everything. The only Great Replacement that Elon wants is a world full of mini-Musks.

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I think I can tell you the exact social moment when the wealthy and powerful became obsessed with auto-recreating themselves, and basically uninterested in sex: it was MeToo. Prior to this, the culture was almost sneeringly pro-sex; I’ve written before (as have others) about the sexually crass decades from 1995-2015 or so; this was also a very rapey and pedophilic period, often sexualizing children—and blaming them for it, too. Again, I remember this very well as a teen girl growing up in the late 1990s - early 2000s, when all elements of the culture said that teen girls were whores in the making (and this was bad, but also hot, and would I like to pose?) I remember when this culture worsened in the later 2000s and 2010s with the broad-scale promotion of child beauty pageants and Here Comes Honey Boo Boo, which was a joke except I’m not sure who was the punchline. I remember the revealing tank tops for little girls which were sold at Target and JCPenny, pretty much the only items available. And then we had a panic about child sex trafficking, Qanon, the supposed rise of puriteens who were frigid about sex scenes in movies, all of these incidents divorced from the immediate conditions that preceded them. Britney Spears had been basically trafficked in front of us, packaged and sold as a teenage sex idol, while the media and most of us mocked her for it.

It was never a libertine culture. It was always a rape culture. And when, around 2017, many people said rape wasn’t okay, the rapists literally took their balls and went home. Once MeToo happened, sex wasn’t fun any more; once Epstein went to prison it was over. Rape is about power; and power is, for certain rich and influential people, the only eroticism. This kind of person might best be defined not in regards to the gender of their victims, which is almost irrelevant, but by the fact that they have victims. They’re not “straight” or “gay,” but something more like “powersexual” or “rapesexual.” Without power imbalances, there’s no eroticism for them. They aren’t fucking anymore because it isn’t hot.

And even now that we’re told MeToo has been defeated at the ballot box,³ and rape is back in fashion I guess, the rich are still mad that rape ever went out of style, and that they might have been slapped on the wrist for assaulting their subordinates. Epstein is still dead and his secrets with him, though Musk recently posted that Trump’s name can be found in the secret unreleased Epstein files. (Musk subsequently deleted that tweet, because he’s a cuck). Trump and Elon’s very messy breakup is a kind of eroticism, as close to an intimate relationship as those two have probably had in some time, or ever. Once again, it’s sad that we won’t get the murder-suicide that will rid us of multiple turbulences at once, or even the release of the Epstein files that will prove what Trump’s haters already know to be true about him and underage girls, and what his fans will never believe.

Many liberals and leftists joke about “pedocon theory” —i.e., the theory that many conservative politicians are pedophiles, and that their voters either ignore or tacitly endorse this fact. There’s plenty of evidence that a shocking number of conservative politicians and influencers are indeed pedophiles. Part of the reason why pedocon theory is true is that it’s basically the only conservative sexuality that’s real; the pedocons are some of the only prominent Republicans who are still regularly—and increasingly proudly and openly—engaging in anything remotely resembling sex. Pedophilia is where power dynamics are definitely, provably on display; it’s where you can be, without doubt, a powersexual.

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We’ve seen certain other strange elaborations of powerful people and their sexuality these days. Jeff Bezos is one of the few rich people who does seem to be getting laid on the regular, and he’s crowing about it with penis-shaped rockets and an outrageously expensive wedding. There’s also Bryan Johnson, the wannabe immortal millionaire, who gamifies and publicizes his supposedly “scheduled” sexual interactions with women. Much of this appears to be about showing off: a life lived on screen, in public. Then there’s Mark Zuckerberg, whose original iteration of the metaverse didn’t imagine that people might want to have sex in it. I wrote about this for the Baffler back in July of 2022, but it’s fascinating that Zuckerberg didn’t imagine that sex would be part of a fantasy world that humans might want to play in. We might want to copy ourselves, breed avatar clones, but we wouldn’t want our bred and cloned copies to engage in anything untoward. Scandal!

Max Read mentioned in a recent newsletter that the right seems to have shifted from a cuck fetish to a breeder fetish, from a fantasy of racist powerlessness to a fantasy of racist generation. He’s right, but it’s interesting that the latter has become a sexual fetish largely without sex. Line go up (or really, white line go up)—that’s the sole pleasure and desire, the increase in numbers. There’s a remaining masturbatory element, jacking off over the higher numbers, the AI-generated art of the tradwife and muscular alpha bro and their ever-increasing, clone-like brood (with ever-increasing numbers of fingers). But it’s hard to say that this is really sex. And certainly none of it’s sexy. It’s difficult to imagine that anyone’s having a genuinely good time.

Up until approximately now, the U.S. has managed to keep the working classes down by selling a fantasy of wealth, the eroticism of power. If you work hard, maybe you too can be rich; look at what rich people have, don’t you desire it? They have fabulous clothes, and gorgeous houses; they have fantastic sex—you would imagine—and their children lack for nothing. But look at these miserable bastards lately: do you really want to be like this? Do you want to be tedious, cone-headed Marc Andreesen, texting in stupid group chats all day? Do you want to be Elon Musk, jerking off in a jar so you can breed more sons you’ll never see, who probably hate you? Is this hell? Is this the opposite of eroticism and human connection? Did these guys already murder-suicide everybody? Are we dead?

1. Look, I don’t want to imagine Marc Andreesen having sex either. But if I’m in hell, then you’re in hell; we’re all in hell together.

2. Obviously no one would want to go work at Tesla because it’s a successful company, lol. Maybe Katie Miller just wanted to get away from her awful husband; on the other hand, she’s the one who married him. Katie, honey, there’s still time to do the right thing (it’s not divorce).

3. I don’t have the link but iirc one of those Red Scare twits actually posted something like “MeToo was defeated at the ballot box.” I don’t remember which one said it, I think it was the dumber one. (“Which one is the dumber one?”) —I know, right?