Throughout history, single young men have been cause for concern. In his book Sex, Law, and Society in Late Imperial China (2000), Matthew Sommer documents how these men, known as “bare sticks,” preoccupied officials of the Qing dynasty, who saw them as potential criminals and rebels. Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, our own intellectuals had begun sounding the alarm about increasing rates of sexlessness among young men, particularly those who identify as “incels,” or involuntary celibates. Media commentary has often linked the incel subculture to other ills imagined to hang over our society, such as misogyny and white supremacy — especially after the Toronto van attacks in April 2018, in which a self-described incel killed 10 people.

Most of this commentary takes the form of shallow exhortation or dark warning. On the Left, writers chide single men to be better feminists and get over their feelings of resentment and sexual entitlement. On the Right, David French calls on them to learn to celebrate “monogamy and chastity” by rediscovering Christianity, while Ross Douthat, though he wishes our culture could recover Christianity’s “special respect owed to the celibate,” gloomily predicts that it will instead harness the “logic of commerce and technology” to pacify the sexually frustrated with prostitution, virtual-reality pornography, and sex robots.