Who Benefits from the Modern Woman’s Embarrassment of Having a Boyfriend

Last week, Chanté Joseph published her opinion piece “Is having a boyfriend embarrassing now?” in Vogue. She wrote about how partnership with woman no longer inherently increase social status as it did with previous generations. Additionally, she mentions the anonymity that woman prefer to maintain when publicizing their relationships with men on social media.

Pumpkin head portrait from social media influencers drea_d.r.e.a and chosen_1ds

All last week my social media feeds were bombarded with pumpkin head soft launches. The timing was impeccable.

Joseph’s column was well written, researched and evocative. Immediately, I had a strong reaction to this piece and began reflecting.

Single Womanhood and Social Media

It is clearly recognizable that women increasingly are boasting of the pleasures of singleness, myself included. In conversations with my girlfriends, often chats about the quality of the dating pool or a story of an embarrassing man come up.

Modern women are having children later or not at all, prioritizing their career, and decentering relationships to benefit themselves. I love to see the world changing into one full of women who are well achieved, credited and free.

However, social media notoriously hyperbolizes viewpoints, swiftly shifting an empowerment movement into talks of hyper independence, hypergamy, and full blown gender wars online.

Decentering a man is different than being embarrassed by having a relationship with one. The later is a bit more sinister and concequential.

A woman, or person really, has nothing to gain from finding shame in having a boyfriend. I am less concerned with if women are embarrassed by boyfriends or why women are embarrassed by boyfriends. Instead, my concern lies with what happens to a society that in general frowns upon relationship, or worse, community.

The Diminishing Value of Family

There is conversations needed about the diminishing value of the family unit and the rise of individualism.

NPR’s Up First Podcast recently released an episode covering how more and more people are choosing to have less kids, or none at all. So much so, that conversations about how to incentivize repopulation is a key consideration in the Trump administration.

I was not shocked by the metric and I think it aligns well with the current societal shame around partnership. Relationships are not celebrated or valued in the same way they were years ago.

As a result, people pride themselves on their individuality. While individualism is not inherently bad, it does sacrifice the benefits of community, belonging and relationships. The loss of the two often creating loneliness.

Male Lonliness Epidempic

Scott Galloway has been experiencing major media attention. He is the author of Notes on Being a Man, a book covering topics of masculinity and mental health.

Male loneliness is a controversial topic that refers to the male experience of loneliness and its detrimental effects on society. It is referred to as an epidemic because of the amount of people suffering and severity.

In a recent interview with CNN, Galloway mentions the interconnectivity between male loneliness and tech companies. I found a lot of value in his perspective on who benefits from male loneliness, and I believe it to relate well to the same beneficiary of female shame towards relationships.

He states “Our economy is attached to one objective and that is to evolve a new species of asocial, asexual males.”

The True Beneficiary

So to my question of who benefits from the embarrassment women feel towards relationships ?

My argument is businesses, especially billion dollar companies surrounding and supporting technological advancements.

Business, especially the top earning companies are profiting now, and more in the future, off of the growing need for technology to replace traditional social relationships. When people are ashamed, or anxious about social interactions, they turn to technology to meet their social needs. This makes the demand and desirability of these technologies grow, gradually becoming more profitable.

The Implementation of Artificial Intelligence into Society

In a study done by OpenAI and MIT Media, participants were tasked with communicating daily with AI chat bots. It revealed that participants who spent more time daily with AI chat bots were “significantly lonelier”, “socialized significantly less with real people” and “displayed significantly higher emotional dependence on AI chat bots”.

Companies such as Microsoft, Meta, Google, IBM and Amazon are all major companies, most people use daily, who are investing in technology that work toward this mission. The list is long and

increasing.

This is a real shift in time, where people are creating more and more ways to diminish their value in society, starting with relationships.