56 THENEWYORKER,APRIL11, 2022
they have done since time immemo-
rial, pay for the company of women.
Yet still the world turns.
M
any books about the atrophy of
our associational ties and the per-
ils of social isolation have been pub-
lished in recent years, but we continue
to underestimate the problem of lone-
liness, according to Hertz, because we
define loneliness too narrowly. Prop-
erly understood, loneliness is a “per-
sonal, societal, economic, and political”
condition—not just “feeling bereft of
love, company, or intimacy” but also
“feeling unsupported and uncared for
by our fellow citizens, our employers,
our community, our government.” This
suspiciously baggy definition makes it
easier to claim loneliness as the signa-
ture feeling of our time, but whether
it’s useful to conflate sexlessness and
political alienation—or accurate to trace
their contemporary manifestations to
the same dastardly neoliberal source—
is questionable.
Disagreements about definition are
at the root of many disputes about lone-
liness data. Spikes in loneliness were
recorded after the J.F.K. assassination
and 9/11, raising the possibility that
what people were really reporting to
survey takers was depression. And even
the most soberly worded research is li-
able to become a bit warped in its jour-
ney from social-science lab to newspa-
per factoid. The figure that Hertz quotes
in her first chapter, for example—“Three
in five U.S. adults considered them-
selves lonely”—comes from a Cigna
health survey published in 2020, which
found that three in five U.S. adults
scored more than forty-three points on
the U.C.L.A. Loneliness Scale. Scor-
ing high on this twenty-question sur-
vey is easier than you might think. In
fact, if you answer “Sometimes” to
enough questions like “How often do
you feel that your interests and ideas
are not shared by those around you?,”
you have a pretty good chance of being
deemed part of America’s loneliness
problem. Given such caveats, three out
of five seems encouragingly low.
Sociologists who are skeptical about
whether loneliness is a growing prob-
lem argue that much modern alone-
ness is a happy, chosen condition. In this
view, the vast increase in the number
of single-person households in the U.S.
over the past fifty years has been driven,
more than anything, by affluence, and
in particular by the greater economic
independence of women. A similarly
rosy story of female advancement can
be told about the sex-decline data: far
from indicating young people’s worri-
some retreat from intimacy, the find-
ings are a testament to women’s grow-
ing agency in sexual matters. In a recent
interview, Stephanie Coontz, a veteran
historian of family, said, “The decline
in sexual frequency probably reflects
women’s increased ability to say no and
men’s increased consideration for them.”
This is certainly a jollier view of things
than Hertz’s hell-in-a-handbasket ac-
count, but, as several women writers have
pointed out, reports of modern women’s
self-determination in sexual and roman-
tic matters tend toward exaggeration.
In “The Lonely Hunter” (Dial), Aimée
Lutkin, a writer in her thirties, wrestles
with the question of how “chosen” her
single life has been. The book describes
a year in which she set out to break a
six-year spell of near-celibacy by taking
up exercise, losing weight, joining a dat-
ing site, and so on. The inspiration for
this experiment was an evening with
friends that left her feeling unfairly
blamed for her loneliness.
By the end of the year, she hadn’t
found a lasting relationship, but she
had gone on many dates, had some sex,
and even fallen (unrequitedly) in love
for a time, so one might reasonably
conclude that the cure for her loneli-
ness had in fact been in her gift all
along. She largely rejects this notion,
however. To insist that any determined
individual can overcome loneliness if
she tries hard enough is to ignore the
social conditions that make loneliness
so common, Lutkin writes. In her case,
there were strong economic reasons
that she focussed on work rather than
on love for many years; she also pur-
sued people who didn’t return her af-
fections. And some significant part of
her loneliness came not from being sin-
gle but from living in a world that re-
gards a romantic partner as the sine
qua non of happy adulthood. Ironically,
she suggests, celebrating single women
as avatars of modern female empow-
erment has made things harder, not
easier, for lonely women, by encourag-
ing the view that their unhappiness is
of their own making—the price they
pay for putting their careers first, or
being too choosy. She notes that the
plight of lonely, sexless men tends to
inspire more public concern and com-
passion than that of women. The term
“incel” was invented by a woman hop-
ing to commiserate with other unhap-
pily celibate women, but it didn’t get
much traction until it was appropri-
ated by men and became a byword for
sexual rage. This, Lutkin believes, re-
f lects a conservative conviction that
men have a right to sex.
Is this true? A less contentious ex-
planation for the greater attention paid
to male sexual inactivity might be that
it has risen more dramatically among
young men than among young women
in recent years. In a study released in
2020, nearly one in three men between
the ages of eighteen and twenty-four
reported no sexual activity in the past
year. What’s more, young male sexless-
ness, unlike the female variety, correlates
with unemployment and low income.
Men’s greater tendency to violence also
probably creates greater public aware-
ness. (Female incels, however grumpy
they get, do not generally express their
dissatisfaction by shooting up malls.)
Nevertheless, Lutkin is surely right that
women’s authority over their sexual and
romantic fates is not as complete as the
popular imagination would have it.
Asked to explain why one out of four
single American women hasn’t had a
sex partner for two or more years (and
more than one in ten haven’t had a sex
partner for five or more years), research-
ers have cited women’s aversion to the
“roughness” that has become a standard
feature of contemporary, porn-inflected
sex. In one recent study, around twenty-
one per cent of female respondents re-
ported that they had been choked during
sex with men; around thirty-two per
cent had experienced a man ejaculat-
ing on their faces; and thirty-four per
cent had experienced “aggressive fella-
tio.” If, as Stephanie Coontz suggests,
women feel freer these days to decline
such encounters, that is of course a wel-
come development, but it’s hard to con-
strue the liberty of choosing between
celibacy and sexual strangulation as a
feminist triumph.
In a new collection of essays, “Love
