The Industrial Revolution of Romance Has Been A Disaster
There's a lot of banter these days about toxic masculinity. It's a blank check for feminists to blame men for anything they don't like. For instance, a man opening a door for a woman can be considered toxic. A father telling his son to toughen up can be considered toxic. But, for all the things feminism gets wrong about life and the human condition, it doesn't get everything wrong. Masculinity does have a dark side when it's not rooted in virtue.
A viral video shows a young man walking around a college campus reciting the exact same line to multiple women: "I just wanna let you know that of all the women I've seen today, you are the most beautiful one. Have a good day!"
Man walked around and told all these women the same line, they felt special, was thankful, and smiled. 👀😭♻️
— Rain Drops Media (@Raindropsmedia1) November 10, 2025
pic.twitter.com/YhUQqYfrdZ
Each woman smiled and thanked him, gushing over the thought that she was the prettiest woman he had seen that day.
For many people, this is harmless and charming. This is what high-value men are supposed to do: pick up chicks, some of the manosphere bros might say. That's alpha behavior! In reality, it's not alpha, harmless, or charming. It is the Industrial Revolution of Romance in action. And just like every other industrial revolution, it mass produces at the cost of the human spirit.
Think about the original Industrial Revolution. America took the blacksmith, the farmer, the chandler, the builder, and replaced them with machinery. Faster, cheaper, more efficient, but soulless. Quality gave way to quantity. Families left their homes to chase factory wages, and towns lost their spirit in the name of progress. The same thing's happening to romance. We've traded the slow grind of real connection for quick, conveyor-belt courtship.
The video celebrates the commodification of human interaction. The rehearsed line and presumably his smile and pleasant demeanor are treated like currency to buy a woman's positive reaction. He doesn't see another soul; he sees an opportunity, a product, an experience. Mass-producing inauthentic interactions leads to more chances of getting laid.
The young man isn't evil. He's a product of the PUA (pickup artist) culture that's been poisoning masculinity since the early 2000s. That scene was the original manosphere before podcasts and YouTube algorithms turned it mainstream. Guys like Neil Strauss—remember his book The Game?—turned seduction into a science. He studied under a man named "Mystery," a name that sounds more like a strip mall magician than a mentor.
One of the more interesting lines in Strauss's book is his description of their Los Angeles mansion, which they dubbed Project Hollywood—"The point was women; the result was men." A great line with a double meaning. On one level, he's referring to the actual people there: no models lounging by the pool; no women serving them breakfast in a t-shirt and panties; just a sausage fest of balding businessmen, chubby college students, and a bunch of Adderall-addicted computer programmers. On a deeper level, it revealed something about their souls. In their quest to conquer women, the men ended up obsessed with themselves. Their lives were centered around their "game," their stats, and the stats of everyone else. Men obsessed with men.
The young man in the video is not obsessed with the women he is seducing; he is obsessed with himself.
Before I get accused of being a "tradcon simp," this is not solely a male failure. Women are culpable as well. When fake charm keeps working, the audience shares the blame. We've got a generation of women so undernourished by real intimacy that they'll take validation from a stranger, in person or over a screen, with a script. If people are grounded in truth, glittering words with no substance go in one ear and out the other. But technology and the immaturity of the dating market leave so many women underwhelmed and starving for intimate connection that they become flattered by even the slightest compliment.
The Industrial Revolution of Romance turns everything into a commodity to be profited from. It's the neoliberal dream—turning people into products.
Our ancestors knew better than to glorify seduction. The Book of Proverbs (7:21) speaks of a crafty harlot seducing a young man. The man pursued her like an ox goes to the slaughter (7:22). In layman's terms, seduction destroys the victim and the seducer.
Let's go New Testament. Paul writes that in matters of sexuality, "no one should take advantage of and defraud his brother" (1 Thessalonians 4:6, NKJV). "Defraud" means to deceive, to breach trust. That's precisely what the pickup industry trains men to do: present themselves, their intentions, and their character falsely in order to obtain access to a woman's body.
Once upon a time, America treated seduction as a crime. Literally. States like New York outlawed it because society understood that the moral collapse of romance leads to the moral collapse of civilization. A man who weaponizes charm to defraud a woman is committing a crime against humanity. Flip the genders around, and the same point applies.
Today's degraded dating scene is, in part, due to the loosening of those laws. Hookup apps, rampant pornography, OnlyFans, the PUA scene, and now, certain parts of the manosphere all rely on seduction. Scholars have connected PUA culture to incel culture—aspiring PUAs failed and eventually became incels (involuntary celibates).
And now, some of the same manosphere "alpha males" complain about the state of the modern woman, politics, and American culture as a whole. Lack of genuine romantic connections leads to fewer relationships and fewer people avoiding marriage and child-rearing, which leads to declining birthrates and a dying population, which leads to politicians wanting to flood the country with millions of illegal foreign nationals. Brother, you helped build this circus.
Here's the cruel irony: the PUA system and that cutesy viral post both promise men power, but they actually reinforce weakness. A confident, virtuous man doesn't need a script. He can risk real rejection because he is anchored in something deeper than female approval. The man who depends on canned lines and psychological tricks is, by definition, a prisoner of his own performance. He is a slave to his own vices, just like the marijuana addict or the greedy entrepreneur.
The Industrial Revolution of Romance has given us cheap, mass-produced intimacy, disposable partners, and a generation that knows how to get a partner but can't keep one.
We are reaping the societal costs of seduction and cheap industrialized romance. At this point, we can either repent or keep "negging" our way into madness.
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