I grew up in a freer time. Just a few decades ago, young people were allowed to just…be. To select our mates (romantic and otherwise) based solely upon our personal tastes. And our choices went mostly unremarked upon, except maybe if it gave rise to gossip or cause for wider scandal, because no one really cared. If we really wanted to pin our colours to the mast, we could signal our allegiances through the music we liked, or the clothes we wore. Band tees or popped collars were about the height of it.

In the 1990’s, I was an indie-loving, hash-smoking, DM-wearing, Gen X kid.

So my tastes skewed heavily toward counter-culture, book-reading and museum-going boys. And this is how I came into possession of the knowledge I am about to share with you—and I learned it the hard way, from years in the trenches of the sex wars.

Ladies, no matter how culturally refined you yourself might be, avoid the art school boys. Give the hard-working, blue collar, chads a shot. Never mind their taste in comedians or the books they have or haven’t read. They have something much more valuable: a basic understanding of how the world works that is far more independent, analytical and useful than anything anyone will ever learn at university.

I had serious, long-term relationships with two art-school boys, the first one starting in my late teens and the second in my late twenties. These relationships took place on two different continents, with men of two different nationalities—but with one thing in common: art school. One in the United States, the other in the United Kingdom.

They were both products of a transnational culture that values intellectual prestige over usefulness or competence. Since the Boomers, this culture has grown exponentially. More and more kids have gone into the liberal arts/humanities degree pipeline, and came out the other end with inflated expectations and ever-grimmer prospects. At the same time as the west churned out more and more English lit and film studies grads, the woke mind virus infected almost all of the sites of cultural production. So today, being anti-normie has become the norm.

I grew up in a very unconventional family with writerly parents who told me when I was very young of their open marriage, smoked dope around me and talked provocatively about sex and politics. We moved around from country to country, my parents flouting bourgeois morality with panache. So I myself am a product of this anti-normie culture. Despite my familiarity with the intellectual counter-culture—or perhaps because of it—I missed the wider picture until those relationships were long over.

The biggest catalyst for my realisation that my breakups were not just personal problems, that they also reflected tendencies I saw in wider culture, came after I met my now-husband. Unlike my two other significant relationships, he was not part of the professional managerial class. While all the men in this story came from humble means, as did I, my husband’s family had not strived to send him off the university so that he could move up the socio-economic ladder. My husband spent his childhood working on his grandparent’s farm and his father’s mechanic’s shed, not doing academic-enrichment activities or listening to indie bands. And from the age of 13 he worked in restaurants as a chef. He left school as soon as he was legally allowed, and has been working full time ever since.

For people like my husband and everyone else who works on their feet, not on their laptops—the Culture Wars are a million miles away. Or at least they were until crazed bureaucrats began encouraging drag queens to participate in early childhood education. Now, even people whose work does not depend on staying in the good graces of the elites, are seeing their families encroached upon by culture-war influenced policies.

As the Culture War wound its way into all our lives, I was just trying to live mine.

Art Boy 1, who I met when I was 18 and he was almost a decade older, was dazzling and ambitious, but would not commit. Domesticity was the thing he feared the most, after obscurity. Being a family man was his idea of hell. After nearly four years, he left me in a serious predicament and simply walked away.

Art Boy 2 had presented totally differently: as a dependable, devoted partner. I married him with the utmost confidence that I was making the smart choice. Eleven months later, I gave birth to our son. Four years after that, I was a single mother living on benefits. He succumbed to a crippling depression, partly—in my opinion—because the high-minded expectations instilled in him by his fancy education were never met. And he never got over it. Being a family man was not enough.

Of course, there are always two sides to any acrimonious break-up, and I make no claims to perfection or blamelessness in either one of mine. In fact, I’m quite sure

I gave as good as I got, turned all my emotional firepower on them. I left scars.

It’s always been known that men who aspire to the heights of culture very often will not put as high a premium on making sure their woman and children are comfortable and secure. The rakish poet seducing and then abandoning an unfortunate young woman is a tale as old as Lord Byron. But the modern rake has an additional weapon in his arsenal of seduction. He can hide behind the label of male feminist.

Add to that the fact that mainstream culture supports female delusions of emotional equality, and what you get is modern, progressive, young women who are ill- prepared for the shock of being let down by men who have all the right flags in their X bios.

I know men who are great husbands and fathers, and are also part of the culture-producing system that my two exes were part of. But in my experience, after a while, the contradictions inherent in the de-masculinisation of the PMC man become apparent. Ultimately, they might be able to talk about art-house cinema and therapy — but when the chips are down, they do not protect or support you. Those instincts have been schooled out of them.

Not so the chad, who is my second husband and my longest relationship. There’s a gruff exterior and sometimes he doesn’t take your in-the-moment feelings with the same level of seriousness as a male feminist might, but he would kill and die and work his fingers to the bone for you and your kids., He wants to see you dressed up in the finest garments and show you off around the town because your femininity delights him. Crucially, his ego is in no way bound up your professional success or failure. He doesn’t give a crap about your opinions. And most fundamentally — he just wants to take care of you and see you happy. There is a very foundational humility—a willingness to serve—in a working class chad, that when it’s combined with strength and competence, is the best thing a woman can ask for in a partner.

Young people have been woefully betrayed by the fact that inherent differences between men and women are conveniently paved over by ideology.

What are the emotional differences between men and women? Having lived with both the art-school type and the blue-collar type, and having raised a boy into his teen years, I can say with some confidence that left in his natural masculine state, a man’s way of processing feelings is not by talking about them. So if you need to talk for hours on end about something that’s bothering you, call your bestie, your sister, or your mom. A man will get impatient listening to your agonising after a while. They are kinetic, not verbal. They don’t dwell on mean words, they don’t think about other people’s lives, or other people’s feelings about their lives. They are very good at not caring about things they don’t need to care about.

But this is not to say that they don’t have feelings. They do. And in my experience, in a relationship with a decent man, his woman’s opinion of him is perhaps the most important thing in his life. While he might carry himself with a IDGAF swagger, a sharp word from a woman can go straight through his heart.

I fear that for many professional managerial-class women who have never encountered anyone outside that demographic, it is just assumed that working class men tend toward chauvinism and ignorance. My own experience has very much taught me otherwise—there’s a great respect for strong women, bred into working-class men by mothers who were not of the gentle parenting school. Mothers who drank and smoked, perhaps, but did not tolerate disrespect.

My husband’s stories of growing up in a large, traditional Irish family, in a home where there was a constant presence of workmen and labourers from his father’s truck yard, are consistent: the women, especially the older women, were the power centre, and inside the home what they said was law. When face-to-face with a matriarch, the rougher the job, the more deferential the man.

The idea that boys and men are built to sacrifice was not something I had ever known, so callow and soft was my own upbringing. Also, it has been totally written out of the culture — replaced by a highly toxic, demented, falsehood that men are inherently predatory and selfish. If this were the case, humanity would have ceased to exist. And while working class men haven’t bought into this as completely as their wealthier and more educated peers, this messaging has been particularly demoralising for them—considering their historical legacy of back-breaking labour, dying in wars, and getting punched in the face, done in large part to protect their families.

Yet at least three generations of young people have been taught these horrible lies about men. They are in the amniotic fluid in which we gestate the culture. The humble sacrifices of ordinary man have been written out of history, along with the male’s enormous tenderness towards his female counterparts. This is a deeply unfashionable idea today. Because all the men who “count” in the culture have grown up with female emotions being celebrated and male ones ignored completely, or demonised by upper middle aged women who watched too many lurid after-school specials in the 1980’s.

The glaring hypocrisy of demanding social justice while shitting all over the men whose labour allows society to function, has done a huge disservice to everyone—women very much included.