America is waking up to a crisis our rulers pretend not to see: women across large swaths of our country are reporting less happiness and more despair than previous generations. Dave Rubin and his Actual Friends panel recently confronted this ugly truth head-on, arguing that the marriage of cultural expectation and modern technology has produced what they call a “feminization crisis” — a frank conversation you won’t hear on the mainstream networks.
Rubin’s guests — including Jillian Michaels, Sage Steele, and Dr. Drew — laid out how everything from dating dynamics to workplace pressure has pushed women into impossible roles: be beautiful but uninterested in relationships, be career-driven but still the primary caregiver, be empowered yet constantly anxious. Those arguments aren’t just hot takes on a podcast; they reflect a growing national conversation about why so many women feel the rug has been pulled out from under them.
The data behind the hand-wringing is stark. Researchers have documented a dramatic rise in depressive symptoms and related problems among teens and young adults over the past decade, and those increases have been especially pronounced for girls and young women — trends many experts link to the rise of smartphones and social media. This is not just generational whining; it’s a measurable collapse in mental well-being that merits immediate attention.
Government health surveillance confirms the alarm: emergency department visits for suspected suicide attempts among adolescent girls spiked during the pandemic years, with certain months showing increases of more than 50 percent compared with 2019. That’s not a political talking point — it’s a human catastrophe, and it tells you something about the cultural stresses bearing down hardest on young females today.
Let’s be blunt: this crisis didn’t happen by accident. For decades the left pushed a one-size-fits-all narrative of empowerment that equated fulfillment with a résumé, likes, and follower counts while denigrating the institutions — family, church, community — that actually structure meaningful lives. Combine that with tech companies engineering addiction and schools that prioritize identity politics over basic life skills, and you get a generation of women who are professionally credentialed but emotionally hollow.
Dating and mating markets have collapsed under the pressure of hookup culture, unemployment or underemployment for men in many regions, and a social media economy that asks women to monetize attention while starving them of real relationships. The resulting loneliness and insecurity aren’t ideological problems so much as predictable human consequences of policies and cultural trends that elevate performative virtue over steady character and commitment. The Economist and other outlets have flagged similar patterns: younger people, especially young women, are suffering more despite apparent progress in rights and opportunities.
If conservatives truly care about women — and we do — our response should be practical, loving, and unapologetically pro-family. That means restoring respect for marriage and stable relationships, reforming schools to teach mental resilience and civic virtue instead of victimhood, and pushing back against social-media monopolies that profit from anxiety. It also means protecting women from toxic workplace policies that force impossible trade-offs and rebuilding community institutions that offered millions of women steady identity and support for generations.
Politically, the answer isn’t more top-down mandates from elites who caused this mess. It’s empowering parents, local leaders, and faith communities to rebuild the social fabric. Encourage policies that make family formation easier: tax incentives for marriage and children, workplace flexibility that actually helps parents, and public-health campaigns to educate about screen time and mental health. Speak up for men too — restoring healthy masculinity is part of the solution, not the problem.
Conversations like the one Rubin hosted shouldn’t be dismissed as “right-wing fearmongering.” They’re a lifeline for hardworking Americans watching daughters and nieces flounder in a world that celebrates the wrong things. Conservatives must be the bold, compassionate voice telling the truth about what’s gone wrong and offering real-world remedies that return purpose, dignity, and joy to women’s lives.
