Men, at large, using relationships and the partriachal view of purpose to, yet again, push women into submission – are we not bored?

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I watched Chris Williamson on Diary of a CEO. It was research and in no way pleasure.

In an era saturated with relationship podcasts, manosphere & misogynistic influencers, and algorithm driven dating advice, conversations about gender have become increasingly detached from social reality, yet are treated as universal truth.

When men speak at length about individualism and women while ignoring systemic realities, the analysis quickly falls apart.

In the few minutes I managed to sit through this particular episode, one moment stood out as especially worth addressing.

Chris Williamson, a self help, self optimising, fairly individualistic figure, suggests that women who are educated, career driven, and more successful than previous generations have one final conquest left in life: a man.

During the podcast, with Steven Bartlett, he performs a caricature of a woman looking for a partner, claiming that educated, career building women in their thirties are now competing not only with other high achieving women, but also with “the 21 year old barista who still lives at home with her parents,” all for a small pool of eligible men.

A subtle message here; Compete with the millions of women who have standards for their hetrosexual relationships, or, lower your own to find a man for you.

The implication is clear. Women have “raised their standards,” by which he appears to mean expecting relationships that are non abusive, equal, emotionally literate, and mutually supportive. Because only a handful of men meet those standards, women are now supposedly competing to secure them.

Let’s be clear. None of us are competing for you.

Men are not the goal. The language that frames women’s lives as a trajectory culminating in “getting a man” is damaging to everyone involved.

If Williamson and others like him listened to women about modern relationships, or even paid attention to declining birth rates, rising misogyny, and the epidemic of male violence, they might notice a pattern. Men struggling to communicate, refusing to see women as equals, and continuing cycles of control and harm. These are not isolated personal failings. They are features of patriarchy, designed to keep everyone in line.

It is worth acknowledging why these narratives resonate with some men. In a time of economic precarity, eroding social safety nets, and shrinking definitions of masculine worth, simple explanations are comforting. Being told that personal optimisation will guarantee status, intimacy, or control offers a sense of order in an unstable world. These stories promise clarity, hierarchy, and reward, even if that promise is built on distortion. But comfort is not the same as truth, and narratives that soothe anxiety by blaming women ultimately deepen the very isolation they claim to solve.

When people are treated as social status symbols, meaningful relationships become impossible. You do not relate to others. You acquire them and assess their value. This is patriarchal logic in action.

And this logic does not stop at dating.

It mirrors the same neoliberal framework that dominates our economy in the West. Individualism over community. Markets over care. Acquisition over connection. Everything has a price. Everything is optimised. Everything becomes a project.

Do not believe me? Look around, or better yet, look inward. Do you function as part of a community? Do you know your neighbours? Do you support others when morale is low?

This is why the rhetoric of “high value men” and “high value women” is so corrosive. It reduces people to their economic usefulness, their productivity, their status.

Feminist research has long shown that during periods of economic instability, men often retreat into outdated social hierarchies because those hierarchies benefit them. When systems fail, control is redirected onto women.

What is most glaring about these podcast conversations, where women are framed as objects, stepping stones, domestic tools, or scapegoats, is the complete absence of systemic analysis. Everything is individualised. Responsibility is placed on personal choices, never on the structures deliberately built to produce inequality across class, gender, disability, age, and race. Humanity becomes a series of optimisation tasks.

Social media now tells us that if you are not constantly working on yourself, earning more, improving more, becoming “better,” then you will fail at love. This is simply not true. Humans are more than productivity units climbing a career ladder in service of a patriarchal definition of purpose.

This mindset breeds hyper individualism. And hyper individualism breeds greed.

Which brings us back to relationships;

Real relationships, romantic, platonic, familial, and professional, are nothing like podcast bro fantasies or self help algorithms. They are slow. They are patient. They are collective. They are rooted in equality. Healthier relational frameworks begin with rejecting the idea that intimacy is something to be earned through dominance, productivity, or self branding. They prioritise mutual care, shared responsibility, and emotional accountability. They value interdependence over hierarchy, community over conquest, and curiosity over control. In practice, this means relationships rooted in consent, reciprocity, and respect, where growth is collective rather than competitive. It means learning to live with difference, to listen without entitlement, and to see others not as assets or obstacles, but as people.

And that is something no optimisation strategy can teach.