Women Aren't Too Much, Men Just Aren't Fuckable Enough.

A few weeks ago, I went on a date with a guy I had been admiring from afar for quite some time, someone I had built up into a sort of icon in my mind. At first glance, he was genuinely charming. Our conversation flowed effortlessly, and our perspectives on life and core values aligned almost seamlessly. But as the minutes ticked by at the table, a detail caught my eye that made it impossible for the magic to last: his real-life style had absolutely nothing to do with the highly aesthetic, refined wardrobe he curated on social media. When the topic of fashion came up and I asked about his favorite designers, his response sent a literal shockwave through my cultural sensibilities. Though he checked off a few designer names, he admitted he hated shopping and was still being dressed by his mother and aunt. The man sitting across from me making this confession without an ounce of hesitation was twenty-six years old.

Right after surviving this minor aesthetic trauma, I found myself on another date. This time, it was the exact opposite scene. Sitting across from me was a man who paid meticulous attention to every single piece he wore, down to the hidden meaning behind each garment. He looked flawless from the outside. However, as the conversation unfolded, I slammed right into the hollow wasteland behind that sleek storefront. He was so intensely focused on his appearance, style, and physique, and so thoroughly convinced that simply dressing well was more than enough for modern women, that he hadn't bothered to enrich himself intellectually, culturally, or educationally.

And yet, long before heading out to either of those dates, I had woken up with the first light of dawn, done my yoga, completed my skincare ritual, and managed three or four intense back-to-back meetings while running my own businesses and ruling my own kingdom. Obsessing over this entire predicament, I brought the topic to the table during our usual Sunday brunch with the girls. Around that table were flawless nails, carefully curated vintage jackets, underlined sentences from the latest books we were reading, and women who were each the main character of their own lives, having made massive investments in their intellect, careers, and personal growth. Turning to the girls, I said:

"I see myself as a whole package, and I don't say that from a place of arrogance or ego. I say it because I was raised under the pressure of this world's beauty standards, and I have worked to transcend them. Out of sheer self-respect, I pour immense effort into my body, soul, mind, and career every single day."

As soon as I shared this, another close friend dropped a bombshell. She had recently gone on a date with a highly popular DJ in his scene. The guy was well-educated, well-dressed, and took great care of himself. Essentially, he was the kind of man most people would label a "whole package" from the outside. But the real issue was the sheer narcissistic gaudiness it took for him to list all of these traits and then shamelessly add: "I'm like a god. I think when God was creating men, He skipped over me." My other close friend chimed in, mentioning how she initially found the guy she was dating incredibly funny, only for his response to validate the bitter truth hanging over our brunch table:

"My body and my looks aren't great, so I had to be funny just to get girls to pay attention to me."

Taking a deep sip of my coffee, I found myself asking that familiar, razor-sharp question: While women in the modern world are transforming themselves into intellectual, aesthetic, and emotional masterpieces, why do so many men still cling to the idea that "I'm enough just as I am," or that having a single admirable quality should be enough? And since when did men decide that possessing more than one decent trait suddenly made them a deity?

To be entirely honest, the autonomous and selective solitude that women have finally stepped into is one of the most revolutionary outcomes feminism has produced in the last fifty years. As our standards and self-respect skyrocket, the number of men worth having a relationship with can sometimes feel countable on one hand. The situation has reached such a standstill that even when we find someone physically attractive, the grand expectation often crumbles into dust within seconds of exchanging a few words. A man can go to the gym and build muscle, sure. But he rarely operates on the same multi-layered level as the whole package many women have worked to become. He fails to add his soul, his vision, the empathy beneath his humor, and his taste to his physical form. While women reinvent themselves across every dimension, men often assume that merely existing is enough.

And worse yet, it’s no longer just about relationships. Our self-respect has set the bar so high that we haven't simply detached from men emotionally; we’ve stopped finding them desirable altogether. A global study published last week revealed that Gen Z currently has the least active sexual and romantic life of any generation. While sociologists love to blame this entirely on online living, I believe the root cause may be something else entirely: we simply do not find men desirable anymore. And men, threatened by the fact that women are merely trying to become the best versions of themselves, often decide we are "too much" and walk away without looking back.

Right in the center of this suffocating gridlock, Julia Fox’s radical, unfiltered, and audacious manifesto echoes in my mind, shattering the unspoken rules of modern dating culture: Men should be more fuckable.

By completely sidelining the male gaze and flipping the script with a single sentence, Julia presents a surprisingly justified manifesto. The labor of being visually desirable, aesthetically compelling, and endlessly analyzed, a burden women have carried for centuries, is now being redirected. Men must now become the ones who are desired, overanalyzed, and evaluated. The ones who excite through their demeanor, aura, curiosity, and presence. Because the rules of the game have changed.

In the dating dynamics of previous generations, a man was often positioned as the centerpiece of a woman's life, wardrobe, and status. He was the outfit itself. Women were expected to accessorize their lives around him. Today, the reality feels very different. When a woman looks in the mirror, she is already a complete outfit on her own. A man, within that composition, can now be little more than an accessory.

And here is the most entertaining part: Whether or not you wear that accessory depends entirely on your mood, your taste, and your life. Will the man you bring into your world be a rare diamond ring that elevates the entire look? Or will he be a forgettable string bracelet whose absence you wouldn't even notice if it snapped? The accessory never defines you. It doesn’t grant you an identity. It merely adds a detail to an outfit that was already complete. And for a man not to look awkward against that backdrop, not to disrupt the cohesion of the whole, he has only one option left: To become maximally stylish, refined, emotionally intelligent, intellectually curious, and, in Julia's words, entirely fuckable.

Redefining "Fuckable": Things Sexier Than Muscle

Men still understand attractiveness from a deeply flawed and highly primitive standpoint, and I think that is the biggest problem. A body that cannot intellectually stimulate a woman's mind remains nothing more than a mannequin, no matter how flawless it is. Without intellectual depth and refined taste, physical attraction evaporates in seconds. As Julia Fox points out, raw attraction cannot be reduced to a superficial gym aesthetic fueled entirely by muscle and protein powder. Nor is hiding behind the "funny guy" persona, without developing an ounce of empathy, enough to save a man anymore.

Let's recall the bomb Julia Fox dropped directly into the heart of patriarchal dating dynamics:

"I actually think it's very attractive when men are a little bit submissive or objectified."

With this single line, Julia dethrones men from their untouchable perches and forces them to face the mirror. She presents a radical truth: the centuries-old burden of being visually desirable, sought after, and endlessly contemplated must now shift, at least partially, onto men. A man must move beyond the rigid mechanism of simply trying to conquer a woman. He must become an aesthetic subject himself. Someone who is desired, studied, and capable of captivating through his style, demeanour, and aura.

If we were to redefine what it means to be fuckable today, the definition might look something like this:

Being fuckable is a man's presence in a room. The aura he carries. His aesthetic taste. His mystery. And most importantly, his ability to hold space.

True desire is hidden in the refinement of how a man selects a wine, the genuine spark in his eyes when discussing a piece of art, and the confidence to use listening and silence as forms of power. Now that women have elevated their mental and aesthetic standards to such heights, wasting time on a man who is merely physically passable, or just funny enough to get by, feels like pairing a haute couture gown with plastic slides. Without intellectual depth, a refined worldview, and that masculine yet adaptable presence, muscles and rehearsed jokes become nothing more than background noise.

Naturally, these rising standards among women have triggered a wave of panic in the dating market. And that panic has given birth to one of the most dangerous dating archetypes of the modern world: The Performative Man.

These men realized, often painfully, that women are no longer evaluating only the body. They are evaluating the whole package. But instead of building that depth authentically, many chose to perform it. You can spot them everywhere now. The men who strategically leave Joan Didion or Nietzsche on their coffee tables. Who copy and paste feminist arguments onto social media. Who deliver perfectly curated intellectual observations at gallery openings. Who play the role of the sensitive man who truly understands women. I couldn't help but wonder: Was the performance of looking like you're putting in effort less exhausting than the effort itself?

Because the moment you are left completely alone with these performative intellectuals, you often find yourself standing in the same hollow wasteland hidden behind the polished storefront. Behind the elegant sentences they have carefully engineered, the same old male reflexes frequently emerge. The ones interested less in connection and more in using a modern intellectual mask to achieve the same old goals. These men are like counterfeit luxury accessories. They gleam brilliantly from a distance. But the moment they get caught in the rain, their colors bleed, revealing the cheap metal underneath. Now that women have transformed themselves into genuine diamonds, it becomes increasingly difficult to mistake fake beads for the real thing.

Beyond the Conflict: The Weary Warriors of a New World

Yet, as I write all of this, I pause and stare at my own reflection warped across the computer screen. Because this is neither cheap misandry nor the latest chapter in an endless gender war. It is the story of a much larger, deeper exhaustion that has swallowed both sides.

The world has spun so fast, and the balance of power has shifted so dramatically, that we have all been left stranded in the middle of the ocean like ships that have lost their compass. Today, men are lonelier than ever. Isolated, confused, and disconnected in ways previous generations rarely experienced. On the opposite shore, women are more powerful and independent than ever before, yet also intimately familiar with the anxiety that comes from carrying that power alone. Society whispers to men:

"Open up. Be vulnerable. Show your emotions." At the same time, it shouts at women: "Lower your standards. Learn to settle. Stop asking for so much."

The result? A complete modern-day paralysis.

Men are scared of rejection and women are scared of settling down. Men are terrified of being rejected, terrified of their egos shattering against hard rocks; while women are terrified of binding themselves to the wrong man, of being trapped in the magnificent kingdoms they built with their own bare nails, and of extinguishing their own light just to "settle down." Men are looking for peace, women are looking for safety. In the ferocious noise of the modern world, a man is merely looking for a quiet sanctuary of peace to rest his head; while a woman is chasing a genuine, refined safety where she can lean back both mentally and emotionally and finally let herself let go.

At the end of the day, both sides look across the water and think: "Their lives are easier. They hold all the cards." But the reality is much less satisfying. Both sides are exhausted. Because they no longer understand one another. They have lost their shared language. We keep falling into the illusion that the conflict is simply men versus women. But that is not the real problem. The problem is that the world has changed irreversibly, and we have forgotten how to adapt to it as human beings rather than as collections of gendered expectations.

From the audacious world of Julia Fox to the Sunday brunch tables of Istanbul, what we are really searching for is a new language. A language of adaptation. A language of connection. A language capable of surviving a world that no longer resembles the one our parents inherited. The claim that men need to be more fuckable, more effortful, more aesthetically aware, and more mentally capable of holding space, is ultimately an editorial reaction to an old model that has failed to evolve alongside women. Because the main outfit has already changed. It has evolved. It has transformed itself. Now the real question becomes: Can the other side find the courage, curiosity, and grace required to complement that transformation? Or will they be left standing still while the world moves forward without them?

I couldn't help but wonder: Perhaps the time has finally come to rewrite the rules of desiring and being desired.