Do Better

Worst Boyfriend Ever sucks

Jan 31, 2026

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s February 2, 2026 World edition. Read Cockburn | The Spectator for more.

The first thing you learn as a young woman, without anyone telling you a word, is that men love sex. Men want to have sex with you and men want to have sex with every woman. They love sex so much they will do anything to get it. They will trick you into having sex with them. They will flatter. They will lie. They will do whatever they can to get you into bed.

This is the foundational myth on which the fantasy of male vitality is built – the red-blooded American man, always on the verge of losing control. Now it may be true that our late-liberal order has neutered this impulse. Blunted it. We may be seeing a new generation of dysfunctional, BlueChew-popping eunuchs. It could also be the case that the girlboss of the 2010s, with her second- and third-wave feminist mother – and all their browbeating, ballbusting, spittle-flecked nagging – have finally purged the American bloodstream of testosterone.

All that may be so. Yet none of it justifies the very online trend for what I call the male sex-confessional. Take, for instance, Worst Boyfriend Ever, a newsletter written anonymously by a young man (let’s call him WBE) chronicling a series of infidelities and anonymous hookups. WBE is one of a small but growing genre of red-pilled male sex writers who transmit their misogynistic impulses and bare-faced appetites straight onto the internet for more inhibited “sensitive young men” to consume.

WBE freely admits to the harm he causes. He understands it. And yet he persists, cheating on his girlfriend over and over, folding his bad behavior into a literary persona, pursuing sex-as-content above all other goods. He is so numb to feeling that, despite being under 30, he relies on pharmaceutical aids to perform sexually. None of this stops his compulsion. In all his loving and leaving, he never reaches the clarity of true remorse; there is only the fog of self-loathing. And his posing grows harder to stomach the longer it goes on.

WBE does, undeniably, reveal something true about our algorithmic age. He is a man driven by appetite and repetition, atomized by detached sex and only able to experience his own behavior at a distance. He is prey to his impulses, treating them as material for his audience, rather than as something to be shaped and restrained. For WBE, desire is ambient and disorganized. In this sense, he seems not to care about absolution at all.

If modern life is indeed diseased and disenchanted, then WBE’s nihilism makes a sort of twisted sense: a young man wandering a blighted, post-apocalyptic world with nothing to live for, nothing to return to and nothing to keep him anchored. Daniel Kolitz wrote a version of this case in his viral Harper’s essay “The Goon Squad,” which describes young men marooned in a sea of endless pornography, exhausting themselves on increasingly mind-numbing stimulation. But these porn addicts were poignant only because they had nothing left to lose. WBE did have something to return to: a loving girlfriend – one he refused to break up with even as he repeatedly cheated on her and broadcast his acts to his audience. This is not a man stranded among the ruins of western civilization. He is someone refusing to preserve the peace he had managed to capture.

Well, at least I’m not pretending to be a good person, WBE seems to tell us, as if that should be enough. It is tempting to treat self-disclosure as evidence of bracing authenticity. The writer Sam Kahn, after much hedging, argues that it takes a “certain wild courage to do what WBE does,” involving “breaking down all the layers of self-deception by which most people try to convince themselves that they’re good people and getting down to something like bedrock of who we actually are.” It’s hard, Kahn says, “to not treat this kind of reckless, dignity-destroying honesty with a very begrudging kind of respect.”

Honesty be damned. There’s a deceptive narcissism here, mirrored by the autoerotic writing of the female sex-confessional. These writers seem to believe that admission of sins is enough – confess and you may continue to act as if nothing you do matters. This is a coward’s posture that demands nothing of the actor while granting him perverse notoriety. WBE recently strung his essays together into a book, further legitimizing his efforts.

WBE wants it all. He wants to have sex with lots of girls, he wants his girlfriend back, he wants to entertain us online. What he does not want is to choose. He refuses to bear the cost of change. Just as he cannot arrive at pleasure without the help of pills, his writing cannot arrive at meaning without endless repetition.

He may be the product of the modern war on men. But this moment, defined by numbing stimulation and the frictionless scroll, demands something much higher-voltage than description. And WBE is barely sufficient as entertainment and wholly unsatisfying as literature. We are already drowning in words. We know how to describe and pathologize our weaknesses, how to narrate the rotting of our own limbs without cutting them off. What we lack is any account of what it would look like to change. There is no bravery here.

As someone with more than 80,000 tweets in the bank, I understand the impulse for self-narration better than most. I once believed that if I explained and exposed myself enough, the world would grant me understanding. My own confessions were neither brave nor especially revealing. They kept me in shallow waters, circling the same half-truths over and over again. The only thing I had to do, in the end, was stop.