Transcript of Interview with David O'Connor on Modern Love

Interview with David O'Connor on Nietzsche, Plato, Christianity

0. Introduction

Johnathan Bi: Something terrible has happened in modern dating. 5% to 10% of young American women are on OnlyFans. Birth rates have plummeted below subsistence in developed nations. And an unbelievable number of young men identify as Incels; men who proudly advertise that they can't get any girls. My guest today is Notre Dame's David O'Connor. He's going to diagnose what has gone wrong, show us how incels and OnlyFans are two sides of the same coin, and what you can do today to secure a happy love life. In this interview, Professor O' Connor will rescue classical resources from the platonic and Catholic traditions, to help you survive modern dating.

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Johnathan Bi: What are young men doing wrong in dating today?

David O'Connor: A lot of young men are actually fearful about letting women know that they're attracted to them. And it's as if they've lost confidence in their own erotic agency somehow. It's important that they just are bold enough to let a woman see that they're interested in her as a woman. I've told students over and over again, I do not believe in this notion that, "Well, we should be friends first." I think that's completely wrong. I don't think that friendship and an erotic connection, are somehow continuous things. I think they're both valuable things. But I think they're quite different things. And I think that one of the things that's wrong, and it can't be wrong just with men, it must be wrong with couples, that'd be the first thing I want to emphasize. I think that young men and women of that age, when their erotic sensitivity, and therefore, their erotic power, is at its greatest, I think that seeing themselves as couples, rather than seeing themselves as just men interested in women and women interested in men, but really seeing themselves as couples, I think that's very diminished in contemporary... At least the kind of contemporary elite culture that the young people I'm around the most are a part of.

David O'Connor: So that's one of the first things I would tell a young man that, have