0
0
If you haven’t been following along, and that’s understandable, here’s the story so far. I set out to build a Black speculative mythology. It is an Afrofuturist superhero story about a Black man carrying every weight the world and his own family and friends could stack on him. This is everything from abuse, rejection, and underestimation, on top of the broader struggles Black men face. Like education, upward mobility, life expectancy, fatherhood, and the justice system. I decided to tell that story three ways at once. Poetry and annotation, straight narrative, and music, across three books and three companion albums. It falls on Swift Nightz Music Society/Badson Publishing.
One book is published so far, two albums are out, and I’m treating each album as a thesis in its own right, meaning every single gets its own annotated blog alongside the usual videos and social media promotion.
Normally, three singles come off an album. With two albums live, that meant choosing six, and every song felt worthy. So, I put the choice in the listeners’ hands. DJ Desperate at 93.3 Choice FM in Freetown ran the vote for me. And in exchange, I promised two early-bird cuts from the third album down the line. The listeners came back with three picks from the first LP and four from the second. That told me something useful on its own. This audience is connecting harder with the second installment than the first. What you’re reading now is the annotation series for whichever of those chosen songs I present next. And today that’s PantyDown, both the poem and the song.
Every song on Stings from a One Man Hive earns its place, but none of them cost me more to write honestly than this one. PantyDown is the shortest argument I have ever made and the longest one I have ever had to live inside first. So before the poem, before the verses, let me break down precisely what the song is actually arguing.
And why I believe the argument needed to be made.
The Alpha & Omega of Romance
Physical attraction, romance, sexual intimacy, gender roles, all of it sits at the center of what makes a heterosexual relationship a relationship in the first place. Take that center out, and you don’t have a wounded relationship. You have two people sharing a lease. I call it the Alpha & Omega of Romance. A strong, long-term, and committed romantic relationship will NOT survive long if that core goes untended. Not the friendship, not the shared finances, and definitely not the family built on top of it. PantyDown is not just a poem and song about desire. It is about Bee Mann and his Bee Woman, a married couple who walked through Hissy Fit and Toxic and came back to each other anyway, finding their way back into that center through the “Alpha and Omega of Romance,” sexual intimacy.
However, I could not write a poem or song defending a man’s return to intimacy with his own wife without first reckoning with why that return has become something men increasingly hesitate to make.
And I believe the hesitation has a source, and the source is not a mystery.
An Ideology Became a Legal Apparatus
I will have to say that Feminism did not stay a set of ideas argued over in university seminar rooms. It moved into media, into corporate policy, into government, into the legal system itself. And once any ideology gains that kind of institutional reach, it stops being a perspective you can simply disagree with. It starts being a set of consequences you live under, whether you agree or not. I want to be precise because precision matters. Feminism is NOT one thing. Liberal feminism, focused on equal pay and equal opportunity, is not the strand I am naming. The strand I hold responsible for what follows is Radical Feminism, specifically. The current within the movement that treats male sexual initiation itself, not just its abuses, as inherently suspect. That distinction matters.
I am not interested in pretending that every Feminist current did this equally. So, here is where that Radical Feminist current left fingerprints on actual law and policy, not just cultural mood.
Conscription
The United States influences the West. President Trump chases illegals away. Europe tightens its borders. In the United States, the Military Selective Service Act requires nearly every male citizen and resident aged 18 to 25 to register for a draft. Women carry no equivalent obligation. Failure to register as a man, and you can lose access to federal student aid, employment, and other benefits. The National Coalition for Men v. Selective Service System challenged this as unconstitutional sex discrimination under the Fifth Amendment. The Supreme Court upheld the male-only rule in Rostker v. Goldberg back in 1981. It reasoned that, based on combat exclusions for women that no longer even exist. Thanks to the relentless push for gender equality by some powerful Radical Feminists, those exclusions were lifted between 2013 and 2016, and the registration requirement was never revisited to match.
One might reasonably ask what conscription has to do with heterosexual men being sexually interested in heterosexual women. My answer runs through the gender role side of the equality argument, not the military itself. Let me be clear about where I stand. I adore the US military. Veterans are some of my biggest heroes. I am not advocating that the government force women into a draft. Or march daughters to the meat grinder of war alongside men. I say that as a traditional man who does not want that outcome for anyone’s daughter or wife. What I am pointing at is the double standard a society leans on when it disguises misandry as something else entirely. It demands sacrifice from men as a baseline expectation while treating the same demand made of women as unthinkable. That double standard is the pattern. Conscription is only the clearest place to see it.
Prostitution law
Speaking of clear places to see systemic discrimination and misandry against heterosexual men. The Nordic model, which they first enacted in Sweden in 1999 and since adopted across Norway, Iceland, France, Ireland, Canada, and elsewhere, blatantly criminalizes the purchase of sex while decriminalizing its sale. The framing behind it is explicit: reduce male demand, treat the seller as a victim regardless of her free-willed account of the transaction. Whatever you think of the underlying trade, the law itself draws its line by gender, and the man on one side of that transaction carries the criminal liability while the woman on the other side walks scot free.
Family law
Most jurisdictions, in a world under the tight grip of Radical Feminism, now claim a gender-neutral “best interests of the child” standard. They claim to replace the old maternal preference doctrine outright. In practice, they still award mothers sole or primary custody in a substantial majority of contested cases. These jurisdictions funnel the fathers toward visitation. Meanwhile, the ongoing financial obligation lands disproportionately on fathers regardless of the neutral language on the books. They practice this misandry regardless of who earns more. In fact, one could argue that those jurisdictions punish the fathers while rewarding the mothers.
Criminal sentencing
Men receive longer sentences than women for comparable offenses, even after researchers control for criminal history and offense severity. This is not a fringe claim. It shows up consistently in federal sentencing data. Faced with the argument for change, the system accuses the man of misogyny while boldly practicing misandry.
Social benefits
The European Court of Human Rights ruled in Beeler v. Switzerland in 2022 that Swiss survivors’ pension rules discriminated against men outright. Widows kept their deceased husbands’ pensions for life. Widowers lost their deceased wives’ pension the moment their youngest child reached adulthood. The Court called it what it was. None of this is a man complaining into the wind. This is case law, statute, and court ruling that did not build itself by accident. They practice this misandristic and discriminatory mentality in many of the highest institutions.
The Jane Doe Problem
Here is where it reaches directly into a man’s willingness to initiate sex, which is the part PantyDown is about. Title IX cases moved from roughly 50 OCR complaints a year before 2014 to over 500 by 2020. Men and women now file for it. Complainants and respondents alike, all alleging their schools mishandled the process. In Doe v. Purdue University, they suspended a male student for a year. The university found he had committed sexual violence, a finding that cost him his ROTC scholarship and his path into the Navy. The Seventh Circuit, in an opinion written by then-Judge Amy Coney Barrett, ruled his due process claim valid. Purdue had never shown him the evidence.
I want to be honest rather than reach for dramatic numbers that some people use in conversations like this. The research on false rape accusations, drawn from FBI data, an Oregon task force review, and multiple independent studies, converges around 2 to 10 percent. It means that out of every 100 rape accusations reported to police, researchers estimate somewhere between 2 and 10 of them turn out to be false. Meaning extremely few accusers make up something that didn’t happen or knowingly accuse the wrong man. I want to be very clear here.
Nevertheless, the other 90 to 98 out of 100 accusations are not necessarily all proven true in court either. Some just never get resolved either way because the evidence was unclear. The case doesn’t move forward, the accuser doesn’t pursue it further, but they aren’t determined to be false either. “False” in these studies specifically means investigators found real evidence that the claim was fabricated, not just that it wasn’t ultimately proven in a courtroom. The odds that any given accusation is a deliberate lie are low, somewhere between roughly 1 in 50 and 1 in 10. That’s the number that undercuts the “women just make this up to destroy men” framing.
However, that statistic doesn’t undercut the point about due process, since a true low rate like 2 to 10 percent still means real women accuse real men falsely. Then again few instances, the question is whether the process handling those cases (campus tribunals using a lower proof standard, for instance) protects the accused. This is regardless of how rare false claims are. That is the real number, and I am not inflating it to make my point. The problem was never that most of the women’s sexual accusations are false. It is that campus tribunals, and plenty of workplace HR processes built in their image, run on a preponderance of evidence standard.
Many land somewhere around fifty-one percent likely, not the beyond-a-reasonable-doubt standard a criminal court would require. Meanwhile, they hand out consequences like expulsion, lost scholarships, lost careers, and a permanently damaged reputation, which used to require a criminal court’s full weight of proof. That gap between the standard of proof and the severity of the punishment is the problem. And it is the reason a man can find himself calculating risk before he ever says a word to a woman he is interested in sexually or romantically.
Radical feminism is the branch of feminism I hold responsible here, and it is worth naming exactly what it argues before I explain why I am naming it. The word radical comes from the Latin radix, root, and that is precisely the ambition. It is not to “reform” society from within existing political, legal, sexual, and economic systems. They identify “the patriarchy” as male domination and control as the root cause of women’s oppression. And they set out to dismantle it ENTIRELY. That is not a fringe position argued by a handful of academics in a seminar room somewhere. It is a declaration of war. Radical Feminism has become mostly corporate and political.
That organization is institutionally influential in the currents inside modern society.
Nobody sets an objective that large from a position of weakness. An ambition to uproot entire systems, built in milinias of culture and traditions, requires funding, firepower, influence, and organization to match it. And Radical Feminism has all three. It has institutions, boardrooms, leadership, staff, and the infrastructure to actually carry its aims into policy rather than just argue them in print. That is exactly why I named it specifically in the PantyDown context. This is not a ghost or a vague cultural mood I am blaming. It is an organized, well-resourced current with a track record of turning its ideas into the kind of misandrist outcomes I have laid out above.
The Sex Recession Nobody Wants to Name Honestly
Something happened to romantic and sexual intimacy itself while all of this was being built. The data on it is not subtle. Weekly sexual activity among American adults aged 18 to 64 fell from 55 percent in 1990 to 37 percent by 2024. According to the General Social Survey. Among adults 18 to 29, the share reporting no sex at all in the past year doubled between 2010 and 2024, climbing from about 12% to 24%. A 2020 JAMA study found roughly one in three men aged 18 to 24 reported no sexual activity in the previous year. Even married couples were not exempt. Weekly sex among married adults fell from 59% in the 1996 to 2008 window down to 49% from 2010 to 2024.
What happened was Radical Feminism recharacterizing and renaming our relational norms. Researchers studying this point to declining cohabitation name economic and housing pressure, and smartphones eating into the time couples used to spend making love with each other. Those factors are real, and I am not pretending they are not part of the picture. But none of them explain why the men in these surveys, specifically the young men, hesitate at the point of initiation itself, the approach, the first move, the willingness to risk rejection or misreading a moment. Economic pressure does not make a man afraid to ask a woman to be his girl. A generation raised to understand that initiating carries legal and reputational risk on top of the ordinary risk of rejection does exactly that.
Marriage & the Numbers Underneath It
So, young men lost interest in showing up. The median age at first marriage in the United States climbed to 30.8 for men and 28.4 for women by 2025, up from 23.5 and 21.1 in 1975. The overall marriage rate fell from 72.9 per 1,000 people in 1960 to 51 by 2021, the lowest point ever recorded. And according to the Institute for Family Studies, roughly 75 percent of the entire fertility decline since 2007 traces back to falling marriage rates specifically, not to married couples simply choosing to have fewer children. Marriage is still doing what marriage has always done for family formation. What changed is how many people are willing to walk into it in the first place.
This brings us back to my “Alpha & Omega of Romance” theory.
What Radical Feminism did was undermine gender roles first. Then they made the ordinary act of a man initiating a heterosexual relationship something to be second-guessed rather than welcomed. The timing matters too. This came directly on the heels of women’s sexual liberation in the third wave. That was a movement that was supposed to affirm female desire on its own terms. But something narrower happened underneath that promise. A woman’s desire got liberated in the abstract, while any expression of it that took a traditional shape, wanting a man to make the first move, wanting to be pursued, wanting the established choreography of courtship, got reclassified as false consciousness, a symptom of “internalized patriarchy” rather than a genuine want of her own.
Liberation only extended as far as desire that looked a certain approved way. The chain that follows from there is simple enough that anyone can trace it without a single citation. Well, attraction means no expression of desire. No reciprocation means no relationships formed. And no romance means no sex. No sex means no marriages. Less sex means fewer offspring. Somewhere inside that chain, heterosexual sex itself got recast, not by Feminism broadly but by its radical current specifically, as an act of male-only pleasure extracted at women’s expense. That is a position academics like Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin argued directly, treating consent itself as suspect under any condition of unequal power (status, wealth, intelligence) between a man and a woman.
Once that framing took hold (and it did at an overwhelming rate internationally), anything that encouraged a woman to name and pursue her own desire outside its approved Radical Feminist boundaries was labeled less as empowerment and more like manipulation dressed up as freedom. There has only ever been one other institution in history that told women their sexual desire was something dangerous, something to be watched, confessed, and controlled rather than trusted. It was called religion. Radical feminism did not invent that impulse. It simply picked it back up, gave it a new vocabulary, and called the same policing instinct protection instead of sin.
What Feminism Promised and Did Not Deliver
Feminism’s own stated promise was equality, and on the narrow question of male and female initiative in courtship and sex, it did not deliver equality. It delivered asymmetry in a different direction. Catcalling, harassment, and abuse are real and deserve every bit of condemnation they receive. I am not walking that back. But condemning the negative side of male sexual initiative was never paired with an equally forceful cultural affirmation of the positive side, the seduction, the sex, the romance that a woman wants to receive from a man confident enough to pursue it. You cannot build a healthy culture around sex and romance by only naming what is wrong with it. Somewhere in that imbalance, an entire generation of men learned caution where their fathers learned confidence, and I do not believe that trade made anyone happier, married or single, man or woman.
Why PantyDown, Specifically
This is the poem that became a song where I refuse the caution inflicted by Radical Feminism. Bee Mann and Bee Woman are married. They fought, Hissy Fit and Toxic (on the album) both told that part of the story honestly. PantyDown is what happens after, two lovers who chose each other choosing each other again, through raw, unguarded intimacy that asks permission from no tribunal and apologizes to no audience. It is not a song about a stranger on a dance floor or a coworker who never consented to a touch. It is a marriage reclaiming its omega.
On the boundaries, since I believe a man asserting his sexual agency should also be precise about where that agency ends: eighteen is the legal minimum for consent, though I would set the bar higher myself, twenty one before I am fully comfortable, twenty-five before I think a person should move entirely on their own discretion. Those boundaries apply the same way regardless of who a person is attracted to or how they understand their own gender, provided both people involved are adults and both consent freely. My own attraction runs toward women, and I hold marriage, entered by mutual and ongoing consent, as the fullest context for the kind of intimacy PantyDown describes. None of that makes the song a rulebook. It makes it honest about the man writing it.
The Song Stands as the Argument
I did not write PantyDown to win a debate. I wrote it because a poem and a song can hold a position a policy paper never could, close, personal, unafraid to be a married man wanting his wife the way he wanted her before either of them had a reason to be careful. If one listener pauses on that, reconsiders one assumption they never examined, that is the whole ambition of this record. I cannot undo decades of institutional Radical Feminism with three verses and a hook. I can put my name on the case for what got lost inside it, and let the song do what the poem only sets up… Please look out for part two of this blog, with the annotations of the poem and song.
