Sex without love is a meaningless experience, but as far as meaningless experiences go, it is pretty damn good”. W. Allen

“The single woman… is a real, living phenomenon… who ceaselessly wages the grim struggle for existence” and fights in the ranks of the proletariat for the right to work. The “younger sister” paves the way for the truly independent “free” and “equal” woman of the future. “ Alexandra Kollontai

“Everything in the world is about sex except sex. Sex is about power.” Oscar Wilde

: “sex is the consolation you have when you can’t have love”

― Gabriel García Márquez

Mia Levitin’s book belongs to a genre that has proliferated in recent years: cultural criticism of romance, desire, and courtship in the digital age. These works, such as Eva Illouz’s Cold Intimacies and Sherry Turkle’s work on technology and relationships, often offer genuinely interesting observations about how capitalist modernity has transformed intimate life. But they consistently stop short of the one conclusion that would make their analysis truly radical: that the pathologies they describe are not accidents of culture or technology but are rooted in the very structure of capitalist social relations.

Much of the book focuses on Mia’s early life. She explains, “When my marriage ended, I thought I had chosen the wrong partner, but I never doubted that a relationship was essential for happiness. Determined to find Mr Right 2.0, I started dating with an Excel spreadsheet and advice from a celebrity love coach. Despite my positive attitude, success has yet to come. If someone had told me then that I would still be single after 111 first dates over about five years, I would have found it hard to believe. But honestly, I am grateful for the time spent alone.” The sooner you stop seeing yourself as a victim—even in the face of a terrible ex’s behaviour—the better. Take responsibility for what went wrong, even if it’s just a small part. She deserves a medal for 111 dates, but perhaps it was more about research than a desire for love or sex.

Sexual Relations Under Capitalism

Levitin isn’t a radical thinker; she generally holds conservative views on sexual relations within the framework of capitalism. Understanding how capitalism influences intimate relationships is essential. Engels’ ‘The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State’ (1884) illustrates that sexual and family structures are shaped by specific historical relations of production, rather than being innate or unchanging. The nuclear, monogamous family emerged alongside private property to regulate inheritance practices. Consequently, women’s oppression isn’t solely rooted in male psychology or “patriarchal culture” isolated from material conditions; it is deeply linked to class society. To eliminate this oppression, dismantling capitalism is necessary.

Various forces shape intimate life in distinct ways. The commodification of human relationships, reducing everything to exchange value, penetrates sexuality just as deeply as other areas of life. Dating apps exemplify this clearly: they turn human beings into consumer products to be browsed, rated, and discarded, applying marketplace logic to the pursuit of love and companionship. This leads not to liberation, but to a new, especially disheartening form of alienation. Exhausted, financially insecure, time-starved, and atomised workers, victims of decades of capitalist social policies, do not see each other as complete human beings. Instead, they encounter each other as commodities amid artificially managed scarcity. The loneliness epidemic and the “crisis of intimacy” that authors like Levitin identify are genuine social issues. However, the key questions remain: what causes these problems, and how can we address them?

The Limits of the Liberal-Cultural Approach

Cultural criticism concerning sexuality and modern romance, from Eva Illouz’s Cold Intimacies to articles in the liberal press, often accurately identifies symptoms but misdiagnoses their causes and fails to propose effective solutions. Typically, it blames the crisis of intimate life on “neoliberalism” as a cultural mindset, on technology, changing “emotional styles,” or on patriarchy as a standalone system. However, this approach consistently neglects the class issue: who actually gains from the atomization and commodification of human relationships?

Capitalism depends on isolating individuals and discourages strong, lasting bonds of solidarity, which are vital for collective resistance. The loneliness, anxiety, and transactional nature of modern sexual relationships are not flaws but integral features of the system. The ruling class benefits not only from unstable jobs, unaffordable housing, and the decline of public life but also from industries that thrive on loneliness, like dating apps, therapy, and self-help sectors.

Capitalism not only shapes how people connect but also influences desire itself. Dating apps like Tinder, Hinge, and Bumble are not neutral; they promote the commodification of humans. User profiles become commodities, with individuals showcasing attractive features—photos, wit, credentials—for evaluation in a swiping marketplace. The logic of exchange value governs intimate life, where relationships are judged like consumer products for utility, status, and compatibility. This is not just metaphorical; it reflects the real subsumption of personal life under capitalism. Cultural critiques that see these issues as problems of “seduction,” “desire,” or “emotional culture” and suggest fixing them through better individual choices or enlightened attitudes remain trapped in the very framework they criticise.

Much of today’s discussion on seduction, gender, and desire is viewed through identity politics, often reducing these issues to gender power dynamics, male privilege, or heteronormativity. Although gender oppression is genuine and historically grounded in the material conditions Engels examined, the identity-politics approach causes political harm by disconnecting gender from class. It treats patriarchy as a standalone system instead of recognising how it is deeply influenced and interconnected with capitalist property relations.

The result is that the critique of alienated intimate life gets channelled into individual empowerment narratives on how to navigate the dating market as a woman, how to assert your boundaries, how to optimise your romantic self, which are perfectly compatible with capitalism and ultimately reinforce the commodified framework rather than challenge it. Genuine liberation from alienated relationships requires the overthrow of the system that produces that alienation, not better personal strategies within it.

What Genuine Liberation Requires

The Marxist position is straightforward: genuine human liberation, including the liberation of intimate life from commodification and alienation, requires the socialist transformation of society. This means abolishing the material conditions that force people into isolated competition with one another: the wage system, private property, the housing market, and all the economic pressures that deform human relationships from the outside in. Alexandra Kollontai, writing in the early Soviet period, understood this clearly. The “new woman” and “new man” she wrote about were not products of cultural attitude shifts; they were to be forged through collective struggle and the building of a new social order in which human beings could relate to one another freely, not as economic units.