One of the more thought-provoking movies of the past — however many years you might consider as your relevant time frame — is Children of Men, the 2006 dystopian apocalyptic nightmare co-written and directed by Mexican filmmaker Alfonso Cuarón and starring Clive Owen, Julianne Moore, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Pam Ferris, Charlie Hunnam, and Michael Caine.

It’s a movie set in 2027, at which time the human race has almost completely stopped procreating (in the movie, it’s due to a fertility crisis rather than a marriage crisis, but nonetheless …). Without children, there is nothing to hold society together, so it simply crumbles. Owen stars as a civil servant attempting to get one of the world’s last children out of a wrecked and chaotic Great Britain, an effort fraught with extreme danger.

Children of Men isn’t a great movie. It’s not the kind of flick you’d want to watch over and over again. But it is a film worth seeing once and thinking about a lot more than once. Because what kind of society do you have if the nuclear family doesn’t mean anything anymore? What happens if men and women don’t mate, don’t pair-bond, don’t settle down into marriages and form and nurture the next generation?

And that thought experiment is worth entertaining, whether or not you believe chaos and carnage as depicted in the film are the inevitable result. Why? Because we are heading in that direction.

The American childbirth rate is now well below replacement, and there isn’t much reason to believe the direction is going to change. Those of us who are having children are actually having a similar number of kids as our counterparts from a couple of generations ago, but there are a lot fewer of us doing it. Marriage rates are down, and surveys are beginning to show that fewer single Americans are having active sex lives today than they were 20 or 30 years ago.

Putting aside the very troubling fact that males all over the planet carry less testosterone today than two generations ago — something that deserves its own discussion (because if that decline continues, we really are looking at a Children of Men scenario) — why is all of this happening?

I asked that question to a friend of mine who’s an affluent 20-something single guy living in a relatively large city. He’s of an appropriate age and demographic, an eligible bachelor with means and prospects looking for a wife, so I figured he’d be a perfect sounding board for such questions.

But when I asked him why his generation was less active in pursuing nuclear families or even engaging in the “hookup culture” that broke out earlier this century, aided by apps like Tinder, he sent me this:

2 years later and I can finally talk about this ⬇️ pic.twitter.com/o6jFqMzY05

— Trevor Bauer (トレバー・バウアー) (@BauerOutage) October 2, 2023

That’s Trevor Bauer, who over the past two years and change has gone from being a Cy Young Award–winning pitcher for the Los Angeles Dodgers to a disgraced pitcher for the Yokohama DeNA BayStars of Nippon Professional Baseball. He was chased not just out of Major League Baseball but all the way across the Pacific Ocean, thanks to sexual assault allegations by a woman named Lindsey Hill, who we now know made up those allegations purely for the purpose of ripping him off.

Bauer, like many single professional athletes engaged in sexual promiscuity, has had his life and career ruined. Without any proof that Hill’s allegations were true — she claimed that he’d sodomized her, punched her in the face, and “choked her out,” just as her text messages suggested she was aiming to do as a means of separating him from his wealth — Major League Baseball suspended him for 324 games, or two full seasons, before reducing the suspension to 194 games.

It doesn’t help that he’s an outspoken conservative, or at least a libertarian, on Twitter, something that may or may not have contributed to the fact that the media mob rushed to burn him at the stake as soon as Hill’s allegations hit the judicial system. And as soon as his name was besmirched, there were other women rushing to the forefront to claim that their own sexual trysts with Bauer were evidence of sexual assault. None of those allegations have had much meat on their bones, either, but Trevor Bauer was suddenly persona non grata.

And his only option to continue making a living in baseball was to go to Japan, where he’s an all-star pitcher making less than 20 percent of what he was making as a Los Angeles Dodger (though, to be fair, he’s still drawing a sizable chunk of change from his contract with the Dodgers).

My friend’s message was, essentially, that if this could happen to somebody like Bauer, regular guys would have no chance against a man-eating female like Lindsey Hill, and, in the age where #MeToo allegations result in personal destruction without any legitimate basis in fact or evidence, the amount of financial and emotional expense associated with pursuing the Wrong Woman make it a fool’s errand.

He hasn’t taken an oath of celibacy, he said, but the idea of a happy-go-lucky sex life is absolutely out of the question for him given the risks.

And who can blame him?

Charlie Kirk said this pretty well:

For all you who push the "believe all women" garbage, Trevor Bauer, a star pitcher and former Cy Young winner, lost two years in his MLB prime because a lying, conniving, gold digger prostitute tried to extort him for $$—and the whole system from MLB, the Dodgers, and the media… https://t.co/HyQQSzxucX

— Charlie Kirk (@charliekirk11) October 2, 2023

As did Greg Price:

Look at this truly evil patriarchy we're living in where the word of one scheming gold digger was all it took for the media to smear Trevor Bauer as a rapist, for him to be given the longest non-lifetime suspension in MLB history, and have his entire life ruined. https://t.co/KoEZHaLAtV

— Greg Price (@greg_price11) October 3, 2023

Not to be too dramatic about this, but think about the cultural signals being sent here. Trevor Bauer was one of the hottest properties in all of baseball, and he was leading the National League in both strikeouts and innings pitched when he was bounced out of MLB on the basis of a lie.

You can’t get any more prominent than Trevor Bauer was in his line of work, and he had no protection at all. He’s a slightly less famous version of Russell Brand, who has also had his livelihood robbed from him by a corporate media entity on the basis of sexual assault allegations. (READ MORE from Scott McKay: Don’t Bother Me About Russell Brand Until You Start Believing Tara Reade)

So what man of high value would put his career, social standing, future prospects, and personal well-being at risk for a simple hookup, much less a romantic relationship that will end in a painful and potentially ruinous divorce in half the cases where it results in marriage, knowing that there are Lindsey Hills out there?

Particularly when some 31 percent of women of childbearing age (18–44) are classified as obese (up from 13 percent in the early 1960s), and the average woman in the United States now stands 5’4″ and 171 pounds. Physical attractiveness today isn’t what it was a generation or two ago, making it harder than ever to find a mate. Men are too fat as well, to be sure, but it’s a fact that men value physical attractiveness more than women when seeking a relationship. So when the universe of desirable women shrinks, and it’s then salted with Lindsey Hills who the culture supports and defends and makes more of, what then?

If our culture continues glorifying #MeToo allegations like the ones made against Bauer without honoring the presumption of innocence that our society’s treatment of accusations was built on, attitudes like the one my young friend has will shortly become a consensus. I’m not sure we aren’t already there.

And when that happens, how exactly do we get men and women together to form families?

As the last column in this space noted, it’s fairly obvious that the Left, and the people in charge of maintaining its cultural hegemony by use of those corporate media organs they control, is bent on preventing the formation of families, not fostering them — because single women vote for Democrats by 37 percent more than they vote for Republicans. So there is immense electoral advantage in building a cultural barrier to marriage and family. Marriage and family perpetuate the patriarchy, after all.

My friend would tell you they’ve already won, because the squeeze is outstripping the juice.

I want to tell him he’s wrong. I want to tell him it’s a distortion of the facts to say what happened to Bauer is an anomaly and not something he ought to concern himself with.

But I can’t. I don’t have a good argument to do that right now.

And I’m not sure I can dismiss the idea that Children of Men looks a little bit like what’s in store for us.