[ CYPHER CODE #237 ]
Women didn’t erase men… They erased responsibility.

[ CYPHER CODE #238 ]
When women play God, they always end up slaying their own creation.

[ CYPHER CODE #239 ]
You can’t build monsters for profit and cry when they start eating you alive.

[ CYPHER CODE #240 ]
You can’t call yourself a victim of the game when you wrote the rules.

[ CYPHER CODE #241 ]
The death of men started the moment women realized power was easier to get through pity than pride.

Jett here. Vogue’s latest masterpiece of delusion is titled “Is Having a Boyfriend Embarrassing Now?” This is a question that’s so absurd, it almost feels like parody. But it’s not. It’s the new gospel of modern womanhood. Women are now being told that men… actual human partners… are cringe. And that their smartest and most empowering move is to blur them out of photos, crop them from wedding shots, and turn them into hands and silhouettes and shadows. Because nothing says “empowered” like pretending half the species doesn’t exist. Let’s get into it.

The irony is that women didn’t get here by accident. They built this era. For decades, women learned to navigate male power, not by confronting it head-on, but by bending it to their advantage. Seduction became their currency. Attention became their leverage. No, it wasn’t always pretty, but it worked. Women knew the rules of the game better than men did, because they wrote them.

But power is addictive, isn’t it? And once the balance shifted… once the monster they’d created and learned to charm stopped obeying commands, everything imploded. The Weinstein saga was the breaking point. He wasn’t some one-off predator; he was a mirror. Women used him, he used them, and the entire sick dynamic finally snapped under its own hypocritical and perverted weight. #MeToo wasn’t born from purity. It was born from exhaustion and anger that the monster was out of control and destroying the entire damn village. The empire of mutual manipulation collapsed, and the rebranding began. Women wrote some new rules, and once again, the monster was contained.

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Now, Vogue’s “blurred boyfriends” are the next evolution of the new manipulation. Women have gone from shaping men to shaming them to erasing them entirely. It’s rather symbolic. It’s the digital purification of history. The final step in distancing themselves from the monsters they once tolerated, partnered with, and, in some cases, created.

Women never lost power… they just created something they couldn’t control.

And now, the crown jewel of female delusion… Vogue’s latest piece on why having a boyfriend is basically a social disease. It argues that men have become so “embarrassing” that women should start blurring them out of photos and wedding videos. Not breaking up with them, mind you, just editing them out like bad lighting. Because apparently, that’s the “rational” way to make sure the monster doesn’t misbehave again.

If someone so much as says “my boyf–”, on social media, they’re muted. There’s nothing I hate more than following someone for fun, only for their content to become “my boyfriend”-ified suddenly. This is probably because, for so long, it felt like we were living in what one of my favourite Substackers calls Boyfriend Land: a world where women’s online identities centred around the lives of their partners, a situation rarely seen reversed. Women were rewarded for their ability to find and keep a man, with elevated social status and praise. It became even more suffocating when this could be leveraged on social media for engagement and, if you were serious enough, financial gain.

However, more recently, there’s been a pronounced shift in the way people showcase their relationships online: far from fully hard-launching romantic partners, straight women are opting for subtler signs: a hand on a steering wheel, clinking glasses at dinner, or the back of someone’s head. On the more confusing end, you have faces blurred out of wedding pictures or entire professionally edited videos with the fiancé conveniently cropped out of all shots. Women are obscuring their partner’s face when they post, as if they want to erase the fact they exist without actually not posting them.

So, what gives? Are people embarrassed of their boyfriends now? Or is something more complicated going on? To me, it feels like the result of women wanting to straddle two worlds: one where they can receive the social benefits of having a partner, but also not appear so boyfriend-obsessed that they come across quite culturally loser-ish. “They want the prize and celebration of partnership, but understand the norminess of it,” says Zoé Samudzi, writer and activist. In other words, in an era of widespread heterofatalism, women don’t want to be seen as being all about their man, but they also want the clout that comes with being partnered up.

Here’s the real tell. When women talk about “the evil eye,” they’re not afraid of men; they’re afraid of other women. Women know better than anyone how sharp female envy can cut. They see how other women size each other up, undermine, and quietly sabotage. So this isn’t superstition; it’s strategy. It’s women hiding their men from the same kind of women they are… the ones who know exactly how to manipulate, seduce, or destroy what someone else has. That’s the unspoken truth behind all this “protection.” It’s not fear of being cursed. It’s fear of being outplayed.

But it’s not all about image. When I did a call out on Instagram to my 65,000 followers, plenty of women told me that they were in fact superstitious. Some feared the “evil eye”, a belief that their happy relationships would spark a jealousy so strong in other people that it could end the relationship. Others were concerned about their relationship ending, and then being stuck with the posts. “​​I was in a relationship for 12 years and never once posted him or talked about him online. We broke up recently, and I don’t think I will ever post a man,” says Nikki, 38. “Even though I am a romantic, I still feel like men will embarrass you even 12 years in, so claiming them feels so lame.”

This is where the rot really starts to come through bigly. The “boyfriend is Republican” mindset isn’t about politics; it’s about status. It’s women policing other women through shame. The female hive doesn’t need men to control it; it does the job itself. A woman can’t even admit she’s in a relationship without fear of social exile, because being “taken” makes her look weak to the collective. So she pretends she’s single, performs independence for the algorithm, and mocks the same kind of love she secretly yearns for and fantasizes about.

But here’s the kicker, guys… it’s not men these women fear. It’s each other. Women are the most ruthless judges of female behavior, and they know it. Every muted post, every blurred boyfriend, every nervous laugh about being “cringe,” is survival. They’re desperately trying to camouflage themselves from the real predators: their own pack.

But there was an overwhelming sense from single and partnered women alike that, regardless of the relationship, being with a man was an almost guilty thing to do. On The Delusional Diaries Podcast, fronted by two New York-based influencers, Halley and Jaz, they discuss whether having a boyfriend is “lame” now. “Why does having a boyfriend feel Republican?” read a top comment, with 12,000 likes. “Boyfriends are out of style. They won’t come back in until they start acting right,” read another, with 10,000 likes. In essence, “having a boyfriend typically takes hits on a woman’s aura”, as one commenter claimed. Funnily enough, both of these hosts have partners, which is something I often see online. Even partnered women will lament men and heterosexuality – partly in solidarity with other women, but also because it is now fundamentally uncool to be a boyfriend-girl.

It’s not just in these women’s imaginations – audiences are icked out by seeing too much boyfriend content, myself included it seems (as indicated by my liberal use of the mute button). When author and Vogue contributor Stephanie Yeboah hard-launched her boyfriend on social media, she lost hundreds of followers. “Even if we were still together, I wouldn’t post them here. There is something cringy and embarrassing about constantly posting your partner these days,” she tells me, adding that, “there is part of me that would also feel guilty for sharing my partner constantly – especially when we know the dating landscape is really shit at the moment. I wouldn’t want to be boastful.”

And here it is, guys… the logical endpoint of female envy. When women can’t dominate the men they secretly want, they turn on each other. Suddenly, heterosexuality isn’t love; it’s some great moral failure. But let’s call a spade a spade. This is all about female competition and a “misery enjoys company” mentality. In other words, it’s easier to call yourself “liberated” than to admit you resent the women who have the man and relationship you secretly want but can’t get.

Basically, this is the new gospel: a woman can flaunt a girlfriend, but not a husband. She can post a same-sex kiss and get applauded, but show her fiancé and she’s a “Republican” tradwife sellout. What these women really want isn’t freedom from men; it’s freedom from each other’s judgment. They’ve turned feminism into a zero-sum game, and the only way to win is to burn the whole f’in thing down.

From my conversations, one thing is certain: the script is shifting. Being partnered doesn’t affirm your womanhood anymore; it is no longer considered an achievement and, if anything, it’s become more of a flex to pronounce yourself single. As straight women, we’re confronting something that every other sexuality has had to contend with: a politicisation of our identity. Heterosexuality has long been purposefully indefinable, so it is harder for those within it and outside of it to critique. However, as our traditional roles begin to crumble, maybe we’re being forced to re-evaluate our blind allegiance to heterosexuality.

Here’s the truth nobody wants to say out loud. The death of men isn’t about men at all. It’s about women turning their claws on each other. The Vogue crowd isn’t waging war on masculinity; they’re fighting every woman who still dares to want it. It’s envy in its rawest and greenest form. A hive-mind purge that none of them truly want to join. That’s why they blur out love… to hide it from the cunning eyes of other crafty women. All of it wrapped up as some noble rebranding of family and love as weakness.

Women are the hardest monsters to control, even by their own kind. This thing thrives on jealousy, on subtle sabotage, on the slow burn of envy disguised as empowerment. It’s not that someone else is pulling the strings. It’s that the strings are tangled around all of the women, and nobody wants to admit who tied the first knot.

Men didn’t die because they lost power. They died because women stopped wanting to share it. And the joke’s on all of us, because in the end, no one wins. Just a world full of blurred faces and empty frames.

Women just can’t stand each other.