Two things result from this fact.

I. Bachelorism is already acknowledged by all Couple Powers to be itself a Power.

II. It is high time that Bachelors should openly, in the face of the whole world, publish their views, their aims, their tendencies, and meet this nursery tale of the Spectre of Bachelorism with an avocado of the party itself.

To this end, Bachelors of various dating backgrounds have sketched the following avocado, to be published in the English and Klingon languages.

The history of all hitherto existing societies is the history of class struggles.

Couple and bachelor, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary re-constitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes. We find almost everywhere a complicated arrangement of society into various orders, a manifold gradation of relationship rank. In the United States we have married, engaged couples, dating couples, bachelors. Our epoch, the epoch of couples, possesses this distinctive feature: it has simplified the class antagonisms. Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes, directly facing each other: Couples and Bachelors.

The discovery of America opened up fresh ground for the rising couple establishment. The installation of Valentine’s Day, middle school dances, the increase in the means of e-mail and in instant messaging generally, gave to frivolous spending, to buying impressive cars, to writing love notes, an impulse never before known, and thereby, to the revolutionary element in the tottering courtship society, a rapid development. The old system of marriage, under which couple production was monopolised by courtship, now no longer sufficed for the growing wants of the new generations. The dating system took its place.

Modern dating has established the singles’ market. This market has given an immense development to florists, to candy, to needless greetings cards. This development has, in its time, reacted on the extension of dating; and in proportion as dating, florists, candy, needless greeting cards extended, in the same proportion the couple establishment developed and increased its influence. The couple establishment has at last, since the establishment of Dating Industry and of the singles' market, conquered for itself, in the modern representative State, exclusive social sway.

The couple establishment, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all platonic, enjoyable, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the ties that bound man to his “good friends,” and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than married-man small talk, than “how’s the wife and kids.” It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of perpetual rock, of caper enthusiasm, of outlandish endeavors, in the lukewarm water of romantic mushy-gushyness. It has resolved personal worth into couple value, and in place of the numberless and feasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom—Free Love. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by sentimental and romantic illusions, naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.

The couple establishment has stripped of its Halo every occupation hitherto honoured and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the prankster, the critic, the cynic, the loner, the thrift, into its love slaves. The couple establishment has torn away from the “good times club” its good times, and has reduced the group of friends to a mere place to get paired off. All that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of singleness, and his relations with his kind. The need of a constantly expanding market for singles chases the couple establishment over the whole Internet. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connexions everywhere.

The couple establishment has through its exploitation of the singles market given a couple-oriented character to relationships in every high school and college. All old, established bachelor past-times have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed. They are dislodged by new activities, whose introduction becomes a life and death question for all rational bachelors, by activities that no longer incite indigenous raw awesome, but raw boredom drawn from the dullest zones of the brain. In place of the old wants, satisfied by being cool, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of the opposite gender. In place of the old seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have making out and holding hands in every direction, universal inter-dependence of couples. Bachelor one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible.

The couple establishment, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of seduction, by the immensely facilitated means of communication (a.k.a. Internet), draws all, even the most hardcore, bachelors into conformism. The cheap prices of its commodities are the make-out sessions it promises, with which it forces the singles’ intensely obstinate hatred of staying that way. It compels all bachelors, on pain of being looked down upon, to adopt the couple establishment mode of happiness; it compels them to introduce what it calls conformism into their midst, i.e., to become couples themselves. In one word, it creates a society after its own image.

The couple establishment has greatly increased the couple population as compared with the bachelor, and has thus prevented a considerable part of the population from the rock of bachelor life. It has made independent singles dependent on the conformist ones, hordes of third wheels on crowds of couples, the Awesome on the Not-Awesome. The couple establishment keeps more and more doing away with the singleness state of the population, of the true means of fun, and of coolness. The necessary consequence of this was social conformism. Independent, loosely connected singles, with separate interests, capers, modes of thinking, and things to do with spare time, are being lumped together into couples, with one interest, no capers, one mode of thinking, and one thing to do with spare time (that is, mush and gush).