FarNearEverywhere
undereducated and overopinionated
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User ID: 157
FarNearEverywhere
undereducated and overopinionated
15hr ago
For a long time, it's been a tricky balancing act. Don't put out? You're a frigid bitch. Do put out? You're a slut. Men seem to want (and I'm emphasising "seem" here because this is all gross generalisation) women to be agreeable to have sex with them, but never to have had sex with previous partners, or only a couple of previous partners. If you think about it, it's not really doable; if you dump/break up with the girlfriend and both of you move on to new relationships, after a while you're both going to have a past history. If Joe has had more relationships than Annie, that's great. If Joe and Annie have the same number, that may be a problem: too high for Annie, too low for Joe even on the same numbers. If Annie has had more relationships than Joe, that's bad because that means she's promiscuous.
The double standard hurts men and women both because men are supposed to rack up more experience, but women are not, which means how do you do that? If the guy is always dating a new girlfriend who had only one or two boyfriends before him, then a small number of men are getting all the 'good' girls and leaving 'sullied' girls after them for the rest of the guys.
So women have an incentive to report lower numbers, and men to report higher numbers, of previous partners than they really have had.
FarNearEverywhere
undereducated and overopinionated
15hr ago
Look, I'm old enough that I remember the tail end of the Sexual Revolution becoming aware of it as going into my teen years. The attitudes then about men versus women were nuts by modern standards, and I don't mean "crazy ultra-feminists hate all men" standards, I mean "treating the other person as a human" standards. The attitudes parodied here where guys were tough and macho and women loved it, and the notion was to be sexually available because this was the new era of doing away with hang-ups. Men did benefit from it, so it does make me smile wryly to read all the crying now that the shoe is on the other foot.
Is it great that women can now be emotionally abusive to men? No. But in general guys are now getting a taste of the medicine that women had to put up with, and they don't like it. Newsflash: neither did women, hence feminism. "Women have the power in the dating market! Women are too picky! Women spurn nice guys and go for the alphas!" Yeah, the sexual market place used to be a male buyer's market, now it's a female one. And men can't shove off all the blame onto women, because men wanted to eat their cake and have it: women willing and available for casual sex, no demands for committed relationships or marriage, and access to novelty. Women were then conditioned into 'if guys can do it, so can you'. And now we have the results, where nobody is happy save for a few who can command premium attention, be they men or women.
If you're going to complain that women are not having babies, you need to look at the other side of "where do you get babies" because it's not out of thin air. Why don't women want marriage and kids? What are the social forces driving this? A lot of it is economic - unless you have one partner with a lot of money, it's not really feasible to be a stay at home wife and mother. If both of you have to work, then there's little chance to have kids because it all needs to be planned around education and careers, and then when you do, you're paying for childcare which is pretty much eating up one of your wages. You won't get a mortgage without two incomes, and renting is another problem (can you even find a place to rent, and if you do how high is the rent, and will the lease allow children?)
I'm not trying to blame men, I'm saying that there are no easy answers and putting all the blame on women alone is as unfair as putting all the blame on men alone.
I don't think you should treat your kids as biological experiments, but as you say, it's nothing to do with me. I'm not talking about "don't put your kids through college", I'm talking about "don't put your daughter on the stage, Mrs. Worthington". If you want to be the equivalent of a stage mother pushing your kids to live your dreams vicariously through them - okay, that's your family business and if they're happy or not with how things turn out, they'll let you know in later years.
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