farhakhalidi.substack.com
It's an essay about the various flaws modern feminist sex positivity culture has for women, and that it's often a good idea to refrain from sex even if one isn't religious. The author is an Only Fans model for context. I thought it did a great job laying out the downsides of ubiquitous sex.(Reposted because I accidentally linked to reddit instead of the original essay earlier).
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I enjoyed the article. I think I'm one contributing factor here is what Scott identified over a decade ago in should you reverse any advice you hear. People in either sex positive or purity cultures are probably in thick information bubbles that take those positions to pathological extremes. This is probably even worse today than when Scott's article was written.
I suspect a lot of people operating in an enthusiastic consent framework would agree with the author that the circumstances she describes some of her friends having sex under were problematic. There's a reason those articles have the disclaimers they do. I suspect they would do so using a language of consent, that various kinds of pressure had rendered the sex in question not really consensual. The problem with this angle is that it turns what is supposed to be a simple and intuitive concept into one that hides a lot of complexity and nuance.
From my perspective it seems like there are two key issues. Firstly, women feel a social and interpersonal pressure to have sex they don't want. Like they need a good reason not to have sex with someone. This is totally backwards to how it ought to work. You do not need any reason to refrain from sex with someone beyond "I don't want to." "No" is a complete sentence, as they say. Related to the first, many men apparently feel no compulsion to respect that "no." Badgering women into having sex with you after they've said no is apparently fine in some people's minds. So the question, then, is how we create the social conditions so that women feel empowered to give that "no" and men feel compelled to respect it.
Including women! And to go a different direction than the poster below me, women expect men to ignore their "no". Say no and then being pursued regardless makes them feel desired. You hear anecdotes all the time of women who said no, the man respected it, and they thought less of him for not just going for it. Like that's not how a "real man" is supposed to act.
This is further confused by the fact that girls who say "no" but are timid or nervous, and girls who say "no" but are just playing coy can sound exactly the same. Grinning ear to ear, giggly, clingy.
Yes, women playing coy is definitely a problem. Maybe this is just me but I think the better option is just... not having sex with women who do that! They can either learn to ask for what they want or no one should have sex with them. Errors in the direction of "some people miss sex they could have had" seem much better than errors in the other direction.
Maybe. If all you are trying to do is get as much sex as you can, fine. But this happens in other context too.
This happens after you've been getting to know a woman for a few weeks, and there is some ambiguity about whether this is going to be friends, or more. You feel like you click on every level, and one night you get your shot to take things to the next level. But you mistook her playing coy for earnestly saying no, and you failed your audition. Now she has the ick and you are permanently friendzoned.
Is it fair? No. But, and I don't have statistics here, if you decide to cut off every woman who does that from your potential partner pool, you've probably just axed 90+% of otherwise well adjusted women. Because in the experience of everyone I've ever spoken to, some degree of overcoming resistance to prove how attracted you are to a woman is expected by both sexes.
I spent my 20's raging at the banking system post 2008 bank bailouts, refusing to participate with my money in a corrupt and fraudulent investing markets... only for nothing to happen. In my 30's I decided I wasn't going to be the only chump not getting mine, and now I have a seven figure net worth. Likewise, I spent my 20's expecting women to be honest, straight forward, and exercise agency. I had zero success. Needless to say in my 30's I changed strategies.
Some systems just aren't worth raging against. The rules may not be fair, but unfortunately we don't get to change them.
On the one hand, I don't doubt it is individually sucky to break away from social norms like this. On the other hand, if we all decide to continue as if these are the rules then they remain the rules. Society does not spontaneously re-order due to nobody doing anything. It is a difficult collective action and coordination problem.
Maybe with respect to my gripe about financial markets.
The dating market is downwind of biology. There is no changing that.
I am skeptical that the particular facts of women playing hard to get are downwind of biology.
The r/K selection theory has pretty much confirmed what you're skeptical of.
Human women have a very long and difficult pregnancy and an extremely long child rearing period. They have a massive incentive to mate with a mate who is going to stick around.
Playing hard to get is a filtering mechanism for a man's ability to stick with an effort despite initial failure or hardship. It's as simple as that. Phrased differently, "if I make it easy for him to come (that's an unintentional double entendre! hahaha, nice), it will also be easy for him to go...Therefore, I have to make it a little hard up front to test out if he's going to see it through"
We can't and don't want to hack our own biology. The "hack" is the social norms and culture that we build to compensate for our biology. In sexual relations, ambiguity is a real problem. Playing coy is intentional ambiguity. We used to deal with it by creating more obvious courtship milestones - she's playing coy, so you ask her to "go steady" or go to the dance or whatever, that's an obvious next step with some built in commitment by both parties. Nowadays, however, literally sleeping with someone is ambiguous. "I know we fucked, but I'm not sure I like like you" is in the head of hundreds of thousands of men and women right now.
This is all a way of saying that we shouldn't ask women not to play coy and start announcing their intentions in a legalistic format upfront (that's autist level 4000 thinking). We should, however, provide the social pressure to hold them accountable for crossing various milestones as well as general honesty with partners. Likewise, on the male side of things, we should be coaching young men on what a good courtship looks like, penalize them for cad-ambiguity behavior, and harshly socially penalize them for abandonment, absentee fatherism, etc. Fortunately, male coercive sexual behavior is still universally recognized as abhorrent - at least in the west
I guess it depends on how specific we get on "playing hard to get." "Woman sometimes turns down date with a guy she would actually like to date to see how persistent he'll be" seems less objectionable to me, although comes with the obvious problem lots of women who don't want to date a guy are going to continue being pestered. "Woman sometimes says so no sex even though she wants it" seems like a much worse norm. Surely we can develop better norms for women to filter men for a kind of stick-to-it-ive-ness than creating strategic ambiguity for rape.
I am unclear on what it means to "hold them accountable for crossing various milestones." I agree that women should be more honest with partners, that was my whole point!
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Not wanting to seem too easy is probably a feature of all monogamous societies. Whether you think civilization is downstream of biology is, I suppose, up to you.
Are non-monogamous societies somehow less downstream of biology than monogamous societies? Observationally dating norms have been very different historically than they are today and can be quite different in different geographical locations even today. It thus seems hard, to me, to argue that some set of dating norms common in the anglosphere are some biological inevitability.
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