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A couple of months ago @Goodguy left the following comment here:
I tried to initiate a discussion about this without success, with my argument being that single men „policing/controlling” the sexual decisions of single women (I'm including „slut-shaming” in this category) has actually only been a social reality in the minds of feminist culture warriors. It was never implemented as a tool of women's „oppression” anywhere. To the extent that such „policing” existed (if we want to call it that), it was mainly done by other women, mainly due to the simple and understood fact that it's such policing that serves the long-term sexual interests of women as a whole. And the men that did engage in this were mostly fathers with daughters, not single men in the current sense of the word. (One can argue that in traditional patriarchal communities it was normal for single men to band together and remove outsider single men through threats or force; I guess this may count as indirect policing, which isn't saying much.)
I'm open to reading any counterarguments but anyway, this is not the subject I want to address here. I think Goodguy touched on something rather important which didn't occur to me at first, namely that society used to have a different attitude regarding this issue before it became modern. There actually used to be a group of men who were basically deputized by society to morally shame women in certain contexts despite being technically single (as I alluded to this above): priests and monks. (And this doesn't just apply to Christendom.) They were also voluntarily celibate, which is another category that disappeared with the rise of modernity. (The cultural memory of this lingers on though, otherwise the people who came up with the „incel” label would simply have called themselves celibate.)
As I was pondering this issue, it also occurred to me that secularization meant that Western societies did lose something significant not just in this respect but others as well. It appears to me that secular society and the churches/denominations used to exist in a symbiosis with the terms never being openly stated. It's well-known that Christianity used to be in a culturally hegemonic/privileged position. But it's also true that the churches basically volunteered to take care of those social groups that nobody else wanted to look after because they're socially a pain in the neck:
singles who can't or won't get married (see: priests, monks, nuns)
generally adults lacking social skills to such an extent that they become shut-ins without outside assistance
sick/diseased people unable to pay for treatment
children sired by men who can't or won't become husbands and providers
poor people that are so helpless and lacking in agency that they die from poverty without the charity of others
children of married couples too poor to pay for any schooling
I think atheists and people hostile to religion in general emotionally get hung up on the former and lose sight of the latter. Some of them who did not lose sight of it came up with the doctrine of eugenics as a solution, but we know what reputation that has today. Instead we expect the state to pick up the slack and look after all these unfortunate groups, which only results in a multitude of horror stories about police departments, child protective services etc. being a useless bunch of uncaring buffoons.
I wonder what the rationalist point of view on all of this is.
I think it’s just the natural order reasserting itself. I can’t think of a single culture anywhere in the globe, even going pretty far back in history, in which women enjoyed the near total sexual freedom and freedom to choose a career etc. that we have in the modern West. I think the reason is simple: it leads to all kinds of negative consequences for both men and women that functional societies were keen to avoid.
The first is rape and sexual harassment. When men think they can get sex from women without having to worry that her male relatives would beat the crap out of him, the urge to try to trick or pressure women into sex increases. And women going out at all hours, or meeting relative strangers the texted with online also increases the risk of outright rape. Especially when the culture encourages women to go out alone dressed in what earlier eras would have been streetwalker outfits. (If you think im kidding, compare the clothing that Julia Robert’s wears at the beginning of “Pretty Woman” — her character is a prostitute — to outfits that people wear to clubs). All of this has created the rape culture that feminism likes to blame men for.
Then you have the rejection of marriage and childbearing. Few women feel the need to marry, and of those who do, children are so far down the list that she’ll be infertile by the time she realizes she wants one. Our population is basically declining, covered only by immigrants from “shithole countries”. And it’s doing so because women are not being pushed toward marriage and family creation. They get casual sex in university while studying for the career that culture told them to want, and by the time they’ve paid back the loans they took out for a career, they’re done.
For men, it’s the loss of men’s spaces, and work that is meant for them. Men no longer have anything meaningful that sets them apart. They can’t provide for a family that doesn’t form when all the women are playing girl boss. They don’t get the prestige of doing a really tough job, because the women are there as well. And a lot of men’s activities and hobbies are colonized by women to the point that men are the ones who can’t make friends easily.
Then Theres the porn. Women now make porn for fun and occasionally money. So our culture is basically soaking in mountains of pornography and kids as young as 9-10 are finding it and using that to make sense of adult dating.
Honestly I'm unconvinced that there's some kind of clear link between male sexual frustration and rape. I don't think rape actually comes from that at all - at least not the bulk of it. Though rapist typologies are a bit problematic what I have read seems to run counter to this idea. Of course in relative terms, obviously women going out more will result in more rape, and women being "less safe" will as well, I think when viewed proportionally the connection appears to be fairly weak. It's not like women are being completely blind to danger either and take zero steps for their own protection. A much stronger case still remains that rape comes primarily from the circumstances of the rapist: "Sexual offenders exhibit heterogeneous characteristics, yet they present with similar clinical problems or criminogenic needs (e.g., emotional regulation deficits, social difficulties, offense supportive beliefs, empathy deficits and deviant arousal); the degree to which these clinical issues are evident varies among individual offenders" (and by type). I suppose you could argue that more socially stunted men leads to more rape, but that's not really what you seem to have actually said?
You have some other good points, but claiming more sexual freedom for women is overall bad for women because it will cause more rape is not a good point at all. Also, the assertion that more acceptance of casual sex leads somehow to more pressure have sex seems a bit mixed up to me, much less an increase in "tricking" women to have sex. This is just not a coherent point at all.
For me, this is pretty clear. You can frequently see questions like "by what date are you supposed to have sex?" on dating forums or reddit (or maybe just the latter). Usually, the answer is anything between "the first date" or "no further than the fifth date". These kinds of rules and expectations absolutely do increase the amount of pressure on dating couples to have sex before any kind of commitment, unless you count going on a few dates as commitment. Girls don't want to lose good men they find. I think there is pressure on men to ask for sex frequently as well. If you don't, you might be gay or not into your date very much.
My understanding is that women really, really, really don't like having a man choose not to have sex with them when they're turned on. Because men are almost entirely higher in sex drive than women, the expectation (and not necessarily an unreasonable one) is that men will be ready to go at any time and all a woman has to do to get some is appear interested. So a man not being into it is a massive ego hurt: "Am I that ugly?" And like all ego hurts, the defense mechanisms start triggering like an intrusion prevention system, and obviously the problem isn't her -- it's that he's gay and no woman would please him, or he's an impotent loser.
The accurate understanding that both men and women have complicated reasons for wanting or not wanting sex at any particular time is hard to adopt and introduces complexity, and the human mind craves simplicity, especially simplicity that results in the protection of the ego. Hence why something like intersectionality, which on the face of it ought to introduce greater complexity and accuracy in the face of how varied social experience is and how many different social hierarchies there are, ended up in actual practice to simply mean adding more of the reductive social rankings that were already in the oppression olympics.
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