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I like Holly Math Nerd, but she's got... some issues (as she readily admits). She insists that the number of women who enjoy sex for sex's sake and will not be damaged by having sex without an emotional bond is nearly an empty set. I... have enough experience to believe that is not the case. I absolutely believe Women Are Different and that most women need/desire an emotional bond in a way men generally do not. But there totally are women who enjoy being sluts, and I don't think that number is so very small (though they may come to regret the physical and social costs of their behavior later).
"Demisexual" is a stupid term, and especially stupid to lump under the anything-but-boring-straight rainbow umbrella, but it's not a universal descriptor for a "normal" woman.
Tangentially (and fitting my theme of Literary Snobbery), a while ago we had some Discourse about Tony Tulathimutte's The Feminist. I just got done reading his complete collection, Rejection. It's very good, though very Online and Of The Moment. The first story is The Feminist, but the second story is basically a gender-reversed version, with a female incel who goes completely off the rails after an ill-fated one-night stand with her best friend. I think the whole collection is fun reading, and rich Culture War fodder. Tulathimutte, being a Thai-American Stanford grad and feted Literary Author, both capitalizes on and leans into/satirizes every stereotype and assumption you are projecting onto him, in a much more clever and intellectual way than, say, Rebecca Kuang's entertaining but subtle-as-an-anvil-launched-by-catapult Yellowface.
This is unrelated to the broader discussion, but I have a feeling that the women who enjoy being sluts enjoy being sluts in the moment. I believe that overtime, they experience a sort of unconscious strain that builds up with each casual sexual encounter, that worsens their mental health, separately from the regret they feel due to the aforementioned physical and social costs. I'm curious to know your opinions on this view? I don't really have much of first-hand experience to verify it.
Of course. After all, who would want to buy goods from a seller that casually exposes their ware(s) to hazardous, ionizing XXX-rays?
But really, this is just "buyers being buyers", in the exact way that "sellers being sellers" is. You instinctively negotiate- used items are inherently worth a little less than new items, it's best to have a service history and low mileage, shops that take care to polish and present their merchandise command higher prices from you just based on the confidence it demonstrates in the product, etc. etc. blah blah blah.
Or is there some other reason I'm not anticipating why you'd believe this is true in the absence of evidence? You can just say "I don't want to spend the money", lol; that's just as morally neutral as sellers who say "that is not enough money".
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Before everything had to be broken down into sixty-seven degrees of "this is the label for my set of special circumstances that fits me and only me", I think 'demisexual' was a useful term. There are asexuals who have no sexual attraction or arousal at all. There are those who generally are not interested in sex but who are interested in romance, and if they are in a romantic relationship may engage in sex (mostly as part of what you do to keep a relationship going, and to make their partner happy, and they may even enjoy it but not necessarily want sex or initiate it otherwise) once they have that close emotional bond and only after that close emotional bond is established.
Then like all somewhat useful terms it got over-used and flogged to death and now means "yeah I have sex like ordinary people but being straight isn't cool enough, you have to be some variety of queer nowadays, so labelling myself demisexual works for me".
(The irony being that I remember the fights over "are asexuals queer enough, or indeed queer at all? if you're not also trans or gay, you can go to hell straight invader of queer safe spaces" in the early days. Apparently we're all queer now, Father).
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"Demisexual" is a nearly perfect term for a "normal" woman to use, though; you just buried the lede as to why.
If it is in the interests of Most Women to assert a need for an emotional bond[1] before sex, but market conditions (where the marginal value of "seeing a woman naked" has dropped to zero, so it is simply an expectation that women offer sex to men up front rather than exchanging it for commitment as their biology and instincts are screaming at them to do) contradict that, then it is only natural that they'd seek to hide behind the framework of sexual identity as a bargaining tactic ("you should pay more because I'm Special, also other people will think you're lesser/bully you if you don't buy into my brand"[2]). Asexuality is used in the same way, by the same sorts of people, for much the same reason.
Furthermore, it is in Most Women's interest to deny that
liberatedwomen who aren't quite as encumbered exist, because from this socioeconomic standpoint, they function as strike-breakers in comparison to the emergent collective bargaining of Most Women (and it is beneficial at the margins since 'man's willingness to risk -> break pointless rules' is generally attractive to women in itself).It occurs to me that in a recently-established environment of equality we should expect mothers to [not necessarily intentionally] sabotage their sons romantically by failing to explicitly point out how and why female sexuality works. Uniquely, men are evolved to do this with their daughters with respect to male sexuality because up until about 150 years ago the inequality tilted that way- since this is a new requirement for women, an outsized proportion of mothers will fail to do this (and will then hide behind "social justice" as a means to escape blame for that failure).
[1] More cynically, this is "before the man has offered the desired price [in commitment] for the sex; the emotional bond is instinctual after that".
[2] Pair-bonding/dating is inherently a market negotiation; "all marriage is just prostitution" is the correct framing so long as you give prostitution a neutral moral valence (furthermore I assert that when people don't, it's also just basic instinct- a company seeks to protect its trade secrets, and both Men, Inc. and Women, Inc. don't like it when you reveal relationships follow market dynamics and/or resent being a slave to them).
Why should we expect evolution to push for ‘getting your kids laid with as many partners as possible’? This is not an offspring maximizing strategy(for humans early and stable marriage is the fertility minmax).
You misunderstand- the thing mothers are failing at is not "getting your kids laid with as many partners as possible" (though admittedly this is more likely to happen given a proper education in these matters), it's "your son dies childless because he was too busy Respecting Women(tm) to ever get successfully laid even once".
In an environment of equality mothers have to look out for their sons' sexual interests (where they enable/encourage them to go from 0 partners to 1) just as much as fathers do for their daughters (and enable/encourage them to go from many partners to 1).
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I'd point out that a belief that "all women want sex, they just act coy about it" is going to get you straight into the old path of "no doesn't mean no, it just means she wants you to push harder to make her say yes" which will get you, and any young men you teach about 'what women really want', into trouble.
There are women who act coy about it. There are also women who genuinely don't want sex, or not casual sex, or who don't experience "oh my god I'm so horny right now I need to jump on the first guy I see" at all. Asexuality is a genuine thing for both men and woman. Agreed, not everybody who claims the label, but we can say that about autism and ADHD and the rest of such self-diagnoses, which does not mean that autism is not a real condition.
Well, when you figure that one out, tell me because I've been a woman all my life and I'm damned if I can work out why some women do what they do when it comes to men. If you mean the simplistic model of "women want meat, men want sex, swap one for the other" good luck there honey. "Your meat is not good enough" - harsh truth or women just being bitches?
I suppose so, in the sense that both men and women can be paraplegic or born blind or whatever.
The ADHD comparison falls apart in that when someone claims to have ADHD they're trying to get the treatment for ADHD (meds, extra exam time) to get an advantage. People who claim to be asexual claim don't want to be treated for it at all.
Oh, I don't know about that. You get enough attractive young women together, along with perhaps a cute twink or two (just for variety), who are all extremely intent on trying to cure my (crippling?) asexuality? I'll absolutely submit to that conversion therapy, in earnest.
People have written many books describing this stuff, or so I'm told.
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No, it's just sellers being sellers (and yes, every seller does this- talk to some salespeople sometime, they'll have plenty of examples). Buyers can deal with that in constructive or destructive ways. I'm more interested in the dynamics between the two.
Sellers have a vested interest in frustrating price discovery.
Sociobiologically/evolutionarily speaking, you are the seller (and were not only quick to claim yourself as such, but you also mocked/confuse me for being one of those damn low-ballers) so naturally, you'll tell me that price discovery is dangerous- you're simply following your incentives to do that.
I assert that treating your [hypothetical] sons the same way, and telling them that lie rather than the truth, is net-negative; both because "yeah, actually, prospective sellers really do work like that", and because by not doing so you choose to make your [child] sacrifice to the social religion of "seller good buyer bad" (or "capital good labor bad", or "woman good man bad") rather than the actual truth. Same thing with fathers and daughters, though the incidentals are slightly different.
And it's not like it's bad to follow those incentives, but my entire point is to use simple market conditions as the framing, not whether or not it be morally better to be a buyer or seller (or the moral questions of buying or selling); this is the point of disclaiming "but buying/selling sex is just prostitution" as morally neutral even though that is completely 100% descriptive of what happens.
Yes, it is; the problem with the label is that it once used to describe a real thing (and by the few people who actually speak both honestly and more self-awarely about it than others), but it has been appropriated by marketing/sellers to achieve a better negotiating position.
Like what? The "battered housewife" is explained spectacularly; a seller who has priced themselves too low or has an overactive instinct to sell in this area. This is also why, as the price of women increased due to their economic situation improving through technology, wife-beating and spousal abuse has declined: husbands simply cannot afford women that will permit them to do that (and that's ignoring minimum-wage and employee protection laws, which age of consent and anti-marital rape/no-fault divorce/abortion laws serve as, respectively).
Oh yeah, and trophy wives are Veblen goods.
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Do you see what the problem is? If there are women who say no because they don't want to have sex, and there are also women who say no but are just acting coy about it, then the only way for a man to find out which is which is to keep pushing and see which ones give in and which ones put up real resistance. Any man who stops the second a women lets out a token "no" (or, worse, believes in affirmative consent) is never going to get laid, because that is simply not how women work. Modern notions of consent make a rapist out of every sexually successful man.
Seems to me like this is the fault of women, not of men.
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I readily admit that there are women out there who enjoy casual sex (I've met plenty of them, including a handful who weren't French) and I'm sure Holly Math Nerd's therapist was exaggerating for comic effect, but I nonetheless think "demisexual" probably describes the modal female experience a lot more accurately than the sex-positive feminist tabula rasa account.
I read Rejection a few months ago ("Pics" was, in my view, the strongest story in the collection) and posted a mini-review here. Curious to see if you agree with any of my points.
Thanks for the link - missed it when you posted it before. I have added my own thoughts there.
I agree "demisexual" is probably a reasonable description for the modal woman, just that there is more variety in the female experience than a lot of men (and women like Holly) want to acknowledge.
I'm a man, I would consider myself having high libido, and still I have noticed more than once that a female acquaintance becomes more sexually attractive as I get to know her better as a person. And from what I've heard, men in general are attracted to women they love.
Perhaps "romantic/personal attraction enhances sexual attraction" is somewhat universal for humans, and a lower baseline libido just makes the effect more pronounced.
Demisexuality should really be confined to those instances where the usual sexual attraction/arousal/hormonal impulses are lacking or very muted, and only arise after the emotional bond is formed. Unlike the general run of sexuality for both men and women, where libido, desire and arousal are independent of being attached to any one particular individual and can be experienced before any attraction to a particular person is experienced (e.g. going out on the pull which both men and women engage in).
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Rat Award 🏅
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Is this irony or are we really this lost?
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