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Got an interesting article to share, with a goofy-ass twist.
https://farhakhalidi.substack.com/p/in-defense-of-male-centered-women?triedRedirect=true
So, my first thought is that it is rare to see a writer lay out so explicitly their hang-ups with sex positivity. She makes the case that heterosexual men exploit the “unwritten rules” of the dating game to string along women for sex, and in doing so, traumatize them through sheer carelessness.
I don’t completely disagree with her assessment of the situation, although I’m confused as to what her policy prescriptions are, and I think she’s in a “Be Careful What You Wish For” scenario.
If you’ll indulge me as I put on my over-analysis hat, the heterosexual dating marketplace can be viewed through an economic lens, with men and women modeled as agents within the marketplace.
The author is making the case that the current status quo privileges men’s interests at the expense of women’s. Even if women would prefer a longer “runway” towards consummating a relationship, it’s the men who get to set the timetable, with their implicit threat of walking away otherwise.
The optimal behavior for women, operating collectively as a self-interested guild within the heterosexual marketplace is to coordinate to demand maximal investment from men in exchange for romantic/sexual relationships. In other words, to collude, act as a monopolistic cartel and engage in price-fixing schemes.
Like every cartel ever, this is hard to enforce because every individual member’s incentive is to undercut the group-set price. It becomes especially hard to enforce in cases of romantic relationships, where people are not fungible economic actors with identical goals of maximizing profits, but flesh-and-blood human beings with radically different goals, desires, and libidos.
The solution that allows women to set a “price floor” for relationships, in spite of both those factors, is to use social technology to align their interests. In this case, that technology would be “slut-shaming”. Any woman who engages in behavior that undermines the interests of Women as a Collective (like being willing to be Chad’s booty call) is declared persona non grata at Mimosa Mondays and banished from the bookclub.
None of this will be new to the average Mottizen, although God knows we never get tired of re-hashing the gender wars. What I find especially interesting in this salvo is the delivery source. In another essay, the author explicitly rejects the patriarchal norms of the conservative community that she grew up in. Despite that, she still converges on advocating for basically traditional conservative sexual morality in women’s dating life.
My concern is that I’ve never really heard of a secular society with those kinds of restrictions on sexuality; the only places that successfully curtail premarital sex do so explicitly through a religious point of view. The Taliban has successfully prevented Afghan women from traumatizing themselves from Hookup Culture, but whether this is better for Women As A Class is left as an exercise for the reader.
The punch line to all this? The author, Farha Khalidi, is an Onlyfans star! She is the bête noire of conservative patriarchs across the globe, and every social system (that I’ve ever heard of) that frowns on premarital sex would consider what she does to be much worse.
So it begs the question: what, exactly, is she advocating for? Quite frankly, I’m not sure. If I had to guess, I think she wants a secular, sexually conservative sororiarchy, where women watch out for their gender’s collective interests and stop each other from undercutting their bids. Either way, an interesting point of view.
I’m not sure the author wants anything at all. I remember her from a while back, and get the same feeling of simple hatred from what she writes. She hates men for being wicked, she hates women for being stupid, and yet she’s still friends with them? Even though her darling mother is right, she frames it in a stupid religious way, and thus is not really worth closeness.
I don’t find a single piece of her writing that betrays an actual appreciation of a single other human being. Hell, she doesn’t even seem to like anything in the abstract. She’s happy enough to look data up, but only insofar as it justifies hate. And then there’s the OnlyFans deal on top of it. I suspect that the reason she’s still a virgin is less that there is something she is reserving it for, or out of a sense of chastity or self-denial, but instead that it’s a helpful way of hurting others by refusing herself to them. This, I’m guessing, is why she also is friends with the kind of men she explicitly hates. She has to understand they’re a very particular subculture, right? She could find men who aren’t like that. So why is she staying around lecherous men who only see value in having sex with women and then denying them - if not so that she can take her satisfaction by denying them first? In that light, this piece seems more a justification for why she enjoys staying friends with women who destroy themselves. It’s for a good cause, so it can’t be because she hates them. Right?
Enough amateur psychoanalysis. It suffices to say that I dislike this woman quite a lot. She’s not totally wrong on the specifics, but this bitter poison is better not tasted.
For the actual question: how does a woman avoid this? I think it’s much simpler than you let on. The men who get away with this nonsense only do because they get a truly disproportionate amount of female attention. A man who gets even modestly less attention will struggle to achieve the same feats. So: go for less popular men, more trustworthy men, or both. Less popular is sufficient to avoid this kind of behavior. More trustworthy gets what a woman actually wants.
One word that has more or less dropped out of common parlance is seducer. It means, roughly, a man who lures women in on false pretenses. What are those pretenses? In the olden days, it was marriage. Dickens’ Pickwick Papers has, as one of its droll episodes, the somewhat aged and unattractive landlady of the titular and rotund Pickwick misunderstanding a totally unrelated announcement of his to be a discussion of marriage. So far, so irrelevant: what matters is that the next chapter (issue) is her bringing him to court over the affair, on the grounds that he was leading her on, and as he did not intend to marry her, she was owed damages.
While the fictional event was intentionally absurd, we could not even write such a scenario today. There is no law that a woman can enforce on the basis that her seducer had promised marriage. The idea is nonsensical: sex is just sex, right? Love is free, so why tie it to marriage? And yet women still want commitment. But “boyfriend” is not something that can be legally enforced, and so a disappointed woman has no recourse.
It’s easy to forget, however, that the explicit law was far from the only protection against seducers. The first line of defense was the woman’s friends and family. There’s a rather enlightening scene in Tolstoy’s War and Peace - spoilers, by the way - where the delightful, young, and severely naive Natasha is seduced by a ne’er-do-well from another noble family. He plans on eloping out of country with her, which will bring him entirely out of the grasp of the law. Natasha’s bosom friend finds out, informs the powerful matron who has lately been exercising godmother-like authority over them, and the whole thing falls apart. The would-be seducer goes to the site of their destined meeting and finds the huge manservant of the house cornering him, deeply rumbling “My mistress would like to speak with you,” manages to slip away and elopes rather more individually than initially planned. I believe “hell for leather” is how we describe that sort of ride. Nowhere in this equation is Natasha having sex, finding out he only wanted sex, and trying to get recompense after the fact. In reality, her friends and family were deeply involved with her and protected her from her worst mistakes. True, the law which made them matriarchal guardians of her made coercion possible, but the mechanism was preventative.
So if women want to stop being disappointed, they need people to help protect them from seducers: people who can sniff them out, stop a dalliance going too far without commitment, and stand up for and to them. And I suspect where this starts is, in fact, recognizing that women have a reasonable demand in commitment and that the man who leads her on and gets what he wants while giving nothing in return is a waste of time. I suppose the Facebook “are we dating the same guy” groups are an awkward attempt at this, but frankly they’re sunk because it’s all women of the roughly same age, and the dynamics devolve to the usual gossipy mess of women’s worst elements unrestrained. What you actually need is a connection to older, married women and good men. They aren’t competing for men’s attention and can give some real advice. And probably, the women who wind up happy will be the ones who manage this in one way or another.
Anyway, things like this make me glad I ain’t a dame. Seems hard!
For years I was under the impression that the term "fuckboy" was the spear counterpart to "slut": a highly promiscuous man. Last year I was talking with a female friend of mine who was single at the time, and who'd recently had some sub-optimal experiences on dating apps which she was feeling bitter about. (Thankfully she's now in a serious relationship with a wonderful man who I like very much.) She linked this article to me, which explained that a "fuckboy" isn't just a slutty man, but rather a man who leads a woman to believe that he's interested in pursuing a serious committed relationship with her and essentially treats her as his girlfriend for the duration of their casual dating stage, only to abruptly drop her without warning as soon as he gets bored.
All, I could think was - man, the more things change, the more they stay the same. Some components of gender politics really are evergreen.
I've seen it used to refer to both a hot Chad whose romantic interest in women extends no further than the tip of his dick and to a pretty boy that a woman keeps hooked on simping for her by using him for her sexual gratification (the female equivalent of a slampig - I haven't watched it but I think the toyboy fantasy film Babygirl with Nicole Kidman probably depicts something like this model), and also to any unappealing men who are more motivated to pursue sex than sitting at home watching porn and complaining online about Stacies.
Is he a boy and is fucking any significant part of the motivation for his actions? He's a fuckboy.
Reading that article though it reads like an attempt to build a stick for hitting men... but I don't see many men who would be particularly offended by the label. Low stakes defensive maybe, but not sincerely offended. What I can see being offensive is calling another woman's boyfriend a fuckboy. In that sense perhaps the fuckboy label is a tool for women to reassert the sort of social policing they're so adept at and that some here in this forum say could alleviate the ills of current day dating culture. Can you imagine if someone told a woman that the new guy she's excited to be dating is a fuckboy? It's a hit at her value - she's giving him her value and not getting compensated (she does it free!). Call a man a fuckboy and internally he'll probably shrug and think DM;HS. It's labelling him as someone who got what he wanted. Beats being an incel or a simp. Tell a woman her bf is a fuckboy and in short order he'll be put on notice that it's time to man up or he won't be getting what he wants any more. You don't need to tell her directly, posting it to the audience of young women reading a fashion blog will probably suffice to start the thought process.
Sure, but then fuckboys are everywhere. Given a broad enough understanding of "significant part of the motivation", most men are.
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