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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.
From the substack:
While this is probably true in some statistical sense, I would argue that this is mainly selection bias. Dark triad traits are (I think) hot in men.
As a man who dropped out of the dating market because the only relationships I might get are with women who are too neurotic to be net positive, and who is not going to organize his life around maximizing his SMV, let me say booo-fucking-hoooo.
The sex ratios in the sub-50 age brackets are balanced, so for every chad who manages to string five women along, there are four men who are not getting any. Society is not going to listen to them whine about that very much, because at the end of the day, nobody is entitled to sex. I find porn can substitute for sex and video gaming can substitute for the social interactions of having a relationship. It is not perfect, but so much better than being in a bad relationship.
I think that for evolutionary reasons, being sexually successful is hot in men. I am not kinkshaming anyone, if you are into men who can find a date and get laid every weekend, by all means go for it.
But just as low SMV men are not entitled to sex, women are not entitled to having a chad go exclusive with them. For evolutionary reasons again, most men have some inclination to take the harem route. The hot men who are inclined to a monogamous relationship likely are in a monogamous relationship, so the hot men in the dating market are mostly not interested in that.
Put frankly, if a woman prefers to date the hottest men who are willing to invest a few hours on dating for having sex with her, then she is actively selecting for men who have no incentive to go exclusive with her. If hookups are all she wants, that is fine, but if she is interested in an exclusive relationship, I would advise she lowers her SMV standards and compensate by requiring a longer runway before she engages in sex, thus making pursuing her more costly for men who are just looking for casual sex.
Also, there is no shame in being without a partner. IMO, anyone who can not function without being in a sexual relationship is definitely not relationship material. Looking at the romantic market and saying "the incentives are badly aligned, I am not going to try to participate in this" is something which women can do just as much as men. Just substitute porn with ao4 or something.
I agree with your solution, but I’m going to push back a little- sex creates the expectation of romantic exclusivity, so these ladies are entitled to Chad’s undivided attention. And statistically, most average women are in a relationship with average men.
Now, it does seem true that the floor beneath which most pick ‘pass’ is lower for women(or should I say higher, considering how much of it is driven by BMI). But 80% of women competing for 60% of men isn’t what you’re describing.
I think that both Chad and the women would agree on that, they just differ on the time frame. In most cases, the women are not starry-eyed virgins who believe that sleeping with a man they just met will create a relationship which will last until death doth part them. They likely had some previous sexual relationships which did not last, so they have enough data to establish a baseline. They might also have been wooed by a PUA before, in which case they would have excellent real world data on the long term prospects of a relationship beginning with sex on the first date. Chad's idea of the time horizon might be more like refraining from swiping on tinder until the post-coital cuddling.
The problem here is selection bias. You might be correct that the average case is an average man and an average woman happily forever (or until the man replaces his wife with a younger model 15 years down the road, or the woman dumps her husband after he gets burnout). But this majority is unlikely to star in the drama described above very often.
My ad-hoc model of partner selection would have two scales. One is a rather absolute scale, e.g. "Would your evolutionary programming tell you to forgo sex for years if this one was the only possible partner?"
The other is relative. "How does sleeping with that person affect your status in your group?"
Unsurprisingly, I think that men are mostly filtering on the absolute scale and women are mostly filtering on a relative scale.
As a thought experiment, consider a group of people of one gender partying. One of them is hitting it off with a person of the opposite gender who has a much lower SMV than the group, say overweight, and they leave the party together. The next day, they meet with their group, and are teased about the night. The group member says "oh yeah, we ended up banging, turns they are really great at oral sex".
If the group is male, my expectation of the response would be something like "congrats on getting laid, bro", with some more mild teasing.
If the group was female, my expectation of the response would be "that bottom-feeder will literally fuck any man with a pulse".
As a corollary, I think that giving all the overweight incels GLP-1 antagonists and bringing them to normal weight will not help them much getting into relationships. Their SMV is a result of their relative status, and while some fraction of women prefer (as in "revealed preference") to share a smaller group of hotter men, there will be an imbalance.
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