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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.
Have to snort if THAT is how this is phrased.
The guy gets to "set the timetable" with their "implicit threat of walking away."
That's generally not how negotiations are framed. A woman has just as much power to walk away, and just as much power to define/set a timetable... assuming she's capable of keeping to her own commitments. "Look, I'll have sex with you by the 5th date if and only if we are exclusive and you've spent ~$400 on me by then" is a valid way to filter out fuckboys... if the guy can reasonably expect that she will keep such a promise.
And a guy is going to walk away only when he doesn't value the sex that highly and/or has multiple other women he can try to hook up with, which devalues sex with any given one of them. There really ISN'T an imbalance in bargaining power here! There's just women who aren't able to state their position and then enforce it, so they don't even attempt to bargain.
From the perspective of virtually every guy who ISN'T trying to solely extract sex, the woman is the one setting EVERY timetable, and even if he does have the power to walk away, he knows he can't/won't cajole her into sex unless and until SHE really wants it, he wouldn't even dream of trying to force the issue.
There was a time in my life when I figured that religious rules against premarital sex were at worst arbitrary and at best outdated given modern contraceptives.
Now, I have to accept that they're an ingenious way to create a Schelling Point where both men and women can be truly sure that they'll be getting the thing they're hoping for, and, much like closing on a house, every material part of the transaction will occur at approximately the same time so nobody can duck out of the bargain before coughing up their side of it.
That is, since it is clear many women are susceptible to being manipulated, and some large subset of men are hardcore manipulators, don't set up a complex set of unwritten rules that can be exploited and that women barely understand. Just tell everyone "no sex until marriage" and don't allow any bend whatsoever. That's a rule that everyone CAN follow and can be policed more directly. Men who want sex... get married. Women who want commitment... get married. Don't agonize over how many dates or how long you have to be with them before giving it up, and don't let guys make implicit promises they fully intend to break.
Maybe it is arbitrary, but no less arbitrary than any other boundary you could set, and a hell of a lot easier/more intuitive to enforce.
In a slightly saner world, Willy would probably be dead. One of these girls' fathers or brothers would have confronted him by now and beaten some sense into him or just put him out of our misery.
But noooooooooo instead the sociopaths are allowed free reign so long as they don't run completely afoul of the law because we've left the sexual marketplace to be regulated solely by social shame and rumor-mongering and removed any implicit threat of violence. And Sociopaths aren't effected by social shame.
/r/deadbedrooms would like a word. It's interesting you brought up closing on a home, and said marriage makes it so that neither party can get what they want without coughing up what they were offering it. It just doesn't hold up under scrutiny though. Virtually the only way to make the arrangement fair like you claim it is would be, is to make it so that you can have as much sex with your wife as you want, consent be damned, legally. But I doubt anyone has the heart to go through with that. So you are left with one side that can defect at will, and the other losing most of their assets and income.
Which is why this was the historical norm in the first place.
Divorce meaning the man loses most of their assets is, quite literally, a pension plan for when a sex worker has had enough of the job. That this means they're grossly overpaid and encouraged to retire that way is a problem not unique to sex workers, but it does come from the same philosophical place as other pension systems do.
Let's dig in to the history of divorce to see how we got to where we are today. The alimony and property division subjects seem to be different from state to state, so it's not automatically "she will take half your stuff and your future income". Historically, divorce was obtained solely, largely, and more easily by the wealthy; men were the major earners, work opportunities for women were much more limited; a divorced woman (especially one with children) would often be socially ostracised and would find it difficult to impossible to remarry and marriage was the main form of maintaining/obtaining income and status (widows were also often in reduced circumstances); men might/would remarry more easily and form new families. Therefore there was an expectation (for the better-off) of maintaining a similar standard of living to what they had enjoyed, and the duty to provide for the abandoned wife and children so they would not be destitute. Men of high status might disinherit children of a former marriage when contracting a new (and better, trading up) marriage for reasons of inheritance rights (see Henry VIII legally changing the status of his daughters Mary and Elizabeth to that of bastards so they had no claims on the throne), so this was important to provide for such children.
So the power in divorces swung gradually, over time and with the fights for rights of women, from men (who could more easily divorce their wives and often used the threat of "I'll take custody of the children and you will never see them again", as legal custody used to be automatically granted to the father, to force their wives into either remaining in the legal marriage or to accept worse settlements in the case of divorce) towards women - automatic or nearly so granting of custody to the mother rather than the father, 'palimony' cases and the likes.
Was this abused? Sure. Just as the previous state of affairs had been abused when the power lay with men. 'No fault' divorce came about because the old procedure was long-drawn out and often difficult to prove (hence the fake adultery cases). It was supposed to be quicker, easier and cheaper when the marriage had irretrievably broken down and both parties agreed they wanted to end it. Of course, the social views at the time (divorce will be last resort) then eroded over time as divorce became more and more acceptable and commonplace, to now where one party can get a divorce even if the other party doesn't want to end the marriage.
This is, after all, the point of the slippery slope argument: you can't fossilise attitudes to be the same forever as at the time you make the changes in the name of compassion or inclusivity or whatever. You start off with the hard cases and the view that "of course this will always be last resort, we just want to help those genuinely suffering" and as the 'last resort' moves from "socially unacceptable" to "tolerated" to "accepted" to "the new normal", or course it will no longer be the 'last resort'.
And that's in England, the USA has gone its own way and introduced, state by state, its own laws. Take the Nevada divorces, where the state purposely made it as easy as possible for people to come to Nevada, fulfil the six month residency requirement, and get a divorce - all in the name of money-spinning for the local economy. That's got little to nothing to do with the rights of women or helping men get divorce-raped because they believed Women Are Wonderful. In this particular case, if you look at the formal notice issued, you have to admit it's some cheek to claim the wife deserted the husband, as he took up with a married woman and they fecked off to America where he then deliberately contracted a bigamous (under British law) marriage with her so his English wife could divorce him at home:
Unhappy marriages were (and are) often complex tangles. Men taking advantage of their wives' beauty, social position, and often connection with high status lovers to advance their own careers were not uncommon (take the (in)famous mistresses, later in the century, of the Prince of Wales, later to be Edward VII, whose complaisant husbands were often rewarded for their discretion and tact). Unsuccessful men living off the earnings of their wives (often the women wrote for a living, hence the increase in women novelists so that now novels are nearly primarily a female art form) also happened. Take famous 19th divorce cases such as that of Caroline Norton:
For an Irish example, there's Charles Parnell and Kitty O'Shea, where a prominent Anglo-Irish politician had a long-running affair, her husband was aware but, as long as he gained advantage from it, didn't rock the boat (the O'Sheas were waiting for Kitty's wealthy aunt to die and leave her an inheritance, which would not have happened if she was involved in a public scandal, and there's some evidence that Parnell tried to help advance O'Shea's career in politics). Although the O'Sheas were separated, the husband did not seek a divorce (and the accompanying scandal which blew up and wrecked Parnell's career) until much later:
Who's in the right? Who's in the wrong?
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