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Notes -
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.
Every society everywhere on Earth for all history up to the 20th century exerted sufficient intrasocietal controls on male avarice and female caprice or else it collapsed. Religious language framed what they already knew, now we don't know and today it's framed purely religiously. Christianity has kept record of its inspired line on biotruths and their peculiarities -- non-consanguineous marriage for life with many children -- you'll see certain lifestyles were discussed from frame of their harms being known in common wisdom. The lecher or the whore were already seen as contemptible, moral lessons weren't "It's bad to be a whore," everybody knew that, so they were "Divorcing your wife makes whores of both of you."
Our connection with this common wisdom withered and died in the age of rapid modernization and individualization, so some Christians, already on the fool's errand of attempting to reconcile their faith with society, could only present their opposition in heavily religiously connoting or outright religious terms. It's bad because God says it's bad, true, but that's at the top. At the bottom is "You'll sleep around in your 20s, get married in your thirties, have one kid, maybe two if you're really lucky, not deeply love your husband, divorce him when your kids are out of the house, and every cold night in your lonely bed be unwarmed by the memories of the dalliances of your youth." It will ruin your fucking life, that's why you don't do it.
Secular society moving past these doesn't come from science. If anything the scientific paradigm should be hyperfixated on healthy, responsible human sexuality. Creatures have reproduced sexually for a billion years, mammals diverged 300 million years ago, 100 years of sexual insouciance might as well not exist on the epochal timeframe yet here we are. Looking down from a period of .0000003% of the history of our biological class and with absolute sincerity and absolute lack of any awareness these people say "Yeah sex doesn't mean anything, it can just be for fun." We feel this dissonance cognitively and viscerally, it's part of the constant psychic background radiation driving everyone crazy, we engage in behavior we know instinctively as destructive and then throw cash at our best so they target their tremendous mental faculties at justifying what we can conclude from intuition and pure reason as wrong. I can only wonder what sort of writing Scott would be putting out if he'd moved to a small Jewish community in New England and married a sensible reformed girl who wanted lots of kids. I can only wonder how much of his tremendous brainpower is sequestered in its quiet battle against a billion years of evolution screaming NO NO NO NO NO!
But it's not about science, it's about greed. It's about the money and power drawn from a destabilized society, and you bet your ass it's about top-% men being able to have sex with whichever beautiful commoners they want, using them up and discarding them. I'll use the socialist's most apt phrasing, it's history's true and greatest transfer of wealth, a self-sustaining fire consuming each new generation.
You know, I see this argument quite often: "Every society ever did things in the traditional (read: my preferred) way, because the Ancient Wisdom of Our Ancestors told us this was how things should be. Societies that failed to do this collapsed!"
Can you actually point to any societies that collapsed as a result of, say, not exerting "sufficient intrasocietal controls on male avarice and female caprice"?
Most "collapsing societies" either did so over a long period of stagnation (Rome, several Chinese dynasties, the Soviet Union) or they did so very abruptly as a result of war or invasion. I can't think of any that did so because they were too libertine and failed to control their menfolk and womenfolk.
This is a just so story.
Your other arguments, about "deep biotruths," are likewise just so stories. Now it is possible (and likely, to my mind) that our current social mores are detrimental to human happiness, that the much-discussed imbalance in sexual relationships in the modern world is harmful to society and putting additional stresses on it (though if we do "collapse," I maintain that "women being whores and alpha-widows and a few chads forcing other men into inceldom" will be like reason #57 on the list), and you can certainly make a good argument that, as you say, "sex doesn't mean anything, it can be just for fun" is not true and not a good principle to encourage.
But whenever I see someone pull out the "Societies collapse if they don't control their females!" argument, I never see any actual evidence of this, just vague handwaving (and the waving is never in the direction of actual societies that do "control" their females - I mean, most Muslim societies are not collapsing right now, but they are not exactly what I'd consider a healthy model in any way, least of all in their sexual relations). Reminds me very much of KulakRevolt's current schtick where he argues that the deep wisdom of his ancestors tells him that worshipping Odin was the best way to ensure the survival of his race and Christianity is a destructive pussification cult. It's entertaining to read, but does anyone not just looking for a reason to dump on Christians (and pussy concepts like mercy and forgiveness and coexistence) actually take it seriously or think it's based on research or even actual inductive reasoning? So it is with arguments about how the Sexual Revolution was a revolt against "deep biotruth" and/or the ancient knowledge of our ancestors (who believed in humors, nature gods, ghosts, aether, a four or five element model of the universe, and so on-this is not a flippant reference to superstition, but pointing out that they made up just so stories to justify their own preferences and to explain things they didn't actually have the ability to investigate or test).
Rome is the example. It failed to exert sufficient control on male avarice and turned empire. It failed to exert sufficient control on female caprice and its birthrates collapsed. When birthrates decline in an otherwise prosperous nation the cause is always the same: multiple avenues for intrasexual competition where women attain status aside from wifehood and motherhood. This started before Caesar was born as changing laws on land ownership and divorce gave women significant privilege. Come Augustus, he attempted to correct their declining population by laws that incentivized having children, but the target was wrong and the incentives were wrong. Women aren't incentivized to become mothers through extra rights, money, or praise; they're incentivized to become mothers when that's the only thing they can do.
I'm not saying this is good, because it's not, it's terrible, unfortunately it's the truth. If women didn't work, if they couldn't go to college and it was legal to discriminate against them in employment, they would be getting married and having children as soon as they could. They wouldn't have avenues for status in what university they attended and where they worked, but only in their household, in their husband and their children. Again I am not remotely saying "WE MVST RETVRN." I'm observing the facts, women are every bit as competitive as men, and every bit as good at it in their domains of competition. Add to that the broader incentive, good alma mater, good career, husband with a better career, lots of money, of course they'll put off having kids, for the individual it follows a line of perfect reason. They are acting entirely logically, for themselves. Society suffers.
Rome's collapse wasn't even that bad though, at least not compared to Weimar Germany. There, wanton greed and profligacy triple threating with Bolshevism precipitated the Nazis. But you don't need to look at them, either, you can look right now to the American black community. Relative to America as a whole, the black community has enclaves that have all but collapsed, only holding on as ample taxpayer assistance keeps them afloat. Were the assistance citizens of Baltimore received limited to what the city could extract as taxes, it would be a wasteland. What characteristics define the American black community? Male avarice and female caprice.
But even if there were no examples, it's enough to say "This was the practice of every successful group of people in history." When the most contentious and bloodthirsty, divided by mountains and jungles, arrive at a uniform conclusion on one a given subject, it's not "just-so" to point out their practice. Uniform agreement makes it the implicit paradigm and means challengers are presumed false. They didn't agree on their gods, they didn't agree on worship, they didn't agree on how they should go about ruling themselves and what should be done with foreigners, but all of them agreed about women. Note, I also didn't use it to justify the metaphysics of "they all said the gods said so," I said they used religious framing for what they already knew.
What they didn't know was how to perfect it, which Christianity did and does for its inspired understanding of biological realities, of those biotruths. You look back from the top of history and think of the chain of progress as inevitable and so you say I'm post-hoc justifying Christianity as integral, but I'm not because I also am looking at history and I can see all the instances of what happened when it was discarded. The French tried, their streets ran red with blood, and created the pinnacle of hubris Directorate, thus Napoleon. Germany tried, thus Hitler. Russia tried, thus Stalin. China never had it, thus the worst of them all in Mao. The healthiest societies are Christian because Christianity is unique in its ability to produce the greatest share of societal buy-in. Without it, assuming Muhammad still exists, either Islam conquers Europe or we get another Attila or a European Temujin and practically all of Europe is ethnically Norman, or it's German, or it's Anglo.
The Japanese have to be mentioned. They are not as healthy as the healthiest Christian civilizations, but they have the highest buy-in, they're secular and they exert sufficient controls on avarice and caprice. I've said I think they're in the perfect position by temperament and population for the coming age of simulacra, so their low birthrates may prove ideal. This is one group, or maybe almost two given how closely related they are the Koreans, and therein the interesting quality of the Koreans having those occasionally flamboyant moments of personal instability (one presidential crisis after another; also, the DPRK). Thing is, Japan would be on the precipice of a crisis if it weren't for that coming automation, but that crisis would be less than nothing to the Weimar's comparative nothing to what might come in America. White America is holding on by its bleeding fingernails, the scenario I've posted about here twice of us making it through this turmoil specifically requires the appearance and ubiquity of the relation surrogate wife-bot.
You can't have civilization without buy-in and we've pissed it away. Buy-in is the same thing for most men, the everyman who comprises the actual society. It's not money, land, fame or praise; it's children. Us wordcels can jerk ourselves into upholding civilization from pure reason, the normies think about their kids, or the kids they will have, or the kids they wish they could have. That's what makes them care, but the family is at its hardest to obtain for at least the last thousand years, and not for actual economic reasons, not for conflict or disease or famine, but because of the profit that was made in doubling the work force and because of the insatiable lusts of the "elites." We can't unfuck this. The laws and social changes that would be required can't happen without cataclysm, because we rightly don't want to enact such laws and make such changes and would only from existential necessity. That cataclysm is what's looming. If I'm wrong about the timeframe and it would take another 50 years to develop the wifebot, we won't get that far, because given another 25 years of the status quo and America will give rise to a figure who makes Mao look like a reasonable man.
You can't have young men who have no hope for the future. It is the terminal condition for civilization. You can have rampant, gross greed in the acquisition of material wealth. If young men were all still getting married, if they had to grind hard in life, but they had a reasonable domicile and they could provide for their wife and children, that would be enough for their buy-in. They don't even have that. It's what people need to understand, especially the righties who do have superior faculties at assessing danger and keep saying "one of these days, man" while the lefties correctly mock them, just for the wrong reasons. Violence will come if this isn't addressed, but it's not from us, we're not the generations who turn violent, we still have enough buy-in. We're the gap, we are the harbingers, it's the boys being born today who will reach adulthood and see a barren wasteland waiting ahead of them and they will be ready to follow anyone who says "Get your guns, we're burning everything down."
You want evidence of the inevitable end of societies that don't control avarice and caprice. You are living in it.
If this is true, you have a nasty problem where you're running civilization off of restricting otherwise-capable women from competing for jobs or niches like 'surgeon' when they can do the job just as well as any other man. It's arguable that a civilization that doesn't have enough people willing to voluntarily contribute should just go belly up.
40% of women physicians leave the field or go part time within six years of finishing residency. Our civilization insisting it can't discriminate against women for spots in medical school — let alone its encouraging more women to get there via affirmative action — is utter insanity.
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