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The specialization of [parasocial] romantic/sexual partnership
(More than a shower thought, less than a fully formulated theory.)
While the median person in the US is still in a romantic relationship, singlehood is on the rise, with some claiming a prevalence of 30%.
It is very apparent that the median man and the median woman have quite different ideas about what they seek in a romantic or sexual relationship, with men being more interested in casual sex and women being more interested in long-term relationships.
(
This seems plausible from a kitchen table evo psych point of view: in the ancestral environment, all things being equal, the man who jumped at a chance to have no-strings-attached sex had a greater inclusive genetic fitness than the man who did not. Realistically, quite a lot of the opportunities for no-strings-attached sex in the ancestral environment were probably wartime rapes, but there were likely opportunities for consensual casual sex as well.
For women, it was likely more complicated. There was a selection for pair bonding to secure paternal investment -- because that increased the reproductive chances of the kids. If one had paternal investment, one would have preferred someone had has the status or ability to provide well for ones family.
On the other hand, one also wanted to select for genetic fitness to boost the reproductive chances of one's offspring. For a lot of traits, this coincided with being a good provider: being a great hunter is partly genetic, so there were both immediate and genetic reasons to prefer such a mate. While being the victim of wartime rape was quite bad also from a genetic point of view (zero paternal investment!), having a partner who was genetically inclined to wartime rape was preferable. One also wanted a partner who was winning the Keynesian hotness contest in your society, because that will bode well for the reproductive success of one's sons. If all the other women of the society thought that men with blue eyes were icky, marrying a blue-eyed man was a very bad reproductive strategy!
In short, from kitchen table evo psych, the ideal man was someone who had a lot of sexual success who was also willing to enter a committed long term relationship.
)
In my world-model, the median single woman going on a successful tinder date is going to meet a man who is great at getting tinder dates and convince them to have sex with him. This is a highly specialized skill. Women pass 95% of the suggestions. Together with a 2:1 gender imbalance towards men, this means that the average man who gets a match probably had to outcompete 30-40 other men to get there. However, being found hot by one woman is strongly correlated with being found hot by another woman. Of course, part of being found "hot" here is "being willing to breadcrumb women into thinking that there is a long term potential".
There are probably men who are moderately successful at dating which use apps for a while, find true love in their fifth match and live happily ever after, but those are also unlikely to stay on the apps (and if they are, will likely state outright that they are in a happy primary relationship, which will likely lower their appeal significantly).
While most of the men using online dating are trying to get laid with little success, I think that for the few men who are able and willing to sacrifice time, money, and ethics to get really good at tinder (or the offline equivalent: being a PUA), stringing along three or four women seems achievable.
While the link in the last paragraph bemoans the fate of these women, I think that it is fair to say that their revealed preference is to pay with sex for the illusion that a hot promiscuous guy is going to go exclusive (or primary) with them any day now. There is a difference between being the hottest unconquered available woman within driving distance on some cloudy Wednesday and being the woman who will make him forget about all other women, forever, though. Relatedly, if a real Nigerian royal had trouble getting money out of the country, chances are they would contact specialized firms on the Cayman Islands, not random owners of email addresses. (That does not change the fact that scamming or lying to get laid is evil, though.)
(Of course, this is not only an online thing. For most offline social situations, the workplace rules are more or less in effect. You have to know what your relative status and SMV is and what you can get away with. Also, flirting is all about deniability and avoiding establishment of common knowledge. I would argue that the possibility to commit a social faux-pas is intentional, being willing to do something which would be transgressive if you had read the signs wrong is a costly signal to send and generally appreciated if you are right. In the real world (at least outside Aella's RMN parties), people do not wear wristbands indicating what they are comfortable with, so engaging with women is left to those men who either are good at reading the cues or who do not care if they come across as sex pests to any women who are uninterested. Dark triad and all that. For spectrum-dwellers like myself, the main advantage of online dating is that women there can be safely (if mostly futilely) approached: as long as you do not use crass sexual language or send unsolicited dick picks, you will be considered background noise, not a sex pest.)
--
On the flip side, catering to the sexual and romantic needs of single men is also a trade which greatly benefits from specialization. Para-social relationships allow for economics of scale far beyond what the fuckbois can achieve. With straightforward porn, there is little malicious deception going on (stepsibling status aside), but I think that there is a niche of softer content (e.g. without guy participation) where romantic attachment from the audience is actively encouraged, and the relevant persona's foster an air of singleness despite being in a happy relationship or married.
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This symmetry is not perfect, of course. The fuckbois are motivated by their sex drive or some obsession, while the women selling sex to men online are mostly motivated by cash.
Given that this is the CW thread, I should probably show some links to the culture war.
I agree, but I think this is mainly a result of our modern techno-dystopia. No one enjoys swiping right on hundreds of profiles just so we can "take whatever we can get" from the bottom 1% who swipe back at us. No one enjoys being the orbiter/reply-guy on social media. No one enjoys fighting for the attention of the one semi-hot woman at a party/bar/club when she's surrounded by men jockying for her attention, with a 10:1 ratio of men:women. Noone enjoys doing our best to make witty conversation while she just stares into her phone (or even worse, texting her while she takes 48 hours to reply "lol") . Noone enjoys going into some women's space like a yoga class/book club/knitting circle and feeling the suspicious stares and closed-off body language. Noone enjoys awkwardly shaking our butts to shitty hop hop at the generic dance clubs.
What I do enjoy is if I can actually meet a woman IRL and have some sort of real connection. It could be dancing, a good conversation, sharing a meal, anything really, as long as I can tell she's actually focusing her attention on me and feeling something from it. But modern life makes it so damn hard to get even that... one time I was a cocktail bar talking to a woman who was not very conventioanlly attractive, but she was still fun to talk to. I was having fun until she mentioned that she was surprised how many men were trying to talk to her, including much younger men. I was like... "look around, you're the only woman here, and there's so many single men here. Of course we all want to talk to you!" The single women are all at home hiding out on social media and I have to pay them if I want even digital attention.
All that said, I still kinda like paying women to hang out with me and give me attention sometimes, just to have that kind of "great date" experience even if it doesn't lead to seggs. They're just way better at entertaining men than any normal woman. So maybe it makes sense for this to be the modern division of labor.
Saw a tweet that made the specific argument that men aren't really competing to be more interesting than other men for a woman's attention at any given time (sometimes they are, of course). He's competing to be more interesting than her phone. Which is a difficult lift. She's got a dozen apps on there for various forms of communication, another dozen for feeding video slop, and then probably a half dozen games to fill in the gaps.
Up against that much dopamine-hacking technology, what can a given guy sitting in front of her do or say that will actually get her to stop thinking about her messages, or her latest instagram post, or make her want to engage in conversation instead of scroll tiktok.
I feel like I can do that, provided that she's sufficiently motivated to get off her butt and go out into the real world to meet people in meat-space. I also like to play with my phone when I'm sitting at the bar, but I'll put at away as soon as I meet anyone interesting to talk to. The real challenge is the women staying at home, using the phone as their sole means of communication... which is most women these days. I went to three bars tonight (fancy cocktail bars in a trendy neighborhood) and there was literally zero women there who weren't there as part of a date.
Yeah. I can't say for sure how much of it is just my own perception, but the time of a single woman going out by herself to places where she might get noticed and approached seemed to be literally over.
Its always a girls' night thing, or she's with a group of friends for a specific event, or maybe its a date she pre-arranged on the apps.
If you spy a woman sitting alone, wait five minutes and it'll always turn out she was waiting for someone. I've avoided some embarrassment by slowing my roll when I see them, even if shooting my shot was the 'right' choice.
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You might as well ask what a given woman can do to be more appealing for an average 2D aficionado than his endless, effortless, potentially AI-enhanced harem of 2D waifus.
From AntiDem's Ask.FM account:
As well as:
And from the comments of "Asia Is Not Our Salvation; It Is Our Suicide" by the same:
Man, do you just bookmark every woman-hating rant on the Internet? I deeply regret learning today what "3DPD" means.
Not at all; I simply remember them, then look them up at need. For example, I recalled that the first two were from AntiDem's Ask.FM page, so I trawled the cache archives (which list several years worth of question and answers) with Ctrl+F until I found them. The last one I saw reblogged on @Capital_Room's tumblr once, so I searched and, sure enough...
A good rant lives rent-free in my head.
I aim to please.
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I think guys like boobs enough to put down the phone if there's a real pair in front of them, at the very least.
Well - getting a pair of boobs in front of you while you're still secluded at home is, as they say, a coup-complete problem.
But the point I'm trying to make is - you can't appeal to the dopamine-hacked, at least not without significantly sacrificing your own preferences and incentives. They have to realize the error of their ways and make efforts to fix them.
And if they, "the the dopamine-hacked", collectively don't realize the error of their ways?
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Oh, that's easy. Blowjobs.
The respective answer for faceh's question would be "just buy GFE from her onlyfans".
A girl with OF isn't going to hold my hand while we walk into Home Depot to pick out supplies for our weekend project.
...well, not unless I pay her an obscene amount of money.
I'd assume a companionship service to go to a specific public location would be not much more expensive than a regular escort (which seems to be the original source of the euphemism). But maybe handholding is just too weird for modern whores.
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