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Notes -
When Sluts Settle Down
One of the incel or black pill arguments I think has more than a grain of truth goes something like this:
Men are raised around the polite fiction that women (and society) want them to be nice above all else. Nice guys get the girl. And, after all, anyone can be nice. That's part of why this is important social messaging. But of course in the end, the boy must live. And he discovers that, in fact, niceness isn't what gets the girl. Being hot is, having status is. The original statement isn't wrong. In the abstract, all but the most damaged women do want a "nice guy". A good husband and father, someone to grow old with, someone who won't abuse her, someone her friends and family will respect. But that isn't all she wants, and it's certainly not the first thing most people look for. The boy knows this himself - after all, he is no less vain when it comes to an ideal partner. But he must see it to know the polite fiction, and when he sees it, it frustrates him.
Girls receive their own version of this polite fiction. It has a worthy intention and there is truth to it. But it is also fake, and when people argue it against the evidence, they do young women and themselves a disservice. That fiction is something like this, although in more liberal or progressive circles it will be stated far less explicitly (although it is still stated, by peers, by elders, and most significantly by men): Men don't want a slut. The sluts end up humiliated, pathetic, and alone. The chaste get the guy, and the happy ending. In the real world, girls grow up knowing this isn't true.
Man, here, will say that men (or at least attractive or otherwise high status men) will fuck promiscuous women but never marry them. But that isn't really true. The truth is that some of the highest status men marry sluts. The truth is, as every woman herself realizes as she gets older, that even chauvinist men, slut-shaming men, men who post nasty comments about a woman's purported body count do so; in many cases even knowingly. Most women could give you a half dozen examples in their own lives. The boy most concerned and public about his contempt for 'sluts' at my own high school married, not ten years later, a woman everyone (including him) knew even then had been around. Who are the Miami streamer/Clav/etc influencer types going to end up marrying? It will not be chaste virgins from the imagined heartland.
Girls know that desirable men love (and fall in love with) sluts all the time. Like the fact that hot women do not always go for the 'nice guy', it is is ubiquitous. In the same way that not being neurotic about being nice makes you more confident, and therefore more attractive, not worrying about being a slut makes many more promiscuous young women more confident around men, more willing to make the first move. As the opinion piece says:
By the way, I think the evidence is clear that promiscuity is bad for men and women. It's bad for the soul, it's bad for future relationships, it makes it more difficult to form meaningful attachments. I don't think it's bad to have a preference for someone who hasn't slept around, in fact it's almost certainly smart. But it's just not a revealed priority preference for most men to strongly disincentive this behavior in and of itself.
Men have always been into sluts, of course. Men have always married them, or always wanted to. Real, working (well, partially working) chastity, it must be remembered, was largely enforced by the older generation, in large part for young women by older women, on both sides of the equation. It was the elderly establishment, the church elders who prevented the King from marrying Wallis Simpson. Chastity is important for paternity and therefore inheritance. There are good societal as well as personal reasons. But as soon as men were allowed (by society, by their parents, by each other) to marry sluts, they did. You cannot take seriously a threat when its very proponents work so hard to disprove it.
It ought to be a truth universally acknowledged- although of course it isn't- that those who have lots of boy/girl friends are for the most part those possessing of the necessary sanguinity in temperament to generally attain to a high degree of success in all of the more ordinary tasks of social intercourse besides, and that these must be acknowledged as more desirable for all the normal reasons. It furthermore ought- although it often isn't- to be acknowledged that these chaste virgins sitting on the sidelines do not particularly want to date and marry Clav, their Mr Darcy may bear physical resemblance to him but is entirely unlike him in other ways.
But all that being said, there really is a large premium for social skills paid in all social tasks, including the mating game. To the sexually frustrated men reading this- go out and socialize. That alone explains a huge portion of this gap- do you think Justinian found Theodora's sexual history incredibly appealing, or Pericles Aspasia's, or Napoleon Josephine's? No, they wanted someone they could interact with as a friend rather than the stereotypical prissy upper-class wife of the day.
I suspect Aspasia's line of work did appeal somewhat to Pericles. He had a side that enjoyed a little rakish scandalizing (particularly in the Socratic tradition, which is at pains to show that Alcibiades didn't get his villainy from Socrates, but it's also evident in Plutarch).
I'll also note that in my experience this question of sexual history goes away somewhat on a psychological level if you as a guy rack up a high body count and some confidence in your skills in bed, and leveling up social skills is a first step to that.
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