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Culture War Roundup for the week of May 25, 2026

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When Sluts Settle Down

Of course there were men who wanted to sleep with Alex Cooper, and of course there was a man who wanted to marry her, too

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.

Andrew Tate once posted that he rejects “women who have slept with more than 3 men. Vile.” And the guys they influence might claim in the group chat that they would marry only a pure, virginal woman. But if a woman who looked like Cooper asked any of those guys out on a date, you best believe they’d jump at the chance—no matter how many notches she had on her bedpost.

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:

When she meets the man she wants as her husband, she’ll go get him. Meanwhile, her chaste peers are often left paralyzed on the sidelines, waiting for a hypothetical Prince Charming who respects their sacred timeline and who ticks all the boxes, only to find themselves in a perpetual state of situationship purgatory.

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.

Female Value = (Sexual attention she gives you)/(Sexual attention she gives/has-given others + 1) * (Everything Else)

If she gives you 0 sexual attention, she has no value. I am not making the claim that sex is the only thing women are good for, but the claim that a woman who is unwilling to have sex with you (even after marriage), clearly does not take you seriously as a partner. Even a woman who is for some biological reason incapable of PIV should still be interested in blowjobs or something.

If she has sex with thousands of other people in all sorts of kinky ways and then gets old and loses sexual interest and you end up in a boring vanilla relationship, that's bad.

If she has sex with a bunch of guys and then marries you and has a bunch of sex with you then that's fine.

If she is a virgin and has sex with you, and only you, and never anyone else, then that's a huge bonus.

All of this multiplies all of the other features. A big everything else like being hot and rich and funny are good features to have, and enough of them can make up for a large denominator in the fraction. But it's an uphill battle compared to someone chaste and loyal who is really really into you, specifically.

How is this consistent with the existence of celebrity simps and stalkers, who receive ~zero sexual attention from the target they value the most?

The formula is true for the average/typical male, not universal. Evolution gears men to be attracted to healthy fertile human women. However biology and psychology are complicated, and so different people develop differently. Some men end up attracted to things like feet or armpits, which are much worse signals for fertility than breasts or hips. Some men end up attracted to dogs or other men, who can't bear their children. Some men have a fetish for cuckoldry, which decreases the chance any children they have are actually theirs. Some men end up deciding to not have children and their genetic line ends. Some men end up stalking people who don't want them. Stalkers are not normal, healthy, or common. If you look at per capita out of all men, how many of them are stalkers, they're quite infrequent. It's just that celebrities are also infrequent so if you pair all the potential stalkers with all the celebrities they end up disproportionately prevalent.

Plenty of individual men break the formula. But if you look on a population level, averages dominate the market. If the majority of men dislike X, then having X decreases your ability to find a good partner. You either need to tradeoff to find a partner who likes your good qualities enough to make up for this flaw, leaving you with a lower value than you otherwise would have, or you need to get lucky searching among the subset of people who don't think X is a flaw. This can be done. If X is really important to you and you not only want someone who would tolerate it but would actively embrace and encourage it, then maybe advertising and amplifying X to disqualify the majority of partners is a good thing for you. I know I did that with being a nerd. When I was single on online dating I actively advertised my nerdiness to screen off anyone who would consider that a negative. But it does significantly curtail your options and make it harder to find a partner. And you can only do it with so many things. If being a massive slut is the core of someone's identity, the hill they're willing to die on, then I suppose they can do that. But it's a heavy cost, and is unlikely to lead to good long-term results in my opinion (especially since the majority of men who are okay with promiscuous women are likely to be promiscuous themselves and less likely to settle down).

Some men end up attracted to things like feet or armpits, which are much worse signals for fertility than breasts or hips.

Disagree. I have noticed that even otherwise stunning MILFs tend to have veiny feet. In fact, that's my theory for why foot fetishism is so prevalent in men; pretty feet are a hard to fake signal of youth.