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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.
There are tradeoffs.
Slutty Sabrina might want Chad Centimillionaire and settle for Nicholas Niceguy. Patrick the Patriarch might want Virginal Virginia and settle for Somewhat Slutty Sarah...
Also 25% of US adults under 40 have never married. So it is completely plausible that Somewhat Slutty Sarah is just not going to marry, same for Nicholas and Patrick for that matter. 25% of the US population seems not to be marriage material.
Why does Internet romance discourse often seem to involve these strange stereotypical characters with catchy names? Chad became so generic and escaped into the mainstream, but who are Slutty Sabrina and Nicholas Niceguy?
Is this a consequence of Dunbar’s number that we must invent these imaginary people to gossip about? You could have said “A slutty woman might want a rich handsome man but will settle for an average nice guy” but instead had to create an alliterative cast of archetypes as if this had somehow happened. Occasionally this catches on and Chad becomes a generic term for a hunk and Karen an annoying middle aged woman, but like, why is this a thing in the first place, to want to give names to these weird fake straw people?
Alice and Bob have been used in cryptography discussions for decades. While initially you would just incrementally add new characters in alphabetical order, over time people began deliberately choosing characters' names as a play on words based on their role in the situation being described (e.g. "Eve" or "Yves" are characters who are eavesdropping on a conversation, "Mallory" is a malicious attacker). I view Slutty Sabrina etc. as a logical extension of that principle.
I prefer Alice and Bob framings because when I'm describing a hypothetical scenario with any degree of complexity, failing to name the characters results in clunky, unwieldy prose where it can be difficult to follow which character is which. Compare:
With:
The second example is actually pretty close to what I started writing when I originally wrote that comment, but after awhile even I started getting confused about who the pronoun "they" and its derivatives was referring to. Naming the characters made the situation much clearer. (And this is a scenario with only two characters: with three or more, naming the characters is practically obligatory.)
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