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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.

Part of the reason narratives conflict is that there really are people who just marry their high school sweetheart and stay happily married for life. In fact, the fertile demographics are primarily composed of such people.

But yeah, if you miss out on that, move away from your hometown, and try to find love in the club or on a dating site, well... yeah, that's a different world. People are more broken there, everything is messier, and there's no community that radiates an aura buff for healthy, long-term relationships. Children become a liability, divorce settlements loom like a sword of Damocles, etc.

the polite fiction that women (and society) want them to be nice above all else

"Niceness" is the wrong word for what most women want in a man. I think it's less of a lie/polite fiction than a viewpoint error. The ideal man is more like a German Shepherd: the dog is friendly and playful among those it knows and trusts, and is hostile and aggressive against those it does not -- especially when they pose any sort of threat to those it knows and trusts. You can leave your toddler alone with the dog without a care in the world that the dog will bite it or attack it. But obviously this in no way implies the dog is incapable of violent aggression: you want vicious aggression when an intruder enters your home! It is the proper discretion of when to be friendly and when to be violent that makes this dog radiate such an aura of safety.

Putting the above three paragraphs together, it's easy to see what's going on: in the high school sweetheart case, there was never any need to treat this person as an outsider because this is someone you've always known since childhood. But a stranger in the city you met in a club? Obviously you cannot treat this person like you would a childhood freind. They are a threat, in some sense, and you're a miscalibrated fool to not treat them as such. They definitely can just have sex with you and ghost you, give you an STD, badger you into giving them money, bring in drama with their ex(es), or goad you into signing a marriage document then waltz off with half your money. It takes a fair amount of work to overcome this trust barrier, and often it's never overcome and no long-term relationship forms.

As for sluts, well... I think this word is also too big. There are prostitutes, people who engage in casual sex, and adulterers, and IMO these are quite different, especially the latter. Historically, I think these were often conflated because of the culture-defining preeminance of pathogenic threat (even if not consciously reified as such), which rendered any non-monogamous sex extremely dangerous. Today, to at least to a decent extent, the pathogen threat can be mitigated: antibiotics and similair treatments are effective for many diseases that would have been showstoppers historically, and if nothing else, we at least have tests so you know whether the person is infected in the first place. I think adulterers now stand out as much worse than the other two, as there's been a breach of trust. Prostitutes, well... the old saying comes to mind: "There are two kinds of men who pay for sex: those who are paying you to come, and those who are paying you to leave." With prostitution, at least, nominally, there's no breach in trust. Arguably, it's just a poor woman's method of searching for a good mate -- a man in the latter category who will hopefully one day decide not to pay her to go away. As for casual sex, I think the dynamics are much the same as for prostitution, it's just for women with enough access to money to find explicit prostitution uncouth (although the social norms for dating, namely "man pays for everything", basically make this tantamount to prostitution, just without calling it that).

Are men attracted to sluts? Eh, men are attracted to women, and sluts are mostly all that's available if you fumbled the high school sweetheart route. I mean where would you even go to encounter a non-sexually-active woman where it would be appropriate to make a sexual advance? The nun archetype exists for a reason: adult women who aren't married or sexually active select themselves into circles where they'll never be approached by a man at all. In The Sound of Music, the Reverend Mother basically boots Maria out of the abbey and into a governess job for this reason: Maria clearly doesn't belong in the abbey; she's supposed to be with children and a good husband. Alas, the role of Reverend Mother seems to have been lost to time.

I agree with you. What was the point of 2rafa's post? The median age of marriage is almost 30 for women. Are they supposed to be virgins or something? Does anybody care about the difference between 3 and 6 bodies? Will they even know? There's a word for men who really don't like sluts: Epstein-ahh pedophiles.

I think this is a real phenomenon, but Epstein is a terrible example. Epstein was bringing in low-class prostitutes and passing them around to his friends. He was running a prostitution ring, not seeking to find an untarnished dame for his hand in marriage.

Normies, especially American ones, don't care. A 23 year old „courting” a 15 year old for marriage goes in the woodchipper right after Jeffrey.

Also, as an aside, I think Epstein was a polygamist and not a pimp. His friends never seem to have partaken. Only him. Doesn't change what you said though.