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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 6, 2023

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While the orgasm gap definitely goes a long way to explaining why women are less radically DTF than men, I think that male sexual desire is also more complicated than "I am having sex and sex is awesome." Yassine put it well in the latest Bailey podcast when he said that the straight male desire for sex is mostly about status. Men want to have sex with the most physically attractive woman they can find willing to have sex with them, because of the status/ego boost. "She's so hot, she could bang literally any guy she wants, and she chose to bang ME!" This explains the disconnect in some of the other discussions in this thread around "incels should stop complaining about how hard it is to get laid, it's really not that hard, all you have to do is X" where X is a list of things like going to bars all the time, learning how to chat up women, learn how to dress better, etc. And at that point it starts to sound like a lot of work. And if you have to put a lot of work into getting laid, suddenly it's not such a status boost, is it? Now she's not banging me because she chose me out of all these other guys, she's banging me because I was the only guy who was willing to flatter her for long enough.

There's certainly an equivalent for straight women but it's the commitment after the sex that is important, not the sex itself. "He's so smart and successful, he could choose to commit to any chick he wants, and he's committing to me!" And I think "can't afford to be that profligate with their scarce reproductive resources" translates to "can't afford to hoe around too much or it will be impossible to get any high-status male to commit to me" in modern times.

the straight male desire for sex is mostly about status

This is a ridiculous assertion. If sexual desire were mostly about status then substitutes for sex would also be about that. But the obvious substitutes (masturbation and pornography) do not confer status. Instead, they mimic the physical qualities of sex. I won't argue that status plays no role at all, but it plays much less of a role than the actual sensations do.