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Time for some good old fashioned gender politics seethe:
https://old.reddit.com/r/BestofRedditorUpdates/comments/11of65g/i_21m_asked_my_friend_21f_to_be_fwb_and_now_she/?sort=confidence
A clearly very socially awkward nerdy literal virgin (despite being 21 years old) guy thinks a cute girl in his study group is flirting with him. He takes her aside privately after a study session and asks her… does she want to be his FWB (friends with benefits)? He reasons that he wants to have fun like many young men and isn’t looking for a relationship right now.
The girl is shocked and taken aback. She turns him down flat and appears uncomfortable. He feels uncomfortable too and apologizes to her and leaves.
Over the next few weeks, she doesn’t say anything to him at study sessions. He tries to make contact again, not to proposition her, but just to resume their friendly acquaintanceship. She tells him directly that she doesn’t want to speak to him. He is hurt but understands and leaves her be. Soon enough, he learns that she has told her friends and extended social circle what happened, and he is widely reviled as a creep. He feels hurt and violated. He laments that he has lost a friend, and now feels like he’s being lambasted for an innocent error, and he wishes the whole thing would just end and go away.
My take on OP is sympathetic. He comes off as extremely awkward and clearly isn’t well versed in the endless myriad of opaque and seemingly contradictory rules of modern dating. He wanted an FWB, and he didn’t understand that the socially acceptable way to get one is to ask a girl out on a date (usually through Tinder), then hook up with her, then either stay as vague as possible for as long as possible about your intentions while continuing to periodically fuck, or to sort of half way shrug after a fuck session and say, “yeah, I’m just really not looking for anything serious right now.” OP genuinely thought he was being upfront and honest with another person, and assumed that he was proposing something mutually beneficial.
Yes, it’s not a good idea to outright proposition a girl to be an FWB in a library. It’s awkward and weird and I can see how it made her feel uncomfortable. But all signs point to OP making an innocent error. He didn’t know any better. When he became aware of his mistake, he immediately apologized, gave the offended party space, and only later attempted to reestablish contact in a friendly, non-threatening manner. He made an innocent mistake and responded in the best possible way.
And Reddit’s response to OP is… calling him a massive piece of shit in every conceivable way.
What I find interesting about the overwhelming criticisms of OP is that they split in two completely opposite directions, but seemingly from the same critics.
On the one hand, OP is relentlessly slut shamed. He is accused of treating this woman like a “flesh light,” of feeling “entitled” to sex, of creepily trying to fuck an acquaintance, of pursuing sex with a girl instead of trying to date thine lady like a proper Victorian gentleman.
On the other hand, OP is relentlessly virgin shamed. He’s an incel, a fool, a creepy moron. He’s daring to try to have casual sex when he hasn’t even lost his virginity because he is SUCH A MASSIVE FUCKING LOSER. OP doesn’t understand that casual sex is only for chads who have fucked a bunch of girls, FWBs are an unlockable perk, not a privilege of the sexually unworthy.
Fortunately, there is a minority of Reddit commenters backing OP up, but it is a small minority. Meanwhile, many more posters are saying that OP is well on the way to becoming an incel or Andrew Tate fan, and unfortunately, they’re right, just not in the way they think they are.
I don’t have a larger point for this post, only that it’s incredibly frustrating that a significant portion of mainstream culture has erected these standards for the dating marketplace where one false step not only does, but should result in social and moral annihilation.
Quoting my favorite Scott article,
Now of course, dating advice isn't Stalin-era Soviet academia, but it is absolutely an adversarial information environment. If you're a 20-year-old dude and you see the top comment in a Reddit advice thread saying, "Tee-hee, just ask us. Girls like sex as much as guys do.😊" and then you take this literally and use your own sex-drive as a baseline to model the mental state of women you might be attracted to, you are going to end up like poor little OP here. You have to be smart enough to know immediately that this is obvious bullshit even though you still don't know what the correct answer is. You have to notice things like:
You see a lot of men trying and failing to get laid, but almost never see women trying and failing to get laid.
The overwhelming amount of porn is geared towards men.
There seems to be a whole lot of anger and vitriol on places like /r/creepyPMs towards guys who do in fact just ask.
Now, most guys don't end up like OP. It's not that hard to figure out some upper bound on how creepy and assertive you can be, below which you can be sure not to suffer social embarrassment (or worse). The main issue is that many men (myself included) will adopt the "never initiate a conversation with a woman IRL about anything except academic or professional topics," rule.
That, I think, is part of the entire problem in this whole arena. Men don't see the girls who try and fail to get laid, or want more than just to get laid on a one-night stand. They see the guys around them trying and failing with women; they aren't in the same set of women, amongst women, seeing the girls who want something and can't find it: plenty of guys willing to fuck 'em and flee, not so many willing to take it slow and stick around. I have seen guys writing online about "if she doesn't agree to have sex by the third date, I'm dumping her. No point wasting time when I can get someone who will have sex on the first date".
So then we get into a stupid arms race, where women think they have to put out or else they can't get the guy to stick around, and the guys think "look at all those bitches riding the cock carousel!" (for the most jaundiced reaction) or "women have no problems getting laid if they want" (for the milder one).
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I'm fascinated by how the 'male looking to [dm]ate female' information environment became so over-the-top noisy and downright adversarial.
My theory is that;
The lack of granularity in information. What should be a flowchart/decision tree based on features such as 'self attractiveness',' target attractiveness',' self social skills',' target social status', 'target flirting ambiguity', etc? (I've conjectured in the past that if a dataset such as this existed, modeling it would be trivial using a tree-based model.) Is just flattened down to lower dimensions and your end up with a shitty model.
Wrong people giving advice: "You don't ask a fish how to catch it, you ask a master fisherman". That statement is absolutely on the mark. Women have 0 idea on how to attract women and you should just about never take their advice (The statement is always preemptively prompted with "the proposer is prince charming"). Having spoken about this with male friends who span the gamut of body counts, I have noticed that only average looking men with very very high body counts (>30) have any useful advice at all (controlled for confounders). At least pre tinder you didn't achieve that high a body count without being physically attractive AND having game, with OLD you can get away with shitty game if attractive enough.
Moreover, everyone chimes into the conversation because there is some universal aspect to attracting a mate, so you get people who are just bad at articulating things shitting up the space even further and the entire circus along with it.
Gynocentricism. Certain dating advice that will actually work might paint women in a negative moral light. This is verboten in the same way implying that black people have weaknesses as a group is just about verboten. Women's true preferences must not ever be discussed and you will be called an INCEL if you point that out, you must tow the party line that height/looks/wealth has nothing to do with it and its all about a lack of body odour and pErSoNalItY (Seriously, this is the most damning plot I have ever seen, and it doesn't get brought up enough, but it is seriously eye opening, my lying eyes tell me R >= 0.95, the perfect proxy variable, you tell me which is the cause and which is the effect).
I'm not sure what the mechanisms for this are, perhaps just simple ingroup outgroup dynamics? I would posit that given women are the gatekeepers of sex, any line of actions that short-circuits the expected mating ritual is seen as the equivalent of the dark arts?
Another one is that the women who give out dating advice or write about relationships (and thus who's opinions you see in online discourse) are either useless or non-representative:
1.way inside the basic normie female bubble. Cosmo-tier advice.
Extremely online and ideological (or cynical). Giving Dating Advice is really just them finding a soapbox to talk about how Men Need to Do XYZ. Often it's tuned to attract clicks, not to be useful to anyone, male or female.
Extremely online and incredibly anxious and atypical, (and also ideological). Girls who think dating game begins and ends with avoiding being raped.
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I think this is mostly true but it is somewhat culturally dependent. I have some female French Canadian cousins and I find that that culture is much more honest about dating. I have learned some useful things from them about what attracts women that I think are true.
I also find foreign women are much more upfront about wanting a man with money and status.
They don't always have good advice though. I have a friend who is pretty average looking but very charming and social and always had a girlfriend. His advice to me - which I immediately recognized as bad - was to just wait because "relationships just happen".
IME that's most women's advice, too, or at least most attractive women. And from their point of view it's perfectly true, but that doesn't make it helpful for people for whom it's demonstrably not true.
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But that's the thing right there! "High body counts"! That is, the kind of women willing to have, or only looking for, casual sex who don't want anything more long-term and aren't interested in a relationship. If you're fishing in that pool, of course your view of women is that they don't mean what they say, don't know what they want, and all the rest of the views about women only wanting handsome bad boys and ignoring the nice guys who would want a relationship, until they're too old and used-up to get men and then they want to hook a beta provider.
Do the guys with high body counts pick a permanent/long-term relationship out of the girls they landed and then discarded, or not? That's the question that needs to be answered.
Yes and no. Do you think a handsome guy who is smelly and mean will get anywhere? A rich guy who is smelly and boring may do, and we all know what the bargain is there. I think the longer version is "Okay, if you're average looking and not very poor or very well-off, the thing that makes the difference is grooming and personality", and that people do have to understand that, life being unfair, the best-looking, richest, and most charming (in whatever combination of those qualities) is going to get the benefits first. Just like tall men allegedly do better than short men even at work, which is unfair, but that's how things are set up.
How many guys, faced with a choice between a plain girl with a lovely personality and a 10/10 girl who is a little bit dumb and airheaded, are going to pick Plain Jane? Works the same way for women.
So yeah, the advice should be worded "if you're not handsome and rich, then in order for Sally to pick you over George, Bob, Phil, Mike, Harry, Eugene and the twenty other guys online dating, you need something like an edge, be that grooming or being funny or whatever".
Another complaint I've seen is that women judge most men on dating sites to be unattractive, and while that sounds wrong because c'mon, they can't all be uggos, I do think that there is a problem of aesthetics going on. I have seen (and being as vague as possible so as not to identify any place or person) dating profiles where the guy puts up a selection of photos, clearly under the impression that "yeah, I look good here" or, something I am coming to think is the salient factor here, "this shows off my interests".
So he'll put up a photo of him after mountain climbing or hiking, thinking "This shows how outdoorsy/fit and active I am", and thinking this is something to back up what he's put in his profile. Meanwhile, looking at it as a woman, he looks like a bedraggled drowned rat in it. A woman isn't thinking "wow, he loves hiking" (unless she's really into hiking too), she's thinking "oh my God, couldn't he at least have taken a shower first before taking this photo?" I've seen photos that made me think "He could have looked really good here, if he only did X, Y and Z" and that would have moved him out of the 85% pile.
So advice like "get a better haircut, get someone to help you pick out clothes, get a good photo taken" really does make a difference.
EDIT: Also, I think guys have no idea of the amount of photoshopping/airbrushing that goes on with magazines etc. when showing models and actresses. I saw one cover today of a woman in a bikini and I went "yeah, they did photo editing to give her wider hips" because the figure as presented wasn't anatomically possible. But a man will look at that and think this is how women can/should look (see the thigh gap thing - when taking fashion photos there's tricks of stance and angles to get the apparent gap).
Men look at photoshopped Insta and OF pictures all the time.
Not the same photoshopping, one removes pimples (or buccal fat) the other makes tits and ass bigger. Most of womens complaining is about the former.
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