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Notes -
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.
The vast majority of 'dating advice' young men are given (by the mainstream liberal feminist zeitgeist) is absolutely terrible and only land them in situations like this if they follow through with it.
I can guarantee at some point someone told OP 'just be honest, straightforward and upfront with women and nothing bad will happen, the worst the woman will do is reject you but respect you for being honest.' And he completely understandably took that advice at face value.
This is combined with the fact we have a sexually liberal, if not libertine culture. The young man probably though that offering some girl to be FwB directly - despite being a literal virgin - was perfectly fine cause media and social media told him that's just how things are. And besides, men and women are the same, so women must think about this hypothetical arrangement the same way he does.
OP is also an actual idiot for thinking his proposal would end in anyway but horribly badly for him and being stupid enough to think going from virgin to FwB playa is in anyway feasible or a good idea. But the problem is that young men aren't allowed to fuck up in a healthy way and learn from the experience anymore, if young men fuck up they're 'literally incels' and a danger to young women who must be ostracised and exiled.
This is what happens when you have a social environmental where the social rules are poorly defined if they exist at all, the advice the young men get is terrible and contradictory, and the consequences for men are astronomical and completely at women's mercy.
Giving terrible advice to men does in fact make the woman's job easier. Her job is to discern who is worthy and who isn't. Social intelligence is a big part of that.
The OP in the story clearly doesn't (yet) have what it takes. He therefore should be rejected. Giving him advice on how to fake having what it takes is terrible because it dilutes the signal.
Men do in fact receive very good advice. But it is not them the advice is meant to be good for.
Yeah except this falls apart when men aren't also allowed to improve and be given a second chance. Because a significant portion of men, probably a majority, will fail this torturous mind game at some point. This level of sabotage against men leaves only a small portion of successful men. This is how you end up with the implicit polygynyous relationships of today.
The deck is completely stacked against (young) men now. In the past, there were social conventions and explicit courtship rituals even a social inept but otherwise good man could follow and be reasonably successful. Now it's the wild west, men have no idea that there are no rules, no guidance, the publicly acceptable advice is sabotaging you and you don't even know it, you as a young man assume all the social risk and put at the mercy of a woman's reaction who can utterly destroy you. This is not a stable arrangement.
This arrangement isn't even good for women in the long run either, because it sabotages the formation of long-term stable relationships which both men and women benefit from.
Maybe with respect to a specific woman but there are a lot of fish in the sea.
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I don't disagree.
By and large, that seems to be the arrangement preferred by women relative to the available alternatives, going by their revealed preferences. A significant portion of women seem to prefer sharing a top man over having a sub-par specimen for themselves. And of course, having the option to utterly destroy a man who slights them.
That's what (non-top) men think is best for them and for society. They are probably right. Alas, we live in a longhouse.
Which women? Where? Based on what empirical evidence?
This seems to be one of those things - it has plenty of counterparts on the SocJus side of things - that's said because it follows from a theory someone is attached to, not because of any particular evidence that it's true. Outside of a very small number of poly arrangements, in which men at the top of the attractiveness scale aren't that overrepresented based on the ones I'm familiar with, I can't think of any cases where this is true. Yeah, it would logically follow if a lot of the ideas that float around the "manosphere" were true, but so much the worse for those ideas. But it's not something I actually see happening at any significant scale.
If I'm right, a small number of men should have a lot of sexual partners and a much larger number of men should have very few. Women should be somewhere in the middle and a lot of them should go without sex for longer periods of time despite having every opportunity to do so. This matches my general observations in my social circle, but I am not sure how I would go about finding statistics that aren't hilariously skewed by social desirability bias working in different directions for men and women.
What should we observe if your model were right and how would we find out?
Bit late, but:
I mostly see people monogamously pairing off. There's a small number of eternal singles, mostly men, but the norm is long(ish)-term serial monogamy. Getting a new partner generally involves the guy sticking his neck out to much greater extent than the girl but the gender balance isn't off by that much. Almost no-one in my social circles has multiple partners on the regular (even the theoretically poly people have mostly broken down into straightforward two-person relationships).
There's certainly nothing I'd be tempted to describe as "women... sharing a top man". Which for that matter, seems largely absent from your description of the state of play, as well; and this is especially true when you fill the ellipsis back in, because I certainly can't think of anything that could plausibly be described as an active preference for this on the part of women, even of the revealed variety. As has been pointed out before, ideas often assumed here, like that and the whole "alpha fucks, beta bucks" notion, IME exist primarily in the minds of incels and MRAs, and hardly at all in real life.
It's possible my crowd and I are older than the people you have in mind, but the pattern doesn't change that much when you go back to our teens and twenties. Far more frequent changes of partner, certainly, and more (but still not all that many) actively poly arrangements, but only one that I would be tempted to describe using anything close to the text I quoted.
Ah, I think the issue is a loose use of terminology on my part. I certainly didn't want to insinnuate that poly relationships are becoming anything other than fringe any time soon. But an arrangement where a large portion of women seek out only the top portion of men for sex or relationships and otherwise stay single would satisfy my description of "rather share a top man over having a sub-par specimen for themselves".
From my observation, all the good men are paired off, the loser men stay single, and the women who didn't snatch a good man get a get rather than one of the loser men. I exxegarate, but there is a pattern.
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