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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.
Scott Aaronson describes a feeling (that I too experienced):
I was not as bad as Aaronson, but I held a completely unquestioned conviction that no girl must ever know how much I desired her, and that no one must know I had any sexual thoughts at all. I have no idea where it came from, but it seemed as evidently true to me as the fact that the sky is blue.
So, reading this story, I wonder if this innate impulse is actually adaptive for spergs. If you don't understand the social landscape of romance and dating, then indeed your best bet is to opt out and hide. If you try to play without understanding the rules, you end up ostracized or worse.
Hmm. I mean. The sperg that never finds a partner contributes more to his family's genetics (by helping his siblings) than he would if he got killed by a rival or something, but less than if he had a family himself. However, I think it's genuinely a good thing if our hero gets ostracized. Or even beaten, maimed, or killed: it was not in vain and those that did him wrong may run afoul of the law.
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It wasn't as nearly as bad for me either, but I had a great deal of shame about my attraction to women in my early teens and I know where it came from. I was constantly teased about girls when I was a kid and I got a very clear message that liking girls was wrong. I remember being shocked at 11 years old when a friend openly admitted liking girls. I hadn't even admitted to myself that I liked them yet. I remember being 13 when I decided that if a girl I really liked asked me out, I would have the guts to day yes. I was 15 before I seriously considered asking a girl out but I chickened out. The first time I asked a girl out was at 23 and it took me a year to get the courage.
The fact is that I probably was ostracized for my mistakes with women at 28, and looking back, I had no idea how little I understood back then.
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I feel like something like there's some component of the opposite of this though. That is, perhaps socially adept people have evolved to shame awkward men into hiding because if they agree to hide then there are fewer men in the dating pool and the remaining men have a lower male to female density and thus more market value. This only works with awkward and weak men as targets because they are unlikely to retaliate, and are more likely to drop out instead of saying "fuck you" and continuing to ask girls out.
We might consider this a form of artificial selection: humans are nudging the fitness landscape in a way that makes being shy and kind less adaptive than it already was, because they are less likely to find a mate, while more aggressive behavior (shamers, and people who ignore negative feedback) becomes more adaptive.
If this is the case, then the correct response is actually the opposite: you should ignore them and in fact become more proactive about pursuing women because you and people like you are being suppressed by a psy-op from a different phenotype of males, which primarily functions by deceiving you and wins if and only if you believe it.
IMHO it's just a special case of desexualization; otherwise-neurotypical Wheelchair Wally gets the same kind of shit even if he's in a wheelchair because a drunk driver T-boned the family car when his mom was picking him up from second grade.
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https://richardhanania.substack.com/p/how-i-overcame-anxiety
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It makes me wonder if it’s adaptive for the species: to keep people with light autism from generating people with heavy autism by reproducing autism genes.
My personal distinction is that us people with autism tend to create new and adaptive tools and interfaces for their people, while people with heavy autism tend to soak up extra resources and be a burden on the tribe.
Evolution works much much more strongly on individual fitness than it does on group or species fitness. So it doesn't have to be adaptive for the species to be selected for, it has to be adaptive for the individuals engaging in the behavior. Socially adept males who shame male autists and cause them to drop out, especially within their own social circles will reduce competition and increase their own sexual market value. This is advantageous for them regardless of the value of autists to society. The only way it wouldn't be advantageous is if the target of shame retaliates (either physically or socially) in a way that costs the shamer more than their expected gain. Which is likely the reason why they don't try to shame non awkward people.
Females who shame male autists don't gain from this source. So it probably lines up with your theory better, but with the caveat that probably most of the value is from the individual female herself not reproducing with the individual after she has shamed him and caused him to drop out.
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