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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 6, 2023

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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.

This guy sounds like an absolute sperg, and actually discouraging this behavior is a sign of a functioning society.

"Hello, would you like to have sex with me?" is not an appropriate thing to say to a woman unless you are in a relationship with her. "Hello, would you like to have sex with me and then have me absolutely ignore you emotionally and treat you like free prostitute" doubly so.

Do not behave this way. "Friends with benefits" is not a thing for people who are asking reddit if they are autistic or not.

"Hello, would you like to have sex with me?" is not an appropriate thing to say to a woman unless you are in a relationship with her.

Maybe it should be. Right now, I feel like a lot women are under the impression that most of their male friends do not want to have sex with them. I don't know the exact numbers, and I can't think of a way to find out the exact numbers, but I'm pretty sure a lot of men would be happy to fuck their female friends if given a no-strings-attached opportunity. Especially the single males but even a decent amount of guys in a relationship. But I constantly see stories like this, where a woman finds out a man wants to have sex with her, and she's disgusted. But why is she surprised? I understand that she doesn't want the sexual attention, but that doesn't change the fact that it exists, and women should be aware of just how common it is. Just because being aware of true facts is good. Lots of woman are friends with lots of men who sexually desire them, but the men just keep it a secret- would it be that much of a disaster if it wasn't a secret, if women were aware their friends desired them?

Maybe our current equilibrium is better. Maybe putting immense pressure on men not to let women know that they're sexually desired is good and prevents women from being pressured into sex they don't want. Maybe this equilibrium has to exist otherwise women would only make friends with the portion of men who genuinely don't want to have sex with them, so other men need to fake not having desire to make female friends. But it still just leaves me scratching my head when I see the degree to which women are shocked and disgusted when they learn that they're desired, since it shows that their mental model of the world was pretty damn off.

Society is built on certain salutary myths. In Plato's Republic, commoners are taught that citizens are brothers, and that everyone is born with the tools that indicate their role in society. These noble lies are foundational to the polis. In the organizational meme we call society, members must be brainwashed into believing (a) morality is for all citizens, not just your blood relatives, (b) some people must do unpleasant, dangerous, and degrading work for the benefit of the superstructure.

Of course, some societies require many more and more rigorously-indoctrinated lies than others. But for sure societies where women have a public and gender-integrated role require the polite fiction that males aren't lusting after them around the clock.

The problem is, when you enforce a social fiction for long enough, people start to believe it. This is okay and society functions as long as the noble lies pay their keep for the cost of people doing insane things because they believe lies. Children's crusades, flagellants, etc were the price medieval christendom paid for Catholic doctrine. Lysenkoism, collective farms, etc were the price the USSR paid for Leninism. Social friction and loneliness are part of the price we pay for modern gender ideology and a bigger workforce.

One noble lie paid its keep for a thousand years, the second for a few decades, the third, we'll see.

I would agree that (a) is a foundational lie of larger societies. (b), though, is not quite right. It’s not self-sacrifice, but self-interest, that shores up the superstructure.

Not that self-sacrifice isn’t valuable! It adds slack to the society by incentivizing the least fortunate (or competent) to hold firm instead of snapping. It’s just not sufficient. Christian ideals never eliminated theft and sloth among the worst-off. And when a society tries to rely on people to choose their own sacrifices, it works great until the first defection. Soviet communism was a series of increasingly desperate attempts to patch this prisoner’s dilemma. No, sacrificial collectivism loses out to personal incentives.

Women weren’t martyring themselves for God and country by having children. They were performing the most socially valuable role. When the bottleneck was individual brute strength, men had a dominant competitive advantage in farming and mining and war. Technological advances made women’s labor more valuable just as the cotton gin added value to slave labor. This is enough to explain the development of women’s rights without relying on attitudes about male lust.

The game has changed.