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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 6, 2023

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I am geeky and nerdy. This level of asking a woman to be a prostitute for you is not geeky or nerdy, it's sexual harassment.

  • -27

A friend with benefits is not a prostitute and I do not see how an invitation to be friends with benefits is sexual harassment unless the person doing it persists despite having been rebuffed.

Edit: Also, something that I just noticed. You might have misread me when I wrote "geeky and needy" and thought that I wrote "geeky and nerdy".

Maybe not a "Prostitute" but certainly not someone you're looking at as proper relationship material, and to that end I think @firmamenti's point holds.

At the risk of sounding like a giga-autist, why does this standard seem to only apply to sex? If OP asked the girl to be a regular tennis partner, no one would accuse him of treating her like a "wall to bounce a ball off of." If he asked her to play video games with him, no one would accuse him of treating her like an "ally NPC."

I don't get why if a guy wants to have sex with a girl but doesn't want a relationship, it's taken to be demeaning and cold, while engaging in any other activity without some sort of grander emotional engagement is fine. Yes, I understand that sex and relationships are traditionally paired, but I also assumed that all but the most trad among us have moved on from that strict coupling in every possible circumstance, especially for college students who are still trying to figure out their dating and sex lives.

It doesn't only apply to sex, sex just happens to be the biggest and most obvious example, and the answer is that "because relationships are, by nature, anti-inductive" No relationship is ever going to be about just what you want because the other party always gets a vote, and that vote might very well be "to hell with this".

You ask why it's considered cold and demeaning to want something from someone without making an offer in exchange and I reply that the answer is in the question.

I agree that relationships have an anti-inductive component (even a significant one), but:

You ask why it's considered cold and demeaning to want something from someone without making an offer in exchange and I reply that the answer is in the question.

The answer is... sex. The girl gets sex in exchange for sex. I think most people, or at least most men, see that as a fair trade as long as both parties are attracted to one another.

The obvious, but often unstated retort is that men and women value sex differently. Both enjoy it on a physical level, but women tend to attach more emotional significance to the act, while men generally take a more casual approach and seem to desire the purely physical aspect more.

Ok, that's fine. It is what it is. But to wrap back around to one of the overriding aspects of my original post and many of the comments... why is the female perspective on sex not only seen as the default, but the male perspective on sex is seen as immoral, at least to the Reddit crowd? Isn't that what happened to the OP? He made a (very clumsy) sexual offer based on the male perspective of sex, but the girl had the female perspective, and shamed him for his error.

Traditional Judeo-Christian morality had an answer to this discrepancy. But I don't think modern sexual mores do. The sensible approach to me is for people to be aware of both the male and female perspectives on sex, and to exercise empathy in negotiations over sex. The Redditor perspective (which I think you are sympathetic to based on what you're saying, feel free to correct me) is that the female perspective should be privileged, and the male perspective should be punished, even if it's touted innocently and ignorantly.

As much as I find much of the rhetoric surrounding the whole "red-pill" and "pick-up artist" community distasteful this is where knowing your market value comes in. What are you brining to the table that makes you think that sex with you is worth the trade?

Honestly as long as people openly vocalise this it is still fine. Sex with you may well not be worth the trade but implicit in even making the statement is an acknowledgement that some people are superior to others while some people are inferior to others. I think over 60% of the West's issues stem from them not openly and publicly accepting this fact (and yes, it is an undeniable fact).

Had the girl said "No, how dare you say such a thing, you are beneath me" that would be a 1000% preferable situation to what happened.

Define "Superior"

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