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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.

I feel some sympathy for OP that he's so clueless and has had so little experience or advice that he thought "Hi, we've had some positive interactions in class so... wanna fuck?" would be an acceptable approach.

But my sympathy is limited - unless he's literally impaired (i.e., autism spectrum, and even then, most folks on the spectrum are able to learn some baseline rules, particularly when it comes to asking people for sex), this was just unbelievably stupid.

I've seen a number of posters suggest that he was done in by bad/disingenuous feminist dating advice, implying that women will tell men "Yes, we like to fuck just as much as you do!" and that means you can approach a woman for sex the same way you wish a woman would approach you for sex. But I don't recall ever seeing dating advice, even from feminists, suggesting that any woman wants a proposition like "How about being my no-strings-attached fuck buddy?" That's a relationship that usually develops from mutual attraction and having hung out together enough that clearly there are some sparks, but neither one (claims) to want a "relationship."

(Do I think "FWB" is generally a stable kind of relationship? No, and I believe that very few women really want to be someone's FWB, it's something they settle for while trying to secure a real commitment.)

So this poor guy wasn't ill-intentioned, but he made an absolutely horrible social blunder, one that anyone, man or woman, could have told him was a blunder, and unfortunately he's suffering the effects people usually do when committing a massive faux pas. It sounds like the consequences for him are that she's told all her friends (and realistically, would you expect her not to?) and he's probably sunk what dating prospects he had at that school. This is sad, but unless this becomes a story of him being charged with actual sexual harassment and academically punished (which I'll grant is certainly within the realm of possibility), I don't think he's suffering more than you'd expect. He fucked up, and fucking up has consequences.

There's a lot of advice out there that says, literally, just treat women like people/your guy friends.

So consider: doing something like he did in the gay community would be on the awkward side, but it would still have some chance of success and certainly wouldn't get him buried under accusations of being a would-be rapist. He's just stating he wants something, directly and honestly, and men are told to do just that with the expectation that the worst that can happen is rejection, and nothing bad will happen if you take that rejection in stride. Not the case. His mistake was treating his friend like someone who has agency to accept or turn down a reasonable proposition and move on with life.

Men have to navigate a whole lot of unstated norms and rules when it comes to dating, and those don't come embedded in our heads at birth: it takes learning and trial and error to discover them. (For some of us, clearly a lot more trial and error.) Many women don't like to acknowledge this ("it's easy for the average man to have casual sex, you just have to ask!"), and so when a learning example comes up, they want to attribute malice or evil intent to the rule violator.

It's also worth considering things with the genders flipped: a woman approaches a man in her study group and says she wants to have sex with him, he rejects her, and he then warns everyone in all their shared social circles that she's a desperate slut. It's unlikely that Reddit would pile on and say norm violator is a would-be rapist.

The social response in the original scenario is to be expected, although it's probably miscalibrated: if men are to learn the rules through trial and error, then they need to be granted the space for low stakes, non-harmful trial and error.

Many women don't like to acknowledge this ("it's easy for the average man to have casual sex, you just have to ask!")

I can't say I've ever heard a woman say that, but if someone does I think that most people (even other women) would laugh at it as remarkably naive. All the women I've ever encountered know damn well (and will acknowledge) that it's easy for them to get casual sex and hard for men to do so.

Just my personal experience, but I haven't experienced the same thing you have. Generally, I've seen a lot of women indicating both that is easy for men to get casual sex, and also women who indicate that it's not super easy for women to do that. Just my 2 cents.

And I can't recall exactly the articles, but I remember seeing a few articles back in like 2018 decrying how put upon women were by dating apps like tinder, and how men there are having tons of string free sex, and stringing along the women, taking advantage of them, and how devastating this is to women and how hard it is for them. Anyone in real life knows how much easier it is for women on tinder than 99% of men.

Your second paragraph makes perfect sense to me, but I think it's important to bear in mind that women aren't (in my experience) complaining about casual sex there. Rather, what women complain they find difficult is how hard it is to find a stable relationship. It's easy for them to find someone to have sex with, but harder to find a boyfriend. Which is why in the articles you mentioned, those women are complaining about Tinder and getting strung along by men trying to have no-strings sex. They aren't after sex (which, idk why you're on Tinder if you aren't because that's explicitly the point of Tinder), they're after a boyfriend and are upset it's hard to get one.

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