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Feminism has no Scalable Answer for Female Promiscuity
The apex of consumerist-choice-Feminism just dropped: this product review disguised as a slutty memoir-thinkpiece in New York Magazine’s Strategist section (typically for product reviews and recommendations, I go there to find good sheets or sheet pans). The piece traces the writer’s life by the backpacks she uses: an overnight bag that she used to cart her things as a side-piece to various jerks for emotionally empty sex, to a laptop bag that held her work when she tried to ignore men altogether, to a small purse that was appropriate to her newly traditional role as a formal “girlfriend” to a “nice” guy. It’s the romanticized and thinkpieced arc of the feminist career woman, which I’m sure has already been “react”-ified and shouted down by various Red Pill commentators online. I’m not particularly interested in the woman-cum-backpack-reviewer at the center of the story, but rather in her portrayal of her new boyfriend, the “nice” guy she worries is too boring, and how he is portrayed as reacting to her actions. It raises the question for me: does Feminism actually have any realistic solution to how men should react to female promiscuity?
The author of the piece describes her relationship to her new boyf:
The author presents her sexual and romantic history to her boyfriend, and he engages in heroic acts of self-abnegation to comfort her for hurting him. He reacts to her efforts to harm him with love and care. This is ideal partner territory, someone who loves you unconditionally and will react to any action with affection, totally unrealistic after fifteen days. This isn't any kind of scaleable solution. And I’m reminded of one of the great artistic works of consumerist-choice-Feminism: Sex and the City.
SATC gets unfairly scratched from midwit lists of great TV shows because the Chapo Trap House types who get excited about TV shows love unrealistic “masculine” fantasies of violent crime stories, and not romantic sex comedies. But SATC was critical to the birth of high concept TV, was a key tent pole that kept HBO making shows like Sopranos and The Wire, and presaged so much of modern culture that it’s a crime to miss it. My wife and I watched the whole series together just after we got married, late at night after studying or working, we joked that arguing about the characters was our “Post-Cana” sessions. What SATC was good at was asking really interesting questions, over and over my wife and I would argue late into the night and over coffee in the morning over which character was right and what one should do in that situation; what it was bad at was pussying out when it came time to face the answers. The characters would always be put into interesting situations, then saved from the consequences of their own actions in a way that sort of neutered the original dramatic/philosophical tension.
In a season 3 episode trenchantly titled “Are We Sluts?”; Big-Law attorney Miranda gets diagnosed with Chlamydia and has to list her sex partners so that she can call them and tell them that they might have gotten it from her. My wife and I counted the lines on the second sheet of notepaper, assuming it was a regular legal pad (and one man per line) she had sex with ~42 men. The character was 33 at the time, so using Slate’s handy slut calculator she is in the 96th percentile, so, yeah, up there. Miranda is naturally…concerned...by this realization, and how her boyfriend Steve will feel about it. Much of the episode is the characters debating the value of chastity and promiscuity, telling the truth, should it matter, etc. There’s a lot of tension around will this ruin Miranda’s relationship. She tells Steve and, guess what? Steve just laughs; I’m a cute bartender, my number is much much higher than that. Dramatic tensions wasted, values crisis resolved: Steve’s fucked a ridiculous number of women so Miranda having fucked a huge number of men is a nothing burger.
Similar plots are wasted later: protagonist Carrie cheats and ruins her relationship with her fiancé, only to have her adulterous partner actually chase her down years and partners later, champion-slut Samantha ultimately only settles down because her man puts in unrealistic efforts of understanding and care and loyalty. The show spends whole seasons asking questions, only to deus-ex the problems right out of existence when they want to make the characters happy. Smart enough to know there is a problem, not smart enough to come up with a satisfying realistic solution.
And this is what connected in my head reading that bullshit little dialogue in this advertisement-cum-confessional: Feminism knows that a sexual past can be a problem, but can’t imagine a realistic solution. Like so many wasted episodes of Sex and the City it is smart enough to understand that tension exists, but not smart enough to come up with a real solution. The only solutions presented are either Christ-like acts of self-control on the part of the male, or for the women to marry a man with an unrealistically high partner count himself. The supply of Christ-like and mega-player partners will never meet the demand, particularly as those men are not similarly limited. It simply will not scale: the solution to female promiscuity can never be greater male promiscuity except through fuzzy math. And those waiting for the one really good man who really loves her may be waiting in vain.
I’m not sure what a Feminist-compatible solution is, beyond rejiggering the entirety of masculinity and sex-positive culture to accommodate for it. I can’t imagine anything New York would print that would be a realistic answer, rather than a scolding “get better, men” that would achieve nothing but catharsis for angry women. A solution to this problem seems outside the Feminist range of imagination. 20 years after Sex and the City aired, promiscuous New Yorkers are no closer to an answer to that age old question: “Are we Sluts?"
Why does it need a solution or an answer? Men can either deal with it or not; if they don't, they're out of the sexual market, and if they do, well, they have access to sex and relationships. Women have the negotiating edge in the dating market, so they can set the price of entry to whatever they want. I'd also add that, anecdotally, most men in my social circles don't really care about n-count, going both by what they say and how they act (i.e. who they choose to date, where there's at least a dozen factors that take precedence).
Except, as is regularly ignored, that is asking the wrong question. Miranda he 33 year old lawyer with 42 partners and chlamydia is basically guaranteed to be miserable for the next 45 years of her statistical life. She will have no, or at best many fewer children than she wants. She will not, statistically, be happy with whatever man she settles down with (if she finds one to do so with at all).
In other words, framing it as "men can just suck it up" is like looking at a rash of teenage girls cutting themselves and thinking, "well teenage boys will just have to deal with seeing scars on their girlfriends." Sure that is a secondary effect that negatively impacts the teenage boys, but the girls are the ones being primarily damaged, and they are the one's who we can treat. And then after that treatment the boys will have a spillover benefit of unscarred girlfriends.
The fictional Miranda ends up happy, IIRC.
Of course, that's a fantasy. But it's also a fantasy that promiscuous women end up unhappy; most don't, at least no more so than people have throughout history. People nearly always end up settling for a less-than-ideal partner, and most women, promiscuous or not, are able to do just that when and if they want to.
If your concern is how this affects men (that is to say, the unequal environment they face in dating), I share your concern. But trying to improve those men's outcomes by pointing to fantastical stories about how women are actually being harmed isn't likely to be effective, because it doesn't match reality.
Women who marry later in life are more unhappy. Regardless of body count. They also typically will have a higher body count than the woman married at 25.
It is also bad for men, yes.
No, it does match reality. The more a woman lives her life like Miranda or Olivia Pope instead of June Cleaver and Marge Simpson the more likely she is, statistically, to be unhappy.
Donna Reed, she worked until she married and had children.
Her "real" marriage started at age 24.
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I'm not convinced a counter-factual Miranda with 0 partners and 0 chlamydia at age 33 would have a particularly easier time finding a man who'll make her happy for the next 45 years of her life.
There's lots of references in the redpill-sphere of how high body count leads to infidelity, but that sounds like something very easily prone to mistaking correlation for causation. I think it's very plausible that women with high body counts have high body counts because they enjoy having sex with lots of different people, and that that desire was already present in them before they had sex for the first time.
As a famous sportsball coach once said "adversity doesn't build character, it reveals it".
Let's say you're right and that X% of women from birth will be unhappy in a relationship because they need sexual fulfillment or validation from multiple sexual partners. Because access to sex is easy for modern women, this X% will tend to have high N counts by age 33, moreso than the average person.
This makes things rather easier for modern men looking for partners. In earlier times, when women married as young virgins, you might have no clue if your wife would turn out to be Madame Bovary. In modern times, the Madame Bovarys of the world have already self selected, revealing their character by having huge N counts.
Which isn't to say that women with high N counts are always unsatisfactory partners, it just makes it more likely. It also applies to men. I'm nearly certain that men with high N counts are more likely to cheat. The difference here is that male cheating is less likely to have an emotional component which would torpedo the relationship.
I'd agree. I just don't think trying to make women have fewer sex partners in their youth is the right societal strategy. Trad men should be happy that people have their characters revealed. And for all the men who don't care, they don't lose anything partnering with those women.
No trad men don't get a good deal because even many better women may have had one or a few one-night stands at some point, or some form of casual sex. And to a trad man that is absolutely repulsive, taking care of a woman who gave herself away to some other man to use as an object of pleasure. Even a small number of ex-boyfriends also don't help, the woman may still be bonded to them.
Trad men may accept these women nowadays, but that's only because there is such a limited supply of truly good women.
I don't think the number of actual trad men is that much larger than the number of virgin women out there. Also I don't have much sympathy for this view point because trad men, and many other various types of conservative men, will rail and rail against women having casual sex, but don't have much to say about other men having casual sex. They might say they disapprove of promiscuous men too if you ask, but they never write long posts about how the quality of our nation is declining because of all the men out there sowing oats instead of settling down. Casual sex should be degrading the character of men just as much as it does women, but these types aren't taking a stand against men engaging in casual sex.
Trad men should be angry about men ruining more pure women. That said, men and women aren't the same. All the men can rail a few prostitutes, which is fine as long as they still devote themselves to, and take care of their wives.
I would expect the number of trad men is larger than the number of virgins, because there are so few virgins.
This "double standard" of men being able to bang prostitutes (not wives!) has been common throughout history. If you really want to see real double standard hypocrisy, see the billion other double standards that favor women. Like women not going to war, not having the responsibility to have children and respect their husbands, female adultery being glorified etc.
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Of course, because she is 33. The problem is feminism's propagandizing that you can flip a switch from promiscuous sex fiend to stable mom + girlboss in your mid 30s.
Of course its plausible, it is probable. It is also destructive, which is why we typically had rules and organizations attuned to limiting this self-destructive constellation of sexual impulses.
A few girls got pregnant and got married in college when I was a student, and everyone was "eeeh, not the best outcome", but now that I'm older I kinda think college or the gap year before it might be the best time to have a child if you want a career as well, certainly better than trying to settle down in your mid 30s.
You finish high school, get married, get pregnant, give birth, spend the first six months with the baby, go to college. The college has daycare, and the classes are not 9-to-5, so you can spend more time with your child. By the time you graduate, the child is old enough to attend kindergarten and you can careermaxx and maybe even have another child later.
The biggest drawback is that most husbands will be college students as well. Too young and too dumb, and fatherhood doesn't trigger wisening up in men the way having a job and dependents does.
Indeed it would be interesting. I think the real issue is that once women get outside the brainwashing space of careermax girlboss feminism they are able to realistically evaluate how much that life sucks, and thus don't do it.
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and, unlike work, you can take a semester off college and pick up where you left off.
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They enjoy having sex with lots of different people AND have the poor impulse control that prevents them from reining in this impulse for the sake of their future husband.
It's the combination of these 2 traits that's the marriage-killer, not just the presence of the first one.
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