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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?"
The pre-modern marriage arrangement is something like men offer physical protection and income in return for chastity, sex, and domestic labor. The marriage 'deal' is being renegotiated because the male contribution has been devalued; physical protection is provided by the state, women make 80% of what men make. Women's domestic labor has largely been devalued too with the exception of childcare. Women's chastity used to be essential to make sure she didn't end up a single mother in a world where agricultural labor was essential, and to indicate paternity certainty. Now we have DNA tests and birth control, female chastity doesn't serve some essential social purpose it's just something men like.
You act like accepting a 'slutty partner' is some unthinkable conflict with masculinity but for most of the past 1000 years would a high status man have accepted anything less than a virgin? Women have already parlayed increased economic power into different norms about how much female promiscuity is acceptable, and their relative economic power keeps increasing.
Like most Intra-gender competition, promiscuity is something of a collective action problem. If every girl in the village is a virgin the one who fucks one guy is unmarriageable. If everyone fucks ten guys then the girl with only one body is practically a virgin. The function of stories where "slutty" women get "it all" in this context should be obvious, they help coordinate reduced intra-gender competition to be chaste. As women and men's economic power equalizes you would expect women to have to cater less to male preferences overall, and the role of such feminist media to be coordinating and normalizing this.
This may lead some people to sort of 'overplay' their hand and stop catering to male preferences at all. The woman who sleeps with fifty dudes, the woman who gives up on makeup and shaving her legs, they're probably going to have to accept low status mates or be single. Whether women systematically holding out for too good of a deal is responsible for low marriage and childbearing rates over all is difficult to say.
While marriage rates overall have fallen they've fallen way more for less educated women. Women 40-45 with Bachelor's degree went from 85% married in 1968 to 75% in 2015, women with a high school degree fell from 80% to 60%. If feminist indoctrination at college and in upper-middlebrow media was the culprit we might expect the opposite. Maybe the issue is that non-college women are huge sluts, but I suspect that a big factor is that real wages for high school educated men have declined since the 1980's so there's fewer marriageable men.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.brookings.edu/blog/social-mobility-memos/2016/08/19/the-most-educated-women-are-the-most-likely-to-be-married/amp/
https://www.hamiltonproject.org/charts/changes_in_real_hourly_earnings_by_education
Many years ago on a long-defunct tradcon blog, I saw this summed up as: marriage is becoming unavailable mostly for women who'd need it the most.
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