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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   35510 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 20, 2023

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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:

This new guy is single — a.k.a. actually available — hot, and nice. I used to think “nice” was an insult, or that if someone were “nice,” I’d grow tired of them, but with him, it excites me even more. [NB: She also states that she has been with him for FIFTEEN DAYS making the boredom question a little…strange]

I don’t know what’s going to happen with this new man. In fact, my past year of dating has made it hard to feel like anything good will happen. I’m pretty convinced I’m still destined to live a life jumping from affair to romance to affair. I’m self-sabotaging. I tell this new man about all of the men I’ve fucked over, who have fucked me over. I name drop. I body count. I say things with the screaming subtext of: Why would you want to be with me?

But this time, I realize what I’m doing. Sorry — this time he realizes what I’m doing. He says hearing about all of the guys I’ve slept with hurts his feelings and asks me why I continue to do it. This kind, goofy man makes me feel like I can apologize. Like I can tell him I lied. Like I can tell him that what I’m doing is obviously me trying to blow up whatever good thing we’re beginning to create.

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?"

I have never encountered a truly gorgeous, promiscuous woman in my social class who has had problems finding a ‘high value man’ (ie. handsome, outgoing, masculine, successful, whatever) to marry.

I think you are onto something. The original article makes it clear, that not her bodycount is the problem, but her self-undermining behaviour and her unability of maintaining a relationship (and probably her taste in men).

I never encountered a counter example where a man rejected a woman because of that. If it is truly an effect felt by women, instead of just being an assumption, maybe it is simply a selection effect? Promisciuous woman are meeting/are interested promisciuous men, so if they want to settle down the try to do it with someone who is less interested in that, but the problem is not out of slut-shamingness?

In a certain sense, if a guy feels that he was the one to actually tame the wild slut and was awesome enough to get her to settle, he can get extra validation from that. "She has all those men to compare me to and chose me as the best."

Problem that arises, at least in my opinion, is if she recounts all the wild stories and depraved sexual acts she engaged in with those previous men... and yet refuses to give the same to the current man because she's "not that person anymore." Now you've got the eternal frustration of knowing that some other guy has gotten your wife to do things she won't do for you, and the nagging doubt that she's denying things to you on purpose despite clearly being willing to do them in the abstract.

So it might be less about slut-shaming and more like shaming someone who sluts it up EXCEPT when it comes to the guy that actually commits. Its not that she's obligated to keep doing promiscuous and sexually adventurous things to keep the current guy happy, but there's no getting rid of the history of doing said things, and so the current guy can't help but be aware of what he 'missed out' on.

If he was also sexually adventurous in his younger years, maybe he has his own history he's bringing in and thus doesn't mind having a more mundane yet intimate sexual partnership because he can say "been there, done that" to the kinkier stuff. The current stats, however, suggest that women are getting more sex in their twenties than men are.

In a broader sense, I think females intentionally or not tend to use their early twenties to go out and experiment and be 'wild', and there are likewise guys (usually older) who know this and basically play around with women going through this phase, string them along for possibly years, then dump her when she hits her mid twenties. So you've got guys who get to spend their time having fun and 'spoiling' young ladies then passing them off, somewhat devalued, to other males who are now expected to accept these womens' past AND put up with the new, less slutty version of her who doesn't want to do all the weird stuff in bed that she previously sought out.

Sadly Porn discusses this phenomenon in excruciating detail.

What was his main take-away?

Replying to you again, I just stumbled across Rob Henderson's review of Sadly, Porn this afternoon and he presents its theses in a more digestible fashion than does the book itself:

The book makes a distinction between sexualized fantasy versus mundane reality by invoking two archetypes: the econ major and the sorority girl. Of course, an econ major can be in a sorority. But the book states “She can only be a fantasy if she stops being an econ major” and instead becomes a sorority girl. And if you do fulfill your fantasy by being with a sorority girl, and eventually marry her, the excitement wanes as you discover she is just an econ major. Even if she really is/was a sorority girl. Others see her as a sorority girl, they see an idealized image of her. They don’t see the mundane reality that you see, of her as an econ major. Thus, you feel deprived that only others get access to this idealized fantasy version of her.

A guy sees a woman and projects all these ideas and fantasies and preconceived notions of who she is. Then they sleep together, and he learns more about her. He no longer sees her in the way he did when they first met. But he realizes others see her that way. The book states, “It’s bad enough he can’t get his fantasy from the woman he loves, but worse is that, logically, everyone else can get it from her except you.” He sees her as the proverbial “econ major” but feels deprived because other see her as a “sorority girl.” Teach writes, “Even if your wish for a sorority girl is fulfilled she will quickly become an econ major—while (you perceive) she remains a sorority girl to everyone else.”

Teach says this also explains why some men react with fury upon hearing about their partner’s previous sexual experiences with other men:

“Her past always sounds more sexual not because she is now less sexual, but because he doesn't hear the past as continuity, the stories of the past are about someone else, before he turned her into an econ major and later a wife. The underlying problem that can't be solved is that therefore the real her, had she been left to her own desires, was the one in the past. That he has no access to, that only everyone else does.”

Fucked if I know.

If I was to hazard a guess, I'd say that he thinks men that get hung up on what the sex lives of their girlfriends/wives were like before the relationship started are pathetic, narcissistic and contemptible, and that hang-ups of this type are at the root of all kinds of modern relationship problems like porn addiction, dead bedrooms, cuckolding fantasies and infidelity.

So he advocates assenting to sin by making men culpable to their reflexive (if not spiritually informed) disdain for promiscuity in their would-be wives. He’s insightful but I’ll reject this out of hand. I might even risk saying it smacks of therapeutic self-cope like that of the man who directed Clerks with the girlfriend subplot.

I'll be frank with you: I found a lot of The Last Psychiatrist's posts almost uncomfortably insightful, but throughout Sadly, Porn I often felt like he was writing to himself as much as to the reader in his head for whom he had so much contempt and disdain.

I'm going to be a boring fence-sitter and admit that I think men who only want to date innocent pure virgins are kind of lame, but also that it's not completely unreasonable for a man's pride to feel a little wounded if his wife/girlfriend was perfectly willing to perform [SEX ACT] with previous partners but not with him.

More comments

I think a lot of it is low self esteem, likely driven by an absent/weak/abusive father. Men in the baby boomer generation seem to have shit the bed generally on parenting well - women too of course but I think the male side gets discussed less.

All of the sudden after WW2 most of the masculine men died or had their mental stability shattered. We kind of lost the male role model in western society and we haven’t been able to have a positive view of masculinity since. Fathers are lost, and their children follow them into the darkness.

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