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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?"
There's a large difference between having a high body count and repeatedly telling your boyfriend about it. The former can sometimes be ignored (and contra redpillers claims, has nothing to do with sexual desirability. Wife-material-ibility, perhaps) , the latter is an emasculating power play (fine, shittest).
At the heart of my disagreement with redpillers on female promiscuity however, is that I cannot bring myself to condemn women for what I take for granted. Trads, okay, they’re against promiscuity generally, no hypocrisy there. But redpillers apply trad arguments only to people who aren’t them. Sex harms your soul or something, unless you’re a man, then I guess it’s okay to harm other people? Their locks and keys analogy isn’t doing it for me. You can get treasure from some terrible locks, and some locks are pristine simply because there isn’t any treasure behind.
I'm sure there are moral hypocrites out there, but from what I've seen of redpill arguments per se, the reason for men to be promiscuous and women to be innocent is simple: Men like innocent partners, women like promiscuous partners. Therefore if you are a man who wants to succeed, you should be promiscuous, and if you are a woman who wants to succeed, you should be innocent. Morality has nothing to do with it.
Suggesting that a man should be a virgin himself if he wants a virgin wife is like saying that he should have D-cup man-breasts if he wants a girlfriend with good knockers. It might seem fair in a moral sense, but as strategy it's gibberish.
Likewise, the question isn't whether a promiscuous man should want a promiscuous woman, the question is whether he actually does. The question isn't whether women should feel empowered and emotionally whole after a promiscuous sex life; it's whether they actually do.
Of course, recommending in favor of promiscuity for men and against it for women runs into the practical problem that the amount of casual sex has to add up somehow, even if it's never been exactly equal. But that's just as much a problem for modern feminism as it is for redpillers; if the hot guy who was juggling 5 different casual partners suddenly became Mr. Open Honest Commitment, the other 4 women he didn't pick would still have to re-asses their sex lives. As the OP says, there aren't enough mega-players to go around. The reason every promiscuous woman has slept with one is that they were sharing.
You said his strategy was to have a high body count. So to get the non-promiscuous woman he wants, he should want promiscuous women. It creates a paradox in evolutionary terms.
Secondly, does he actually want a virgin wife ? Sure, if you ply me with studies showing promiscuity and infidelity are correlated, I’ll concede that less is better, I guess. But it’s not important to me like attractiveness is. Show me the man who averted his eyes from porn because it featured a promiscuous woman. And women’s love of men’s promiscuity is even less clear.
Women use virgin as an insult. Women are disgusted by male virgins. They don’t necessarily like male promiscuity per se, but they like the validation from other women that their man is desirable and high value.
No man insults a woman by calling her a virgin. A man might be interested in sex with a promiscuous woman. But all else being equal he would prefer to commit to/marry a virgin/less promiscuous woman. You don’t want to marry a whore
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