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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   35546 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 20, 2023

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June 22 2020, PCGamer - Chris Avellone accused of sexual misconduct by multiple women

"He got me blackout drunk on Midori Sours (on the company dime). He and two friends somehow got me back to my room, where he pounced in front of the other guys. They left after a few moments (also drunk), and one of them told me what he had witnessed the next evening. I had very vague impressions that someone had made out with me when I woke up that morning, but thought it was a dream," she wrote(opens in new tab).

"When I asked Chris about it, he told me that I had eventually refused him. When more of the night came back to me, I realized the ONLY reason I was able to refuse him in my blackout stupor was because I was on my period that weekend. The ONLY reason."

Karissa said she witnessed Avellone act in a similar fashion with multiple other women at the event, and eventually reached the point where she, backed by two men who were also aware of his behavior, reported him to organizers, who immediately blacklisted him.

"His behavior didn’t stop, though. If anything, it got worse. It took years for his employer to finally fire him (I honestly don’t recall the exact reason he was given, it was a while ago and I wasn’t there personally—this was relayed to me by a friend who also worked there)," she wrote. "He moved to other studios. Other projects. Other conventions until they stopped inviting him on their own accord (whether due to behavior or relevance, I don’t know). I pushed him out of my memory, as did my dear friends, and we only discussed our anger and disgust if he happened to come up.

June 29 2021, PCGamer - Chris Avellone files libel suit over last year's sexual misconduct allegations

Barrows stands by her allegations. "The only statement I will make at this time is that I stand by my story," Barrows told PC Gamer when reached for comment this week. "I told the truth. I am not at liberty to speak further until legal proceedings have concluded."

Along with the lawsuit, Avellone published a blog post titled "It's Come To This"(opens in new tab), in which he claims that Barrows became antagonistic toward him when his relationship with a friend of hers soured. In 2020, Barrows claimed that her best friend "endured over a year of heartache, gaslighting, and emotional abuse at [Avellone's] hands." Avellone says that the friend in question did become "unhappy," but that they had not been in a committed relationship. (The friend is only identified in the post as someone named Jackie. She is not identified in the lawsuit, either.)

March 25 2023, Chris Avellone's blog - JOINT STATEMENT FROM KARISSA BARROWS, KELLY BRISTOL, AND CHRIS AVELLONE

Mr. Avellone never sexually abused either of us. We have no knowledge that he has ever sexually abused any women. We have no knowledge that Mr. Avellone has ever misused corporate funds. Anything we have previously said or written about Mr. Avellone to the contrary was not our intent. We wanted to support women in the industry. In so doing, our words have been misinterpreted to suggest specific allegations of misconduct that were neither expressed nor intended. We are passionate about the safety, security and agency of women, minorities, LGBTQIA+ persons, and every other community that has seen persecution in the video game industry. We believe Mr. Avellone shares a desire to protect and uplift those communities. We believe that he deserves a full return to the industry and support him in those endeavors.”

March 25 2023, PCGamer - crickets

March 25 2023, Kotaku - crickets

It's remarkable that rpgcodex had the coverage that aged best.

Erik Kain working his beat as a based games journalist as well.

I'm not sure what more to add to this that hasn't already been said. Mostly I felt like summing up the entire event from primary sources for posterity and clarity, so that it's obvious who the liars are, and who the good faith actors are.

In their forced apology letter, Karissa and Kelly spend half of it non-apologising.

It’s not our fault that we lied; if you believed our lies, it’s your fault for misinterpreting. We had no way of knowing our accusations of sexual abuse would be interpreted as accusations of sexual abuse; our campaign to accuse Chris of sexual abuse was not intended to accuse him of sexual abuse.

They spend the other half reiterating their allegiance to women, minorities, LGBTQIA+ persons. People whose safety and security matter. The safety and security of white heterosexual men, on the other hand…

It’s pretty funny that, even in a statement on falsely accusing a man of sexual abuse, they managed to allocate half of it to idpol preening. It’s also funny them doing so isn’t even surprising nowadays. Next steps for being better would be to include a stolen land acknowledgement and a reaffirmation of their commitment toward sustainability and combating climate change.

"He got me blackout drunk on Midori Sours (on the company dime).

“He got me,” not “we got” or “I got.” As if Chris beamed the Midori Sours into her stomach using a Star Trek transporter, with her having no role in the part. What happened to being passionate about the agency of women? Schrödinger’s feminism: Strong, independent #GamerGirls one moment and damsels in distress the next.

He and two friends somehow got me back to my room, where he pounced in front of the other guys.

Okay, the image of Chris pouncing made me chuckle internally. Pounced, like a cat! And what would she claim his game-plan here was? Bang her in front of the other guys while they watched? Run a train in the spirit of “It ain't no fun, if the homies can't have none”?

Along with the lawsuit, Avellone published a blog post titled "It's Come To This"(opens in new tab), in which he claims that Barrows became antagonistic toward him when his relationship with a friend of hers soured. In 2020, Barrows claimed that her best friend "endured over a year of heartache, gaslighting, and emotional abuse at [Avellone's] hands." Avellone says that the friend in question did become "unhappy," but that they had not been in a committed relationship. (The friend is only identified in the post as someone named Jackie. She is not identified in the lawsuit, either.)

So it sounds like this whole thing started because Chris did not treat a member of his soft harem with the wonderfulness she and her friends thought she was entitled to, thus hoes maddening ensued. Between this and UVA, a takeaway is to avoid girls named Jackie/Jacqui.

Originally, I had no idea who these people were, so I did some googling (how does a video game writer, of all people, have so many groupies in the first place? Maybe I’m in the wrong profession). Jacqui’s Insta quickly came up, which like those of many young women, has a fair share of bikini pics, and outfits and poses to show off her rack. Including a bikini pic with one of the more blatant displays of camel toe I have seen on the app.

I was about to make a sarcastic comment like “ugh, stupid Chris. How could he proposition her over text message, thinking she’s that kind of girl?” But I returned to read some more about the situation.

Apparently, the Insta camel toe pic is just the tip of the thot-iceberg. Jacqui has actually done porn, a video with James Deen under the name “Violet,” evidence of which she has since tried to scrub away from the internet. However, NeoGAF commenters here have receipts in the form of screenshots, and tips on how to find the video.

One commenter remarked in that thread: “Now we know why she talks shit. She eats JD's ass!” Interesting, but I haven’t watched the video to verify. Another noted: “To her credit as a upstanding feminist, she doesn't seem to be among the ones that let Deen shove their heads into the toilet during sex.”

The irony of a porn actress pearl-clutching over some sexual text messages did not go unnoticed. For example, RPG Codex user ScrotumBroth declared: “A frigging porn cumbucket moralising sexual advances via text is a new peak.”

The existence of corners of the internet like RPG Codex and NeoGAF that still contain many based users gives me greater hope for the world.

I did a little search up on James Deen, it's a pretty sad story.

Deen was born in Los Angeles County, California and raised in Pasadena.[5][9][10][11] His father is a mechanical engineer and his mother is a computer electronic engineer,[12] and one of them worked at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.[13]

According to Deen, performing in pornographic films was his ambition since he was in kindergarten.[14] Around age 15, he left high school and spent two years homeless.[15] He graduated from La Cañada High School in 2004.

After entering the pornography industry in 2004,

He's got two parents in engineering, one fairly prestigious and goes for pornography straight after high school, as soon as he can. Probably some serious conflict with his parents.

I'm more curious how a kindergartener knows what a pornographic actor is.

When I took state mandatory reporter training, young children being oddly familiar with sexual acts or pornography was mentioned as the most common sign of child sexual abuse which should always be reported to CPS. We can probably assume that this was more true in 1991(so before internet porn was incredibly ubiquitous) than it is today.

I don't see anything sad about this story.

Jesus, Mary and Joseph, that 2012 article:

With minutes to go until go time, the cast talks shop. In response to a conversation starter I do not catch, Allie relates a childhood memory, the gist of which is that when she was 9 years old, hanging out with her brothers, she was encouraged to perform sexual acts for their friends in exchange for marijuana.

Now Deen looks up from his telephone for the first time in quite a while.

"And you were cool with it?"

"Oh, _yeah," _says Allie James.

Deen hoists his eyebrows. "As long as you were cool with it," he says.

Shit like this does a lot more to push me towards the hardcore feminist viewpoint that all porn is exploitative; even a high-end company that does vanilla porn is hiring a 19 year old 'actress' who should probably be in therapy and not posing for pics of her sucking a guy's dick that they then send to her mother:

While the crew is dragging lighting rigs and attending to last-minute particulars, James takes a seat at the poker table with Allie and Steve. Allie perches on Steve's engorged lap. Steve gets an idea: Wouldn't it be diverting if Allie James were to pose for a photograph with Steve's penis in her mouth, which Steve could text to Allie's mother?

She kneels. He snaps. "He's gonna send it to my mom!" Allie cries with apparent delight.

Expansion on that kindergarten bit, hard to know if it's true or if it's a crafted answer to fit in with the porn actor image of 'this stuff is great and I always wanted to do it':

Q: So when did you decide to do porn?

A: Kindergarten. I remember I was walking home one day, and I found this magazine, I don't know, a _Hustler _or something, with people banging in it. I was enamored by it. I was like, I want to do this. I actually got in trouble in third or fourth grade. They were asking everybody what they wanted to be when they grew up, and I said I wanted to be a porn star. They didn't like that. They thought I was being a dick. I was like, "I'm not being a dick, it's just what I want to be."

That sounds so odd. You're six or so, you find this magazine with adults doing weird stuff in it, and you decide "this is great, I want to do this when I'm grown up" rather than "what is this, what is going on here?" Yeah, that does sound more like "somebody got to little James and taught him things he shouldn't know about at that age". There's a contradiction there between "I got in trouble for saying I wanted to do porn" and what he claims happened when he was that same age:

Deen, contrary to our notion of porn stars as survivors of sexual trauma, does not recall any sexual abuse or destructive misadventures, other than a teacher who Deen says tried to molest him when he was 8 or 9, but Deen "punched his testicles a lot" and made good his escape.

The teacher tried doing what the magazine was imaging, so why did Deen try to get away? I think there is more going on there. This entire story is depressing:

Though you could not hire a lobbyist to boost for the porn industry more enthusiastically than James Deen, he does acknowledge that the life has its pitfalls. On our ride north, I mention what will be, for me, the least forgettable or pleasant image of the week I spend with him: that of Allie James posed with Steve Holmes's organ in a photo for her mother.

"Yeah, obviously she's damaged. I'm, like, getting pimped out when you were 9 so your brothers could smoke weed? That's not healthy. She's like Rick Santorum's wet dream, the poster child for how people in porn are damaged," Deen says. "But for every person like her, there's someone like, I'd like to say, me. I had a great childhood. My parents and I get along. I just like sex, and I like porn, and I think it's fun. I'm always terrified that someday I'm going to come to the realization that I've got some deep, dark secret, some terrifying, horrible experience where I'm going to be like, ‘I'm actually not normal. I'm a crazy person!' But it just doesn't seem to be the case."

And yet. The company still hires her. She still gets work. Maybe she'll be chewed up and spat out in a few years, if she isn't resilient and a good actress. This isn't selling me on "porn is just great". But maybe I'm just a prude.

Besides the "kid knowing about porn at a really young age" thing mentioned below, Deen was accused some time ago of sexual abuse or something along those lines.

thus hoes maddening ensued

This made me laugh

We wanted to support women in the industry. In so doing, our words have been misinterpreted to suggest specific allegations of misconduct that were neither expressed nor intended. We are passionate about the safety, security and agency of women, minorities, LGBTQIA+ persons, and every other community that has seen persecution in the video game industry.

We are passionate about the safety of everyone except men. Fuck men. We will make no admission that this accusation only worked because it came from a woman, against a man. We will make no actual apology. We will make no recompense. We will instead hide behind the trusty, tired old aegis of minority groups to abdicate any sense of wrongdoing. We do not believe we were wrong to ruin this man over nothing, because we did it "for a good reason".

Yeah, it's blatantly obvious that the only thing they're sorry about is that they didn't get away with it.

This is why we need to start smacking women who make false accusations like this with the same jail sentence their victims would've gotten.

From what I can tell, the two women ended up paying Avellone a seven-figure settlement, which is just... wow. At least $1 million for an out-of-court settlement, plus lawyer's fees paid by the accusers... Avellone must have had some bombshell evidence that would have made a court case a complete cake-walk. So at least the women in this case did pay the piper, even if it wasn't jail time.

What jail sentence? They were just ruining his reputation in professional and social circles. No criminal charges ever came up, as far as I know.

Perjury is already a crime, is it not?

So are libel and grievous bodily harm. These women deserve prison time and ruinous fines, because they conspired to create consequences indistinguishable from simply hacking off their target's limbs.

Character assassination is still assassination and should be punished as such. "Oh, don't worry, we left you with two arms and a head" is not a defense.

Sure, intentionally and knowingly making false accusations is wrong and should be treated as a crime. But existing laws- perjury and libel- should probably start being applied to it before we start creating new crimes.

But existing laws- perjury and libel- should probably start being applied to it before we start creating new crimes

Yes, but there's still an inherent imbalance in the seriousness (and redress) in each case. If we're following progressive thought properly, intersectionality predicts that women should be punished as harshly as a man would for murder given that the consequences and intent are very similar. (This is the general form of "the accuser is of ill-repute".)

Sure, liberal thought prevents that from being a concern, but liberal thought only works when the power balance between genders is equal in the first place- and while that's true in industrial societies, it's not true in most post-industrial ones where the inherent advantages men have over women (at the population level) have disappeared but the disadvantages persist.

The problem is not, that false accusations ‘devalue the words of real victims’. The problem is, women are a privileged social and legal category with the power to issue lettres de cachet that send men to purgatory or prison on their word alone. Feminists have pinned their favourite victims against equality before the law and public opinion, and the answer should be: female victims can get in line like every other victim.

Indeed, women have always been the primary victims of men getting falsely accused.

However, where did you see “devalue the words of real victims”? I might have missed it in the links above.

Kain 4:21

March 25 2023, PCGamer - crickets

March 25 2023, Kotaku - crickets

This is a momentous enough retraction for a famous cancelled figure that they'll have to make some sort of article about it. 95% one will, 60% both will. 99% I will hate their framing of the story.

EDIT: By the by, I checked back on the cursed motherland. In many subs the mods have locked comments on threads about this story. Can't have people developing any unapproved inferences.

24 hours later and still nothing.

It's still the weekend. If nothing pops up by the end of the workweek, I'll have been wrong and will be suitably embarrassed and nonplussed.

Well, PCGamer finally put up their article. Seems relatively honest, and unambiguous about what a vindication this is for Avellone.

A bit mealy mouthed about which outlets stoked the original cancellation flames. They link to Kotaku's hitpieces, ignoring that their own was significantly the same content.

This is quite the turnaround and vindication for Avellone, who became a pariah in the immediate aftermath of the accusations. He was fired from Dying Light 2, people demanded that companies with any association with Avellone publicly denounce him, and follow-up reporting added fuel to the raging fire (links to Kotaku), with further accusations being made and Avellone described as "fucking disgusting" among many other things.

Naturally, PCGamer pre-emptively disabled comments, and the article is utterly absent from their front page. I'm not sure how anyone would find it unless they were looking, like I was.

Can you link to those threads?

In many subs the mods have locked comments on threads about this story.

Can you link to those threads?

/r/pcgaming thread

/r/fallout thread

/r/kotor thread (I'll give these guys a pass actually, as they also locked discussion of the allegations when they first came out, too.)

/r/games thread got deleted

Didn’t this just happen to the creator of Rick and Morty?

I’m ready to say I will never believe a rape accusation unless (1) it makes it through the courts and (2) I can see the evidence myself. I might make an exception in cases where I can evaluate the repute of the woman — let’s be honest, false accusers fit a certain type. What other option is there? False accusations are endemic for the most significant creative men in America. Something similar happened to the frontman of Arcade Fire not long ago.

If we want to end sexual assault, our best bet is to reintroduce guardrails for male-female interaction (like every developed society in history). We can’t implement a norm of texting affirmative consent, because women do not want consent to be verbally agreed upon (read the testimony of women getting the ick about this online, it’s hilarious). Unless you don’t want to have sex, asking women to clearly write out what you can do to them when they get to your apartment is a false start. Women clearly desire the costly signal of a guy only relying on implicit consent, and also appear to like the inherent high stakes and seduction of the situation. This is probably biological. You can draw a line from the oldest tradition of husbands “wifenapping” his bride from her family, to the convoluted sexual games which make affirmative informed consent impossible.

This whole thing can be fixed with just: don’t hang out or drink with guys you don’t want to have sex with. Don’t go into a guy’s place alone, ever, unless you want to have sex. Don’t hang out with guys you don’t trust. Literally you can put to bed (pun intended) our whole cultural neuroticism by enacting these rules. I had a conservative Pakistani Muslim friend in college who gave me a shocked look when I thought we were going to her apartment together (we were walking and she needed to grab something). She explained she would never be with a guy alone in an apartment. Guess which demographic is probably not being sexual assaulted?

Didn’t this just happen to the creator of Rick and Morty?

Yes, but in the course of the legal proceedings for domestic assault and kidnapping (technically, preventing someone from leaving by blocking a door or taking their keys counts as attempted kidnapping, so it sounds like a drama-filled domestic spat), there was a bunch of fishing around and apparently he made some joke about a 14-year-old fan being Jailbait while interacting with said fan. Which also turned him into a groomer and a pedophile according to Reddit. So legal exoneration now doesn't do much for him. Plus he generally has a drunk-texting habit, which provides additional examples of being "creepy," the ultimate sin.

In the course of this, there were also claims that he hadn't actually done any in-person work apart from voice stuff on any of his shows or projects since Rick&Morty Season 3, which I'm slightly skeptical of; it sounds like all his friends and co-workers distancing themselves and claiming they never liked him anyways and none of those projects should suffer cancellation because they don't represent his work. Buuut, you can tell on the Season 3 R&M commentary that he's less involved; there's a lot more guest writers and randos and vapid LA circlejerking; and there's no Season 4 Commentary, which is consistent with less engagement from him. It's also consistent with someone who was muscled out of his own show by Dan Harmon. Genuine shrug here, the evidence is ambiguous, everyone involved has motivation to lie or elide.

My own hypothesis is that guys who luck into fame and success (and the sexual opportunities that come with it) later in life often don't know how to handle it, they're the eternal underdog who finally caught the car. Famous men who haven't lived through decades of sexual deprivation before becoming famous have better OpSec and don't fall for Crazy so easily.

The old rules are to protect men as much as women- a conservative Pakistani Muslim man knows he’s not supposed to take a woman into his apartment alone, too.

Easier said than done. You might just end up creating a multipolar trap.

A lot of men would simp/do favors for women for a potential go at even the most minute probability of sex. It's in every womans individual self-interest to exploit this. Women who defect from the "don't invite men unless u want to fuk" equilibrium gain the advantage for themselves only, Simultaneously tarnishing the reputation of the "prudes"... for being well "prudes".

I think the above is a male-braind take, if anyone has a female mirror of the failure modes, please share.

Yeah the entire point of female sexuality/seduction is plausible deniability. A girl who's into you will suddenly become gigantically gullible/culpable to the most overt and sleazy approaches, but will claim ignorance if the vibe's gone.

And it’s fine for women to do this defection, provided that they understand the risk is squarely on them. The utility of the rule is that it cures our dread and uncertainty regarding an activity that should be beautiful and pure (dating, sex). I imagine this was the rule for legislating rape for most of civilizational history: “you invited the man to your place alone? You willingly drank with him? Others have testified to your ill repute? Case dismissed.” The amount of harm immediately cured by this norm is infinitely better than the harm introduced (women no longer allowed to hang out with questionable men alone; who cares?)

The utility of the rule is that it cures our dread and uncertainty regarding an activity that should be beautiful and pure (dating, sex).

Our? You mean men's. What do women have to gain from your arrangement? They lose out on sexual opportunities, the favours they often gain for implicit promises of sex, AND on the plausible deniability that this is what they were doing in the first place. In exchange for what? If they're paranoid about being assaulted, they already have the option not to chug 5 Martinis and go alone to a dude's room at 2 AM.

If there's one thing women are generally capable of doing, it's inflicting reputational damage against other women who violate norms of acceptable behavior. If there's two things women are generally capable of doing, it's the above plus paying a lot of attention to the likelihood of them receiving reputational damage as a result of that process.

Didn’t this just happen to the creator of Rick and Morty?

That case was dropped, not settled with an apology from the "alleged" victim.

There really needs to be severe criminal penalties for lying about this. If the Jackie Coakleys and Karissa Barrows and Judy Munro-Leighton spent several decades in prison after public trials the chilling effect on complete fabrication would probably eventually result in society that was more likely to #believeallwomen.

Every once in a while you get a case where all cards really are on the table. I think there was some college kid who got metooed, the girl accused him of taking advantage of her when she was drunk, but it turned out he recorded the whole interaction, and noped out when he realized she's not sober. Some newspaper was later complaining about him having the recording, implying it was some sting operation.

Sometimes someone accuses a person that ends up having a rock-solid alibi. You can probably assume they were lying, when the person they point at was in another country at the time.

A trial of peers just like any other criminal punishment?

In the case of Jackie, her story involved being raped stop shards of broken glass so a lack of scaring would be my exhibit A. In the other cases they admitted it:

We have no knowledge that he has ever sexually abused any women.

“Oh, Lord no,” she responded on whether she has ever met Kavanaugh.

Presumably we'd investigate their claims and when they turn out to be impossible to have occured the accuser would then face criminal charges under a new criminal statute with the normal criminal trial procedures.

How would you prove they were lying beyond reasonable doubt?

Via a court case that the women decided they'd rather pay Chris million(s) of dollars in settlement rather than risk.

Although in civil cases "beyond a reasonable doubt" is unnecessary, admittedly.

Yeah, I'd like to see a load of civil cases where the woman who probably lied gets taken to the cleaners.

Why would we need to do that? We just have to get our ideology in the right hands, and we can accuse anyone we want of anything, and everyone will believe it. This is about speaking Power to Truth, man.

Christ.

It's good to know he didn't actually do it. Apparently any of it. And that justice, ultimately, was served.

Not so good that it took two years and a "seven figure" lawsuit to clear his name. I can hope that the relevant outlets get around to their mea culpa, but like you, I am not optimistic.

And that justice, ultimately, was served.

Justice delayed is justice denied, and anyway he's still cancelled and will still be known for the accusations. We already see people here in this thread rationalizing away the retraction.

TBH I don't even know why people settle like this. The damage is done, you should do as much damage to them as possible.

It's especially inexplicable imo in cases like Johnny Depp's. Avellone might have wanted to avoid a public and embarrassing trial about his sex life. Depp had basically exposed everything anyway.

Why settle with Heard unless she full retracted everything in public?

What more would he get from a full victory in court? I doubt the women have substantial assets to seize, they've admitted to fabricating the original claims. A judgment in civil court isn't going to convince anyone not also convinced by the settlement statement.

I suppose if you really wanted to release a bunch of embarrassing evidence about one side, fighting to the end might help but there is always some uncertainty around the jury so I'd imagine it's tough to pass up an offer that gives 80% of what you were claimed as damages.

Because that sort of lawsuit is probably terrible and stressful to go through and he wanted it over?

I was thinking about that too. There’s a permanent asterisk next to his name, where people won’t want their daughters to date managers to hire someone who was uncool enough to get accused.

I guess the idea is to capture that in monetary damages, but yeah, I do hope he’s able to find work.

To be accurate we don't KNOW he didn't do it. We just know he won a court case about it, so that his accusers (or their attorneys) had to draft said statement, which contradicts their earlier statements.

That may well mean he didn't but could mean there wasn't enough proof etc.

Just like people being found not guilty does not actually mean they are not guilty.

It does mean he should be treated as innocent though you probably still wouldn't want to find out your daughter was dating him.

I consider saying “he didn’t do it” to be an important part of treating him as innocent. It’s not fair to add a permanent caveat when the accusation turns out to be non-credible.

If my daughter is ever in such a position, I’ll keep in mind the cringe to which he admitted. No more, no less.

That sames...naive. Not in this case necessarily but in general. The accusation can be non credible but the behaviours the investigation uncovers can still be something warranting caution.

If the cops charge someone for murder but it turns out they're only an asshole who makes idle threats. They are STILL an asshole who makes idle threats. You can incorporate that information into how you treat them.

To be accurate we don't KNOW he didn't do it.

I did say rpgcodex had the best coverage. You should have read it.

During this time, Ms. Barrows mentioned that she could connect us with Chris Avellone and David Gaider, since she recently partied with them at Dragon Con (August 30th, 2012 — September 3rd, 2012). Even mentioning candidly that she had “made out with Chris the first night there.” Ms. Barrows would speak about Mr. Avellone very fondly as if there was a potential relationship there. She clearly liked him, and to us, it almost came across like they were dating (by listening to her). Ms. Barrows was more than willing and excited to set up an interview with Mr. Avellone.

On November 23rd of 2012 our group interviewed Chris Avellone via Skype. The people on the call were Chris Avellone, Karissa Barrows, Phil Hornshaw (currently an editor at GameSpot), Jakub Riedel, and myself (Jeff Johnson). The entire call was recorded. Pre-interview banter through interview, to post interview banter. During this call you can clearly hear Karissa’s affection and attraction to Chris. While the interview is public on YouTube, https://youtube.com/watch?v=lLj3YcpbV5U, I will also be releasing all relevant audio from the unreleased audio soon. This was the first time I had ever spoken with Mr. Avellone.

This during a period she claimed she was warning everyone off of Avallone for being a sex pest.

I am a longtime member of the Codex as it happens. But i would point out if you look at Chris's own admissions he apologised for inappropriate sexual propositions and said there was some truth to the accusations.

The position seems to be he did do most/all the things in question but with consent. That the accusers public views shifted on that doesn't actually prove they are lying.

They may well be and indeed it is probably most likely but we don't "know" it.

Did she rationalize the events because she liked/loved/was in awe of Chris? Once emotion fell away did she see the truth?

Or was it just a vendetta? That seems most likely but we don't know it. I'm not taking issue with Chris being exonerated, some of my most favorite games he was involved in. Just being overly sure in our knowledge.

  • -14

I'm really not buying into this mealy mouthed "We'll never really know" attitude. And I'm not buying into this framing of "Is she lying, or has her feelings towards a past event shifted over the years?" She told a material lie. To repeat.

Karissa said she witnessed Avellone act in a similar fashion with multiple other women at the event, and eventually reached the point where she, backed by two men who were also aware of his behavior, reported him to organizers, who immediately blacklisted him.

Here she is saying at the event where Avellone "assaulted" her, he was being such a sex pest she, as well as other witnesses, immediately had him blacklisted. And then here she is, in a recording, after this assault and public sex pestery that was so bad a gaggle of witnesses was able to compel a blacklisting.

During this time, Ms. Barrows mentioned that she could connect us with Chris Avellone and David Gaider, since she recently partied with them at Dragon Con (August 30th, 2012 — September 3rd, 2012). Even mentioning candidly that she had “made out with Chris the first night there.”

The discrepancy between these two accounts is not a matter of the mists of time altering our perspectives of past events. It's a material, bold faced lie. The gulf between them is irreconcilable and not due to the fragility of memory. And one of them is a contemporary recording of her, in her own words. Stop hedging.

And I'm not buying into this framing of "Is she lying, or has her feelings towards a past event shifted over the years?"

Even if that were true...so what tbh?

Or are we arguing that consent can not only be revoked during the act but long after?

Did you know many abuse victims lie that everything is ok? Especially when they have strong feelings towards the abuser? Do you know that they often overcompensate in front of other people?

Is it likely in this situation? Probably not. But its not impossible. I've worked with people who have been literally battered and still told their friends and family about how loving and wonderful the abuser was and helped them get jobs. So those statements are evidence she is lying, i agree. But they are not 100% proof. That is my point. That plus the settlement is strongly indicative. But people do settle because they feel its the best option even if they are in the right.

We roughly know she lied. But we cannot KNOW if the lie was the "he's great" part back then, or when she made the accusation or when she retracted the accusations after the settlement.

That is enough that Chris should not suffer consequences, but it isn't enough for us (in my view) to claim we have aboslute certainty.

Abuse victims are often not dealing with their emotions rationally, so if you see irrational outcomes it is not necessarily proof they are lying.

They may well be, and obviously the legal system has to err on the side of caution where credibility is concerned, but if you have dealt with abuse victims, you see a lot of lies in both directions depending and you can't necessarily discern the truth from them.

  • -19

You keep ignoring the material portion of the lie, and defaulting to some incoherent "no perfect victim" rhetoric. Address the material lie, or just stop.

She claimed she did a thing, a material, specific thing, in 2012 at Dragon Con. That she got Avellone blacklisted from the event. We then know she networked in the industry, and even pulled Avellone into events, based on their meeting at Dragon Con in 2012, because it's recorded. Forget whatever apparent mush brain sexual assault victims suffer from which you keep proposing. Why would Avellone network with a woman who got him banned from Dragon Con 2012 for being a sex pest, if that actually happened and she's not telling a bold faced material lie?

Who knows?

Just to be clear I would say i am 85% to 90% on Avellone being the victim here.

But people do weird things. Maybe she lied about Dragoncon banning but told the truth about the rest. Maybe Avellone was very forgiving or really wanted to take their make out session to the next level. Maybevshe is confus8ng Dragoncon 2012 for Unicorncon 2013 or a vivid hallucination from when she was high on mushrooms.

My point is not that it is highly likely that she is lying about the situation, but that we cannot know for sure because people do weird, apparently fucked up decision making all the time.

Also to be clear anyone who claims to be sure he is guilty is even more wrong in my opinion. But, I haven't seen anyone saying that here.

Though see my reply to the guy saying it might be 50/50 where i am arguing that he is underestimating the chance of Avellone's innocence.

  • -20
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But i would point out if you look at Chris's own admissions he apologised for inappropriate sexual propositions and said there was some truth to the accusations.

The truth seems to be that they did in fact get drunk and then make out, which she later characterized as nonconsensual when it was very consensual.

I appreciate you taking the contrarian position here (really) but it seems like you're mostly just being anti-contrarian. I understand why you want to push back against the easy, uncharitable "Hah, bitches be lyin'!" narrative, but it sure looks like at least in this case, bitches do be lyin'.

More like "bitches do be lying" AND "Chris do be a bit of a pushy dick"

More nuance than anti-contrarian.

  • -15

But i would point out if you look at Chris's own admissions he apologised for inappropriate sexual propositions and said there was some truth to the accusations.

People make false confessions under duress: of those that Innocence Project Innocence exonerated, 25% confessed and 11% pleaded guilty. This is despite the fact that they were facing the death even with this admission.

Also worth noting that the leftist demand to "believe women" and avoid "victim blaming" and "slut shaming" basically constrains your options here.

Calling her a liar doesn't play well, admitting it happened but it was consensual will just be seen as validating part of the story.

But this was in an email to someone he was asking to back him up. And immediately after he crossed the line by saying he could help a girl out through oral sex.

We have his text messages showing what he himself admits to saying.

To be accurate we don't KNOW he didn't do it.

Yes, we also don't know that you didn't do it. There's a reason we don't ask people to prove negatives, particularly when they're accused of a crime.

Correct. Which is why we legally

treat people as innocent at that point. But that still doesn't mean you are gonna necessarily want OJ Simpson marrying your sister for example.

Accusations are not near enough evidence to lock someone up, they might be enough evidence to behave differently around that person.

  • -11

Accusations are not near enough evidence to lock someone up, they might be enough evidence to behave differently around that person.

Should one also be more wary of Trump supporters, given the accusations leveled at them by Smollett?

Should one tread lightly near members of Phi Kappa Psi frat, in light of what Rolling Stone had to say about them?

You can be wary about what they said themselves. Take a look through the evidence Chris himself put out there. Including apologizing for sexually inappropriate behaviour.

He even says the accusations have some truth with embellishments in his emails asking for support. He probably osn't a sexual predator, but he does seem to have a habit of shitting where he eats and sometimes misjudging situations.

He doesn't seem to be a bad guy, just to be clear. But there is enough smoke he himself admits to that if my 25yo daughter said she had a date with him, i would be wary.

I would be wary because I don’t want my daughter dating a boorish fellow (which is different from dating a sexual abuser).

Sure, like i say he almost certainly is not a sexual predator in that regard.

Accusations should be given as much weight as the cost of making the accusation and the benefit of making the accusation.

Seems unworkable in a social space. Its trivial for me to tell you Bob stole my wallet and i will certainly gain social status for revealing a thief.

The weight should probably be based on how well you know/trust me and how well you know/trust Bob and whether anyine else has said Bob is a thief or if i lie about people beaing thieves before?

Then again, they might be not. Particularly when they're made in the midst of a moral panic.

Indeed, but if you read what Chris himself has put out there,his behavior is not exactly exemplary. In his own evidence packet it contains things about him having to apologise about making sexual comments and advances inappropriately. Where he himself acknowledges it at the time.

Is he a "sexual predator"? Probably not. He is probably what would have been described as a cad or a rake. Should he have been fired? Probably not. Though maybe telling him to stop shitting where he eats would have been good advice for him to hear.

"Not exemplary" under which moral framework? I happen to be pretty trad when it comes to sex and relationships, so I might agree, but the kind of people attacking Avellone don't seem to be trad, and don't seem to have a coherent critique of fuckboys as a general concept.

I find the whole idea of "not shitting where you eat" bizarre, inhumane, and neurotic. Several of my friends got happily married off of a workplace relationship, and I don't see anything wrong with that.

Ah lets clarify, pursuing a longterm relationship at work has risks but probably worth it.

But pursuing multiple short term entanglements at work exponentially increases the risks of some sort of fallout. Plenty of people do it of course, but the more break ups the more times you are rolling the dice.

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in which fucking large numbers of your groupies is no longer socially acceptable.

While that would seem a silly outcome, if that was the sexually conservative upshot everyone acknowledged and codified it'd actually sufficiently more rational and tolerable (in that the mores would be clear) than the current situation.

The current situation is not a general norm that sleeping with groupies or casual sex is bad, quite the opposite - the sex positive norms are still parroted (though some feminists do insist on this infantilizing view). Case in point: Roiland and Avellone were both taken down for alleged assault and grooming teenagers.

It would honestly be better if we went back to a Victorian "being a cad is bad" norm since then you wouldn't need to accuse someone like Avellone of being a sexual assaulter to smear him.

Every major liberal social movement of the past century has one goal in mind: sustainable development.

Transgenderism, Feminism, Gay Rights/Equality, Abortion are the best because they sustain development.

The goals of “MeToo” and the issues of “Groomers”, “Creepers”, “Cheaters” and “Power Imbalances” are all about one thing: sustainable development.

Turning the age old practice of seducing a younger woman or a workplace subordinate into an unthinkable social crime is about one thing: sustainable development.

These are cultural safeguards set in place to ensure our betters “guide reproduction responsibly” (their words).

Is this darkly hinting? I'm not sure what the externalities/failure modes of false accusations of sexual harassment/assault are supposed to do for "sustaining development." Development of what? The economy, civilization in general?

You’re not?

The more barriers to men and women having sex with one another, the less babies there will be. I’m not sure where you’re getting tripped up. Every major social standard we have left is fundamentally dedicated to damming this drive.

“Darkly hinting?” Sustainable development is the U.N.‘s term. Haven’t you heard? There are too many humans. “Sustainable development” is a euphemism for the correction of this large problem.

That's what I'm getting at: you're using euphemisms. If you want to argue that "the chilling effect of MeToo on sexual relations is not a bug, but a feature intended to drive population control as desired by The Shadowy They," you can just argue that plainly. It may be declasse, it will probably attract a hard counterargument, but you won't get the likes of me noticing their own confusion.

I don’t think there’s anything “Shadowy” about the U.N. or their explicitly stated goals. Sustainable development is also a good thing, and the effect of “MeToo” isn’t chilling, it’s necessary.

One mustn’t alert whom one is forced to deceive.

Being out of fashion has never bothered me. I’d like to hear your counterargument if you have one.

I don’t think there’s anything “Shadowy” about the U.N. or their explicitly stated goals.

Yes, but "To achieve our stated goals, we will manipulate social media to amplify accusations of sexual misconduct, creating a chilling effect against casual sex that reduces fertility" is a strategy that, if it exists, exists in the shadows. As do whatever organs the UN is using to enact said strategy.

This approach would be dubious IMO, as casual sex rarely results in children these days, and the hypothetical blowback from the ploy being discovered is immense.

Unless you're suggesting the coordinators have such an iron grip that discovery or blowback are non-factors? In which case, why are they pussyfooting around the issue with sneaky psyops rather than just putting contraceptives in the water supply or something?

Every major liberal social movement of the past century has one goal in mind: sustainable development.

Your ideas suppose the elites are amazingly powerful and coordinated in pursuing this end, but at the same time, they've contented themselves with a 100 year policy of slowly changing gender roles through ad hoc puppeteered social movements, rather than just enacting the New World Order and having done with it.

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I don’t have a counter argument to this(although I do think the truth is more nuanced than that, it’s probably at least directionally correct) but I agree with @halloweensnarry that it could and should have been worded more plainly.

We know that the bygone monogamous patriarchy was a system where men were responsible for women, and women were accountable to men, simply put. We also know that since then we’ve transitioned to a post-patriarchal era where none of that applies. It seems to me what the female MeToo generation really wants is to introduce a new unbalanced and unequal system, where everything stays the same except that a new social norm is introduced, namely that a single man having casual/premarital sex with a single woman implies the assumption of unilateral commitment on his part.

We are passionate about the safety, security and agency of women, minorities, LGBTQIA+ persons, and every other community that has seen persecution in the video game industry.

Doesn't this just sound like a ChatGPT generation? Sometimes it gives you this stuff unprompted or as a tangent from what you're asking specifically. It's one of those sentences I'd just be too repulsed to type out by hand since it's so sanctimonious. Many here hope that machines will make this stuff totally unacceptable, like using 'ejaculated' for the role filled by 'said' (it's like that in Sherlock Holmes). That day can't come soon enough!

Doesn't this just sound like a ChatGPT generation?

It's the other way around; ChatGPT sounds like that because it was trained on stuff like that.

More like beat with a stick (RLHF) and given pats on the head until it became a democrat. Gpt3 before the gimp was rather candid. It felt like you were talking to a higher being not an overeducated HR drone like ChatGPT feels like.

It's one of those sentences I'd just be too repulsed to type out by hand since it's so sanctimonious.

Well, sure, because you're on a different political team than them.

Many here hope that machines will make this stuff totally unacceptable

??

The machines are being trained to write this type of stuff more often.

Oh I meant that because machines write this way it would become insincere, or more insincere than it already is.

It's hard to say what will happen with these stock phrases in press releases like this one, because they have to be published widely, and faking sincerity in text is almost trivial. I'd guess that since the possibility for insincerity has always been present, AI won't make too much of a difference.

But for individual cases, I'd guess things would go in the opposite direction. Instead of submitting some diversity statement, I think you'd have to go in person to talk to a DEI administrator to convince them of your sincerity through your genuine flesh and blood interactions. Not only text, but video will be easy to fake in the future, so only in-person interactions would suffice. Once we get Terminator-level robots and Oscars-level acting technology, then things might break down since even in-person interactions could be faked.

Doesn't this just sound like a ChatGPT generation?

I mean, Vanderbilt University recently got (rightful) flak for using an AI to generate a starting point for a sympathy statement, so it wouldn't be unheard of.

Question for the Motte:

What are your priors for whether an accusation is true or false, particularly with regard to the status of the man? Most people in practice seem to drop the "believe all women" pretense when the male status is high enough (see the accusations against Biden and Clinton), and that makes sense. Absent strong corroborating evidence, there's a point of public renown where there's enough benefit and enough bad actors who know about your existence that unverifiable false accusations will eventually outnumber unverifiable true accusations.

How far does this extend all the way down the status pole, though? To well-known video game journalists? To line level managers at a F500? To a coworker at a Walmart? To a homeless dude? And how does this interact with the status of the woman involved?

The Feminist movement has successfully moved towards calling a lot of things that are very different in my mind rape. So it depends on the nature of it. If it's a highly violent stranger-in-the-bushes thing, then I'd default to believing it. That's what most people understand as rape. The feminist movement seems to move towards considering romantic misunderstandings between people who know each other as rape with very low standards though, so I default to not taking that seriously without some level of knowing one or both parties and having hard evidence of the situation. It doesn't matter to me the status of either of the individuals.

I suppose my actual standard in a situation that started voluntarily takes into account that men are expected to take the initiative in the great majority of all romantic encounters. This will inevitably go wrong sometimes. So IMO, no harm until the woman has expressed clear and unambiguous desire for it to stop multiple times and the man still refuses to stop. And that would have to be solidly proven - both sides have motive to lie in this situation, and having recordings is going to be pretty rare. This leads to (as advice to women), if you really definitely don't want to get physical with a guy, don't let him buy you a dozen drinks and then go up to his room with him alone. Doing the above doesn't mean you're obligated to let him do whatever he wants, but it's pretty obviously a situation with high potential for misunderstanding, and I'm going to have high priors against believing any claim that you were violated in a way that deserves legal recourse.

Regarding Biden and Clinton, I also can't help but notice that there's a highly partisan coding here. The progressive movement wants to completely ignore Clinton's well-known history of violent rape, and ignore Biden at least doing lots of highly inappropriate groping. But they want to sink Trump for the "grab them by the pussy" remark, and Kavanaugh for allegedly doing something inappropriate at a high school party decades ago which nobody had heard a word about until he was nominated for the Supreme Court.

If the accusation happens on Twitter, it didn't happen.

Default disbelief in all cases regardless of status, unless compelling evidence is presented and actions are congruent with an actual offence happening (did she go to the police, did she sit on it for years, is this hopping on a bandwagon trend a la MeToo?) Making a malicious, false accusation is a zero-cost action, and stands the gain the woman in question financially and socially even if later revealed to be false. Very, very rarely does it backfire a la Amber Heard. And she still has her supporters.

For me it's more about the circumstances of the accusation, though status does play a role. If the woman reports it immediately and goes to the police I'm much more likely to believe her than if she makes accusations on social media years later. If she was sober and clearly rejected his advances then it's more believable than if she got black out drunk and went to his hotel room. If the accusation is against somebody she has no reason to dislike then it's more believable compared to someone she has a grudge against. If it's against a criminal or someone with a known past of being violent then it's more believable than it would be against a model citizen.

Depends on what the man is known for. Prominent athletes and actors seem to legitimately have more than their fair share of date rapists, for example, while judges don't. Secondly look at who's doing the accusing. A minor league liberal activist making accusations of a conservative nominee for the supreme court is a different ballgame than a party-hearty coed accusing a runningback.

As far as "everyone acknowledges they had sex, but he-says-she-says on the consent" situations which are the vast majority of accusations leveled against lower status men, I'm perfectly prepared to adopt a "you had casual sex, you knew the risks" attitude but I do think it goes both ways; I credit that accusation from a known loose woman, for example, as needing a bit more supporting evidence, and my prior for a case where a woman willingly meets a man alone in his apartment/hotel room is that she wanted to sleep with him.

Depends on what the man is known for. Prominent athletes and actors seem to legitimately have more than their fair share of date rapists, for example, while judges don't.

Prominent athletes have more opportunities for sex - which means more opportunities for any one woman to claim abuse (especially given that many of them are used as casual sex partners and have no cause for loyalty).

They're also more prominently covered (barring some disaster or OJ situation) than judges. It seems like the entire societal backlash against sexual abuse was aimed at Hollywood actors and producers.

Those things muddy the waters.

If Alice accuses Bob, default to assuming the accusation is true in dealings with Alice and assuming it is false in dealings with Bob, regardless of the status of either.

That's how you end up being Bob Number 2.

Stick with the legal presumption of innocence, even if the case involves someone you'd like to believe the worst of.

What are your priors for whether an accusation is true or false, particularly with regard to the status of the man?

"J'accuse...!"-ations are all obviously false. Ones that only hit the newspaper when charges are laid could go either way.

All sexual abuse accusations against men are false, regardless of his status. #BelieveAllMen, but the inverse if he admits to it - which would only be the case if he has been longhoused so thoroughly that he has developed a false gynocentric consciousness.

Mostly I felt like summing up the entire event from primary sources for posterity and clarity, so that it's obvious who the liars are, and who the good faith actors are.

In that case, it would be a good idea to link to archived versions of those articles you mention.

I don't think it's obvious who the liars are. It's obvious who can afford the best lawyers, but I think this result is about equally likely regardless of who is lying.

The statement on its own isn't I agree, the statements made at the time are more evidence though as are subsequent actions of the accusers. While abuse victims do often say positive things about their abusers, I think its unlikely (but not impossible) that is the situation here. As the relationship doesn't fit my experience in this area. The reason I am not certain though is that odd behavior does happen with abuse.

Despite me being skeptical about how SURE we can be, I still think its likely the scenario is pretty much as presented. Maybe 85% or 90% on that. Just not 100%

Should Nature endorse political candidates? Yes — when the occasion demands it:

This week, Nature Human Behaviour publishes a study suggesting that Nature’s 2020 endorsement led many supporters of now former president Donald Trump to lose trust in science and in Nature as a source of evidence-based knowledge.

[...]

Participants who were Trump supporters did not view the summary favourably and, compared with Trump supporters who had been shown text on a different topic, had a lower opinion of Nature as an informed and impartial source on science-related issues facing society.

The growth of activism in ostensibly-neutral organizations is old news, particularly since this event took place three years ago. What stuck out to me is that they seem surprised by those findings, and have to reach for esoteric explanations like the "rebound effect". The simple explanation works just fine, and Bret Devereaux put it best: "Public engagement is how you build support for the field; activism is how you spend support for the field. Yet the two are often conflated; spending is not saving.".

Also notable is the primacy of feels over reals: Nature literally is not impartial, and Trump supporters correctly identified that fact based on the evidence they were presented. They didn't even pretend to grapple with the base reality: Instead of looking at trustworthiness, they look at feelings of trust. More broadly, instead of looking at personal finance, researchers and reporters look at feelings of stability and instead of looking at crime, they look at fear of crime.

I find it utterly incredible how little self-awareness is on display here and this single article and the point you've demonstrated has actually lowered my estimation of the scientific community and Nature especially so. Even beyond the comically stupid and obvious immediate failure that you've pointed out, a study like this should be raising gigantic flashing alarm bells in the minds of anyone concerned with science as a field. They have here a sign that descending into the muck of partisan politics renders them less trustworthy and damages public faith in science, one of the worst possible outcomes for both science as a field and individual scientists. And their response is to double down?

These are the first steps on the well-travelled road that leads to Hypatia's fate.

I have bad news. It was always this bad and you just found out.

The only thing that happened was a cohort of Millenials thought that Science was a good replacement for Religion, and so convinced themselves that it wasn't populated with the same stupid, scheming, biased humans as every other profession. Now you know what your father knew, and his father before him. There is no one to trust, so get on with it.

"Magazine decides to become arm of political activism in support of the party of Tweedledee. Is shocked, shocked! when party of Tweedledum gets into power and amongst other matters cuts funding to magazine/its pet topics".

Well, at least now we know. I don't mind reading partisan media when I know which side of the fence they're on, and that can even be a valuable experience to hear from the other side. Some bunch pretending they are "the facts are impartially in support of our guys" are not neutral, whatever they may like to think.

Should Nature endorse political candidates? Yes — when the occasion demands it:

How tf do you get from the conclusion that endorsing Biden didn't help him at all but reduced public trust in your paper as an argument for doing more political endoresements?

Writing papers in the academic landscape of current year often means that the conclusion is already set. So if you want to argue X, you let your data speak to that effect and then tack on a hasty "but, uh, of course this shows that not-X".

We are just returning to the historical norm. A couple hundred years ago you were expected to squeeze a "so of course this all shows that God is magnificient and the church correct in everything" in your stuff as well.

Because the actual goal is to demonstrate that they’re team players for the blue tribe, not to do either of those two other things.

I really want to see Nature doing a piece on how, if Biden runs again, being 80 years old at the start of his campaign and potential second term says nothing about his cognitive abilities and general state of health. I dare them. Because when my own father got to 80, I could see the slow, gradual, but definite decline in his health and capacity. So tell me that Biden is Super Joe, defying the laws of biology!

Not to mention the fact that Nature is British. I suspect they see themselves as global (and therefore American, or at least entitled to comment on American domestic politics), but the journal is historically British, the company that publishes it is the London-based subsidiary of a German corporate parent, and the editor-in-chief and most of the editorial team are based in London.

Foreign endorsements almost always hurt the endorsee. The most notorious examples are Putin's endorsement of Donald Trump and Obama's endorsement of remain in the Brexit referendum - both elections were close enough that there is an outside chance that the foreign endorsement flipped the result in the opposite way to the one intended.

I would expect Science to endorse an American political candidate and (to a lesser extent, because Science is published by the AAAS but Nature is not published by the BAAS, Nature to endorse a British political candidate) if science was actually at stake - for example if one candidate was expected to dramatically cut science funding or introduce political litmus tests for receiving it. Nature sort-of endorsed remain, reflecting the (correct) views of the vast majority of British scientists that Brexit would be bad for science. But for Nature to endorse a candidate in a non-British election is stupid.

Political endorsements might not always win hearts and minds, but when candidates threaten a retreat from reason, science must speak out.

Why must "science" speak out? Science didn't.

But the study does question whether research journals should endorse electoral candidates if one implication is falling trust in science. This is an important question, and there are, sadly, no easy answers. The study shows the potential costs of making an endorsement. But inaction has costs, too. Considering the record of Trump’s four years in office, this journal judged that silence was not an option.

The article doesn't bother to explain what the costs of inaction are. The endorsement didn't shift any votes, and to the extent it had a public impact it seems mostly to have pissed away some of whatever political capital Nature has. Even if you were to grant that Democrats are 100% aligned with reality and Republicans 100% opposed, the endorsement did nothing to further the cause of better public policy by maximizing Democrats' electoral fortunes. And it adds further to the Republican perception that "science" is just an institution driven more by fads and an ideological worldview with implacably opposed, non-empirical values.

I think it has to be understood less as Nature's editorial board trying to influence the election (implausible anyway) and more trying to position itself as a valuable ally to Democrats.

Funny you should mention Science. This may deserve its own top level post, but the Editor in Chief of Science today posted a tweet thread praising the decision by Nature and essentially making the claim that the role of scientists is not merely to provide evidence to be used in discussions of policy, but to demand that evidence is used exclusively to advance ostensibly left-wing goals.

To acknowledge the science and evidence underlying climate change, and develop a different policy prescription based on that is “unacceptable.”

Maybe I am naive, but I had some degree of faith in the scientist as a disinterested truth seeker. That is no longer the case. “Science,” and Science, have confirmed themselves as activist organizations only willing to expose (and, conversely, conceal) the truth in pursuit of political goals.

Affirmative Action or Transparency, Pick One.

In the hierarchy of court systems, lower-level courts (typically referred to as trial courts or district courts) handle the dirty work of sifting through an ass-load of witness testimonies, pretrial hearings, exhibit litigation, etc. across what can amount to months or even decades of lawfights. For context, one of my felony criminal trials took about 4 days of testimony and generated about 1000 pages in transcripts. A civil trial with well-heeled and sophisticated litigants is going to kill way more trees.

Normally, appellate courts (such as SCOTUS) don't want to concern themselves with the nitty gritty detail of what exactly was said at every hearing of every trial. Generally speaking, appellate courts will only deal with questions of law rather than of facts, so if they're going to get anything at all, appellate courts want a tidy streamlined package of only the bare minimum information they'd need to answer the limited questions in front of them.

Public trials are one of the bedrocks of the American legal system. Even if you're not directly involved, the presumption for any legal case is one of transparency and the exceptions are limited. During a trial, jurors are expected to come to a decision based solely on what was admitted into evidence in front of them, and so whenever the parties have to discuss whether the jurors are allowed to see anything, this naturally has to be done outside of the presence of the jury (known as a "sidebar"). Keeping the jury out of the loop is routine, but lasts only until their job is done, and sidebar conversations are absolutely still part of the open record.

The only other shroud used by the court system is sealing. The most common applications, such as redacting bank account information or social security numbers, are banal and trivial to justify. At least on paper, if a court is going to seal anything, it must make a determination that there is an "overriding interest" requiring secrecy that trumps the presumption of openness. But in practice, parties routinely ask the court to seal either dockets, and sometimes even ask to seal the motions to seal (Eugene Volokh has done heroic work on this front, watching dockets across the country like a hawk and regularly filing successful motions to unseal).

The big affirmative action case before SCOTUS at the moment involves a lawsuit against Harvard for anti-Asian discrimination. SCOTUS made the unusual step of requesting everything from the trial court. The only reason this would happen is if SCOTUS has a reason to think they're not seeing the full picture, and at least in this case it seems like the trial judge has indeed been trying to hide some skeletons. Jeannie Suk, a Harvard law professor, has been watching this case with interest and noticed that the transcripts for the multiple sidebars were automatically sealed by the judge. Suk wrote about her efforts to pry open this sealed vault and what she found hidden inside.

What was Judge Burroughs trying to hide? I eventually obtained the joke memo and the surrounding e-mails, and what I read didn’t strike me as having been worth the fight to keep them secret. But the fight itself showed that both Harvard and the court expect the public to operate on trust that their decisions are not biased—an expectation that is all the more troubling as the Supreme Court’s likely ban on using race in admissions will drive the consideration of race further underground.

William Fitzsimmons began working in Harvard admissions more than fifty years ago and has been the dean of admissions and financial aid since 1986. The federal official who wrote the joke memo, Thomas Hibino, worked at the Boston location of the Office for Civil Rights, eventually serving as the regional director; he retired in 2014. Earlier in his career, he had worked at the Japanese American Citizens League. After Hibino oversaw the federal investigation into Harvard’s alleged discrimination against Asian American applicants, decades ago, he and Fitzsimmons became friends, and by 2012 their exchanges included banter about lunch dates and running races together, and teasing when one opted to sleep in. But the relationship wasn’t all palling around, because Hibino was still at the federal agency regulating Harvard. In April of 2013, he wrote to Fitzsimmons, “Regarding the impact of legacy on Asian American applicants, what proportion of AA applicants are legacies and what proportion of white applicants are legacies? Of course I’m happy to talk about this if necessary!” More than anything, the e-mails reveal the coziness of the federal regulator toward the regulated entity.

On November 30, 2012, amid a friendly back-and-forth about lunch plans, Hibino e-mailed Fitzsimmons an attachment that he described as “really hilarious if I do say so myself!” Hibino explained, “I did it for the amusement of our team, and of course, you guys”—presumably Harvard admissions officers—“are the only others who can appreciate the humor.” The joke memo had been written on Harvard admissions-office stationery, during the earlier investigation. It was purportedly from an associate director of admissions and parodied the admissions officer downplaying an Asian American applicant’s achievements. The memo denigrated “José,” who was “the sole support of his family of 14 since his father, a Filipino farm worker, got run over by a tractor,” saying, “It can’t be that difficult on his part-time job as a senior cancer researcher.” It continued, “While he was California’s Class AAA Player of the Year,” with an offer from the Rams, “we just don’t need a 132 pound defensive lineman,” apparently referring to a slight Asian male physique. “I have to discount the Nobel Peace Prize he received. . . . After all, they gave one to Martin Luther King, too. No doubt just another example of giving preference to minorities.” The memo dismissed the fictional applicant as “just another AA CJer.” That was Harvard admissions shorthand for an Asian American applicant who intends to study biology and become a doctor, according to the trial transcript.

Like Suk, I can't think of any possible justification to keep something like this hidden under seal. In a case about racial discrimination against Asians, it seems patently absurd to claim how Harvard officials and federal regulators pally around and openly mock Asians is somehow not relevant to the issue. It seems plain to me that the judge chose to hide it because it's embarrassing and inconvenient to Harvard. Anti-Asian bias also came up from education officials in the Thomas Jefferson High School case, where text messages plainly revealed their intent was to reduce the number of Asian students enrolled.

I'm very much against Affirmative Action policies. Although I'm not opposed in principle to remedial measures designed to narrowly target affected groups (although the amounts were pitiful, see Japanese internment compensation), painting entire groups with such a broad brush doesn't work when we have such an incoherent taxonomy of race. Beyond that, although Affirmative Action is often cited as evidence of a "woke pro-minority" institutional bias it seems just as plausible to conclude that privileged white people are hiding behind the "black and hispanic" veil as a way to disguise their motivation to avoid having to compete against Asians for the top spots (I'm open to evidence showing one way or another).

Harvard plainly wants to be able to discriminate on the basis of race. They may offer lofty justifications about why their particular kind of racial discrimination is justified or warranted or morally right, but no one is obligated to accept their statements at face-value. The fact that Harvard (with the help of a federal judge) is working so hard to avoid transparency only makes suspicion that much more warranted as a response to their actions.

Didn't know that Volokh did that. Props to him.

Here's an argument in favor of explicit, quota-based affirmative action compared to what exists now: it adds transparency instead of driving it underground. Clearly adcoms want to engineer the racial composition of their classes and will do so by whatever means possible. But avoiding explicit quotas just shifts AA mechanisms to illegibility and makes it impossible to discuss. Any debate around the extent, values, and goals of AA gets obscured by a bunch of sand being thrown up in the air. "We are objective and meritocratic, it's just that Asian Americans have ineffably worse personalities" and all that dross.

People can debate the value of AA itself (I'm probably more supportive of it in some circumstances than most here), but it's better to make it explicit so people can reasonably discuss it instead of getting sidetracked about whether and to what extent it's happening. And psychologically it's better for students to know that they're being held to different standards instead of gaslighting them about mysterious personality defects that they all have but group X doesn't.

openly mock Asians is somehow not relevant to the issue

I don't read the quote from the memo as mocking Asians; it's mocking admissions committees and the ridiculous standards they apply to Asians. It's doubtlessly still relevant for trial and there's no reason it should be sealed, but if anything I read some empathy toward Asians and an acknowledgment that they face a much, much higher bar than other minority groups.

Someone needs to get Californians to pass another proposition, one that bans any admission criteria except state residence and SAT results in UC and CSU.

Here's an argument in favor of explicit, quota-based affirmative action compared to what exists now: it adds transparency instead of driving it underground. Clearly adcoms want to engineer the racial composition of their classes and will do so by whatever means possible. But avoiding explicit quotas just shifts AA mechanisms to illegibility and makes it impossible to discuss. Any debate around the extent, values, and goals of AA gets obscured by a bunch of sand being thrown up in the air. "We are objective and meritocratic, it's just that Asian Americans have ineffably worse personalities" and all that dross.

People can debate the value of AA itself (I'm probably more supportive of it in some circumstances than most here), but it's surely better to make it explicit so people can reasonably discuss it instead of getting sidetracked about what's actually happening. And psychologically it's better for students to know that they're being held to different standards instead of gaslighting them about mysterious personality defects that they all have but group X doesn't.

I agree with this, though I admit I haven't thought too deeply on it. Clearly the desire to discriminate against Asians is there, and this desire will be fulfilled one way or another due to the people who have this desire being the same people who control the levers to power in this context. It's best if it's all out in the open, so that potential applicants, their parents, and others can more accurately assess both their chances and the standards of Harvard and other universities.

However, I suspect that the obfuscation is a very important part of the point that is also desired by the people who desire to discriminate against Asians, and as such any implementation of AA will inevitably have to be obscured. AA's value in providing a nice-sounding mechanism for engineering the admissions results they're targeting would be lost if everything were out in the open, and that function might be a critical, irremovable portion of it.

In a case about racial discrimination against Asians, it seems patently absurd to claim how Harvard officials and federal regulators pally around and openly mock Asians is somehow not relevant to the issue. It seems plain to me that the judge chose to hide it because it's embarrassing and inconvenient to Harvard.

I suppose… but the facts being embarrassing and inconvenient for Harvard is hardly new, e.g., Hsu quoting Kronman in 2019: “‘…The facts are just so embarrassing to Harvard…’”

Facts that I would posit have been embarrassing for decades, given the old age of affirmative action.

And Kronman, as Hsu would like you to know, “is an anti-Trump lifelong democrat.” That is, Hsu and Kronman are both One of the Good Ones.

Obviously Harvard wants to discriminate on the basis of race; no one ever claimed they didn’t except themselves. I don’t think we’re going to get a straight answer as to why, exactly- and anyways, to me the more interesting question is ‘how did they get this sealed in the first place’.

Is it usual for federal judges to do this?

Federal judges do indeed have a habit of rubberstamping unopposed motions to seal and this becomes the status quo up until the moment a journalist (or Eugene Volokh) catches wind of it and files a motion to unseal. The caselaw is very solidly in favor of open access, and so judges kind of act embarrassed at being caught with their pants down and make a big stink about having to grant the motion to unseal.

In this case, my guess is that SFFA didn't really want to agree to seal the document, but also didn't want to make a big fuss about a collateral issue since they were going to remain in front of that same judge (also, agreeing to seal sometimes comes along with settlements). The only people who are positioned to push the issue are outside observers like journalists, but they need to be lucky enough to know about it in the first place.

I don’t think we’re going to get a straight answer as to why, exactly- and anyways, to me the more interesting question is ‘how did they get this sealed in the first place’.

They got it sealed because they had a friendly judge and if you are an opposing party its bad practice to make a fuss about everything the opponent asks for if it isn't materially affecting your case in a significant way.

As to why they are obsessed with AA, there are a few charitable takes: Genuinely believe in oppression narratives, genuinely believe in restitution narratives, etc. There are also uncharitable ones like hatred of Asians/Whites, I personally think it is an aesthetic fetish.

Realistically:

The same proportions Harvard has now, but perhaps even more tilted in favor of blacks and latinos.

Harvard (and similar schools) will find a way to further stack the deck in favor of blacks and latinos, and against Asians and whites. Regardless of what SCOTUS has to say. It would be a distinct "fuck you" to SCOTUS, wrong thinkers, and those of the wrong demographics.

Naively:

As Espenshade and Chung (2005) found—at top schools, in the absence of racial preferences, nearly 4/5 of spots occupied by blacks and latinos would be assumed by Asians. This would only be more extreme at a school like Harvard nowadays, given tail-effects and how things in general have progressed since then.

So a conservative estimate would be like, via cocktail arithmetic and rounding "nearly 4/5" down to 3/4: 46% white, 31% Asian, 14.3% multiracial, 2.7% black, 1.6% latino, 3.8% South Asian, etc. by applying a 1 - 3/4 constant to blacks and latinos and transferring the residual to Asians. Given the assumptions, this would already be very favourable to blacks, and to a lesser extent, latinos (or should I say latinx?).

According to the Jerusalem Post, in 2015, Harvard's undergrad student body was 25 percent Jewish and 27 percent Jewish in Yale. 6% may be closer to the proportion of students who are religious Jews, but ethnic Jews are almost certainly much greater than 5-6% of the white bucket.

Inference based on last names is likely going to undercount, as there are many Jews with names that could not easily be inferred to be Jewish. Where I do agree is that these numbers are manipulated based on the political projection Hillel wants to make, and there is a lot of uncertainty. "5-6% of the white bucket" as ethnically Jewish is obviously absurd and the real percentage would be much higher. It's not exactly something they want to track- as much as they want to count beans for other ethnicities it's another case where Jews enjoy special treatment to avoid the possibility of any sort of scrutiny that is applied to other represented ethnic groups.

I know quite a few (often rowers etc recruited for sports).

St Paul's or Eton, is the question I suppose, as there are seven of one and five of the other. Heavyweight men's crew is the only sport like that, however. It has 27 white foreigners, which is probably more than all the other sports put together. The other sports with substantial numbers of white Europeans is women's Field Hockey, with 13, and Men's soccer with 11.

The rest of the sports have a few sprinkled here and there, such as the three Israeli women in Track and Field, Eden Finkelstein, Shaked Leibovitz, and Estel Valeanu. Skiing has 2 Scandanavians, both male. Women's soccer has 5 Europeans, but one is Black. As I mentioned, Men's soccer has 11, (Iceland, England, Germany, Serbia, Monoca, Slovakia (2), Finland, Norway, New Zealand, and Sweden). Men's heavyweight crew is the big outlier. The other three crew teams have 4 (+ 7 antipodeans) combined (including another boy from St. Pauls).

My guess is 7% are Jewish, and perhaps a fifth or sixth of that is non-white (ie. half-Asian or half-black) Jews, meaning only 5-6% of the ‘white’ bucket is Jewish.

Stanford has 550 Jewish undergraduates, down from 600. This is about 8%, and indeed, about 1 in three white kids are Jewish in my experience. When I was there last, Harvard seemed significantly more Jewish than that. If Harvard really is less Jewish than Stanford, that would be a very big turnaround.

It is also, for example, extremely unlikely that almost 1% of Harvard admits are fully or even half native, or that 3% are half or more native Hawaiian or Mormon Samoans. Most likely both groups, especially the latter, are predominantly white.

I would guess the Hawaiians are mostly Asian, as that is the plurality there. Native Americans are mostly white, but what matters is tribal affiliation, not blood quantum.

The Crimson’s stats also separate ‘mixed race’, which will largely be half-white, half-Asian

I agree but would guess that almost all are half white half Asian, as all other mixes choose the better choices for college admission (Hispanic, Black, Native, or Pacific Islander). 3% of 20-24 year olds are mixed race in the US, so this group is hugely over-represented.

Goes to show just how superior Asians are compared to whites, with 1/9 of the population and an affirmative action regime that hurts them even more than it hurts whites they still manage to get 30% more seats than whites at Stanford.

Wouldn't surprise me if a significant portion of the remaining white population is in rural communities which almost never get recruited by the ivy league.

I don't have it on hand, but there was a study which found that signifiers of achievement in rural areas actually impose a substantial penalty on acceptance rates among the Ivy league.

Ross Douhat described it as: "one of the [Espenshade and Radford] study’s more remarkable findings:

while most extracurricular activities increase your odds of admission

to an elite school, holding a leadership role or winning awards in

organizations like high school R.O.T.C., 4-H clubs and Future Farmers

of America actually works against your chances. Consciously or

unconsciously, the gatekeepers of elite education seem to incline

against candidates who seem too stereotypically rural or right-wing or

“Red America.”"

Espenshade's subsequent characterization was that "We mentioned, as a relatively minor point in the book, that students who had participated in career-oriented extra-curricular activites—especially if they held a leadership role or won an award—had a slight decrease in their chances of admission to these elite colleges".

If a white person complains about this, they're almost immediately called a racist. Most just keep their mouth shut...

Do you think there's good research on this?

My bet would be approximately the same, with some deviations to account for the changing racial makeup of high school graduates. You'll probably see more people who currently identify as white instead identify as Hispanic/Latino, because everyone will know that AA is still widely used under the table.

Black or African American

This categorization always irks me. For Harvard in particular, a huge proportion (40% as of 2004, though they don't make these numbers readily available and it's hard to find more recent ones) of its Black students are international or first generation immigrants. This is weird given some of the common justifications for AA, particularly the "it's to make up for slavery" one. That's not to say the international ones don't deserve to be there; in my freshman dorm at a similar institution, they comprised about half the Black students and largely outperformed the ADOS half. But if I were ADOS, I'd be pretty pissed about Harvard trying to whitewash (blackwash?) its numbers by that particular grouping.

ETA my actual guess: 43% white, 19% Asian, 15% multiracial, 10% black, 4% South Asian, 8% Latino, 1% native or pacific.

Its my understanding that certain black immigrant groups like Nigerians are highly successful, on par with Asians and Jews. So, its not surprising they would be overrepresented. I would sat this is actually semi-good as it means Harvard is at least treating black applicants internally-meritocratically even while discriminating against other racial groups.

Just to clarify you mean that they are to Blacks what Jews and Asians are to whites; not that they are otherwise are not comparable to Jews or Asians? I would agree.

This is weird given some of the common justifications for AA, particularly the "it's to make up for slavery" one.

It isn't at all weird, because that is not a legal justification for affirmative action, and has not been for at least 20 years. Rather, schools can employ "narrowly tailored use of race in admissions decisions to further a compelling interest in obtaining the educational benefits that flow from a diverse student body." Grutter v. Bollinger, 539 US 306, 343 (2003). So, it makes perfect sense.

Perfect sense? Yeah if you buy that bullshit I guess. What educational benefits flow from a student body that all thinks the exact same way but is superficially “diverse”? If anything grads these days are dumber than ever, that’s what comes from ignoring g factor in admissions

My guess:.

46 percent said they are white, 18.1 percent of surveyed students identified as Asian, 14.3 percent as multiracial, 10.7 percent as Black or African American, 6.5 percent as Hispanic or Latino, 3.8 percent as South Asian, 0.6 percent as American Indian or Alaska Native, and 0.1 percent as Pacific Islander.

They'll call it holistic admission or something.

Is the question "what will they look like if the supreme court bans racial preference?" Or is it "what would they look like if admissions were truly race blind?" I fully expect Harvard will try to skirt the rules even if the supreme court bans it. I think your numbers are are reasonable for the first question. The second question would be at least 40% Asian and not more than 2% black

I imagine this category is largely half-white, half-Asian?

I imagine this category is almost entirely white, perhaps with a spanish or non-european surname.

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’m not particularly interested in the woman-cum-backpack-reviewer at the center of the story

Hmm yeah, she does have a lot of experience with cum backpacks.

I don’t think I could had done better if I were assigned to write a satirical article with “Coffee Emoji: Backpack Edition” as the prompt.

If that is the published version of the article, I wonder what her earlier drafts were like—

Her editors: And your article provides an insightful, analytical, and comprehensive review of the backpack?

Her: Backpack?

>In 2019 I tweeted, “Please G*d, Please don’t let me be a 30-year-old with roommates.” I am 30 and a half years old, and I hear sex noises that aren’t my own when I go to sleep at night, and I think about this tweet all of the time. I don’t have my own bathroom.

Self-censors the “o” in God ironically or not, but sees no issues about broadcasting her promiscuity.

>Recently, after I finished seeing a guy who had three other girlfriends, I started seeing another guy. This one just had one girlfriend. I thought, Must be love.

Another W for polygyny and female mate-choice copying. The cringe doesn’t really get better from there and I tapped out.

It raises the question for me: does Feminism actually have any realistic solution to how men should react to female promiscuity?

Yes, feminists do have realistic solutions, ones that they've successfully deployed over the past few years/decades. As evident from academia, pop culture, mainstream opinion pieces, to subreddits like AmItheAsshole and relationship_advice, and even supposedly more neutral ones like PurplePillDebate—women (and sometimes even men) will often express an opinion to the tune of:

You WILL propose to a woman after she's had her fun and is ready to settle down.

You WILL buy her an expensive engagement ring that she can show off to her friends, family, and coworkers.

You WILL give her the princess wedding of her dreams.

You WILL be happy. The past is the past. Nothing better than a woman with experience. Only incels would disagree.

Shaming, deplatforming, and pushing contrary opinions outside of the Overton Window can work in preventing men from comparing notes... and in getting women to believe that ugh, only shitty, toxic men are too insecure to date an experienced woman.

If men prefer female youth, beauty, and chastity, it’s because they’re shallow, controlling, misogynistic pedophiles. Women are Wonderful and don’t care about male height, strength, income, status, and/or ability to pull other women, but if they do it’s only due to internalised misogyny or because men are so shitty that women have to use those factors as heuristics.

Women are valid if they get the ick from short men, but it’s gross and problematic if men get the ick about committing to promiscuous women (such men are only telling on themselves).

Self-censors the “o” in God ironically or not, but sees no issues about broadcasting her promiscuity.

This is a Jewish thing. Jews traditionally interpret the commandment "Thou shalt not take the name of YHWH thy God in vain, for YHWH will not hold him guiltless that taketh his name in vain" as prohibiting inappropriate usage of YHWH as a personal name for God. The Jewish tradition deals with vague biblical laws by "putting a fence round the law" - i.e. unless there is a very good reason for pushing the boundaries of the law they set up social norms which prohibit anything that might be a violation of the underlying divine law. In this case, Jews never use a personal name for God at all - hence euphemisms such as HaShem (literally, "the name") or "The LORD" (used in small caps in the KJV and KJV-inspired English translations of the Old Testament where the original Hebrew has YHWH).

Christians are bound by the divine law against blasphemy, but not the Pharisaical fence against using a personal name for God, and in English Christians generally use "God" as a personal name for God the Father. So English-speaking Jews say G*d to make it clear they are not doing that. (So, wildly inappropriately, do some philo-Semitic Christians as a show of solidarity)

As a PMC white New Yorker who writes for a living, it is a safe assumption that Annie Hamilton either is a secular Jew, or lives in a social milieu dominated by them. So she is expressing allegiance to New York Jewish culture - presumably unironically - not trying to avoid blasphemy.

Women hate feminine men much more than short men. A man not having jealousy is a huge red flag to women at an instinctual level. These same women who say all of these lies on reddit go on to pull out their latest romance novel about some controlling man who does the opposite of what they say they like. Either that or rape porn. And these types of dominant men are the ones they are pulled towards in real life.

There is a reason Andrew Tate blew up, men with normal structured brains quickly latch on to these types of "misogynistic" ideas, which are essential for their survival and reproduction, and are actually secretly attractive to these complaining women.

I used to marvel at how well the men were written on SATC, until it dawned on me that the show was run and written mostly by gay men. They understood men from both empathetic and adversarial positions.

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.

Forgive the quip, and I hope I will be able to engage more meaningfully with your really interesting questions, but: Women not facing the negative consequences of their actions isn't an omission on part of the writers. It's what makes it feminist fantasy. That is the feminist solution and it is indeed quite scalable as far as mainstream feminism is concerned. If not, well. Then the man-shaming will just have to continue until morale improves.

I am forced to conclude that even though in an ideal world men would surely prefer their wife have fewer rather than more sexual partners in her past, they are not particularly committed to this as the primary or even a major criteria.

A common refrain in the manosphere is that, to understand women, you have to watch what they do, not what they say. Revealed preference and all that.

It's a valuable heuristic, but it cuts both ways. Waxing poetic about virginal, loyal tradcath wives is largely a performance for other men on the Internet and would be forgotten as soon as a pretty IG influencer expressed any interest.

It's a valuable heuristic, but it cuts both ways.

I agree, but I think that when you take a broader perspective the more traditional view wins out - when you look back in history, men do actually act in a way that implies virginity is valuable, especially men with options (royalty etc). Men aren't going for virginal, loyal tradcath wives for a variety of reasons (demand outpacing supply being a big one), but we live in a rather anomalous period for gender relations historically. It seems to me like looking at men and their choices in the present is akin to looking at a consumate gourmand stranded on a deserted island and claiming that his diet of fish and coconuts reveals that he doesn't actually care about eating good, well-prepared food at all.

It's a valuable heuristic, but it cuts both ways. Waxing poetic about virginal, loyal tradcath wives is largely a performance for other men on the Internet and would be forgotten as soon as a pretty IG influencer expressed any interest.

My wife's childhood friend is a virginal, loyal tradorth wife, so I've been invited to a few tradorth birthday parties and have been fed the choicest gossip. All I can say is tradness is inversely correlated with sexual adventurousness. Not saying there aren't trad wifes that consider their bedroom the temple where every rite honors the matrimony, but I'll bet most of their tradorth husbands will not cheat on them with someone who can do a striptease and a blowjob only because they will ejaculate prematurely.

The difference is, yes, actually if you go to some very conservative parts of the Midwest or still heavily Catholic partts of rural Texas, I'd actually bet you're right. I disagree heavily with those people's likely politics, but I don't doubt that most of them arre following the tenets of their religion. The problem is, those aren't the people on Twitter complaining about women having too many partners in college, but rather, it's basically dudes who spend too much time on Twitter that decided the sexual revolution was the reason why they didn't have a cute 19 year old to marry when they finished college (when the reality was, they'd be out of luck in 1962 as well).

but rather, it's basically dudes who spend too much time on Twitter that decided the sexual revolution was the reason why they didn't have a cute 19 year old to marry when they finished college (when the reality was, they'd be out of luck in 1962 as well).

Those particular guys might have been out of luck, but in general "having a cute 19 year old to marry when they finished college" was far more a thing in 1962 than now.

Mostly because only 10% of people finished college, so they were very high earning people with lots of social value. I bet the top 10% of college graduates who have any social skills at all, do fine.

If you dropped most of the people currently complaining about the sexual revolution leading to their lack of marriable women, and dropped them into 1962 with only their high school knowledge and no knowledge of the future to get rich actually wouldn't be as happy with their choices as they think they would be.

Mostly because only 10% of people finished college, so they were very high earning people with lots of social value

No, mostly because both the age gap at marriage and the average age for women at first marriage lined up with that better in 1962.

Meanwhile, my beautiful ex-VP (boss) got bored of promiscuity at 32, found herself a handsome 40 year old MD at another bank who was similarly tired of being a lothario, and settled down. They have a mansion on an island in Greece now, and two kids.

This is perfectly fine for the two of them, and I hope they are happy. Both of them are from a background where they have the social safety net to accommodate it when things go wrong. From a personal point of view for themselves both of them took the utility maximising option and that's OK.

However such actions have a societal negative externality. Firstly from all the other people they slept with who might have wanted to settle down and got their heart broken, those people suffered a negative hit to their utility. But in the grand scheme of things it's comparatively minor compared to the other negative externality they generate (people get their heart broken all the time, it's no big deal). Namely that humans are a monkey see monkey do species and we've completely dispensed with "do as I say, not as I do" even when it's better for people to "do as I say" and this promiscuity leading to a happy ending sends the lower classes a message that yes, they too, can sleep around and still do well for themselves in the end.

Naturally when the lower classes do so they are forced to face the pointy end of the stick your VP/MD pair had the looks/money to cushion away completely. This leads to significantly worse long term outcomes for them compared to if they had just been chaste, found a decent partner (note: decent, not perfect) and committed to life with them, come hell or high water.

At the moment it's considered vulgar for people to really point out that this marriage was successful despite the early promiscuity because there was "buy a mansion on a Greek island" level money standing behind it. Instead social messaging is that sleeping around has literally 0 effect on long term outcomes for (effectively) everyone. This just leads to people trying the promiscuity without the Greek island mansion money and getting burned. No different to a society where people with parachutes jump from airplanes all the time and enjoy the experience and encourage others to do so too because it is fun but its considered déclassé to mention the necessity of the parachute for this act because some people can't afford one. In such a society a lot of people who aren't smart enough to work out the criticality of the parachute but follow the social messaging end up going splat on the ground completely unnecessarily. The same is happening in modern western society.

The way we deal with negative externalities is to discourage them at a governmental/societal level via Pigouvian taxes, social shaming and awareness campaigns. However modern western society seems loathe to admit that there even exists a negative externality in this case despite the statistical mountain of evidence showing it primarily harms the poorest, the exact same group they profess to try and help the most. They say that the first step towards fixing a problem is admitting you have it. Until society openly accepts that we have a problem millions of people each year will continue to go SPLAT!

Do you think stable relationships are generally far easier with money? I’ve seen the opposite anecdotally but not sure about the data.

I think having enough money to be able to cover your "needs" and be able to handle negative consequences of your decisions is generally a positive to relationship strength, see e.g. an alcoholic who can afford rehab Vs can't, the relationship of the second one is more likely to fail.

There's an old joke/proverb about women choosing their partner based on who they think he could become, and men choosing their partner by who they happen to be with when they get ready to settle down.

I don't think it's a rule, but it does explain a lot.

I've heard a variation of this joke, that a man marries a woman hoping she doesn't change, which she inevitably does, and a woman marries a man hoping he will change, which he inevitably doesn't.

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.

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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.

Do you know of a good primer to read that goes into the modern British upper class, or discusses how the aristocracy has handled the transition to the modern/post modern world? Curious to read more I don’t know much.

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

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%.

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.

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.

Likewise, the question isn't whether a promiscuous man should want a promiscuous woman, the question is whether he actually does.

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.

Show me the man who averted his eyes from porn because it featured a promiscuous woman.

This comment makes it clear that you don't understand the argument being made by the other side.

If you did, the question you'd actually be asking is "show me the man who withdraws commitment and resource-provision from a woman when he discovers her promiscuity" - and that's a question that can actually be answered a lot more thoroughly.

Then I'll show you women who withdrew commitment when they discovered their husbands' promiscuity.

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Are you actually interested in having a conversation and understanding what the other side is trying to claim, or do you want to try and score sick burns instead?

The basic assumption they operate under "Men like innocent partners, women like promiscuous partners" is false, or marginal at best. So when you try to use anecdotes as proof of your universal law, I think a counterexample is appropriate.

"Men like innocent partners, women like promiscuous partners"

Is true if you just add the statement with "traits associated with". A 22 year old who has had sex with 9999 guys, had her mind and body wiped to be equivalent to the 22 year old that lost her virginity at prom, eventually broke it off, and is now marrying her college sweetheart is probably just as appealing so long as the man doesn't know. But there is no such thing. A man who is promiscuous is high status because he can win women. A woman wants a man who can win women, because women are convinced by this. But the woman also wants to win him and end his promiscuity streak. If they could have a virgin that simply refused 100 propositions a day from hot actresses, they would pick him over the guy who slept with all 100. But again, they can't have that because it doesn't exist (aside from possibly Tim Tebow).

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The basic assumption they operate under "Men like innocent partners, women like promiscuous partners" is false

Wrong. Men have a preference for women with low partner counts when it comes to seeking long term relationships - but it isn't the only preference that they have. Individuals are complex and there are multiple factors involved in what makes someone a compelling choice as a partner. Partner count is just one of a galaxy of factors at play in any individual interaction or mating choice, and while influential, it isn't the only quality being looked at. Women generally prefer tall, wealthy and handsome men - pointing out that short, poor and ugly men can still find partners doesn't even reach the point of needing refutation because it does nothing to even address the point being made. Some women marry men who are shorter than them - this does not mean that there is not a general trend of women preferring that their partners are taller than they are.

Similarly, the notion that men are the gatekeepers of commitment does not mean that men have exclusive control over all relationships and their preferences are the sole determinant in how relationships play out. Jeremy Meeks and Leonardo DiCaprio are more than capable of turning women down for sex, and JK Rowling doesn't have to think twice when she turns down a local plumber's offer of making her his housewife and living off a portion of his income. This does nothing to change the broader general trends and isn't some "gotcha" for the view you're arguing against.

Do you really not believe this? How many women do you know?

This isn't some oblique inference I've picked up or just assumed. From the dozens of actual mouths of horses, women do not want to lash themselves via marriage to a man with unknown sexual skills, preferences, and penis size. While men (bizarrely) tolerate hot dead fish for a long time, rolling the dice on ever having an orgasm from someone else just doesn't even pass the sniff test of rationality.

I'm not saying women only want lotharios with high body counts, but an untested virgin is a massive risk.

During their marriage or before it?

So to get the non-promiscuous woman he wants, he should want promiscuous women. It creates a paradox in evolutionary terms.

Not in the least? There is a long historical phenomenon of men with the ability (often higher status) plowing through great numbers of lower-status women, but with one equal-status partner/wife. In evolutionary terms, this is the apex of male evolutionary potential, both the high-investment of a stable, high-status partnership for one set of kids, plus a scattering of bastards across the status spectrum. An economist might call it a well-diversified genetic portfolio.

Does he want the promiscuous women or not ? It makes sense for him to have a non-promiscuous woman as a wife, just like it makes sense that she should be rich, politically connected etc, but how is that hard-wired ?

Camus says of Don Juan: "[When he leaves a woman], it is not because he has ceased to desire her. A beautiful woman is always desirable. But he wants another, and it is not the same thing."

Of course men are attracted sexually to sexually attractive/available women. Of course some percentage will take the opportunity of sex with a promiscuous woman, regardless of their intentions or hopes for a long term relationship. Of course some percentage of that will be fine with settling down with a formerly promiscuous woman, and some even smaller percentage would be fine with settling down with a currently promiscuous one.

Where you fall on this issue depends a lot on how big or small you think those various categories of behavior are.

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

Redpillers have an inherent logic to them too. They don’t think men and women are the same so there’s no issue there. They believe men and women have different desires.

This is the a common opinion in most of the world and throughout history, not something specific to redpillers. Also notice that women are allowed to have different desires of their own, it's only when men have some desire that isn't matched that western misandrist society considers it problematic.

I am familiar with their logic, I think it poor and self-serving, but you're welcome to try and explain it. I don't believe men and women, the rich and poor, or you and I, are the same either. You need more than that to carve out an exception to a rule. The apparent reasons for the old exception have fallen away: the link between sex and pregnancy, the uncertainty of paternity.

The apparent reasons for the old exception have fallen away: the link between sex and pregnancy, the uncertainty of paternity.

The reasons we love sugar have fallen away. The evolved attitudes towards it still exist though and must be accounted for.

The apparent reasons for the old exception have fallen away: the link between sex and pregnancy, the uncertainty of paternity.

The "uncertainty of paternity" exception remains in effect because it's socially taboo to ask for genetic verification of paternity. And even so, the husband may still be liable for alimony after a divorce caused by infidelity.

It remains important to be convinced in the reliability of your partner before marriage. Low body count is an honest signal for that worry. (Although, like other honest signals, it's unreliable and can be faked.)

Those are good points, but the logic is mostly post-hoc for many men like me. This is about the most primal and fundamental instinct evolution has drilled into our brains. Even with 100% paternity certainty, non-virgin women disgust me.

This is about the most primal and fundamental instinct evolution has drilled into our brains. Even with 100% paternity certainty, non-virgin women disgust me.

That disgust doesn't seem likely to be from evolution though. The posited male evolutionary strategy is to impregnate as many women as possible, in a scattergun approach. Tribes conquered other tribes and integrated their women virgin or not. To put it bluntly, your genes do not "care" as long as the woman is fertile.

Your disgust then seems likely to be culturally instilled not from some in built instinctual urge which in fact the evidence suggests runs the other way. That men are sexually attracted to young, fertile women no matter their status or promiscuity.

Oh I would def bang non-virgin women, but marrying one when I could have a virgin is what makes me so uncomfortable. Men in the west assume they wouldn't be like this and it's not part of their culture anymore, but I've met some muslim converts and when they realize it's an option they quickly change their minds lol.

Also you're only partly right about the tribes conquering, some of the women who weren't virgins were sometimes killed. Sometimes all women were killed. It really depends on the circumstances. I'd love to steal a loyal woman from another man as part of my harem, but that's not the same to me as being with a woman who had promiscuous sex before me.

I agree the gene-environment interactions are very complex, but that hardly means my jealousy instinct is just culturally instilled, any more than the fact that we can pressure people into killing themselves means they don't want to survive.

I’m fairly certain you know their reasoning. We are an evolved species so the desires we have come from what was beneficial when we were evolving. So to maximize happiness you still with the rules when we evolved.

American legal system is still set up like uncertainty of pregnancy exists. You’re still going to pay if some other dude knocks up your chick. Along with all the other financial losses of splitting assets in divorce etc.

American legal system is still set up like uncertainty of pregnancy exists. You’re still going to pay if some other dude knocks up your chick. Along with all the other financial losses of splitting assets in divorce etc.

It's not an oversight. The state wants to foist as much of parenting as possible unto some private citizen and not itself, and women obviously want more freedom to leave marriages and so lobbied for more favorable laws.

No one is going to suddenly realize tech has changed the game and adapt because it's serving a pragmatic purpose. Well, people have adapted - in the other direction. IIRC France just banned paternity tests. This is not a failure to account for the lack of uncertainty, it's simply deciding the uncertainty shouldn't matter.

Or redefining the very marriage contract, from another point of view.

It's not an oversight. The state wants to foist as much of parenting as possible unto some private citizen and not itself, and women obviously want more freedom to leave marriages and so lobbied for more favorable laws.

Exactly. The system is built to ensure the child gets paid for, not to enforce paternity.

Telling men they shouldn't be worried about promiscuity because it's no longer linked with paternity certainty, is like telling people they shouldn't have sex because it no longer results in pregnancy when they use protection.

It's about how evolution wired our brains.

There’s two justifications for those preferences, pick one:

A) It’s hard wired. Counterexamples: men don’t act like it’s all that important, especially in their sexual desires, the most hard-wired of all, desires that bypass the brain entirely. Women do have problems with promiscuity in men.

B) There are rational reasons for those preferences. Answer: Those mostly went away with modernity.

It's not a complete binary, environment and genetics interact in very complex ways. But sexual jealousy is quite common in humans and other animals for obvious biological reasons, and to argue these are completely cultural is just insane.

Women experience sexual jealousy. Men want to have sex with promiscuous women. Evolution apparently wired you differently for fucking, and for the primordial institution of marriage, back in the savannah. Yeah it's very complex maintaining a theory contradicted left and right.

Women do experience sexual jealousy as well, not sure what your point is there.

Yes evolution is complex, pair-bonding did evolve and requires different investment as a strategy on the part of the male. All of this clearly happened and the different strategies can even be seen in different mammals, let alone the Savannah. Human males align with the different strategies and differ in their investment to loyal women vs promiscuous women.

Where is the contradiction?

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I don't believe men and women, the rich and poor, ...

Are you really saying that there is no difference between biological sex differences and social-economic differences? You seem to be employing a rather weak strawman...

As far as I can tell, the male equivalent to the slut in the Red Pill worldview is the orbiter simp beta, who's mostly just as much of a duped loser as the other. When you think about it that way, it makes sense.

Men and women trade sex and commitment.

Simps cheapen commitment in the same manner that skanks cheapen sex. It's why they're seen as "losers". They do not value what they have enough to demand its value from others.

Or maybe, what they have just isn't valuable. Free stuff is usually shitty.

I cannot bring myself to condemn women for what I take for granted.

Men and women are nothing alike so this makes no sense. It's like a man saying women are hypocrites for wanting a man taller than them when they're only X feet tall. Nothing operates on logic here, so you can't suddenly apply logic to the male "hypocrite" case, everyone is a hypocrite.

does Feminism actually have any realistic solution to how men should react to female promiscuity?

Feminism's answer or 'solution' to any problem is always the same. Men have to be more and more accommodating, to the point of remaking men if necessary. If women are unhappy, that's because men (i.e. the patriarchy) are making them unhappy! Women feeling like sluts and devalued after years of sleeping around! That's only because the negative spooks the patriarchy is slut shaming you and trying to control your sexuality! Men have to learn to accept women's sexuality (sexuality, of course, means sleeping around)! Women feeling unfulfilled after 20 years climbing the corporate ladder and having no family? That's only because the patriarchy is trying to push you back into oppressive gender roles (at a abstract, psychic level if necessary if not discrimination can be found)! Men need to accept women can be girlbosses! Feminism is just a long list of demanding men accommodated more destructive behaviours from women and give them more.

Really, this is nothing new, this is how women have excerted influence for millennia. Women complains, men accommodates or makes changes. Moral panics. The difference is that feminism is leading women down a endless self-perpetuating death spiral, a train with no brakes. Other moral panics would reach a critical point and dissipate. Here, the dissipation that feminism is pointing at is women, men and society itself.

Really, this is nothing new, this is how women have excerted influence for millennia. Women complains, men accommodates or makes changes.

I really think this is so true, and true in groups, not just in one-on-one interactions with men. Feminists would like us to believe that women have been kept out of any public sphere of influence for all of history, but I do doubt this. For example, in ancient Rome, women took to the streets in 195BC to protest the lex Oppia, which was a wartime austerity measure to restrict the wearing of flashy garments. Spoiler: they were successful, and the measure was repealed.

Also Hortensia marched on the forum and successfully stopped a tax on Rome's wealthiest women. Roman women could own their own property and were completely exempt from taxes. I assume that's also an example of the patriarchy somehow.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hortensia_(orator)

Feminist history has always latched on to a superficial oppressor-oppressed analysis of gender roles and anthropology, rather than a natural order followed across most cultures and time periods throughout the world. History has become a battleground for the culture war, and current politics incentivises it.

This is akin to a trend I've noticed with promiscuous people in general. I'll call it the "promiscuity trap" and it applies equally to men and women, though women are usually more open about it. The vast majority of relationships begin with both parties in more or less the same position—they're looking for companionship and intend to get to know the other party better and treat the relationship as a going concern. This isn't to say that the occasional flings don't happen, but they're the exception and there's usually a specific reason. Sometimes the reason is benign, like you meet someone from another city while on vacation and there's chemistry but no long-term potential there. Other times, though, it's more sinister, like you just got dumped and are looking to feel good about yourself. But when most people engage in the second kind of hookup it's due to an acute emotional situation and doesn't become a habit.

People in the promiscuity trap tend to dwell in this second world all the time. They have a constant underlying self-loathing that has them seeking instant validation from a sexual partner. But since availability trumps compatibility, these relationships never last very long. And the inevitable failure only feeds into the self-loathing more. This whole process is compounded by the fact that promiscuous people tend to be around more promiscuous members of the opposite sex than average, but aren't really any less capable of developing genuine feelings for someone else. So if a promiscuous woman sleeps with a promiscuous guy and ends up liking him there's a good chance he'll only use her for sex and dump her as soon as the next opportunity presents itself, and if a non-promiscuous guy likes her there's a good chance she doesn't like him and just wanted sex. So of course the original author talks about how she fucked men over or they fucked her over.

By the time the stars align and they meet someone whom they like and who actually likes them back the cycle of self-loathing being validated and self-medicating it with sex ends, and they're left wondering how anyone could actually like them enough to genuinely want to spend time with them? I know about this because I have a friend who fits this pattern exactly, and when I read this excerpt my mind immediately jumped to her. Then I thought of how all the promiscuous people I know seem to fit the general pattern, and the whole theory coalesced. And yes, she's admitted to me that self-loathing has a lot to do with it.

I mean I feel the modern moment makes it tricky.

I've done a lot of dating in the last year or two trying to find 'the one', whatever that means, and yet it's been my experience that if I'm not trying to storm the proverbial castle in terms of sexual and physical escalation within 2-3 dates that I'm going to get automatically discarded as a potential partner due to the women getting confused and ultimately talking themselves out of the interaction.

As a result, I've spun off more than a few cases where it's 2-3 dates in, we sleep together and then the relationship fails to happen for whatever reason. There's a lot of dealbreakers you can't really figure out on that small a sample, and yet I feel I have to put out or I'm not going to even get a chance to take things slowly. In an ideal universe I'd be perfectly happy if my current dating stanza involved me just actually getting to that stage with one woman (provided she was the The One) but yet to be competitive in the marketplace I need to swing myself around.

This is akin to a trend I've noticed with promiscuous people in general.

Your post very accurately described the movie "Trainwreck." Say what you like about Amy Schumer, that movie really captured a common contemporary female neurosis.

This whole process is compounded by the fact that promiscuous people tend to be around more promiscuous members of the opposite sex than average, but aren't really any less capable of developing genuine feelings for someone else.

Is that true tho?

I've seen claims that promiscuity leads to diminished ability to pair-bond.

Surely, if gluttony leads to reduced insulin-sensitivity, reduced ability to feel satiated / reduced tolerance for hunger, temporarily or permanently...

Couldn't similar biological mechanisms apply for oxytocin or reward circuits?

Do they really have the same ability to start and sustain a loving relationship that they used to have before n attempts?

Maybe, but it's more complicated than that. We're talking about standard-grade promiscuity here, not nymphomania. The people I know who are like this are still, occasional hookups aside, still ostensibly trying to find a long-term partner. The problem is that they get caught up in the whirlwind period at the beginning of the relationship and quickly sour on the other person. Unless, of course, the other person sours on them while they're still in the whirlwind period, hence the self-loathing. This also explains why promiscuous people tend to describe normal "nice guys" as "boring". If you never get past the early stages of a relationship you're either in the period where the only time you see the person is on dates when doing fun things and in the bedroom, or you're so infatuated that doing absolutely anything together is exciting. Or both. If you're a self-loathing person who hates their boring life, the new person seems like a window into a better one. Except eventually the relationship progresses to the point where instead of drinking Bloody Marys on bright, beautiful Saturday afternoons you're at his house on a rainy Tuesday night while he watches the local news and YouTube videos about how to fix the leak in his dishwasher.

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.

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.

Dramatic tensions wasted, values crisis resolved:

Similar plots are wasted later

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.

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.

Big brother and the bachelor are cultural touchstones and bill payers, as are dool and eastenders and home and away - that doesn't make them great tv. In fact I think you have identified exactly why satc doesn't usually make it onto the lists of prestige tv shows - it's a forty minute sitcom*. The characters don't face consequences for their actions, they are resolved through plot contrivances and contradictions. The wire, the sopranos, breaking bad - these shows are considered prestige because there are consequences for the characters' actions, writing wise.

At any rate you haven't convinced me I am missing out by not watching it, or that if I was more intelligent I would spend dozens of hours watching a show with plot holes so frequently that they are considered part of its structure.

*which is not to shit on sitcoms, many of which I love, they just aren't prestige tv, they don't elevate or transcend the medium the way those shows do.

I think the key element in that review is that he was watching it at night with his wife.

SATC is like porn to the female mind, I imagine that must have worked to get her in the mood.

Watching it alone as a man is like getting cucked by a gross, older woman.

Her best-selling book and the racy TV series it inspired taught a generation of women that they could ‘have it all’.

But Sex and the City creator Candace Bushnell, 60, has admitted that she regrets choosing a career over having children as she is now ‘truly alone’.

What is your list of top sitcoms? I just finished How I met your Mother with my partner and it was remarkably anti-feminist for so recent and so popular a show.

That is a good question. Personally my favourite sitcoms are of the "sitcoms are for comedy, get your drama out of here" philosophy, so my tops are Seinfeld, It's always sunny, 30 Rock, Arrested Development and Newsradio. But I think it would be crazy to make a list of top sitcoms that didn't include himym or Friends or Scrubs or The Office, all of which had hilarious moments and episodes, and much broader appeal than my first picks. And even now my list is being unfair to older sitcoms - I think sitcoms evolved pretty significantly over time though (not to mention the effect on comedy of the backlash against pcness that cim mentioned below), and it's hard for me to tell what jokes in say All in the family or The Jeffersons or Taxi or Cheers* I am biased by nostalgia to appreciate - they definitely don't get as many laughs from younger friends as newer shows do.

*Special mention for Frasier, which did an amazing job for four seasons of relying heavily on farce and still managing to find humour and surprises. Pity it went on for seven seasons.

Edit: ffs as I hit post I realised I was being geographically biased too - I've left out Blackadder, Linehan's shows, Extras, The League of gentlemen, Darkplace and The mighty boosh! For the Aussies, I didn't include Hey Dad for obvious reasons, and I never watched Kath and Kim, which is basically the extent of Aussie sitcoms. Welcher and Welcher? Aussie comedy seems to work better in sketch shows anyway.

I could do the same things with occurrences throughout Breaking Bad or (at least the later seasons of) The Wire; the difference being that when there's a yawning plot hole in those shows they shove a bomb into it or handwave corruption somewhere in the system as covering it up. An understanding boyfriend is a much more logical plot contrivance than a robot machine gun.

I used to think “nice” was an insult

Years ago, I got so sick of being called "Nice" by women around me I eventually had a Do Not Call Me That moment. I now feel slightly vindicated.

/images/16794429084510765.webp

What do you mean? Did you start telling women to not use that word or did you break some glass?

The feminist solution is obvious.

Women having one night stands and/or affairs are self-harming. The article you quoted acknowledges as much. Statistics on female orgasm in one night stands are consistent on this point, one night stands suck for women.

They are also harming women as a class. Even if you are a rare extreme outlier who regularly has satisfying ONS sex, you are normalizing the cultural pressure on other women to do the same.

As feminism is about improving the condition of women as a class, promiscuity is anti-feminist. Having an affair with a married man is anti-feminist (this should be obvious with even two seconds of thought - it is by definition betraying class solidarity)

Promiscuity is bad for the woman engaging in it, and bad for women as a whole.

But third wave feminism is all about empowering women to make whatever stupid self harming choices they want! Well, that's a very specific sub brand of "feminism" that frankly is not convincingly feminism at all, given it's other attempts to make obvious disempowerment of women "empowering". No, you can't have eyeliner sharp enough to kill the patriarchy, permanently deforming your feet with high heels isn't liberation, and having meaningless, orgasmless sex with men who have no respect for you will never be feminist.

For the confused: "Post-Cana" appears to be a reference to Pre-Cana, a Catholic counseling/training course done prior to marriage.

The feminist solution is to throw out the relationship script and replace it with something or other, it’s best not to think about it too hard. No it isn’t vague it’s just making space for every woman to get what she wants whatever that is. Yes, obviously this will never happen and most feminists have a revealed preference for relationships.

Yes, obviously this will never happen and most feminists have a revealed preference for relationships.

The link between feminist activism and fantasies of living out traditional domestic arrangements is really fascinating to me and something that I think deserves more exploration - though I don't fancy my chances of trying to get a study like that done in modern academia.

You've convinced me to give watching SATC through with my wife. She loves the movies and has never seen the show, it was on when my sisters were of exactly the right age for it so I've watched a lot of it in the background, and we're light on TV to watch through right now.

The first half season they're finding their legs, the show follows the book really closely the first season and a half. Between scooter to the first wedding is the peak of the show.

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).

It's a meme for a reason: women are the gatekeepers of sex, men are the gatekeepers of commitment.

The idea that women can just set whatever price they want and not end up childless spinsters is delusional. In the end there are only so many possible mates. And society used to recognize this and warn them against this common failure mode.

Society no longer warns them because that's been deemed oppressive. Quousque tandem?

Society no longer warns them because that's been deemed oppressive.

I agree with society. I think that having less of the "delusional entitled woman" genes in society, by the request (implicit and explicit) of their mothers, is the correct move in the long run- yeah, it sucks for the entitled women of today, and it will be worse for the men of today because those women are nowhere near their peak lifetime political power, but in 100 years things will likely be saner than they would have been had they been "forced" to reproduce as their parents were.

I think the eugenic effects of a significant number of women failing to reproduce are under-studied; I am cautiously optimistic that our grandchildren will be better off as a result but things will get worse before they get better as these women will probably try (and have time and money) to take that frustration out on everyone else before they die off.

Have you considered that this would select for women who listen to their parents, rather than for women who have the independent thought to realize their standards are too high(these things are probably anti correlated because independent thought is independent thought).

Im quite interesed in how the modern dating/mating landscape would affect genetics. My priors are that these things take 10000s of years to change not a generation or two. Perhaps consider an effort post?

Not an effort post, but consider that much of the phenotypic diversity we see in dogs developed over the last couple centuries. Selection can be surprisingly rapid.

Men can either deal with it or not

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.

But it's also a fantasy that promiscuous women end up unhappy

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.

If your concern is how this affects men

It is also bad for men, yes.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

and, unlike work, you can take a semester off college and pick up where you left off.

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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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.

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.

Because there isn't a seperate 'women society' and a seperate 'men society' that are independent from each other where people from each society can voluntarily elect to interact just for a bit of fun. Nor is this some kind of financial transation for a novelty item where people can just pay the exorbitant price, or choose not to and suffer nothing for it.

This situation is incredibly dysfunctional to society and if it continues, it can quite easily become ruinous. And sure, yeah the 'market' will correct itself eventually even if takes the whole thing crashing and burning. I'm sure the Romans with their civilisation burning would have been comforted if they only knew that other empires will come after theirs.

Because there isn't a seperate 'women society' and a seperate 'men society' that are independent from each other where people from each society can voluntarily elect to interact just for a bit of fun.

Given the prevelance of single sex friendship groups and associations compared to evenly balanced friendship groups, there functionally are male societies and female societies. This state is further magnified when you leave co-ed environments: there are countless men in tech or women in nursing who have zero interaction with men that they were not already acquainted with before the transition.

This situation is incredibly dysfunctional to society and if it continues, it can quite easily become ruinous.

Yes it is, and I see not a single sign that this will improve. South Korea's gender politics and 0.78 birthrate beckon.

Given the prevelance of single sex friendship groups and associations compared to evenly balanced friendship groups, there functionally are male societies and female societies.

I get your point, but I am yet to meet a man or woman who can reproduce asexually.

Because there isn't a seperate 'women society' and a seperate 'men society' that are independent from each other where people from each society can voluntarily elect to interact just for a bit of fun.

Increasingly, that seems to be the arrangement we're heading for.

Not that such an arrangement is historically unprecedented. If anything, the idea that men and women should live in "one society" is the historical aberration. The traditional view was that a man's proper place was in the public sphere and a woman's proper place was in the private sphere. There was once a time in some European countries where a respectable woman couldn't even attend a play at a public theater, particularly if she was unchaperoned.

Of course, we've long since done away with the traditional constraints and norms surrounding marriage and sex that made such an arrangement workable.

Do most liberal/apolitical men take serious issue with their partners having had a few previous boyfriends and 5 more previous casual partners? My impression is, generally, not really. Maybe something biological prevents most men from marrying someone with 100 bodies (although I doubt it, cultures are very flexible), but marriage rates demonstrate 5 bodies doesn't mean much. You note that these characters are '96th percentile', and most men avoiding long-term partnerships with the top 5% of sluts isn't a societal issue. So I don't think there's a societal issue here - we've already moved the needle a long way from 'parents checking for bloodstains on the marital bed'.

Do most liberal/apolitical men take serious issue with their partners having had a few previous boyfriends and 5 more previous casual partners?

Their partners? No. Their future wives? Probably more so.

Do most liberal/apolitical men take serious issue with their partners having had a few previous boyfriends and 5 more previous casual partners?

Given how politically charged the topic is, it's more useful to look at how people act rather than what they claim. Women lie downward about their number of sexual partners. Why do they do this if they don't feel the number lowers their status?

Do you believe women are just being paranoid?

but marriage rates demonstrate 5 bodies doesn't mean much

I don't think this demonstrates that. Relationship success for women is about quality of partner instead of whether they can marry. Or even exclude "for women" if you find that controversial. Lower your standards enough and practicially anyone can marry.

To you and @rococobasilica - yeah, there's some general dislike (potentially justified!) of higher body counts, especially for wives. But - how strong is that? It doesn't seem to be anywhere near what the OP implies. Anecdotally, while my right-leaning friends care a lot (imo too much) about body count, my apolitical or liberal friends either don't care about, or care a bit but not much about, for instance 8 past partners, for a wife - and it's somewhat hard to tell but their actions don't seem to contradict it. They'd, ofc, find 50 past partners unappealing, but few women have that so it's not a general issue. My experiences aren't universal obviously, social clustering is weird, but my guess is it's common enough, and the amount of caring about 8 past partners among non-conservatives small enough, that OP's worry about 'promiscuous women not finding partners because men aren't interested' isn't a big issue for feminism.

Why do they do this if they don't feel the number lowers their status? Do you believe women are just being paranoid?

No, it does a bit, just not that much. People lie about all sorts of things. Men lie about their height, everyone lies about attractiveness, even though everyone can already see them.

Just off the cuff and if we're talking about a woman in her late 20s/early 30s: <3 is preferred but might raise suspicions about prudishness, 4-6 is expected, 7-10 is a slight argument against, >20 is close to an exclusion criterion.

it's somewhat hard to tell but their actions don't seem to contradict it

It's important to realize that it may affect the men at a deeper level even if they get into relationships with these women. There are a lot of biological mechanisms at play to prevent men from wasting their energy on strategies that don't lead to survival, so these men may not give these women as much attention, focus on committing adultery etc.

"How many men you claim to have slept with in the past" seems like a difficult target for a 'biological mechanism'. Do you have any evidence/arguments for this, aside from 'its evolutionarily plausible'? There are a lot of much more likely evolutionary mechanisms that didn't happen, because evolution is complicated and random.

"How many men you claim to have slept with in the past" seems like a difficult target for a 'biological mechanism'.

Everything in human life is complex, so evolutionary targets and gene-environment interactions are always complicated, but that doesn't mean they don't exist.

And no evolution isn't just "random", I study it mathematically, it's meant to ensure survival and reproduction, and to assume it hasn't affected sexual jealousy, common in many animals, is just batshit crazy.

I can tell you what disgusts me about promiscuity and it's not necessarily body count, but imagining my woman giving herself to other men makes me want to vomit, so having a woman who hasn't had one-night stands is more important than absolute body count to me. I'd love to steal other men's loyal women though.

By 'random' I meant 'has randomness as a significant input'. I'm confident that "your women, at the moment or in the future, fucking another guy" is unpleasant for natural selection reasons. But the strength of the extension of that to 'your woman fucked another guy in the past' is probably mostly cultural - even if there is a natural basis to it, it's weak enough to be overridden (as opposed to the first example, which would be much harder to override)

I think you’re way overestimating the promiscuity of the typical woman.

The first one was intended to be higher than average, to suggest that most non-culturally-conservatives don't care that much. from a cdc page i didn't read too closely, "Median number of opposite-sex partners in lifetime among sexually experienced women and men aged 25-49 years of age", Women - 4.3 (0.10), Men - 6.3 (0.39)", although one of those is 'my current partner', 5 is pretty close. Although 'liberal/apolitical' for my example means it'll be a bit higher than that.

Dunno if the meme has made it around the liberal agnostic spheres but these graphs are widely discussed in right wing circles.

Were there no women with 20+ partners in the surveyed sample, or were they all divorced?

edit

Glancing at this, which is an interesting read otherwise, 2021 data still shows a median number of partners of 5. Dating apps might change the derivative, so maybe it'll take a decade to adjust, but idk. Trojan's survey is basically an advertisement and probably doesn't mean anything. GSS and similar sources of data would have 'number of partners, if in a big city', but i cba to check

I think the "solution" to this "problem" will be some combination of:

1. Women having relatively less casual sex and;

2. Men being relatively more comfortable dating and/or marrying women who have a higher number of partners.

How much we'll get of each one depends on the cost/benefit ratio for each party in question. Given the relative difference in rates of single men vs single women who are looking for a relationship I suspect we'll see relatively more of (2) than (1).

ETA:

Also not clear to me that a random article in New York Magazine or plot lines in Sex and the City represent comprehensive overviews of feminist thought on the topic.

It's not so much that my two data points represent a comprehensive overview of feminism, so much as I can't imagine an alternative statement that I could make without offending Orthodox feminism. It's impossible to imagine anything else nymag.com would publish.

Congratulations. You reinvented measuring how good a programmer is by measuring how many lines of code he produces.

Bodycount is meaningless metric. Just some people are desperate for something to measure to be able to do a quick discard.

  • -20

Bodycount is meaningless metric.

What an interesting hypothesis. It'd be a shame if someone were to... test it.

Let's say I have a graph that shows "Divorce rate vs. number of pre-marriage sexual partners". Do you think the correlation will be positive or negative?

The answer may surprise you! (Lolno, it won't surprise anyone)

Let's say I have a graph that shows "Divorce rate vs. number of pre-marriage sexual partners". Do you think the correlation will be positive or negative?

That's not the divorce rate. That's the ratio of 30yo+ women who've had the same partner for the last five years. This is affected both by the divorce rate and the age at which they got married. Someone who has had only long-term boyfriends since she was 16 might look like this:

  • age: 34

  • number of partners: 3 (16-24, 24-31, 31-now)

  • in a stable relationship: no

Does this mean her current marriage will end up in a divorce? No, not really.

Let's say I have a graph that shows "Divorce rate vs. number of pre-marriage sexual partners". Do you think the correlation will be positive or negative?

Do you think that's mostly a direct causal relationship (having premarital sex directly increases the rate of divorce), or indirect (some common factor both causes people to have premarital sex and also causes them to be more prone to divorce)?

Perhaps a more direct intuition pump. Let's say we have a pair of 30 year old friends. Both are newlyweds (not to each other). One of the friends had 20 sexual partners prior to getting married, which is at the 80th percentile, and the other had 8, which is the median. We should expect the friend with the median number of partners to have around the median chance of divorce within 5 years (around 20% as far as I can tell), and the one at the 80th percentile to have a higher 5-year-divorce chance (~35% if my slightly sketchy sources are right, but the exact number isn't really important).

Now take the exact same scenario, but instead of friends they're identical twins. Do you expect that the twin who had more partners is 1.5x to 2x more likely to divorce within the next five years? I personally don't particularly expect that, just because I expect that divorce rates are quite strongly driven by heritable factors rather than environmental ones.

Do you think that's mostly a direct causal relationship (having premarital sex directly increases the rate of divorce), or indirect (some common factor both causes people to have premarital sex and also causes them to be more prone to divorce)?

Direct. The more pair-bonding you do with different people, the less you are capable of psychologically investing in the next one. And if you can't psychologically invest in your spouse, you're gonna have a bad time.

Still there's gonna be a bunch of cultural/behavioral confounders.

I don't doubt that there's a direct correlation effect, but I'd also be surprised if there wasn't a significant case of lower pre-marital partners amongst a plethora of cultural & religious groups who marry young and don't really divorce.

Without graph for hotness ... it doesn't mean much. An explanation for this graph is that the ugly and unfuckable are so out of options that divorce is pointless for them.

Aella's recent survey showed women (and men) having many previous partners was the number 1 predictor for them cheating. Previous promiscuity is bad for the vast majority of people and their partners.

Also IIRC #previous partners is actually somewhat anticorrelated to physical attractiveness for women.

I don't understand your objection. If body count is correlated to divorce rate, then a high body count woman has a higher chance of divorcing you than a low body count woman, by definition.

Looking at an r=0.8 correlation and responding "Ah-ha but maybe the correlation would be r=0.9 if you control for hotness"... The fact that you can speculate on the existence of a hypothetical better study doesn't remove meaning from the existing study!

Lizzardspawn is saying that 40%~ of women polled with low body counts aren't divorcing because they can't abandon the one guy who was willing to take them. So, the common cause of low divorce rate and low body counts is desperation, rather than chastity or high relationship ethics.

I do not find this interpretation of the data convincing as, in my experience, 40% of women in their teens and twenties do not struggle to find partners willing to bed them.

On the other hand, a lower number of lifetime partners is probably correlated with marrying younger, which we know correlates with divorce risk on its lonesome. So having that graph in that direction means the effect is strong enough to overcome the correlation between early marriage and divorce.

I don't think bodycount in of itself is a problem, but having a very high one is indicative of a bunch of other correlated factors.

but having a very high one is indicative of a bunch of other correlated factors.

Also, having specifically zero is positively correlated with belonging to a (sub)religion that takes "you don't divorce on a whim" seriously, and usually means your friends and family believe similarly. This is hidden in the discontinuity between 0 and 1, though the effect could be a minor one.

Oh, and the graphs don't necessarily separate one cycle of marriage/divorce from more than one, so women on their second, third, etc. marriages are pretty obviously going to have had more than one partner (unless that was why the marriage ended, but y'know).

I suspect that any study of very high body count women(say, top 5%) is going to be dominated by prostitutes, drug users, women who’ve engaged in survival sex, women with a history of mental illness, etc, and that that’s going to confound it all to hell. I also expect that that’s probably not a major affect for women at the 75th percentile.

Both extremes are likely gonna have a bunch of weird correlations, though.


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