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non_radical_centrist  7mo ago (farhakhalidi.substack.com)   7245 thread views

confessions of a femcel: why i'm a 24 year old female virgin.

farhakhalidi.substack.com

It's an essay about the various flaws modern feminist sex positivity culture has for women, and that it's often a good idea to refrain from sex even if one isn't religious. The author is an Only Fans model for context. I thought it did a great job laying out the downsides of ubiquitous sex.(Reposted because I accidentally linked to reddit instead of the original essay earlier).

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I think one of our regulars had a similar opinion, just phrased more palatably: that sexual revolution was a scam. "You are free to have casual sex with anyone, go and embrace your newfound freedom by having sex with everyone, if you don't you're an ally of the reactionaries" is a bait-and-switch just like "you are no longer required to eat only halal food, why do you refuse to try this dog poop?"

I also have to vote for "seems fishy" here. OF has a known problem that most models aren't actually super-profitable, with two broad exceptions: A tiny number of superstars, and those exploiting parasocial relationships with whales. The former is quite hard and unpredictable. For the latter, the model needs to convince the guys that she isn't just some camgirl, but that she is special. There are obviously many ways to do this, but some of the most popular are "I got exploited in the past and now just trying to survive, this isn't the REAL me", "actually, I'm a virgin/have a low number of physical partners, unlike all those other sluts" or "but I'm really smart". In this essay, she is hitting ALL these simultaneously. She gets a shot at superstardom, and if it doesn't work out, she has the necessary background to still go for the parasocial relationship.

In general given her OF, the essay is also quite hypocritical imo. She is literally exploiting what she is decrying.

Checked around what the vibe was on her and I highly doubt her OF has more than teasing and political content, and is mostly just a way to monetise attention she attracts on her other "influencer" gigs and a prop to use in debates (in the last years it seems her thing was going around debating "misogynists").

and those exploiting parasocial relationships with whales

What does whales mean in this context?

You probably meant to ask that to the person I was answering to, but anyway, in the context of exploitative provider-customer relationships, whales means big spenders. For girls with an OnlyFans, whales will usually be guys who believe that spending big on the girl makes them special to her. Savvy girls will play into that, send personalized messages to the whales, have chats with them, etc...

You probably meant to ask that to the person I was answering to

Oh yeah, thanks!

Interesting. I was thinking maybe it had to do with channels like Casting Curvy.

I saw the term often associated with "gacha" mobile games. It mostly serves to show how in those kind of relationships, there isn't really an entire spectrum of spending. You'll have the little fish, who throw in a bit of petty money in occasionally, and those big spenders who will casually drop hundreds or thousands of dollars, with pretty much nothing in between. It's usually understood that whales have some sort of pathological obsession with what they are spending on that the sellers are willingly preying on. Or sometimes, rarely, it's an oil prince who has a wildly different concept of "petty money" than most of us would have. More often it's someone who is ruining themselves throwing money at virtual cards with waifus in a korean mobile game or at softcore pictures and the vague impression of being close to a girl who wouldn't go even as far as typing their name if it weren't for cash.

I saw the term often associated with "gacha" mobile games.

My understanding is that it originates in the casino industry.

My first exposure to the term was with free-2-play, non-mobile games.

What struck me about this article was how completely different her university experience was to mine. I never had sex in university. I never even went on a date, though did occasionally get drunk at parties and make out with girls.

I never talked about sex with my parents and only very rarely with my friends, and certainly not in any detail. I didn't even watch porn. The university didn't lecture us about consent. I didn't read about it on the internet. I didn't have a well developed theory (sex positive or otherwise) about how consent, dating or sex were supposed to work. Most of what I knew came from TV and movies. I only had vague ideas about how things were supposed to work, and I struggled to form a coherent understanding of courtship by piecing together conflicting clues. The whole subject was a mystery to me, and seemed almost fantastical, something which on some level I didn't really believe would ever be relevant to my life.

I did start dating and having sex in my late twenties and tried to educate myself by reading the internet, but nothing like the craziness this girl describes took place. She is really describing an alien world to me. It might be because I am ten years older than her, but I wonder if something equally crazy was taking place at my alma mater while I focused on studying. I certainly would never have guessed that anything like this was happening.

Also, my friends who did date mostly had a series of monogamous relationships. There wasn't that much hooking up, at least that I knew of.

I remember being frustrated early on in college that every woman who was friendly to me turned out to still have their high school boyfriend back in their hometown, which made me roll my eyes at either the lame lie or at the impracticality. I never got any consent training from the school itself, and it turned out not to be needed, because I gained a bunch of weight and my hair started thinning unfairly early, and I got lonely and depressed. Didn't help that my main social outlet was the gamer's club.

Then near the end of college it got strange; every woman's favorite topic of conversation became rape at frat parties, despite our college not having frats or sororities or any sort of Greek life. They started talking about Consent like it was the first time they'd ever heard of the concept and it needed to be constantly explained to everyone else like they were five. I once walked in the same direction as a group of women after class, because that's where my car was parked, and got accused of stalking them to their dorm.

After college I lost weight, grew better facial hair, and shaved my head. But I wound up interacting with a slightly rougher crowd. And I saw women repeatedly choose to stay with men who physically assaulted them, repeatedly, while being surrounded by supportive friends and potential suitors. And the rape rape rape, abuse abuse abuse, rhetoric had gotten worse; all women live in fear of all men, who might abuse her, but her abusive boyfriend isn't like that, she can change him, he's been so much better lately. Also, the seeds of the gamergate schism were sprouting; the new buzzwords that geek girls threw around at all the men they shared their hobbies with were Toxic Mansplaining Gatekeeper. It was also the height of the "men I don't already know aren't allowed to speak to me" rhetoric, which started with On the Bus or At The Supermarket, but eventually became In Class, At Concerts, and At Bars and Clubs.

Through all this, all my male friends (and I) ever wanted was casual dating; doing cute couples stuff together, fucking, and being at social events together, but not planning a wedding. Hookups were something the particularly-hot guys got to do between relationships (or to end relationships).

"men I don't already know aren't allowed to speak to me"

It's just the usual shit. Women in general want fried ice (this is supposedly an old Arab proverb, although I have my doubts about that as they likely had no concept of ice.) They want to jettison the patriarchy because it's oppressive and whatnot while at the same time preserving aspects of it that benefit women. It doesn't work.

Desert people from that area made ice using the night sky for millennia.

Further evidence that Iran is relatively high IQ, that is actually quite neat.

Thankfully, I encountered very little of this sort of thing, maybe because I didn't know any geeky women. Good thing, because I was already shy enough as it was. I didn't need any more reasons to be afraid of approaching women.

every woman who was friendly to me turned out to still have their high school boyfriend back in their hometown

I had this brought up to me in tones and contexts that (should have) made it clear that this was just another angle of flirting, "look at this social proof of my attractiveness which is nevertheless only nominally an obstacle for you", from women who hadn't yet learned that that doesn't typically work the same way on men as it would have on them.

My own thoughts went from "whew, my new friend is establishing clear boundaries quickly so now I don't have to worry about accidentally overstepping them!" at the time to "damn, how did I miss that opportunity!" with a little hindsight to "wow, glad I dodged that bullet!" with a lot of hindsight.

"I have a boyfriend" is a shit test.

"Boyfriend back in their hometown" is a nonsensical category anyway. He's not your boyfriend, because in a practical sense you aren't together. If you actually had a boyfriend, you wouldn't be attending parties without him.

No kidding. I'm guessing girls who say that with the intent of flirtation may not realize that they are filtering out guys with ethics in favor of guys who have no issue with enabling a cheater. Bonus points if they later complain about all the guys who hit on them being jerks who aren't into commitment.

Maybe it's to filter out guys with low social skills who don't know how to read non-verbal social cues?

Also: https://youtube.com/watch?v=Y6NWDBFo0gQ filters out guys like that

Sure, but that's not the point. I was talking about effects, not intent.

If a college girl says, "I have a boyfriend," she may intend that to mean, "I am not interested," or "I am interested."

In the first case, the statement may be true (she's being honest and straightforward) or false (she's saying buzz off, per @Skulldrinker's dude-repellant comment below).

In the second case, she's flirting, which is the context that @roystgnr was addressing above. This is an example of saying "no" when you mean "yes, please," and I agree, this may well be a filter intended to exclude guys who can't parse the conflicting social cues.

All of that said, what she is actually accomplishing is filtering in favor of guys who are willing to read "I have a boyfriend" as "please continue to flirt, this could go somewhere." This strategy is remarkably unlikely to attract a guy with integrity who wants to develop a relationship, especially when the one thing that traditional and progressive advice to guys agrees on is "no means no."

If a college girl says, "I have a boyfriend," she may intend that to mean, "I am not interested," or "I am interested."

Hmm indeed, it’s either x or not-x. How could she make it 🎶 any more obvious 🎶

All of that said, what she is actually accomplishing is filtering in favor of guys who are willing to read "I have a boyfriend" as "please continue to flirt, this could go somewhere." This strategy is remarkably unlikely to attract a guy with integrity who wants to develop a relationship, especially when the one thing that traditional and progressive advice to guys agrees on is "no means no."

It’s almost as if chicks subconsciously or consciously select for men sufficient in toxic masculinity as to not take them seriously and as to be willing to trample over their boundaries, and that the winning move for men is to act accordingly.

It shouldn't be that hard for them to figure out, since they use "Ihaveaboyfriend" as their default dude-repellant.

I only skimmed her article, but I'm roughly the same age as you, and I think that neither of your descriptions sound accurate.

Farha's description sounds like every woman in college is compulsively having sex even though they don't really want to, and basically gets repeatedly laid then never spoken to again by every guy who pressures them enough. From what I've witnessed, it doesn't seem that the women around me were at all interested in one-night stands or fuck buddies. They mostly wanted to and did hook up with people, then get into relationships with those people and had sex in those relationships. This describes like 90% of the women I knew in college. I'm not a woman, so I may not know the full picture, but I do have my wife's perspective and many female friends' as well.

But you seem to describe a rather sexless college existence, and I definitely wouldn't say that college seemed like that for me or 90% of the people I knew. Granted I went to a very liberal and notoriously hippie-ish school and was involved in a number of coed communities, so maybe that made the difference. What sort of school did you go to?

I was describing my own experience, not that of others at my university. I actually didn't really make friends with anyone in university. My friends were all friends from high school and were mostly guys. Most of the women I knew were my friends girlfriends.

I was in engineering at a mid-sized school, so about 85% of my classmates were men. I didn't really know much about the dating life of my classmates, but among my friends, there wasn't a huge amount of hooking up that I was aware of. People mostly pursued relationships that would last about a year to a few years.

Yours is closer to my experience as well, though I'm willing to believe there's a vast experiential gulf between hot, agreeable woman in CurrenYear who performs for Only Fans and average, prickly woman a decade ago at a provincial state U who hangs out with Baptists and the kind of Greeks who teach folk dancing and won't let a 20 year old drink ouzo with them.

Am I the only one who couldn't get through this? I like longform posts and I'm not uninterested in the trials of young women but I found myself skipping ahead and losing patience.

I threw in the flag early too. Might be bias: I pretty quickly realized I wasn't going to place a high truth value on it.

No. She uses a lot of words to say not much.

I got about halfway through before I called it quits because it got repetitive.

A person with the same name is having onlyfans. And recently it seems that she made claims that biden admin paid her to support Ketanji Brown

OnlyFans star Farha Khalidi claims she was paid by Biden administration to spread 'political propaganda' to her thousands of social media followers

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13363931/onlyfans-star-farha-khalidi-biden-administration-pay-claims.html

My bullshit detector is ringing that this is someone that tries to become a right wing grifter.

She is obviously trying to leverage her current fifteen minutes of fame into becoming a political commentator, but that doesn't make her a "grifter". Especially since her comments align with radical feminist beliefs, yet she participates in porn, yet she has done a podcast episode with Richard Hanania. That seems to me the mark of someone who's honestly living their beliefs, not someone trying to tell people what they want to hear in order to scam money off of them.

I'm also confused by this. She has an onlyfans which she advertises on her twitter and instagram, which are both just full of normie talking-point debates. This seems like 99% grift.

Yeah, I saw that news too; someone I had never about before pinging on my radar twice within less than a month is a sure sign to me something is up. Someone is trying to market that person to me. It could be her marketing herself succesfully as it got the attention of two sites where I get linked to news, or a third party powerful enough to have it pushed past the filters to make sure people like me heard about her.

Someone is trying to market that person to me.

Or she just went temporarily viral, attracted some fans, and now the fans are spreading her work? You're seeing her here because I posted the link. I posted the link because I liked her writing after seeing Richard Hanania endorse her videos debating red pillers.

Oh, I'm not implying YOU'RE trying to market her to us, but for her to have attracted the attention of two of the very few places I spend my time online means that someone is doing a good job of getting her to appear on my radar, and it could very well be simply by just spreading her content virally.

I enjoyed the article. I think I'm one contributing factor here is what Scott identified over a decade ago in should you reverse any advice you hear. People in either sex positive or purity cultures are probably in thick information bubbles that take those positions to pathological extremes. This is probably even worse today than when Scott's article was written.

I suspect a lot of people operating in an enthusiastic consent framework would agree with the author that the circumstances she describes some of her friends having sex under were problematic. There's a reason those articles have the disclaimers they do. I suspect they would do so using a language of consent, that various kinds of pressure had rendered the sex in question not really consensual. The problem with this angle is that it turns what is supposed to be a simple and intuitive concept into one that hides a lot of complexity and nuance.

From my perspective it seems like there are two key issues. Firstly, women feel a social and interpersonal pressure to have sex they don't want. Like they need a good reason not to have sex with someone. This is totally backwards to how it ought to work. You do not need any reason to refrain from sex with someone beyond "I don't want to." "No" is a complete sentence, as they say. Related to the first, many men apparently feel no compulsion to respect that "no." Badgering women into having sex with you after they've said no is apparently fine in some people's minds. So the question, then, is how we create the social conditions so that women feel empowered to give that "no" and men feel compelled to respect it.

Badgering women into having sex with you after they've said no is apparently fine in some people's minds.

To move away from drunk hookups into committed relationships, there is this kind of issue where libidos don't always match and as such some accommodation must be reached where either:

  1. The low-libido partner (usually but not always the woman) agrees to have sex more in exchange for some consideration,
  2. The high-libido partner (usually but not always the man) agrees to have sex less in exchange for some consideration, or
  3. Both agree on some middle ground.

One issue I've seen with a decent amount of feminist thought (including, to some extent, the article under discussion) is that it declares agreement #2 exploitative and defends women's right to outright renege on agreements #1 and #3 without consequence (as consequences are a form of coercion). That doesn't leave any zone of possible agreement.

I'm not saying it's alright to ignore a "no", but... there are circumstances where "no" is an arsehole move.

I'm not saying it's alright to ignore a "no", but... there are circumstances where "no" is an arsehole move.

This is more or less where the concept of the marital debt comes from.

New term to me, but that's basically what I was gesturing at, thanks.

So the question, then, is how we create the social conditions so that women feel empowered to give that "no" and men feel compelled to respect it.

You've got to create a consent culture. If most women positively responded to very fastidious requests for explicit consent and respect for hesitance or rejection, men would go for it, every bit as much as they would start walking everywhere on their hands if that's what women wanted.

But, having spent too much time in the wild, women generally hate it when you ask for explicit consent; I've been told multiple times that I ruined the mood by asking if it was okay if I kissed her. Instead, there's a set of implicit rules that men are never explicitly taught but are expected to learn through repeated failed attempts. Underlying all of that is still the goal of discerning real consent, but obscured by social games. (This isn't something that comes up nearly as much in gay culture; if you want to fuck, you can ask someone if they want to fuck, and it won't affect your chances either way.)

So long as that's the landscape that heterosexual men have to navigate while dating, there will still be "consent accidents" where the man mistakenly misreads a signal, and there will still be men who take advantage of the ambiguity to get what they want but excuse it by feigning confused signals.

For sure. I definitely don't intend to place all the onus to change on men. It's a cultural change that includes changing behaviors by both sexes.

Badgering women into having sex with you after they've said no is apparently fine in some people's minds.

Including women! And to go a different direction than the poster below me, women expect men to ignore their "no". Say no and then being pursued regardless makes them feel desired. You hear anecdotes all the time of women who said no, the man respected it, and they thought less of him for not just going for it. Like that's not how a "real man" is supposed to act.

This is further confused by the fact that girls who say "no" but are timid or nervous, and girls who say "no" but are just playing coy can sound exactly the same. Grinning ear to ear, giggly, clingy.

Yes, women playing coy is definitely a problem. Maybe this is just me but I think the better option is just... not having sex with women who do that! They can either learn to ask for what they want or no one should have sex with them. Errors in the direction of "some people miss sex they could have had" seem much better than errors in the other direction.

or no one should have sex with them

So how exactly are you going to enforce this rule? If there's a fixed contingent of women that wants to be "conquered" in this fashion, the more men you persuade to follow your compact, the more advantageous will it be for the marginal man to defect, as there will be droves of women waiting for someone who is, in their eyes, still enough of a man to pursue them. Even if you posit that this preference that some/many women have is purely acquired and can be untaught, there will at least be a transitional period where you need to exercise tremendous amounts of coercion - which will, from the outside, look a lot like the "I consent - I consent - I don't" image macro, with the "don't" being an unpopular and unsuccessful man while the first two are popular and well-adjusted men and women - to stop male defectors.

The most likely outcome is that any attempt at enforcement will look exactly like our present reality, where you only get to pick off defectors at the most awkward and unsuccessful fringe, who at the end of their efforts can not present a woman witness that says that she actually liked it, both of them understood consent was actually implicitly given and outsiders should stop creepily insinuating themselves. This will only increase the signalling value of ignoring a "no" and getting away with it.

So how exactly are you going to enforce this rule?

The same way any other social norm is enforced? Shaming the people who violate it.

If there's a fixed contingent of women that wants to be "conquered" in this fashion, the more men you persuade to follow your compact, the more advantageous will it be for the marginal man to defect, as there will be droves of women waiting for someone who is, in their eyes, still enough of a man to pursue them.

Yes, as I mention in several other replies I'm aware it is a complex coordination problem. Still I think it is a thing worth doing.

Even if you posit that this preference that some/many women have is purely acquired and can be untaught, there will at least be a transitional period where you need to exercise tremendous amounts of coercion - which will, from the outside, look a lot like the "I consent - I consent - I don't" image macro, with the "don't" being an unpopular and unsuccessful man while the first two are popular and well-adjusted men and women - to stop male defectors.

"Ahh but you see, your social movement is doomed for I have already drawn myself as the chad and you as the soy!"

The most likely outcome is that any attempt at enforcement will look exactly like our present reality, where you only get to pick off defectors at the most awkward and unsuccessful fringe, who at the end of their efforts can not present a woman witness that says that she actually liked it, both of them understood consent was actually implicitly given and outsiders should stop creepily insinuating themselves.

My point is that I don't think it matters, and it is no defense, that the woman liked it. It is (or ought to be) bad to ignore a woman's "no" even if she wants you to in a symmetrical way to how it is wrong to enslave people even if the enslaved people like it.

it is wrong to enslave people even if the enslaved people like it.

How is that slavery if they like it?

If they are not free to leave? Or say no?

There's always a way out, and slaves can say no until their tongues get cut off, it just doesn't do much.

Slaves can be in a situation where they are regularly looked after, fed, clothed and sheltered, which means that they have less incentive to revolt or end their life and their master keeps profiting from owning them.

It's only a matter of difference of degree with wage-slaves who keep showing up and are only technically free to leave or refuse directions if they accept renouncing future paychecks. Then it's a matter of the employer being able to find new wage-slaves to replace the ones that 'revolted' by finding better prospects (slightly better working conditions).

Now if a slave likes it, where's the harm? Who can deny them their fun?

Should mentally-impaired people not be under the guardianship of parents with better capacities to make decisions and guarantee their well-being, if not their self-sovereignty? Should the children be in charge of themselves?

"Ahh but you see, your social movement is doomed for I have already drawn myself as the chad and you as the soy!"

I don't see where I come into it - whatever is my culture must be maximally far removed from the "men must push" one, because I was passively approached by the SO in every single relationship I have been in. However, yes, if your proposed social technology is shaming your target group but your culture is currently wired in a way that your natural allies are considered shameful relative to your target group, you should explain how you intend to flip the gradient. Almost any social problem can be solved if you could magic the exactly right type of social pressure into existence, and yet social problems persist.

I did not intend that to be about you, specifically, so let me apologize for that. As the to the specifics I admit considerable uncertainty. I know that what kinds of social behavior are considered shameful historically have been different than they are today but I have not made a study of them, it just seems to me this would be a norm worth changing.

Maybe. If all you are trying to do is get as much sex as you can, fine. But this happens in other context too.

This happens after you've been getting to know a woman for a few weeks, and there is some ambiguity about whether this is going to be friends, or more. You feel like you click on every level, and one night you get your shot to take things to the next level. But you mistook her playing coy for earnestly saying no, and you failed your audition. Now she has the ick and you are permanently friendzoned.

Is it fair? No. But, and I don't have statistics here, if you decide to cut off every woman who does that from your potential partner pool, you've probably just axed 90+% of otherwise well adjusted women. Because in the experience of everyone I've ever spoken to, some degree of overcoming resistance to prove how attracted you are to a woman is expected by both sexes.

I spent my 20's raging at the banking system post 2008 bank bailouts, refusing to participate with my money in a corrupt and fraudulent investing markets... only for nothing to happen. In my 30's I decided I wasn't going to be the only chump not getting mine, and now I have a seven figure net worth. Likewise, I spent my 20's expecting women to be honest, straight forward, and exercise agency. I had zero success. Needless to say in my 30's I changed strategies.

Some systems just aren't worth raging against. The rules may not be fair, but unfortunately we don't get to change them.

On the one hand, I don't doubt it is individually sucky to break away from social norms like this. On the other hand, if we all decide to continue as if these are the rules then they remain the rules. Society does not spontaneously re-order due to nobody doing anything. It is a difficult collective action and coordination problem.

Maybe with respect to my gripe about financial markets.

The dating market is downwind of biology. There is no changing that.

I am skeptical that the particular facts of women playing hard to get are downwind of biology.

The r/K selection theory has pretty much confirmed what you're skeptical of.

Human women have a very long and difficult pregnancy and an extremely long child rearing period. They have a massive incentive to mate with a mate who is going to stick around.

Playing hard to get is a filtering mechanism for a man's ability to stick with an effort despite initial failure or hardship. It's as simple as that. Phrased differently, "if I make it easy for him to come (that's an unintentional double entendre! hahaha, nice), it will also be easy for him to go...Therefore, I have to make it a little hard up front to test out if he's going to see it through"

We can't and don't want to hack our own biology. The "hack" is the social norms and culture that we build to compensate for our biology. In sexual relations, ambiguity is a real problem. Playing coy is intentional ambiguity. We used to deal with it by creating more obvious courtship milestones - she's playing coy, so you ask her to "go steady" or go to the dance or whatever, that's an obvious next step with some built in commitment by both parties. Nowadays, however, literally sleeping with someone is ambiguous. "I know we fucked, but I'm not sure I like like you" is in the head of hundreds of thousands of men and women right now.

This is all a way of saying that we shouldn't ask women not to play coy and start announcing their intentions in a legalistic format upfront (that's autist level 4000 thinking). We should, however, provide the social pressure to hold them accountable for crossing various milestones as well as general honesty with partners. Likewise, on the male side of things, we should be coaching young men on what a good courtship looks like, penalize them for cad-ambiguity behavior, and harshly socially penalize them for abandonment, absentee fatherism, etc. Fortunately, male coercive sexual behavior is still universally recognized as abhorrent - at least in the west

Playing hard to get is a filtering mechanism for a man's ability to stick with an effort despite initial failure or hardship. It's as simple as that. Phrased differently, "if I make it easy for him to come (that's an unintentional double entendre! hahaha, nice), it will also be easy for him to go...Therefore, I have to make it a little hard up front to test out if he's going to see it through"

I guess it depends on how specific we get on "playing hard to get." "Woman sometimes turns down date with a guy she would actually like to date to see how persistent he'll be" seems less objectionable to me, although comes with the obvious problem lots of women who don't want to date a guy are going to continue being pestered. "Woman sometimes says so no sex even though she wants it" seems like a much worse norm. Surely we can develop better norms for women to filter men for a kind of stick-to-it-ive-ness than creating strategic ambiguity for rape.

We should, however, provide the social pressure to hold them accountable for crossing various milestones as well as general honesty with partners.

I am unclear on what it means to "hold them accountable for crossing various milestones." I agree that women should be more honest with partners, that was my whole point!

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Not wanting to seem too easy is probably a feature of all monogamous societies. Whether you think civilization is downstream of biology is, I suppose, up to you.

Are non-monogamous societies somehow less downstream of biology than monogamous societies? Observationally dating norms have been very different historically than they are today and can be quite different in different geographical locations even today. It thus seems hard, to me, to argue that some set of dating norms common in the anglosphere are some biological inevitability.

The "some people miss sex they could have had" direction is understating that error. It's more like "some people miss highly meaningful, mutually respectful relationships that massively increase the well-being of both parties." It's not merely a matter of someone not getting their dick wet enough.

Fair enough, that's certainly a possible outcome. I am skeptical that it is worse than the alternative. Especially since I think there's an equilibrium that's better for both.

I got a wife by changing my strategy, and we make each other extremely happy, so the outcome was definitely net good for us. And I'm 90% confident that continuing on my previous path would have ended in actual suicide.

In the end, I'm not going to martyr myself, or advise anyone else to martyr himself, to satisfy an imagined set of rules the vast majority of women don't even themselves follow. Make it even 25%, and I'd reconsider.

I get it. I mentioned in another reply about the complexities of the coordination problem. That's why it's hard! The individual incentives are the other way!

"I don't want to." "No" is a complete sentence, as they say. Related to the first, many men apparently feel no compulsion to respect that "no." Badgering women into having sex with you after they've said no is apparently fine in some people's minds. So the question, then, is how we create the social conditions so that women feel empowered to give that "no" and men feel compelled to respect it.

This isn't exclusive to men. Many Women don't respect a Man's no either. Both genders don't like it when you turn down their offers of sex. Badgering men into sex by calling them gay, questioning their masculinity, and suggesting impotence are classic Women variations of this playbook. This is anecdotal, but I and many of my close male friends, have experienced it both in serious relationships and casual ones. We realistically need to create social conditions where everyone feels not only empowered to say no but people have empathy for that no and can respect it. Not just in the Women: Good, Man: Bad sense

Definitely agree.

Witnessing what my friends went through, as well as living through my own batch of lackluster dates, I wondered if I should just wait to have sex.

The idea felt odd. And boring. I wasn’t religious, nor did I have my sights set on a diamond ring. So I wasn’t scared of hell, nor a future puritanical husband. “What are you waiting for?” people would ask me. I’d ask myself as well. I didn’t have the gall to admit that I was sort of waiting on my gut to tell me when. It felt like a cop-out. I knew gut feelings were wonky moral compasses– afterall, that semester we were reading Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in class, and learning how Huck’s gut feeling of guilt for abetting a runaway slave is shaped by the social mores he’s been exposed to. That was also the year the media littered the term “implicit bias” in basically every headline,27 to unmask rampant racism and sexism in institutions. Suffice it to say, gut feelings were not in season.

Now estranged from the sex-positivity I once adored, I do believe there is a right and wrong time to have sex. I also believe that your sexual footprint does affect you, for better or for worse. And I think a lot of girls are having sex at the wrong time. All these beliefs are fundamentally at odds with the principles of sex-positivity, which beats out any notion of right or wrong sex, other than via the consent-yardstick.

A proper feminist should make prescriptions not off some optimistic blank-slate, but from these basic phenomena: girls are more agreeable, more susceptible to manipulation, cognitive-sexual overload, and sexual blueprinting. They are more likely to be pressured into the receiving end of violent porn fantasies, lied to about STDs, addled by sexual regret, and victim to partner violence.

Anyone who turns a blind eye to this epidemic and eggs on young women to carelessly leap into bed with guys in the name of female liberation, is grooming girls with a flashy, pink glove.

Instead of working against the culture of rampant sexual coercion, pop feminism basically just serves as a bottom-bitch.

Everything old is new again, isn't it? It's fascinating watching someone think out loud, going round and round and found in a neurotic spiral for 30,000 words.

When I tell people that I’m opting out of having sex, I get told a lot of things. That I’m prudish, wasting my “prime,” overthinking it, a control-freak, or even pathological.

I mean, both can be right.

It's fascinating, going through this bizarre, alternate reality hellscape of sexual relations. Absent is even a single person in a monogamous relationship. Not even a single one. How is that even possible? You don't know one single person in a relationship? You don't even know of one? This reads like some sort of speculative fiction where relationships have been outlawed.

Then again, I'm married. I've been with the same woman 15 years. Apps were brand fucking new right when I met my wife, old school dating websites being the standard. In my 20's I remember a lot of people in turbulent relationships. Or the weird friend groups where it seemed like everyone had tried a relationship with everyone at some point. Those were bizarre to me. It was rough. I know a few guys who opted out, and just couldn't take women's high expectations, sociopathic behavior and imperious attitudes anymore.

Maybe there really are just two breeds of men. The ones depicted in this article, who somehow get these broken women to throw themselves at him, and everyone else who these broken women take their trauma out on.

I can imagine how the experience of dating has deteriorated greatly since I was active. But the reality of this article where a monogamous relationship is literally not an option for anyone, and doesn't exist at all, seems a bit extreme. It seems more like cope to justify sex work and/or trying to rebrand as some sort of "intellectual" e-girl.

She'd be better served deleting her entire internet presence.

It's fascinating, going through this bizarre, alternate reality hellscape of sexual relations. Absent is even a single person in a monogamous relationship. Not even a single one. How is that even possible? You don't know one single person in a relationship? You don't even know of one? This reads like some sort of speculative fiction where relationships have been outlawed.

It is a bit of an elephant in the room in the article, but at the same time, I don't think it'd be completely necessary to include. Most people agree that a loving monogamous relationship with good sex is the ideal. Saying that out loud again doesn't change anything. The point of this piece is just to push back against toxic sex positivity without back sliding into toxic purity. It's about nudging our current culture a little bit closer to a better equilibrium. It's not about describing the perfect equilibrium with lots of happy loyal relationships for everyone.

Maybe there really are just two breeds of men.

I think it's more of a spectrum, but there are definitely a lot of different male archetypes. Incel and red pill types are mocked for stuff like that video which went something like "Are you a Sigma Male? And is it better than Alpha?" for the weird categories they had, but I think there's a fair amount of truth to those categories.

The point of this piece is just to push back against toxic sex positivity without back sliding into toxic purity

"toxic" aren't traits of impersonal "sex positive" or "purity" cultures - they're attitudes and actions of individual people, which are going to exist no matter the "culture" or "norm" you set up. There's no systematizing your way around human imperfection and failure, including but not limited to shittiness and evil.

Leaving out any examples of healthy monogamous relationships, in an article trying to figure out how to escape some sort of sex positivity trap, and then throwing up your hands and going "There is no way out! Might as well do sex work!" Is nonsense. Its ignoring the most obvious examples to learn from about how to escape said trap.

But then again, this assumes agency. That there is something women could do in order to find and keep emotionally healthy relationships, as opposed to them being things that randomly happen to some people and not others. And if you dont believe women have agency, I guess it makes sense to not try to learn from them. It would be like trying to learn how to win the lottery.

Which way modern women... which way. If they don't believe they have agency, they'll be treated the way those without agency are treated.

Cultures which treat women like children have notably higher marriage rates, and marriage is probably the best proxy for what women actually want(loving, committed, and more or less monogamous relationships).

Evaluating wanting to have the act of sex outside of the context of a relationship with a guy is putting the cart before the horse. It flows out of getting to know somebody. Imagine how the trajectory of this lady's life would have changed if she had just gotten together with an steady boyfriend and had sex if and when she felt comfortable enough and attracted enough to that particular guy, not the abstract idea of sex where the guy is a placeholder. Were no men trying for long term relationships with her? Or were they, and she was just oblivious? Maybe she could have attracted more or better male attention using the guide @No_one posted the other day on what men are actually attracted to (https://www.jsanilac.com/dispelling-beauty-lies/).

There is absolutely zero medical basis for virginity.

Virginity isn't real.

As an aside, she (like most people TBF) seems pretty oblivious to evolutionary psychology, and what sex and virginity meant to illiterate goat herders with no access to antibiotics or pregnancy tests or STD tests and how that shaped sexual strategies and the evolution of our emotions and culture. From an evolutionary standpoint for men, the absolute worst case reproductive outcome is raising somebody else's kid. Guarding against that possibility occupies a lot of young men's thoughts. In all of human history, we in the last 60 years are the weird ones, where we can plan pregnancies and detect/manange/treat STDs.

the guide @No_one posted the other day on what men are actually attracted to (https://www.jsanilac.com/dispelling-beauty-lies/).

Is that available anywhere in a non-stupid font? I probably wouldn't mind reading it but the typeface makes my eyes bleed.

There's a button at the top that does that for you (translate to occidental).

Toggle simplified reader view (available in Brave and Chrome, I think, the button is next to the bookmark star); or open the page style and remove the font from the rules (right click on the text -> Inspect -> in the "filter styles" box write font-family -> uncheck all the rules setting the "Charm" font).

It flows out of getting to know somebody.

Well, yeah. You pick the most attractive somebody you can find, go on a couple dates, fuck, get tired of their shit/discover they actually weren't that great in the first place/discover someone even better, and move on. Rinse, repeat.

Some of us just appear to have a much tighter loop for that for whatever reason, operating in days or weeks rather than months or years. (And to be fair, I don't necessarily blame them; some people just don't have the personality traits to even entertain the possibility of a short-term relationship.)

As an aside, she (like most people TBF) seems pretty oblivious to evolutionary psychology, and what sex and virginity meant to illiterate goat herders with no access to antibiotics or pregnancy tests or STD tests [edit: or economic niches for women outside of dowry prostitution, which is how marriage worked back then] and how that shaped sexual strategies and the evolution of our emotions and culture.

Which creates problems when the people who do understand it (and can put that understanding into practice) feel the need to redesign social systems for those who can't. I think the people that can internalize this might as well be a different gender (for better or worse), and that problems of the type common to gay-X-married-to-straight-Y occur when only one party is like that.

Were no men trying for long term relationships with her?

She's straight. As such, she wants to be the only woman in the relationship; dealing with womanlier men is not what she wants. (Of course, the cost of that is dealing with a straight man, and straight men are making the calculation that they can do better than her.)

No one mentioned this. But I am getting she made it up vibes for the rape. They just met some random dude on a train and her friend was fall over drunk. Who happened to be really sweet and carried her home. The other friend then decides to leave her friend with random dude when her friends unconscious. The University kicked the guy out because he raped her, but no mention of criminal charges.

Somehow I doubt the price of pussy is so low in college that it can’t ask a guy to wait an hour or even a day.

Overall the story felt like it was honest. But the rape story feels heavily embellished if not made up.

18-22 year old guys being flirted with by a girl who clearly comes off as a bit of a floozy likely do not have the same thought process about sex.

Rape's not that rare. Lots of men go to the trouble of putting date rape drugs in women's drinks to do precisely what the author claims that random dude did. I hardly think it's impossible that a guy would take advantage of an "opportunity" he stumbled upon that other men go out of their way to arrange.

Lots of men go to the trouble of putting date rape drugs in women's drinks

Odd that when their urine is tested these drugs almost never show up and it's almost always sky high alcohol levels. Inexperienced drinkers are bad at monitoring signs of drunkenness until they get some experience with them.

The conclusion was that only 21 of the 1,014 accounts could be classified as potential DFSA cases.

detailed examination of the testing results does not support the contention that any single drug, apart from alcohol,

This echoes an investigation in Wales in 2007 which found no evidence of covert drink spiking but did find excessive levels of alcohol consumption and frequent illicit drug use.

These studies strongly suggest that the media fixation on covert drink spiking with a pill or powder is misplaced, and that such acts are vanishingly rare.

Yes. It’s always been an urban myth that won’t disappear. My guess is it’s works perfectly for female regret. Instead of I chose to drank too much they can say they were drugged.

I have only seen one documented case of date rape which is Bill Crosby. And it was done in private.

"Date rape" drugs are largely an urban legend, except for one: alcohol. And it's still absolutely true that men will encourage women to drink to excess, particularly through a ratchet where each successive drink lowers judgment, leading to susceptibility to another drink, etc, to the point of being black out drunk and having no judgment at all.

This is pretty messy: each step is consented to, and there's no deception about what's being consumed. Sometimes it's even innocent, particularly when both people are getting trashed. But enough women regret it that I'd be a fan of stigmatizing and punishing this behavior, particularly when the alternative is encouraging women to never have a single drink on a date for fear of falling prey to this ratchet.

Doesn't MDMA occasionally get used as a date rape drug?

I agree that most cases of 'roofies' are actually just drunkenness.

I'm skeptical that MDMA gets dumped in a drink of an unsuspecting victim at any significant scale.

It has played a role in the rapes I know of in the rave scene. But, similar to the alcohol ratchet, the victim knowingly consumed it, overshot and reached an incapacitated state, and then a predator took advantage. Still very much a rape, but "date rape drug" has much different connotations than that scenario.

A few years ago the UK had a brief moral panic about 'needle spiking'. The idea that sexual predators were walking around with syringes full of rohypnol and stabbing unsuspecting women on nights out. Needless the say, the police didn't find a single case of it actually happening.

That said, our country's most prolific rapist actually did use GHB to rape over 200 young men, so it's not as if it can't be used for that purpose.

I would just like to add that GHB the most infamous “date rape drug” is actually amazing and fun to take.

Bizarre stuff, though it is eye-opening.

Are these women incapable of picking (understandably less attractive) simp/soyboy/nerdy men (perjorative terms used to denote an archetype succinctly) who would be flattered by any female attention and very likely take it slowly with sex? No, they have to go after the fratty chad/dudebros who all want to have anal sex and constantly pressure them. Who even wants to have anal sex with women? There's a hole specifically designed for penis, free of feces and it's right there!

The author's career as an onlyfans star shows that she knows that there are a bunch of unassertive and unthreatening men who are very interested in relationships with women, men she plans to exploit financially! A 7 goes for 9s and 10s and is shocked to discover the 10 has more options and is less likely to settle, what a cruel world... Only this 7 is busy doing the exact same thing to 5s and 4s on a ruthless, depersonalized, industrial scale.

simp/soyboy/nerdy men (perjorative terms used to denote an archetype succinctly)

The problem is that this archetype (because less attractive) includes lots of men with low social skills, and (because inexperienced romantically) badly wrong ideas about women. Women aren't looking for a grubby and immature man-child either. There's no quick fix here.

Women are looking for a good-looking, confident but humble, respectful and unconditionally loving confidant who earns more than them...

Men are looking for a harem of sweet, nubile girls who'll provide stress-free sex on tap. Or perhaps a nice, pretty, forever-loyal tradwife who'll stay at home and raise children.

Nobody is going to get what they want unless they're very lucky or high-value. There are trade-offs. The tradwife probably isn't going to be that good looking. The harem girls are probably most interested in your wealth. The good-looking men are hard to lock down. The 'nice guys' aren't so attractive, physically or socially.

That sort of thing stood out to me too. But I think women with holding sex from fratty dudebros and being more aware those fratty dudebros won't make them happy, like this article advocates, would lead towards women looking for other types of men. To select less on looks and more on whether a man isn't douchey.

Are these women incapable of picking (understandably less attractive) simp/soyboy/nerdy men (perjorative terms used to denote an archetype succinctly) who would be flattered by any female attention and very likely take it slowly with sex?

These women are very unlikely to put themselves in social situations where such a man takes the initiative, and they themselves obviously won't take the initiative with any man.

That was more or less my impression. The most charitable reading would be that her college was heavily female-skewed and focused on social status over STEM, so she literally couldn't find a guy who wasn't swimming in pussy and had his incentives shaped accordingly.

There’s a few comments below calling the article time wasting for its obvious triteness. That’s basically true, but it does serve a valuable function of reframing obvious but inconvenient truths for an audience that does not want to hear them.

The motte is not the intended audience for that article. Nor are tradcons. Progressives who deeply believe there is nothing wrong with casual sex are, that sex isn’t a big deal, that it certainly doesn’t need to be reserved for anything in particular.

Now this has to reconcile with the facts of biology, which is that a negligible percentage of otherwise mentally healthy women desire casual sex while a large portion of young men do, that teenaged girls are, on average, simply not competent to make their own relationship decisions, and that many young men have no real desire for a relationship or emotional bonding.

What all that adds up to is that a culture which considers casual sex normal and acceptable is bad for women, not in the sense of being rape culture- although sure, that’s probably pretty close to the Bailey definition of rape culture- or devaluing women or whatever- although you can make a case it does devalue women, I’m not doing that right now, and this Muslim virgin stripper(only one in the world, I presume) definitely isn’t- but in the sense that it’s choosing who gets the short end of the trade off between male and female preferences, particularly in scenarios like college campuses where very closely age matched and very young men and women interact unsupervised. And feminism is a class interest movement for upper class urban educated women, so you can expect them to turn against casual sex when they have an opinion on it.

so you can expect them to turn against casual sex when they have an opinion on it

They have already turned, Dear Colleague. Their position and emphasis on the righteousness of becoming a eunuch was the logical next step in being anti-sex for juniors.

In no particular order:

  • Her college sex and dating environment does sound pretty bleak.
  • Islam as represented by the people in her life also sounds pretty bleak in respect to women.
  • She does seem to be perpetuating some of the bleakness with camgirl activities and inviting romantic prospects to bed then ejecting them again, rather than just not inviting them.
  • As is sometimes said, it probably isn't to women's advantage that colleges are very female now. But it doesn't even seem cearly to men's medium term advantage, if the women come out jaded and thinking of men as basically beasts.
  • It seems like eventually the college girls would learn to say things like "I want a romantic relationship, not a one night stand" and hold out against the "why's" with their experiences of disappointment? It doesn't seem like most of them care all that much for the sex in and of itself, or are all that carried away in the moment aside from the effects of intoxicants they're choosing to take.

I think saying you want a romantic relationship has the excluded buyer issue especially with gender imbalances in Universities.

Let’s so there is the captain of the football team let’s call him Travis. And there the Rich hot girl who’s a ten let’s call her Taylor. Taylor may want a relationship. But Travis knows he can also get a dozen girls who don’t quite know they aren’t Taylor quality. So he goes that route. Which then puts Taylor wanting a relationship at her level to jump in the game too. Then add in gender imbalances. Maybe the bottom 30% of male market doesn’t hasn’t matured and doesn’t have many desirable dating traits yet.

Guys getting a choice between hanging out with the better choice or going down a rung and having a lot of fun choose to have a lot of fun. They learn to fake interest a little (but kind of think it’s just manners by providing plausible deniability). Now you have market dynamics where sluttiness is required to get attention. Of they aren’t invited to the right parties/events. Or even get chances to hang out one on one.

I guess one could say girls should form a union to eliminate the behavior. Which we did use to have. It was called religion. But society decided that was archaic.

It’s like game theory. Perhaps the best position for all girls is not to be a slut. But once a lot of girls are defecting their move becomes to defect too.

This seems to prove too much. How is it that anyone finds a long term partner in college? And yes, this does happen, I know of several cases.

One party intentionally or unintentionally dates down, finding a partner who recognizes the very good thing they got and holds on tight.

I don't think so.

Back in the day, fathers and brothers would take it upon themselves to defend the woman's honor. If a man slept with a woman under false pretenses of a long-term relationship and then just abandoned her, they would beat the crap out of him, ostracize him, and possibly even kill him.

We can't do that in modern society and, while the rule of law is useful and helps protect people from threats of violence for less significant offenses, I think something was lost here.

You can totally do that today, it would take 5 seconds of google to find a story about someone beating up his daughter’s boyfriend for messing around. And there are literally laws on the books in multiple states against things like ‘seduction under false promises’.

You can do that, but it's rare. Therefore, as in Scott's Be nice at least until you can coordinate meanness (which I only partly agree with), it doesn't really do much unless it's a norm. The curve of behavior as a function of consequence is highly nonlinear, and a rule which is enforced in 0.1% of cases might as well not exist, since people will just ignore it. A world in which each instance of hooking up under false pretenses carries a 0.1% chance of getting beat up or having to go to court leads to basically no change in behavior and just increases violence to no benefit. It's only if men seeking to take advantage of women expect to actually face consequences, and have either had it happen to themselves in the past or to people they know, that they will factor those consequences and rethink their behavior.

Back in the day, fathers and brothers would take it upon themselves to defend the woman's honor. If a man slept with a woman under false pretenses of a long-term relationship and then just abandoned her, they would beat the crap out of him, ostracize him, and possibly even kill him.

In goatfucker patriarchy, male family members would "defend a woman's honour" by killing her first. Whether they go on to deal with the man depends on the clan politics of the situation - punishing him is a nice-to-have for the standard honour-culture reasons, but not a social obligation. Farha Khalidi is Arab and claims to have been raised in an at least somewhat traditional Arab Muslim family, so she is seeing this through the lens of goatfucker patriarchy, not Christian purity culture. This is based on a (correct) assumption that getting into a situation where illicit sex can happen almost always involves mutual co-operation, and also on the practical issue that the no-longer-virginal woman is damaged goods regardless of fault and therefore her continued existence is embarrassing to the family.

The notorious Jeb Rubenfeld rape article points out that similar ideas exist in the English common law of rape - before feminism, "rape" was a carve-out for the small subset of illicit sex which was 100% the man's fault. Trad Christian culture solved this problem with shotgun weddings, which are not okay in a culture with strong arranged marriage norms. Modern Christian purity culture deals with it by denying the agency of teenage girls and allowing Daddy to lie to himself that she was mind-controlled into it by Chad's magic thunder cock, so punishing Chad is a sufficient solution.

goatfucker patriarchy

Write like everyone is reading and you want to include them in the conversation, please.

I think you’re pointing out, correctly, that she’s going at it from the perspective of ‘this is how patriarchy works in goatfuckerstan’. It’s worth emphasizing for the audience- goatfuckerstani patriarchy is legitimately a worse deal for women than modern or historic Christian purity culture. Pagan primitives patriarchy is possibly an even worse deal.

FWIW, I think modern Christian purity culture is bullshit (in the Harry Frankfurt sense of something fake and not intended to be taken seriously, not as a moral condemnation). Apart from a small number of families still practicing Christian patriarchy most "conservative" Christians are living in mainstream post-sexual revolution America and lying to themselves about it.

There is a certain minimum degree of patriarchy in societies with enough socially necessary physically demanding work that they need non-elite men to be productive (i.e. not hoe cultures). It is an interesting question how close medieval Christian patriarchy got to that minimum. I find it entirely plausible that if you asked the question "Where was the best place to be a non-elite woman in year X given various gender norms in different cultures?" that the answer would be "Cishajnal Western Europe" for most values of X between 1100CE and the present.

Absolutely agree that if offered the choice to be reincarnated as a woman in a city of your choosing, but a random year, you should pick Rotterdam or London.

There is actual change in behavior involved in ‘Christian purity culture’, however, even if the patriarchal elements are generally larping.

Out of interest, why Rotterdam over other places in the Netherlands?

As the main trade hub for Western Europe it would have had a relatively consistent middle class and some insulation from food shortages.

It seems like eventually the college girls would learn to say things like "I want a romantic relationship, not a one night stand" and hold out against the "why's" with their experiences of disappointment?

That does happen, but is also impeded by men putting a lot of effort into deceiving women they want more than hook ups, then not doing hook ups. And some women also being horny enough at times to go along with it even if they regret it later.

It seems like eventually the college girls would learn to say things like "I want a romantic relationship, not a one night stand" and hold out against the "why's" with their experiences of disappointment?

It seems like they don’t do this because teenaged girls(which is what they are) aren’t capable of regulating their own emotions well enough to say no to a guy their interested in.

I was admittedly both rather low agreeableness and not particularly hot, and also unlikely to be friends with Ms. Khalidi. But it doesn't take all that much willpower to not invite a man into your dorm room on the first date after getting burned a couple of times?

This is precisely why these debates are grating as @f3zinker says; we suddenly develop a whole new standard for agency in order to turn a problem into a trap.

I'm not sure I understand what you're saying. What trap? What standard for agency? Isn't f3zinker the one asserting without elaboration that women have no agency?

There is no trap - as in "a problem that's unpredictable and becomes worse if one uses their better judgment". There's a problem that's very soluble to the actions of the selective sex.

I took f3zinker's point to be more that, in many cases, we just tell people to do the sensible thing to avoid certain problems. But in this particular case people try to contrive some explanation (and/or blame society/men/patriarchy) for why people can't just do the thing that makes it seem like they've been trapped rather than just misusing (allegedly - revealed preference and all that) their agency.

I think the only solution to sexual morals is purity culture enforced and maintained with equal passion for both sexes -- actually, even stronger for men, as has been understood in Christendom for a very long time.

This isn't in the culture war thread. So I'll try to be restrained in my views here. But I see the author's post as a distinct demonstration of the utter failure mode of Islam, that it does not teach sexual purity to both sexes but hammers home the impurity of sex for women while maintaining the significance of having many sexual partners for men.

What Christian purity culture done right does, what it's always done, is insist that both sexes are placed with the burden of avoiding sexual sin and seeking righteousness. And this is not a purity that is eternally lost, but something that can be regained through repentance and a change of heart. The Christian tradition is full of sexual sinners of all kinds who made the active choice to change their behavior and are celebrated as just as holy -- maybe even more, in some ways! -- as the saints who never struggled with such sins. "For the moment all discipline seems painful rather than pleasant; later it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it." (Heb 12:11)

I also resent the repeated insistence that Western sexual mores are in any way equivalent to the ones from her background. The "husband stitch" is equivalent to full-on removal of the clitoris? Really? I'm open to this being a bad practice, but in any case I don't see this as equivalent to FGM, just as, while opposing it, I don't see male circumcision as equivalent to FGM.

I'd also note that the purity-based murder in London she recounts, from 2002, was not a native English father, but a Kurdish man, according to her own citation, weakening her view that this is a pervasive problem in the West because of Western values:

In 2002, 16-year-old Heshu Jones, from the Kurdish community of West London, was murdered by her father after allegedly failing a virginity test. Her father slit her throat and then jumped off a balcony in an attempt to kill himself.

My stance on this issue is somewhere between her and her mother. I think she's right that the double standard for men and women, the teaching that God is "the type that’s supposedly the arbiter of justice, yet puts its thumb on the scale for women," is bad. I also don't believe in that God. Instead I believe in the God who teaches that "no fornicator or impure man, or one who is covetous (that is, an idolater), has any inheritance." (Eph. 5:5) May the fuckboys live in as much shame as the sluts -- perhaps more.

I agree with the author that there are many cases in which women choose to have sex when they'd probably be better off making a different choice. That's baked into the pie of my fair-minded views on sexual mores, and is the same for men. But I also think this particular person may be doing that thing where people project their own understanding of their sexuality onto other people, and then recoil in horror with an inability to understand how other people's legitimate sexual desires differ.

While I'm not the biggest fan of BDSM's existence in the world, I think she, like many radfems, has utterly no understanding of the actual and real women out there who legitimately and in the deep recesses of her desire want some sort of kinky sex life. I have known women like this. Fifty Shades of Gray did not become a best seller because of the patriarchy.

As with all radical feminists, I'm not sure she's the best person in the world to make a full determination as to the state of play re: women's sexuality. I believe she still has a lot of her mother in her, though she doesn't realize it. In her feminism, I think she may have become a raging sexist, denying equal agency and humanity to women. In pinning blame for all of the sexual revolution's failures on men, she ignores the actual reality that many women do want sex, even promiscuous sex, even kinky sex, and in that way falls deeply into her childhood beliefs that "it's different for boys."

Islam doesn’t encourage premarital sex for men. As with all Abrahamic religions there was a certain historic tolerance for prostitution and female chastity is discussed more than male chastity. But premarital sex for men is still zina, it’s still a sin.

What is different about Islam is that it is less concerned with agency than Christianity or modern rabbinical Judaism (which has invented many highly legalistic workarounds for historical Old Testament harshness). The man who kills his daughter for being seduced by a man doesn’t necessarily ascribe to her more agency than a Christian father who is merely Very Disappointed in her. Agency is simply not relevant.

By contrast, historically Christian honor killings involved a man murdering the man who cuckolded you, because he was the responsible agent. In Islam, honor killings seem to involve murdering the daughter who engaged in sexual immorality. The man must marry her and pay off the family if he is single (that much was historically the case in many non-Muslim societies too), but he is rarely murdered if this isn’t possible.

You mean the weekend marriages Shia men use to hire prostitutes are for married men only ?

the Catholic Church preaches traditional sexual morality and operated brothels in the Middle Ages, I don’t think the existence of prostitution really changes much.

I'd agree with most of what you've said. But ultimately I think a better equilibrium is achievable than a Christian purity culture, although I probably couldn't convince you of that if you're operating off of Christians principles instead of utilitarianism. But I look at Christian purity culture and still see many failure ponits- e.g maritial rape, or to a lesser degree all the other ways a couple could get married and grow to dislike each other and would be much happier divorced. And I agree with you that the author overlooks the many women who do enjoy kink. Although I don't think she's saying they don't exist, just that many women are pressured into kink despite not enjoying it. And I think Christian purity culture also fails those women- if a girl would genuinely be happier engaging in BDSM with multiple different men a week, and those girls do exist I believe albeit they're rarer than some pop culture would lead you to believe, they should be free to pursue that. But I do think the sort of culture you paint would be my second choice. My first choice being a culture where everyone is aware of the biologically differences between men and women, and men are held accountable for sexual abuse but only sexual abuse that's real, and women are expected to exercise agency in identifying and seeking the outcomes that are actually best for her instead of just waiting for a hot man to ask her to hook up.

The premise that “24 year old female virgin” is a rare specimen is in itself pretty interesting.

Its not that rare, its just that people typically understand the formation as if it would be difficult to not be in that status anymore. Most high school boys are virgins. But they generally have no way of alleviating that. Any post pubescent girl can "fix" being a virgin by going up to an unattached guy and propositioning him.

Not even propositioning, just acting interested long enough and then responding positively to some inexperienced advances.

The idea that we're going to take the statements of a woman selling sex about her sexual history seriously is in itself pretty interesting. This is what you call a gimmick. She's appealing to over-intellectualized lefties in the same way that Aella makes her money appealing to the ratsphere.

Aella makes her money appealing to the ratsphere.

But at least she has birthday gangbangs. Although I won't qualify for the next because I am AI accelerationist. Oh well ... human progress requires sacrifices.

Thank you, I can't believe I had to scroll this far to see someone questioning the basic validity of this whole story. I swear to god e-girls are the real mind killer, not politics.

I swear to god e-girls are the real mind killer, not politics.

This for real. You know how there are some men with extremely skewed brains where they're brilliant at logical reasoning but terrible at dealing with people? E-girls are like that but in reverse, and they've weaponized it to take people's money like a modern day highwayman.

I think that's understated. I recently went on an anthropological expedition by way of mass online dating. I had about 80 first dates over the course of 2022. I was mostly looking for upper-middle, educated, career-having women and I'd say about a quarter were palpably inexperienced to the point that I don't think they had any meaningful romantic experience by their mid-late twenties.

Like this wasn't coy 'oh teehee I'm a virgin, bats eyelids', this was like... obvious unfamiliarity with how dating even 'worked'. The common theme generally being some form of coming from a fairly repressive sub culture, focusing hard on education/career until finally getting to 26-27 and their parents' reproach shifted from 'When are you becoming a doctor' to 'When am I becoming a grandparent'. Then they'd sally out onto Hinge with a vague dream of meeting somebody nice, and no real experience beyond consuming KDramas.

I was mostly looking for upper-middle, educated, career-having women and I'd say about a quarter were palpably inexperienced to the point that I don't think they had any meaningful romantic experience by their mid-late twenties.

Where was the best place to meet this type of women?

Coffee Meets Bagel. Not sure how universal it is as an app but kind of focused on this demographic.

The girls on Coffee Meets Bagel a very disproportionately Asian in my experience.

That's because upper-middle, educated, career-having women are disproportionately Asian

I don't think that explains much of it. I don't find the women on there to be noticeably higher class on average than the ones on Hinge or Bumble, and despite there not being many East Asians here, most of the women on there are East Asian. The vast majority of educated upper middle class career having women here are white.

True. I found my dating mostly trended Asian but in my experience trying to filter by non-obese, non-singlemom, non-tattooed, educated and white-collar job having meant that I was left with 90% Asian girls.

Yes. Definitely hugely skews that way in my geographic area.

The common theme generally being some form of coming from a fairly repressive sub culture, focusing hard on education/career until finally getting to 26-27 and their parents' reproach shifted from 'When are you becoming a doctor' to 'When am I becoming a grandparent'.

This is a kind of stupid on the part of the Asian (South or East, at least based on my British experience) parents that makes the stupid in Western sexual culture look mild. Enjoy your 0.8 TFR, Chonky.

There are excessively few high quality women having kids in the west even controlling for earlier sexual activity. The high breeders in the west are muslims and blacks and latinos, with only latinos being able to reliably reach class escape velocity. Most new kids are net negative, and the Asians have bet on robots. Not necessarily the best bet, but if their societies collapse it'll just fall over dustily, not ruined from within by disgruntled 'minorities'.

I think indigenous people have far more children than any of those groups.

Natives have substantially higher birth rates (typically about 50% higher than whites) in all settler colonies, including Australia, Canada and most of the US (although stats are hard to find, this is true for Hawaii and probably Alaska at least). Nevertheless, the trend is typically still the same as other groups (ie downward) rather than holding steady above replacement. So we can expect these groups to shrink in time too, especially because (obviously) they’re not going to be replenished with inbound immigration.

In Canada at least, the indigenous fertility rate is 2.7. The Inuit have a fertility rate of 2.8. From what I've heard, they have a completely different attitude towards having children than the rest of the country does. Teenage pregnancy followed by single motherhood after a few years is common and many very young people really want to have babies.

I think it’s best to see these as trends affecting extremely poor, rural, badly educated people more than indigenous people specifically per se. It’s not irrelevant but if you look at the places with eg. highest single motherhood, teenage pregnancy among the white population they’re probably places that are closer in many ways to indigenous communities on many metrics. In Canada, Hawaii and elsewhere, indigenous people who are smart and want to make something of themselves in settler civilization quickly assimilate within 2 generations; there isn’t a native elite the way there’s a longstanding (if small) black upper-middle class in places like Atlanta.

Red tribe whites with their upper 90s IQ have a TFR on par with Latinos.

Muslim fertility in the west is below replacement if one looks at the children they have once they're actually here. No one is having a ton of kids outside of small religious extremist groups and the vast majority of Muslims do not fall into that category.

'Its only the extremists breeding uncontrollably!' is not the comforting message I believe you intended...

I didn't intend to comfort you.

The high breeders in the west are muslims and blacks and latinos

Nonsense. Neither blacks nor Latinos have fertility above replacement. Black fertility is only marginally greater than white fertility.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/226292/us-fertility-rates-by-race-and-ethnicity/

no real experience beyond consuming KDramas.

Someones experienced the east asian dating sphere and knows the horror for himself. Virginal asian girls really live a cloistered life totally unknown to their foreign counterparts, even indian, and the girls who are put off by obnoxious yellow fevered men are unlikely to waste time dating asians either. For great fun see if these girls read webnovels, those things are hilariously smutty and gay.

I moved in with my partner and her younger sister (mid-late twenties East-Asian consultant) 6 months ago, and have had kinda first hand view of her sister's involvement in dating as a 100-hour week consultant who occasionally has an awkward first date... and yeah it's a whole subculture/form of existence I had no idea about until now.

You have no idea. Good east asian girls are a totally unknown quantity to westerners because these girls generally didn't date at all and find even nebbish whites too aggressively forward. These girls also have their preference profiles shaped by the most asinine Kdrama shit, and their expectations for male behavior are simultaneously low and ridiculously high. While more leeway is given to whites in terms of cultural compliance, less leeway is given for emotional unintelligence. This is a huge warning sign because these girls have no experience in managing their own emotional states under duress and present a totally unknown variable even to themselves.

These girls also have their preference profiles shaped by the most asinine Kdrama shit, and their expectations for male behavior are simultaneously low and ridiculously high.

As someone with zero familiarity with K-dramas, I'm interested to know what this means.

What @Forgotpassword says.

High expectation: ridiculous grand gestures of romance as the end point of a horrifyingly long dating process, conspicuous consumerism as a shit test for love, gotta match the girls skincare routine, 7 heads tall

Low expectations: fidelity is practically a sideshow, alcoholism is not a problem, men are presumed to be incompetent caregivers and are not expected to step up to childraising, emotional incompetence is assumed. These lows are actually pretty terrible for relationships but the presumed low emotional competence of asian men thanks to Kdramas is a fucking paradise of calm the men enjoy. Young women openly ventilating emotional meltdowns and expecting understanding/validation is nightmare I hope to never endure again.

fidelity is practically a sideshow

Perhaps true for the older generation of East Asian women, but I would expect the younger ones obsessed with romantic Kdramas about true love surely expect fidelity/monogamy?

Ok so the the point of fidelity is less that 'he will cheat' and more that 'marriage is no guarantee he is off limits', whether as an initiator or as a recipient. Fidelity being an afterthought was a statement meant to communicate required vigilance on the part of the woman, compared to observed western practices where women take husbands for granted and presume they will never stray. Asian women are hardly 'accepting' of cheating insomuch as wary of it, and that wariness permeates. Not the most extant expectation by far, but women raised on kdramas do seem especially sensitive to female friends of their husbands. One guy I know has to surrender his phone to his wife every night for message review, even though he's the nicest dweeb ever who had to be cajoled into going to the beach with the woman on a church outing.

I once saw an interview with a bunch of (young) Japanese women where said women expressed they wouldn't mind if a partner went to a brothel but they'd get very upset if the partner went to a Hostess Club.

Who knows.

My defacto Mother in Law & Grandmother in law practically fainted from shock when I proactively changed diapers and bottle fed the newborn. Not that they disproved, but the bar for childrearing involvement seems to be Marianas trench levels in East Asian cultures.

Super slowburn romances, lots of grand gestures of romance, incredibly pretty boys without particular masculine push.

I've got a baby and a longterm relationship with one and live with another. Both born in Asia and came across for University. I think you're tarring a bit too broadly, my partner's a lot more adventurous than her sister both romantically and career-wise, but having watched a few KDrama I do agree that it's a deranged way of forming romantic expectations. I do think this has been compounded by the online dating meta, since I've observed a ton of 'an interaction went slightly subpar, GOODBYE FOREVER' from talking to female friends.

Also having been 4-5 dates in with a few other East Asian girls where the pace of engagement was glacial during my time on the apps. Which made up the majority of my 'this 26 year old girl has essentially zero idea how to play the game' experiences.

I don't have much experience dating East Asians, but one did ask me to be her boyfriend on the third date before we'd even kissed. I thought that was odd.

That’s pretty normal for socially conservative cultures.

I thought they'd wait longer than most people to ask that.

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I live in East Asia and I am strangely amenable to women despite glaring deficiencies likely common to many esteemed members of this board. These women regularly lament with me the trials of their female friends, and upon reviewing their behavior at inane group functions my partner and I both agree that this derangement is both unique to east asia and far more prevalent than westerners think. You see girls on bad dates, I see girls who have never dated ever. Dateless men bitch visibly, dateless (but not crazy) women disappear into some horrorsbow kdrama abyss

Can you elaborate on this behaviour?

Not much to elaborate. Clueless, nervous, uncommunicative. Unable to initiate conversation,monosyllabic in response, zero cross gender social skills. They never give any indication to any man that they are interested (if they are capable of having any form of interest generated in the first place), cannot parse flirtation or conversation, collapse into shrinking incoherence when the penny drops. These girls would in kinder days be matchmade by the church or their parents, and the normal pattern for them is to be pushed into dating whichever clueless male cell group member is in their church by their friends. Without a church, these women disappear into kdramas and trashy webnovels.

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I don't think it's totally unique to East Asia. Dated some white women who essentially exhibited the same behaviors (admittedly way less as a proportion), but there's a particular subgenre that is cultivated by East Asian cultures.

I'd consider the sort of 'bad dates' they go on essentially not going on any dates ever. They'll occasionally sally to make an app profile, book a single 30 minute coffee with somebody who passes a 3 week DM interview and then strike them from the record for whatever random reason onto the next.

I personally know quite a few women in their late twenties who are relatively attractive and either virgins or have maybe had one partner in their whole lives. Often they’re women who have mainly female hobbies or career, but some work in male-dominated jobs too. They’re usually very shy and have feminine hobbies/interests.

One of the big failure states for men looking at modern women is judging them by the most promiscuous decile, simply because those are the women they’re most likely to encounter socially (even if they don’t hook up with them, they’re more likely to go out, drink, and have masculine hobbies and interests).

I’ve definitely heard this before, and it seems like solving the problem for shy, introverted women with (de facto)conservative preferences would solve the problem for normie men.

Modernity culturally has a lot to answer for, but in this case I think it’s also urbanization and the atomization that followed limiting traditional familial and community matchmaking. One sees the same phenomenon in big cities even in comparatively trad countries, where urban areas often have lower tfr than more rural communities in ‘lib’ nations. 2024 Tehran is less socially conservative than most Americans probably think, but it’s still more socially conservative than rural America and yet has a lower birthrate.

2024 Tehran is less socially conservative than most Americans probably think, but it’s still more socially conservative than rural America and yet has a lower birthrate

Ditto for Turkish cities.

Anglos have been living with dating norms that are relatively recognisable in the modern world for almost a millennium. Lots of cultural (and likely actual physical) evolution to accommodate this and still keep making babies. Rapidly modernising Muslim countries have all absolutely wrecked dating norms and corresponding abysmal fertility rates.

Yes I wouldn’t be surprised to see ultra-low East Asian type tfr in a lot of the wealthier Muslim countries very soon. Many of the people from there I work with are married (some for many years) but have only one child, or none at all.

Honestly I think a lot of the tragedy of this is that these women get onto the dating apps and it's usually one of two outcomes from what I've heard.

  1. Week or two of chatter with guys, maybe a first/second date which doesn't really go anywhere and eventually churning for another few months after a moderately bad experience or since work picks up. Rinse and repeat twice a year from 25-35.

  2. Get absolutely played by somebody they don't have enough knowledge to know who's too good to be true and either abandon the apps or pivot into the most promiscuous decile for vague meandering reasons of revenge.

I've noticed the best women I meet on dating apps downloaded it about a week ago, haven't been on a date yet, and are about to delete it because it's overwhelming.

Absolutely one hundred percent true. It’s almost as if being able to play that game and enjoying it for long amounts of time says bad things about a girl

Yeah. Lots of girls will do that where they'll make an app account, be exposed to the firehose of approaches, maybe do a date or two and if that person is good they've got a boyfriend and if that person is lacking they'll delete and be back in 6 months.

Speaking for myself, I didn't see any point to dating in high school or college, because I always knew that I would move states afterwards and didn't want to have to breakup. In college my Mom would tell me that I could be a little less practical.

Now that it's been 10 years I realize that the whole point of my Ivy league education was to meet people and that dating would have been a better use of my time than doing my homework. But at the time I didn't understand.

It's the usual stuff. Your parents assumed that it will, like, just happen.

Now that it's been 10 years I realize that the whole point of my Ivy league education was to meet people and that dating would have been a better use of my time than doing my homework. But at the time I didn't understand.

It's the usual stuff. Your parents assumed that it will, like, just happen.

People don't waste mental effort analyzing things that work. It's why no one can draw a bicycle even if they ride one regularly.

It's a curious phenomenon. When I was a teen, I made an effort to seek out the best arguments against gay marriage, in favor of traditional gender roles, in favor of Christian sexual prudery, etc. The apologists I found were hilariously bad at this, and they melted into a puddle of "it's not natural" and "things have always been done this way". I did not find them convincing.

Now that dating and marriage are broken, cogent defenders of these position can be found. The clock was taken apart, and people see how it ticked.

I believe this happens with almost all belief ideologies - Most modern socialists are hilariously bad at defending socialist/communist idealism beyond the most elementary criticism, with the only notable person I know who can hold their own being Zizek. Likewise, modern atheism has become low hanging fruit and poorly upheld compared to it's intellectual roots of Dawkins and others. There needs to be intellectual and social challenge to peel away the grifters and the stupid to reveal the people capable of actually defending an ideology.

IME, almost every bit of "bad" advice I see people complain about is basically this - just assuming well-adjusted people will find their way. And it isn't (wasn't?) even usually wrong, which is what makes it worse. There's no easy solution in just stopping people from it.

What do you mean it isn't wrong? My friend with by far the most successful love live in high school and university told me that getting a girlfriend is something that "just happens" and that you don't need to try. Is that what you're referring to? Because that doesn't work.

and that you don't need to try.

Oh, that's too far. There are annoying people like that but they're oversold. I don't think the average person thinks men should literally do nothing. The people telling you to "just be yourself" are taking it for granted that you are doing other things (like maintaining a social life).

I mean that the banal advice people give that you always hear complaints about are usually just assuming that people possess the same amount of socialization and enough agency to work their way through it like they did. People for whom it doesn't work naturally get frustrated, but that doesn't make it wrong or, as more neurotic and paranoid sides of the internet claim, some sort of plot or acceptable lie like telling kids about Santa Claus. To use one example from this sub: this is not bad advice, even if someone is not well-adjusted enough to take it.

The little advice I got from my parents wasn't bad, even though they came from a totally different society. They assumed it'd work out. And, had I been a different person, it absolutely would have.

That reminds me of some useless (for me) advice I've read online, where people say that, to socialize more, you should start accepting any social invitations you get. I and many other people already do that. The hard part is getting the invitations in the first place.

For a certain type of person this is indeed good advice though. I definitely know people who are struggling to meet anyone for dating but don’t see how rejecting any social interaction has any relation to this.

Also social interaction is a snowballing thing. When you first enter a new social network (university, work, potential new friend group, sports team etc) saying yes to that one invitation early on can mean hundreds of invitations down the line. Conditioning someone to always say yes so they don’t miss out on that freshman’s party where multiple friend groups formed is quite useful

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So far I have given them four grandkids. So that's something. But I didn't start participating in the dating market until I was 25 and married someone they probably thought was a step down.

Generally matches my experience too. Also I don't think I've encountered any women who have gone "oh no I've never done this tee hee", they were all pretty up front with their experience if the conversation went there, or did genuinely have little experience. Although it's not impossible I was taken in by excellent liars, I doubt it.

You had 80 first dates?!? Have you ever heard of the paradox of choice? The more choices you have the less you'll enjoy the one you'll finally end up with, because you'll compare all the best pieces of all your previous possible choices to your final one. It is a real thing...you might already be totally fucked from it.

I've got a partner and a child now, actually doing pretty well!

But I do agree that 80 was excessive but this was me essentially starting from a 2/10 in attractiveness and going on a date who'd anybody who'd take me in order to develop social skills, my self-confidence and generally explore options.

Don't be that hard on yourself man. I doubt anyone that is a 2/10 has a wife a child now.

The 2/10 was largely self-inflicted!

Yeah I tend to agree, I met a 30 year old virgin on a dating app. She was good looking and socially normal, just had never really gotten around to it.


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