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non_radical_centrist  6mo ago (farhakhalidi.substack.com)   7094 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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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!

Surely we can develop better norms for [social stuff]

Regardless of the specific issue, I'm rather skeptical of this possibility. Perhaps we could imagine better norms which, if people followed them, would create a better society or a society that at least suffers less from this one particular problem, but that's just a creative writing exercise. Whether we could develop better norms in the sense of actually directing norms and enforcing them in society in general in such a way that they solve the problems they're intended to solve without introducing worse problems (or negating the solution in some other way) is a different question.

I don't know. I think social norms around the treatment of women, LGBT people, people of different races and lots of other groups were much worse in the past, including in my lifetime. We got here from there somehow.

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The gender norms being biologically driven would be almost reassuring: if it were just our genes driving the behaviors, we will at some point in the future be able to move around a couple base pairs and solve the issue entirely.

If they arise purely from social dynamics and have nothing to do with biology, on the other hand, they are self-sustaining and have resisted millenia of attempts to change them, across massive geographic and temporal spaces. That seems much harder to fix.

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.

I can't find the link, but see a recent Twitter fracas wherein a young lady invited a man to her apartment, told him she wasn't interested in sleeping with him, he respected those wishes, and she then made a TikTok (or other video platform) bemoaning that he didn't "go for it."

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!

Step one would be dating / sleeping with more than one person at one time (for both men and women) is seen as bad behavior.

I haven't seen that fracas, but Louis CK has a similar bit about a woman who was similarly disappointed that he backed down when she pushed him away. As he put it: "are you out of your fucking mind? You want me to rape you, just on the off chance you're into that kind of thing?".

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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!

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