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non_radical_centrist  6mo ago (farhakhalidi.substack.com)   7092 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 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.

I think some of those norms made sense in certain contexts. In a world with no condoms and no anti-biotics and no anti-virals, I personally would support some pretty harsh norms to stop the sort of disease spread that would occur if all men felt like they had a free pass to have orgies with each other. Since about the 40s, that began to be rapidly obsolete, with a backtick towards relevant in the 80s with AIDs, and today with even better medicine is back to being very obsolete.

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?".

Here's the Hanania piece on it. Paywalled, but the intro paragraphs and link to the video should give you all necessary context

To add another thing that got memory-holed for me; the Blurred Lines song by Robin Thicke and the ensuing controversy.

It's crazy to think that got released (and was a major hit) in 2013. Would any music studio release it just 11 years later?

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.

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