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So I just finished Michel Houellebecq's Platform and have written up my thoughts about it over on my blog. I thought I would cross-post here in text form to get some thoughts.
Short plot summary: Like most Houellebecq novels, the protagonist of Platform, Michel, is a middle-aged frenchman with little in the way of meaning to his life. He hates his bullshit job in the government, doesn’t have much in the way of a social network, and lacks hobbies except for perhaps a bit of cooking.1 At the start of the novel, Michel’s father dies, leaving him with an unexpected windfall. He uses this money to take a trip to Thailand, where he visits some “massage parlors” as well as engaging in the usual touristy pastimes of relaxing on the beach and visiting ancient ruins. His tour group consists of an eclectic group of other French people: the jaded Robert, the working class Lionel, a few couples of various ages, and the smoking hot Valerie. For some reason Valerie falls in love with our main character, and when they return to France the two begin a relationship.
Valerie works in the tourism industry, and upon her return to France she is put in charge of a series of failing hotel chains along with her coworker Jean-Yves. Michel has the bright idea to turn these hotels around by making sex tourism an implicit part of the vacation experience. This goes swimmingly: Valerie and Michel prepare to retire to one of their sex resorts in Thailand, until the usual suspects intervene and it all goes to shit.
I first found out about Houellebecq on the subreddit /r/stupidpol circa 2020. Stupidpol is a forum dedicated to a Marxist/Leninist critique of identity politics: the userbase loved Houellebecq’s irreverence for contemporary “woke” sacred cows like Islam and Feminism, as well as his extension of Marx’s analysis to the arena of romantic relationships highly relevant to our times.2 I didn’t get around to reading any of his books until 2023, where I read The Elementary Particles, which I enjoyed other than the stupid sci-fi subplot. Last year I read three more of his books: Submission, Whatever, and Annihilation. Although he can get a bit repetitive, Houellebecq perfectly captures my own frustrations with dating, and with lack of meaning in the modern world. Platform was no exception to this pattern. Here Houellebecq focuses on our troubled relationship with the Third World and on romance as the meaning of life.
A quick note on translation: This was my first Houellebecq book in Spanish. While my reading experience was probably slightly worse than it would have been in English, as my Spanish is not as good, there were two aspects of the Spanish edition that I liked more than its English equivalent. First: Houellebecq actually includes phrases in English in the parts of the book taking place in Thailand, highlighting the unequal relationship between the languages of the West and the East (and even French and English). Without another language to compare to, you would completely miss this. Secondly, the Spanish translation includes footnotes about the translation itself, and for identifying French celebrities and politicians an international reader might not be familiar with. I certainly appreciated these, and I hope future English editions include them.
So, tourism: It’s not a very controversial position to disapprove of sex tourism, especially in America, where prostitution itself is illegal, and puritanism still holds some cultural sway. Sex tourism is obviously exploitative and coercive of young women: they trade their beauty and their best years of their life for money in a manner that we would never allow here.
Yet even in an era before OnlyFans, this attitude is highly hypocritical in a number of ways.
To start with, all our relationships with the Global South are like this. Our cheap raw materials and manufactured goods all rely on unsafe, exploitative labor performed in the Third World. Is there really such a big difference between selling your body directly to an overweight German, or selling your body to the factory that makes his BMW? The more family-friendly aspects of tourism in dining, beaches and hotels are not really much better. Houellebecq uses the example of Cuba, which after the spent fury of the few years after the revolution siphoned labor off of essential agricultural and industrial work (which it would have needed to become self-sufficient and truly free from the American embargo) to the tourism industry to make a quick buck, leaving the country dependent on the West once again. Even the most benign form of tourism, that which encourages the preservation of historical sites, art, and artifacts has damaging effects on the coherence of a local culture. No longer are those artifacts for the culture itself to enjoy, but a product to marketed towards Americans.3
Secondly, as my Spanish tutor Rafa pointed out, we have no problem with other types of sexual tourism that don’t involve money. Rafa told me a story of one of his German friends who used Tinder Plus as an alternative to hostels in Latin America. Although all these women were consenting to this German man sleeping over and presumably having sex with them, the relationship was no less exploitative than if cash was used. Dreams of being taken away to the West, higher status in one’s local community (for bagging a Blanco), are two big non-amorous factors at play in this situation that many would find just as damaging to the individual women and the local community than if cash was exchanged.
Finally, sex tourism is the natural result of a refusal to deal with the incel-problem. The sexual revolution, and its far more damaging digital counterpart, created a “sexual marketplace”. Like other markets, this created a range of outcomes. Certain men enjoyed a very large amount of sexual success, due to their physical appearance and “rizz”, while others were completely locked out of the market. Most women did fairly well until their mid-thirties when their physical appearance began to decline. Without the marriage and traditional family formation, these two demographic groups (low-status, ugly men and older women) have had to resort to other ways to satisfy their desire for sex and personal connection. One solution is internet pornography, which is obviously bad and frowned upon, but covertly permitted. Another is sex tourism and mail-order brides.
Now don’t get me wrong, I don’t think sex tourism is good. But it’s incredibly frustrating to hear people condemn the practice (and things like it like OnlyFans) without acknowledging what the root of the problem is. Young men don’t want to be alone in their room jerking off to a computer screen, but society doesn’t present them with many other options for romantic connection. And the problem is getting worse.
This brings me to my final point about this book, and Houellebecq in general. Contrary to what many think, the man is not a nihilist. Rather, I think he believes that we derive most of our meaning in life from our personal relationships, and from Romance in particular. You can see this in the way the Michel and Valerie’s relationship4 just lightens up the tone of this book. Their once-every-ten-pages sex scenes and other tender moments seem like something that Houellebecq is happy to be writing, especially when contrasted to the rather grim tone of the rest of the book. Houellebecq is a Romantic with a capital R. Yet he also recognizes that even in the best of times that these relationships are only temporary. We no longer even live in the best of times. Hence the accusations of nihilism.
Personally I am 100% on board with Houellebecq on this. I have never been happier than when I have been in love, both romantically, and in a more general sense with the community I am surrounded by. But those kind of connections are becoming harder and harder to find in a world that is increasingly split into its Elementary Particles.
Although he also spends quite a bit of time throughout the novel reading Auguste Comte, the father of positivism. Perhaps the French really are much more literate/cultured than we are, but I always find Houellebecq’s everyman constructions a little bit unbelievable. If you’re fairly obscure philosophy, you’ve got a bit more going on than the average dude who just likes sportsball.
The title of Houellebecq’s first book in French translates as “the Extension of the Domain of the Struggle”, referring quite literally to Marx. Why the English translator decided to use the title “Whatever” instead I could not tell you.
I think I understand a little better why Palestinians don’t want non-Muslims going up to the Dome of the Rock
This is apparent in Houellebecq's other works as well.
Yes, the former is degenerate and immoral behavior, while the later is virtuous and praiseworthy. This is very easy to discern to anybody who adheres to any form of virtue ethics, such as let's say stoics, who praised temperance, justice, prudence and fortitude. This is similar to Christian virtue ethics which praises chastity, temperance, charity, diligence, kindness, patience, and humility while abhors pride, greed, wrath, envy, lust, gluttony, and sloth.
Interesting take. But just a couple of sentences above you wrote that:
The ultimate "meaning" can be found in Romance with big R, but society™ gets in the way. Which calls for even greater meaning, the greater utilitarian socialist good - we need The Revolution and rework the society so everybody can find their own meaning. How surprising.
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I find this statement amusing, because it's still ignoring the one elephant caterwauling in the corner. That being; Money.
If I want to indulge in some sex tourism in Thailand(or Japan), I'm still going to be throwing down a few thousand dollars just to travel there. And while staying(in Japan, atleast, I know nothing of Thailand) there is surprisingly cheap(going by a friend of mine who enjoys his trips to Japan), and supposedly white men receive alot more sexual attention in Thailand and the like than elsewhere(I'm taking this with a grain of salt), there's still that massive wall of roughly a few thousand dollars worth of buy in for getting a two week experience. And I'm not sure that's something that's worth it.
(I understand the Motte is weird, and some posters would see a few thousand as chump change, this is not the case for me.)
Now, I think the entire phenomena of and reaction to Passport Bros says alot about the current state of relationships between men and women, and might certainly be valid for some people as a solution to their relationship ills and woes, I wouldn't call this a result of refusal to deal with the 'incel problem'.
Oh yea I really don't think it's worth it either. And yes it's only a partial solution to the Incel problem. Sex tourism doesn't help the NEET in his mom's basement, or the man who really wants to start a family. But it does like you said, directly make sex interchangeable with everything else through the medium of money. This was the natural result of the sexual revolution, but certain people (mainly women) don't want to hear it.
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Good review. I'm also a big fan of that book, and of Houllebecq in general.
Worth noting that the book came out in 2001, presumably based on what it was like in the 90s (I'm very curious how much of this he experienced directly and how much was just his imagination or interviews with other people). I went there a couple years ago, so I can speak to what it's like. In some ways things are still the same, but in some ways things are different:
In general I agree with your review. Houllebecq holds up a magnifying lens at the ugly warts of modern society, forcing us to confront some of the things we'd rather not think about. The sexual revolution idea of "free love" isn't going to work for everyone, it can't work for everyone because there's not enough attractive peole to go around and western society is still kind of awkward and cold about sex. One obvious solution is to solve that problem like we do everything else in capitalism- hiring poor people to do it with money.
And sure, in principle it's not that different paying a poor 3rd-world person for sex just like we pay them to sew garments or grow fruit. But it does feel different when you experience it directly. Most of us are never going to run a 3rd-world sweatshop, we just buy the t-shirts and don't think about it much. But when you go to Thailand, and some woman quote you a price for sex that you know is too high, and you don't want to get taken advantage of like a sucker, but it's still not that high and you know how poor this woman is, but then you look around and see so many other women around who look hotter and are offering it for cheaper... you feel a little piece of your soul die.
On the other hand, it was an interesting experience to see capitalism "solve" sex, the way it solves everything else. Unlimited liquor, junk food, and sex, all for sale in the same place and for basically the same price. Whatever you want, you got it. Now with legal marijuana, too!
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Nice book review.
I too wonder why prostitution or sex tourism is still so shunned. It's clear why the far left and far right hate it: the Fascist-Feminist Synthesis holds that women have no agency in such a situation, and that they must be protected from their own decision to offer themselves to beastly men.
But why does the center go along with this still? Residual Puritanism might explain some part, but I doubt it's the whole answer.
The same cast of Baptists and Bootleggers hates prostitution and sex tourism, and related things like porn and men traveling for geographical dating arbitrage. The Baptists are social conservatives who hate those things for the usual reasons; the Bootleggers are women in general who hate those things because more sexual outlets for men means less leverage and bargaining power for women. There is tremendous compass unity when it comes to blaming men for women’s coffee decisions.
Unlike drugs where the suppliers are blamed more than the consumers of drugs, the consumers of sex (men) receive all of the blame while the suppliers of sex (women) are absolved. You fucking donkey vs. oh dear, oh dear, gorgeous. The exploitation narrative is an alibi for Western women to signal and protect their Wonderfulness and cover-up their own self-interest, one that Just so Happens to paint men as villains and women the victims. Sex Work is Real Work and sex workers are Stunning, Brave, and Empowered victims of capitalist, patriarchal societies that oppress and objectify women; men who use prostitutes or consume pornography are disgusting perverts and exploiters of women just trying to make ends meet.
Everyone who’s not an incel or misogynist knows women don’t care about height or wealth, and that hypergamy is a redpill myth. So if Western men find greater dating success by traveling, it must be because they’re exploiting foreign women or doing something else nefarious. The modal secular Western woman hates sexual/romantic offshoring—the idea that she could be a Replaceable commodity in the global marketplace, that she might have to compete with foreign women for Western men—lest she has to work on keeping herself thin and making herself pleasant to be around. After all, she’s not some sort of pathetic Pick Me with internalized misogyny.
It's bad enough that some unattractive Western men cheat their rightfully deserved fates in eternal sexual/romantic purgatory by going abroad, leaving fewer simps, orbiters, and monkey-dancers for Western women. Ugh, gross. What if a substantial number of attractive men start doing so, as well? "Are we dating the same man?" Facebook groups would need to expand to be global in scope. A city-level problem turns into a planetary one; you're already struggling with the Penguin and then one day Doomsday shows up.
In general, it appears many Western women have a haunting fear that somewhere, a Western man might be happy without it actively benefitting Western women. Sometimes that somewhere is right in front of them. Hence the occasional, amusing thread in FIRE- or AITA-adjacent subreddits to the tune of “Sold my company and happily fatFIRE’d, but now my wife wants me to get a job—what do I do?” or “My husband retired and now I resent him, AITA?” where she then goes on to talk about him like Tony Soprano talking about his son.
Western women like to portray foreign women who date or prostitute themselves to Western men as the victims of poverty and exploitation, that women in regions such as Southeast Asia or Latin America have no other choice if they want to put food on the table or have a roof over their heads. It certainly couldn’t be that, for the most part, such women prostitute themselves primarily for the same reasons Western women do, the same reasons Instathots flyout to Dubai to serve as human toilets: buy the latest phone, get their nails done, buy more makeup, expand their shoe collection, buy more expensive clothes, travel to exotic places and take photos of themselves. And sure, it makes paying rent and buying food easier too because money is fungible. In any case, spreading one’s legs is easier and faster than slowly saving up from working a 9-5 job like some regular schmuck. Then when she's ready to settle down after having had her fun and marry a Western or local man, she can just pretend she was an angel all along.
When it to comes to the topic of men dating abroad or foreign prostitution, it’s like the sudden view of Western women that the default lifestyle of regions of the world such as Southeast Asia is to live in mudshacks or underground tunnels, akin to the Vietcong in a ‘Nam war movie. If foreign women are as desperate and destitute as Western women claim, then shouldn’t the Western men who date or use the services of foreign women be praised for stimulating the local economy and lifting women out of poverty? Or maybe Western men should just Be Decent People and give foreign (and Western) women money for free.
Plus, what happens to foreign men in such supposedly destitute regions? Do they just go, “guess I’ll die” since they don’t have quite the same dating and prostitution options as women do? I suppose one could tack on an epicycle by saying: Due to lingering patriarchal oppression from Western colonization and cultural imperialism, foreign women don’t have nearly the same opportunities as their countrymen do, thus have no choice but to do sex work.
You mentioned once that you have many female relatives who waited until marriage for sex. Given that this is practically unheard of among the native Angloid population, you must be a foreigner, but from where? The Balkans? South Asia?
What does that have anything to do with his arguments?
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You do realize sex workers are capable of having relationships while also being sex workers, right?
In all seriousness, this doesn't work out. I know a guy who married a prostitute made good (not as a client, they met elsewhere). The problem with marrying someone who has sex for money is that the mercenary attitude to sex tends to leak into their relationships. She ended up treating the guy as a sort of long-term john, cheating on him when she wanted more spending money or when his salary was too low for her liking. Also, of course, all the original problems that led her to prostitution were still there: awful criminal family, drugs, low motivation etc. The guy was far from perfect but this isn't a dynamic you want.
I read an interview once with a prostitute who also had a boyfriend. She said she loved him very much, but it caused problems all around. When she was with him she was tired from having sex in her job and just wanted to take a break. When she went back to work, she felt like she was cheating on her boyfriend. Not sure if she was telling her boyfriend the truth about her job, but it caused problems all around.
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That wording makes it sound like a relationship with an ex-sex-worker, not a current sex-worker. Or at least the guy thought they were no longer a sex-worker and turned out to be wrong about that.
If the guy believed being "good" requires not being a sex worker, then I can see how the relationship went poorly.
"Made good" is a turn of phrase. He married her. They were (supposed to be) in a committed, monogamous relationship for several years. There was some tension there, it's true, but he also did his level best to get her back on her feet and help her build the financial independence and social life she'd never been able to achieve on her own.
I think you have a very idealised view of 'sex workers'. This particular girl wasn't a free spirit being imprisoned by her awful sex-negative husband, she was a sweet, lonely girl who lacked the innate sense of self to turn down anything that made her feel good in the moment. She had been doing this since she left school, and it had left her physically broken and worn out in certain important ways. The cosmetic alterations she got, or had been encouraged to get by her pimp, had long term consequences that ruined her health. I can't say for sure, but I think she realised that she was rapidly running out of road, tried to escape, and kept getting dragged back in by drug addiction, criminal family members and chronically low time-preference.
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That's a rather strange reading of what he said. Nowhere in there was any mention of her returning to prostitution.
You think she'd be showing him undying loyalty otherwise?
How did you interpret
then?
No, but believing your partner is fundamentally a bad person sounds like a poor basis for a trusting relationship.
That she slept with other men, not because she returned to prostitution, but as some sort of act of petty revenge, or behavioral conditioning on her husband.
You can believe someone did something bad in the past, but aren't fundamentally bad people. With prostitution in particular it's easy to believe the person was victimized into it, but when they're no longer doing it, it's still accurate to describe it as being "made good".
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Does the far left hate it? Maybe I just don't have any exposure to the group you're calling "the far left". I understand it's not a normie view, but I somewhat often see pro-sex-worker sentiment in places as diverse as the leftist Tumblrs I follow, my IRL friends' Facebook posts, and Ars Technica comments (mostly when in comes up in the context of anti-sex-worker laws like FOSTA-SESTA).
The leftist take is generally that the female prostitutes are either empowered women or hopeless victims, and that the Johns should all burn in Hell. Some feminists prioritize the empowerment of women while mostly ignoring Johns (they still think they should probably burn in Hell), while other feminists think the presence of Johns is so terrible that the entire industry needs to be incinerated. Sometimes one or the other group will dominate. Other times there'll be compromises like in Sweden where prostitution is legal for women to sell, but illegal for men to buy. It's truly a shining model of feminist equality.
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To the extent that I'm familiar with this political issue, I'd argue that the 'far left' in this case does claim to be pro-sex-worker in the sense that they advocate or at least claim to advocate for the protection of their rights as workers and see them as victims of an exploitative trade to be rescued. They see the entire industry as one manifestation of the horrors of late-stage capitalism and advocate for its eventual abolition.
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I mean, there may be a platonic ideal of non-exploitative prostitution, but that’s certainly not what it looks like in practice. Centrists care more about that than they do lofty ideals.
There's plenty of non-exploitative prostitution where the woman comes in as an independent provider, works whenever she feels like it, and stops of her own accord at some point. There might be some abuse on the sides, but that'd be far more easily stopped with legalization + regulation than attempting total bans.
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The elephant in the room is the association in the minds of many of prostitution with sex slavery. This is a perspective that people on the left, right and center share to a degree. With sex tourism an angle might be that some prostitution practices in third world might include coercion or underaged victims.
There are other reasons people have to dislike prostitution, but that is the biggest one.
Those include seeing it as a degrading practice for the people who engage it. For those of more conservative viewpoint, including centrists, seeing prostitution as having a negative influence on society which would be better off if people are having sex within their monogamous relationships and marriage.
It's a matter of supply and demand. No matter how much serious effort is made to normalize 'sex work', there will never be enough voluntary prostitutes among the native population of well-off Western countries to satisfy local demand. Prostitution and human trafficking necessarily go hand in hand.
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I would argue that it should be in the interest of anyone who dislikes sex slavery to have legalized (and somewhat regulated) prostitution instead. In my opinion, the goal would be to treat sex work similar to tobacco. Sure, some people might smuggle in tobacco to avoid paying taxes, and some of the smugglers might rely on slave labor to increase their margin, but the average consumer of cigarettes or vapes is not going to go to the darknet to save a few bucks.
By contrast, there will always be some demand for sex work, and someone will be ready to supply it at a premium. Sometimes, this will be escorts, but sometimes it will be organized crime, which is typically bad for the sex workers.
Also, some men looking for sex behave quite immoral (and sometimes outright criminal) to get it. I think that is jurisdictions where sex as a commodity exists, they are at least somewhat less likely to spin an elaborate web of lies to get a woman to fall in love with them. (I am less sure about rape, likely for some men violent rape or roofies are a kink in itself, and they would still do it if they could just pay for sex instead.)
Regarding coercion, I think that all wage labor is at least somewhat coercive in a world without a solid UBI. Shelter and food cost money, and the labor market exploits that fact. I don't think that giving someone the option of earning their rent fucking people they would not otherwise fuck instead of flipping burgers for eight hours a day is a-ok. Obviously, more direct coercion is not okay.
Also, I think that a lot of relationships involve both sex and the transfer of material goods and can thus be seen at least as somewhat transactional. For one thing, rich people (especially men) are often able to attract partners who are physically hotter than they are, which clearly suggests that expected future material benefits play a role in evaluating partners. Nobody is talking about criminalizing that.
By this reasoning pretty much everyone should be in favor of legalized-but-regulated rape too. (Or legalized, regulated, bank robbery.)
Say what?
So your position is that prostitution always implies sex slavery? Someone tell Aella that she self-enslaved when she worked as an escort.
Also, some libertarians might consider taxes legalized, regulated robberies, and yet taxes are quite instrumental in discouraging the unregulated kind.
I will grant you that likely, there are two effects from legalization which work in opposite direction. The one is the one I described, where the legal goods replace the illegal ones. The other is that legalization creates additional demand, and a part of that which will be filled by illegal channels. Think weed, once you legalize medical marijuana, sorting out which joints are legal and which ones are not becomes difficult.
However, in the case of prostitution, this would be solved easily enough. Issue government IDs for prostitutes and decriminalize only sex for pay with registered prostitutes, while keeping the Johns on the hook for rape if they fuck someone without such ID who was coerced by organized crime.
I think he stated his position pretty clearly - it's the same one you outlined later about it being hard to sort out which goods are legal, and which ones are illegal. An example of any particular prostitute doing it willingly is irrelevant here.
Also Aella is hardly the most fortunate example for your case. She might not have a knife on her throat, but a common argument for the exploitation in prostitution, is that it's taking advantage of people who were messed up by rape and/or other forms of sexual assault, and I seem to remember her saying directly that it's what happened to her. If you get your "willing" prostitutes by raping them first, I don't know if you can call them "not-exploited".
There's a number of countries that have legal prostitution, and I don't think either of them decided to have such a restrictive system, and I don't think you will ever have one. With the incentive structure stemming from legal prostitution, you will always have a tonne of money backing the "legal, and not very tightly controlled" position.
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I observe those things are called "work" and "taxes", respectively.
Damn, what do you do for a living?
I can't snap my fingers and get everything my heart desires without having to work for it; rather, if I don't work, I don't eat, and I die.
In that sense, I am raped by reality.
If being mugged by reality turns a liberal into a conservative, what does being raped by reality do?
Anyway, if you want to get all metaphysical about it, I'd say the state of being raped is less about not getting what you want, and more about someone else taking something from you against your will. That something also probably needs to be very intimate, since mere material deprivation would fall under the above-mentioned being mugged.
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Article: There are ten US states where more than a quarter of all cigarettes consumed are smuggled. In New York, more than half of all cigarettes are smuggled, so "the average consumer of cigarettes" does "go to the darknet to save a few bucks" (tax of 4.35 $/pack, plus another 1.5 $/pack in New York City).
I think I also read an article a while ago about how cigarette smuggling is a major business in Europe (maybe in Sweden or Poland).
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I feel like there'd still be a lot of pushback to sex tourism in a relatively wealthy country like Japan or South Korea or Taiwan, which would presumably be at the same level of concern in regards to "sex slavery". With the contempt I've seen, it seems more like an ugly guy in the US shouldn't be able to just go to another country to have sex, as that's cheating!
Few people who are in a decent sexual relationship visit prostitutes.
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"Women have no agency" may be fringe, but "the poor have no agency" is fairly mainstream. (I would reckon that acceptance of sugardaddying and luxury escorts is far higher.) With regards to third-worlders, you could say the Kiplingpill was never actually fully removed from the diet.
That's an interesting perspective. Sure, we don't let poor people sell their own kidneys, but we certainly let them do a ton of other degrading or dangerous stuff, like be garbage collectors or work in coal mines. I haven't noticed the acceptance of sugardaddying and luxury escorts to be higher, and I'm highly certain it's not far higher.
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Maybe no agency might be fringe. But women having lower agency is not fringe but mainstream and not only far left and far right. Just not outright stated by some of the adherents of this since they might still want women to have equal influence or don't mind even women being overepresented in colleges.
It is still mainstream to think that women should be especially protected and are easier to exploit, can more easily go along with what is harmful for them, are more passive, defer decisions to others, and so on.
I suppose what you bluntly mean is that it's mainstream to assume that it's easy to lure (some) young girls into prostitution through empty promises of romance and commitment?
Not that specifically, although it can be a part of it and more that they are more passive and a greater subset of women can be pushed around by the more aggressive men, or even more aggressive women than would apply to equal % of men. Of course as we see with only fans, it would be inaccurate to assume that any woman that sells sex is necessarily coerced into it. And there are women who benefit from expectation of lower agency and lower responsibility where it is assumed that they aren't responsible for their own choices.
Low agency I would see it to be about taking ownership of one's own choices and taking an active role in directing one's life and one's affairs. It is about being responsible. Women do this less. Which isn't just about only vulnerability since higher agency men often take care of important things for the sake of their wives.
The feminist side sorta acknowledges this low agency view when it comes to the "protect vulnerable women", but blames the patriarchy and opposes it in some cases, and also forgets the negative side of female behavior when it comes to their quest to give more positions to women, including above and beyond their 50% share of population.
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If some 20-year-old throws herself at a 40 year old centrist, he will go for it. Yet if you ask him about someone else, he will spout some “it’s creepy, that poor women” conformist sludge. Yet he is also aware of the knock-down “consenting adults, no harm done, women have agency” liberal argument. So he is unable to justify his middle position either in practice or in theory. It just looks like he’s socially pressured by middle aged women into parroting a feeling he doesn’t share or agree with.
Yeah, there's definitely a lot of that going on. "Age gap" discussions have always been farcical. It's OK for a 20 year old woman to take a loan or a job from a 60 year old man, but not to have sex with him? The double-standard is extremely obvious, and it's clear that most "age gap" stuff is just older women being angry at older men not finding them attractive as they once did.
I'd go as far as to say that ~90% of the angry online/feminist discourse regarding the age gap is driven by urban middle-class PMC single women aged 31-33 expecting in vain urban middle-class well-paid high-status PMC single men aged 34-37 to marry them.
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For most normal human beings, sex is tied up with emotion in such a way that these other things are not.
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Yes. Although I admit, the age gap argument is the easiest to make, the one where the centrist will most readily concede. But imo it is fully generalizable to most issues involving women having sex : prostitution, porn, workplace sexual harassment, ‘college party culture’/drunk consent. Here again, the centrist is torn. He says one thing (we must protect women), but can justify another (women have agency). Part of his confusion comes from the fact that, as you mention, feminists/progressives and reactionaries are on the same side (women have no agency), so his usual ideological points of reference are all over the place and useless.
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While this may be true, my only exposure to the "age gap" discourse is 40-something women posting on Tumblr about how the teens/20-somethings policing age gaps are talking nonsense.
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Not quite.
When you view women through the standard "human fleshlight, plus domestic labor" lens (and the far-left and far-right agree that this is the best a woman can do in life; they just differ slightly in their approach to making that state of nature men's problem), prostitution and sex tourism offer a far superior product to domestic women.
Normally, to get a human fleshlight you have to marry it and you're stuck with it for the rest of your life; prostitution offers a massive variety and it's by the hour. Southeast Asia is considered the best place for prostitution simply because there's no minimum (w)age for prostitutes there.
Gynosupremacists are simply making sure there's no competition for domestic women, so they can get a higher price for their assets ('why buy the cow' and all that). Casting aspersions about the safety and morality of the competitor's products is a classic sales tactic.
The exact spear counterpart to this is illegal immigration; foreign men work harder and expect less than domestic men, so it's obvious why the femcels love them.
Because those sales tactics work.
There's a lot of horseshoe in gender discussions when it comes to the far left and far right, but I'm not sure the far left would go that far. Care to elaborate a bit?
I definitely agree there's a ton of this going on. I'd say "sex cartel" concerns account for roughly 80% of the discussion around prostitution, although nobody would admit it obviously.
I think the main difference between the far-left and far-right is how they deal with the biological ground truth that "women are useless, men are disposable".
The far-left leans a lot more into policies emphasizing the disposability of men (and that men exist to serve women, "all are equal but men are more equal than others", #itsHerTurn) while encouraging women to make sacrifices for some grand social project ("a good woman is independent and dominates men", "criminals and vagrants can't help it", and the like). Men are not permitted dignity in this society and their masculinity is taken for granted; that is why these societies tend to be communist (where any masculinity-driven private improvement belongs to your neighbors).
The far-right leans a lot more into policies emphasizing the uselessness of women (and that women exist to serve men, "man is head of the household", etc.) while encouraging men to make sacrifices for some grand social project ("women and children first", wars on neighboring societies/white feather effects, 996, and the like). Women are not permitted dignity in this society and their femininity is taken for granted; that is why these societies tend to be [what people actually mean when they say] fascist (where any femininity-driven public improvement is a waste of valuable resources).
This doesn't necessarily mean that these factions are going to state this openly (it's just relying on instinctive human behavior; anyone not following their instincts is naturally suspect), but it is why far-leftism and far-rightism naturally attract women and men (respectively) who are worth less. By contrast, centrist men and centrist women aren't just running solely on instinct (for a variety of reasons) and tend to hold views that are a mess of sloppy, logically-inconsistent compromise between those extremes.
Thanks for the clarification. I broadly agree with this.
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I suppose what you actually mean is closer to "women are perishable, men are disposable"?
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You are of course leaving out all the benefits of traditional marriage which are not ‘access to sex on demand’.
What other benefits? Aside from legal protections around having children, there's little else that marriage offers to men that a close male friend couldn't also provide, oftentimes at higher quality. And there's the issue of "marriage" and "close male friends" are often substitutes, i.e. men often lose their male support groups when they get married either due to time constraints or from the woman covertly sabotaging things (e.g. controlling the social schedule and deprioritizing them).
Access to your own children, full time or near full time companionship, having two adults in the house, and all the little things that tend to be improved downstream of having a woman in the house. Most people prefer a woman’s touch for their dwelling, and most men cannot replicate it for themselves.
If you’re saying ‘well men don’t need to marry for all that’- you’re talking about cohabitation, not prostitution. Those are meaningfully different arrangements.
I think this really varies from person to person. I've seen too many single guy friends get married, and then when I visit their home, it's totally dominated by their wife's style. Frilly cute things everywhere, and not a single visible trace of the stuff the guy used to like (or maybe it's hidden away in a single room, the mancave). The women in a modern western marriage just have so much power they can take over the house if they want to. One of the benefits (for the man) of prostitution is he can still get sex very conveniently but allso still have his own living space just the way he likes it. Including being roommates with a close male friend if that's what he wants, which most married women wouldn't tolerate.
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It's possible that more of the benefits accrue to society in general than to the specific man, in a way that benefits defectors as long as society as a whole doesn't unravel (as it has been lately). For instance, having an involved father is a benefit to a boy and young man, as part of living in the kind of society where marriage is the norm.
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Hang on, the far-right want women pumping out children and raising them patriotically as good citizens of the nation. Hitler was very big on natalism, the whole point of the war was to acquire more land and increase the number of Germans in the world. The far left were among the first to conceive of birth strikes and were generally bearish on natalism.
Too much horseshoe, not enough 'different things are different'.
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Some of it is exploitative, some of it is just because life in poor countries is generally not so great. Of the part that is exploitative, some of it is because the politicians and other elites in these countries are corrupt, and it is genuinely difficult for even a benevolent rich country to change that.
Based on historical evidence and my understanding of the underlying economic mechanisms, it seems to me that trade is very good for making poor countries not poor anymore. I think that rich countries have screwed up many times in this area, but:
For the most part, life in poor countries is bad because that's the definition of being in a poor country, not necessarily so much because they're being exploited by rich countries.
When poor countries don't get rich, there are other factors at play besides the machinations of rich countries.
Those factors would be:
a. Corrupt rulers.
b. Locals who use their power to support economic policies which turn out to be counter-productive, whether the locals are the rulers or the public at large.
Some would say this is what happened in Mexico with their domestic oil company, Ghana under Nkrumah, Brazil's attempt at trade-substitution, the Sri Lankan energy crisis, Argentina under both Peron and the military junta that deposed him, etcetera.
I know this is a tangent, sorry.
Oh Houellebecq is very clear that they're partially doing it to themselves. Especially in the case of Cuba. Cubans didn't necessarily believe in Communism and the Revolution and all that, they just wanted to be not poor. So once Che left and Fidel was dead, they went right back to the same old capitalist system, just with different people on top.
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Not quite a tangent, if you think about it. The language of 'exploitation' is employed by failing nations to externalize their own responsibility for failure onto other countries that are willing to accept said responsibility, whether or not said country actually did anything. Bangladeshi intellectual employs the language of colonialism to blame English self-flagellants for their current woes, even though it is Pakistanis who engaged in * actual * genocide. Pakistanis are both too poor to be bilked for sympathy, and also more likely to declare that the job should be finished than issue even a cursory apology. By contrast local activists in the UK or US are eager to take up the Bangladeshi cause to castigate their proximate opponents.
Similarly, Nigerian or Congolese or Saudi governments engage in direct transactions with foreign entities to let their own economies and resources be exploited. Oil or minerals buried underground have no worth if they are not extracted, and waiting 50 years to MAYBE develop the necessary industry and intellectual capability to exploit said resources is itself a threat when neighboring countries would immediately attack if the land owners are too weak to protect themselves, like Guiana.
Most of third world exploitation by first world powers is not done by the first world, but by the rules or local power brokers who sell out their own people. The khaleeji nobility reap all the profits of their oil resources and spend said profits in Europe. Meanwhile South Korean chaebols who let their people be low wage factory slaves were strongarmed into domestic reinvestment for industrial development. Whenever a country cries against the evils of colonialism, it is useful to ask where the monies received in exchange for selling out their people actually went.
Yes, and the smarter third-world intellectuals explicitly call the first world out for being all too willing to take the money from third-world elites when it is complaining about third-world corruption at the same time.
Honestly, as a third worlder, I find these intellectuals to be disingenuous blowhards. Railing against the first world is easy, because there are sympathizers in the first world eager to take up any cause that undermines proximate enemies. Railing against their own elites is harder because of the obvious risk of bodily harm but also because the intellectuals want to be the elite and thus want to preserve the system for themselves to take over. The first world being heckled isn't even the same first world enabling the third world elites to stay in power; Shell pays off Bruneian royals to have first rights to extract resources, and both the Shell executives and Bruneian royals buy property in High Street with their share of the loot.
The other group that I find to be disingenuous blowhards are the first world anticorruption campaigners. Moralizing from afar is especially tedious for a recipient to hear, and the anticorruption westerners are usually the most clueless and sanctimonious dickheads to ever lecture us. We don't really like corruption here already, but some bespectacled nerdy woman lecturing us makes us reflexively band up to our kin. Better my neighbor reap the rewards than some NGO pretending to be useful.
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I can think of three bad options for Western countries:
Saying "you are corrupt, therefore we embargo you". This might work when the sale of natural resources was essential to prop up the regime, but in general it will at most result in the people being exploited by slightly poorer elites. (This is great if one follows the Copenhagen interpretation of ethics, though: profiting from child labor is wrong; who cares what happens to the kids without employment though.)
Invade with the goal of establishing a democracy. This one has a terrible track record.
Just shrug and buy their resources. This makes the West complicit in their exploitation.
Ideally, the West would keep trading, but also exert some pressure to make conditions for the workers less horrible. But telling the elites to industrialize so that their country will not stay poor might not be well received.
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I don't see how this is meaningfully different from any sexual/romantic relationship between a wealthy man and a poor woman which doesn't lead to marriage (or an otherwise committed relationship). What you're describing is a critique of the sexual revolution, not a critique of the relationship between the global north and the global south.
Why stop there? Even if it leads to marriage, the fact remains that the poorer woman was likely somewhat incentivized by material gains, so the pure act of sex was profaned by base worldly considerations.
The reality is that social status has been hot since our ancestors were living in the trees. Money is one of the ways we track social status. Over millions of years, the women who were selecting mates purely on physical or emotional grounds were surely selected against compared to women who were also considering the social status of their mates. Nor was it very different for men. A young woman wearing jewelry indicates "my family is rich (or at least of appropriate social standing) and would be a useful ally to you". The fact that such displays were (from what I can tell) common seems to indicate that they worked.
And while we are criticizing one of the core tenets of mate selection in social species, why stop there? Physical attractiveness might also have solid genetic reasons, but it is hardly less worldly.
If you would not fuck your True Love (TM) even if they were a worm, then you are profaning sex with your petty worldly concerns.
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As someone who admittedly did something similar to the described tourist at some point in my life, the biggest difference was that I am not a particularly rich or exceptionally handsome guy, but some of the girls I could date easily were definitely the top of their societies in these aspects. (Also I am not particularly “white” to a westerner but in the third world I am. Weird dualism of being Turkish..)
People are generally accepting of class differences and its consequences in their own societies to sometimes extreme degrees. But they tend to get angry and develop some class consciousness very quickly when it’s the foreigners doing the same and disrupting the existing cultural norms. Perhaps it’s because this also bothers local elites and they are the only people whose opinions actually really count.
The great genius of American world empire compared to the previous European attempts was to avoid appointing any visible American rulers to its colonies but instead co-opt the local elites to run their own countries like colonies and share the spoils through opaque financial means.
If I'm parsing this correctly, you mean that you're not particularly wealthy in your home country, but were unusually wealthy relative to the typical standard of wealth in the countries in which you were travelling. A sort of comparative advantage?
Right now I am rather wealthy in both aspects but this is a while ago and I was just a broke backpacker back then
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True, and maybe this is a weakness of my review: that I'm mixing the a critique of the sexual revolution with a critique of the exploitation of the global South. To steelman myself I think what I was probably going for her was a direct comparison with prostitution (why is this kind of relationship okay, whereas one more explicitly involving money is not).
To be fair, I do not think that the Tinder plus thing is very transactional.
As far as 'bagging a blanco' is concerned, if people having sex with you for bragging rights is exploitation, then the popular girls in college are exploiting their boyfriends pretty hard.
As far as dreams of a better passport are concerned, I think that most woman have a realistic estimate of the probability of a tinder hookup leading to marriage. It is not like they think the next guy will be the one to fall for them. They have sex because they want to have sex. They also know that there is some minimal chance that the relationship will turn into something more serious, and would prefer a relationship with someone with a western passport, so they decide to optimize and prefer white dudes. Solid decision theory on their part.
As an intuition pump, consider either a gay person or a straight woman engaging in the same behavior, using the fact that they are exotic and come from a desired culture to fuck their way through a country without paying for a bed to sleep in. Would these people also be vile exploiters?
Fiirst of all, yes.
Second, the whole argument should start with "is such a thing as exploitation at all?" A lot of the extreme rationalist arguments on this subject aren't really about sex, they're about the idea that exploitation isn't real unless you're forcing someone at gunpoint.
If you believe this, it's an extreme minority position among pretty much everyone that isn't a weird Internet guy, and really needs to be defended on its own terms, not taken for granted.
If you don't believe this, you should lay out exactly what you do think counts as exploitation before trying to argue that something can't be exploitation, especially based on a principle that you don't believe anyway.
So your position is that if two people have sex, but their idea of what a 99th percentile good outcome might be (say, "he falls in love with me and marries me, so that I can move to the West" vs "she brings another hot girl along and we have a threesome"), exploitation is taking place? By that test, every human interaction is exploitive. (How do we determine who is the one being exploited? Easy, whoever is higher on the woke totem pole.)
I mean, if we twisted that scenario a lot, saying that the guy is happily married in an open relationship, but falsely indicates a willingness to marry some woman in the third world so that he gets to fuck her, then sure, that would be exploitive.
I find your comment deeply unethical, but I won't substantiate why. Instead, I want you to either admit that you are a nihilist who does not believe unethical behavior is a useful category or otherwise lay out in detail a coherent theory of ethics and argue why your comment is in fact ethical. See what I did there?
It's not what I did.
"There is no such thing as ethical or unethical, as long as nobody is at gunpoint" is an extreme minority position. "There is such a thing as ethics" is not. The more extreme your position is, the clearer you need to be that you actually hold that position, and the more you need to explain it. This also applies if you are making arguments that can be easily and reasonably mistaken for that extreme minority position.
I haven't expressed such an extreme minority position myself, so that doesn't apply to me.
This sentence isn't parseable. If you mean what I think you're trying to say, the "exploiter" is entitled to make reasonable assumptions about the other person. If the "exploited" has unreasonable expectations, but hides them, the"exploiter" isn't exploiting. If the exploited has sufficiently unreasonable expectations, and the exploiter does or should know about them, yes, it's exploitation.
I think that is the crux of our disagreement.
In my model of the world, the woman on tinder likely has a realistic estimate of how rare it is that white men marry their tinder dates. After all, she is likely in contact with other women who are applying the same strategy, and knows how many Westerners they had sex with without getting married by any of them. She likely has some mid-status life and job in her home country (it is hard to invite Westerners over if you are living in a street or in a room with ten family members, after all). She enjoys being part of the hookup culture, and preferring white dudes is simply optimizing for the unlikely case that a hookup nets her a long term boyfriend (whom she would prefer to have a Western passport).
From what I can tell, in your model, the woman on tinder is desperately looking for a ticket to the west, in the same way that someone who sinks all their disposable income and then some into lottery tickets it trying to win the lottery. Like that gambler, she is totally deluded about her chances. She despises having meaningless sex, but carries on regardless, always convinced that the next date will finally be the one, and always being heartbroken when the guy leaves in the morning.
I think that we can both agree that having sex with someone one knows to be in the latter situation so one can save the costs for a hostel would be exploitative. I also maintain that having sex with the former woman is not exploitative.
The reason I consider the latter situation somewhat unlikely is that it basically is contrary to how women traditionally try to attract high quality mates, which is making a credible effort of appearing to be hard to get. If you are 25, on tinder and willing to fuck a man you have just met, that man can likely make an educated guess at the number of partners you had before him. While I am sure that there are men who tend to fall for woman who had tons of partners, I would assume that the average man would be slightly less likely to consider a long term relationship given that information. For example, getting hired by a Westerner as a tour guide for some token amount, being a bit flirty but not having sex with him in the first week, while also spending a lot of time with your mark seems a lot more likely to net you a boyfriend than just fucking your way through tinder. But what do I know.
Weird Internet guys drastically change their actions based on tiny optimizations. Nobody else does. That suggests she thinks the chance is unrealistically large.
I would agree that if your scenario is correct, it's not exploitation.
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I mean... we do kind of apply that framework to most, if not all interactions. A lot of things are left unspoken, and the person who breaks such unspoken conventions is treated as a transgressor of some sort, if he does not follow them.
I had the understanding that tinder is used by people looking for sex. But perhaps I am ignorant.
I would argue that it is indeed rare that the motives of people are 100% aligned. If person A hires person B as an uber driver, the shared baseline expectation is that B will transport A in a safe manner and A will pay the pre-agreed fee. If you ask A "what would be a 99th percentile outcome?", they might reply that to meet the trip would have to be quicker than expected, and B would delight them with good conversation. If you ask B, they might say if A gives them a 50% tip. While the 99th percentile outcomes might coincide for both participants of the transaction, it likely won't.
Or take a man who buys a woman a drink in a bar. Both of them have a prior probability estimate that this will not end with a "thanks for the drink" ten minutes later. In most cases, the estimates of the nonstandard outcomes (sex, marriage, becoming the next Bonnie & Clyde, whatever) of both participants will not coincide. However, this does not make their deal unfair. Even if the woman knows beforehand that the outcome the man is hoping for is not in the cards, she is under no obligation to give him a warning that she is not in the mood for sex / would not fuck him if he was the last man on earth / has vowed never to marry again / is strictly against gun violence. This does not make her an exploiter. The line I would draw is intentional deception.
Again, this is a matter of social conventions, which are of course somewhat arbitrary. I could imagine some weird culture where the buying of a drink is equivalent to marriage vows being exchanged, et cetera. Now, if the white backpacker is in a country where 80% of tinder dates lead to marriage, and knowingly flouts this convention by planning to go on tens of tinder dates without marrying anyone, then I would say that he is taking advantage of his partners.
Not as an absurd hypothetical as you might think. Back when I was on a local genuinely hook-up app, lots of girls used a variation of “yes, I'm using this app as Tinder, I'm actually looking for a long-term relationship” in their bio. (There is a tangent that could be made about how even 10% of female users openly admitting interest in sex for its own sake counts as a genuinely hook-up app.)
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As often, the "unspoken conventions" are either applied selectively (Hello Human Resources), or wholly made up after the fact and imposed by the higher-status party.
I'm sure that's what those Tinder gals that have absolutely no romantic or sexual intentions, and just want to go on a series of first dates where the guy pays for everything, tell themselves and others.
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Mail order brides and incels long predate the sexual revolution, though. There were men unable to get married(and resorting to prostitution- when they could afford it- for their entire lives). And brides shipped in were extremely common.
Right but unlike then we've made those things illegal or at the very least heavily looked down upon in the West. So of course people are going to look elsewhere for those kinds of things.
I don't think "looking down on guys who can't get a mate" is a new thing, or something we've developed recently in the West.
Prostitution has been varying degrees of frowned on/illegal in the West since Christianity took hold (and even absent Christianity, I think it's fairly rare that prostitution is considered an esteemed career, historically). It's not like everything was fine up until George W. Bush banned prostitution, or whatever. Historically there have always been cycles where it was tolerated and then cracked down on.
It's true that literal "mail order brides" are looked down on, but people still go overseas (or online) and find someone who meets their fancy and marry them, and that's not illegal and I don't think is generally looked down on at all, as long as it isn't framed as a transactional relationship.
Setting all the moral quibblings aside, the nuclear family is a very beneficial societal force, and prostitution a negative one, so it doesn't seem strange that people would promote the one thing and look down on the other.
While I'm sure there are plenty of people here who share this view, I'm not convinced that the existence of prostitution is inherently negative for society (the reality, of course, often can be). I think it's a good idea, for instance, for there to be an outlet for pent-up male sexual frustration that isn't rape/SA.
Fortunately we have invented video games which are infinitely superior to prostitution!
Glib answers aside, and conceding your point for the sake of argument - it seems to me that we would want to balance what you are saying against the demonstrated positive good of the monogamous model. Which I think suggests that having prostitution "normalized" is not the ideal. Again, agreeing with you for the sake of argument (I'm not sure that I do "for real" but I acknowledge that this argument is facially plausible and worth engaging with) it seems that the goal would be to have prostitution available enough to reduce violent crime, but suppressed or stigmatized enough to drive most people towards the nuclear family.
Which I think is historically a not unusual state of, ah, affairs.
Does anyone know what proportion of clients of prostitution are married vs single men (for any given time/place)? I feel like that's an important detail when discussing the impact of access to prostitutes on monogamy.
Not today, but off the top of my head I do know that the medieval church took for granted that urban men would not be virgins at marriage, although it deplored this, but considered it achievable to prevent fornication during courting/engagement. This points to most single men visiting prostitutes.
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