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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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