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This guy sounds like an absolute sperg, and actually discouraging this behavior is a sign of a functioning society.
"Hello, would you like to have sex with me?" is not an appropriate thing to say to a woman unless you are in a relationship with her. "Hello, would you like to have sex with me and then have me absolutely ignore you emotionally and treat you like free prostitute" doubly so.
Do not behave this way. "Friends with benefits" is not a thing for people who are asking reddit if they are autistic or not.
Maybe it should be. Right now, I feel like a lot women are under the impression that most of their male friends do not want to have sex with them. I don't know the exact numbers, and I can't think of a way to find out the exact numbers, but I'm pretty sure a lot of men would be happy to fuck their female friends if given a no-strings-attached opportunity. Especially the single males but even a decent amount of guys in a relationship. But I constantly see stories like this, where a woman finds out a man wants to have sex with her, and she's disgusted. But why is she surprised? I understand that she doesn't want the sexual attention, but that doesn't change the fact that it exists, and women should be aware of just how common it is. Just because being aware of true facts is good. Lots of woman are friends with lots of men who sexually desire them, but the men just keep it a secret- would it be that much of a disaster if it wasn't a secret, if women were aware their friends desired them?
Maybe our current equilibrium is better. Maybe putting immense pressure on men not to let women know that they're sexually desired is good and prevents women from being pressured into sex they don't want. Maybe this equilibrium has to exist otherwise women would only make friends with the portion of men who genuinely don't want to have sex with them, so other men need to fake not having desire to make female friends. But it still just leaves me scratching my head when I see the degree to which women are shocked and disgusted when they learn that they're desired, since it shows that their mental model of the world was pretty damn off.
Because the idea that a low status male thinks he has a chance with her implies she is low status.
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Society is built on certain salutary myths. In Plato's Republic, commoners are taught that citizens are brothers, and that everyone is born with the tools that indicate their role in society. These noble lies are foundational to the polis. In the organizational meme we call society, members must be brainwashed into believing (a) morality is for all citizens, not just your blood relatives, (b) some people must do unpleasant, dangerous, and degrading work for the benefit of the superstructure.
Of course, some societies require many more and more rigorously-indoctrinated lies than others. But for sure societies where women have a public and gender-integrated role require the polite fiction that males aren't lusting after them around the clock.
The problem is, when you enforce a social fiction for long enough, people start to believe it. This is okay and society functions as long as the noble lies pay their keep for the cost of people doing insane things because they believe lies. Children's crusades, flagellants, etc were the price medieval christendom paid for Catholic doctrine. Lysenkoism, collective farms, etc were the price the USSR paid for Leninism. Social friction and loneliness are part of the price we pay for modern gender ideology and a bigger workforce.
One noble lie paid its keep for a thousand years, the second for a few decades, the third, we'll see.
I would agree that (a) is a foundational lie of larger societies. (b), though, is not quite right. It’s not self-sacrifice, but self-interest, that shores up the superstructure.
Not that self-sacrifice isn’t valuable! It adds slack to the society by incentivizing the least fortunate (or competent) to hold firm instead of snapping. It’s just not sufficient. Christian ideals never eliminated theft and sloth among the worst-off. And when a society tries to rely on people to choose their own sacrifices, it works great until the first defection. Soviet communism was a series of increasingly desperate attempts to patch this prisoner’s dilemma. No, sacrificial collectivism loses out to personal incentives.
Women weren’t martyring themselves for God and country by having children. They were performing the most socially valuable role. When the bottleneck was individual brute strength, men had a dominant competitive advantage in farming and mining and war. Technological advances made women’s labor more valuable just as the cotton gin added value to slave labor. This is enough to explain the development of women’s rights without relying on attitudes about male lust.
The game has changed.
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The women already know they're desired. They are shocked and disgusted by the social faux pas of men confronting them with that desire when they aren't themselves interested.
Maybe. Whenever I hear stories from friends or online, it definitely seems a lot more that they didn't imagine that so many male friends wanted to fuck them. Pretty much every woman I know in real life or seen stories from have been shocked when they go on dating apps for the first time and realize they have hundreds or thousands of likes from men who want to fuck them.
I think this is the critical part. You are under a selection effect of "Anecdotes that women think it will be socially advantageous to publicize", so those are the ones you hear about. Other adjacent anecdotes, you don't.
One therefore ends up only hearing the scenarios that women want to humblebrag about. And she can humblebrag about "I'm so hot that X wanted to fuck me but I'm too good for him so I said "Eww, no, nerd" lol", but she can't humblebrag about "I'm so hot that X wanted to fuck me and so we fucked", because that would make her a slut.
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The difficulty with the current social mores is that you have to determine the truth values of contradicting advice, and act on it in a sociopathic manner:
-women are just like men, they deserve the same respect, plain speaking, no need to take kiddie-gloves for them (mainstream media feminism/women page articles)
-women are fragile animals full of emotion, that, similarly to children, you can trick into buying your products (the ads running on the side or intersped with the content of the aforementioned articles)
To date successfully, a man has to claim to genuinely believe the former, to the grave, while in practice behaving ruthlessly like the latter (marketing/ad professional), and make it seem effortless, as if there was never any contradiction to resolve.
Once this premise is begrudgingly somewhat internalized, the main obstacle becomes a combination of idealism/integrity and ego.
We want to believe Hollywood lies about the poor, unattractive nerd getting a love story with the girl next door, after he stopped believing in incel conspiracies or started showering or what not.
We want to believe that women will just give the average man a fair chance.
And more than anything we want to believe that we are great as we are and we shouldn't change anything to attract a woman.
I think the greatest tragedy in all of this is how much effort smart men end up deploying before they can secure one wife. For the 50-80% of men who cannot effortlessly attract women they are attracted to, securing a long-term partner becomes a long-term hobby, or a second career. How many of the nerds on this website have dating sites statistics memorized, like Scott Adams with FBI crime statistics?
But but but I just can't believe in God, it doesn't make sense, cries the atheist, before spending the next decade crying about the unfairness of the dating market generated by his elders' criminal apostasy.
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I think that there is nothing inappropriate about being forward, but being forward in a way that is geeky and needy is pretty unlikely to work. I speculate that this guy, if the story is real, probably suggested sex while projecting a logical vibe rather than a playful or seductive vibe and that he might have projected more of a "this is super important to me" energy rather than a "I can take it or leave it" energy. Such neediness can be creepy. I think that the fact that he was crushed by what happened lends credence to my theory. Every day loads of guys are even more forward than this guy without provoking the same kinds of negative reactions from women. And it is not because of the "be attractive / don't be unattractive" meme, although I am sure that plays a role, but because they are forward with a playful and seductive vibe rather than with a hyper-logical or needy vibe.
I am geeky and nerdy. This level of asking a woman to be a prostitute for you is not geeky or nerdy, it's sexual harassment.
Your premise assumes that the women won't enjoy having a FWB ever. This is true in this case, but it's not "prostitution" if both parties benefit from it.
But using this as the premise, "prostitution" as a concept itself is a fiction, yes?
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But you do know that FWB are a thing, right?
And there are men that successfully proposition women for sex point blank.
And the women not only accept, but feel flattered and tell their friends to make them jealous.
The rule is to be attractive, not unattractive.
Also the men that are successful at this are also probably aware whether or not the women are interested before asking, as they are aware of their sexual worth.
The issue is with generally unattractive men. Any kind of sexual approach will fail for them. They could spend 6 months courting the one lady and it would still fail if she decided in the first minute that she is not attracted to them.
Their failure is not for using the wrong magic words or behavior, but for improperly assessing their sexual attractiveness.
The issue when being an unattractive man is that you see other people successfully dating, so while interacting in a variety of ways with a variety of women, you misinterpret a variety of subtle rejections in different ways.
'she's not immediately wincing at me and politely smiles at me so she must like me'.
If a woman rejects the unattractive man in a polite manner, he gets to imagine that he did better than with the other woman that was having a bad day and rudely put him down for imagining he had a chance with her. 'This rejection went better, I should tweak what I did today and next time it will work.'
What they need to do is actually something along of working out a lot to appear more attractive, getting a lot of money and power to signal status, or fame, or just a lot of drugs and finding the women that are into that.
Or becoming a violent man that can signal spilling blood, that works too with some women (see the ones sending love letters to convicted serial killers).
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A friend with benefits is not a prostitute and I do not see how an invitation to be friends with benefits is sexual harassment unless the person doing it persists despite having been rebuffed.
Edit: Also, something that I just noticed. You might have misread me when I wrote "geeky and needy" and thought that I wrote "geeky and nerdy".
Even somebody who's looking for casual sex may still be insulted by this. That's why it's called a "friend" with benefits.
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Maybe not a "Prostitute" but certainly not someone you're looking at as proper relationship material, and to that end I think @firmamenti's point holds.
At the risk of sounding like a giga-autist, why does this standard seem to only apply to sex? If OP asked the girl to be a regular tennis partner, no one would accuse him of treating her like a "wall to bounce a ball off of." If he asked her to play video games with him, no one would accuse him of treating her like an "ally NPC."
I don't get why if a guy wants to have sex with a girl but doesn't want a relationship, it's taken to be demeaning and cold, while engaging in any other activity without some sort of grander emotional engagement is fine. Yes, I understand that sex and relationships are traditionally paired, but I also assumed that all but the most trad among us have moved on from that strict coupling in every possible circumstance, especially for college students who are still trying to figure out their dating and sex lives.
Well, from the person's report about what happened:
It could actually be inferred that she MIGHT possibly have been interested in this guy if he'd just...asked her to go on a date instead of proposing this no-strings sex arrangement.
As a woman, it would imply, to me, that 1.) the guy only wanted me for sex and didn't want to do romantic stuff because...? 2.) he's embarrassed to be seen with me or something?
It comes off like he regarded her as good enough for sex but not good enough to actually be his girlfriend. I'm not sure why the guy thought she'd be more amenable to banging him than to dating him.
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...and then maybe she talked to her friends about it, and her friends were all like "good god what a creep/asshole/jerk/whatever" at which point the school's gossip-network took care of the rest. Girls asking each other "Did you hear about so-and-so?"
Maybe this is another one of those inferential distance moments but to me your and @EdgeCityRed's take-aways seem like the most obvious interpretations.
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Exactly.
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It makes sense if promiscuous women are judged as lower value. Asking someone to be FWB means you thought there was a possibility she would say yes, which is essentially an accusation of being "easy". Having a reputation of being easy means lowering your chances of a long term relationship with desirable men and increasing your chances of getting propositioned by undesirable men. You would suffer all the downsides of having low social value. A harsh rejection would be necessary to clearly deny such an accusation.
I can see how someone learning about sex and relationships from reading feminist leaning sources would mistakenly think its okay to ask to be FWB. Feminists push for a world where women are not judged for their sexual choices. If there's nothing wrong with being easy then there's nothing wrong with just asking politely as long as you calmly accept a "no". In fact it would be asking for consent, which is the only acceptable thing to do before any kind of sexual escalation.
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It doesn't only apply to sex, sex just happens to be the biggest and most obvious example, and the answer is that "because relationships are, by nature, anti-inductive" No relationship is ever going to be about just what you want because the other party always gets a vote, and that vote might very well be "to hell with this".
You ask why it's considered cold and demeaning to want something from someone without making an offer in exchange and I reply that the answer is in the question.
I agree that relationships have an anti-inductive component (even a significant one), but:
The answer is... sex. The girl gets sex in exchange for sex. I think most people, or at least most men, see that as a fair trade as long as both parties are attracted to one another.
The obvious, but often unstated retort is that men and women value sex differently. Both enjoy it on a physical level, but women tend to attach more emotional significance to the act, while men generally take a more casual approach and seem to desire the purely physical aspect more.
Ok, that's fine. It is what it is. But to wrap back around to one of the overriding aspects of my original post and many of the comments... why is the female perspective on sex not only seen as the default, but the male perspective on sex is seen as immoral, at least to the Reddit crowd? Isn't that what happened to the OP? He made a (very clumsy) sexual offer based on the male perspective of sex, but the girl had the female perspective, and shamed him for his error.
Traditional Judeo-Christian morality had an answer to this discrepancy. But I don't think modern sexual mores do. The sensible approach to me is for people to be aware of both the male and female perspectives on sex, and to exercise empathy in negotiations over sex. The Redditor perspective (which I think you are sympathetic to based on what you're saying, feel free to correct me) is that the female perspective should be privileged, and the male perspective should be punished, even if it's touted innocently and ignorantly.
As much as I find much of the rhetoric surrounding the whole "red-pill" and "pick-up artist" community distasteful this is where knowing your market value comes in. What are you brining to the table that makes you think that sex with you is worth the trade?
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True, I guess as someone who is looking for casual sex rather than for a romantic relationship I can sometimes fail to realize that people who are looking for a romantic relationship might be offended when they fight out that someone else wants only casual sex from them. They might be offended even if that person does not want a romantic relationship with them not because they don't measure up to some preferences but simply because the person just does not want a romantic relationship with anyone at the moment.
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