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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 20, 2023

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I have never encountered a truly gorgeous, promiscuous woman in my social class who has had problems finding a ‘high value man’ (ie. handsome, outgoing, masculine, successful, whatever) to marry.

I think you are onto something. The original article makes it clear, that not her bodycount is the problem, but her self-undermining behaviour and her unability of maintaining a relationship (and probably her taste in men).

I never encountered a counter example where a man rejected a woman because of that. If it is truly an effect felt by women, instead of just being an assumption, maybe it is simply a selection effect? Promisciuous woman are meeting/are interested promisciuous men, so if they want to settle down the try to do it with someone who is less interested in that, but the problem is not out of slut-shamingness?

In a certain sense, if a guy feels that he was the one to actually tame the wild slut and was awesome enough to get her to settle, he can get extra validation from that. "She has all those men to compare me to and chose me as the best."

Problem that arises, at least in my opinion, is if she recounts all the wild stories and depraved sexual acts she engaged in with those previous men... and yet refuses to give the same to the current man because she's "not that person anymore." Now you've got the eternal frustration of knowing that some other guy has gotten your wife to do things she won't do for you, and the nagging doubt that she's denying things to you on purpose despite clearly being willing to do them in the abstract.

So it might be less about slut-shaming and more like shaming someone who sluts it up EXCEPT when it comes to the guy that actually commits. Its not that she's obligated to keep doing promiscuous and sexually adventurous things to keep the current guy happy, but there's no getting rid of the history of doing said things, and so the current guy can't help but be aware of what he 'missed out' on.

If he was also sexually adventurous in his younger years, maybe he has his own history he's bringing in and thus doesn't mind having a more mundane yet intimate sexual partnership because he can say "been there, done that" to the kinkier stuff. The current stats, however, suggest that women are getting more sex in their twenties than men are.

In a broader sense, I think females intentionally or not tend to use their early twenties to go out and experiment and be 'wild', and there are likewise guys (usually older) who know this and basically play around with women going through this phase, string them along for possibly years, then dump her when she hits her mid twenties. So you've got guys who get to spend their time having fun and 'spoiling' young ladies then passing them off, somewhat devalued, to other males who are now expected to accept these womens' past AND put up with the new, less slutty version of her who doesn't want to do all the weird stuff in bed that she previously sought out.

Sadly Porn discusses this phenomenon in excruciating detail.

What was his main take-away?

Replying to you again, I just stumbled across Rob Henderson's review of Sadly, Porn this afternoon and he presents its theses in a more digestible fashion than does the book itself:

The book makes a distinction between sexualized fantasy versus mundane reality by invoking two archetypes: the econ major and the sorority girl. Of course, an econ major can be in a sorority. But the book states “She can only be a fantasy if she stops being an econ major” and instead becomes a sorority girl. And if you do fulfill your fantasy by being with a sorority girl, and eventually marry her, the excitement wanes as you discover she is just an econ major. Even if she really is/was a sorority girl. Others see her as a sorority girl, they see an idealized image of her. They don’t see the mundane reality that you see, of her as an econ major. Thus, you feel deprived that only others get access to this idealized fantasy version of her.

A guy sees a woman and projects all these ideas and fantasies and preconceived notions of who she is. Then they sleep together, and he learns more about her. He no longer sees her in the way he did when they first met. But he realizes others see her that way. The book states, “It’s bad enough he can’t get his fantasy from the woman he loves, but worse is that, logically, everyone else can get it from her except you.” He sees her as the proverbial “econ major” but feels deprived because other see her as a “sorority girl.” Teach writes, “Even if your wish for a sorority girl is fulfilled she will quickly become an econ major—while (you perceive) she remains a sorority girl to everyone else.”

Teach says this also explains why some men react with fury upon hearing about their partner’s previous sexual experiences with other men:

“Her past always sounds more sexual not because she is now less sexual, but because he doesn't hear the past as continuity, the stories of the past are about someone else, before he turned her into an econ major and later a wife. The underlying problem that can't be solved is that therefore the real her, had she been left to her own desires, was the one in the past. That he has no access to, that only everyone else does.”

Fucked if I know.

If I was to hazard a guess, I'd say that he thinks men that get hung up on what the sex lives of their girlfriends/wives were like before the relationship started are pathetic, narcissistic and contemptible, and that hang-ups of this type are at the root of all kinds of modern relationship problems like porn addiction, dead bedrooms, cuckolding fantasies and infidelity.

So he advocates assenting to sin by making men culpable to their reflexive (if not spiritually informed) disdain for promiscuity in their would-be wives. He’s insightful but I’ll reject this out of hand. I might even risk saying it smacks of therapeutic self-cope like that of the man who directed Clerks with the girlfriend subplot.

I'll be frank with you: I found a lot of The Last Psychiatrist's posts almost uncomfortably insightful, but throughout Sadly, Porn I often felt like he was writing to himself as much as to the reader in his head for whom he had so much contempt and disdain.

I'm going to be a boring fence-sitter and admit that I think men who only want to date innocent pure virgins are kind of lame, but also that it's not completely unreasonable for a man's pride to feel a little wounded if his wife/girlfriend was perfectly willing to perform [SEX ACT] with previous partners but not with him.

Ironically, I think most sex-positive feminists would agree with the last line of your comment, especially if there's been no conversaion about said sex act.

I think a lot of it is low self esteem, likely driven by an absent/weak/abusive father. Men in the baby boomer generation seem to have shit the bed generally on parenting well - women too of course but I think the male side gets discussed less.

All of the sudden after WW2 most of the masculine men died or had their mental stability shattered. We kind of lost the male role model in western society and we haven’t been able to have a positive view of masculinity since. Fathers are lost, and their children follow them into the darkness.