Slut-onomics: How the scarcity of sluts tears the social fabric apart
woodfromeden.substack.com
woodfromeden.substack.com
> I don't say slutshaming was good - I say that when it comes to intra-male relationships, the current situation might be even worse. During the times of slutshaming, there were two kinds of women: Good ones and bad ones. Post-slutshaming there is only one kind of woman, graded on a scale from one to ten in physical and social attractiveness. Competition for the tens is bitter.
Read this from the perspective of a woman, but especially a slut. You have invented a whole philosophy based on the idea that women have some sort of numerical rating, and that sex is some kind of competition. Presumably you're "losing" unless you're having sex with a "10".
Women often have impossible beauty standards marketed towards them, with the intent of making us feel bad so we spend money on self-improvement. This is the masculine equivalent. Nothing is tearing the "social fabric", you're tearing at yourself.
They still seek answers, in the midst of their social inadequacy the only answers they can find is through other similarly frustrated men, and so they start spiraling into made up reasons or logic in how sexual and emotional attraction work... Instead of experience through living, through feeling their ways into this world they attempt to intellectualise it (in big quotes because it's pure stupidity), not looking into themselves, their relationships and bit by bit fixing their issues causing the loneliness, they want a framework, a rulebook, an easy way out.
It's just... Sad.
A lot of dating advice for men is women trying to explain how they feel about people who are larger, stronger, and think that they have some sort of right to sex.
So yeah, people treat dating like a meat market. It's unfortunate, and it is exacerbated by cultural trends, but I generally think it is unavoidable for people who live in an environment with a lot of other people they're not immediately familiar with, which is a majority of us.
Any given day, hey, maybe I feel like being treated like a piece of meat, but thinking I owe you sex in exchange for your being "nice" or "cheerful" is dangerous.
The problem is already there, believing that there are things to cross off on a to-do list and will generally attract girls, as if they were a homogeneous group that shares a common rulebook to follow.
The only rule to follow is: treat people as people, as human beings, be respectful, be genuine and honest. That's the only foundation to have (even for friendships amongst men), from there one needs to figure out how to be themselves, and that's the whole issue, this is not easy, it doesn't come with a step-by-step framework, telling someone "just be yourself" is the most vague guidance to get, you can only know how to do it after you've done it, after you've found yourself and are comfortable being it.
These men are trying to shortcut this to get sex, that's all to it, instead of doing the work which takes time and effort, they try these little rules told by other men about what women want: you need to have a good job/salary, you need to dress like X or Y, you should be nice, etc., but they follow these with the expectation of having sex, and get frustrated when they feel they "followed all the rules" and get nothing in return.
Does it suck to learn who you are, how to present that to someone you are attracted while being respectful but sexy at the same time? Yes, it does suck, it takes time, it takes effort, it requires knowledge of yourself, but if you want a fulfilling relationship, even if just sexual, you kinda need this wisdom to find someone.
There are no shortcuts, all the shortcuts will lead to dissatisfaction at some point.
Unfortunately, like much wisdom, it's not something someone can pass down to you, you can hear all of that and still it will take tons of experience to actually ingrain that wisdom, desperately lonely men trying the rulebook do not have the patience to gain that experience and just keep bumbling around, becoming angrier in the process, which takes them further away from their goal of finding emotional/sexual connection.
In the end they blame women, because they think "I've done everything right", and that's the trap: thinking you followed the "right" rules and still got nothing, so there's nothing wrong with them but with others.
At the end of the day, those people want to have an understanding of what is going on and reassuring that they are not a failure compared to their ancestors, but a "work-in-progress", especially when nobody actually encourages, pushes them on or provides guidance. Of course, one must still walk the journey, but you're not exactly helping.
I don't know where you are in life, but I hope you're in a good position, having achieved your goals. The problem is that you don't really want to understand the hardships that people are going through, even if you gone through them yourself at some point. I know I did become less empathetic to people until I got back into the same shoes.
Another problem is that no one really offers a good advice. "No more Mr.Nice guy" is a book that attempts to read too much into people's motivation and seems to see everyone as an entitled narcissist. The only good thing that came out of it is some small guidelines in which direction to move and some encouragement along the way. But I still hate the fact that it pushed me into becoming less kind and more cynical towards the others, something that I'm trying to fix in myself.
Anyhow, if the solution to the problem was easy, you'd expect that the world would have corrected itself. Maybe there is some underlying situation going on, that we are conveniently oblivious to?
The problem is that they're trying to get things that "work". The thing they need to do is to throw all of that out, and to want to be with women because they like women. If the women themselves are secondary to their goal, then the women are not going to be very interested in it.
That’s the nature of the world today. Everything is quantified, everything is transactional. It’s not particularly true of women.
> and that sex is some kind of competition
I find the reduction of human sexuality to mere biological competition distasteful, but there’s no denying that it is competitive.
> Women often have impossible beauty standards marketed towards them, with the intent of making us feel bad so we spend money on self-improvement. This is the masculine equivalent. Nothing is tearing the "social fabric", you're tearing at yourself.
Note the difference in passivity with which you describe women and men. This is done to women, whereas men do it to themselves.
There are extreme, systemic problems affecting both, which is exactly what tearing the social fabric describes.
The active vs passive voice is depicting the angst as a choice, a reaction which is under voluntary control. No one is required or forced to feel social distress, certainly not by advertising or philosophy.
Systemic problems assuredly exist, but this article sheds no light on them.
I’m trying to take this in good faith, but I’m struggling, and it feels like a convenient way to divert this conversation into meaningless hair-splitting about whether by biology you mean the science itself or the processes biologists study, and whether by goal you mean an consciously intended outcome or a mechanistic one. Neither of which topics has any real bearing on what I said.
> Reproduction as distinct from sex might be a safer argument, but reducing sex to reproduction is inapt, particularly in a discussion of human social behavior.
It’s impossible to disentangle reproduction from sexual behavior, and, again, I’m having trouble taking this in good faith.
It’s more troubling since I specifically voiced my distaste for the reduction of sexuality to mere biological processes. I’m in the middle ground between the extremes of biological essentialism and positions like your own that biology has no meaningful relation to human sexuality.
> The active vs passive voice is depicting the angst as a choice, a reaction which is under voluntary control. No one is required or forced to feel social distress, certainly not by advertising or philosophy.
This, again, seems to be a very extreme and basically religious position to take. People are affected, whether they intend to be or not, by those around them. None of us is a being of pure reason divorced from the world around us, or anything even close to it. We can’t choose to be unaffected by our social environment any more than we can choose to be unaffected by our physical one.
Talking about goals is a way of suggesting that sex isn't competitive. It is simply an act, with what meaning humans impart.
> It’s impossible to disentangle reproduction from sexual behavior
Gay people beg to differ.
I'm not going to engage in generalities about how people affect each other; the subject at hand was a philosophy that encourages people to feel badly about themselves if they're not having sex with a "10", with an analogy to beauty product advertising. The claim was that subscribing to that philosophy was a choice. Happy to hear your thoughts regarding that.
As do straight people. Most straight people, most of the time, take considerable pains to avoid reproduction.
Evolutionary psychology often proposes badly oversimplified models, and people draw invalid conclusions, even in non-human animals. But even more importantly, human conscious goals are categorically different from "every action is a selfish gene making a choice".
There may be a number of bad takes in the article, but this one isn't it. Sex is undeniably a competition in every society, has been and will be throughout history. This is obviously from a male perspective. Men and women don't compete for the same things.
To deny that is a delusion in its own category of absurdity.
> Women often have impossible beauty standards marketed towards them
Not anymore, really. That was the trend in the 90s. You're about 30 years late. None of the women I regularly speak to has expressed any kind of pressure to conform to these standards.
I'll never understand why some people will promote being so "free" that you don't even need to bother with marriage, kids, and whatever else seems antiquated, then those same people will whine about being celibate in between their frustrated, unrealized porn fantasies.
Men, if you want to have sex – and a lot of it – here's the formula: get married, hold down a steady job, and treat your wife well.
[1]: https://www.webmd.com/sex-relationships/what-to-know-how-oft...
I will also say, through lots of communication our sex is light years better now at 20 years of marriage than when we were first married. Our emotional connection is incredibly strong, and we have 20 years of communication to make the physical sex better as well. I am much happier sexually in my 40s with my committed spouse than I was as a teenager having sex (before I was religious) with different partners (the "variety" that the article mentions). Don't lose hope people. You can make a great life after marriage that is deep and rewarding sexually. Marriage can be wonderful if you value the right things in a partner and find that partner.
Sad to say, this is probably the hardest part for the majority of men who are like, "people will promote being so "free" that you don't even need to bother with marriage, kids, and whatever else"
I'll probably get downvoted for having this opinion, but that's been my anecdata of one.
I can see how my tongue-in-cheek reply can be taken as man-bashing though.
But in general, yeah, this is good advice (for both partners, of any gender.) As my grandfather-in-law said, "Happy wife, happy life."
Congratulations, sample size of 1.
That’s unrealistic, and your religious indoctrination shows in your other posts. People hook up since teenage years. It’s normal.
I quote:
It somehow seems less impressive that a small subset of men take most of the market, when that market mostly consists of a somewhat similar small subset of women. A minority of men and a minority of women are having fun (?) with each other while most people of both sexes are either living in traditional couples or standing beside the whole spectacle without even participating.
I’ve also questioned the metrics that say only a few men have all the women. It turns out a few men have sex with a few women, just lots of it.
Question: Why don't women that sleep around a lot sleep with me.
Answer: Because they know you can't handle it.
It's so extraordinarily more complex than that.
Men are not slavish automatons who only desire sex. We're complex organisms with multiple (sometimes conflicting) desires - love, companionship, meaning, importance, sex etc... sex is on that list, but its priority is very different for different men.
It's not abnormal for a man to evaluate a woman who appears to only offer sex and decide "nah, not worth it - not what I'm looking for". This may have absolutely nothing to do with how many partners she's had (or has) - and may have a lot more to do with a rational risk/reward analysis based upon whether she brings more than just sex to the table.
The term "incel" is derogatory and doesn't take the above into account. There's a lot of nuance. Involuntarily celibate? What does that even mean?
Does it mean "I would have sex with any female, under any circumstance, regardless of her character and attractiveness, but I am unable to"?
Or does it mean "I evaluate the whole person, and I haven't found anyone who's both interested in me and meets my criteria, but if I could I would"?
And at what point does the person who feels the latter decide to become voluntarily celebate because the whole thing is just too much of a hassle, too painful, and there's no upside? A phenomena that's rising, by all accounts, in both men and women.
I thought the article was interesting, but I'm personally more interested in discussions with a broader scope and more nuance.
Men and women have been rejecting each other for sexual and other liaisons at least as long as there is been recorded history.
EDIT:
Top comment as of my writing:
I mean, the obvious solution is superhuman sexbots, right? People aren’t breeding anyways, they don’t really seem to like each other much for relationships qua relationships given “divorces and mutually unhappy marriage” rates, at least when given options and interesting Western lives.
My take on the divorce rate, is that people no longer know how to talk to each other in the context of a relationship. Instead of actually substantively talking to each other, so many accept a substitute. By this, I mean shutting down one's partner or letting one's self be shut down. This is also connected to an erosion in society's teaching people about accountability.
My partner and I are accountable to each other, and we know how to actually talk about everything, including uncomfortable things. From what I see, we are an uncommon case.
Divorce rates spiked after it became easier to get one through no-fault divorce, and slowly reduced from there.
Now, we need to consider the difference between that and cohabiting couples, but the other piece is that there were a lot of unhappy marriages that had no escape until no-fault divorce. They weren't better about talking about everything, but they were even worse at bucking societal expectation.
No it doesn't so much bearing. I was talking about the situation with communications in relationships in the present day, not back in the 80's.
The 'problem' is that 99% of men need to win a huge payday both to feel in the mood to get themselves a prostitute (and have sex with someone who is undoubtly smoking hot but that you have not seen in person not even once before and you won't see her not see anymore after doing the dirty) and also let's face it to afford the hourly rates.