That solution (deeper relationships before sex) used to be imposed by religious/social norms that cast deep shade on anything but long-term monogamy. But, oops! we all decided that was bad.
Can you please explain what you mean about socially and legally enforced monogamy being replaced by mandatory gender anarchy?
The family is the best group by which we organize society and proven by history across the ages. Name me one society/people in all of history that existed that was not based on the family and successfully propagated itself? Blood is thicker than water and no chosen family will ever replicate the family.
I feel for people who have toxic, broken, unsupporting or unloving families feel but the answer is not to replace the family, but repair it.
Perhaps you mistyped. Women have a million eggs at birth. We lose an egg when we ovulate every month, and we ovulate about 300–400 times during our lifetime (says google).
Your overall point is correct—men have way more sperm than women have eggs—but your understanding of women's bodies is wrong. Just google it or ask your wife.
We need models other than "one night stand without knowing the other person's last name" and "lifelong commitment or at least the belief that you're pursuing it together."
It’s not my scene, but I think the polyamorous movement is maybe starting to provide this kind of model. I think the culture of any poly dating scene will vary from place to place, but people with the maturity for it do seem to end up with something pleasant and casual - and I think that often comes with mutual acknowledgment at the outset that you can name and honor your connection without promising a certain commitment.
I used to think less of it, until I met more people doing it well out of college. The combination of having left behind adolescent horniness, plus having some relationship experience and attendant understanding of what they wanted emotionally and sexually, makes it a more mature world.
But it’s true, even the people in the scene will complain about those in the community who get into it because they’re not mature enough to hold down a “real” relationship and decide to blame it on oppressive monogamy rather than their own issues with communication/commitment.
This is the kind of trend that attracts morons. For sure there are some people who find themselves in unusual circumstances, are legitimately in touch with their feelings, and are capable of making something less conventional work...but they're drowned out by delusional opportunists. More often than not, denial is so deep, that the deluded can't self-identity. So, they make their arguments in good faith, they're just wrong.
I think of it this way: Even if there’s a higher proportion of delusional opportunists (and of course you’re more likely to run into them if you’re actively dating a lot of people in one social group), it’s also a subculture with built-in norms around communicating the end of your involvement with someone when it isn’t working out. Open communication is prized in that community, sometimes to a fault.
I’m not saying it’s a great experience for everybody, and I know there are some pretty crappy iterations of it that don’t work out for everyone involved. But, like... monogamous heterosexuality also has some crappy iterations that lead to bad experiences. I don’t argue that polyamory is a *better* model for relationships (as many of its adherents do), just that it’s an example of a model that, when functional, doesn’t adhere to the one night stand/marriage pipeline approach that Freddie describes.
Why and who does this help? Throughout my 20s, 30s and now my 40s, almost all of the women I've known (mostly college educated and non-ethnic) want a commitment and are having difficulty finding it. Men want no strings attached sex or a casual relationship without marriage as the focus. The ethnics and religious tend to have less of this problem. You want more friends with benefits scenarios. It's terrible for women.
Both paradigms, the previous and the current, were flawed because they ignored the needs and desires of women in different ways.
Women are autonomous human beings who want to be treated that way. We want a voice in politics, control over our own money, equal access to careers in the wider world (although we often want to approach careers differently), and generally to be treated as intelligent human beings with our own thoughts, feelings, desires, and needs, entirely independent from and sometimes very different from men’s. That includes the ability to choose whether or not to enter into a relationship, rather than having it selected for us as a default.
Wanting to get out from under all of that has *absolutely nothing to do* with supporting the kind of sexual culture we see today.
It’s perfectly internally consistent to think that women needed (and continue to need!) liberation from the various forces in society that treat us as fully autonomous only insofar as we are made identical to men—and also to think that the current sexual climate is in fact one of those toxic structures.
(Some) earlier feminists very understandably wanted to get rid of many of the rules around sex and sexuality. I think they were right to want to free women to choose, but wrong to want to throw out the rules entirely, largely because I think they misjudged the way everything would play out from there (I have lots of thoughts on why they misjudged this, but putting all of that aside).
I think a sexual ethic centered on women’s needs and desires would involve a culture where emotionally intimate relationships are the default setting in which sex occurs; where men meet extreme social stigma if they are not entirely willing to father any resulting child; where everyone enters sex with the understanding that (short of, perhaps, a total hysterectomy) there is no sense in which sex can be entirely casual for women in the way it can be for men, and that therefore most women need a fair amount more care, attention, and trust in a sexual relationship; and where, generally, neither gender is treated as an object to be pursued, rejected, and then discarded at the pleasure of their partner.
Most of my lifetime friends are women that I have had sex with at one point or another. I am married and monogamous at the moment so the only person I am having sex with is my wife.
But my best friend "A" is someone I have dated on and off for at least 30 years now. I think this relationship is good for both of us. The sex is good and so is the friendship, though I have to admit she broke my heart a couple of times before I realized that she wasn't going to marry me.
Last week I went and stayed at a different friends house far away. The woman is someone else that I used to date and we have stayed close friends with. She is married now and so am I and we have stayed close enough to stay at each others' homes.
So these relationships help both of us or we wouldn't have extended them beyond our breakups. I have a couple more like this. Good thing my wife is not the jealous type. I would never date or marry someone who expected me cut myself off from my friends.
I have similarly kept in touch with the men who I was close to that I dated, though there is really only one of them.
I guess I go from friends, to friends with benefits, to friends with no benefits.
Why is "friends with benefits" terrible for women? I am really curious why you think so and I mean that in the most respectful way possible.
I will say that when I was younger, when I wanted to date casually and and was up front about that and really had no problem finding them, at least after I had completed my stint in the military. I am (was?) reasonably good looking, smart, ambitious, educated and generally a good catch, except for my extremely poor family background. I think I unintentionally broke a few hearts, but also had my heart broken a few times too.
When I was in my early thirties I wanted to settle down and get married and it was no problem finding women who wanted to though. That was true.
My personal situation is unusual in that I tended to hang around in politically radical, sex positive communities and I am bisexual. Frida Kahlo and Emma Goldman are my heros. My personal life probably doesn't extend generally to other people. But I secretly think that is true for everyone. We all have unique existences.
Women don't get any enjoyment from casual sex? As far as I can tell, women get as much physical pleasure from sex as men do, perhaps even a bit more so. Do you think that sex is not pleasurable for women?
I understand your concern about pregnancy. Obviously unprotected sex is dangerous to women but birth control used property can reduce that risk to less than 0.01% with a vasectomy. Other forms of birth control are not as effective but used properly they can reduce the risk to a very small amount. Add in Plan B and abortion and I don't think that any women have children unwillingly. Please correct me if you think otherwise.
Connection in depth is the best sex and the only kind I would recommend these days, though obviously people should be free to do anything that they want with their bodies.
You state that my comment lacks anything about the friendship, only the benefits, but I mentioned numerous lifelong friendships that have been consummated at one point or another. Are you sure you aren't commenting on some other post?
I really agree with this. As usual, we dealt with a very real problem (workplace harassment) by swinging so far in the opposite direction that we’ve made mutual attraction between people that spend most of their waking time together something aberrant.
It's like when an office has that one slob who leaves crumbs all over the place and instead of being adults and talking to him, they issue an all employee email banning eating at desks.
In today's insane corporate policies, asking a coworker out *a single time* could be construed as harassment. Technically, in some of these policies, someone else overhearing such a conversation is obligated to report it. It's a paralyzing environment...or would be if it were followed "faithfully."
Pathologizing is a pretty strong word. I have no problem with people dating from work who don't work on the same team together, but when they do, when things end, one of those two people will likely want (or need) to leave. I certainly don't think it needs to be any kind of a rule, but I think it's unwise in most cases. As with all things, individuals and workplaces vary and it may work quite well in some contexts.
Yeah, I mean certainly there can be externalities. There's no free lunch. But in general I'd argue it's a net positive to have more permissive workplaces.
The question is not whether we've pathologized workplace romance (IDK I see it in this Netflix show I watch that's considered very progressive). The question is whether anyone still works in gender/sex-integrated workplaces, or even integrated lines of work.
I'm "interdisciplinary" so I can commute between one building, almost entirely filled with men, to another, almost entirely filled with women.
Interesting. I don't mean to say my workplace is de jure segregated, only de facto. There are few enough women in Building A versus few enough men in Building B that if you mixed the two you'd have something more like an even, or at least random, proportion of genders. Dating solely within Building A or Building B simply doesn't offer very inviting prospects for the majority gender.
Liberal arts colleges are not typically 50/50; in 2008 it was more like 46% male / 54% female. Interestingly, that's a broad average; the reality is that state to state ratios vary fairly considerably.
so well said. the piece does seem to be celebrating casual sex a bit, but honestly, the hookup scene seems less about fulfilling even physical desires—certainly not finding intimacy—but more about receiving cheap validation from strangers. sure, women do desire sex, but usually not the variety they're finding out there. still, they play along and put up with it, and the real question no one is asking them is... why?
i agree! but i think a lot of women also fall into the trap of seeing sex (and the pursuit by men) as a form of validation. they enjoy playing the game, holding the power, and ultimately being treated as a 'prize' to be won. there's dysfunction on both sides.
There's no way around sex being validating, especially when you're young.
For men, it means that you've been chosen over competitors. For women, the attention makes you feel desired and important.
The only reliable way to progress beyond that is to build a monogamous relationship which an increasing proportion of emotionally stunted adults don't seem to be able to do.
exactly. i guess i just wonder if they aren't able to make the conversion in adulthood as readily because they've lost the interpersonal skills, the positive role models/social validation for doing so, or because they're getting something more satisfying to them than actual intimacy (e.g. a dopamine hit of a real-life 'like'). i'm beginning to think maybe we're trapped in a feedback loop of shallow, transactional relationships for eternity.
Yeah I don't know what it is and I might be too old to understand it.
By my mid to late 20s I had figured out (at least in principle) that whatever validation you get from sex is transient and that a relationship can start with chemistry but you need to build on it from there.
I guess it is possible to stay in these loops long enough to miss key developmental points.
i think real-life options are incredibly limited for a lot of people, especially if you live in a suburban or rural area, work in an unusual field where you're unlikely to meet a partner in the workplace or out socially, all your friends are married/you're recently divorced, you recently moved, etc. and i think some people like the idea of not leaving their lifelong relationship up to a random chance encounter in a bar.
when i was younger, i used to work on farms in an industry where 90% of the men were gay (not an exaggeration). these were rural-ish areas with literally no dating prospects. the handful of straight men were all married/players and worse. i would have loved having online dating back then.
i've tried it since and found it...meh. the idea of being able to shop a catalog of potential matches with exactly the criteria you'd ideally desire in a mate already preselected seems like the perfect solution to finding compatibility. except, of course, people are more complex than that. sometimes the people i think are incompatible with me are the ones i enjoy spending time with the most. also, it becomes creepy searching for other humans like items online you'd like to order for sex--and knowing they're shopping you. it weirded me out after a while. but that could just be me.
The world of finding partners is complex and you make many good points and show the difficulties faced through different situations. I've always worked at universities where there have been a lot of people of a variety of ages and stages of life. Besides the faculty there are tech people and builders who maintain the campus. Away from a situation like this I would join a group of some sort that brings together people of different types. Because I am library-focused I see the different groups that meet at libraries and they are from all over--food security, horticulture, book discussion groups, tax assistance, animal rescue, radio enthusiasts. Maybe you won't meet a person there but they might have a friend or cousin. This is real-life, not online.
those are great suggestions. i'm usually too busy and not generally much of a joiner, but i've met a diverse group of people by taking different courses--then covid happened. oh well, there's always tomorrow... ;-)
oh, i guess i made that sound more exotic than it is ;-) i'm referring to horse farms and the world of english equestrian sports. the female to male ratio is at least double, possible more, and the men who do participate are disproportionately gay, at least in the community i was part of. the few straight men often take advantage of their scarcity with predictable results. it's also a really weird scene (imagine 'tiger king' with horses) with a lot of big egos, abused animals, and a notorious history of sexual misconduct (think olympic gymnastics coaches with zero oversight or accountability.) a very sketchy place for young people to navigate. i saw a lot of bad choices made. i won't even mention what happens to the horses behind the scenes...
There's basically no support for single people who are trying to date anymore. Families, friend groups and even churches and have just completely stopped setting up single people they know. It's really odd. I also think it hurts that there's so much confusion and vagueness about dating lately--unless you meet on an app, if a single person asks another single person out for drinks or coffee, they almost never specify that it's a date. Which in some ways might make it lower stakes, but it's just confusing and weird.
I think it would be extremely interesting to review some statistics on how many women own vibrators these days. The "sex is often disappointing" angle is absolutely true, especially in a casual context (it often takes some time to get to know what a woman likes), so perhaps frequency of masturbation in women might be a more accurate measure of desire.
As in pretty much all the serious fights I have ever gotten into in my life were the result of egos flaring up and people refusing to back down. I suspect testosterone is correlated.
That's what I was trying to get at in my comment. Whenever I started thinking the article had a point about how to get women, the thought 'but the guy in it only wants sex' would pop up as a reason why I would never under any circumstances want to be involved with him. Not because I want to marry every guy who comes on to me, or any guy, but because I don't want to be treated as an item for somebody else's sexual gratification.
Oh I like this a lot! I think there’s a lot of truth to this: if women are constantly (aggressively) pursued, they’ll become fearful and avoidant, and if men are constantly exhorted to pursue, they’ll become aggressive and bombastic. Which in turn reinforces the preexisting stereotypes of who does and doesn’t enjoy sex—a vicious cycle as opposed to the virtuous one Freddie talks about above.
When I was a teenage girl, my friends and I weren’t having sex and we were all boy-crazy and sex-obsessed. When we went to college and having sex with men became an actual possibility, we quickly realized that we couldn’t be totally transparent about our baseline sexual interest at the risk of inviting constant harassment, assault or worse. Men don’t always realize how awful it can feel—even if you’re horny!—to cope with a constant barrage of aggressive, often angry sexual attention.
I can't help but feel that some of this is just American culture. Relentlessly pursuing somebody with the intention of getting laid is something that exists.
But courtship in the romantic sense is something that existed in the past. If it's been deemphasized and lost that's really too bad because that little dance is one of the sweetest things that life can offer.
The problem with this is that the empirical reality is the opposite.
20 (or even 10) years ago men were more aggressive and there were more people having sex. Interactions weren't mediated to the same degree by apps and we didn't have an HR bureaucracy to manage interactions at work or school.
In general, women seemed more comfortable managing attention (wanted and unwanted) and some (if not most women) wanted to be pursued by the those they were interested in rather than some formal process of demonstrated mutual interest.
At the end of the day I don't think these psychological tableaux hold. The best thing is to have men and women go through these interactions iteratively until they develop the appropriate social skills to make things work. This will inevitability be preceded by awkwardness. But there's no way around it.
But how? This is like woke sex politics 101. And I don't mean any negative judgement by that - on this issue the standard woke answer is great. The American Pie model of heterosexual relationships is factually wrong, bad dating advice, and harmful for everyone, particularly women. I'm sure there are some deeper wrinkles where I, or you, would disagree with the modern mainstream social justice view on sex and relationships, but I don't see any of them on display here. This is one issue where you're lock-step with the cool herd; I genuinely don't see how this would get a rise out of the usual suspects.
I hope that doesn’t happen, because I think this is very reasonable and helpful. If it does get mocked or misrepresented, that would seem consistent with your dispiriting role as the guy who points out toxic conditioning and nonsense in our culture, and then gets slammed for doing so.
Great article. As I was reading it, i was thinking how wonderful this would be to send to my children. I have three adult children, one married, one in a serious hetero relationship, and one gay. I don't perceive that there's a gay analogue to your observations, but if there is, I'd be curious to hear it.
Also, on moves and TV, the show "Euphoria" definitely escapes the meme you write about.
And yet, from a biological point of view, spreading your seed far and wide as a guy is probably a good strategy. Women on the other hand benefit by being choosy.
OK but let's think about this: if men are conditioned to want to sleep around and women are conditioned not to, you're going to end up with a lot of miserable men and women who don't get to enjoy sex. Like, it's math.
Yeah, I guess my thought is that you can predict, based on a few parameters, you can predict who will be most attractive to women, such that a small proportion of men will get way more attention than they can handle. Being 'capable' is an important but abstract measure that income is a reasonable proxy for.
This doesn't comport with my experience at all. Most people do pair up and are broadly happy with their partners, not huffing and puffing that they didn't get to marry the highest status person possible. "The one good one is taken and there are no others worthwhile" is something you do sort of hear women say, but they all seem to be talking about a different person (that they've fallen in love with) when they do.
Women, no matter what you like to imagine are conditioned to think that sex can result in a baby and years of taking care of the child. So enjoying sex comes in second in most women's minds. There needs to be a lot of negotiation before casual sex to ensure pregnancy doesn't happen which might seem conditioned "not to want to sleep around"--but really comes from knowing the result of sleeping around can have life-long results. "
It's nature and nurture. Social and cultural norms are factors but so is biology. In a hypothetically "neutral" society that didn't push gender narratives one way or the other wouldn't women still end up being more choosy and less promiscuous?
An argument from consequences is if I'm saying something can't be true because of the consequences. This post is normative, not empirical. It's a prescription, not a description.
Feels like a lot of people in the comments don't think much of human empathy and compassion.
Like, if women are designed to not let men wander away and have sex with whoever they want, part of the reason men may choose not to do that is because they care about the women in their lives.
I am not sure that wills away the fact that women have more to lose and less to gain from promiscuity. Certainly, it would make my life easier if queens were always in heat, but they aren't.
Evolution optimizes for *reproductive success,* not happiness. In evolutionary terms, the wretchedly unhappy man who has tons of promiscuous sex to distract him from his suffering, fathers ten children with ten women, and dies of an overdose at thirty is a smashing success compared with the well-adjusted man who marries the love of his life, has one child with her, and dies in his sleep at ninety. I don't like this one bit, but reality doesn't care about what I like.
Yes, absolutely! I did not mean to imply that we're doomed to unhappiness, because evolution. I was just objecting to what I saw as a fault in Freddie's logic: If x were true, then people would be unhappy. Yes, and? Evolution doesn't care.
Many mammals have "cheap" offspring that are a quantity over quality kind of investment (think rabbits, mice). Primates are not like that, at all.
Gibbons and siamangs are monogamous (or sometimes polyandrous!), chimps and bonobos are promiscuious, orangutans are solitary (real primate weirdos; with males sometimes having territories that overlap multiple females), and gorillas have harems. This is probably more closely related to the ecology / diet of each species, rather than taxonomic closeness.
There are many monogamous primate species, and like everything, it is on a continuum. Feel free to google monogamous primates and learn the ecological situations that often lead to monogamous parenting solutions.
"If that was the case, there wouldn't be thousands of animal species that evolved monogamy."
As I pointed out only about 3% of mammal species are monogamous. Spreading one's seed far and wide is a viable strategy for most mammals. If you want to make the argument that "thousands of species" somehow validates monogamy as a reproductive strategy you need to account for why that only represents a tiny fraction of mammals.
As for humans I don't think there is any evidence whatsoever to suggest a biological/evolutionary preference for monogamy. My guess is that it's widespread now primarily because of economic development.
Yep. Polygamy (usually practiced as polygyny) was common historically, and still is in many places. The primary downside is surplus men, but you can get rid of those via warfare (at times, explicitly--I once read a book about some tribe or another wherein "the unmarried men are getting uppity" was the sole reason they declared war on another tribe).
That's silly. If you get rid of the surplus men, how are you going to maintain your economic hierarchy that brings disproportionate food/money/riches your way that allows you to support your harem?
Security is a feature that can be disproportionately divided, right? If you work for the king to secure his house, than you are providing security to all the women in his harem. You are helping to raise children! Just none that you've fathered.
These are much smaller societies, generally, than you're thinking. Five or six unmarried men causing trouble can be a huge problem for the tribe, one that is easily taken of by planning a raid on another tribe: either your unmarried men manage to abduct a few women and thus they have wives; they die, in which case they're not causing problems; or they conduct some act of heroism that makes them an attractive option for other men to wed their daughters to (marriage==alliance, after all, and you only want strong allies).
It's a pretty common theme in the anthropology books I've read.
typically, to be able to afford a harem, you have to be rich. Being rich is parenting support in this scenario. Food, housing, and security from other humans / predators / disasters matters, and typically woman can't do it all by themselves.
So, maybe harems are only feasible in the human model in societies that develop economic hierarchies.
Also uh...evolution does not necessarily require that the female *want* her partner, although her desire can smooth things along. For most cultures throughout most of human history, "do you want to marry that guy?" was not a question women were being asked. Hell, my partner's parents are from "the old country": the father just went to a neighboring village, asked to see all their marriageable women (it's hard since they don't speak English, but the sense I get is "literally lined them all up in the square"), picked one, and that was that. She appears to hate him (again, cultural differences, hard to tell), but they've got multiple children.
The thrust of it is that men may want to spread their seed, but they also want a reliable, healthy partner and safety for their offspring. Which would, biologically, compel them to stay near their pregnant partner and any children that follow.
Evolution favors the woman who holds out for a man who will stay as a partner. Together their children will face a greater chance of survival.
A mother without a man faces greater hardship—read greater chance of mortality—than a mother with a partner.
A man has much greater adoration for his own offspring than the offspring of another man. We see in large predators that offspring of competing males are routinely killed in order to end competing blood lines: apes; horses; bears; lions.
Certainly that's how it works out for cats. That's also why no mother cat would let me come within ten yards of her litter. I am not aggressive that way, but she's not taking chances.
I think it's fair to say that evolution has enabled any these strategies to be enacted. You do see historical (Genghis Khan) and modern (those fertility doctors who get caught impregnating all their patients with their own semen) examples of sheer quantity-maximizing behavior in men but you also see lots of commitment, and the dominant strategy seems to be a mix--committing to a partner and having occasional affairs. We can argue about what are empirical questions here--what affordances are provided by the psychological landscape evolution has delivered to the present, under what circumstances and to what degree they are used? But simplistic questions about what "evolution prefers" are really odd to pose here, because it has no preferences and we're the ones working with its inheritance. We know our evolutionary history has influenced the present, but we can also look directly at how people behave and have normative discussions about how they should behave. Evolutionary psychology can help answer what are to my mind very interesting questions about /how/ we got here, but if the question is simply "where are we?" or "what should we do" we can also look around. And we can note immediately that we don't see all men behaving the same way.
As I replied to Freddie everything is a mix of both nature and nurture. A world in which everyone gave in to their homicidal instincts with regards to parking slights and highway rudeness would not be a world that I would care to live in. It's bad enough now when a small minority is unable to control themselves.
For a future post, maybe you could write about the sexualization of children and how that's becoming normalized, as evidenced by your picture (and many, many, many others).
I don't think this is dynamic is at work that much anymore.
Hate to use the 'n word' but but we have a pretty well developed neoliberal marketplace for sexual partners.
If you're attractive, smart, have a high salary, etc. as a male you're likely to have access to a number of sexual partners. If you are at the far end of the tail, more than you can reasonably pay attention to. The gamification of this process with apps worsens it.
And I do think that most women in most circumstances want to be paid attention to by their sexual partner... They do want that.
So we have a problem where as a guy in your 20s or 30s you may have a ton of sexual partners, the women are likely to get frustrated, and then maybe a third of guys won't have sexual partners at all. As a guy in your 20s it is certainly likely that you will be interested in a certain proportion of women sexually but have no interest or time for anything else.
This abates as the men with lots of partners get bored of being single and want to have kids and pick one woman.
Ah, but a lot of women who went to college would, in fact, call that a schlub. Especially when those men start developing the "bear body" that tends to result from blue-collar labor rather than aesthetic care for the body.
I suspect that as those women approach 40 and it becomes evident that no manscaped and effortlessly confident C-suite type is going to sweep them off their feet, their standards may change.
I could be wrong, as I am a tomcat engaged in the futile quest to figure queens out. But what I had more in mind for a "schlub" was not the "licensed electrician" or "ASE Certified auto mechanic" (since they have skills that are in demand) but more the "43 year old guy still working fast food".
Maybe their standards will change, but I somewhat doubt it. A lot of people don't question their beliefs about class very deeply, and educational polarization is presently the most severe cancer upon the world's social body.
In my experience, yes. College educated people of both sexes tend to have a lot of inculcated class disdain for the cultural accompaniments to blue-collar labor, and blue-collar workers tend to have ingrained ressentiment and tall-poppy syndrome against the educated.
Women are doing themselves a disservice by focusing on income only. Women want men who can provide, but women shouldn't overlook men who are hard-working, driven and good with money (e.g., saving). Money comes and goes and what's more important is the work ethic and relationship with money v. high income, though I admit most women do seek a minimum level of income.
Class is not necessarily the same as income. That guy who owns a plumbing contractor may be well into the 1%, income wise, but that doesn't put him in the same social class as a college professor who is paid much less.
I understand that, for humans, the dynamic really starts to get interesting as people age.
There's an awful lot of single middle-aged dudes that are basically all-around schlubs, compared to the number of single middle aged women who are reasonably fit, interesting, vibrant, and attractive. That leaves the older non-schlub male population in very good circumstances.
I’m in my late thirties, and I’m amazed when I look at the women I know and then their partners. There seems to be a real generational issue happening in that cohort, where the women are “doing it all” and the men are sort of stuck in college dorm life.
You don’t think there’s a generational aspect? Gen X men seem to have it more together, and Gen Z…I’m not even sure what’s going on. But millennials, even across most socioeconomic groups, seem to have a sex divide.
What do you think accounts for this? Is there a cohort of men who are sexually deprived in their 20s but patiently bide their time knowing, statistically, that many women will have to settle when life planning and pairing off occurs.
I mean, in my private musings I think there’s two factors at work. 1. Many, if not most, women want to have children and they’d prefer to do it with a partner, so eventually all of these sparkling women just pick up the least bad option and try to make it work. And 2. I really think there’s a post-feminism malaise or confusion among these men. Like all the gender roles changed in a relatively short period of time, and they don’t really know “how to be a man” in this new era, and the women are both the breadwinners and the homemakers, and so they just kind of settle into being another child-like figure in the household.
I know that all sounds overly broad and probably inflammatory, but I’m just trying to paint a broad picture of the trends I’ve seen in my generation.
Well, humans are all children of God, but I think you will find that some of God's children enjoy more success in the dating/mating market than others.
As someone who has almost exclusively dated and given much encouragement to schlubs, I have to disagree. Some seem fundamentally unmotivated to like, grow up, for lack of a better phrase.
Schlub="stupid, worthless, or unattractive person." I think, maybe, as a person in a field that tries to accept everyone (libraries) I may miss the point...relationships are different than providing a service. I see what you mean, here.
Opportunities if you pursue them, sure. But you have to make the first move. You have to be pretty high up for it to fall in your lap - for lack of a better term.
I was always told I didn’t have lots of male attention because I was “so pretty they’re scared to talk to you.” By that metric I was top 5%. So the top 5-10% of guys must only go for the bottom 95% of women.
Until very recently the result of sex for women was often unwanted pregnancy. It's not been but a bit over a generation that women had agency over the results of sexual encounters . If a woman would take a risk before birth control, that risk was likely to be with a potential long-term partner--not a casual encounter. Pregnancy as a result of sex does not seem to be a concern for most men, but it is a concern for most women.
Although I think Freddie has a point here that we should just chill out a bit about sex, you’re totally right about the the different consequences of sex for men and women. All the women I know who already have a kid or two are much less interested in sex than they were before kids, and if you dig into it a bit with them, they always talk about the consequences of sex; pregnancy, another kid to care for, and (most importantly) maybe having to put up with a man they aren’t crazy about for the rest of their lives because they have a kid together. This is a HUGE deal for women, especially those in their 30s and 40s who are realizing baby daddy just kinda sucks, but now they are stuck with him, wether married or not. Who the father of your children is and his behavior have massive consequences for women.
Or "I think I'm into this dude, but I don't know him that well and do I really want him around my kittens? For that matter, what happens if things go south after a short while?" I've seen that movie a few times.
This is true for men as well, they just don't think about it that way. At least half of my cousins have ended up married to women they didn't intend to marry due to an "oops" we got pregnant situation.
I also know for a fact that two of my closest women friends deliberately stopped using birth control so that they could get pregnant. Both of them are nurses too.
I always always always used condoms, mostly due to this fear, but also a fear of AIDS. At least until I got a vasectomy, which took care of the pregnancy issue. More men should get vasectomies.
Because the risks that come from casual sex (pregnancy, reputational risk, violence) are higher for women. You simply can't make conclusions about women's desire for casual sex without considering those variables.
True story: Stanford chemistry professor Carl Djerassi, "father of the birth control pill", once tried to pick up a female friend of mine (half his age) with the line, "I invented women's liberation."
That's ironic. That's a great story. Most of the burden of b/c still falls on women. The pill was liberating, but it is chemicals men don't have to absorb.
Thank you! I was too busy today to write earlier but yes, this issue should not be yanked from it's historical basis, which is that women could not engage in casual sex, for the most part they alone suffered the consequences, which was not only pregnancy, but shame (no one could easily tell who the father was) and sadly, even death in childbirth, which was far from rare until recently.
It is important when we have a cultural situation, like the deprivation model, to understand the historical basis for its existence today. It may not be relevant now, but that is a recent development.
I am 95% certain that none of the men on this board have watched a single episode of "Call the Midwife" (Netflix) about post-WW2 London's impoverished areas. Less than 50 years ago childbirth was precarious and it still is (that was my exp.)
Awareness of the dangers of childbirth lingers among women. And yes, shame-- the Magdalene Laundries in Ireland for "fallen women" are not so long ago (ended in the 1990s) ...and the perpetuation of shame was as much male generated as female. Reproductive freedom is very recent in the history of humanity. We have barely begun to know how to deal with it.
That's the cows, in beef cattle, most losses are calving difficulty, first time heifers birthing too big calves. In the dairies, the herds tend to be 5,000 or more. With those numbers, there's a vet, or experienced cowboy assigned to reproduction. He chooses the replacement bulls (mom has the best milk), draws semen, synchronizes ovulation (with hormones), artificially inseminates, is available to assist with delivery.
I'm surprised at the death rate. I've read that traditional death rate for humans is about 1 per 1000. I wonder if the high death rate in beef cattle has to do with selective breeding or if that is just the natural death rate for bovines without assistance.
Such a good show! I was actually thinking of it reading these comments. There's a moment in season 1 (or 2?) when a couple emerges from an alley or field--having clearly just gotten done having sex--and they run into the main character. They say something mean to her and she responds along the lines of 'careful what you say to me: it looks like you might be needing my help pretty soon.' For some reason that moment in the show has always stuck with me.
I've worked with so many women who weren't careful and kept a child from a casual encounter and then the child is their focus. For most women after birth the maternity becomes more important than the fun. I certainly don't mean to discourage modern norms, but children do happen unless a person is very thoughtful and that may not be part of the Tinder world.
Simpler, and consistent with the obvious biological imperatives. Why so many want to deny this is hard to understand.
That solution (deeper relationships before sex) used to be imposed by religious/social norms that cast deep shade on anything but long-term monogamy. But, oops! we all decided that was bad.
Can you please explain what you mean about socially and legally enforced monogamy being replaced by mandatory gender anarchy?
The family is the best group by which we organize society and proven by history across the ages. Name me one society/people in all of history that existed that was not based on the family and successfully propagated itself? Blood is thicker than water and no chosen family will ever replicate the family.
I feel for people who have toxic, broken, unsupporting or unloving families feel but the answer is not to replace the family, but repair it.
Perhaps you mistyped. Women have a million eggs at birth. We lose an egg when we ovulate every month, and we ovulate about 300–400 times during our lifetime (says google).
Your overall point is correct—men have way more sperm than women have eggs—but your understanding of women's bodies is wrong. Just google it or ask your wife.
We need models other than "one night stand without knowing the other person's last name" and "lifelong commitment or at least the belief that you're pursuing it together."
It’s not my scene, but I think the polyamorous movement is maybe starting to provide this kind of model. I think the culture of any poly dating scene will vary from place to place, but people with the maturity for it do seem to end up with something pleasant and casual - and I think that often comes with mutual acknowledgment at the outset that you can name and honor your connection without promising a certain commitment.
Unfortunately, the polyamorous movement does not attract many "people with maturity."
I used to think less of it, until I met more people doing it well out of college. The combination of having left behind adolescent horniness, plus having some relationship experience and attendant understanding of what they wanted emotionally and sexually, makes it a more mature world.
But it’s true, even the people in the scene will complain about those in the community who get into it because they’re not mature enough to hold down a “real” relationship and decide to blame it on oppressive monogamy rather than their own issues with communication/commitment.
This is the kind of trend that attracts morons. For sure there are some people who find themselves in unusual circumstances, are legitimately in touch with their feelings, and are capable of making something less conventional work...but they're drowned out by delusional opportunists. More often than not, denial is so deep, that the deluded can't self-identity. So, they make their arguments in good faith, they're just wrong.
I think of it this way: Even if there’s a higher proportion of delusional opportunists (and of course you’re more likely to run into them if you’re actively dating a lot of people in one social group), it’s also a subculture with built-in norms around communicating the end of your involvement with someone when it isn’t working out. Open communication is prized in that community, sometimes to a fault.
I’m not saying it’s a great experience for everybody, and I know there are some pretty crappy iterations of it that don’t work out for everyone involved. But, like... monogamous heterosexuality also has some crappy iterations that lead to bad experiences. I don’t argue that polyamory is a *better* model for relationships (as many of its adherents do), just that it’s an example of a model that, when functional, doesn’t adhere to the one night stand/marriage pipeline approach that Freddie describes.
Why and who does this help? Throughout my 20s, 30s and now my 40s, almost all of the women I've known (mostly college educated and non-ethnic) want a commitment and are having difficulty finding it. Men want no strings attached sex or a casual relationship without marriage as the focus. The ethnics and religious tend to have less of this problem. You want more friends with benefits scenarios. It's terrible for women.
“Why and who does this help?”
Men, of course.
It helps men.
I should change my username to “Andrea Dworkin.”
Exactly my point.
Both paradigms, the previous and the current, were flawed because they ignored the needs and desires of women in different ways.
Women are autonomous human beings who want to be treated that way. We want a voice in politics, control over our own money, equal access to careers in the wider world (although we often want to approach careers differently), and generally to be treated as intelligent human beings with our own thoughts, feelings, desires, and needs, entirely independent from and sometimes very different from men’s. That includes the ability to choose whether or not to enter into a relationship, rather than having it selected for us as a default.
Wanting to get out from under all of that has *absolutely nothing to do* with supporting the kind of sexual culture we see today.
It’s perfectly internally consistent to think that women needed (and continue to need!) liberation from the various forces in society that treat us as fully autonomous only insofar as we are made identical to men—and also to think that the current sexual climate is in fact one of those toxic structures.
(Some) earlier feminists very understandably wanted to get rid of many of the rules around sex and sexuality. I think they were right to want to free women to choose, but wrong to want to throw out the rules entirely, largely because I think they misjudged the way everything would play out from there (I have lots of thoughts on why they misjudged this, but putting all of that aside).
I think a sexual ethic centered on women’s needs and desires would involve a culture where emotionally intimate relationships are the default setting in which sex occurs; where men meet extreme social stigma if they are not entirely willing to father any resulting child; where everyone enters sex with the understanding that (short of, perhaps, a total hysterectomy) there is no sense in which sex can be entirely casual for women in the way it can be for men, and that therefore most women need a fair amount more care, attention, and trust in a sexual relationship; and where, generally, neither gender is treated as an object to be pursued, rejected, and then discarded at the pleasure of their partner.
Most of my lifetime friends are women that I have had sex with at one point or another. I am married and monogamous at the moment so the only person I am having sex with is my wife.
But my best friend "A" is someone I have dated on and off for at least 30 years now. I think this relationship is good for both of us. The sex is good and so is the friendship, though I have to admit she broke my heart a couple of times before I realized that she wasn't going to marry me.
Last week I went and stayed at a different friends house far away. The woman is someone else that I used to date and we have stayed close friends with. She is married now and so am I and we have stayed close enough to stay at each others' homes.
So these relationships help both of us or we wouldn't have extended them beyond our breakups. I have a couple more like this. Good thing my wife is not the jealous type. I would never date or marry someone who expected me cut myself off from my friends.
I have similarly kept in touch with the men who I was close to that I dated, though there is really only one of them.
I guess I go from friends, to friends with benefits, to friends with no benefits.
Why is "friends with benefits" terrible for women? I am really curious why you think so and I mean that in the most respectful way possible.
I will say that when I was younger, when I wanted to date casually and and was up front about that and really had no problem finding them, at least after I had completed my stint in the military. I am (was?) reasonably good looking, smart, ambitious, educated and generally a good catch, except for my extremely poor family background. I think I unintentionally broke a few hearts, but also had my heart broken a few times too.
When I was in my early thirties I wanted to settle down and get married and it was no problem finding women who wanted to though. That was true.
My personal situation is unusual in that I tended to hang around in politically radical, sex positive communities and I am bisexual. Frida Kahlo and Emma Goldman are my heros. My personal life probably doesn't extend generally to other people. But I secretly think that is true for everyone. We all have unique existences.
Women don't get any enjoyment from casual sex? As far as I can tell, women get as much physical pleasure from sex as men do, perhaps even a bit more so. Do you think that sex is not pleasurable for women?
I understand your concern about pregnancy. Obviously unprotected sex is dangerous to women but birth control used property can reduce that risk to less than 0.01% with a vasectomy. Other forms of birth control are not as effective but used properly they can reduce the risk to a very small amount. Add in Plan B and abortion and I don't think that any women have children unwillingly. Please correct me if you think otherwise.
Connection in depth is the best sex and the only kind I would recommend these days, though obviously people should be free to do anything that they want with their bodies.
You state that my comment lacks anything about the friendship, only the benefits, but I mentioned numerous lifelong friendships that have been consummated at one point or another. Are you sure you aren't commenting on some other post?
Workplace is great to meet people.
You get a feel for whether there's chemistry and you are part of a community so you'll be incentivized to behave within acceptable norms.
Pathologizing workplace relationships is truly one of the worst things we've done.
I really agree with this. As usual, we dealt with a very real problem (workplace harassment) by swinging so far in the opposite direction that we’ve made mutual attraction between people that spend most of their waking time together something aberrant.
It's like when an office has that one slob who leaves crumbs all over the place and instead of being adults and talking to him, they issue an all employee email banning eating at desks.
I don't think 'workplace harassment' can be solved.
I met my wife at work and was persistent in pursuing her. It took a while before she went out with me.
At the same time there was another guy who was also pursuing her that she wasn't interested in.
His (and my) interest could definitely meet the low threshold for what is unacceptable today (i.e. multiple attempts after being rebuffed).
There's no way to 'fix' the situation without imposing major costs.
In today's insane corporate policies, asking a coworker out *a single time* could be construed as harassment. Technically, in some of these policies, someone else overhearing such a conversation is obligated to report it. It's a paralyzing environment...or would be if it were followed "faithfully."
Yup - multiple attempts and then on our first date I think I had 12 or 15 drinks with predictable consequences.
Would not be acceptable by today's standards.
Yet here we are almost 15 years later happily married with kids!
And I met my wife of 35 years arguing about jib sheet handling!
It does make things awkward. Like how I knew had to leave DC after I had laid one or more waitresses at all of my favorite establishments.
QED for some here.
Haven’t you ever heard “don’t screw where you eat”?
I am a tomcat. We don't always plan that far out.
“Who gets to keep the restaurant?”
Pathologizing is a pretty strong word. I have no problem with people dating from work who don't work on the same team together, but when they do, when things end, one of those two people will likely want (or need) to leave. I certainly don't think it needs to be any kind of a rule, but I think it's unwise in most cases. As with all things, individuals and workplaces vary and it may work quite well in some contexts.
Yeah, I mean certainly there can be externalities. There's no free lunch. But in general I'd argue it's a net positive to have more permissive workplaces.
Every workplace should have a make out closet.
The question is not whether we've pathologized workplace romance (IDK I see it in this Netflix show I watch that's considered very progressive). The question is whether anyone still works in gender/sex-integrated workplaces, or even integrated lines of work.
I'm "interdisciplinary" so I can commute between one building, almost entirely filled with men, to another, almost entirely filled with women.
I have never worked in anything but sex integrated workplaces. The idea that work life is mostly sex-segregated is completely foreign to me.
Interesting. I don't mean to say my workplace is de jure segregated, only de facto. There are few enough women in Building A versus few enough men in Building B that if you mixed the two you'd have something more like an even, or at least random, proportion of genders. Dating solely within Building A or Building B simply doesn't offer very inviting prospects for the majority gender.
I got that you meant de facto. It’s still not my experience, though.
In a university this might be going from a liberal arts college (abt. equal M & W) to an engineering college (abt.80% male).
Liberal arts colleges are not typically 50/50; in 2008 it was more like 46% male / 54% female. Interestingly, that's a broad average; the reality is that state to state ratios vary fairly considerably.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/ccap/2012/02/16/the-male-female-ratio-in-college/?sh=19751e69fa52
I was thinking that Building A is engineeringish (yep about 80% male) while Building B is psychology (easily 75% female).
so well said. the piece does seem to be celebrating casual sex a bit, but honestly, the hookup scene seems less about fulfilling even physical desires—certainly not finding intimacy—but more about receiving cheap validation from strangers. sure, women do desire sex, but usually not the variety they're finding out there. still, they play along and put up with it, and the real question no one is asking them is... why?
I think what I'm asking for is precisely that we stop seeing sex for men as something validating so that we can instead focus on mutual enjoyment
i agree! but i think a lot of women also fall into the trap of seeing sex (and the pursuit by men) as a form of validation. they enjoy playing the game, holding the power, and ultimately being treated as a 'prize' to be won. there's dysfunction on both sides.
There's no way around sex being validating, especially when you're young.
For men, it means that you've been chosen over competitors. For women, the attention makes you feel desired and important.
The only reliable way to progress beyond that is to build a monogamous relationship which an increasing proportion of emotionally stunted adults don't seem to be able to do.
exactly. i guess i just wonder if they aren't able to make the conversion in adulthood as readily because they've lost the interpersonal skills, the positive role models/social validation for doing so, or because they're getting something more satisfying to them than actual intimacy (e.g. a dopamine hit of a real-life 'like'). i'm beginning to think maybe we're trapped in a feedback loop of shallow, transactional relationships for eternity.
Yeah I don't know what it is and I might be too old to understand it.
By my mid to late 20s I had figured out (at least in principle) that whatever validation you get from sex is transient and that a relationship can start with chemistry but you need to build on it from there.
I guess it is possible to stay in these loops long enough to miss key developmental points.
Why did so many people move to online? What was not working with real life?
Isolated maybe because the illusion of connection via the Internet stops people from going out and about.
I'd imagine it's the same thing that drives online behavior elsewhere: convenience.
But a real bookstore versus Amazon....
Precisely.
i think real-life options are incredibly limited for a lot of people, especially if you live in a suburban or rural area, work in an unusual field where you're unlikely to meet a partner in the workplace or out socially, all your friends are married/you're recently divorced, you recently moved, etc. and i think some people like the idea of not leaving their lifelong relationship up to a random chance encounter in a bar.
when i was younger, i used to work on farms in an industry where 90% of the men were gay (not an exaggeration). these were rural-ish areas with literally no dating prospects. the handful of straight men were all married/players and worse. i would have loved having online dating back then.
i've tried it since and found it...meh. the idea of being able to shop a catalog of potential matches with exactly the criteria you'd ideally desire in a mate already preselected seems like the perfect solution to finding compatibility. except, of course, people are more complex than that. sometimes the people i think are incompatible with me are the ones i enjoy spending time with the most. also, it becomes creepy searching for other humans like items online you'd like to order for sex--and knowing they're shopping you. it weirded me out after a while. but that could just be me.
The world of finding partners is complex and you make many good points and show the difficulties faced through different situations. I've always worked at universities where there have been a lot of people of a variety of ages and stages of life. Besides the faculty there are tech people and builders who maintain the campus. Away from a situation like this I would join a group of some sort that brings together people of different types. Because I am library-focused I see the different groups that meet at libraries and they are from all over--food security, horticulture, book discussion groups, tax assistance, animal rescue, radio enthusiasts. Maybe you won't meet a person there but they might have a friend or cousin. This is real-life, not online.
those are great suggestions. i'm usually too busy and not generally much of a joiner, but i've met a diverse group of people by taking different courses--then covid happened. oh well, there's always tomorrow... ;-)
These aren't things you'd have to join, just attend. And the odds are that this is better than the Internet. (disclosure: am a librarian)
Wait, what? There's a sector of agriculture where 90% of the men are gay?
oh, i guess i made that sound more exotic than it is ;-) i'm referring to horse farms and the world of english equestrian sports. the female to male ratio is at least double, possible more, and the men who do participate are disproportionately gay, at least in the community i was part of. the few straight men often take advantage of their scarcity with predictable results. it's also a really weird scene (imagine 'tiger king' with horses) with a lot of big egos, abused animals, and a notorious history of sexual misconduct (think olympic gymnastics coaches with zero oversight or accountability.) a very sketchy place for young people to navigate. i saw a lot of bad choices made. i won't even mention what happens to the horses behind the scenes...
Ah, thank you for clarifying. I'm in the rural south in the US and was running through things like tobacco? soybeans? corn? Etc.
There's basically no support for single people who are trying to date anymore. Families, friend groups and even churches and have just completely stopped setting up single people they know. It's really odd. I also think it hurts that there's so much confusion and vagueness about dating lately--unless you meet on an app, if a single person asks another single person out for drinks or coffee, they almost never specify that it's a date. Which in some ways might make it lower stakes, but it's just confusing and weird.
I think it would be extremely interesting to review some statistics on how many women own vibrators these days. The "sex is often disappointing" angle is absolutely true, especially in a casual context (it often takes some time to get to know what a woman likes), so perhaps frequency of masturbation in women might be a more accurate measure of desire.
Testosterone is the devil.
As in pretty much all the serious fights I have ever gotten into in my life were the result of egos flaring up and people refusing to back down. I suspect testosterone is correlated.
If only alcohol was a requirement. I have seen guys brawl at the supermarket because they bumped into each other walking in the door.
Expected weird PUA shit in the comments and got surprisingly less than expected. It seems that the redfem-adjacent lesbians are angrier about this?
That's what I was trying to get at in my comment. Whenever I started thinking the article had a point about how to get women, the thought 'but the guy in it only wants sex' would pop up as a reason why I would never under any circumstances want to be involved with him. Not because I want to marry every guy who comes on to me, or any guy, but because I don't want to be treated as an item for somebody else's sexual gratification.
Yes, exactly
Oh I like this a lot! I think there’s a lot of truth to this: if women are constantly (aggressively) pursued, they’ll become fearful and avoidant, and if men are constantly exhorted to pursue, they’ll become aggressive and bombastic. Which in turn reinforces the preexisting stereotypes of who does and doesn’t enjoy sex—a vicious cycle as opposed to the virtuous one Freddie talks about above.
When I was a teenage girl, my friends and I weren’t having sex and we were all boy-crazy and sex-obsessed. When we went to college and having sex with men became an actual possibility, we quickly realized that we couldn’t be totally transparent about our baseline sexual interest at the risk of inviting constant harassment, assault or worse. Men don’t always realize how awful it can feel—even if you’re horny!—to cope with a constant barrage of aggressive, often angry sexual attention.
"Men don’t always realize how awful ..."
Some of us had athletics teachers who were, shall we say, youth attracted.
Oh totally! That’s why I say they don’t always realize—some men definitely do (and I’m sorry!)
I can't help but feel that some of this is just American culture. Relentlessly pursuing somebody with the intention of getting laid is something that exists.
But courtship in the romantic sense is something that existed in the past. If it's been deemphasized and lost that's really too bad because that little dance is one of the sweetest things that life can offer.
'Sign this paperwork to ensure *safety* during the agreed upon sexual acts'
Ask for consent every 15 minutes or before any new act.
15 minutes?! That’ll land you in the hoosegow! Seconds more like.
Consent. Enthusiastic consent. Continuous enthusiastic consent. I’m exhausted just thinking about it.
The problem with this is that the empirical reality is the opposite.
20 (or even 10) years ago men were more aggressive and there were more people having sex. Interactions weren't mediated to the same degree by apps and we didn't have an HR bureaucracy to manage interactions at work or school.
In general, women seemed more comfortable managing attention (wanted and unwanted) and some (if not most women) wanted to be pursued by the those they were interested in rather than some formal process of demonstrated mutual interest.
At the end of the day I don't think these psychological tableaux hold. The best thing is to have men and women go through these interactions iteratively until they develop the appropriate social skills to make things work. This will inevitability be preceded by awkwardness. But there's no way around it.
I suspect without firm evidence that the increasing prevalence of internet porn plays a role here.
Odds that this one will be mocked and misrepresented on Twitter are off the charts, but they all are
The headline writes itself!
But how? This is like woke sex politics 101. And I don't mean any negative judgement by that - on this issue the standard woke answer is great. The American Pie model of heterosexual relationships is factually wrong, bad dating advice, and harmful for everyone, particularly women. I'm sure there are some deeper wrinkles where I, or you, would disagree with the modern mainstream social justice view on sex and relationships, but I don't see any of them on display here. This is one issue where you're lock-step with the cool herd; I genuinely don't see how this would get a rise out of the usual suspects.
I hope that doesn’t happen, because I think this is very reasonable and helpful. If it does get mocked or misrepresented, that would seem consistent with your dispiriting role as the guy who points out toxic conditioning and nonsense in our culture, and then gets slammed for doing so.
Well, those people can get fucked!
*badumching*
Great article. As I was reading it, i was thinking how wonderful this would be to send to my children. I have three adult children, one married, one in a serious hetero relationship, and one gay. I don't perceive that there's a gay analogue to your observations, but if there is, I'd be curious to hear it.
Also, on moves and TV, the show "Euphoria" definitely escapes the meme you write about.
And yet, from a biological point of view, spreading your seed far and wide as a guy is probably a good strategy. Women on the other hand benefit by being choosy.
OK but let's think about this: if men are conditioned to want to sleep around and women are conditioned not to, you're going to end up with a lot of miserable men and women who don't get to enjoy sex. Like, it's math.
Right well that is what is happening.
Women are lining up for a few men.
I think we are lining up for more men. Men who are capable of doing things, not necessarily high earners.
Yeah, I guess my thought is that you can predict, based on a few parameters, you can predict who will be most attractive to women, such that a small proportion of men will get way more attention than they can handle. Being 'capable' is an important but abstract measure that income is a reasonable proxy for.
This doesn't comport with my experience at all. Most people do pair up and are broadly happy with their partners, not huffing and puffing that they didn't get to marry the highest status person possible. "The one good one is taken and there are no others worthwhile" is something you do sort of hear women say, but they all seem to be talking about a different person (that they've fallen in love with) when they do.
That’s what Napoleon Dynamite said: girls only like guys who have skillz
Women, no matter what you like to imagine are conditioned to think that sex can result in a baby and years of taking care of the child. So enjoying sex comes in second in most women's minds. There needs to be a lot of negotiation before casual sex to ensure pregnancy doesn't happen which might seem conditioned "not to want to sleep around"--but really comes from knowing the result of sleeping around can have life-long results. "
I think there are many who are not as prepared as you.
It's nature and nurture. Social and cultural norms are factors but so is biology. In a hypothetically "neutral" society that didn't push gender narratives one way or the other wouldn't women still end up being more choosy and less promiscuous?
Sounds like an argument from consequences.
An argument from consequences is if I'm saying something can't be true because of the consequences. This post is normative, not empirical. It's a prescription, not a description.
In this case, it seems to be "I don't want it to be true, so it isn't".
No it's "There is absolutely no inevitability as long as there is a willingness to contemplate what is happening."
Feels like a lot of people in the comments don't think much of human empathy and compassion.
Like, if women are designed to not let men wander away and have sex with whoever they want, part of the reason men may choose not to do that is because they care about the women in their lives.
I am not sure that wills away the fact that women have more to lose and less to gain from promiscuity. Certainly, it would make my life easier if queens were always in heat, but they aren't.
Evolution optimizes for *reproductive success,* not happiness. In evolutionary terms, the wretchedly unhappy man who has tons of promiscuous sex to distract him from his suffering, fathers ten children with ten women, and dies of an overdose at thirty is a smashing success compared with the well-adjusted man who marries the love of his life, has one child with her, and dies in his sleep at ninety. I don't like this one bit, but reality doesn't care about what I like.
Biological view point gives perspective, doesn't it?
--But the pursuit of happiness is in our constitution.
Yes, absolutely! I did not mean to imply that we're doomed to unhappiness, because evolution. I was just objecting to what I saw as a fault in Freddie's logic: If x were true, then people would be unhappy. Yes, and? Evolution doesn't care.
I do see what you mean. Evolution is all about as many offspring as possible.
If that was the case, there wouldn't be thousands of animal species that evolved monogamy.
There is no reason spreading your seed far and wide if all your babies die because they needed more parenting support. Its unclear where humans fall.
Only 3% of mammal species are monogamous. Chimps certainly aren't.
Many mammals have "cheap" offspring that are a quantity over quality kind of investment (think rabbits, mice). Primates are not like that, at all.
Gibbons and siamangs are monogamous (or sometimes polyandrous!), chimps and bonobos are promiscuious, orangutans are solitary (real primate weirdos; with males sometimes having territories that overlap multiple females), and gorillas have harems. This is probably more closely related to the ecology / diet of each species, rather than taxonomic closeness.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5474116/
There are many monogamous primate species, and like everything, it is on a continuum. Feel free to google monogamous primates and learn the ecological situations that often lead to monogamous parenting solutions.
So the two species that are most closely related to humans are not monogamous.
They also aren't polygamous.
What does taxonomic closeness have to do with it?
What determines social structure of primates?
In evolutionary history, did human ancestors live in an ecology similar to chimpanzees?
Why would our reproductive structure remain the same, if humans evolved to be so different from chimpanzees in other ways?
"If that was the case, there wouldn't be thousands of animal species that evolved monogamy."
As I pointed out only about 3% of mammal species are monogamous. Spreading one's seed far and wide is a viable strategy for most mammals. If you want to make the argument that "thousands of species" somehow validates monogamy as a reproductive strategy you need to account for why that only represents a tiny fraction of mammals.
As for humans I don't think there is any evidence whatsoever to suggest a biological/evolutionary preference for monogamy. My guess is that it's widespread now primarily because of economic development.
From the human male point of view, the most successful strategy is to have it both ways.
A female or harem that are bound to him and will raise children that he knows are his, plus whatever randoms he can get to improve the odds.
Yep. Polygamy (usually practiced as polygyny) was common historically, and still is in many places. The primary downside is surplus men, but you can get rid of those via warfare (at times, explicitly--I once read a book about some tribe or another wherein "the unmarried men are getting uppity" was the sole reason they declared war on another tribe).
Or the "lost boys" of Utah.
That's silly. If you get rid of the surplus men, how are you going to maintain your economic hierarchy that brings disproportionate food/money/riches your way that allows you to support your harem?
Security is a feature that can be disproportionately divided, right? If you work for the king to secure his house, than you are providing security to all the women in his harem. You are helping to raise children! Just none that you've fathered.
These are much smaller societies, generally, than you're thinking. Five or six unmarried men causing trouble can be a huge problem for the tribe, one that is easily taken of by planning a raid on another tribe: either your unmarried men manage to abduct a few women and thus they have wives; they die, in which case they're not causing problems; or they conduct some act of heroism that makes them an attractive option for other men to wed their daughters to (marriage==alliance, after all, and you only want strong allies).
It's a pretty common theme in the anthropology books I've read.
No seriously. If you don't have a hierarchy, how do you support a harem?
How does the hierarchy start? Why hierarchies? Were there always hierarchies?
typically, to be able to afford a harem, you have to be rich. Being rich is parenting support in this scenario. Food, housing, and security from other humans / predators / disasters matters, and typically woman can't do it all by themselves.
So, maybe harems are only feasible in the human model in societies that develop economic hierarchies.
What human society doesn't have economic hierarchies?
1) you can study these things on a continuum, so you can study the continuum.
2) But they certainly exist; Google egalitarian, stateless, or acephalous societies
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_stateless_societies
Last I checked, the village headman or the super duper hunter got more women than that dude who was a nobody.
It's not quite Gene Simmons vs. Average Frustrated Chump levels of inequality, but it's still there.
So maybe 0.1% of the total?
Also uh...evolution does not necessarily require that the female *want* her partner, although her desire can smooth things along. For most cultures throughout most of human history, "do you want to marry that guy?" was not a question women were being asked. Hell, my partner's parents are from "the old country": the father just went to a neighboring village, asked to see all their marriageable women (it's hard since they don't speak English, but the sense I get is "literally lined them all up in the square"), picked one, and that was that. She appears to hate him (again, cultural differences, hard to tell), but they've got multiple children.
Arranged marriages are still common in Asia. I have plenty of co-workers who met their spouses literally fifteen minutes before the wedding.
Those same co-workers often had a few thousand guests at those weddings.
Close Encounters with Humankind (https://bookshop.org/books/close-encounters-with-humankind-a-paleoanthropologist-investigates-our-evolving-species/9780393356762) has a good essay about this.
The thrust of it is that men may want to spread their seed, but they also want a reliable, healthy partner and safety for their offspring. Which would, biologically, compel them to stay near their pregnant partner and any children that follow.
As compared to just having 20 kids by different partners and letting the law of averages play out?
Evolution favors the woman who holds out for a man who will stay as a partner. Together their children will face a greater chance of survival.
A mother without a man faces greater hardship—read greater chance of mortality—than a mother with a partner.
A man has much greater adoration for his own offspring than the offspring of another man. We see in large predators that offspring of competing males are routinely killed in order to end competing blood lines: apes; horses; bears; lions.
True but that isn't necessarily an argument for monogamy. Polygamy could well encapsulate the best of both worlds.
There's some evidence that there's actually a fitness advantage for women who have sex with multiple men allowing for the healthiest sperm to rule....
The scenario is having sex with somebody with really good genes and then if he's not available to raise the child finding some poor shlub who will.
Chimpanzees follow the model Freddie cites, and male chimpanzees provide no parenting support.
Male competition is in the uterus. Exciting!
Certainly that's how it works out for cats. That's also why no mother cat would let me come within ten yards of her litter. I am not aggressive that way, but she's not taking chances.
I think it's fair to say that evolution has enabled any these strategies to be enacted. You do see historical (Genghis Khan) and modern (those fertility doctors who get caught impregnating all their patients with their own semen) examples of sheer quantity-maximizing behavior in men but you also see lots of commitment, and the dominant strategy seems to be a mix--committing to a partner and having occasional affairs. We can argue about what are empirical questions here--what affordances are provided by the psychological landscape evolution has delivered to the present, under what circumstances and to what degree they are used? But simplistic questions about what "evolution prefers" are really odd to pose here, because it has no preferences and we're the ones working with its inheritance. We know our evolutionary history has influenced the present, but we can also look directly at how people behave and have normative discussions about how they should behave. Evolutionary psychology can help answer what are to my mind very interesting questions about /how/ we got here, but if the question is simply "where are we?" or "what should we do" we can also look around. And we can note immediately that we don't see all men behaving the same way.
As I replied to Freddie everything is a mix of both nature and nurture. A world in which everyone gave in to their homicidal instincts with regards to parking slights and highway rudeness would not be a world that I would care to live in. It's bad enough now when a small minority is unable to control themselves.
For a future post, maybe you could write about the sexualization of children and how that's becoming normalized, as evidenced by your picture (and many, many, many others).
Somebody's never read 19th century literature!
I don't think this is dynamic is at work that much anymore.
Hate to use the 'n word' but but we have a pretty well developed neoliberal marketplace for sexual partners.
If you're attractive, smart, have a high salary, etc. as a male you're likely to have access to a number of sexual partners. If you are at the far end of the tail, more than you can reasonably pay attention to. The gamification of this process with apps worsens it.
And I do think that most women in most circumstances want to be paid attention to by their sexual partner... They do want that.
So we have a problem where as a guy in your 20s or 30s you may have a ton of sexual partners, the women are likely to get frustrated, and then maybe a third of guys won't have sexual partners at all. As a guy in your 20s it is certainly likely that you will be interested in a certain proportion of women sexually but have no interest or time for anything else.
This abates as the men with lots of partners get bored of being single and want to have kids and pick one woman.
But I get why many men and women are frustrated.
There is a huge issue with regards to the declining number of men enrolled at four year universities. That definitely impacts the "high salary" part.
Electricians, welders carpenters..no college but high earning and usually confident. No sweeter words than, "let me fix that."
That's not what I'd call a "schlub".
Ah, but a lot of women who went to college would, in fact, call that a schlub. Especially when those men start developing the "bear body" that tends to result from blue-collar labor rather than aesthetic care for the body.
I suspect that as those women approach 40 and it becomes evident that no manscaped and effortlessly confident C-suite type is going to sweep them off their feet, their standards may change.
I could be wrong, as I am a tomcat engaged in the futile quest to figure queens out. But what I had more in mind for a "schlub" was not the "licensed electrician" or "ASE Certified auto mechanic" (since they have skills that are in demand) but more the "43 year old guy still working fast food".
Maybe their standards will change, but I somewhat doubt it. A lot of people don't question their beliefs about class very deeply, and educational polarization is presently the most severe cancer upon the world's social body.
Is it the profession and body type or the cultural accompaniments?
In my experience, yes. College educated people of both sexes tend to have a lot of inculcated class disdain for the cultural accompaniments to blue-collar labor, and blue-collar workers tend to have ingrained ressentiment and tall-poppy syndrome against the educated.
Women are doing themselves a disservice by focusing on income only. Women want men who can provide, but women shouldn't overlook men who are hard-working, driven and good with money (e.g., saving). Money comes and goes and what's more important is the work ethic and relationship with money v. high income, though I admit most women do seek a minimum level of income.
Class is not necessarily the same as income. That guy who owns a plumbing contractor may be well into the 1%, income wise, but that doesn't put him in the same social class as a college professor who is paid much less.
https://indiepf.com/michael-o-churchs-theory-of-3-class-ladders-in-america-archive/
Agreed. Income is often a proxy for class, though not always.
I understand that, for humans, the dynamic really starts to get interesting as people age.
There's an awful lot of single middle-aged dudes that are basically all-around schlubs, compared to the number of single middle aged women who are reasonably fit, interesting, vibrant, and attractive. That leaves the older non-schlub male population in very good circumstances.
I’m in my late thirties, and I’m amazed when I look at the women I know and then their partners. There seems to be a real generational issue happening in that cohort, where the women are “doing it all” and the men are sort of stuck in college dorm life.
I think it gets worse as humans get older.
You don’t think there’s a generational aspect? Gen X men seem to have it more together, and Gen Z…I’m not even sure what’s going on. But millennials, even across most socioeconomic groups, seem to have a sex divide.
What do you think accounts for this? Is there a cohort of men who are sexually deprived in their 20s but patiently bide their time knowing, statistically, that many women will have to settle when life planning and pairing off occurs.
I mean, in my private musings I think there’s two factors at work. 1. Many, if not most, women want to have children and they’d prefer to do it with a partner, so eventually all of these sparkling women just pick up the least bad option and try to make it work. And 2. I really think there’s a post-feminism malaise or confusion among these men. Like all the gender roles changed in a relatively short period of time, and they don’t really know “how to be a man” in this new era, and the women are both the breadwinners and the homemakers, and so they just kind of settle into being another child-like figure in the household.
I know that all sounds overly broad and probably inflammatory, but I’m just trying to paint a broad picture of the trends I’ve seen in my generation.
Porn, Holmes. Porn.
The days when a dogeared copy of Playboy was furtively handed down from older to younger brother are long gone.
I suspect without real evidence that much of the reason for this is the rise of internet porn.
In my relationship I’m the wretched slob and my husband is the hot one. #feminism
Cats don't really do "wretched slob" much. We also don't do #feminism, for that matter.
If you give them a chance no one is really a schlub.
Well, humans are all children of God, but I think you will find that some of God's children enjoy more success in the dating/mating market than others.
Yes, but I have found that listening sometimes reveals more than meets the eye.
As someone who has almost exclusively dated and given much encouragement to schlubs, I have to disagree. Some seem fundamentally unmotivated to like, grow up, for lack of a better phrase.
I agree with this - I am often impressed by the pairings that I see in Brooklyn. Many schlubs.
Schlub="stupid, worthless, or unattractive person." I think, maybe, as a person in a field that tries to accept everyone (libraries) I may miss the point...relationships are different than providing a service. I see what you mean, here.
I think your theory is overly influenced by the fact that peak Freddie was probably in the top 10% of attractiveness.
From what I can tell - men will hit on 65% of 25 year old women. A guy needs to be in the top 5% or 10% to get that kind of attention.
I don't think the statistics are that extreme. I think that if you are in the top 1/3 of men you will have more opportunities than you can handle.
Opportunities if you pursue them, sure. But you have to make the first move. You have to be pretty high up for it to fall in your lap - for lack of a better term.
If they *fall* in your lap most places will give a partial refund.
This is what evolutionary biologists call the "Sexy Freddie Hypothesis."
I was always told I didn’t have lots of male attention because I was “so pretty they’re scared to talk to you.” By that metric I was top 5%. So the top 5-10% of guys must only go for the bottom 95% of women.
Until very recently the result of sex for women was often unwanted pregnancy. It's not been but a bit over a generation that women had agency over the results of sexual encounters . If a woman would take a risk before birth control, that risk was likely to be with a potential long-term partner--not a casual encounter. Pregnancy as a result of sex does not seem to be a concern for most men, but it is a concern for most women.
Although I think Freddie has a point here that we should just chill out a bit about sex, you’re totally right about the the different consequences of sex for men and women. All the women I know who already have a kid or two are much less interested in sex than they were before kids, and if you dig into it a bit with them, they always talk about the consequences of sex; pregnancy, another kid to care for, and (most importantly) maybe having to put up with a man they aren’t crazy about for the rest of their lives because they have a kid together. This is a HUGE deal for women, especially those in their 30s and 40s who are realizing baby daddy just kinda sucks, but now they are stuck with him, wether married or not. Who the father of your children is and his behavior have massive consequences for women.
Or "I think I'm into this dude, but I don't know him that well and do I really want him around my kittens? For that matter, what happens if things go south after a short while?" I've seen that movie a few times.
This is true for men as well, they just don't think about it that way. At least half of my cousins have ended up married to women they didn't intend to marry due to an "oops" we got pregnant situation.
I also know for a fact that two of my closest women friends deliberately stopped using birth control so that they could get pregnant. Both of them are nurses too.
I always always always used condoms, mostly due to this fear, but also a fear of AIDS. At least until I got a vasectomy, which took care of the pregnancy issue. More men should get vasectomies.
For men, such consequences are on some level consensual. Many a man has run like hell, rather than get married or otherwise man up.
Women do not have the option to outrun their unwanted pregnancies.
Abortion and Plan 3. have been legal for decades. Abortion is certainly challenging but nothing like having a child.
this comment aged badly
Sadly enough.
You'd think that, but historically speaking, a lot of women got excited, had sex, and wound up pregnant. That was, from evolution's view, the point.
A lot, but at the population level the percentage of women who go in for casual sex is smaller than the percentage of men.
Because the risks that come from casual sex (pregnancy, reputational risk, violence) are higher for women. You simply can't make conclusions about women's desire for casual sex without considering those variables.
And happiness wasn't. Procreation is foundational, or we wouldn't be here.
True story: Stanford chemistry professor Carl Djerassi, "father of the birth control pill", once tried to pick up a female friend of mine (half his age) with the line, "I invented women's liberation."
That's ironic. That's a great story. Most of the burden of b/c still falls on women. The pill was liberating, but it is chemicals men don't have to absorb.
Lmao this is the kind of thing you say when you know you’re not getting laid so you just want to amuse yourself, just brilliant.
Thank you! I was too busy today to write earlier but yes, this issue should not be yanked from it's historical basis, which is that women could not engage in casual sex, for the most part they alone suffered the consequences, which was not only pregnancy, but shame (no one could easily tell who the father was) and sadly, even death in childbirth, which was far from rare until recently.
It is important when we have a cultural situation, like the deprivation model, to understand the historical basis for its existence today. It may not be relevant now, but that is a recent development.
I am 95% certain that none of the men on this board have watched a single episode of "Call the Midwife" (Netflix) about post-WW2 London's impoverished areas. Less than 50 years ago childbirth was precarious and it still is (that was my exp.)
Awareness of the dangers of childbirth lingers among women. And yes, shame-- the Magdalene Laundries in Ireland for "fallen women" are not so long ago (ended in the 1990s) ...and the perpetuation of shame was as much male generated as female. Reproductive freedom is very recent in the history of humanity. We have barely begun to know how to deal with it.
It was and the changing technology and medical advances were fascinating.
I used to have a herd of cattle (66 pairs), nation wide, calving losses are around 4%, ranchers know their losses.
Really? That high? Is that stillborn calves or cows dying giving birth? All breeds, or mostly beef cattle?
That's the cows, in beef cattle, most losses are calving difficulty, first time heifers birthing too big calves. In the dairies, the herds tend to be 5,000 or more. With those numbers, there's a vet, or experienced cowboy assigned to reproduction. He chooses the replacement bulls (mom has the best milk), draws semen, synchronizes ovulation (with hormones), artificially inseminates, is available to assist with delivery.
I'm surprised at the death rate. I've read that traditional death rate for humans is about 1 per 1000. I wonder if the high death rate in beef cattle has to do with selective breeding or if that is just the natural death rate for bovines without assistance.
largely a lurker here but I have watched more than one episode of "Call the Midwife"
I watched during COVID and it's a sweet simple show but the births make you think abt what women go through and most of it before birth control.
Such a good show! I was actually thinking of it reading these comments. There's a moment in season 1 (or 2?) when a couple emerges from an alley or field--having clearly just gotten done having sex--and they run into the main character. They say something mean to her and she responds along the lines of 'careful what you say to me: it looks like you might be needing my help pretty soon.' For some reason that moment in the show has always stuck with me.
I've worked with so many women who weren't careful and kept a child from a casual encounter and then the child is their focus. For most women after birth the maternity becomes more important than the fun. I certainly don't mean to discourage modern norms, but children do happen unless a person is very thoughtful and that may not be part of the Tinder world.
Have you seen Booksmart? It's a horny teen movie *and* the horny protagonists are girls. It's a fun movie.
iirc what you're calling "the deprivation model" is the definition that i'd always seen for "rape culture"