Feminist sex is false advertising

Susan Walsh tracks a remarkable trajectory of supposedly "sex-positive feminism" in a female advocate of casual sex that provides solid support for Roissy's theory of the Slut Cycle, in which the alpha chaser just happens to decide to slide off the carousel and start considering relationships with lower rank men as she ages and The Wall looms:

Age 24: I’m a 24-year-old member of the hookup generation — I’ve had roughly three times as many hookups as relationships — and, like innumerable 20-somethings before me, I’ve found that casual sex can be healthy and normal and lead to better adult relationships....  I learned something from all of the men I dated. Sexually, I learned plenty about what turns me on. More important, by spending time in uncommitted relationships, what I wanted in a committed relationship became clearer — and it wasn’t amorous antagonism but a partnership that didn’t trigger self-protectiveness…Perhaps young women are putting feminist ideals of equality into sex by refusing shame and claiming the traditionally male side of the stud/slut double standard.

Age 26: As I see it, young women have fully proved that we can have one-night stands, hear us roar – and maybe we’re beginning to also allow ourselves more nuanced feelings about our hookups…We can now acknowledge regret over a one-night stand, without being considered, or seeing ourselves as, forever ruined women; if there’s been a recent change in my generation’s relationship to casual sex, I suspect it’s that we’re relaxing our defensive posturing.

Age 27:  I wanted company, warmth and no danger of attachment.... Except that in reality there was. I actually liked him, quite a bit, as a human being…At some point I realized that, despite my insistence otherwise, I actually wanted those sorts of intimacies, only with an actual commitment. 

Age 28: I’ve tired of hookup culture’s dictatorial reign over modern courtship. It doesn’t feel so free when it doesn’t feel like an intentional choice….I’ve often had no one but myself to blame — especially when going after boys literally wearing warning signs in the form of tattoos reading things like, “I am what I am” or “forgive me.”  Sometimes, tearing off your clothes is just a pathetic attempt at taking control of the uncontrollable: love. It took me a while to realize that I wasn’t always getting what I wanted from hookups.

She's right on schedule.  In three more years she'll be declaring that there are no good men left, followed seven years later by loud and unconvincing declarations of how much she loves being single at 40.  The punchline?  The woman who wanted us to hear her roar that she had fully proved her ability to have one-night stands belatedly confesses that she almost never climaxed in any of the casual encounters she was so enthusiastically championing.  " I didn’t mention that I’d faked it during nearly all of my dalliances."  Now, how much can she possibly have learned about what turns her on if she didn't even manage to learn enough to get off?

Susan is absolutely correct to conclude that this seller of casual sex was a fraud.  Now, I would not go so far as to conclude that no woman genuinely enjoys casual sex or one-night stands, as there are without question true sluts at heart whose cravings for physical activity are very similar to those of highly-sexed men.  But it is simply not true to claim that all, most, or even a significant minority of women are wired that way, or it would not be so common for women involved in hookups, one-night stands, or friends with benefits situations to destroy the casual relationship by attempting to turn it into a committed one.

The primary lesson here for women is that they need to apply the same skeptical lens to female advice that Game-savvy men habitually do and realize that the media figures do not define the norm.  Their task, however, is even more difficult, as they need to not only watch what the other women do instead of what they say, but also attempt to distinguish between what those women feel and what they say they feel.  That's a task that would be well beyond the vast majority of men, but perhaps would be possible given the more developed sense of female intuition.

Marriage as rape protection

This anti-rape logic seems totally nonsensical from the Western perspective:

Caste councils, known as Khap Panchayats, called for children to be allowed to marry lawfully as soon as they reach puberty and said they believe it would halt the increase in rape cases which has caused alarm throughout Northern India.  Their call came following an outcry over the gang-rape and subsequent suicide of a 16 year old girl, Sharmila, in Sacchakhera village, Haryana, close to the capital New Delhi.

The fact that we Westerners can't figure out how this could possibly make sense only goes to show how far removed from the historical human reality our society is.  Marriage was historically a form of protection for women.  By becoming the property of a man, a woman was protected by her husband, who could be expected to use lethal force against anyone who would offend him by bothering her.

Secular faith in the law gradually replaced this concept of the husband-as-protector, to such an extent that husbands are now considered intrinsically dangerous by many women.  But under the thin veil of society, the old human reality remains; a man in Florida recently cut the throat of a Chicago man who made the mistake of approaching and talking to the Florida man's wife, while Richard Gere was kicked out of a restaurant by a diner after he attempted to chat up the man's wife during dinner.

But the deterrent effect of the law requires an amount of long-term thinking that is noticeably lacking in the cultures that are making up an increasing percentage of the populations of the West.  I suspect that the decrease of the deterrent effect, combined with the decreasing ability of the legal authorities to maintain civil order, will likely serve to bring about a partial return to the very thinking that we currently find nonsensical, and which many men and women probably find offensive.

Wife or $200 whore?

I found this comparison to be a fascinating one:

I wouldn’t judge the man who balks when his fiance demands a guarantee for two weeklong trips to Paris every year and diamond jewelry on birthdays, or the woman who balks when her fiance demands a guarantee for sex twice a week, at least not without without more details.

This is truly astonishing.  Apparently sex, a fundamental and intrinsic aspect of the marital relationship, without which no marriage is considered to have been consummated, can somehow be equated with a weeklong trip to Paris, plus diamond jewelry.  This strikes me as somewhat of an overvaluation of the female service provided, especially in light of the readily available economic data on the average cost of sexual transactions.  If we assume $7k per trip, plus another $5k per diamond jewelry, that works out to $182 per sexual encounter with no volume discount.  Actually, that would be cheaper than a mortgage... although one suspects this is envisioned as being in addition to rather than instead of the household expenses.

Anyhow, if a woman is unwilling to commit to having sex on some sort of regular basis, then how on Earth can any man be reasonably expected to commit to never having sex with anyone else?  If 104 times per year is too much and justifies a refusal to commit to it, then how much is a reasonable average expectation? 12x per year? 1x per year?  Never?  Dalrock recently posted on the ways that marriage and men's reasonable marital expectations have been debased, but are we really supposed to believe that marriage, with all of its responsibilities, sexual and otherwise, now provides absolutely no sexual rights to the husband?

Update: Marriage isn't the only form of false female advertising.

A question of character

Contra the assumption of many Americans, European-style maternity leave simply isn't the answer to the challenge presented by working mothers-to-be:

"Family-friendly" has become a cliché for a direction of political travel, which politicians have accustomed the voters to expect. So it would be a brave politician who questioned the most well-established plank of family-friendly policy - maternity leave.

Under present UK law, women who give birth can take up to a year’s maternity leave, for six weeks of which they are paid 90pc of their usual salary, though after that the rules vary and it’s around £135 a week or less.

However, maternity leave is creating a great burden on many women and businesses. The legislation puts employers off employing women. Companies are reluctant to give jobs to women of childbearing age.

The problem is actually more serious than the article makes it appear.  The UK has created a perverse incentive system where the woman is provided significant incentive to lie about her intention to return to the workforce after the year's leave, thus forcing the company to pay for the entire year when everyone knows she isn't coming back.  This not only forces the company to spend around £6000 in addition to her six-week 90 percent leave, but prevents them from making any plans to replace her until one year after she has left the job.

Not only that, but as long as she can get a simple note from her doctor, a woman can stop showing up to work once she's pregnant and still get paid her regular salary before she goes on maternity leave.  Now, while it's understandable that women will be tempted to take advantage of this legalized theft, what sort of message does it send about the woman's character to her co-workers and employers?  It's not merely men who resent the fact that one of their co-workers can take advantage of up to 15 months paid vacation. And how does it benefit women to create such a strong disincentive to hire women who are of an age and situation where pregnancy is a reasonable possibility?

Society needs women to bear children; without them doing so, it will eventually cease to exist.  But how can anyone look at the situation and credibly insist that the material gains of doubling the size of the female workforce - remember, one-third of women always worked - have been worth the material costs?

She's probably had better

Many unmarried young women with an N count greater than one or two will argue vociferously that their N doesn't matter and should not be taken into account by men who are considering them as potential wives.  But the reality is that the known male distaste for seconds, or twentieths, as the case may be, is well-justified in terms of an increased probability of future infidelity as well as the fact that his wife will likely compare him unfavorably to one or more of her previous lovers:

Many women are looking back with longing on past relationships, admitting sex was better with their ex than their current partner.  A total of 38 per cent of women confessed in a recent survey that they had the best sex of lives in a previous relationship. Meanwhile just 29 per cent of men said their best sex was with an ex....

 'They don't regret not choosing them as long-term mates, but they do miss the great sex they had. Women don't tend to marry the guy they had great sex with. They marry for more 'sensible' attributes - like whether he'll be loyal and a good father. I get lots of emails from women saying they love their husbands but fantasise about sex with their exes.'

What is particularly troublesome about the 38 percent figure is that it does not appear to leave out the 29 percent of women who are still virgins by the time they reach marital age, and who as married women could never prefer sex with a nonexistent previous lover.  It's not a precise match here since some of those virgins will not marry, but the statistic is still close enough to make the point that this report actually indicates that 53 percent of all married women with previous sexual experience had the best sex of their lives in a previous relationship.  And obviously, the higher her N, the greater the possibility that this is the case.

So, if you've married a woman who wasn't a virgin, there is a one-in-two chance that she considers you to be sexually inferior to one of her previous lovers.  And the more experience she's had, the more likely that is the case.

This widespread sexual preference for previous lovers may also explain why the men least troubled by their wives' previous sexual experience are the high Alphas.  Given the tendency of Alphas to be obtuse, is not only likely to assume that he is not only his wife's best, but to believe he is the man that other men's wives are pining after.  And then, it might be hard to be too worried about not being number one or number two when she's not even in his own top ten.

A maternal right to kidnap?

Somehow, I don't seem to recall any of the cases of fathers abducting their children and taking them across international borders being portrayed quite as favorably as this maternal kidnapper, who is quite clearly supposed to be the victim of the story:

Disturbing scenes showing four girls being dragged kicking and screaming on to a plane in Brisbane to be sent back to their Italian father caused outrage across Australia today.  The sisters, aged between nine and 15, were ordered by a judge in Australia to be returned to their father in Italy, despite the children’s wishes to stay in Queensland with their mother.

The girls’ mother, who was married to an Italian, had taken them to Australia from Italy for a holiday two years ago – and then kept them in the country. The Courier Mail newspaper reported that it had learned the mother of the girls clung in desperation to the rear of an Australian Federal Police car as it drove away with three of the sisters from a house where they had been staying.

She collapsed in the road sobbing at the end of what was described as a day of unfathomable anxiety and stress.

A bitter international fight ensued between the parents, resulting in an Australian judge ruling the sisters must be returned to their father.  For weeks the girls, who have joint Australian and Italian citizenship, had remained in hiding with their great-grandmother after a court ordered they should be returned to their father in Italy.

If you're a parent of either sex who claims to be concerned about the well-being of your children, you cannot kidnap them and attempt to forcibly keep them from their mother or their father.  The family courts are, for the most part, complete travesties with no regard for the rule of law, but it shouldn't take a law or a court to make it clear to everyone that children must not be removed from the geographic proximity of a parent by the state or the other parent without the first parent's permission.

The heavily emotional angle of this story strongly suggests mothers have some sort of implicit right to abduct and abscond with their children that somehow trumps the legal system.  How, one wonders, can that be rationally justified in a nominally equalitarian legal system?

Business Game

Game has broader utility than most of its advocates imagine.  But regardless of the application, it always unwise to pay excessive attention to women telling you what they want, regardless of whether the subject is business or inter-sexual relations:

A leading German women’s magazine praised for dropping skinny models in favour of 'real people' has reversed its decision after two years - because sales dropped as the lbs piled on. This month's e-edition of Brigitte features slimline pro-models again.

This is code for the 'real people' experiment being a failure. During the two year trial over 1,000 women aged between 18 and 68 had been used in fashion and beauty features - 'to give beauty its naturalness back and show that attractiveness has many faces'.

Think about this.  The German magazine, Brigitte, sells almost exclusively to women.  The publishers were no doubt assured that eliminating those offensively slender models from the magazine's pages would increase sales, and probably found themselves subject the usual point-and-shame pressure of the sort that women have directed at a wide range of organizations and institutions for the last forty years as well.

The publishers almost surely believed that by giving women what they were actively demanding, they would benefit from in the form of more positive press and increased sales.  They got the more positive press they were expecting, as the media around the world covered their action favorably.  But they didn't get the sales; the best-selling magazine that once sold 700,000 copies per month saw that its subscriptions "dropped by nearly 22 per cent while 35 per cent fewer copies were sold in shops".

The magazine would have been in much better shape had its publishers kept this basic principle in mind: women cannot tell you what they want because they do not consciously know what they want.  Their desires can only be ascertained by their actions, not their assertions.