No doubt this post will drop into downvoted oblivion. But I would like to explore the following, for personal reasons:
Have you ever used the services of a legal prostitute, like the ones who operate in bordellos in some Nevada counties? Did you have your sexual debut with a legal prostitute because you couldn’t make it happen in your organic social situation while growing up, for example, with girls you knew in high school or college? And did that experience somehow make it easier to develop the skills for having sexual relationships with women through dating? Or does it still leave you relatively incompetent in that area because prostitutes don’t really solve the sex problem you thought you had?
I don’t know of any research into this. But then professional sex researchers in general seem strangely incurious about the problems of sexually inexperienced and excluded adult men, judging from the absence of this topic in the recently published Human Sexuality 101 textbooks I’ve seen.
BTW, I find it interesting that over a decade ago, Eliezer described himself in a news story as a “volunteer virgin,” though he has since become sexually active. That implies he had opportunities for sexual relationships that he had simply declined until something happened to change his mind about pursuing them. Perhaps he realized that sexual experience would elevate his “armor class” in the male status hierarchy. It would also improve his social relationships with women in other areas; women can pick up on the “tells,” as Texas Hold’em players call them, of sexually inexperienced men, and they tend not to respect them.
No doubt this post will drop into downvoted oblivion.
If posts on certain topics are getting downvoted repeatedly, maybe it may make sense to pay attention to that feedback that the community is either not interested in the subjects in question or strongly objects to the presentation of the posts in question.
No doubt this post will drop into downvoted oblivion.
This is a rhethorical move IMHO. It’s like when you say “I know it is a stupid question, but ” then everybody expects something really bad, and in comparison finds your question not so stupid at all. Lowering expectations.
This is almost certainly not something that merits investigation. Many different users have expressed that the posts are posts that have issues, and the posts have clearly gained their negative votes over a long time period. This isn’t votebombing or the like, this is the Karma system doing what it is supposed to.
Individual posts or comments getting a lot of downvotes isn’t something I investigate. It’s vague, but if there’s a suspicious pattern of receiving downvotes—particularly if a person’s karma is dropping fast for no apparent reason, that’s what I look into.
If you ask the question for personal reasons, is interacting sexually really the most relevant skill you are lacking? From what I read from you it seems like you don’t have the ability to have a simple friendship with a woman.
As long as you lack those skills any focus on sexuality is unlikely to yield much.
BTW, I find it interesting that over a decade ago, Eliezer described himself in a news story as a “volunteer virgin,” though he has since become sexually active.
In general drawing a lot of information out of such a statement in a news story is a bad idea. You have little idea about the context of the conversation between the journalist and Eliezer when Eliezer used the term “volunteer virgin”.
That implies he had opportunities for sexual relationships that he had simply declined until something happened to change his mind about pursuing them.
“Simply” is very likely wrong. Declining opportunities for sexual relationships is seldom simple and accepting them isn’t either. Both are complicated.
“Simply” is very likely wrong. Declining opportunities for sexual relationships is seldom simple and accepting them isn’t either. Both are complicated.
Eh. All of the opportunities for sexual relationships that I’ve declined have been for reasons that seemed simple to me. But that may be because I’m unpacking “simple” as “easily comprehensible” instead of “easily communicable.”
Having a friendship and a relationship are incredibly different but overlapping skillsets. If you simply set out to be very good friends with woman, but not have sexual relationships, you’d probably learn a lot of bad habits you’d have to unlearn when you decided you wanted to have a physical relationship.
Did you have your sexual debut with a legal prostitute because you couldn’t make it happen in your organic social situation while growing up, for example, with girls you knew in high school or college? And did that experience somehow make it easier to develop the skills for having sexual relationships with women through dating?
It seems likely that a virgin male who patronizes prostitutes will wind up with an unhealthy transactional (rather than relational) attitude toward women. If anything, I would expect hiring prostitutes to exacerbate the john’s relationship failures.
It’s complicated. A lot of virgin guys have pedestalizing attitudes, and it means they are alredy transactional AND think the price to pay for the transaction is enormous, like you must be a world-champion hero and bring her the Moon for birthday to deserve her attraction. This is very visible on how many virgin guys fall over themselves to try to give favors to hot girls in order to try to win their attraction that way: they really think a man must work his butt off to earn the attraction of a woman, and that is a transactional attitude, and with a very high price.
Lowering the transaction price can be a step in the right direction, it can remove the pedestal and put them on more of an equal footing, basically it can replace the imagined goddess to be worshipped that lives in the virgin guys mind with a mere human, and that can make in his mind women more relatable and thus more able to form relationships.
After all the man is used to whoring out everything that is valuable in himself anyway (work, intelligence, creativity, muscles, shoulder to cry on etc.) so prostitution can be how a woman becomes relatable for men, it can create a more equal footing and thus a higher chance to form relationships.
However it is nowhere sure to cause this, it can easily confuse people by getting completely contradictionary signals (s.x with a hot woman not very valuable but her real attraction very valuable as a source of validation).
I want to emphasize that a transactional attitude toward relationships is itself inherently pathological. Someone with this attitude will always either feel resentful that they aren’t getting a better “deal” in the relationship or anxiety that the other person feels that way about them.
It’s complicated. A lot of virgin guys have pedestalizing attitudes, and it means they are alredy transactional AND think the price to pay for the transaction is enormous, like you must be a world-champion hero and bring her the Moon for birthday to deserve her attraction.
I don’t think this is really the problem for many long-term male virgins. Really, emphasizing the virginity aspect is a mistake in itself. If you’re forming stable romantic relationships, sex happens. It’s a secondary effect. A 25 year old virgin’s real problem is not that he isn’t having sex, it’s that he’s not forming stable romantic relationships which are consequences of normal social/psychological development. Patronizing a prostitute or trying to seduce a girl in a nightclub isn’t going to solve the underlying problem that has prevented him from normal social/psychological development. I think likely it will feed into the bitterness and futility they feel.
Mostly, the “pedestal” concept is part of a self-serving narrative that a lot of men who are suffering from social failures find appealing. They tell themselves their problem is that they are to respectful and nice to women, and women are cruelly victimizing them for that. This seems to be a completely pathological attitude.
A 25 year old virgin’s real problem is not that he isn’t having sex, it’s that he’s not forming stable romantic relationships which are consequences of normal social/psychological development. Patronizing a prostitute or trying to seduce a girl in a nightclub isn’t going to solve the underlying problem that has prevented him from normal social/psychological development.
Well, it’s complicated. There are several different problems that lead to one being a 25 year-old virgin and what works in one case need not work in another. Sex surrogates are a thing and have been used to help people overcome certain inhibitions and anxieties. I have heard anecdotes of some people getting a similar benefit from prostitution. On the other hand, others have expressed regret at stooping to prostitution. Caveat emptor.
Some people have more fundamental social problems or harbor toxic attitudes and for them it’s not likely to work.
Mostly, the “pedestal” concept is part of a self-serving narrative that a lot of men who are suffering from social failures find appealing. They tell themselves their problem is that they are to respectful and nice to women, and women are cruelly victimizing them for that.
I think you’re mixing it up with Nice Guy syndrome. The pedestal concept is the observation that a lot of these men have an unrealistic view of women as pure, virtuous beings, which ends up inhibiting their ability to form meaningful relationships.
This seems to be a completely pathological attitude.
Honestly, it’s hard for a virgin in his 20s to develop a non-pathological attitude without stumbling upon it through pure chance. What attitude he does develop is born of inexperience and distorted by the lens of whatever problem led to him remaining a virgin in the first place.
Is there some further info about the concept of “transactional attitudes in relationships” ? I tried to google it, little avail. I would like to know more about it, because IMHO some amount of transactionality is inherent (even in friendships, people will not give forever without getting anything in return), and it sort of makes sense from the different libido of the two genders that the major exchange is women giving sex, men giving something else, but probably too much short-termist attitude in that (expecting instant repayment instead of an ongoing mutual happiness goal with both getting what they want) is probably indeed unhealthy, but it would be good to have something more than opinions on it. At least a detailed analysis. My hunch is that only martyrs can be 100% non-transactional so it is probably something about flexibility and time-frame.
Interestingly, googling transactional vs. relational brings seemingly unrelated results, it is about how businesses can treat customers.
Dan Savage encouraged straight up paying for sex if you have trouble getting it the usual way. Also, sex surrogate services are available for those in need. The problem is the unfulfilled need for emotional intimacy and companionship, which are not currently easy to purchase or rent.
Actually, I suspect that if the person in question has reasonable looks and is willing to be somewhat submissive, he can get a certain type of women to pay him for the privilege of teaching him sex :-)
which are not currently easy to purchase
I think they are not hard to purchase, the problem is that they are REALLY expensive :-/
So I know a neighbor of a neighbor who was once high on grass in Amsterdam where the ladies sit in shop windows and gave it a try. He said despite that said substance is a known aphrodisiac and despite she was hot, seriously kind and sweet, and eager to please, it is not good at all because due to the lack of love or lack of real attraction on her part—despite faking it - it was very much like doing a warm lifelike rubber doll. However this neighbor of a neighbor have never really had very high libido so it should be compared to him being “moderately pleased” 6⁄10 with normal intercourses and 3⁄10 with it.
However, this neighbor of a neighbor also learned that s.x with a hot body in and of itself is not a valuable thing, you can buy it for roughly the same price for twenty mins as a hotel room for a night, so you don’t put the p..y on a pedestal, you don’t worship it, and you are no longer scared by hot women as such.
However, this neighbor of a neighbor also learned that compared to how worthless s.x is, the love of a woman and the loving s.x or s.x with real attraction on the womans part is incredibly valuable and well deserves being put on a pedestal. Love is obvious enough and even not loving attraction on her part is valuable because it gives the man validation.
As a result, this neighbor’s neighbor’s feelings about hot women got kind of confused. After the encounter, he did not value s.x itself as a highly valuable and pedestal-worthy commodity, but he still valued the attraction of a hot woman and the kind of validation of she offering s.x for free because she finds the man hot highly valuable, and of course love too.
He also started wondering if this is how women tend to think about it too.
This neighbor of a neighbor spent years trying to figure it out, with fairly low motivation to chase women.
He ended up saying to the hell with it, let’s find a smart and funny and kind and really loveable-as-a-person woman and fall in love with each others brain and person, even if she does not look very hot, and there will be the occasional s.x too but it is not really a high priority aspect of the relationship.
No doubt this post will drop into downvoted oblivion. But I would like to explore the following, for personal reasons:
Have you ever used the services of a legal prostitute, like the ones who operate in bordellos in some Nevada counties? Did you have your sexual debut with a legal prostitute because you couldn’t make it happen in your organic social situation while growing up, for example, with girls you knew in high school or college? And did that experience somehow make it easier to develop the skills for having sexual relationships with women through dating? Or does it still leave you relatively incompetent in that area because prostitutes don’t really solve the sex problem you thought you had?
I don’t know of any research into this. But then professional sex researchers in general seem strangely incurious about the problems of sexually inexperienced and excluded adult men, judging from the absence of this topic in the recently published Human Sexuality 101 textbooks I’ve seen.
BTW, I find it interesting that over a decade ago, Eliezer described himself in a news story as a “volunteer virgin,” though he has since become sexually active. That implies he had opportunities for sexual relationships that he had simply declined until something happened to change his mind about pursuing them. Perhaps he realized that sexual experience would elevate his “armor class” in the male status hierarchy. It would also improve his social relationships with women in other areas; women can pick up on the “tells,” as Texas Hold’em players call them, of sexually inexperienced men, and they tend not to respect them.
If posts on certain topics are getting downvoted repeatedly, maybe it may make sense to pay attention to that feedback that the community is either not interested in the subjects in question or strongly objects to the presentation of the posts in question.
This is a rhethorical move IMHO. It’s like when you say “I know it is a stupid question, but ” then everybody expects something really bad, and in comparison finds your question not so stupid at all. Lowering expectations.
Possible. But a number of the users comments have been actually downvoted to oblivion.
Has Villiam, or whoever is in charge now, investigated this?
This is almost certainly not something that merits investigation. Many different users have expressed that the posts are posts that have issues, and the posts have clearly gained their negative votes over a long time period. This isn’t votebombing or the like, this is the Karma system doing what it is supposed to.
I’m the current moderator.
Individual posts or comments getting a lot of downvotes isn’t something I investigate. It’s vague, but if there’s a suspicious pattern of receiving downvotes—particularly if a person’s karma is dropping fast for no apparent reason, that’s what I look into.
Yes, sure, that’s the #1 reason why people date.
Ambiguous between sarcasm and sincerity :(
I’d say it’s 100% pure, unadulterated sarcasm.
If you ask the question for personal reasons, is interacting sexually really the most relevant skill you are lacking? From what I read from you it seems like you don’t have the ability to have a simple friendship with a woman. As long as you lack those skills any focus on sexuality is unlikely to yield much.
In general drawing a lot of information out of such a statement in a news story is a bad idea. You have little idea about the context of the conversation between the journalist and Eliezer when Eliezer used the term “volunteer virgin”.
“Simply” is very likely wrong. Declining opportunities for sexual relationships is seldom simple and accepting them isn’t either. Both are complicated.
Eh. All of the opportunities for sexual relationships that I’ve declined have been for reasons that seemed simple to me. But that may be because I’m unpacking “simple” as “easily comprehensible” instead of “easily communicable.”
Having a friendship and a relationship are incredibly different but overlapping skillsets. If you simply set out to be very good friends with woman, but not have sexual relationships, you’d probably learn a lot of bad habits you’d have to unlearn when you decided you wanted to have a physical relationship.
LOL. Really? Listen to Nancy Reagan and “Just say NO” :-)
It seems likely that a virgin male who patronizes prostitutes will wind up with an unhealthy transactional (rather than relational) attitude toward women. If anything, I would expect hiring prostitutes to exacerbate the john’s relationship failures.
It’s complicated. A lot of virgin guys have pedestalizing attitudes, and it means they are alredy transactional AND think the price to pay for the transaction is enormous, like you must be a world-champion hero and bring her the Moon for birthday to deserve her attraction. This is very visible on how many virgin guys fall over themselves to try to give favors to hot girls in order to try to win their attraction that way: they really think a man must work his butt off to earn the attraction of a woman, and that is a transactional attitude, and with a very high price.
Lowering the transaction price can be a step in the right direction, it can remove the pedestal and put them on more of an equal footing, basically it can replace the imagined goddess to be worshipped that lives in the virgin guys mind with a mere human, and that can make in his mind women more relatable and thus more able to form relationships.
After all the man is used to whoring out everything that is valuable in himself anyway (work, intelligence, creativity, muscles, shoulder to cry on etc.) so prostitution can be how a woman becomes relatable for men, it can create a more equal footing and thus a higher chance to form relationships.
However it is nowhere sure to cause this, it can easily confuse people by getting completely contradictionary signals (s.x with a hot woman not very valuable but her real attraction very valuable as a source of validation).
I want to emphasize that a transactional attitude toward relationships is itself inherently pathological. Someone with this attitude will always either feel resentful that they aren’t getting a better “deal” in the relationship or anxiety that the other person feels that way about them.
I don’t think this is really the problem for many long-term male virgins. Really, emphasizing the virginity aspect is a mistake in itself. If you’re forming stable romantic relationships, sex happens. It’s a secondary effect. A 25 year old virgin’s real problem is not that he isn’t having sex, it’s that he’s not forming stable romantic relationships which are consequences of normal social/psychological development. Patronizing a prostitute or trying to seduce a girl in a nightclub isn’t going to solve the underlying problem that has prevented him from normal social/psychological development. I think likely it will feed into the bitterness and futility they feel.
Mostly, the “pedestal” concept is part of a self-serving narrative that a lot of men who are suffering from social failures find appealing. They tell themselves their problem is that they are to respectful and nice to women, and women are cruelly victimizing them for that. This seems to be a completely pathological attitude.
Well, it’s complicated. There are several different problems that lead to one being a 25 year-old virgin and what works in one case need not work in another. Sex surrogates are a thing and have been used to help people overcome certain inhibitions and anxieties. I have heard anecdotes of some people getting a similar benefit from prostitution. On the other hand, others have expressed regret at stooping to prostitution. Caveat emptor.
Some people have more fundamental social problems or harbor toxic attitudes and for them it’s not likely to work.
I think you’re mixing it up with Nice Guy syndrome. The pedestal concept is the observation that a lot of these men have an unrealistic view of women as pure, virtuous beings, which ends up inhibiting their ability to form meaningful relationships.
Honestly, it’s hard for a virgin in his 20s to develop a non-pathological attitude without stumbling upon it through pure chance. What attitude he does develop is born of inexperience and distorted by the lens of whatever problem led to him remaining a virgin in the first place.
Is there some further info about the concept of “transactional attitudes in relationships” ? I tried to google it, little avail. I would like to know more about it, because IMHO some amount of transactionality is inherent (even in friendships, people will not give forever without getting anything in return), and it sort of makes sense from the different libido of the two genders that the major exchange is women giving sex, men giving something else, but probably too much short-termist attitude in that (expecting instant repayment instead of an ongoing mutual happiness goal with both getting what they want) is probably indeed unhealthy, but it would be good to have something more than opinions on it. At least a detailed analysis. My hunch is that only martyrs can be 100% non-transactional so it is probably something about flexibility and time-frame.
Interestingly, googling transactional vs. relational brings seemingly unrelated results, it is about how businesses can treat customers.
Dan Savage encouraged straight up paying for sex if you have trouble getting it the usual way. Also, sex surrogate services are available for those in need. The problem is the unfulfilled need for emotional intimacy and companionship, which are not currently easy to purchase or rent.
Actually, I suspect that if the person in question has reasonable looks and is willing to be somewhat submissive, he can get a certain type of women to pay him for the privilege of teaching him sex :-)
I think they are not hard to purchase, the problem is that they are REALLY expensive :-/
So I know a neighbor of a neighbor who was once high on grass in Amsterdam where the ladies sit in shop windows and gave it a try. He said despite that said substance is a known aphrodisiac and despite she was hot, seriously kind and sweet, and eager to please, it is not good at all because due to the lack of love or lack of real attraction on her part—despite faking it - it was very much like doing a warm lifelike rubber doll. However this neighbor of a neighbor have never really had very high libido so it should be compared to him being “moderately pleased” 6⁄10 with normal intercourses and 3⁄10 with it.
However, this neighbor of a neighbor also learned that s.x with a hot body in and of itself is not a valuable thing, you can buy it for roughly the same price for twenty mins as a hotel room for a night, so you don’t put the p..y on a pedestal, you don’t worship it, and you are no longer scared by hot women as such.
However, this neighbor of a neighbor also learned that compared to how worthless s.x is, the love of a woman and the loving s.x or s.x with real attraction on the womans part is incredibly valuable and well deserves being put on a pedestal. Love is obvious enough and even not loving attraction on her part is valuable because it gives the man validation.
As a result, this neighbor’s neighbor’s feelings about hot women got kind of confused. After the encounter, he did not value s.x itself as a highly valuable and pedestal-worthy commodity, but he still valued the attraction of a hot woman and the kind of validation of she offering s.x for free because she finds the man hot highly valuable, and of course love too.
He also started wondering if this is how women tend to think about it too.
This neighbor of a neighbor spent years trying to figure it out, with fairly low motivation to chase women.
He ended up saying to the hell with it, let’s find a smart and funny and kind and really loveable-as-a-person woman and fall in love with each others brain and person, even if she does not look very hot, and there will be the occasional s.x too but it is not really a high priority aspect of the relationship.
I love the way that advancedatheist assumes that we’re all guys. That, or lesbians.
These aren’t really questions, are they? Any more than that was.