After talking it over with some friends recently, I have given serious consideration to crossing over to the Dark Side by seeing a legal prostitute in Nevada this summer to try to have just one successful sexual experience in my life (at the age of 55).
I discovered an interesting spread of experiences in talking to these friends, guys around my age or somewhat older. One of them had a sex-negative upbringing like mine, and he said he had his sexual debut in his early 30’s, but with a woman he knew socially. Another told me that he started to see prostitutes in his teens, and that he has had a lot of experiences with them.
I wish I didn’t have to do this so “late in life,” according to current definitions of human lifespans, and with a prostitute. I couldn’t make this happen organically, in the social environment I grew up in 40 years ago; and I have a lot of empathy for the younger men who have had faced similar problems which have interfered with forming sexual relationships starting at appropriate ages. (I know this sounds out of character for me, because I don’t feel much empathy in general.)
What about She Who Must Not Be Named? You might happen to know her. She provided the opportunity for my first and so far only sexual experience in 1994, but I couldn’t get an erection with her in that situation to save my life, just from the lack of conditioned responses for doing so for the first time in my 30’s. (I talked to a sex therapist a few years afterwards who explained this to me. Basically young men’s first sexual experiences, assuming they can get them, help to calibrate the equipment; and I didn’t have that calibration. Nothing wrong with me medically, though.) Because this woman insists currently on slandering me in public in my absence at inappropriate times and places for reasons which don’t make much sense, I have an additional incentive just to hit the “reset” button with a prostitute and pretend that the 1994 incident with her never happened.
As for my Dark Side comment, sex involves the irrational. I don’t want you to get the wrong idea about my parents, because I had a happy childhood in general. My parents just conveyed to me a negative view of sex, and they had inadvertently damaged my sexual development by making me ashamed of sexual expression. But then my father died six months ago, and lately I’ve had the thought that I don’t have to live up to his standards of a “good boy” any more. He certainly wouldn’t have approved of my seeing a prostitute. But with his permanent absence, I don’t have to worry about his opinion of me from now on. And I admit the irrationality of my former way of thinking about this while my father lived.
I have some additional reasons for doing this – why not have more than one reason for a major change in your life? Not just to resolve finally the sex matter, but also:
To improve my position in the male hierarchy. Hey, advancedatheist has become a regular guy now. He has shown strength of character by overcoming a difficult personal challenge. Welcome to the men’s club, and better late than never.
To add the experience to my “Lazarus Long résumé.” Cryonicists want to stay alive so that we can continue to have experiences. Well, what would you call seeing a prostitute, especially if you have never done that before?
To start the process of developing better social skills for dealing with women in general. My current inexperience and discomfort with women mean that I give off weird “tells,” as Texas Hold’em players say in their context, that women can pick up on that apparently make them feel uneasy about me. If I can gain some basic level of sexual confidence by having some sexual experiences with other women after a successful experience with a prostitute, I should start to give off a better variety of tells when I encounter women socially that might make them more receptive towards me.
Farther down the line, I have aspirations of writing at least one novel, so I would like to develop the experience base for writing about sexual relationships in a novel that wouldn’t sound implausible or ridiculous. I can sometimes tell when I read a story that the author tries to depict a feasible action that he clearly hasn’t done in real life, like shooting a firearm. Sex scenes in stories have the same requirements.
I probably have more to say about this, and I may address them in your replies.
To me all of these seems rationalizazions. I feel there’s nothing wrong in wanting to satisfy your impulse, sex is a need and should not be disregarded. No need to label it Dark Side, there’s nothing dark in it. Plus
My current inexperience and discomfort with women mean that I give off weird “tells,”
I don’t think is inexperience that gives off uncomfortable vibes, I would bet that it’s rather anxiety and repressed desire.
Good for you for breaking the chains. And there is nothing dark-side-ish about patronizing a sex worker, as long as you treat her as well as you would anyone else you hire, say, a massage therapist or a physio.
And if it helps you connect with women without an explicit pay-for-sex contract, that’s a bonus.
I’m half your age and I’ve also been strongly considering using an escort to just get it over with, for many of the same reasons you listed. I’d rejected the idea in the past because I didn’t want to resort to prostitution, but the more I think about it the more I feel that’s more a product of my own vanity than any moral reservation (especially since I stopped being a Christian around the new year).
I don’t foresee anything happening in the near future that’s going to significantly improve my chances.* On the contrary, I’ve noticed a steep decline in prospects since leaving the dorm room environment in college. My social circle does not contain any known prospects. I figure I could wait for a random encounter, try some kind of online dating service, spend my evenings frequenting bars looking for a casual encounter, or use a prostitute.
* There are certain aspects of my situation which differ from yours and regarding which I have made some progress in the last few months. However, the issues with anxiety and inexperience still remain and are unlikely to fix themselves.
Well, whatever you do, please don’t go on an omega male rampage like Elliot Rodger last year.
I just find our boy-rearing practices odd. We can see starting in middle school, or its equivalent in your country, which boys readily attract girls. They get girlfriends early, they get the best looking girls, they get more girls in general, and they start having sexual experiences and relationships in their teens.
The rest of us as young men, by contrast, receive the seemingly well meaning advice from our elders to “develop ourselves and wait,” so that perhaps, possibly, some day, conceivably, young women will give us a turn with them. I know this happens because I heard this crap from my mother at that age.
Funny how our elders don’t tell the naturally bangable boys that they have to “develop themselves and wait.” At best the elders might advise these youngsters to slow down and bang more carefully to prevent unwanted pregnancies. But otherwise these guys can do pretty much whatever they want with girls because the girls let them with their parents’ complicity.
It looks almost as if a tacit understanding exists that adults need to set the sexually unfavored boys aside somehow so that they don’t get in the way of the bangable boys, who have the pleasant task of breaking in, sexually speaking, the girls in their generation. The rest of the young men have to wait until these girls, now young women, have to turn to them, reluctantly and without enthusiasm, for their “mature” relationships and sexually sparing marriages.
Early sexual experience is bad news. This is mostly due to common causes. Parents (ala EDT) might be hesitant to push their offspring in that direction, and at the very least (ala CDT) they probably don’t want their offspring to pair up with an early-breeder. This is particularly (perhaps only?) true of parents with traits that tend to produce those very offspring who aren’t getting laid in middle school.
Partially, as Ilya said, it’s difficult to explain. Some fathers do not have any good strategy; maybe they just had a lucky set of circumstances once, so their advice is for you to wait and hope that a similar lucky situation happens to you, too. Some fathers do have a good strategy, but are bad at explaining it by words; being a good teacher is a skill that many people simply do not have. Expecting a mother to give a reasonable advice does not make sense; unless she is a lesbian, she has no experience in the area of picking up girls. Her opinions in this area never had to pay rent, so they don’t have to reflect reality.
The remaining part is that other people do not care about your utility function as much as they do. Just because you don’t get pleasure from sex, it does not make their lives worse. Only your complaining is annoying. The advice “develop yourself and wait” simply means “quit annoying me”.
It looks almost as if a tacit understanding exists that adults need to set the sexually unfavored boys aside somehow
It seems to make evolutionary sense to not help other people’s sons reproduce.
Expecting a mother to give a reasonable advice does not make sense; unless she is a lesbian, she has no experience in the area of picking up girls. Her opinions in this area never had to pay rent, so they don’t have to reflect reality.
Mothers who manage to come up with good pick-up advice for sons might wind up with more grandkids on average. To the extent that accurate pick-up advice (or the ability to think of accurate pick-up advice) passes from one generation to the next, I’d expect parents to have otherwise-mysteriously accurate pick-up advice.
Not my mother. I tried to talk to her about my dating problems in my early 20′s, and Mom came up with, “Ask out the fat and ugly girls. They don’t have boyfriends.”
Needless to say, this “advice” astonished me, and in a bad way. You don’t normally expect your mother to express open contempt towards you.
Well, if you would have started with the less attractive girls, you could have gained more confidence and experience and slowly progress towards the more attractive ones. Imagine a parallel universe where you did exactly that. Which one of these universes would you rather be in, now?
(I am not sure if “starting here, then progressing there” was a part of the original advice, but I am trying to be charitable here. It is not necessarily a bad advice, maybe just not explained sufficiently.)
Also, the “fat and ugly” doesn’t have to be taken into extreme. There are many average girls without boyfriends simply because the boys around them fight for the few most attractive ones. Some of those boys will lose in the competition, and those who win will often get a spoiled princess that will probably cheat on them soon because she will get many attractive offers.
If you go for “average in attractiveness, but has a few traits that I personally prefer (traits that are not generally popular; such as being a nerd)”, you can get rather close to the optimal outcome… and yet as an overconfident young guy this would probable seem to you like settling down, because you imagine getting a princess plus the traits you personally prefer. Which is not impossible, just less likely, especially if are not one of the most attractive guys. (Similar advice applies to women, too; and most of them also hate to hear it.)
Well, if you would have started with the less attractive girls, you could have gained more confidence and experience and slowly progress towards the more attractive ones.
If only my mother had told me that. She could have said, ask out the average looking girls, preferably ones within a range of healthy weight, and then when you get your experience and confidence built up, try working your way up. And I would have found that advice helpful and constructive, and a signal that Mom thought that I had a shot at getting some of the better things in life.
No, in the context she meant that she thought I didn’t deserve any better. When I told this story to my friends at the time who had met my mother, they came away with the same impression. Decades later Mom wonders why I never had a girlfriend, I never got married and she doesn’t have any grandchildren.
Mom’s advice made no sense for another reason: How could I get sexual experience with fat and ugly women if the physiology on my end refused to cooperate?
All along I would have wanted to have some sexual experiences with average looking, even “nerdy,” women. But apparently in this iteration of the Matrix I had an unreasonable goal. So in my 50′s I have to budget money for a trip to a legal bordello in Nevada.
Some fathers do not have any good strategy; maybe they just had a lucky set of circumstances once, so their advice is for you to wait and hope that a similar lucky situation happens to you, too.
My father was 31 when he married my mother, aged 19, in 1958. I was born in November of 1959, so I don’t think Grandpa Langley had to stand behind Dad with his shotgun at the altar or anything like that. Dad told me very little about his adult life before he married Mom, and I suspect he just had little to tell in terms of experiences with women in his teens and 20′s. He might even have been a virgin when he got married.
Yet he had a pharmacy degree and he worked as a pharmacist, so he knew more about biology and medicine than most men in his generation. He must have filled prescriptions for contraceptives as well, so I can’t attribute his discomfort with advising me about sex to ignorance. That leaves relative inexperience as an explanation.
I suppose religion played a role in this sex-negativity, but we stopped going to church (a Southern Baptist one) when I was 14 (I never inquired into the reason, and I didn’t miss it); and the family just wasn’t overtly religious afterwards.
The most “bangable boys” as you put it is a constantly shifting target. The most successful boys in high school are the ones who are naturally good-looking and extroverted. As you grow older, income and conscientiousness play bigger factors. A guy with no money is perceived poorly by dates and will frequently be left with only one night stands. An undisciplined guy will gradually pack on weight and this will hurt his chances. Introverts, with practice, will get better at forcing themselves to make small talk and the extrovert advantage will diminish. Hard-working guys will have a higher income and stay in better shape, and can force themselves to learn how to approach girls in the right way. There are some constants like height, but a lot of your life choices can dramatically increase your chances. Genetics are a factor, but any guy with well above average intelligence born into a first world country (IE 90% of the LW community) already has been given the two biggest advantages possible.
Facial attractiveness correlated with the number of short-term, but not long-term, sexual partners, for males … Body attractiveness also correlated significantly with the number of short-term, but not long-term, sexual partners, for males, and attractive males became sexually active earlier than their peers. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1090513804000765
I’m not sure how they’re distinguishing between short-term and long-term because I can’t find an ungated copy. It also seems to be the case that our society discourages sex at an early age. I certainly don’t envy the kids who were most sexually active in high school.
The whole calibration thing definitely fits my experience. I think you just have to build up some comfort with being in a sexual situation.
Regardless of fault, it’s not rational to drag your parents or your upbringing into the situation at this point. They may have been the root cause of the problem, but they can do nothing to fix it for you now. However, it IS within your power to do that.
If I can gain some basic level of sexual confidence by having some sexual experiences...
This can help, but I think it’s just confidence in general that will help you in social situations. Fake it until you make it (become it). Your self image is largely impacted by your behavior even if the behavior is forced (look up some of the research done by Amy Cuddy, it’s interesting stuff). As for the “Weird Tells,” remember that what’s going on in your head is a mystery to others. Someone with only part of the information is going to assume the worst. You see some attractive woman you’d like to talk to, but you don’t know what to say or how to break the ice. So you don’t say anything and now you feel uncomfortable. She sees this uncomfortable, anxious looking dude who seems to be paying way too much attention to her… Danger Will Robinson! Danger! I think it’s better to be awkward and open than awkward and withdrawn. The first makes you seem less of a threat and the second lets the imagination go crazy. Either case exposes you to a lot of potential negative feedback, so just accept that as a given and drive on.
I’d like to say something along the lines of “you should try with women that you may actually be able to form a relationship with.” To be honest though, If I were in your shoes, I know I’d be looking pretty seriously at Nevada right about now.
Finally, there’s no dark side here, and it’s not irrational. Thinking that you shouldn’t have, shouldn’t want, or don’t deserve what 7 billion other people have and want is pretty irrational. Make the map fit the territory. MrMind is right, you don’t need to rationalize doing something that’s perfectly rational to begin with.
In any case, good luck with your sex life (and good luck with that novel too).
I think it’s just confidence in general that will help you in social situations. Fake it until you make it (become it). Your self image is largely impacted by your behavior even if the behavior is forced
Psychotherapist Albert Ellis writes in one of his autobiographical recollections that he had tremendous anxiety as a young man about talking to women. So, anticipating the kinds of advice given by today’s self-styled dating coaches and pickup artists, he forced himself to try to start conversations with 100 consecutive women he didn’t know in public places. After this exercise, he writes that he lost all approach anxiety. I think today’s pickup instructors call this something like “day game.”
However, I can see a problem with this in the current culture. PUA’s in training have become common enough in some cities to draw attention to the phenomenon, and feminists have started to complain about day game as a form of harassment.
I have also received negative views on sex during childhood. I wasn’t even sure if women do derive any pleasure from sex, or whether they merely do it to achieve something else (e.g. to have children, to have a relationship, to conform to social pressure, etc.). Of course if you can’t model the other person even approximately, then it is difficult to propose win/win solutions in situations when there is a social taboo to debate things openly. And as a nice guy (unlike how the sociopathic online warriors define the term, I simply mean a person who genuinely cares about how other people feel), I wouldn’t propose anyone a deal I wouldn’t believe they would like. -- But the truth is, many people do enjoy sex a lot, both men and women. Whatever the sex-negative people say, it may describe a fraction of population they belong to, or maybe they just say it because it is their idea of how to conform to their political or religious views; I never had the courage to ask.
I was perhaps lucky that one day I was in a situation where all other men in the group were even more “omega” than me, so the environment selected me for the role of the “local alpha”, and I happened to date the only girl in the group. And we had enough time and patience to experiment. She was curious too. -- But when the relationship was over, despite the lack of tension about sex, I still didn’t have the proper seduction skills. That I only learned a few years later, reading some online stuff (during the beginning of the “seduction industry”, when people were still trying to provide useful advice to their online friends, instead of trying to win more customers by doing something even more outrageous than all their competitors). Yes, social skills can be learned from textbooks, if you are willing to try it in real life later. And an imperfect textbook is better than no textbook at all.
Your strategy seems reasonable to me. Just wanted to warn you that “not feeling tension about sex” is only a part of the seduction skills. But if you can rid of the tension this easily, then why not.
I think you overestimate the impact on the “male hierarchy”. Seriously, how can anyone know how much sexual experience did you have? Do you tell them? I guess many of them lie, or at least exaggerate, why couldn’t you? (The rule of thumb is that men usually multiply the number by two, women divide it by two.) If you can’t invent plausible details, then simply don’t mention any details.
My advice: If you have an opportunity, learn to dance. In my experience, usually women are more interested in dancing than men, and men with good dancing skills are rare. So if you learn to dance decently (nothing too complicated, you are not trying to win competitions, only to have and provide fun when the music plays; give it one afternoon every week, and in a few months you are ready), you will get enormous opportunity to make a positive impression on women in socially acceptable situations. Even in politically correct societies, it is still acceptable for men to lead during the dance. In dance, everything is “plausibly deniable”, and yet it is almost a demo version of sex. When people feel good dancing together, they will probably feel good having sex together, and they both know it. Dancing jumps over many awkward steps from the usual dating scenario: one moment you are complete strangers, the other moment you are spending time together isolated from the rest of the group, touching each other and enjoying it. -- I guess now I sound like a dancing club advertisement, but this stuff really helped me a lot. And you could combine it with your strategy.
Where? How? I’m interested, but lack knowledge so very thoroughly that I don’t know what to Google or how to judge the results of a best-guess Google search beyond “bellydancing is not for me… probably.”
You need Waltz for 3⁄4 music (Viennese Waltz for quick music), and the rest of them can be used for 2⁄4 or 4⁄4 music. Quickstep, Jive, and Cha-cha are rather flexible for both quicker and slower music. Ten lessons and you are ready to go. Salsa is the most difficult of these, but is seems very popular.
If it is popular in your area, Polka is also a good choice. But this advice probably only applies to central Europe. There may be other cultural differences I am not aware of.
My advice: If you have an opportunity, learn to dance.
You know how in some sort of therapies they gradually increase exposure rather than all at once? It just occurred to me that learning to dance before learning to attract women is probably a good idea for the same reason why those therapies use gradual exposure.
I’ve heard the advice learning to dance will make women more interested in you, but I never made the inference that learning to dance also has the benefit of allowing you to make gradual progress.
Just thinking: what would be even more gradual approach? I know a guy who is already scared by the idea of dancing.
Probably something where you have to move your body, alone. Preferably not repeating the same simple two or three moves all the time, but something more varying, in the best case something where you could get skill and then you become proud of having that body skill. Yoga? Parkour? Volleyball? Anything like this is probably better than nothing.
Just thinking: what would be even more gradual approach? I know a guy who is already scared by the idea of dancing.
I was scared of dancing before I started Salsa dancing. It wasn’t easy at the beginning as someone who didn’t do any sport beforehand but I managed with time.
As far as non-dancing physical activity goes there martial arts which is scary for other reasons.
I would recommend Western body work systems like Feldenkrais and Alexanders Method over Yoga. Yoga isn’t bad as such as such, but there a lot of unquestioned dogma involved. Things are done in a certain way because they are thought to have been done that way 1000 years ago in India.
If he’s scared of dancing for social reasons, I would think that the underlying causes of that would have to be addressed. Off the top of my head, this might be a good gradual behavioral approach (but wouldn’t address any of the underlying cognitive causes):
Pen pal.
Do something that involves cooperation in person, but not socializing.
Go to a meetup that is like semi-professional and semi-social.
Initiate small talk in acceptable situations (with the barber, taxi driver, contextual comments to the person sitting next to you).
Initiate in a more random way. Ex. Hey, I like your glasses, where’d you get them? Something tells me that you’re a fan—did you see the game last night?
If his fear is more specific to physical activity, then I agree with you about starting off with something like Yoga. Some other ideas: Racquetball, Running, Ping Pong.
Unless it is a health problem that cannot be fixed, this seems like another good place to start. And it’s totally uncontroversial. You could start by visiting a physiotherapist and asking them: “uhm, I’m generally uncoordinated, and I was wondering if it can be fixed”. They are people who study this stuff all their lives; if they can help a victim of some horrible accident, they can probably help you too. And even partial results may be worth it.
And when your coordination improves, people are likely to notice that “something is different” about you, although they will have no idea why. There is no reason to tell them truth, because this will provide beautiful “evidence” for any story you might decide to tell them instead. (Or just blush and say “sorry guys, this is private”. And if they start torturing you, admit that you are fucking a married woman, so you must be 100% discrete.)
The sex therapist I mentioned, who has his practice in Orange County, CA, works with surrogates. I couldn’t afford it at the time, I lived too far away (about a three hour drive from the Inland Empire), and it felt a bit icky for some reason. I live in another state now which apparently doesn’t allow the practice of sexual surrogacy.
I don’t have a lot to add except to say, I can’t think of a single reason why not to do it. Which makes me just a bit confused, because it’s unlikely that this is the only time that society has generated a widespread taboo against a thing for literally no reason.
The reason in the past was probably disease and/or unintended pregnancy, and both of those can be fixed now. Also concerns about making sure women wouldn’t cheat on their husbands and leave them raising someone else’s kid, I think. The third reason, which is still applicable today, is that hiring a sex worker signals “can’t get sex without paying, therefore undesirable” but that’s probably not too big of a deal.
I’m a virgin at 25 (which is not the same as being a virgin at 55). One reason I haven’t used a prostitute is that I don’t want to admit to losing my virginity to a prostitute, and I also don’t want to lie about it.
As I told Epictetus, please don’t go on an omega male rampage like Elliot Rodger.
I can see why regular women feel ambivalent about prostitutes, BTW. On the one hand prostitutes handle the load of sexually satisfying the kinds of men regular women find repulsive. But on the other hand prostitutes seem to demonstrate that women can function sexually with almost any man through an act of will, without invoking the mystical claim about needing to feel “chemistry” with the man first.
“I want to have lots of sex, and can’t find anyone who wants to do it with me. But look, here are these people who not only get all the sex anyone could want—they even get paid for it! How dare they! Why should they so easily get what I want and can’t get?”
(For the avoidance of doubt: I am not in any way endorsing either the opinions or attitudes expressed there.)
It’s hard to know large numbers of other people’s motivations. My first guess is that some men really resent that they can’t get sex for their intrinsic wonderfulness, and prostitutes remind them of that fact.
On the other hand, I don’t know whether men who hate prostitutes don’t have non-monetary sex.
Looking at it from the outside, it’s just weird—it’s like resenting restaurant cooks because they aren’t making home-cooked meals for their families.
So far as money is concerned, I’ve seen a man describing women as “sitting on the bank”, but that seems to be resentment of women for having a source of financial security that men don’t have.
There’s a big difference between ‘function sexually’ and ‘getting what she wants from the encounter in itself’. There’s a big difference between the prostitute/client relationship and between lovers, just as there’s a big difference between an accountant/client relationship and a married couple, one of whom has balanced the books (or better, after they balanced their books together).
A woman’s sheer ability to perform can require only an act of will (in some cases), but for it to be part of the basis of a relationship requires a lot more things, which are what they mean by ‘chemistry’.
For anybody reading this: save for one very lucky encounter at 18, I was too. It happens. Three years later, I’ve spent nearly all that time in sexual relationships, sometimes more than one at once. The turn-around can come really quickly. I’m not sure I have enough information to pinpoint the changes I need to make, though.
I resisted the idea for a long time, obviously, because it conflicts with my upbringing. My late father definitely would not approve my seeing a prostitute.
If I can carry out my plan, I have thought of telling my mother about it afterwards to see her reaction.
If you no longer agree with the views of your father, I would recommend consciously changing the language you use when you talk about it to others as well as in your own head. If you see a prostitute and then feel unnecessarily guilty, it could do more harm than good.
I notice a lack of humor among LessWrong posters. When I talked to a friend about completing my journey to the Dark Side via prostitute, he laughed at the joke.
I don’t anticipate feeling guilty afterwards. Pissed off, perhaps, because I couldn’t make this happen organically in my teens and early 20′s with young women I knew in high school or college.
The existence of prostitution puzzles me, because it looks like a dysfunction of human sexuality in agricultural societies. I gather that in some agricultural societies, many men have their first sexual experiences with prostitutes as a rite of passage.
Yet I haven’t heard of any hunter-gatherer societies with prostitutes, though I would appreciate references to documented examples if you know of any. If you look to the paleolithic hunter-gatherer as the baseline for human welfare, as in paleonutrition, then a postulated “paleo-sexuality” wouldn’t seem to allow for prostitution.
I notice a lack of humor among LessWrong posters. When I talked to a friend about completing my journey to the Dark Side via prostitute, he laughed at the joke.
In a text only medium you can’t tell at all whether people who read what you write laugh.
In this case laughing at speaking about “the Dark Side” is also a simple mechanism to avoid dealing with the substance of the issue. Laughing to avoid dealing with moral questions is not in the spirit of LW.
Did not read grandparent, but poes law is more likely to hold if speaker creates weak signals that a sentence is parody, compared to alterative hypotheses such as holding a curious view. When there is greater variance of views, a stonger signal is needed to provide same level of evidence
The existence of prostitution puzzles me, because it looks like a dysfunction of human sexuality in agricultural societies.
Prostitution might not even be a uniquely human phenomenon.
There’s also a question of what, exactly defines prostitution. It’s straightforward enough when it’s a one-time transaction, but what to make of a relationship where one party provides regular sex in exchange for food and a place to stay (a paleo sugar daddy)?
but what to make of a relationship where one party provides regular sex in exchange for food and a place to stay
Sounds like one idea of traditional marriage. The woman promises to provide sex and the man promises to provide. Some feminists (e.g. Germaine Greer) have described this arrangement as prostitution.
Sounds like one idea of traditional marriage. The woman promises to provide sex and the man promises to provide.
I think this view of “traditional marriage” comes from fetishizing the 1950s, Leave-it-to-Beaver nuclear family. Go back a bit further and you’ll find the aristocrats marrying for political reasons while a peasant’s household required everyone to work long hours each day.
No, what you described is a trophy wife, a way for a man to signal his wealth by having a wife who can spend her days being idle.
The idea is your brain has a fast and slow part. System 1 is ‘fast, instinctive, and emotional’. System 2 is ‘slower, deliberative and logical’.
You have much better introspection of System 2 than of System 1. The first part of the post is suggesting you focus on introspecting these automatic quick reactions and strategizing around them.
The last part of the post is a not-very-funny joke based on HPMoR.
To start the process of developing better social skills for dealing with women in general. My current inexperience and discomfort with women mean that I give off weird “tells,” as Texas Hold’em players say in their context, that women can pick up on that apparently make them feel uneasy about me.
A lot of the tells might not have to do with being inexperienced but with being misogynistic.
Even if that would be true it’s still something that makes some woman feel uneasy. Not making woman uneasy itself doesn’t guarantee sexual success but it’s still very useful. On the other hand I don’t see how inexperience makes woman feel uneasy.
On the other hand I don’t see how inexperience makes woman feel uneasy.
Of course a man’s inexperience can make women uneasy, and for reasons they might find hard to articulate if they don’t encounter enough inexperienced middle aged men to form a good profile about them. Men who got their sexual experience at an appropriate age develop what I call the Adult Man’s Skill Set (AMSS); yet ironically they don’t see what AMSS does for them because they lack perspective on it and just take it for granted, like learning how to drive as a teenager. I, by contrast, can see all kinds of nonobvious things about AMSS from its absence in my life.
If so, I rather doubt that AA wishes to be—it seems rather more like AA’s more atomistic description (inexperience and discomfort) encapsulates the actual content of the feeling. I’m not sure what labeling it that way would add aside from making things worse.
Labeling that way increases the likelihood that he notices the causation between expressing misogynistic thoughts and women as a result feeling uneasy.
Hmm. Has She Who Must Not Be Named talked to you about me? I’ve started to wonder if her obsession with me derives from something I don’t seem to have generated in a woman before, namely, jealousy.
After talking it over with some friends recently, I have given serious consideration to crossing over to the Dark Side by seeing a legal prostitute in Nevada this summer to try to have just one successful sexual experience in my life (at the age of 55).
I discovered an interesting spread of experiences in talking to these friends, guys around my age or somewhat older. One of them had a sex-negative upbringing like mine, and he said he had his sexual debut in his early 30’s, but with a woman he knew socially. Another told me that he started to see prostitutes in his teens, and that he has had a lot of experiences with them.
I wish I didn’t have to do this so “late in life,” according to current definitions of human lifespans, and with a prostitute. I couldn’t make this happen organically, in the social environment I grew up in 40 years ago; and I have a lot of empathy for the younger men who have had faced similar problems which have interfered with forming sexual relationships starting at appropriate ages. (I know this sounds out of character for me, because I don’t feel much empathy in general.)
What about She Who Must Not Be Named? You might happen to know her. She provided the opportunity for my first and so far only sexual experience in 1994, but I couldn’t get an erection with her in that situation to save my life, just from the lack of conditioned responses for doing so for the first time in my 30’s. (I talked to a sex therapist a few years afterwards who explained this to me. Basically young men’s first sexual experiences, assuming they can get them, help to calibrate the equipment; and I didn’t have that calibration. Nothing wrong with me medically, though.) Because this woman insists currently on slandering me in public in my absence at inappropriate times and places for reasons which don’t make much sense, I have an additional incentive just to hit the “reset” button with a prostitute and pretend that the 1994 incident with her never happened.
As for my Dark Side comment, sex involves the irrational. I don’t want you to get the wrong idea about my parents, because I had a happy childhood in general. My parents just conveyed to me a negative view of sex, and they had inadvertently damaged my sexual development by making me ashamed of sexual expression. But then my father died six months ago, and lately I’ve had the thought that I don’t have to live up to his standards of a “good boy” any more. He certainly wouldn’t have approved of my seeing a prostitute. But with his permanent absence, I don’t have to worry about his opinion of me from now on. And I admit the irrationality of my former way of thinking about this while my father lived.
I have some additional reasons for doing this – why not have more than one reason for a major change in your life? Not just to resolve finally the sex matter, but also:
To improve my position in the male hierarchy. Hey, advancedatheist has become a regular guy now. He has shown strength of character by overcoming a difficult personal challenge. Welcome to the men’s club, and better late than never.
To add the experience to my “Lazarus Long résumé.” Cryonicists want to stay alive so that we can continue to have experiences. Well, what would you call seeing a prostitute, especially if you have never done that before?
To start the process of developing better social skills for dealing with women in general. My current inexperience and discomfort with women mean that I give off weird “tells,” as Texas Hold’em players say in their context, that women can pick up on that apparently make them feel uneasy about me. If I can gain some basic level of sexual confidence by having some sexual experiences with other women after a successful experience with a prostitute, I should start to give off a better variety of tells when I encounter women socially that might make them more receptive towards me.
Farther down the line, I have aspirations of writing at least one novel, so I would like to develop the experience base for writing about sexual relationships in a novel that wouldn’t sound implausible or ridiculous. I can sometimes tell when I read a story that the author tries to depict a feasible action that he clearly hasn’t done in real life, like shooting a firearm. Sex scenes in stories have the same requirements.
I probably have more to say about this, and I may address them in your replies.
To me all of these seems rationalizazions.
I feel there’s nothing wrong in wanting to satisfy your impulse, sex is a need and should not be disregarded. No need to label it Dark Side, there’s nothing dark in it.
Plus
I don’t think is inexperience that gives off uncomfortable vibes, I would bet that it’s rather anxiety and repressed desire.
Good for you for breaking the chains. And there is nothing dark-side-ish about patronizing a sex worker, as long as you treat her as well as you would anyone else you hire, say, a massage therapist or a physio.
And if it helps you connect with women without an explicit pay-for-sex contract, that’s a bonus.
I’m half your age and I’ve also been strongly considering using an escort to just get it over with, for many of the same reasons you listed. I’d rejected the idea in the past because I didn’t want to resort to prostitution, but the more I think about it the more I feel that’s more a product of my own vanity than any moral reservation (especially since I stopped being a Christian around the new year).
I don’t foresee anything happening in the near future that’s going to significantly improve my chances.* On the contrary, I’ve noticed a steep decline in prospects since leaving the dorm room environment in college. My social circle does not contain any known prospects. I figure I could wait for a random encounter, try some kind of online dating service, spend my evenings frequenting bars looking for a casual encounter, or use a prostitute.
* There are certain aspects of my situation which differ from yours and regarding which I have made some progress in the last few months. However, the issues with anxiety and inexperience still remain and are unlikely to fix themselves.
Well, whatever you do, please don’t go on an omega male rampage like Elliot Rodger last year.
I just find our boy-rearing practices odd. We can see starting in middle school, or its equivalent in your country, which boys readily attract girls. They get girlfriends early, they get the best looking girls, they get more girls in general, and they start having sexual experiences and relationships in their teens.
The rest of us as young men, by contrast, receive the seemingly well meaning advice from our elders to “develop ourselves and wait,” so that perhaps, possibly, some day, conceivably, young women will give us a turn with them. I know this happens because I heard this crap from my mother at that age.
Funny how our elders don’t tell the naturally bangable boys that they have to “develop themselves and wait.” At best the elders might advise these youngsters to slow down and bang more carefully to prevent unwanted pregnancies. But otherwise these guys can do pretty much whatever they want with girls because the girls let them with their parents’ complicity.
It looks almost as if a tacit understanding exists that adults need to set the sexually unfavored boys aside somehow so that they don’t get in the way of the bangable boys, who have the pleasant task of breaking in, sexually speaking, the girls in their generation. The rest of the young men have to wait until these girls, now young women, have to turn to them, reluctantly and without enthusiasm, for their “mature” relationships and sexually sparing marriages.
It’s not a conspiracy, they just don’t know what to tell you.
Early sexual experience is bad news. This is mostly due to common causes. Parents (ala EDT) might be hesitant to push their offspring in that direction, and at the very least (ala CDT) they probably don’t want their offspring to pair up with an early-breeder. This is particularly (perhaps only?) true of parents with traits that tend to produce those very offspring who aren’t getting laid in middle school.
Multiple reasons for this.
Partially, as Ilya said, it’s difficult to explain. Some fathers do not have any good strategy; maybe they just had a lucky set of circumstances once, so their advice is for you to wait and hope that a similar lucky situation happens to you, too. Some fathers do have a good strategy, but are bad at explaining it by words; being a good teacher is a skill that many people simply do not have. Expecting a mother to give a reasonable advice does not make sense; unless she is a lesbian, she has no experience in the area of picking up girls. Her opinions in this area never had to pay rent, so they don’t have to reflect reality.
The remaining part is that other people do not care about your utility function as much as they do. Just because you don’t get pleasure from sex, it does not make their lives worse. Only your complaining is annoying. The advice “develop yourself and wait” simply means “quit annoying me”.
It seems to make evolutionary sense to not help other people’s sons reproduce.
Mothers who manage to come up with good pick-up advice for sons might wind up with more grandkids on average. To the extent that accurate pick-up advice (or the ability to think of accurate pick-up advice) passes from one generation to the next, I’d expect parents to have otherwise-mysteriously accurate pick-up advice.
Not my mother. I tried to talk to her about my dating problems in my early 20′s, and Mom came up with, “Ask out the fat and ugly girls. They don’t have boyfriends.”
Needless to say, this “advice” astonished me, and in a bad way. You don’t normally expect your mother to express open contempt towards you.
I have a friend who is very sexually experienced. I asked him how he did it and he said, “Lower your standards”.
To be sure, even if the selection effect I mention is non-negligible, it evidently isn’t strong enough to drive pick-up knowledge to fixation.
I suspect I’m missing something but I don’t discern that in what you quoted (although it does sound simplistic & exaggerated).
Well, if you would have started with the less attractive girls, you could have gained more confidence and experience and slowly progress towards the more attractive ones. Imagine a parallel universe where you did exactly that. Which one of these universes would you rather be in, now?
(I am not sure if “starting here, then progressing there” was a part of the original advice, but I am trying to be charitable here. It is not necessarily a bad advice, maybe just not explained sufficiently.)
Also, the “fat and ugly” doesn’t have to be taken into extreme. There are many average girls without boyfriends simply because the boys around them fight for the few most attractive ones. Some of those boys will lose in the competition, and those who win will often get a spoiled princess that will probably cheat on them soon because she will get many attractive offers.
If you go for “average in attractiveness, but has a few traits that I personally prefer (traits that are not generally popular; such as being a nerd)”, you can get rather close to the optimal outcome… and yet as an overconfident young guy this would probable seem to you like settling down, because you imagine getting a princess plus the traits you personally prefer. Which is not impossible, just less likely, especially if are not one of the most attractive guys. (Similar advice applies to women, too; and most of them also hate to hear it.)
If only my mother had told me that. She could have said, ask out the average looking girls, preferably ones within a range of healthy weight, and then when you get your experience and confidence built up, try working your way up. And I would have found that advice helpful and constructive, and a signal that Mom thought that I had a shot at getting some of the better things in life.
No, in the context she meant that she thought I didn’t deserve any better. When I told this story to my friends at the time who had met my mother, they came away with the same impression. Decades later Mom wonders why I never had a girlfriend, I never got married and she doesn’t have any grandchildren.
Mom’s advice made no sense for another reason: How could I get sexual experience with fat and ugly women if the physiology on my end refused to cooperate?
All along I would have wanted to have some sexual experiences with average looking, even “nerdy,” women. But apparently in this iteration of the Matrix I had an unreasonable goal. So in my 50′s I have to budget money for a trip to a legal bordello in Nevada.
My father was 31 when he married my mother, aged 19, in 1958. I was born in November of 1959, so I don’t think Grandpa Langley had to stand behind Dad with his shotgun at the altar or anything like that. Dad told me very little about his adult life before he married Mom, and I suspect he just had little to tell in terms of experiences with women in his teens and 20′s. He might even have been a virgin when he got married.
Yet he had a pharmacy degree and he worked as a pharmacist, so he knew more about biology and medicine than most men in his generation. He must have filled prescriptions for contraceptives as well, so I can’t attribute his discomfort with advising me about sex to ignorance. That leaves relative inexperience as an explanation.
I suppose religion played a role in this sex-negativity, but we stopped going to church (a Southern Baptist one) when I was 14 (I never inquired into the reason, and I didn’t miss it); and the family just wasn’t overtly religious afterwards.
The most “bangable boys” as you put it is a constantly shifting target. The most successful boys in high school are the ones who are naturally good-looking and extroverted. As you grow older, income and conscientiousness play bigger factors. A guy with no money is perceived poorly by dates and will frequently be left with only one night stands. An undisciplined guy will gradually pack on weight and this will hurt his chances. Introverts, with practice, will get better at forcing themselves to make small talk and the extrovert advantage will diminish. Hard-working guys will have a higher income and stay in better shape, and can force themselves to learn how to approach girls in the right way. There are some constants like height, but a lot of your life choices can dramatically increase your chances. Genetics are a factor, but any guy with well above average intelligence born into a first world country (IE 90% of the LW community) already has been given the two biggest advantages possible.
I wonder about this. It wouldn’t surprise me if popularity at 15 strongly correlated with popularity throughout life.
Losing your virginity at a young age seems to predict increased sexual experience, but not in a good way. More akin to what you’re referring to:
I’m not sure how they’re distinguishing between short-term and long-term because I can’t find an ungated copy. It also seems to be the case that our society discourages sex at an early age. I certainly don’t envy the kids who were most sexually active in high school.
The whole calibration thing definitely fits my experience. I think you just have to build up some comfort with being in a sexual situation.
Regardless of fault, it’s not rational to drag your parents or your upbringing into the situation at this point. They may have been the root cause of the problem, but they can do nothing to fix it for you now. However, it IS within your power to do that.
This can help, but I think it’s just confidence in general that will help you in social situations. Fake it until you make it (become it). Your self image is largely impacted by your behavior even if the behavior is forced (look up some of the research done by Amy Cuddy, it’s interesting stuff). As for the “Weird Tells,” remember that what’s going on in your head is a mystery to others. Someone with only part of the information is going to assume the worst. You see some attractive woman you’d like to talk to, but you don’t know what to say or how to break the ice. So you don’t say anything and now you feel uncomfortable. She sees this uncomfortable, anxious looking dude who seems to be paying way too much attention to her… Danger Will Robinson! Danger! I think it’s better to be awkward and open than awkward and withdrawn. The first makes you seem less of a threat and the second lets the imagination go crazy. Either case exposes you to a lot of potential negative feedback, so just accept that as a given and drive on.
I’d like to say something along the lines of “you should try with women that you may actually be able to form a relationship with.” To be honest though, If I were in your shoes, I know I’d be looking pretty seriously at Nevada right about now.
Finally, there’s no dark side here, and it’s not irrational. Thinking that you shouldn’t have, shouldn’t want, or don’t deserve what 7 billion other people have and want is pretty irrational. Make the map fit the territory. MrMind is right, you don’t need to rationalize doing something that’s perfectly rational to begin with.
In any case, good luck with your sex life (and good luck with that novel too).
Psychotherapist Albert Ellis writes in one of his autobiographical recollections that he had tremendous anxiety as a young man about talking to women. So, anticipating the kinds of advice given by today’s self-styled dating coaches and pickup artists, he forced himself to try to start conversations with 100 consecutive women he didn’t know in public places. After this exercise, he writes that he lost all approach anxiety. I think today’s pickup instructors call this something like “day game.”
However, I can see a problem with this in the current culture. PUA’s in training have become common enough in some cities to draw attention to the phenomenon, and feminists have started to complain about day game as a form of harassment.
Thanks for your support. I’ve gotten encouragement from others I talked to.
Thanks for the openness.
I have also received negative views on sex during childhood. I wasn’t even sure if women do derive any pleasure from sex, or whether they merely do it to achieve something else (e.g. to have children, to have a relationship, to conform to social pressure, etc.). Of course if you can’t model the other person even approximately, then it is difficult to propose win/win solutions in situations when there is a social taboo to debate things openly. And as a nice guy (unlike how the sociopathic online warriors define the term, I simply mean a person who genuinely cares about how other people feel), I wouldn’t propose anyone a deal I wouldn’t believe they would like. -- But the truth is, many people do enjoy sex a lot, both men and women. Whatever the sex-negative people say, it may describe a fraction of population they belong to, or maybe they just say it because it is their idea of how to conform to their political or religious views; I never had the courage to ask.
I was perhaps lucky that one day I was in a situation where all other men in the group were even more “omega” than me, so the environment selected me for the role of the “local alpha”, and I happened to date the only girl in the group. And we had enough time and patience to experiment. She was curious too. -- But when the relationship was over, despite the lack of tension about sex, I still didn’t have the proper seduction skills. That I only learned a few years later, reading some online stuff (during the beginning of the “seduction industry”, when people were still trying to provide useful advice to their online friends, instead of trying to win more customers by doing something even more outrageous than all their competitors). Yes, social skills can be learned from textbooks, if you are willing to try it in real life later. And an imperfect textbook is better than no textbook at all.
Your strategy seems reasonable to me. Just wanted to warn you that “not feeling tension about sex” is only a part of the seduction skills. But if you can rid of the tension this easily, then why not.
I think you overestimate the impact on the “male hierarchy”. Seriously, how can anyone know how much sexual experience did you have? Do you tell them? I guess many of them lie, or at least exaggerate, why couldn’t you? (The rule of thumb is that men usually multiply the number by two, women divide it by two.) If you can’t invent plausible details, then simply don’t mention any details.
My advice: If you have an opportunity, learn to dance. In my experience, usually women are more interested in dancing than men, and men with good dancing skills are rare. So if you learn to dance decently (nothing too complicated, you are not trying to win competitions, only to have and provide fun when the music plays; give it one afternoon every week, and in a few months you are ready), you will get enormous opportunity to make a positive impression on women in socially acceptable situations. Even in politically correct societies, it is still acceptable for men to lead during the dance. In dance, everything is “plausibly deniable”, and yet it is almost a demo version of sex. When people feel good dancing together, they will probably feel good having sex together, and they both know it. Dancing jumps over many awkward steps from the usual dating scenario: one moment you are complete strangers, the other moment you are spending time together isolated from the rest of the group, touching each other and enjoying it. -- I guess now I sound like a dancing club advertisement, but this stuff really helped me a lot. And you could combine it with your strategy.
Where? How? I’m interested, but lack knowledge so very thoroughly that I don’t know what to Google or how to judge the results of a best-guess Google search beyond “bellydancing is not for me… probably.”
I would start googling “dancing lessons” + your city.
My favourite dances: Waltz, Viennese Waltz, Foxtrot-Quickstep, Jive, Cha-cha, Salsa. If you could find a course that teaches exactly these, I would totally recommend it.
You need Waltz for 3⁄4 music (Viennese Waltz for quick music), and the rest of them can be used for 2⁄4 or 4⁄4 music. Quickstep, Jive, and Cha-cha are rather flexible for both quicker and slower music. Ten lessons and you are ready to go. Salsa is the most difficult of these, but is seems very popular.
If it is popular in your area, Polka is also a good choice. But this advice probably only applies to central Europe. There may be other cultural differences I am not aware of.
You know how in some sort of therapies they gradually increase exposure rather than all at once? It just occurred to me that learning to dance before learning to attract women is probably a good idea for the same reason why those therapies use gradual exposure.
I’ve heard the advice learning to dance will make women more interested in you, but I never made the inference that learning to dance also has the benefit of allowing you to make gradual progress.
Just thinking: what would be even more gradual approach? I know a guy who is already scared by the idea of dancing.
Probably something where you have to move your body, alone. Preferably not repeating the same simple two or three moves all the time, but something more varying, in the best case something where you could get skill and then you become proud of having that body skill. Yoga? Parkour? Volleyball? Anything like this is probably better than nothing.
I was scared of dancing before I started Salsa dancing. It wasn’t easy at the beginning as someone who didn’t do any sport beforehand but I managed with time.
As far as non-dancing physical activity goes there martial arts which is scary for other reasons.
I would recommend Western body work systems like Feldenkrais and Alexanders Method over Yoga. Yoga isn’t bad as such as such, but there a lot of unquestioned dogma involved. Things are done in a certain way because they are thought to have been done that way 1000 years ago in India.
If he’s scared of dancing for social reasons, I would think that the underlying causes of that would have to be addressed. Off the top of my head, this might be a good gradual behavioral approach (but wouldn’t address any of the underlying cognitive causes):
Pen pal.
Do something that involves cooperation in person, but not socializing.
Go to a meetup that is like semi-professional and semi-social.
Go to a social meetup.
Toastmasters.
Learn to dance.
Initiate small talk in acceptable situations (with the barber, taxi driver, contextual comments to the person sitting next to you).
Initiate in a more random way. Ex. Hey, I like your glasses, where’d you get them? Something tells me that you’re a fan—did you see the game last night?
If his fear is more specific to physical activity, then I agree with you about starting off with something like Yoga. Some other ideas: Racquetball, Running, Ping Pong.
When you’ve known the same people for over two decades and you don’t show up to social gatherings with a woman on your arm, they can figure it out.
That would work against me. Not coordinated enough, and I wear size 15 shoes.
Unless it is a health problem that cannot be fixed, this seems like another good place to start. And it’s totally uncontroversial. You could start by visiting a physiotherapist and asking them: “uhm, I’m generally uncoordinated, and I was wondering if it can be fixed”. They are people who study this stuff all their lives; if they can help a victim of some horrible accident, they can probably help you too. And even partial results may be worth it.
And when your coordination improves, people are likely to notice that “something is different” about you, although they will have no idea why. There is no reason to tell them truth, because this will provide beautiful “evidence” for any story you might decide to tell them instead. (Or just blush and say “sorry guys, this is private”. And if they start torturing you, admit that you are fucking a married woman, so you must be 100% discrete.)
Did you consider a sexual surrogate?
The sex therapist I mentioned, who has his practice in Orange County, CA, works with surrogates. I couldn’t afford it at the time, I lived too far away (about a three hour drive from the Inland Empire), and it felt a bit icky for some reason. I live in another state now which apparently doesn’t allow the practice of sexual surrogacy.
I don’t have a lot to add except to say, I can’t think of a single reason why not to do it. Which makes me just a bit confused, because it’s unlikely that this is the only time that society has generated a widespread taboo against a thing for literally no reason.
The reason in the past was probably disease and/or unintended pregnancy, and both of those can be fixed now. Also concerns about making sure women wouldn’t cheat on their husbands and leave them raising someone else’s kid, I think. The third reason, which is still applicable today, is that hiring a sex worker signals “can’t get sex without paying, therefore undesirable” but that’s probably not too big of a deal.
I’m a virgin at 25 (which is not the same as being a virgin at 55). One reason I haven’t used a prostitute is that I don’t want to admit to losing my virginity to a prostitute, and I also don’t want to lie about it.
As I told Epictetus, please don’t go on an omega male rampage like Elliot Rodger.
I can see why regular women feel ambivalent about prostitutes, BTW. On the one hand prostitutes handle the load of sexually satisfying the kinds of men regular women find repulsive. But on the other hand prostitutes seem to demonstrate that women can function sexually with almost any man through an act of will, without invoking the mystical claim about needing to feel “chemistry” with the man first.
Also, especially when monogamy is a strong social norm, prostitutes break up a wife’s monopoly on sex for her husband.
What I can’t figure out is why some noticeable proportion of heterosexual men hate prostitutes.
My bet is that they process it as a purity/sacredness violation.
“I want to have lots of sex, and can’t find anyone who wants to do it with me. But look, here are these people who not only get all the sex anyone could want—they even get paid for it! How dare they! Why should they so easily get what I want and can’t get?”
(For the avoidance of doubt: I am not in any way endorsing either the opinions or attitudes expressed there.)
It’s hard to know large numbers of other people’s motivations. My first guess is that some men really resent that they can’t get sex for their intrinsic wonderfulness, and prostitutes remind them of that fact.
On the other hand, I don’t know whether men who hate prostitutes don’t have non-monetary sex.
Looking at it from the outside, it’s just weird—it’s like resenting restaurant cooks because they aren’t making home-cooked meals for their families.
So far as money is concerned, I’ve seen a man describing women as “sitting on the bank”, but that seems to be resentment of women for having a source of financial security that men don’t have.
There’s a big difference between ‘function sexually’ and ‘getting what she wants from the encounter in itself’. There’s a big difference between the prostitute/client relationship and between lovers, just as there’s a big difference between an accountant/client relationship and a married couple, one of whom has balanced the books (or better, after they balanced their books together).
A woman’s sheer ability to perform can require only an act of will (in some cases), but for it to be part of the basis of a relationship requires a lot more things, which are what they mean by ‘chemistry’.
For anybody reading this: save for one very lucky encounter at 18, I was too. It happens. Three years later, I’ve spent nearly all that time in sexual relationships, sometimes more than one at once. The turn-around can come really quickly. I’m not sure I have enough information to pinpoint the changes I need to make, though.
Why do you see this as “the dark side”?
I resisted the idea for a long time, obviously, because it conflicts with my upbringing. My late father definitely would not approve my seeing a prostitute.
If I can carry out my plan, I have thought of telling my mother about it afterwards to see her reaction.
If you no longer agree with the views of your father, I would recommend consciously changing the language you use when you talk about it to others as well as in your own head. If you see a prostitute and then feel unnecessarily guilty, it could do more harm than good.
I notice a lack of humor among LessWrong posters. When I talked to a friend about completing my journey to the Dark Side via prostitute, he laughed at the joke.
I don’t anticipate feeling guilty afterwards. Pissed off, perhaps, because I couldn’t make this happen organically in my teens and early 20′s with young women I knew in high school or college.
The existence of prostitution puzzles me, because it looks like a dysfunction of human sexuality in agricultural societies. I gather that in some agricultural societies, many men have their first sexual experiences with prostitutes as a rite of passage.
Yet I haven’t heard of any hunter-gatherer societies with prostitutes, though I would appreciate references to documented examples if you know of any. If you look to the paleolithic hunter-gatherer as the baseline for human welfare, as in paleonutrition, then a postulated “paleo-sexuality” wouldn’t seem to allow for prostitution.
In a text only medium you can’t tell at all whether people who read what you write laugh.
In this case laughing at speaking about “the Dark Side” is also a simple mechanism to avoid dealing with the substance of the issue. Laughing to avoid dealing with moral questions is not in the spirit of LW.
Did not read grandparent, but poes law is more likely to hold if speaker creates weak signals that a sentence is parody, compared to alterative hypotheses such as holding a curious view. When there is greater variance of views, a stonger signal is needed to provide same level of evidence
Prostitution might not even be a uniquely human phenomenon.
There’s also a question of what, exactly defines prostitution. It’s straightforward enough when it’s a one-time transaction, but what to make of a relationship where one party provides regular sex in exchange for food and a place to stay (a paleo sugar daddy)?
Sounds like one idea of traditional marriage. The woman promises to provide sex and the man promises to provide. Some feminists (e.g. Germaine Greer) have described this arrangement as prostitution.
I think this view of “traditional marriage” comes from fetishizing the 1950s, Leave-it-to-Beaver nuclear family. Go back a bit further and you’ll find the aristocrats marrying for political reasons while a peasant’s household required everyone to work long hours each day.
No, what you described is a trophy wife, a way for a man to signal his wealth by having a wife who can spend her days being idle.
I like to think about these situations from two perspectives: System 1 and System 2.
System 2 - In my evaluation of the options and their costs and benefits, what should I do?
System 1:
a) What is my System 1 currently telling me? (I think that making this explicit is helpful)
b) Why is it telling me this? (Knowing why your brain does what it does makes it easier to trust and control it)
c) How does the information System 1 provided me with affect my cost-benefit analysis?
d) How can I massage System 1 to help motivate me to do what I want to do?
(joke; maybe it’ll make you smile)
So it seems that:
1) You have a mysterious dark side.
2) Bad things happened when your “magic” “interacted” with She Who Must Not Be Named.
Are you The Boy Who Lived??
Can someone translate this into plain English for me?
The idea is your brain has a fast and slow part. System 1 is ‘fast, instinctive, and emotional’. System 2 is ‘slower, deliberative and logical’.
You have much better introspection of System 2 than of System 1. The first part of the post is suggesting you focus on introspecting these automatic quick reactions and strategizing around them.
The last part of the post is a not-very-funny joke based on HPMoR.
A lot of the tells might not have to do with being inexperienced but with being misogynistic.
If misogynistic guys had problem getting laid, misogyny would have already disappeared long ago.
(Disclaimer: I do not approve of misogyny, but I believe it is more or less orthogonal to sexual success.)
Even if that would be true it’s still something that makes some woman feel uneasy. Not making woman uneasy itself doesn’t guarantee sexual success but it’s still very useful. On the other hand I don’t see how inexperience makes woman feel uneasy.
Of course a man’s inexperience can make women uneasy, and for reasons they might find hard to articulate if they don’t encounter enough inexperienced middle aged men to form a good profile about them. Men who got their sexual experience at an appropriate age develop what I call the Adult Man’s Skill Set (AMSS); yet ironically they don’t see what AMSS does for them because they lack perspective on it and just take it for granted, like learning how to drive as a teenager. I, by contrast, can see all kinds of nonobvious things about AMSS from its absence in my life.
Can I rephrase this?
Are there really no such traits X?
If so, I rather doubt that AA wishes to be—it seems rather more like AA’s more atomistic description (inexperience and discomfort) encapsulates the actual content of the feeling. I’m not sure what labeling it that way would add aside from making things worse.
Labeling that way increases the likelihood that he notices the causation between expressing misogynistic thoughts and women as a result feeling uneasy.
Yes, IF he is misogynistic and hasn’t noticed that, then he could do some introspection to determine whether that is the case.
From the way he’s presented it—putting the problems entirely within himself—it really doesn’t seem to me like that’s the problem here.
Hmm. Has She Who Must Not Be Named talked to you about me? I’ve started to wonder if her obsession with me derives from something I don’t seem to have generated in a woman before, namely, jealousy.