Women’s agency causes there to be nothing to pay men with, because if women are given a choice they favour a minority of males, harem behaviour, promiscuity, childlessness, etc.
There are so many problems with this statement I hardly know where to start. First off, if men are being paid with sex (from women—note that gay men exist and also make contributions to society, even if you want to ignore the non-natal contributions of women!), then doesn’t promiscuity mean more availability of sex, not less? Also, when some women have agency, they work in porn or prostitution, further providing greater availability of sex to more men, and it’s even mediated by money, so you can’t argue it’s going to men who aren’t contributing to society.
I also don’t think that your “favour a minority of males” holds up either. Any individual woman favors a minority of males due to individual preferences… just like each man favors a minority of women. Sure, there exist males that are favorites of lots of women, but this is vastly more relevant to short-term mating than pair bonding. There’s a reason there’s a game called “Fuck, Marry, Kill”. Wilt Chamberlain might have had sex with a lot of women, but he didn’t have long-term relationships with them.
Both men and women have differing interests for short-term mating vs. pair bonding, so promiscuity doesn’t actually much affect the availability of pair bonding. (And paternity tests are a thing, for anyone who cares.) Polyamory, swinging, “hotwife” and other lifestyles often involve women having both a husband and either a boyfriend or multiple casual partners, so I’m really confused by how this choice leads to a restriction of available sex or reproductive opportunities for men!
In addition to attractiveness being on a bell-curve for men, it’s also not uniformly distributed among women. This means that in your theoretical environment where a few men grab all the women, there’s actually a limit to how many these super-attractive dudes will accept, since they have the pick of the best and limited time to go around… leaving the “rest” of the women for the “rest” of the men.
Most women are also not interested in a pair bond with someone who doesn’t have time for them, and—ironically enough—the availability of choices for women that they didn’t have before, means that women don’t have to join a harem just to be able to live well and have a decent shot at providing for their offspring!
So I don’t see how giving women options leads to more harems. After all, any historical example of harems has to take into account the historic lack of economic opportunity for women to provide for themselves or their children, and the threats that existed if they were independent.
Historically, as far as I can tell, about the only thing women needed men to “protect” them from… was other men! Because the “social contract” of the times dictated that women were property, and didn’t have any agency.
But if you look at where polygamy is actually practiced today, in the sense of dudes with multiple wives, I would guess you’ll find that it’s in places where women don’t have as many economic opportunities or the same amount of social safety. (For example, cults.) And if you look at what kind of “harems” exist where women have greater agency and economic opportunity, what you’ll find is that it’s overwhelmingly the women who have multiple partners, not the men.
Anyway, it seems to me that your argument relies upon “women” being undifferentiated beings with uniform desires… which if, you’ve ever actually been friends with any, would be obviously untrue. (Well, I might be biased because my friendships and relationships have been with smart women, and smart people’s preferences vary more greatly than average people’s do, of any gender. But most of the phenomena that keep women from say, forming a marriage harem around Brad Pitt, apply to most women.)
To sum up the unspoken premises you seem to be relying on:
Women have uniform attractiveness (nope)
Women all find the same men attractive (nope)
Women are willing to be part of huge harems as long-term partners when they have other options (nope)
Short term and long term mating preferences being the same (nope)
Women having economic options removes opportunities for men to trade their economic success for access to sex (nope, since even rich women still prefer financially-stable men, and sex work is also an economic option that some women prefer; see also the modern notion of an “arrangement” or “sugar daddy”)
And apart from all that, I have to say as a man that I have hugely benefited from the greater agency women have now, especially with regards to sexual agency. So I’m really confused by this entire argument. (Note that fewer women being forced by economic or social conditions into sex work, “arrangements”, harems, etc. means that the women who still do choose these situations are more likely to be willing and enthusiastically consenting than before… which IMO is an obvious good for the men as well!)
It’s possible that your experience of “premise seems to be almost unconsciously accepted by everyone I raise it with” is actually “people haven’t taken more than a moment to think about it”, or “people who don’t have much experience of women exercising their actual sexual agency and preferences, vs. what society (or some dude with a blog) says they’re supposed to do or want.”
Also, while I didn’t even touch the premise of “Men do the bulk of the work when it comes to creating, maintaining, and defending everything in society,” this doesn’t mean I agree with it. My arguments here show, I believe, that even if one accepted that premise as true, the rest of your idea falls flat! (And I don’t accept it as true, because even if you assume a patriarchal society with traditional gender roles, one could say that “women do the bulk of the work when it comes to creating, training, and supporting the next generation of society”… and it’s still pretty true even without them being forced into that role.)
Finally, as the saying goes “never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right”. The women I know are people who deserve agency and choices… and make their own contributions to society, too, thank you very much. (Which would be even greater with more access to choices, since e.g. my wife was discouraged in high school from pursuing advanced mathematics, since she was a girl and “wouldn’t need it”.)
So, your response to my questioning your premises is to propose more premises?
Men do not favour a minority of women
What? Of course they do. I’m a man, I would think I would know if I favored the majority of women. I don’t. Similarly, you state that “men” require reproductive opportunity. I don’t. I don’t want children.
So I’m a trivial counterargument on both counts.
These seem to me like trivial refutations of large portions of your ideas about men, without even getting to such notions as “what social contract?” “Who made this contract with whom?” Or, for example:
Good luck trying to wring 60 solid years of slavish labour from a man that has checked out of the race and just wants to play xbox.
My response to that is, why on earth would I want to? I’m similarly baffled as to what value you see in the constructs you see as decaying. Many of them seem like things I’m more than happy to see us rid of. For example:
birth rate crash of the West
I’m not sure why I should see fewer people existing as a problem. Perhaps the people that do exist will be ones who feel wanted, rather than that they are being born into a society that expects them to do things they don’t want in order to preserve a society full of people doing things they don’t want to preserve a society full of… endlessly recursive suffering. If that is what children have to look forward to, then it’s better they not be born in the first place. (Which is one of the reasons I’m not interested in having children.)
Another random point:
search for pictures of Leonardo DiCaprio on beaches with models. He’s coming up on 30 years of dozens of models a week (although he does share them with his friends, so that’s nice of him).
Does he have a collection that he keeps locked away in a harem? If not, he’s not stopping them from pursuing “reproductive opportunities” with other men. Lots of women might enjoy a weekend with Lenny D, but a lot fewer actually want to stick around and have kids with him. Plus, that’s what, 18000 women? There are still four billion left. There could be a thousand Leo DiCaprios not sharing any of those women and that’s still only like one major city populated by women you no longer want to sleep with because apparently sleeping with more than one guy is (somehow?) a problem in some way I don’t understand… and then there’s still billions left.
And another thing:
virtually all women that want sex are getting it
On behalf of virtually every woman I have ever known… bwahahahahahahaha. Ha. No. No, no, no, no.
This is obviously, trivially false, as can be shown by observing the billion-dollar industries known as “romance novels” and “vibrators”. (Let alone “Fifty Shades”… and for the two previous generations’ versions, “Nine and a Half Weeks” and “Story of O”.)
See also the research showing the main reason women are less likely to respond to random propositions than men do, is because they have a lower prior expectation for a randomly-selected man being a good lover. That is, they expect that on average, sex with a guy is a crapshoot with regard to the quality of the experience, such that they’re better off going home to curl up with a good book and a vibrator.
(Which is one reason that a guy who is discovered to be even halfway decent in bed will sometimes get passed around a woman’s circle of friends like a party favor… regardless of what the guy looks like on their OKCupid. The fact that people judge books by their covers should not be construed as them not caring about the contents, in situations where the cover is the only thing available to them to judge by!)
Anyway, none of these things are at all consistent with the idea that “virtually all women that want sex are getting it”.
many men that want sex are not getting it
And? So? We live in a world where you can jack it to almost anything you can imagine… for free! Or you can pay a cam girl to act it out for you, or even hire an actual live person to do something for you.
So if what you are calling “sex” is not one of those things, it’s not actually sex that’s being sought, but something else that you can’t actually buy… like love, or appreciation, or respect. (Which making more sex available will not give you, if it’s from someone who resents you for making them, or who sees you as an obligation.)
Honestly, this whole thing sounds to me like, “women should want to have sex with me because social contract, blah blah”. And my response is, why should they want to? If you’re making a contribution to society, surely you have something you can contribute to them, personally, that they value? Arguing that another market participant should value something different than what they actually value, is not very good marketing, so it’s not surprising your product isn’t selling in that case.
I mean, as far as I can tell, 99% of this is “women want the wrong things, in my opinion, and should want things that benefit me”, and/or “society should be restructured to force women to want the things that benefit me”, with most of the rest being chaff and smokescreens for that fundamental point of view.
But if the person reading your arguments doesn’t have the same value system as you, none of that is meaningful. All I can hear is “people should be made to want the things I do, or at least forced to do them whether they want to or not”, which to me doesn’t distinguish between you and J Random Fundamentalist of whatever religion.
the labour of one sex was the payment for the other
See, this is what continues to baffle me. If what you want is ownership of a sex partner, you can have that consensually, too, in this day and age. There exist plenty of women who want this arrangement just because it’s their fetish, too, let alone the vast number of women who still live in cultures where that’s just the done thing (if that’s the sort of dubcon that gets you off). So if that’s what you want, why not just go get it, instead of insisting that everyone must do it that way, or else? If that’s what floats your boat to the tune of 60 years of backbreaking work or whatever, hey, go for it.
But that doesn’t mean everybody else wants to live in a world that revolves around ownership fetishes.
I can’t help but feel there’s some kind of fundamental thing I don’t “get” about people with this type of “men don’t get enough sex” argument. The weird thing about it to me, is that it seems like an example of the same sort of argument that radical feminists make, i.e. “the other sex isn’t doing it right, so let’s make them”.
Not, “how can we give them what they want to get what we want”, but “how can we make them see how wrong they are to not value the same things?”
I really don’t get it, especially since I apparently don’t value the same things as either group of “the other sex is doing it wrong” people.
Given I specifically cautioned against people raising their own ‘solutions’ as objections
I don’t understand. Where have I proposed a “solution” to your stated problem? I don’t believe the problem you stated actually exists to begin with (or at least is not being stated coherently), so I don’t understand how I have raised a solution as an objection.
Women aren’t useless but let’s not pretend they have equivalent utility to men.
Ok, this is just weird to me. Apparently, it’s super important that women have children (because men want that), and men dying is bad. But when women take the risk of dying (by getting pregnant), this is not as important or valuable to society?
By your own arguments this makes no fucking sense. If the guy’s prize for working is “me get woman”, then how is the woman in that equation not of equivalent utility to the man her (literal) labor births, cares for, and raises to the point he can work, not to mention the part where, if she is also payment for his work, then her mere existence must be at least of equivalent worth, within your own framework!
So if, in today’s society, the woman does all the same stuff she’d have done in a patriarchal society, and also makes some direct contributions in a job, isn’t that a net gain for “society”?
(TBH, I don’t even grok “society” as a coherent entity. Small towns can have a “society”, churches can, and other small cultural groups. But “society” as a unified entity in the US started collapsing at least as of the advent of cable TV and the death of prime time, let alone the birth of the internet. The world is much more transactional now: more a marketplace than a society as such. If you were going to stop this trend, you would have needed to start by preventing the death of the “company man” with the collapse of pensions and lifelong expectation of employment, that started a few decades ago and birthed the “free agent” economy that has replaced the previous “society” now in all matters, not just those of employment.)
Since your reply to my bringing up problems is to bring up more stuff that has problems, while not addressing most of the problems I previously raised, I don’t see how a conversation can meaningfully proceed from here, without it feeling like a Gish Gallop. For example:
I cite the OKCupid data that specifically supports my statement here. I am saying men, as a class, do not favour a minority of women.
I read the article you linked, and it says that 2 out of 3 messages sent by men are to the women in the top 1⁄3 of attractiveness, while on the other hand, women rate 80% of men as below-average attractiveness… and then message most of them anyway.
This sounds to me like it 100% contradicts your statements about men and women’s mating preferences.
If the very data you cite literally contradicts the premises you’re citing it to support, I don’t see how to have a sane conversation about this, given that you don’t even remotely touch on the majority of my objections. Also, the part where we have thoroughly different value systems means that there’s a ton of difference in what’s considered even relevant, so a meaningful discussion is probably not possible.
Good luck trying to wring 60 solid years of slavish labour from a man that has checked out of the race and just wants to play xbox.
At this point, I’m beginning to wonder if you’ve ever been in an IT department. The coding world contains significant numbers of single men who make money to pursue hobbies. And not all work is “slavish”. The best-rewarded kinds are often intellectually stimulating as well.
There are so many problems with this statement I hardly know where to start. First off, if men are being paid with sex (from women—note that gay men exist and also make contributions to society, even if you want to ignore the non-natal contributions of women!), then doesn’t promiscuity mean more availability of sex, not less? Also, when some women have agency, they work in porn or prostitution, further providing greater availability of sex to more men, and it’s even mediated by money, so you can’t argue it’s going to men who aren’t contributing to society.
I also don’t think that your “favour a minority of males” holds up either. Any individual woman favors a minority of males due to individual preferences… just like each man favors a minority of women. Sure, there exist males that are favorites of lots of women, but this is vastly more relevant to short-term mating than pair bonding. There’s a reason there’s a game called “Fuck, Marry, Kill”. Wilt Chamberlain might have had sex with a lot of women, but he didn’t have long-term relationships with them.
Both men and women have differing interests for short-term mating vs. pair bonding, so promiscuity doesn’t actually much affect the availability of pair bonding. (And paternity tests are a thing, for anyone who cares.) Polyamory, swinging, “hotwife” and other lifestyles often involve women having both a husband and either a boyfriend or multiple casual partners, so I’m really confused by how this choice leads to a restriction of available sex or reproductive opportunities for men!
In addition to attractiveness being on a bell-curve for men, it’s also not uniformly distributed among women. This means that in your theoretical environment where a few men grab all the women, there’s actually a limit to how many these super-attractive dudes will accept, since they have the pick of the best and limited time to go around… leaving the “rest” of the women for the “rest” of the men.
Most women are also not interested in a pair bond with someone who doesn’t have time for them, and—ironically enough—the availability of choices for women that they didn’t have before, means that women don’t have to join a harem just to be able to live well and have a decent shot at providing for their offspring!
So I don’t see how giving women options leads to more harems. After all, any historical example of harems has to take into account the historic lack of economic opportunity for women to provide for themselves or their children, and the threats that existed if they were independent.
Historically, as far as I can tell, about the only thing women needed men to “protect” them from… was other men! Because the “social contract” of the times dictated that women were property, and didn’t have any agency.
But if you look at where polygamy is actually practiced today, in the sense of dudes with multiple wives, I would guess you’ll find that it’s in places where women don’t have as many economic opportunities or the same amount of social safety. (For example, cults.) And if you look at what kind of “harems” exist where women have greater agency and economic opportunity, what you’ll find is that it’s overwhelmingly the women who have multiple partners, not the men.
Anyway, it seems to me that your argument relies upon “women” being undifferentiated beings with uniform desires… which if, you’ve ever actually been friends with any, would be obviously untrue. (Well, I might be biased because my friendships and relationships have been with smart women, and smart people’s preferences vary more greatly than average people’s do, of any gender. But most of the phenomena that keep women from say, forming a marriage harem around Brad Pitt, apply to most women.)
To sum up the unspoken premises you seem to be relying on:
Women have uniform attractiveness (nope)
Women all find the same men attractive (nope)
Women are willing to be part of huge harems as long-term partners when they have other options (nope)
Short term and long term mating preferences being the same (nope)
Women having economic options removes opportunities for men to trade their economic success for access to sex (nope, since even rich women still prefer financially-stable men, and sex work is also an economic option that some women prefer; see also the modern notion of an “arrangement” or “sugar daddy”)
And apart from all that, I have to say as a man that I have hugely benefited from the greater agency women have now, especially with regards to sexual agency. So I’m really confused by this entire argument. (Note that fewer women being forced by economic or social conditions into sex work, “arrangements”, harems, etc. means that the women who still do choose these situations are more likely to be willing and enthusiastically consenting than before… which IMO is an obvious good for the men as well!)
It’s possible that your experience of “premise seems to be almost unconsciously accepted by everyone I raise it with” is actually “people haven’t taken more than a moment to think about it”, or “people who don’t have much experience of women exercising their actual sexual agency and preferences, vs. what society (or some dude with a blog) says they’re supposed to do or want.”
Also, while I didn’t even touch the premise of “Men do the bulk of the work when it comes to creating, maintaining, and defending everything in society,” this doesn’t mean I agree with it. My arguments here show, I believe, that even if one accepted that premise as true, the rest of your idea falls flat! (And I don’t accept it as true, because even if you assume a patriarchal society with traditional gender roles, one could say that “women do the bulk of the work when it comes to creating, training, and supporting the next generation of society”… and it’s still pretty true even without them being forced into that role.)
Finally, as the saying goes “never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right”. The women I know are people who deserve agency and choices… and make their own contributions to society, too, thank you very much. (Which would be even greater with more access to choices, since e.g. my wife was discouraged in high school from pursuing advanced mathematics, since she was a girl and “wouldn’t need it”.)
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The study focuses on STI rates. How would promiscuity possibly improve these rates?
It seems to me that when pressed on the compact claim you made above, you just made a lot more claims (as pjeby pointed out).
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So, your response to my questioning your premises is to propose more premises?
What? Of course they do. I’m a man, I would think I would know if I favored the majority of women. I don’t. Similarly, you state that “men” require reproductive opportunity. I don’t. I don’t want children. So I’m a trivial counterargument on both counts.
These seem to me like trivial refutations of large portions of your ideas about men, without even getting to such notions as “what social contract?” “Who made this contract with whom?” Or, for example:
My response to that is, why on earth would I want to? I’m similarly baffled as to what value you see in the constructs you see as decaying. Many of them seem like things I’m more than happy to see us rid of. For example:
I’m not sure why I should see fewer people existing as a problem. Perhaps the people that do exist will be ones who feel wanted, rather than that they are being born into a society that expects them to do things they don’t want in order to preserve a society full of people doing things they don’t want to preserve a society full of… endlessly recursive suffering. If that is what children have to look forward to, then it’s better they not be born in the first place. (Which is one of the reasons I’m not interested in having children.)
Another random point:
Does he have a collection that he keeps locked away in a harem? If not, he’s not stopping them from pursuing “reproductive opportunities” with other men. Lots of women might enjoy a weekend with Lenny D, but a lot fewer actually want to stick around and have kids with him. Plus, that’s what, 18000 women? There are still four billion left. There could be a thousand Leo DiCaprios not sharing any of those women and that’s still only like one major city populated by women you no longer want to sleep with because apparently sleeping with more than one guy is (somehow?) a problem in some way I don’t understand… and then there’s still billions left.
And another thing:
On behalf of virtually every woman I have ever known… bwahahahahahahaha. Ha. No. No, no, no, no.
This is obviously, trivially false, as can be shown by observing the billion-dollar industries known as “romance novels” and “vibrators”. (Let alone “Fifty Shades”… and for the two previous generations’ versions, “Nine and a Half Weeks” and “Story of O”.)
See also the research showing the main reason women are less likely to respond to random propositions than men do, is because they have a lower prior expectation for a randomly-selected man being a good lover. That is, they expect that on average, sex with a guy is a crapshoot with regard to the quality of the experience, such that they’re better off going home to curl up with a good book and a vibrator.
(Which is one reason that a guy who is discovered to be even halfway decent in bed will sometimes get passed around a woman’s circle of friends like a party favor… regardless of what the guy looks like on their OKCupid. The fact that people judge books by their covers should not be construed as them not caring about the contents, in situations where the cover is the only thing available to them to judge by!)
Anyway, none of these things are at all consistent with the idea that “virtually all women that want sex are getting it”.
And? So? We live in a world where you can jack it to almost anything you can imagine… for free! Or you can pay a cam girl to act it out for you, or even hire an actual live person to do something for you.
So if what you are calling “sex” is not one of those things, it’s not actually sex that’s being sought, but something else that you can’t actually buy… like love, or appreciation, or respect. (Which making more sex available will not give you, if it’s from someone who resents you for making them, or who sees you as an obligation.)
Honestly, this whole thing sounds to me like, “women should want to have sex with me because social contract, blah blah”. And my response is, why should they want to? If you’re making a contribution to society, surely you have something you can contribute to them, personally, that they value? Arguing that another market participant should value something different than what they actually value, is not very good marketing, so it’s not surprising your product isn’t selling in that case.
I mean, as far as I can tell, 99% of this is “women want the wrong things, in my opinion, and should want things that benefit me”, and/or “society should be restructured to force women to want the things that benefit me”, with most of the rest being chaff and smokescreens for that fundamental point of view.
But if the person reading your arguments doesn’t have the same value system as you, none of that is meaningful. All I can hear is “people should be made to want the things I do, or at least forced to do them whether they want to or not”, which to me doesn’t distinguish between you and J Random Fundamentalist of whatever religion.
See, this is what continues to baffle me. If what you want is ownership of a sex partner, you can have that consensually, too, in this day and age. There exist plenty of women who want this arrangement just because it’s their fetish, too, let alone the vast number of women who still live in cultures where that’s just the done thing (if that’s the sort of dubcon that gets you off). So if that’s what you want, why not just go get it, instead of insisting that everyone must do it that way, or else? If that’s what floats your boat to the tune of 60 years of backbreaking work or whatever, hey, go for it.
But that doesn’t mean everybody else wants to live in a world that revolves around ownership fetishes.
I can’t help but feel there’s some kind of fundamental thing I don’t “get” about people with this type of “men don’t get enough sex” argument. The weird thing about it to me, is that it seems like an example of the same sort of argument that radical feminists make, i.e. “the other sex isn’t doing it right, so let’s make them”.
Not, “how can we give them what they want to get what we want”, but “how can we make them see how wrong they are to not value the same things?”
I really don’t get it, especially since I apparently don’t value the same things as either group of “the other sex is doing it wrong” people.
I don’t understand. Where have I proposed a “solution” to your stated problem? I don’t believe the problem you stated actually exists to begin with (or at least is not being stated coherently), so I don’t understand how I have raised a solution as an objection.
Ok, this is just weird to me. Apparently, it’s super important that women have children (because men want that), and men dying is bad. But when women take the risk of dying (by getting pregnant), this is not as important or valuable to society?
By your own arguments this makes no fucking sense. If the guy’s prize for working is “me get woman”, then how is the woman in that equation not of equivalent utility to the man her (literal) labor births, cares for, and raises to the point he can work, not to mention the part where, if she is also payment for his work, then her mere existence must be at least of equivalent worth, within your own framework!
So if, in today’s society, the woman does all the same stuff she’d have done in a patriarchal society, and also makes some direct contributions in a job, isn’t that a net gain for “society”?
(TBH, I don’t even grok “society” as a coherent entity. Small towns can have a “society”, churches can, and other small cultural groups. But “society” as a unified entity in the US started collapsing at least as of the advent of cable TV and the death of prime time, let alone the birth of the internet. The world is much more transactional now: more a marketplace than a society as such. If you were going to stop this trend, you would have needed to start by preventing the death of the “company man” with the collapse of pensions and lifelong expectation of employment, that started a few decades ago and birthed the “free agent” economy that has replaced the previous “society” now in all matters, not just those of employment.)
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Since your reply to my bringing up problems is to bring up more stuff that has problems, while not addressing most of the problems I previously raised, I don’t see how a conversation can meaningfully proceed from here, without it feeling like a Gish Gallop. For example:
I read the article you linked, and it says that 2 out of 3 messages sent by men are to the women in the top 1⁄3 of attractiveness, while on the other hand, women rate 80% of men as below-average attractiveness… and then message most of them anyway.
This sounds to me like it 100% contradicts your statements about men and women’s mating preferences.
If the very data you cite literally contradicts the premises you’re citing it to support, I don’t see how to have a sane conversation about this, given that you don’t even remotely touch on the majority of my objections. Also, the part where we have thoroughly different value systems means that there’s a ton of difference in what’s considered even relevant, so a meaningful discussion is probably not possible.
At this point, I’m beginning to wonder if you’ve ever been in an IT department. The coding world contains significant numbers of single men who make money to pursue hobbies. And not all work is “slavish”. The best-rewarded kinds are often intellectually stimulating as well.