Really good stuff. I think there is some dissonance between narratives and data that you highlight. The interplay of social and biological is key. Is there a natural drive for women to want more assertive partners and select accordingly? Plausible if sexual assertiveness reasonably proxies future economic outcomes. (Codes for low neurotic score and higher risk taking?)
Looking at the data linked below, experience of young men is relatively bimodal compared to other groups: more no sex men then women and more 3+ partners then young women. By late thirties monogamy is an overwhelming norm for both men and women. The characterization of men aggressively seeking casual partners is really a quarter of the men under 25. While I agree that this is the "problematic population", there are actually more men that age reporting celibacy. In contrast more young women are having frequent sex, primary with a single partner. Time trends are towards more young men abstaining more and fewer having multiple partners.
I think sexual norms are viewed through the "frat party" lens because those are formative. While we need ethics that help with navigate those situations, more important are norms that guide young adults to stable, fulfilling long term relationships as that is where people are most satisfied (as evidenced by both revealed preference and survey data).
I vacillate between a few views on social construction in general. My least charitable take on it is that it is the most intellectual way we have invented for calling everyone sheeple. But I suspect this undersells why this idea is unreasonably popular in feminism, which leads me to a suspicion that may be better or worse: women are more the product of social construction than men. They're generally more agreeable and more motivated to confirm to social expectations. So often when I hear a feminist say "society socializes women to be X and men to be Y", if this instance sounds preposterous, I substitute it with "society socializes women to be X and fails at socializing men to not be Y", and now I have a more plausible sounding statement that sounds more in line with my own experience... but I can't really judge how that version lines up with women's experience.
Of course the generous take is it's all a mix, which is true. But I do think most public discussion on the left today overestimates the truth of social construction, and I do think this is a problem, both because it makes us ineffective but more importantly I think it makes us not nice. It leads us to affirm preposterous-bordering-on-gaslighting beliefs in the hope society's problems will be solved when others believe them and to police each other's speech out of recognition of everyone's responsibility to be a good puppet master of everyone else in society, and it provides a way to dismiss others' desires as simply not real. It isn't *entirely* wrong, but we need to dispense with this idea that it is uncomplicatedly pro-social whenever we can find it in ourselves to believe in social construction a little harder.
You have hit on something here. It explains stuff like the 'mommy wars'. (Why do I care if another man has kids or not? Why is that any of my business?) Or why women seem to spend so much time obsessed over whether their forms of attraction are problematic or not? (OK, you're into tentacle anime. Just don't show me any and we're cool.)
There's a huge motivating reason why the left in general goes in for nurture over nature, though, and not just for gender. If something's socially constructed, it can theoretically be changed. If gender, racial, or class distinctions have any biological basis, then they are going to be much harder to change, and existing social hierarchies are 'natural' in the way earlier eras said they were divinely ordained and therefore trying to change them is counterproductive. There's a long history of nurture=left and nature=right; it's the reason Boas and Galton's busts face each other at the University of Chicago.
There are actually 'reactionary feminists' and radical feminist who believe in human nature, mostly about how irredeemably awful men are.
Yeah, that's part of it, too. I have joked elsewhere that the nature/nurture distinction only has political implications if you're trying to decide whether you want the kind of authoritarianism with reeducation camps or the kind with death camps. I much prefer the politics of people who don't see this question as important to their politics.
While you are generally correct I don't think it's that simple. For example most conservatives think it makes a difference whether a society is Christian or secular or Muslim or Buddhist, whereas the left doesn't think this matters, or maybe thinks it only matters whether a society is secular or not, or maybe it only matters if the dominant West is, or maybe it only matters if they are of the globally dominant Christian religion. Meanwhile, the left is blank slatist about many things but also believes firmly in "born this way" for sexual orientation and now gender identity. And not only can you be a feminist and believe in natural differences in how much men suck, sometimes you can even get away with implicitly believing in natural differences in the context of claiming that the norms of society are built around what works for men and not women. Tema Okun even pulled off that last one with some classic racial stereotypes, though I'm uncertain if her ideas are still in vogue.
Fascinating essay....and on a difficult subject where it can be hard to avoid being misunderstood one way or another. I also wrote about the erotics of dominance/submission in this piece on my own Substack: https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/the-less-desired
" The differing nature of male and female sexual desire has been the subject of much empirical research in recent times. Some of it is buried away as dry academic research papers, some has found its way into book form and some into journalism (both broadsheet and pop magazine). “Certain traits associated with masculinity seem to be attractive to women on average: dominance, confidence, assertiveness, and extraversion”. Numerous studies of sexual desire have reached the same (broad-brush) conclusion that male sexuality is primarily about desiring whereas women’s is more about the desire to be desired. This, it is argued, accounts for the particular attractiveness of men with an insistent, confident ‘charm’ – one that makes the woman feel that it must be her and no one else will do.
Research has tended to confirm yet another piece of folklore. Behaviour that sometimes gets labelled as ‘toxic’ is most typical of the kind of male to whom a very lot of women (and especially young women) are most sexually attracted - at least in the short term. This is an elephant in the feminist room but is revealed in abundance in story form. The handsome (or sometimes not so handsome) bad guy always with a pretty girl in tow is the stuff of every tv soap opera ever made. Then there were “Oh you [delicious] brute!” fantasies of 19th century novelists like Edith Hull. And then there are the “more disconcerting research findings that men who use sexual coercion have more partners than men who do not.....[and men] ...high on Dark Triad traits are viewed as more attractive by women, are more likely to have consensual sexual partners, and are more likely to engage in sexual coercion.” (One thinks here of those gut-wrenching stories of women who, escaping one violent, abusive relationship, head straight for similar in the choice of their next partner.)"
I once dated a woman who called me, "my handsome brute", and who didn't (she said) believe in sex before marriage. I've always felt that if two people are together and they are both trying to make at least one of them orgasm, then that counts as "sex", even if it doesn't involve a penis going into the vagina, but then it was her (she said) values, not mine, so I tried to respect that.
Many, many times with her I got the sense she wanted me to pressure her in the moment, or "get carried away" and do it anyway. I didn't.
Many years later I'm with a much more straightforward woman, no weird games.
Well, after we broke up, within about three months she was with a guy in a bikie gang. I feel fairly confident he would have been indifferent to her expressed boundaries.
I do wish we'd had sex (according to her definitions of it, as well as mine). I don't wish I'd ignored her boundaries, even if her boundaries were not entirely sincerely-held.
I like what Deniro said in Ronin: "where there is any doubt, there is no doubt." I think it's best to be together where there is no doubt, if at all possible. This must of course allow for people being young and inexperienced, the context of the relationship (as you so well-expressed with one-night stand vs long marriage), and so on.
The other difficulty comes from this. Part of the thrill of a new relationship, especially when you're young, is the uncertainty of what the other person means or wants - that exploration. You can't lay it all out like a banking contract without taking the passion out of it. This perhaps explains why younger people are having less sex than previous generations - they're too frightened of crossing a boundary.
Obviously we must do what we can to prevent sexual assault. But if we're too paranoid about that, we deprive people of that thrill of exploration in a new relationship. It's a difficult balance. I doubt that woman regrets the bikie bonk, though.
Oh, you can produce a lot of orgasms without PIV. You have more fine motor control over a finger or tongue anyway, and the muscles of the arms tire a lot less easily. You can easily deliver 3-6 orgasms over the course of half an hour if you know what you're doing.
Agreed, I think extreme porn being normalized is the major game changer, along with easy accessibility to it at a young age. When we become desensitized to what was traditionally taboo (sex and nudity itself), something more extreme replaces it, until there's enough societal consequences for conservatism to swing back in. Alan Watts says: "I mean, imagine what it would be like if the libertines won, and they took over the church so that on Wednesday evenings the young Presbyterian group would meet for prayer through sex. Every child would go to the school physician for a course in hygienics, and they would have classes that have plastic models, and all the children would do it in class. Very clean, hygienic circumstances all sprayed with rubbing alcohol; everything would be fine. Imagine how boring it would all become! So you see: the people who say no, modesty is important, have something right about them. But they mustn’t be allowed to get away with it. But they mustn’t be obliterated. It’s exactly the same thing as between the libertines and the prudes. They need each other, - if you’ve got a prudish father and mother, you should be very grateful to them for having made sex so interesting! So don’t defy them completely. Don’t go around campus with placards bearing four-letter words. Because that’s going to spoil the show. But every generation must react to the one before, you see, to keep this tension going. "
There's an argument for a certain amount of ignorance about sex among the young. They should certainly know the mechanics of it, the risks (pregnancy, STDs) and that it's pleasurable, and they should be told that it works best when done lovingly, if not actually in love. But with a little mystery as to the details and a good person, their first experiences in late adolescence of exploring their bodies and sexuality can be a wonderful thing.
The wonder and mystery is somewhat missed if by 12 years old they have seen videos of a gaping anus.
I agree with this. I think porn is sometimes unfairly blamed but at the same time am definitely concerned about the exposure that those younger than me had
There's a movie my wife used to like as a teenager but can't watch now because she had to analyse it at school for media studies. She just got sick of it, and can't enjoy it because she's so sees every detail of it rather than just taking it in overall.
Even if porn were all morally neutral or good, it still takes out the mystery.
I remember a couple weeks ago the discourse was all about how "civilized" men were a gift that women give each other. Actually, the trait that women should be producing in men and then gifting to each other is sexual assertiveness. Like anything else, people get better at sex by practice and feedback. For better or for worse, the men who internalize feminist ideas are presumably getting less practice in because they are desexualizing the workplace, not bothering women, avoiding women younger than them, and requiring clear and enthusiastic consent.
Yes, I agree, those men aren’t very successful either. I think there’s something in between here, where men who *understand* women, have female friends etc. and respect women but don’t become *subservient* to women are the most sexually attractive and successful. Getting clear and enthusiastic consent is easy when a woman is actually attracted to you. I don’t mean verbally saying “can I kiss your neck now, can I touch your breast now”, that will generally give a woman the “ick”, but it’s not actually so hard to tell when a woman is excited to have sex with a man. What women want is a civilized man who knows how to control his primitive urges in general, only to release them on her.
Not sure if we mean the same thing, when I wrote "bother", I mean the practice of chatting up women, which is described by some people as bothering them. Regardless, whether they are getting more sex or not isn't really something I have any certainty about. Rather, I'm just taking the maryarchived linked TikTok's assertion that misogynistic men are better in bed at face value and offering a plausible explanation if it is true.
Yeah, and I generally agree except on the enthusiastic consent piece of your first comment - even the PUA community which I have some problems with is clearly on to something with helping men get over the problem of inaction and fear of rejection. Certainly helps with getting women in the long run.
I don't agree. There is something to be said for sheer numbers and shamelessness. I guy who just makes a move with lots of women...and who does not particularly care whether he gets called a creep or gossiped about...IS going to have higher success just based on the numbers. Most people fear rejection, fear being viewed as pushy, and care what other people think. They would HATE being door to door salesmen for example. But it's pretty similar...if you knock enough doors and just move on quickly at all the nos and doors slammed in your face, you're going to make a lot of sales eventually, even if 9 out of 10 say no.
Great article. As a 60 yr old man, I was raised on the idea that women despised sexually aggressive men and viewed such behavior as unsophisticated, brutish. Only now (that it’s too late) do I realize that we were oversold, that many, perhaps the majority of women, desire a sexually dominant male partner who sometimes approaches the limits of self control. Srinivasan is unfortunately off the mark, perhaps due to exposure to a culture that is quite a bit more misogynist and sexually violent than modern Western culture.
Interesting! I was thinking just because it is biological doesn’t mean it isn’t cultural. So the patriarchal argument made by utopian feminists is quite focused on external beliefs. But perhaps the biological asymmetry and heterosexuality is itself a pressure on women, so in fact cross culturally this wouldn’t be much eradicated. Idk if that makes sense.
My general belief is that culture exaggerates—and builds layers on top of—aggregate differences that start in biology. For example, hunter-gatherers tend to have a gendered division of labor, but it's never strict due to fluctuating conditions sometimes requiring more or substitute hands at certain tasks; and because everyone immediately needs each other's contribution to survive, the imbalance in physical strength doesn't amount to much.
"The degree to which feminists have a responsibility to examine and challenge the source of their desires depends on whether they actually contribute to the subjugation of women outside of the bedroom."
You get what you incentivize. I'd argue that one of the most red-/blackpilling discoveries a young feminist man can make is the misogynist content of women's literary porn. Pair that with the torrent of complaints online from women about abusive lovers creating or reinforcing the classic "they only want bad boys" narrative, which drives young men still further into the Manosphere. These are not even close to being a full account of the true breadth of female desire, but a young man isn't going to know or ever be likely to learn that as he falls deeper down the rabbit hole.
By contrast, some of the most hopeful I've felt about gender relations has been a tendency identified on TikTok for bisexual women to have "golden-retriever boyfriends"—men who tend to have a harmless, boyish demeanor. I can even back this up in my own life: I, a straight autistic man who has been described as "sweet" and even "like a puppy", have only ever had bisexual lovers (chuds dismiss men like us as "soyboys", but that's just coping against having their worldview undermined). So I'd wager women would see a drastic improvement in men over time if they conducted a concerted years-long effort to elevate their unconventional lovers to public prominence.
Why do you say that men enjoy casual sex more than women do? I think you forgot to include the reference for it. It doesn’t seem obvious to me, at least not as something to be the case throughout all societies.
Every year a certain number of unfortunate men are found having hung themselves while masterbating in search for a better orgasm. Dying wasn't the intention. I haven't heard of women found in similar circumstances -- but then I wouldn't -- but it makes me wonder if any of the women who want to be choked are in it for physiological rather then psychological reasons?
I know, this is a squishy topic largely because people don’t typically record their sexual preferences. I don’t rule out socialization as I do think it affects the particulars (e.g choking becoming popular rather than something else) but I also think the deeper themes seem to reemerge over and over. Plus, I don’t think there’s a clear case to be made that these preferences actually meaningfully contribute to the subjugation of women anyways.
The issue is that women who want "light choking" during sex or other such edgy moves don't actually want to be choked. If you as a guy were having sex with a girl and started choking her for real she would likely end up very traumatized and you'd get arrested.
Thus I argue that the choking is actually a subversion of male aggression, taking a violent outburst and replicating it as a controlled performance. And it's both performed and controlled for the benefit of the woman, who supposedly wants it. By having a man play act a violent act one demonstrates that he is domesticated; able to restrain impulse. I totally feel like zizek when I write stuff like this lmao
I don't know. I had quite a few ask me for it and I never actually acceded because I was always hearing how dangerous it was. I tend to be on the risk-averse side. But hearing about autoerotic asphyxiation...yeah, maybe there is something about the increased CO2 levels in the brain or something. Still not something to play with IMHO. Messing with both the air and blood supply to the brain...eh. I'll drive 100 on the freeway if I want to live on the edge.
For the record they don't want you to actually choke them, as in cut off blood flow or anything. They just want you to put your hand around their neck and vaguely squeeze in a way that resembles choking. No actual restrictions of anything should happen. If you're with a girl who wants actual choking then you know you found a crazy one and should probably run away.
Have you read any Nancy Friday? My own research for writing bore out the claim that BDSM submissives are five times as common as dominants, regardless of whether the group looked at is male or female.
Wow, where'd you get that? I've looked into this a lot, and from what I can tell it's majority male doms and female subs, though the male sub population vastly outstrips the female dom population.
That’s a really good point. The stat relates to reported fantasies, not acting upon them. There is a plentiful supply of female and male subs. There are plenty of male doms who are very eager, but this is not reflected in general fantasies within the male population. The demand for female doms is such that they can be paid.
Really good stuff. I think there is some dissonance between narratives and data that you highlight. The interplay of social and biological is key. Is there a natural drive for women to want more assertive partners and select accordingly? Plausible if sexual assertiveness reasonably proxies future economic outcomes. (Codes for low neurotic score and higher risk taking?)
Looking at the data linked below, experience of young men is relatively bimodal compared to other groups: more no sex men then women and more 3+ partners then young women. By late thirties monogamy is an overwhelming norm for both men and women. The characterization of men aggressively seeking casual partners is really a quarter of the men under 25. While I agree that this is the "problematic population", there are actually more men that age reporting celibacy. In contrast more young women are having frequent sex, primary with a single partner. Time trends are towards more young men abstaining more and fewer having multiple partners.
I think sexual norms are viewed through the "frat party" lens because those are formative. While we need ethics that help with navigate those situations, more important are norms that guide young adults to stable, fulfilling long term relationships as that is where people are most satisfied (as evidenced by both revealed preference and survey data).
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7293001/
(Sorry a wrote another essay, just feels like these topics are culturally timely and important.)
I vacillate between a few views on social construction in general. My least charitable take on it is that it is the most intellectual way we have invented for calling everyone sheeple. But I suspect this undersells why this idea is unreasonably popular in feminism, which leads me to a suspicion that may be better or worse: women are more the product of social construction than men. They're generally more agreeable and more motivated to confirm to social expectations. So often when I hear a feminist say "society socializes women to be X and men to be Y", if this instance sounds preposterous, I substitute it with "society socializes women to be X and fails at socializing men to not be Y", and now I have a more plausible sounding statement that sounds more in line with my own experience... but I can't really judge how that version lines up with women's experience.
Of course the generous take is it's all a mix, which is true. But I do think most public discussion on the left today overestimates the truth of social construction, and I do think this is a problem, both because it makes us ineffective but more importantly I think it makes us not nice. It leads us to affirm preposterous-bordering-on-gaslighting beliefs in the hope society's problems will be solved when others believe them and to police each other's speech out of recognition of everyone's responsibility to be a good puppet master of everyone else in society, and it provides a way to dismiss others' desires as simply not real. It isn't *entirely* wrong, but we need to dispense with this idea that it is uncomplicatedly pro-social whenever we can find it in ourselves to believe in social construction a little harder.
You have hit on something here. It explains stuff like the 'mommy wars'. (Why do I care if another man has kids or not? Why is that any of my business?) Or why women seem to spend so much time obsessed over whether their forms of attraction are problematic or not? (OK, you're into tentacle anime. Just don't show me any and we're cool.)
There's a huge motivating reason why the left in general goes in for nurture over nature, though, and not just for gender. If something's socially constructed, it can theoretically be changed. If gender, racial, or class distinctions have any biological basis, then they are going to be much harder to change, and existing social hierarchies are 'natural' in the way earlier eras said they were divinely ordained and therefore trying to change them is counterproductive. There's a long history of nurture=left and nature=right; it's the reason Boas and Galton's busts face each other at the University of Chicago.
There are actually 'reactionary feminists' and radical feminist who believe in human nature, mostly about how irredeemably awful men are.
Yeah, that's part of it, too. I have joked elsewhere that the nature/nurture distinction only has political implications if you're trying to decide whether you want the kind of authoritarianism with reeducation camps or the kind with death camps. I much prefer the politics of people who don't see this question as important to their politics.
While you are generally correct I don't think it's that simple. For example most conservatives think it makes a difference whether a society is Christian or secular or Muslim or Buddhist, whereas the left doesn't think this matters, or maybe thinks it only matters whether a society is secular or not, or maybe it only matters if the dominant West is, or maybe it only matters if they are of the globally dominant Christian religion. Meanwhile, the left is blank slatist about many things but also believes firmly in "born this way" for sexual orientation and now gender identity. And not only can you be a feminist and believe in natural differences in how much men suck, sometimes you can even get away with implicitly believing in natural differences in the context of claiming that the norms of society are built around what works for men and not women. Tema Okun even pulled off that last one with some classic racial stereotypes, though I'm uncertain if her ideas are still in vogue.
Fascinating essay....and on a difficult subject where it can be hard to avoid being misunderstood one way or another. I also wrote about the erotics of dominance/submission in this piece on my own Substack: https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/the-less-desired
" The differing nature of male and female sexual desire has been the subject of much empirical research in recent times. Some of it is buried away as dry academic research papers, some has found its way into book form and some into journalism (both broadsheet and pop magazine). “Certain traits associated with masculinity seem to be attractive to women on average: dominance, confidence, assertiveness, and extraversion”. Numerous studies of sexual desire have reached the same (broad-brush) conclusion that male sexuality is primarily about desiring whereas women’s is more about the desire to be desired. This, it is argued, accounts for the particular attractiveness of men with an insistent, confident ‘charm’ – one that makes the woman feel that it must be her and no one else will do.
Research has tended to confirm yet another piece of folklore. Behaviour that sometimes gets labelled as ‘toxic’ is most typical of the kind of male to whom a very lot of women (and especially young women) are most sexually attracted - at least in the short term. This is an elephant in the feminist room but is revealed in abundance in story form. The handsome (or sometimes not so handsome) bad guy always with a pretty girl in tow is the stuff of every tv soap opera ever made. Then there were “Oh you [delicious] brute!” fantasies of 19th century novelists like Edith Hull. And then there are the “more disconcerting research findings that men who use sexual coercion have more partners than men who do not.....[and men] ...high on Dark Triad traits are viewed as more attractive by women, are more likely to have consensual sexual partners, and are more likely to engage in sexual coercion.” (One thinks here of those gut-wrenching stories of women who, escaping one violent, abusive relationship, head straight for similar in the choice of their next partner.)"
Thank you, Graham! Appreciate the comment. I find the direct desire vs. desire to be desired really fascinating.
I once dated a woman who called me, "my handsome brute", and who didn't (she said) believe in sex before marriage. I've always felt that if two people are together and they are both trying to make at least one of them orgasm, then that counts as "sex", even if it doesn't involve a penis going into the vagina, but then it was her (she said) values, not mine, so I tried to respect that.
Many, many times with her I got the sense she wanted me to pressure her in the moment, or "get carried away" and do it anyway. I didn't.
Many years later I'm with a much more straightforward woman, no weird games.
I’ve heard of something quite similar once before
Well, after we broke up, within about three months she was with a guy in a bikie gang. I feel fairly confident he would have been indifferent to her expressed boundaries.
I do wish we'd had sex (according to her definitions of it, as well as mine). I don't wish I'd ignored her boundaries, even if her boundaries were not entirely sincerely-held.
I like what Deniro said in Ronin: "where there is any doubt, there is no doubt." I think it's best to be together where there is no doubt, if at all possible. This must of course allow for people being young and inexperienced, the context of the relationship (as you so well-expressed with one-night stand vs long marriage), and so on.
The other difficulty comes from this. Part of the thrill of a new relationship, especially when you're young, is the uncertainty of what the other person means or wants - that exploration. You can't lay it all out like a banking contract without taking the passion out of it. This perhaps explains why younger people are having less sex than previous generations - they're too frightened of crossing a boundary.
Obviously we must do what we can to prevent sexual assault. But if we're too paranoid about that, we deprive people of that thrill of exploration in a new relationship. It's a difficult balance. I doubt that woman regrets the bikie bonk, though.
Oh, you can produce a lot of orgasms without PIV. You have more fine motor control over a finger or tongue anyway, and the muscles of the arms tire a lot less easily. You can easily deliver 3-6 orgasms over the course of half an hour if you know what you're doing.
Agreed, I think extreme porn being normalized is the major game changer, along with easy accessibility to it at a young age. When we become desensitized to what was traditionally taboo (sex and nudity itself), something more extreme replaces it, until there's enough societal consequences for conservatism to swing back in. Alan Watts says: "I mean, imagine what it would be like if the libertines won, and they took over the church so that on Wednesday evenings the young Presbyterian group would meet for prayer through sex. Every child would go to the school physician for a course in hygienics, and they would have classes that have plastic models, and all the children would do it in class. Very clean, hygienic circumstances all sprayed with rubbing alcohol; everything would be fine. Imagine how boring it would all become! So you see: the people who say no, modesty is important, have something right about them. But they mustn’t be allowed to get away with it. But they mustn’t be obliterated. It’s exactly the same thing as between the libertines and the prudes. They need each other, - if you’ve got a prudish father and mother, you should be very grateful to them for having made sex so interesting! So don’t defy them completely. Don’t go around campus with placards bearing four-letter words. Because that’s going to spoil the show. But every generation must react to the one before, you see, to keep this tension going. "
There's an argument for a certain amount of ignorance about sex among the young. They should certainly know the mechanics of it, the risks (pregnancy, STDs) and that it's pleasurable, and they should be told that it works best when done lovingly, if not actually in love. But with a little mystery as to the details and a good person, their first experiences in late adolescence of exploring their bodies and sexuality can be a wonderful thing.
The wonder and mystery is somewhat missed if by 12 years old they have seen videos of a gaping anus.
I agree with this. I think porn is sometimes unfairly blamed but at the same time am definitely concerned about the exposure that those younger than me had
There's a movie my wife used to like as a teenager but can't watch now because she had to analyse it at school for media studies. She just got sick of it, and can't enjoy it because she's so sees every detail of it rather than just taking it in overall.
Even if porn were all morally neutral or good, it still takes out the mystery.
That Alan Watts quote is a painfully allistic take. Enjoy sensual experiences like sex for their own sake, not what other people think of them.
I remember a couple weeks ago the discourse was all about how "civilized" men were a gift that women give each other. Actually, the trait that women should be producing in men and then gifting to each other is sexual assertiveness. Like anything else, people get better at sex by practice and feedback. For better or for worse, the men who internalize feminist ideas are presumably getting less practice in because they are desexualizing the workplace, not bothering women, avoiding women younger than them, and requiring clear and enthusiastic consent.
The men who "bother" women aren't getting sex. Women call them creeps behind their back and warn each others about these guys.
Yes, I agree, those men aren’t very successful either. I think there’s something in between here, where men who *understand* women, have female friends etc. and respect women but don’t become *subservient* to women are the most sexually attractive and successful. Getting clear and enthusiastic consent is easy when a woman is actually attracted to you. I don’t mean verbally saying “can I kiss your neck now, can I touch your breast now”, that will generally give a woman the “ick”, but it’s not actually so hard to tell when a woman is excited to have sex with a man. What women want is a civilized man who knows how to control his primitive urges in general, only to release them on her.
Not sure if we mean the same thing, when I wrote "bother", I mean the practice of chatting up women, which is described by some people as bothering them. Regardless, whether they are getting more sex or not isn't really something I have any certainty about. Rather, I'm just taking the maryarchived linked TikTok's assertion that misogynistic men are better in bed at face value and offering a plausible explanation if it is true.
Yeah, and I generally agree except on the enthusiastic consent piece of your first comment - even the PUA community which I have some problems with is clearly on to something with helping men get over the problem of inaction and fear of rejection. Certainly helps with getting women in the long run.
I don't agree. There is something to be said for sheer numbers and shamelessness. I guy who just makes a move with lots of women...and who does not particularly care whether he gets called a creep or gossiped about...IS going to have higher success just based on the numbers. Most people fear rejection, fear being viewed as pushy, and care what other people think. They would HATE being door to door salesmen for example. But it's pretty similar...if you knock enough doors and just move on quickly at all the nos and doors slammed in your face, you're going to make a lot of sales eventually, even if 9 out of 10 say no.
Great article. As a 60 yr old man, I was raised on the idea that women despised sexually aggressive men and viewed such behavior as unsophisticated, brutish. Only now (that it’s too late) do I realize that we were oversold, that many, perhaps the majority of women, desire a sexually dominant male partner who sometimes approaches the limits of self control. Srinivasan is unfortunately off the mark, perhaps due to exposure to a culture that is quite a bit more misogynist and sexually violent than modern Western culture.
Interesting! I was thinking just because it is biological doesn’t mean it isn’t cultural. So the patriarchal argument made by utopian feminists is quite focused on external beliefs. But perhaps the biological asymmetry and heterosexuality is itself a pressure on women, so in fact cross culturally this wouldn’t be much eradicated. Idk if that makes sense.
My general belief is that culture exaggerates—and builds layers on top of—aggregate differences that start in biology. For example, hunter-gatherers tend to have a gendered division of labor, but it's never strict due to fluctuating conditions sometimes requiring more or substitute hands at certain tasks; and because everyone immediately needs each other's contribution to survive, the imbalance in physical strength doesn't amount to much.
Most things are both.
"The degree to which feminists have a responsibility to examine and challenge the source of their desires depends on whether they actually contribute to the subjugation of women outside of the bedroom."
You get what you incentivize. I'd argue that one of the most red-/blackpilling discoveries a young feminist man can make is the misogynist content of women's literary porn. Pair that with the torrent of complaints online from women about abusive lovers creating or reinforcing the classic "they only want bad boys" narrative, which drives young men still further into the Manosphere. These are not even close to being a full account of the true breadth of female desire, but a young man isn't going to know or ever be likely to learn that as he falls deeper down the rabbit hole.
By contrast, some of the most hopeful I've felt about gender relations has been a tendency identified on TikTok for bisexual women to have "golden-retriever boyfriends"—men who tend to have a harmless, boyish demeanor. I can even back this up in my own life: I, a straight autistic man who has been described as "sweet" and even "like a puppy", have only ever had bisexual lovers (chuds dismiss men like us as "soyboys", but that's just coping against having their worldview undermined). So I'd wager women would see a drastic improvement in men over time if they conducted a concerted years-long effort to elevate their unconventional lovers to public prominence.
Wow. This 82 year old is doing as well as the kids. Actually better.
Why do you say that men enjoy casual sex more than women do? I think you forgot to include the reference for it. It doesn’t seem obvious to me, at least not as something to be the case throughout all societies.
Every year a certain number of unfortunate men are found having hung themselves while masterbating in search for a better orgasm. Dying wasn't the intention. I haven't heard of women found in similar circumstances -- but then I wouldn't -- but it makes me wonder if any of the women who want to be choked are in it for physiological rather then psychological reasons?
That's what I figured was part of it. Apparently the increased CO2 levels in the bloodstream produce a kind of euphoria. Still not safe though.
It'd be pretty interesting to know what preferences are in the small number of matriarchial soceites that exist.
I know, this is a squishy topic largely because people don’t typically record their sexual preferences. I don’t rule out socialization as I do think it affects the particulars (e.g choking becoming popular rather than something else) but I also think the deeper themes seem to reemerge over and over. Plus, I don’t think there’s a clear case to be made that these preferences actually meaningfully contribute to the subjugation of women anyways.
I wish you could @ people in substack comments, because I bet Alice Evans will just know the answer to this question if it's out there.
The issue is that women who want "light choking" during sex or other such edgy moves don't actually want to be choked. If you as a guy were having sex with a girl and started choking her for real she would likely end up very traumatized and you'd get arrested.
Thus I argue that the choking is actually a subversion of male aggression, taking a violent outburst and replicating it as a controlled performance. And it's both performed and controlled for the benefit of the woman, who supposedly wants it. By having a man play act a violent act one demonstrates that he is domesticated; able to restrain impulse. I totally feel like zizek when I write stuff like this lmao
I don't know. I had quite a few ask me for it and I never actually acceded because I was always hearing how dangerous it was. I tend to be on the risk-averse side. But hearing about autoerotic asphyxiation...yeah, maybe there is something about the increased CO2 levels in the brain or something. Still not something to play with IMHO. Messing with both the air and blood supply to the brain...eh. I'll drive 100 on the freeway if I want to live on the edge.
For the record they don't want you to actually choke them, as in cut off blood flow or anything. They just want you to put your hand around their neck and vaguely squeeze in a way that resembles choking. No actual restrictions of anything should happen. If you're with a girl who wants actual choking then you know you found a crazy one and should probably run away.
Copyedit: "When sex outside of marriage was subversive, all on it’s own," -> Should be "its".
Thank you!!
Have you read any Nancy Friday? My own research for writing bore out the claim that BDSM submissives are five times as common as dominants, regardless of whether the group looked at is male or female.
Wow, where'd you get that? I've looked into this a lot, and from what I can tell it's majority male doms and female subs, though the male sub population vastly outstrips the female dom population.
That’s a really good point. The stat relates to reported fantasies, not acting upon them. There is a plentiful supply of female and male subs. There are plenty of male doms who are very eager, but this is not reflected in general fantasies within the male population. The demand for female doms is such that they can be paid.
Very interesting essay