All seems intuitively correct to me. By the way, research does not actually confirm that women are judged more harshly for having a lot of sexual partners than men. That's a common assumption, but studies have not borne it out. Women and men are equally as likely to think someone with a ton of previous partners is not attractive for a relationship, and if anything men are actually somewhat more forgiving than women are about this, especially in the short term context. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00224499.2016.1232690
I guess you just never hear about slut shaming men because everyone assumes they would not actually be ashamed, and therefore don't bother trying to shame them. They accurately perceive women to be more sensitive to social criticism. But in reality, people's views about the opposite sex's history and body count are virtually identical between the sexes, with women being just slightly less accepting of slutty men.
I'm in a few FB groups that seem to consist solely of men slut-shaming women. (Look up "the single moms are at it again") I assume these are incels who are debasing the product they cannot get in any case. However, slut-shaming has definitely not died.
This is a great essay. Veering into maybe-slightly-too-honest-territory ... I was kind-of-slutty while single up until I met my husband, often down for one-off make-out sessions after a night of partying but not sex. I was also a serial monogamist, often entering a new relationship weeks after ending an old one (and sleeping with the new boyfriend within a week or so of dating). One of my best friends and roommates in university was sluttier than me, and stunningly beautiful. Think Lindsay Lohan mashed up with Jennifer Lawrence mashed up with Ariel from the cartoon Little Mermaid. She also was smart and had a great personality, and men LOVED her and wanted to date her (many marry her). She ended up marrying a great guy.
Neither of us were "slut-shamed". And at least for me, I didn't experience the negative aspects of hook-up culture so many women talk about. The random guys I made out with were more likely to want a relationship with me than I did with them (the guys I liked who did reject me also never hooked up with me, being quite good guys who were aware of how I felt and didn't take advantage). The handful of times I tried online dating (on OKCupid), the meanest comment I ever got was a guy who called me a "nerd" (which I am). No guy ever lost interest in me for sleeping with him on the first date. I've never been dumped for another woman (to my knowledge -- I was the one to end over 90% of relationships), but I know of several women who were dumped for me (in most cases without the guy consulting me about that decision). The only guy who was ever really put off by the number of my past partners was quite obviously upset because he was scared I'd leave him for another guy -- and that insecurity, possessiveness, and general dysfunction was a major reason I dumped him.
My husband -- an attractive musician with a master's degree, a good regular-job, who still plays music professionally -- was also slutty in his youth. (When he told me his number, I raised my eyebrows, and he said, sheepishly, "I was a musician!"). We slept together on the first date, which lasted three days. I was fresh out of a bad relationship, and casually serial dating at the time -- he was the third guy I'd started "seeing" like this, and when I confessed this he didn't care, though quite reasonably encouraged me to break up with the other two, which I did (it was kind of a slutty Goldilocks story, the first guy was too "cold", too much into long conversations and not super cuddly, the second too "hot", always going for the body not the mind, and my husband was "just right"). He proposed after three months, and now we've been together for four years and are still very much in love and happy. I'm not worried about him cheating on me, and I don't think he's worried either (especially as we have one kid and another on the way).
It kind of feels like the modern dating world works great for people like us. I don't think either me or my husband are "10s" (the friend I mentioned earlier probably is), but we were fairly popular with the opposite sex and all the dating and hooking up was really because neither of us found the right person until we found each other. I have a high need for intimacy, and I think in a slut-shaming culture, I would have married one of my boyfriends from my early twenties and ended up significantly less happy. One of the reasons my mom married my dad at 23 was that she slept with him and having a Roman-Catholic background and it being the early 80s, she didn't like the idea of sleeping with more than one guy. Their marriage was not-so-great, my dad clearly not the right guy for her, and now they're divorced. I was more scared of committing to the wrong guy than I was letting my number of partners creep into the high teens and low twenties. So I shopped around.
People like me, my husband, and my friend seem to the be beneficiaries of this cultural shift, but far more people seem to be hurt by it. I have no solutions, I just sort of feel a bit guilty.
It sounds like the insecure potential boyfriend who worried you'd leave him and go find another man may have been reasonable since you called off 90% of your relationships, often quickly finding a new boyfriend. Ofc I am missing a whole lot of context for the reasons those breakups occurred.
I don't know. I really liked my husband so he was just going to get away with a lot, no matter what. He only told me because I asked him, I think I would have been turned off by him volunteering that information. I think I'd find approaching 100 difficult, but it would depend on the guy. If I thought someone was BS-ing a way bigger number than was true, it would be a huge turn-off.
A very interesting piece. It endlessly frustrates me how most journalism on sexual relations is framed in terms of crude stereotypes...'Men' and 'Women'. Your piece does make subtle distinctions.....for instance between more/less promiscuous women and more/less randy men. But there are much bigger factors at play governing who gets more and who gets less of whatever they are after. I wrote about it in this piece: https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/the-less-desired "What always strikes me when I read most sex relations journalism is how it is always framed in terms of a generic species called ‘Women’ and a generic species called ‘Men’; as if the perceived ‘unfair’ asymmetries under discussion are entirely ones between the sexes. ..... The huge intra-sexual differences between the experiences of pretty women and ‘plain’ ones; and between confident ‘alpha’ males and ‘betas’ – this never gets considered.
>> Men still chased them, of course, but being a man who chased loose women was not a very honorable thing to be.
I would say that depending on the social context, it could go even more than that - into a form of male slut shaming.
Back in my high school days (15 years ago, in Poland), casual sex seemed unacceptable for both sexes. Hookup culture apparently didn't exist, the only acceptable options were to be single or have a boyfriend/girlfriend. Also, I recall no gossip about other people having casual sex whatsoever. Even discussing the desire for casual sex in a male group was frowned upon - I brought up the topic a couple of times and my friends thought I was a lunatic. I would then go home, watch American teenagers getting laid all the time in movies like American Pie and cry a little inside.
All of this was probably related to me attending one of the top schools in my city and/or hanging out with nerds. Shortly after graduating high school I found the local pickup artist community, the first people I met that truly believed in casual sex. But almost all of my high school friends went on to marry their high school or college girlfriends and, quite possibly, may have never experienced the joys of casual sex.
Anyways, it seems that the slut-shaming system worked exactly as described in the post, possibly to a greater extent. For some reason though, it didn't quite work on me - maybe I was too socially awkward / neurodivergent and focused too little on the social norms of real people around me (unable to give in to the 'casual sex is bad' (self)deception), and maybe too much on the social norms coming from the international mainstream pop culture, or the glimpses or American teenager life I saw in the online forums that included mentions of their sex lives.
But most guys are unattractive to most women, and most guys aren't learning how to be effective, so most guys stew in loserdom, or struggle to attract and maintain one woman. It's a sad equilibrium, but I hypothesize that most guys do not actually care about getting laid, https://theredquest.substack.com/p/most-guys-dont-care-much-about-getting-laid-i-hypothesize, and that for many of them, pr0n is an okay enough substitute, the same way e.g. dominos is an okay enough substitute for true food.
> the deeds of pick-up artists and their disciples seem less impressive than otherwise
The number of guys who learn any real pickup is miniscule. It's too hard.
I would say pickup is unnatural only created due to the breakdown of social spaces. It's actually women who have lost interest in relationships. Most men are not losers but their value is simply unvalued, like a vast forgotten hoard of gold in a shipwreck rotting beneath the sea. Untapped potential. Most men do indeed do not care about getting simply getting laid which is actually very easy, they want relationships.
The people who are the most sick are those who have lost all desire, adventure and romance altogether. Using and discarding people, rating 1 to 10 is a sign of a loss of all depth.
I mean, the obvious solution is superhuman sexbots, right? People aren’t breeding anyways, they don’t really seem to like each other much for relationships qua relationships given “divorces and mutually unhappy marriage” rates, at least when given options and interesting Western lives.
Sexbots for everyone who wants them solves this problem permanently on both ends.
And given the advancements Eureka and others are making using LLM’s to train superhuman performance with simple verbal instructions, they honestly seem about 5 minutes away, so this age-old problem should fall relatively soon.
Then Western fertility rates will *really* become a problem! But so much more will be going on in that timescale, it either won’t matter or we’ll figure something out.
It's probably worth checking out Baumeister's publications. I have noted down "The laws of supply and demand can be substantiated in all sorts of marketplaces, and there is no reason that sex should be an exception." and my memory is that the rest of what I've read of him is along economic lines.
Humans are imitative and women perhaps even more so than men at least when it comes to follow a fashion. With feminists pushing for the social acceptance of "sluts" and their ubiquitous presence of social media lots of women feel the need to look like them. So, unintuitively, feminism led to a Great Undressing in which in all areas of life young women are wearing skimpier and more form fitting outfits than men even when doing the same activity. At the pool is swim trunks vs bikini, on hikes cargo pants vs yoga pants and in the office it's suits vs pencil skirts.
I think we are the first society in history in which men are wearing outfits that are more modest than women's.
This of course makes life even more painful for the set of men who see all this feminine beauty on display but they are not getting any action.
>>Humans are imitative and women perhaps even more so than men at least when it comes to follow a fashion.
Thinking about it, do we know feminism is the foremost culprit? Couldn't men be the foremost reason that women try to look sexually appealing? I mean, it is plausible that women choose to dress in clothes that reveal their bodies and hide their faces behind make-up are doing so because they earn something from it. On a collective level it might be damaging for both sexes: Men are distracted by what they in almost all cases can't get, women waste their time on their own appearances. Still, I have this feeling that the trend is difficult to reverse, because individuals gain from it.
Women make an art out of fashion together. They amuse themselves with little details that most men are too distraught to or blunt to understand. Still, fashion would have been meaningless without men. Just like many other things that women do. Female friendship centers around talking about relationships to men. And a little about the clothes that are supposed to look attractive to men.
Kryptogal says women dress elaborately because they want to be liked by men
I think it rather is because women want to be desired by men. Women mostly don't consciously think "I need to dress uncomfortably so he will like me". Instead, they reflexively desire so much to be desired that they will do it "for themselves".
Edit: See comment below by Apple Pie. He makes the point.
How do you think that women should dress if their sole objective was to maximize their chances on the marriage market?
I mean, women have little reason to care about what men who want casual sex want. But how should a young woman who wants to maximize her chances to find a husband and form a family dress, in your opinion?
Maybe you didn't get around reading the essay I posted in my other comment, but this essay contains many tips for women who want to find a good mate for a long-term relationship: https://www.jsanilac.com/dispelling-beauty-lies/
I also don't understand why you're asking the question, although I would think that a woman seeking casual sex would care very much what men want, unless she really is indifferent to whom she has sex with.
Women seem to be playing two status games at the same time: attracting male attention and gaining status with their female peers. Those two games can at times stand in conflict with one another.
Here is Louis Perry explaining the female status games on the Chris Williamson podcast:
(1:35:25) Louise Perry: “Men are actually incredibly easy to please, right, in terms of physical cues. But the problem is that there are two parallel status games going on when it comes to female beauty and appearance. One is attracting men, which is basically just looking youthful and fertile. And then the other is the much more difficult game, which is the intrasexual competition game, which is about making yourself look high status in other ways. And that's where the brands come in. That's where keeping up with fashion comes in. Men don't care about that. But you have those two things going on parallel and occasionally they'll come into tension, occasionally there'll be some trend which makes you fashionable but the men don't like. Short hair would be an example of that although it's quite a rare for that to be really popular but as you know, baggy clothes or something like that. Men aren’t going to be interested in that. But that might occasionally come around.
(1:36:25) Chris Williamson: “Guys would be happy with girls just permanently wearing leggings. Like, hot leggings. Like, gym shark leggings or something. Just go out in those, with heels.
(1:35:25) Louise Perry: “Yeah, it's very basic. But also part of what's driving fashion is the fact that gay men are so overwhelmingly overrepresented in fashion and they don't care about that stuff. So that's why you have really skinny women on catwalks and stuff. It's partly because the clothes kind of hang... It's easier if everyone's a small sample size to deal with the clothes, fitting everyone. But I think it's also because the more androgynous look is just considered to be more beautiful by gay man.”
The infamous Aella has come to a somewhat similar conclusion:
“it's tragic men dont get sexually aroused by the things women like to wear. i wish mens boners would get proportionally harder the more sparkly, gown-y, princessey an outfit is on a woman. i wanna walk into a room dripping in pink jewels and have that be what makes men love me
instead no, the outfits that earn boners are literally $10 leggings, a visible thong, and a too-small tee u cut off right underneath your boobs with scissors. doesn't matter the color of the tee, the print, the cut, all that matters is it's small and you're not wearing a bra
men are uncivilized trash. We could be living in the alternate universe where im writing beautiful artistic clothes off on my taxes but no, my wardrobe is full of itchy transparent shit from shein because of you.
(guys to clarify i do not literally think men are uncivilized trash, i was using funny hyperbole language to bemoan my lack of princess dresses. everyone is incentivized by genes built in an ancestral state and i have compassion for this)”
Last but not least there is this long, interesting, and somewhat controversial essay by J. Sanilac that talks about lies we tell each other about female beauty: https://www.jsanilac.com/dispelling-beauty-lies/
That was fun: since I'm totally uninterested in fashion, my husband buys most clothes for me. And he really buys the kind of items Chris Williamson claim that men like: simple yoga pants, always of the same model, and t-shirts in bright pastel colors. So I have every reason to believe he is right.
> Men are distracted by what they in almost all cases can't get
February is the hardest month in northern New England, and not only because the snow keeps piling up beneath barren branches, but because women are covered in shapeless coats. Not until the spring thaws arrive do the lovely flowers, singing birds, and beautiful ladies once more begin to appear.
If some men become distracted and unhappy by all the flowers and birds they can't have sex with, nobody regards this as normal, or feels any concern for their immoderate desires. Shall we cover up the ladies, pull the jewelry from their necks, and wash the color from their faces for the sake of immature men and envious women?
I suppose that makes erections impossible to hide, doesn’t it? It sounds like a good way to rub it in: “Ha, ha, you can’t have this, and there’s no way you can deny how desperately you crave it! Ha, ha, sucks to be you, loser!”.
No, I don’t think people in those societies actually behave like this.
There is a book series by a German anthropologist called Hans-Peter Duerr that is totally focused on that kind of problem and how different naked and almost-naked tribes have approached them. Unfortunately, none of the books seem to have been translated to English.
Chimpanzee males hide erections from each other (beta males hide erections from the alpha male), so I guess there might be a very long tradition of hominin males finding ways to avoid showing off erections.
No, that’s retarded. Inshallah, all sex havers will be slapped into Titanium Burkhas to rot and never gaze upon flesh again.
Death to Coomerism.
Sluts are sluts only for tall chads.
Monogamy is the only solution.
Nope… men get along just fine because none of us is getting the girl. It is only men and women, let take a look at South Korea and the 4B movement
All seems intuitively correct to me. By the way, research does not actually confirm that women are judged more harshly for having a lot of sexual partners than men. That's a common assumption, but studies have not borne it out. Women and men are equally as likely to think someone with a ton of previous partners is not attractive for a relationship, and if anything men are actually somewhat more forgiving than women are about this, especially in the short term context. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00224499.2016.1232690
I guess you just never hear about slut shaming men because everyone assumes they would not actually be ashamed, and therefore don't bother trying to shame them. They accurately perceive women to be more sensitive to social criticism. But in reality, people's views about the opposite sex's history and body count are virtually identical between the sexes, with women being just slightly less accepting of slutty men.
Far as I can tell, slutshaming was largely a female activity, the equivalent of denouncing scabs who undercut the union price.
I'm in a few FB groups that seem to consist solely of men slut-shaming women. (Look up "the single moms are at it again") I assume these are incels who are debasing the product they cannot get in any case. However, slut-shaming has definitely not died.
This is a great essay. Veering into maybe-slightly-too-honest-territory ... I was kind-of-slutty while single up until I met my husband, often down for one-off make-out sessions after a night of partying but not sex. I was also a serial monogamist, often entering a new relationship weeks after ending an old one (and sleeping with the new boyfriend within a week or so of dating). One of my best friends and roommates in university was sluttier than me, and stunningly beautiful. Think Lindsay Lohan mashed up with Jennifer Lawrence mashed up with Ariel from the cartoon Little Mermaid. She also was smart and had a great personality, and men LOVED her and wanted to date her (many marry her). She ended up marrying a great guy.
Neither of us were "slut-shamed". And at least for me, I didn't experience the negative aspects of hook-up culture so many women talk about. The random guys I made out with were more likely to want a relationship with me than I did with them (the guys I liked who did reject me also never hooked up with me, being quite good guys who were aware of how I felt and didn't take advantage). The handful of times I tried online dating (on OKCupid), the meanest comment I ever got was a guy who called me a "nerd" (which I am). No guy ever lost interest in me for sleeping with him on the first date. I've never been dumped for another woman (to my knowledge -- I was the one to end over 90% of relationships), but I know of several women who were dumped for me (in most cases without the guy consulting me about that decision). The only guy who was ever really put off by the number of my past partners was quite obviously upset because he was scared I'd leave him for another guy -- and that insecurity, possessiveness, and general dysfunction was a major reason I dumped him.
My husband -- an attractive musician with a master's degree, a good regular-job, who still plays music professionally -- was also slutty in his youth. (When he told me his number, I raised my eyebrows, and he said, sheepishly, "I was a musician!"). We slept together on the first date, which lasted three days. I was fresh out of a bad relationship, and casually serial dating at the time -- he was the third guy I'd started "seeing" like this, and when I confessed this he didn't care, though quite reasonably encouraged me to break up with the other two, which I did (it was kind of a slutty Goldilocks story, the first guy was too "cold", too much into long conversations and not super cuddly, the second too "hot", always going for the body not the mind, and my husband was "just right"). He proposed after three months, and now we've been together for four years and are still very much in love and happy. I'm not worried about him cheating on me, and I don't think he's worried either (especially as we have one kid and another on the way).
It kind of feels like the modern dating world works great for people like us. I don't think either me or my husband are "10s" (the friend I mentioned earlier probably is), but we were fairly popular with the opposite sex and all the dating and hooking up was really because neither of us found the right person until we found each other. I have a high need for intimacy, and I think in a slut-shaming culture, I would have married one of my boyfriends from my early twenties and ended up significantly less happy. One of the reasons my mom married my dad at 23 was that she slept with him and having a Roman-Catholic background and it being the early 80s, she didn't like the idea of sleeping with more than one guy. Their marriage was not-so-great, my dad clearly not the right guy for her, and now they're divorced. I was more scared of committing to the wrong guy than I was letting my number of partners creep into the high teens and low twenties. So I shopped around.
People like me, my husband, and my friend seem to the be beneficiaries of this cultural shift, but far more people seem to be hurt by it. I have no solutions, I just sort of feel a bit guilty.
It sounds like the insecure potential boyfriend who worried you'd leave him and go find another man may have been reasonable since you called off 90% of your relationships, often quickly finding a new boyfriend. Ofc I am missing a whole lot of context for the reasons those breakups occurred.
He was right to be worried! It's a complicated story -- my husband doesn't worry about me leaving him and he doesn't need to.
Thanks for sharing your story! I enjoyed reading it.
I don't think you should feel guilty for the good outcome you landed - there's no causal pathway from your experience to the suffering of others.
"Over 50". Which seemed like a lot to me, but, again, I was only kind of fringe-slutty.
I don't know. I really liked my husband so he was just going to get away with a lot, no matter what. He only told me because I asked him, I think I would have been turned off by him volunteering that information. I think I'd find approaching 100 difficult, but it would depend on the guy. If I thought someone was BS-ing a way bigger number than was true, it would be a huge turn-off.
A very interesting piece. It endlessly frustrates me how most journalism on sexual relations is framed in terms of crude stereotypes...'Men' and 'Women'. Your piece does make subtle distinctions.....for instance between more/less promiscuous women and more/less randy men. But there are much bigger factors at play governing who gets more and who gets less of whatever they are after. I wrote about it in this piece: https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/the-less-desired "What always strikes me when I read most sex relations journalism is how it is always framed in terms of a generic species called ‘Women’ and a generic species called ‘Men’; as if the perceived ‘unfair’ asymmetries under discussion are entirely ones between the sexes. ..... The huge intra-sexual differences between the experiences of pretty women and ‘plain’ ones; and between confident ‘alpha’ males and ‘betas’ – this never gets considered.
>> Men still chased them, of course, but being a man who chased loose women was not a very honorable thing to be.
I would say that depending on the social context, it could go even more than that - into a form of male slut shaming.
Back in my high school days (15 years ago, in Poland), casual sex seemed unacceptable for both sexes. Hookup culture apparently didn't exist, the only acceptable options were to be single or have a boyfriend/girlfriend. Also, I recall no gossip about other people having casual sex whatsoever. Even discussing the desire for casual sex in a male group was frowned upon - I brought up the topic a couple of times and my friends thought I was a lunatic. I would then go home, watch American teenagers getting laid all the time in movies like American Pie and cry a little inside.
All of this was probably related to me attending one of the top schools in my city and/or hanging out with nerds. Shortly after graduating high school I found the local pickup artist community, the first people I met that truly believed in casual sex. But almost all of my high school friends went on to marry their high school or college girlfriends and, quite possibly, may have never experienced the joys of casual sex.
Anyways, it seems that the slut-shaming system worked exactly as described in the post, possibly to a greater extent. For some reason though, it didn't quite work on me - maybe I was too socially awkward / neurodivergent and focused too little on the social norms of real people around me (unable to give in to the 'casual sex is bad' (self)deception), and maybe too much on the social norms coming from the international mainstream pop culture, or the glimpses or American teenager life I saw in the online forums that included mentions of their sex lives.
Most guys have abysmal fitness and nutrition habits, and worse game.
A lot of women will be up for a lot of things, if it's pitched well to them, https://theredquest.substack.com/p/how-many-women-are-open-to-sex-parties-and-partner-swapping-intermediate-advanced
But most guys are unattractive to most women, and most guys aren't learning how to be effective, so most guys stew in loserdom, or struggle to attract and maintain one woman. It's a sad equilibrium, but I hypothesize that most guys do not actually care about getting laid, https://theredquest.substack.com/p/most-guys-dont-care-much-about-getting-laid-i-hypothesize, and that for many of them, pr0n is an okay enough substitute, the same way e.g. dominos is an okay enough substitute for true food.
> the deeds of pick-up artists and their disciples seem less impressive than otherwise
The number of guys who learn any real pickup is miniscule. It's too hard.
I would say pickup is unnatural only created due to the breakdown of social spaces. It's actually women who have lost interest in relationships. Most men are not losers but their value is simply unvalued, like a vast forgotten hoard of gold in a shipwreck rotting beneath the sea. Untapped potential. Most men do indeed do not care about getting simply getting laid which is actually very easy, they want relationships.
The people who are the most sick are those who have lost all desire, adventure and romance altogether. Using and discarding people, rating 1 to 10 is a sign of a loss of all depth.
I mean, the obvious solution is superhuman sexbots, right? People aren’t breeding anyways, they don’t really seem to like each other much for relationships qua relationships given “divorces and mutually unhappy marriage” rates, at least when given options and interesting Western lives.
Sexbots for everyone who wants them solves this problem permanently on both ends.
And given the advancements Eureka and others are making using LLM’s to train superhuman performance with simple verbal instructions, they honestly seem about 5 minutes away, so this age-old problem should fall relatively soon.
Then Western fertility rates will *really* become a problem! But so much more will be going on in that timescale, it either won’t matter or we’ll figure something out.
Seems like a first year economics student would probably have a solution for this, in both a personal and societal sense.
It's probably worth checking out Baumeister's publications. I have noted down "The laws of supply and demand can be substantiated in all sorts of marketplaces, and there is no reason that sex should be an exception." and my memory is that the rest of what I've read of him is along economic lines.
I will take a look at it!
Maybe they don't teach about collective action problems until the second year.
Humans are imitative and women perhaps even more so than men at least when it comes to follow a fashion. With feminists pushing for the social acceptance of "sluts" and their ubiquitous presence of social media lots of women feel the need to look like them. So, unintuitively, feminism led to a Great Undressing in which in all areas of life young women are wearing skimpier and more form fitting outfits than men even when doing the same activity. At the pool is swim trunks vs bikini, on hikes cargo pants vs yoga pants and in the office it's suits vs pencil skirts.
I think we are the first society in history in which men are wearing outfits that are more modest than women's.
This of course makes life even more painful for the set of men who see all this feminine beauty on display but they are not getting any action.
> This of course makes life even more painful for the set of men who see all this feminine beauty on display but they are not getting any action
Men can up their game but most choose not to.
So...what... do you lead a class on this topic or something?
Yes. More accurately, I live class on this topic or something.
And what is the purpose? To satisfy hedonistic desires? Which today are simply another pleasure trigger. Not leading to children, family or meaning.
That's always been my response to red quest and other pickup artists: it's mostly pointless hedonism.
In a zero-sum competition everybody uping their game just leads to the same result for more effort, what the chinese are calling involution.
Done right, it's positive sum, not zero sum.
How?
>>Humans are imitative and women perhaps even more so than men at least when it comes to follow a fashion.
Thinking about it, do we know feminism is the foremost culprit? Couldn't men be the foremost reason that women try to look sexually appealing? I mean, it is plausible that women choose to dress in clothes that reveal their bodies and hide their faces behind make-up are doing so because they earn something from it. On a collective level it might be damaging for both sexes: Men are distracted by what they in almost all cases can't get, women waste their time on their own appearances. Still, I have this feeling that the trend is difficult to reverse, because individuals gain from it.
AFAICT, human women do not dress for men. They dress for each other.
Women make an art out of fashion together. They amuse themselves with little details that most men are too distraught to or blunt to understand. Still, fashion would have been meaningless without men. Just like many other things that women do. Female friendship centers around talking about relationships to men. And a little about the clothes that are supposed to look attractive to men.
Kryptogal says women dress elaborately because they want to be liked by men
https://open.substack.com/pub/kryptogal/p/femininity-is-fake-but-masculinity?r=rd1ej&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
I think it rather is because women want to be desired by men. Women mostly don't consciously think "I need to dress uncomfortably so he will like me". Instead, they reflexively desire so much to be desired that they will do it "for themselves".
Edit: See comment below by Apple Pie. He makes the point.
If women were that interested in men's opinions, they'd dress a lot differently.
How do you think that women should dress if their sole objective was to maximize their chances on the marriage market?
I mean, women have little reason to care about what men who want casual sex want. But how should a young woman who wants to maximize her chances to find a husband and form a family dress, in your opinion?
Maybe you didn't get around reading the essay I posted in my other comment, but this essay contains many tips for women who want to find a good mate for a long-term relationship: https://www.jsanilac.com/dispelling-beauty-lies/
I would recommend reading the whole essay, but here is the chapter that gives practical tips: https://www.jsanilac.com/dispelling-beauty-lies/?ref=jsanilac.com#xii-reality-based-beauty-tips
I have no idea, cats don't do marriage.
I also don't understand why you're asking the question, although I would think that a woman seeking casual sex would care very much what men want, unless she really is indifferent to whom she has sex with.
Women seem to be playing two status games at the same time: attracting male attention and gaining status with their female peers. Those two games can at times stand in conflict with one another.
Here is Louis Perry explaining the female status games on the Chris Williamson podcast:
https://youtu.be/HAmQ7Tcrh6A?feature=shared&t=5727
Transcript:
(1:35:25) Louise Perry: “Men are actually incredibly easy to please, right, in terms of physical cues. But the problem is that there are two parallel status games going on when it comes to female beauty and appearance. One is attracting men, which is basically just looking youthful and fertile. And then the other is the much more difficult game, which is the intrasexual competition game, which is about making yourself look high status in other ways. And that's where the brands come in. That's where keeping up with fashion comes in. Men don't care about that. But you have those two things going on parallel and occasionally they'll come into tension, occasionally there'll be some trend which makes you fashionable but the men don't like. Short hair would be an example of that although it's quite a rare for that to be really popular but as you know, baggy clothes or something like that. Men aren’t going to be interested in that. But that might occasionally come around.
(1:36:25) Chris Williamson: “Guys would be happy with girls just permanently wearing leggings. Like, hot leggings. Like, gym shark leggings or something. Just go out in those, with heels.
(1:35:25) Louise Perry: “Yeah, it's very basic. But also part of what's driving fashion is the fact that gay men are so overwhelmingly overrepresented in fashion and they don't care about that stuff. So that's why you have really skinny women on catwalks and stuff. It's partly because the clothes kind of hang... It's easier if everyone's a small sample size to deal with the clothes, fitting everyone. But I think it's also because the more androgynous look is just considered to be more beautiful by gay man.”
The infamous Aella has come to a somewhat similar conclusion:
“it's tragic men dont get sexually aroused by the things women like to wear. i wish mens boners would get proportionally harder the more sparkly, gown-y, princessey an outfit is on a woman. i wanna walk into a room dripping in pink jewels and have that be what makes men love me
instead no, the outfits that earn boners are literally $10 leggings, a visible thong, and a too-small tee u cut off right underneath your boobs with scissors. doesn't matter the color of the tee, the print, the cut, all that matters is it's small and you're not wearing a bra
men are uncivilized trash. We could be living in the alternate universe where im writing beautiful artistic clothes off on my taxes but no, my wardrobe is full of itchy transparent shit from shein because of you.
(guys to clarify i do not literally think men are uncivilized trash, i was using funny hyperbole language to bemoan my lack of princess dresses. everyone is incentivized by genes built in an ancestral state and i have compassion for this)”
Thread: https://x.com/Aella_Girl/status/1711247047880286368
Last but not least there is this long, interesting, and somewhat controversial essay by J. Sanilac that talks about lies we tell each other about female beauty: https://www.jsanilac.com/dispelling-beauty-lies/
That was fun: since I'm totally uninterested in fashion, my husband buys most clothes for me. And he really buys the kind of items Chris Williamson claim that men like: simple yoga pants, always of the same model, and t-shirts in bright pastel colors. So I have every reason to believe he is right.
> Men are distracted by what they in almost all cases can't get
February is the hardest month in northern New England, and not only because the snow keeps piling up beneath barren branches, but because women are covered in shapeless coats. Not until the spring thaws arrive do the lovely flowers, singing birds, and beautiful ladies once more begin to appear.
If some men become distracted and unhappy by all the flowers and birds they can't have sex with, nobody regards this as normal, or feels any concern for their immoderate desires. Shall we cover up the ladies, pull the jewelry from their necks, and wash the color from their faces for the sake of immature men and envious women?
The exception could be societies where men wear penis strings and women wear nothing at all.
I suppose that makes erections impossible to hide, doesn’t it? It sounds like a good way to rub it in: “Ha, ha, you can’t have this, and there’s no way you can deny how desperately you crave it! Ha, ha, sucks to be you, loser!”.
No, I don’t think people in those societies actually behave like this.
There is a book series by a German anthropologist called Hans-Peter Duerr that is totally focused on that kind of problem and how different naked and almost-naked tribes have approached them. Unfortunately, none of the books seem to have been translated to English.
Chimpanzee males hide erections from each other (beta males hide erections from the alpha male), so I guess there might be a very long tradition of hominin males finding ways to avoid showing off erections.