Fly Fresh and Young (FFY) has a post where he ponders the morality of being a player, titled Are women “collateral damage”? (H/T In Bona Fida):

Look, I love women. I love the chase, I love the seduction. I love that look in their eyes when you know it’s on, I love getting to know the cool ones better. I love having sex with them, I love having one night stands with them. I love having wild yet short flings with them, I love being f***buddies with them. I love being in a relationship with a worthy woman (rare as they are), and I love being in love. However, I have the power to get all of the above from many women, and often a few concurrently. So I do.

He is touching on a topic I’ve discussed previously, but the problematic mindset is so prevalent that this is very much worth revisiting. Most Traditional Conservatives are obsessed with creating and enforcing rules of the road for fornication. There is an unspoken assumption that young women engaging in uncommitted sex have a right to swing from man to man on an ultimate path to marriage. Once the woman tires of the carousel, Christian and secular Traditional Conservatives ride in on a white horse and start demanding that whichever man the woman is having uncommitted sex with now must do the honorable thing and marry her. However, Trad Cons go a step further and also create elaborate rules of the road for fornication in their desperate attempt to make the carousel as pleasurable and rewarding an experience for women as possible. These two issues are interrelated, because the underlying assumption is that promiscuous women need to be treated as marriage material, they just haven’t gotten around to getting serious about marriage yet. Another assumption is closer to the College Boyfriend view, that women need many years of “relationships” until they find the man they want to marry, and in the meantime they may as well have a career. This issue came up a few months ago on the blog Darwin Catholic, where one commenter lamented the changes in the culture:

There are only so many years of fertility that a woman has, and it seems the secularists have won a great victory with this education/career nonsense encouraging an awful lot of women to waste that time in dubious endeavors.

This outraged Mrs. Darwin, who scoldingly explained that what looks from the outside like women putting career before marriage is really just women looking for a husband for a really really long time while working (and sampling a quantity of men):

I’ve said this before, and I’ll continue saying it until my voice gives out: One does not choose marriage in a void; one can only discern marriage in the light of another person, real and present, whom one wants to marry. All this talk of how women ought to get married young posits a world in which women browse through the orchard of love and pluck likely men off trees. Real relationships don’t work that way. Until a woman meets the right man, what is she to do? Having a career sounds like a pretty positive option.

One might assume Mrs. Darwin was limiting her passionate defense to career women who delay marriage while remaining virgins, except it turns out that men not wanting to marry non virgins is another hot button issue for the Darwins. Commenter GKC/Mr Anonymous politely argued the practical and biblical merits of men being averse to marrying non virgins on another Darwin Catholic post, and this resulted in him being banned from the Darwin Catholic blog and the thread being locked from further discussion. Mr. Darwin sent him on his way with:

Now, I’m done with you. In your initial comments, you seemed like you were open to reasonable and polite discussion. Your last few comments have become increasingly insulting and, frankly, suggest some rather perverted obsessions. Take them elsewhere. You’ve shit tested one too many times here and it bores me. If you comment again on this blog, I will delete it. And I’m closing comments on this thread. I’m not impressed with the level of thought coming over from manosphere blogs, and I’d rather spend my limited writing time talking about something interesting.

I think it is safe to add one more to the man up and marry those sluts column.

Before we go any further, I’ll reiterate a point I’ve made many times before. If you are a Christian the moral issue isn’t to find the most moral way to fornicate. FFY isn’t being moral, and neither are the women he is with. But the moral answer isn’t for him to switch from being a player to a nice guy serial monogamist (with or without cash and prizes). The moral choice would be for him to ditch the hos and either remain celibate or find a worthy wife, although since he is an alpha I wouldn’t advise a woman to marry him.

Yet Trad Con moral angst is directed almost exclusively at the men in the fornication market who they feel aren’t playing by the rules. It isn’t that these men are fornicating, it is that they aren’t doing it the way Trad Cons want them to do it. As I wrote above, this comes from a generally unspoken assumption that fornication is the logical path for women to follow to marriage. Therefore their partners in fornication need to live up to a set of high fornication standards. With seemingly no discussion this idea has somehow become sacred, something which must not be challenged.

This is when you consider it a truly bizarre idea. Why do the Darwin Catholics and Pastor Driscolls of the world look at women engaging in the hookup culture and see marriage material? At the same time, why do men like FFY see these same women as good for a good time and nothing more? I think the answer to both questions can be found in the shift from a dating/courtship/marriage Sexual Marketplace (SMP) to our current hookup/serial monogamy SMP, and this is closely related to the changing age of marriage:

The chart above uses data from this US Census spreadsheet, and shows the long term trend in the US regarding age of marriage. To better explain how this long term trend has impacted the SMP, I’ll break it down further below by decade. I’ll also focus on median age of marriage for women, since young women are in the power position in the SMP.

Note: The red lines in the charts which follow indicate the average for the decade.

Put yourself in the shoes of an 18 year old young woman in the 1950s. As you can see, half of her peers are married by the time they are a few months past their 20th birthdays. Since marriage isn’t something which typically occurs overnight, these women have likely been in the courtship and engagement process for several years. A woman who marries at age 20 was very likely strongly considering marriage at age 18 if not younger. Many of the women around her have in fact married at younger ages than 20. Young women in this kind of situation will approach the dating market very differently than young women do today. They may not plan on marrying their first boyfriend, but they are generally looking for a boyfriend who they feel is husband material. This focus on dads over cads is reinforced by the fact that other women are looking for the same dad traits. This creates what is called in game parlance preselection, and can be very powerful.

Now place yourself in the shoes of a young man in the 1950s. As it has always been, young women are the prize of the SMP. If you want them to give you the time of day, you had better be offering what they are looking for. As I’ve just shown, generally this meant demonstrating dad potential. This isn’t to say that players/alphas didn’t exist or didn’t have success, but the playing field wasn’t stacked in their favor as it is today.

Fast forward a decade to the 1960s. As you can see, the trend has continued but the fundamental SMP hasn’t changed; the median age of marriage has increased by only a few months. If you are an 18 year old young woman, you still find that your peers just a few years older than you are very likely to already be married. The pressure is on to find a husband. Screwing cads for sport might be enticing, but there is no time to waste, and developing a reputation would harm your near term goal of finding the best husband you can attract.

Since the women are still looking for dads and not cads, as a young man the signal is still strong; work hard and prepare to act as a provider. Young women will spot the young men with the best potential and want to be with them.

Ten years later and we are in the full swing of the sexual revolution. On top of that, the trend towards later marriage for women has continued. However, a young woman’s peers are only marrying a year later than her mother’s peers did in the 1950s. This isn’t a lot of time to embrace the carousel, and marriage is still a near term goal for an average 18 year old woman. Certainly more women are screwing cads like FFY for sport than in previous generations, but the smart ones stay off the carousel or at least seriously limit their exposure to it. Many no doubt decide to split the difference with a series of college boyfriends until she finds the one she likes the best, and then pressure him into proposing.

By all accounts this must have been the golden age for greater betas. They have enough alpha/cad to be attractive to women on the carousel, and they also have the dad/beta qualities that women were still considering with marriage just around the corner. This golden age of greater betas seems to be what so many Trad Cons have etched in stone in their minds. This along with the apex fallacy leads to the premise that most men have all of the options. They can either use and discard women looking to marry, or they can marry them. Better yet, why not decide to have the best of both worlds and use and discard marriage worthy women until they decide to marry?

Note that the split-the-difference strategy in this scenario looks strikingly similar for men and women. One would be hard pressed to determine who was conning whom.

Now we are in the 1980s. While it took 20 years for the median age of marriage to go up one year between the 50s and 70s, it has gone up another two in the last decade. However, AIDS and the fear of STDs in general have put a bit of a damper on the promiscuity of the last decade, and when it comes down to it large numbers of young women are still in the marriage market from the beginning. 18 year olds look to 20 and 22 year olds for an understanding of what they should be doing, and those women are actively hunting down husbands. This isn’t a good time to develop a reputation, but a college boyfriend or three probably won’t do any harm. A few cads might find their way accidentally into the mix as well.

For greater betas the split the difference strategy still probably works pretty well. Cads are doing better because a larger number of women are delaying marriage into their late 20s and some even past then.

Enter the 1990s and the median age of marriage for women is now 24 and a half. While an 18 year old woman in the 1950s saw herself likely marrying in 2 years, an 18 year old woman in the 1990s doesn’t see this happening for over 6 more years. 6 years is a lifetime to an 18 year old of either sex, so her initial foray into the SMP likely isn’t looking for a husband. However, there is an inertia to inhibitions and the “good girls” are still following the college boyfriend script, even though fewer women now feel compelled to follow it. Those who chase cads assume rightly or wrongly that they can clean up their act and marry an unsuspecting beta once they are ready.

For the greater beta things are starting to get much tougher. Fewer women are seeking out dad qualities, and those who are could well have been chasing cads just a year or two prior.

Skip ahead to the generation that survived Y2k. Women are marrying roughly an additional year later than they did a decade ago, and 7.5 years later than they did in the 1950s. An 18 year old woman’s peers aren’t looking for a husband, and neither are the women 2 and 4 years older than her. The women who are looking for husbands are in a very different life stage than she is, so this removes her sense of urgency. The only thing holding her back from fully embracing the now raging hookup culture would be a strong moral belief that sex shouldn’t occur before marriage. For the rest, why not go after the hottest men they can find? There will be time to paper it over with stories about college boyfriends later. Besides, everyone is doing it.

For young betas this SMP is an unmitigated disaster. Your choices amount to finding one of the rapidly vanishing young women who are looking to marry, learn to emulate the cads, or remain celibate (voluntary or otherwise). On top of that, courting young women has become outright foolish unless one has a high degree of certainty that she is motivated to marry soon. Young women will gladly accept your quaint offer of gifts, free food, and entertainment, but most won’t be on the market for anything serious for many years. Courting older women has the same basic problem, with the additional negatives of them being less attractive and more likely to carry baggage of STDs, be hung up on a past alpha, or raising another man’s child.

For players like FFY, this is the time to be alive. Sexually unscrupulous young women are literally throwing themselves at you, and the only thing you have to worry about are the finger wagging Trad Cons who want to make sure the hos enjoy the ride. These same conservatives have generally turned their backs on marriage in the past decades, allowing it to become a mechanism to crush honest men. But even if the Trad Cons hadn’t squandered their moral authority it wouldn’t deter men like FFY, because he is one of the bad boys women are flocking to. His bad boy nature is both what makes him attractive to hordes of young women seeking out cads, and also what makes him not care what society in general and Trad Cons in specific think of him.

As you can see, the trend of women having “relationships” with men for an extended period of time has continued in the most recent years data is available for. Unfortunately, Trad Cons are so obsessed with the rules for the road of fornication they can’t focus on bringing us back to a truly moral situation.

See also: