Happy Valentine’s Day, everyone!

Table of Contents

I put on these sunglasses… bonobos everywhere!

(images: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5)

Hold the line: love isn’t always on time.

Whoa-oh-oh. Toto

“Isn’t it pretty to think so?” The Sun Also Rises

Women across the mainstream political spectrum, from progressive feminists to slightly more progressive feminists, are in agreement: men have suddenly gone crazy for no reason, and they should stop and do what progressive feminists tell them to do.

Hanna Rosin, for instance, famously heralded “the end of men” (2010):

Women now earn 60 percent of master’s degrees, about half of all law and medical degrees, and 42 percent of all M.B.A.s. Most important, women earn almost 60 percent of all bachelor’s degrees — the minimum requirement, in most cases, for an affluent life. In a stark reversal since the 1970s, men are now more likely than women to hold only a high-school diploma. “One would think that if men were acting in a rational way, they would be getting the education they need to get along out there,” says Tom Mortenson, a senior scholar at the Pell Institute for the Study of Opportunity in Higher Education. “But they are just failing to adapt.”

College! That’s a big one. If only men were capable of being rational, they would realize how important it is to drop tens of thousands of dollars learning next to nothing, for no real reason, personal or professional — except to subsidize urgent research into critically important fields like “transgendered” literature, the feminist critique of Christianity, applied white guilt, Beyonce studies, the cutting edge of transnational feminism, and of course prostitution and general deviance.

Not to worry: these maladaptive males are unlikely to get through grade school without a healthy dose of social conditioning; learning, for example, that a “good citizen… does not argue,” that “the wants of an individual are less important than the well-being of the nation,” and that high achievement is hurtful — and, if you’re white, racist.

But this isn’t really about college (I refuse to call it “education”). Penny Nance made this pretty clear when she found herself surrounded by “‘Peter Pan’ men” (2011):

Working in an office full of women, many of whom are young, single gals, I hear all the time, “Where are all the good men out there?” Even in this post-feminist age of asserting independence from men and having both a career and a family, women still want their prince and these days, he can be really tough to find.

[…]

Bennett writes about how the culture has so badly confused males in what their role in life should be that they just never grow up — or man up for that matter. They have fallen behind in college where women now surpass men in getting their college degrees. These women are getting jobs in the workforce while the men are lingering in dead-end jobs — if they are working at all. While opportunity for women is a good thing, men should not take this as a cue to coast. And don’t even get me started on the maturity level of these Peter Pan-like boys. The statistic from Bennett’s book that perhaps struck me the most is that teenage boys, ages 12-to-17 years old, actually spend less time playing video games than 18-to-34-year-old men. I can understand the desire to play a video game here and there as a kid, but as an adult? Grow up. These men should be studying in college, getting a job, and contributing to society through the workforce and family. How in the world do they have time to play video games for hours? The answer is that they just don’t ever grow up.

“Contributing to society” — because it goes without saying that society deserves their contributions. Friends, let us now (and, if at all possible, with a straight face) invoke man’s solemn duty to defend the family — which any college professor can tell you is a crypto-fascist patriarchal Christian social construct, far inferior to the peaceful, free-loving Papua New Guineans; his, too, is a golden opportunity, the American Dream — minus a mere third or half (or so) of his income, to feed and house a feral underclass and train his replacements: twelve million illegal DREAMers and counting.

No wonder the prince is so badly confused.

But we’re still not getting to the heart of it. Forget college degrees, forget jobs — none of that makes a “prince” and you know it. The question, again: ‘Where Have The Good Men Gone?’ Kay Hymowitz has been wondering for some time (2011):

“We are sick of hooking up with guys,” writes the comedian Julie Klausner, author of a touchingly funny 2010 book, “I Don’t Care About Your Band: What I Learned from Indie Rockers, Trust Funders, Pornographers, Felons, Faux-Sensitive Hipsters and Other Guys I’ve Dated.”

Gee, that sure is a lot of men you “dated” in your youth, Ms. Klausner.

Julie Klausner (image)

What Ms. Klausner means by “guys” is males who are not boys or men but something in between. “Guys talk about ‘Star Wars’ like it’s not a movie made for people half their age; a guy’s idea of a perfect night is a hang around the PlayStation with his bandmates, or a trip to Vegas with his college friends… They are more like the kids we babysat than the dads who drove us home.” One female reviewer of Ms. Kausner’s book wrote, “I had to stop several times while reading and think: Wait, did I date this same guy?”

Bear in mind, these women, in their youth, did in fact “date” those men — and the cynic in me is not entirely convinced they aren’t still “dating” them. Ms. Klausner, after all, is a sprightly 35. Surely she’s got another three, four years of “hooking up” in her.

Single men have never been civilization’s most responsible actors; they continue to be more troubled and less successful than men who deliberately choose to become husbands and fathers. So we can be disgusted if some of them continue to live in rooms decorated with “Star Wars” posters and crushed beer cans and to treat women like disposable estrogen toys, but we shouldn’t be surprised.

Because modern girls clearly deserve better treatment than that. Feel your heart break for Ms. Klausner, so callously used and tossed aside: “When you cry about things not working out, you’re crying not only because a guy you slept with now doesn’t seem to care you’re alive, but also because you’re ashamed of yourself for crying.” Aww.

But thoroughly scurrilous (and curiously well-liked) commenters beg to differ:

If women really wanted good men who would be stable income providers and raise good families, they wouldn’t spend age 16–25 sleeping with perpetual manchildren. [25 recommendations] Men do not want to marry promiscuous women, period. And promiscuous women seem to be the American norm. [22 recommendations] There are lots of “good” men out there who are successful, hold down professional jobs, and would love to marry a decent woman. However, many women shun those men because they are “boring” and instead chase after the loser-types who are underemployed, are alcoholics or drug addicts, and often live at home. I find that women are incredibly picky throughout their 20s when they are their most attractive and have the greatest ability to find a great man. Unfortunately, a lot of women squander their 20s playing the field and foolishly dating men well below them in terms of status or looks, only to wake up in their mid-30s single and bitter about not being married. By the time they are in their mid-30s the women are far less desirable in terms of looks and fertility and they often have emotional baggage and bitter attitudes. I don’t think women realize just how unattractive a bitchy attitude is. A man who has his life in order and is successful and good-looking would almost have to be out of his mind to settle for a woman in her mid-30s for marriage when there are younger women available who are better looking, likely more fertile, generally have less emotional baggage, and are often much, much nicer. [21 recommendations]

Pay no attention, you empowered single ladies! The problem, as always, lies entirely with men. “Why won’t guys grow up?” Sandy Hingston complains (2012).

The women are irate. The women are talking about men, young men, the men they’d like to date and marry, and are they ever pissed. Here’s what they’re saying: “All they want is sex. They don’t care about relationships.” “They’re so lazy.” “All they do is play video games.” “They aren’t men. They’re boys.” The women are a little bewildered. They’re good girls. They followed the script: did well in high school, got into college, worked hard there, got out, got jobs, started looking around for someone special to share life with, and…

… Nothing. Note that not one of these things — job, diploma, good grades, hard work — no part of this script makes women more desirable to men. Older, yes. “Irate,” “bewildered” and “pissed,” yes. Bitter, yes. Used up, dried up, worn out — oh, but wait, I forgot: we’ve got that epidemic of maladaptive men to deal with.

In case you were wondering how men should behave:

[University of Pennsylvania education professor Shaun] Harper’s had a smart idea. There are young men out there, he says, who manage somehow to navigate the harrowing voyage through American culture and come out as “good guys” — men who drink responsibly, respect women, and behave in anti-sexist, anti-racist and anti-homophobic ways. […] He’s looking at how these “good men” develop and perform their masculinities in a culture where bad behavior is rewarded and admired. If he can identify what they share, he says, we can work to replicate it.

This is the first and only time Ms. Hingston sees fit to mention that we happen to be living in “a culture where bad behavior is rewarded and admired.” What could this mean? Hmmmmm… I apply my enormous brain to the conundrum. Surely not that we reward men who are openly “racist” and “homophobic” (whatever that means). No, I suspect this has something to do with “respecting women.” Let’s investigate!

‘Girls Give Advice to Their 20-Year-Old Selves’ (2012):

Stuart Brazell and her best friend created DirtyandThirty.com because they wanted a more edgy, “tell it like it is” resource for women. She joins host Jennifer Tapiero and special guest Ashley Hume on this episode of Planet Love Match Radio to discuss what dating was like in her 20s and what advice she would give herself. “Stop dating type A football jock meatheads!” Stuart says. “Don’t date the guys that get in the fights.” Ashley agrees, saying, “Bad boys are bad for a reason. When you’re looking at someone that you want to spend the rest of your life with, it has to be someone you can rely on.” “You sleep with the bad boy, you don’t marry him,” says Stuart.

Similar advice from Facebook executive and feminist icon Sheryl Sandberg (2013):

You know, I give advice to young women. I say “pick a partner.” […] If you are a female and your partner is likely to be male, this is something to really pay attention to. I say in the book, date the bad boys, date the crazy boys, but do not marry them. Marry the boys who are going to change half of the diapers.

“Get all the bad boy in you out,” MTV’s Girl Talk (2013) advises. “Have crazy sex with bad boys, get it out of your system, learn some new tricks, but marry the good guy.”

And what a lucky guy he’ll be.

In xoJane (2013), a feminist magazine, Daisy Barringer reviews nine “must-bang” types of men that girls are supposed to track down “before you get married.” (“Heaven forbid I don’t check them all off before someone decides to put a ring on it.”) Number one:

OK. This is a given. Every girl needs to hook up with a “Bad Boy.”

Whereas a “nice guy” merits only a “Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.”

I always got bored. Mature Daisy would love to meet one though.

Until then, she consoles herself with “a lot of ‘alone wine.’” Aww.

Daisy has convinced herself she likes it this way (image)

The all-time top-rated comment on ‘Ladies of Reddit, what tastes in men do you have that you’re not proud of?’ (2013), currently sitting at 131 points:

If there’s a man in a 10 mile radius with scruffy facial hair that is completely broke and selling the weed he just grew it’s likely I will find him and date him.

Not to mention these selections:

“I like arrogance. Not just confidence but that arrogant nature”

“Ugh. Arrogance is so attractive to me. I hate that I’m a sucker for the cocky guy who boldly rolls up on a group of women and just knows that he can charm the panties off every single one. I love that type. I just hate dating them”

“I still find myself attracted to a ‘cool guy’ over the nerdy guy. The guy who plays guitar and sports, and blah blah blah. It’s pretty ridiculous, considering I am a fucking adult now. Those things don’t mean anything. The nerdy guy is smart, and therefore has a good job, but for some reason that means nothing to me”

“When I was younger I used to be really attracted to the ‘bad boy’ type guys. In trouble a lot, drank a lot, generally rebellious… The guy you wouldn’t bring home to your mother. Then I grew up a bit and really dislike that type of person now”

“I always like the men that dont [sic] like me”

“Dark and brooding, boarderline [sic] evil”

“I like the serial killers”

Indeed, for some women, there are no limits on how bad a man’s behaviour can be. Fame helps, no doubt, if you’re a terrorist, mass murderer or psychopath, but garden-variety career criminals have no shortage of admirers, either — even in prison (2013):

“I would marry him because I love him and I see him having a really good future now,” said Young, whose sweetheart, Steve Mehlenbacher, is serving his fourth federal sentence after a total of 16 bank-heist convictions.

[…]

Shortly after posting his profile, he said he started to receive letters, including one from a woman in Nairobi, Kenya, who was looking for a pen pal. Many of the notes, he said, were from women hoping to see him at the prison for conjugal visits. “I already had women who were willing to do that,” Mehlenbacher said. “That’s not what I was looking for. I wanted to find a real relationship.”

Clinical psychologist Leon Seltzer investigates “why some women can be so attracted to, or hopelessly beguiled by, the most terrifying of human predators” (2012). Lesson one (which should be obvious): don’t ask women to explain it to you.

Since these mostly self-deceptive notions derive from these women’s conscious minds, we need to delve much deeper if we’re to grasp the subconscious motives driving such melodramatically aberrant behavior. […] Ogas and Gaddam find substantial evidence from Web searches, posts, and many 1,000s of romance novels that women demonstrate a strong erotic preference for dominant men. Or toward what’s now commonly referred to as alpha males — in the authors’ words, men who are “strong, confident, [and] swaggering.” Unfortunately, what these descriptors often imply is behavior sufficiently bearish, self-centered, and insensitive as to often cross the line into a physical, mental, and emotional abuse that can be downright brutal. Consciously, most women would like their men to be kind, empathic, understanding, and respectful. But there’s something in their native wiring that makes a great many of them susceptible to “bad boys.”

Now, could some of these choices women make have something to do with why men won’t “grow up” and settle down with the aforementioned “good girls”?

Apparently not, because Ms. Hingston’s article is over. Men are simply irrational now. It is a brute fact. They refuse to adapt — the brutes. Those poor, dumb, stupid men.

Kay Hymowitz returns, seeking answers in the dismal science (2013):

Their high school grades and college attendance rates have remained stalled for decades. Among poor and working-class boys, the chances of climbing out of the low-end labor market — and of becoming reliable husbands and fathers — are looking worse and worse. Economists have scratched their heads. “The greatest, most astonishing fact that I am aware of in social science right now is that women have been able to hear the labor market screaming out ‘You need more education’ and have been able to respond to that, and men have not,” MIT’s Michael Greenstone told the New York Times. If boys were as rational as their sisters, he implied, they would be staying in school, getting degrees, and going on to buff their Florsheim shoes on weekdays at 7:30 AM. Instead, the rational sex, the proto-homo economicus, is shrugging off school and resigning itself to a life of shelf stocking. Why would that be? This spring, another MIT economist, David Autor, and coauthor Melanie Wasserman, proposed an answer. The reason for boys’ dismal school performance, they argued, was the growing number of fatherless homes. Boys and young men weren’t behaving rationally, the theory suggested, because their family background left them without the necessary attitudes and skills to adapt to changing social and economic conditions.

Those poor, dumb, irrational, maladaptive, dumb men. Now girls have all the college.

Are men being irrational? Are they just incapable of adapting to the modern world? “Not if you distinguish biology from economics,” says James Taranto (2013).

Except perhaps in very conservative communities, men with sufficient social skills can find sex and companionship without need of a matrimonial commitment (and for those who lack social skills, a willingness to marry is unlikely to provide much compensation). The culture’s unrelenting message — repeated in Hymowitz’s article — is that women are doing fine on their own. If a woman doesn’t need a man, there’s little reason for him to devote his life to her service. Further, in the age of no-fault divorce, “reliable husbands and fathers” not infrequently find themselves impoverished by child support and restricted by court order from spending time with their children.

Well, hoo-ray for sufficient social skills. The rest we already knew:

As for education, the story of Joshua Strange ought to be enough to give any sensible young man second thoughts about enrolling in college. And work? Not all jobs, including those that require a college degree, are as rewarding as writing for an intellectual magazine (or, we hasten to add, a newspaper). Men traditionally sought to “better themselves” not because working in an office or on an assembly line was itself a source of delight, but because being a workingman enabled them to earn respect and made possible the joys of domestic life. Today, the idea of commanding respect for an honest day’s work seems quaint, and if you don’t believe us, try “resigning” yourself to “a life of shelf stocking” and see where that gets you. In a world of female independence and limitless options, traditional family life is both less attractive and more elusive — for men and women alike — than it used to be. Boys and young men are no less rational, or capable of adapting to incentives, than girls and young women are. They are, in fact, adapting very well to the incentives for female power and independence — which inevitably also serve as disincentives to male reliability and self-sacrifice.

Adaptive indeed — and selective pressures abound. Psychologist Helen Smith lists ‘8 Reasons Straight Men Don’t Want to Get Married’ (2013):

8. Single life is better than ever. While the value of marriage to men has declined, the quality of single life has improved. Single men were once looked on with suspicion, passed over for promotion for important jobs, which usually valued “stable family men,” and often subjected to social opprobrium. It was hard to have a love life that wasn’t aimed at marriage, and premarital sex was risky and frowned upon. Now, no one looks askance at the single lifestyle, dating is easy, and employers probably prefer employees with no conflicting family responsibilities. Plus, video games, cable TV, and the Internet provide entertainment that didn’t used to be available. Is this good for society? Probably not, as falling birth rates and increasing single-motherhood demonstrate. But people respond to incentives. If you want more men to marry, it needs to be a more attractive proposition.

“Dating is easy,” so let’s give it up for sufficient social skills!

Now, Suzanne Venker has been saying this for years (2012):

As the author of three books on the American family and its intersection with pop culture, I’ve spent thirteen years examining social agendas as they pertain to sex, parenting, and gender roles. During this time, I’ve spoken with hundreds, if not thousands, of men and women. And in doing so, I’ve accidentally stumbled upon a subculture of men who’ve told me, in no uncertain terms, that they’re never getting married. When I ask them why, the answer is always the same. Women aren’t women anymore.

[…]

Contrary to what feminists like Hanna Rosin, author of The End of Men, say, the so-called rise of women has not threatened men. It has pissed them off. It has also undermined their ability to become self-sufficient in the hopes of someday supporting a family. Men want to love women, not compete with them. They want to provide for and protect their families — it’s in their DNA. But modern women won’t let them. It’s all so unfortunate — for women, not men. Feminism serves men very well: they can have sex at hello and even live with their girlfriends with no responsibilities whatsoever.

“Sex at hello.” A paradise for men! All men.

Even feminists are on board with that bit of analysis. Cristina Page, for instance, author of How the Pro-Choice Movement Saved America, doesn’t believe in any disincentives. She thinks men are doing better than ever — and they owe it all to feminism, “the best thing that ever happened to men” (2013). Indeed, “the research on men suggest [sic] their lives have improved immeasurably as a result” of it. Why?

One of the most transformative freedoms we can thank women for is sex without unwanted consequences. The modern man enjoys an active sex life with multiple partners before marriage and after. Marriage is not determined by unintended pregnancy or the rush to have sex as it most often was in the ’50s. Men embark on a much more leisurely path to marriage; settling in with a more thoughtfully chosen partner much later in life as a result of the campaigns women have waged and won. Sex in marriage is also more fun, fulfilling and less fraught with life-altering risks. It’s also worth mentioning that family planning is a cornerstone of the critical work of stabilizing nations in the developing world. So, thank you to women for coming up with a solution for that, too.

I think my brain just shut down from sheer feminist stupidity. Power through!

To limit the scope of our discussion, we’ll need to set aside such fascinating notions as these: that “sex in marriage” has become “more fun” because of feminism; that the “unwanted consequences” of sexual reproduction include reproduction, but not, e.g., “crying because a guy you slept with now doesn’t seem to care” blah blah (Klausner); that women invented “family planning”; that “family planning” is “stabilizing” the Third World; and that the Third World is “developing” — into something other than a colony of China, on anything short of an evolutionary timescale (Issue 12).

Cristina Page (image)

And that’s just one paragraph. Elsewhere Ms. Page declares that “success, equality, ambition and independence are the qualities men find most attractive in women these days” — as opposed to, say, physical attractiveness, physical attractiveness, youth, youngness, being young, not being old, being physically attractive, attractiveness-comma-physical, and — oh, I don’t know, maybe youth and physical attractiveness?

Set it aside! Consider, if you will, the notion that “the modern man,” in general, “enjoys an active sex life with multiple partners” before his casual stroll towards marital bliss (where, of course, everything only gets more “fun” and “fulfilling”).

A college case study, courtesy of the New York Times (2010):

After midnight on a rainy night last week in Chapel Hill, N.C., a large group of sorority women at the University of North Carolina squeezed into the corner booth of a gritty basement bar. Bathed in a neon glow, they splashed beer from pitchers, traded jokes and belted out lyrics to a Taylor Swift heartache anthem thundering overhead. As a night out, it had everything — except guys. “This is so typical, like all nights, 10 out of 10,” said Kate Andrew, a senior from Albemarle, N.C. The experience has grown tiresome: they slip on tight-fitting tops, hair sculpted, makeup just so, all for the benefit of one another, Ms. Andrew said, “because there are no guys.”

No guys! Not one! Not a single guy anywhere on campus. Well… not exactly:

Jayne Dallas, a senior studying advertising who was seated across the table, grumbled that the population of male undergraduates was even smaller when you looked at it as a dating pool. “Out of that 40 percent, there are maybe 20 percent that we would consider, and out of those 20, 10 have girlfriends, so all the girls are fighting over that other 10 percent,” she said.

Five girls for each guy. Nice to have those top-tier “social skills” — because otherwise you’re getting no girls at all.

Needless to say, this puts guys in a position to play the field, and tends to mean that even the ones willing to make a commitment come with storied romantic histories. Rachel Sasser, a senior history major at the table, said that before she and her boyfriend started dating, he had “hooked up with a least five of my friends in my sorority — that I know of.”

The women are a little bewildered. They’re good girls. They followed the script…

“A lot of my friends will meet someone and go home for the night and just hope for the best the next morning,” Ms. Lynch said. “They’ll text them and say: ‘I had a great time. Want to hang out next week?’ And they don’t respond.” Even worse, “Girls feel pressured to do more than they’re comfortable with, to lock it down,” Ms. Lynch said. As for a man’s cheating, “that’s a thing that girls let slide, because you have to,” said Emily Kennard, a junior at North Carolina. “If you don’t let it slide, you don’t have a boyfriend.”

A culture where bad behavior is rewarded and admired…

Indeed, there are a fair number of Mr. Lonelyhearts on campus. “Even though there’s this huge imbalance between the sexes, it still doesn’t change the fact of guys sitting around, bemoaning their single status,” said Patrick Hooper, a Georgia senior. “It’s the same as high school, but the women are even more enchanting and beautiful.”

Want to know how that feels? Ask Michael:

It hurt me to watch these girls go out of their way to pursue and spread their legs for complete losers. COMPLETE LOSERS. I’m talking: Hi I work in a carnival part time, I’m covered in tattoos, I have no job, I failed my minimum wage drug test and I’m in a band. These guys were losers. Some did not even go to the college! They would hop a bus stay with friends and get laid THAT NIGHT.

[…]

Now at 32 and successful these women are hitting me. In my mind these are the same women who rejected me. I’m not interested.

Do read the whole thing! This, too, by a self-described former “incel” (involuntarily celibate):

Some may say this was one long pitiful rant. Meh… you could be right. But i feel it needed to be told, this tale of misery to triumph. As i see it, my part in this tale is over, my chapter is done. I’m too old to do anything about it now, you can’t go back. All i can do is keep my promise to not expend my valued time, energy or resources propping up a happy, had her fun with alpha’s and now settle with beta bux little old moi. Nope. I’m going lone wolf alpha and enjoying the rest of my life on my terms as i see fit. This isn’t about me anymore. It’s about the next ‘me’ who’s in highschool or college right now, who’s sitting in his room alone at night wondering why some girl he really likes and treats well is off fucking some dude she just met at the bar. Who’s being ignored because of rampant hypergamy, inflated ego’s and facebook attention whores who vastly overrate their sex rank and will be lining up to get slaughtered by PUA’s and frat boys, only to go to complain to that poor, introverted, incel beta LJBF in training that all men are assholes and how if only she could find someone like him.

[…]

So now you know where my cynicism and rage comes from. Now you know why it’s not a healthy idea for me to ‘man up and marry a slut.’ Now you know why i hate feminism and its evil ideology. Now you know why i view slutty behavior as i do. Now you know why i intrinsically never believe what women say at face value, i only follow what they do. Now you know why feminists call me a woman hater and a misogynist. The funny thing is i practiced feminism to the letter, and by treating women as human beings and respecting them as prescribed. I loved women and cared for women. I did all those nice things not simply to get into their pants, but because i was a decent human being, a human male, and someone who *wanted* to get into a loving relationship with a woman. And by loving women the way feminism asked, i was nearly destroyed for it.

I wonder what sort of incentives we’re creating here…

Meanwhile, relationship “expert” Dear Wendy offers advice to a broken-hearted 22-year-old nice guy who just lost his good girl to the bad boys of college (2013):

You are right not to go to Six Flags with your ex and her family. You are right to give her space. And though I wish I could tell you that time and absence will make her heart grow fonder, the truth is it probably won’t. Because the thing with 20-year-old girls is that 80% of the time, they don’t go for the guy who takes a bus six hours so they don’t have to drive home alone and they don’t go for the guy who sends them rice pilaf in the mail or the guy whom their moms are crazy about. They go for the guys who ignore them and cheat on them and break their hearts. Not always, of course, but a lot of the time. And for a while, it seems like no one is happy because guys like you are pining away for girls like your ex and those kinds of girls are pining away for someone else and everyone is sad and a little lonely and wishing they could just love the people who already love them back. The good news is that eventually the 20-year-old girls turn into 25-, 30-, 35-year-old women and they’re tired of longing for the guys who don’t treat them well. And they long for the kind of guy who will go on a family vacation with them and help them move and bring them their favorite food. And you’re going to be in luck when that happens because you’re going to have your pick of the litter. In about 5 years or so, the kind of girl you like is going to be looking for someone exactly like YOU. And then it’s all just going to be a matter of timing to find the right match. I know that doesn’t help you much now. It doesn’t do much to soothe your broken heart and make you feel less alone. And the only thing I can say to that is that it WILL get better. As long as you remain the sweet, thoughtful guy you are — the kind of guy moms love and girls want as their “friend,” it won’t be too long before they’re going to want so much more than that. And who knows, maybe you’ll get lucky and you’ll find the rare breed of young woman who has no interest in dumb games and already understands the value of a guy who wants nothing more than to be a great boyfriend.

Yes, a lot of girls do change their minds… eventually. Take Laura Fraser (2013):

I recently came across a photo of a sexy Brazilian man I had an affair with a few years ago. (OK, I Googled him.) […] We spent a passionate week together, and when I left town, I thought I was leaving behind a new long-distance boyfriend — one who, it turned out, didn’t like to call or e-mail… ever. I thought our fling was the start of a relationship; he thought it was a fling, period. […] Disappointing, but it fit my usual pattern. […] Outwardly, I told myself I was having fun and it was just a matter of time before someone wanted to settle down; inside, I started to worry that I wasn’t lovable or exciting enough. Then I met Peter — or, rather, re-met him. I had known Peter vaguely in college [my emphasis]. He’d recently emerged from a divorce and onto a dating site where I’d been lurking. I passed over his profile, which depicted an earnest guy with bright blue-gray eyes wearing an old Guatemalan sweater. But he recognized me, and we started chatting. There were no witty phrases in his e-mails, no sense that he was teetering on that razor’s edge between genius and madness. Unconvinced of his romantic potential, I invited him over for soup, less a date than a get-together with an old friend. From the moment he walked in, I felt like he’d been sitting in my living room forever. I didn’t feel compelled to impress him; he seemed to genuinely like my apartment, my books, my soup… and me. We laughed easily and kissed each other good night. Surprisingly, given how kind he was, I didn’t want to stop kissing him. […]

Truly shocking — “given how kind he was.”

On our second date, we had a quiet dinner at a bistro. On our third, he told me he was only interested in a committed relationship. I’d never heard a man say such a thing. But even though it was what I’d always said I wanted, the word monogamy sounded a lot like monotonous.

[…]

One evening, after one too many drinks, some demon took over my brain and I confessed that I thought he was too boring for me. […] When I considered it, most of the charismatic men I’d dated were actually jerks or bad boys, hardly relationship material. They’d subtly reject me but keep me around for fun, playing games where I always ended up the loser. […] The problem wasn’t that Peter was boring. It was that I was scared to be in a real relationship. Who cared if he didn’t speak three languages? Peter made me deeply happy, not constantly anxious that I wasn’t good enough. His solidity was exactly why, I realized, I loved him so much.

Feel that passion.

The next day, too scared to call, I texted Peter that I loved him, too. He came over and crowed about it, then insisted I tell him out loud. Now I say it all the time. And the more he feels secure, the more he’s game for new adventures: going to Patagonia and Mexico, hosting parties, learning to ski. These days, I feel silly for not realizing a long time ago what I needed: someone I could trust with my heart. And that beats a sexy Brazilian any day.

Feel that love. Meanwhile, she’s Googling the Brazilian.

Congratulations, Pete! All this is finally, finally yours (image)

Canadian blogger Free Northerner demurs, and makes about a hundred times as much sense as Dear Wendy and all the other “experts” put together (2013):

This has been said a thousand times around these parts, but I’m pointing it out again: If you are decent guy, most everybody expects you to get shit on romantically and just take the lumps for a decade, then get the used-up, washed-out, emotionally-wrecked left-overs of the assholes’ pillaging. Wendy just dismisses this, like it’s just the way it is. There’s no condemnation of the attitude, no real thought as to how thoroughly poisonous this is. Does nobody else think there’s something disastrously wrong with this attitude? Does nobody realize what a destructive message this sends to young men? Does anybody even care? How can we just casually accept that anti-social assholes get the prize, while the decent, honest builders and maintainers of civilization get the dregs, if they’re lucky? This is how civilization dies, tiny cut, by tiny cut.

[…]

If you learn nothing else of economics, of politics, of sociology, of psychology but this one fact, you have more understanding than most of the fools with doctorates and fancy titles. If you never get anything else from this blog, remember that phrase: You get what you incentivize. If you incentivize douchebaggery, you get douches. If you incentivize decency, you get decency. If being a decent fellow gets you a broken heart and being a douche gets you blown by young co-eds, any rational man is going to be douche. So, we have more douches who fail to do anything useful for civilization because who cares? when being an ass is enough to get you sex. We have fewer decent guys willing to pick up the burden of civilization because all it gets you is heartache and loneliness. Thus, civilization dies as parasitism becomes the norm.

Allow me to introduce one Tracy Clark-Flory, 24 years old and a staunch defender of female empowerment through sex with strangers (2008):

I’m a 24-year-old member of the hookup generation — I’ve had roughly three times as many hookups as relationships — and, like innumerable 20-somethings before me, I’ve found that casual sex can be healthy and normal and lead to better adult relationships. […] That’s not to say I had a host of one-night stands — I’ve never had a one-night stand, only several-nights stands. But I went through a dressing room phase of trying on different men to see how they fit. […] I can easily and embarrassingly categorize these men: Lonely Lawyer, Sociopathic Spaniard, Testosterone-Poisoned Pilot and Bellicose Bartender, for starters. […] As far as I can tell, these choices don’t form a pattern, other than a refusal to really choose. I was like a college freshman filling out the Career Center’s job placement questionnaire, making an enthusiastic check mark next to every box; except, in my case, I was checking off men.

No pattern at all — just like Julie Klausner’s indie rockers, trust funders, pornographers, and felons. Hoo-ray for “sufficient social skills.” Doesn’t that just make you want to get out there and start “contributing to society”?

Tracy Clark-Flory, once upon a time (image)

Meet Tracy Clark-Flory, age 26, not quite as staunch a defender of casual sex (2010):

As I see it, young women have fully proved that we can have one-night stands, hear us roar — and maybe we’re beginning to also allow ourselves more nuanced feelings about our hookups. Like Klausner and Anderson, we can now acknowledge regret over a one-night stand, without being considered, or seeing ourselves as, forever ruined women; if there’s been a recent change in my generation’s relationship to casual sex, I suspect it’s that we’re relaxing our defensive posturing.

We met Julie Klausner already, of course. The aging Hephzibah Anderson, “tired of dating disasters,” quit sex for one year after wasting all her best years on “casual hook-ups” — “sex without love” (2009). Self-imposed celibacy supposedly drew her to a new type of man, with “unglamorous traits like loyalty and kindness.” (She forgot solidity.)

Anyway. Meet Tracy Clark-Flory, age 27, confirmed casual sex skeptic (2011):

When you talk to people who have been there and done that — and even those who are continuing to do that — the response is overwhelmingly negative. As my own former “friend with benefits” put it to me, “I’ve been in so many of these situations and, basically, they work until they don’t.” For six months, this guy and I would hang out and sleep together — euphemistically and literally — roughly once a week. […] I wanted company, warmth and no danger of attachment. The guy openly refers to himself as “a slut” and has the words “forgive me” tattooed on his arm — there was no ambiguity here. Except that in reality there was. I actually liked him, quite a bit, as a human being. We weren’t dating, but then he would invite me out for an evening that sounded a whole lot like a date, and sometimes he would pay. We would talk on the phone for hours. With my head resting on his chest, he would ask me, “We like each other, we have fun, why aren’t we dating?” as though it were actually something he was considering. […] At some point I realized that, despite my insistence otherwise, I actually wanted those sorts of intimacies, only with an actual commitment.

We can gain some insight into Ms. Clark-Flory’s mindset by studying her one-night stand with a “porn star” (that is, a prostitute) she picked up in a bar (2012):

I was at a neighborhood bar when in walked a man that I’d slept with before — virtually speaking. We had traded intimacies without ever having met. I grabbed my friend’s arm and whispered, “My favorite male porn star just walked in the door.” She looked at me dumbfounded: “You have a favorite male porn star?” […] Seeing him in person, there was one thought on my mind: I need to sleep with him.

Well, technically there were other thoughts, like: Before I sleep with him, I will tell my friend that he is a porn star and I am going to sleep with him. (This is important.)

I asked my friend to tell him that I liked him and then ran and hid at the bar. […] As we walked to my apartment, there was a voice in my head playing on repeat, begging: What the hell are you doing? It isn’t that I didn’t want to sleep with him, it’s just the sex-shame came rushing in: Once I do this, won’t I forever be a girl who’s slept with a porn star — ruined, tainted, stained? What would my mom think?

Fortunately, feminism trained her to ignore those instincts (patriarchal mind-control, etc., etc.). Take, for example, “sex-positive feminist” Tabitha Berry (2010):

It ought to be somewhat evident that if women are sexual beings, they cannot be passive objects or possessions. And it ought to follow that if women are not simple trophies to be won, they cannot depreciate in value — no matter how many strangers they have sex with. The “value” of a being is not similar to that of a car. It does not go down with age or use.

Plus, Ms. Clark-Flory was actually raised “by a pair of pot-smoking hippies who were the opposite of the parental stereotype: They jumped at any opportunity to talk about sex — always as the most loving, spiritual act imaginable.” This allows Ms. Clark-Flory to overcome her momentary doubts and experience a truly “loving, spiritual act” — maybe even a “loving, spiritual act” in the ass (surprisingly, she doesn’t tell us):

“Mmm,” I lied. It wasn’t unpleasant, but it was all happening too fast to be felt; he was moving at the speed of smut.

[…]

It’s exactly what I had breathlessly watched him do many times before, but this time it seemed mechanical and theatrical. Instead of being entertained, I was doing the entertaining, and I suspect he was too — but for whom, exactly? We were the only audience. All of which is to say: It was like nearly every casual hookup I’ve ever had. Here were two strangers connected only by their fantasies of who the other was.

Healthy and normal!

Despite the emptiness of it, I felt a sense of accomplishment over my conquest. I mean, I slept with my favorite male porn star! But when I texted my roommate with the breaking news, she wrote back, “Is this supposed to be a good thing?” […] What had originally felt empowering — the unabashed pursuit of something I strongly desired — began to feel shameful. I started wondering, “What kind of man will want to be with a woman who’s slept with a male porn star?”

Evidently, what Ms. Clark-Flory desired was a story to tell her friends the next day. The idea of casual sex with her favourite prostitute “originally felt empowering” because she expected to get praise and respect from her social group; in other words, she was conforming to what she believed were social norms or expectations for women’s sexual behaviour. When she realized her mistake — that her culture hasn’t degenerated quite as far as she thought — she felt shame. That’s when she decided to tell the whole world about it, for reasons best left to shame expert The Last Psychiatrist (2012):

There are people who like doing dangerous sexual stuff, and people who don’t, and those who don’t are divided into those who never tell anyone and those who do tell someone. I already knew Amy was in the latter category because she was telling the story on the radio, and people usually tell stories about things they are ashamed of for one reason: absolution.

“Not too long” after her “shameful” brush with “mechanical emptiness,” Ms. Clark-Flory, “as it happens,” in a truly wacky coincidence, finds herself in a relationship. Since these mostly self-deceptive notions derive from these women’s conscious minds…

Now 28, having “spent her twenties having lots of good sex,” Ms. Clark-Flory admits she “faked her way through nearly every climax” (2012). Aww.

“Who needs casual sex!” Yes, it’s Tracy Clark-Flory yet again, a little longer in the tooth but no less comically short on self-awareness, “shocked to find that traditional courtship is pretty great” (2012):

As I wrote four years ago in my essay “In defense of casual sex” [above] hookups can be a legitimate way of getting to know other people, as well as ourselves. And even when they aren’t, who cares: Women are just as entitled to meaningless flings as men. But, yes, as I’ve gotten older, casual sex has lost some of the luster of freedom. It isn’t that I’ve forsaken the delights of no-strings flings, but rather that I’ve tired of hookup culture’s dictatorial reign over modern courtship. It doesn’t feel so free when it doesn’t feel like an intentional choice. This isn’t about blaming men. […] I’ve often had no one but myself to blame — especially when going after boys literally wearing warning signs in the form of tattoos reading things like, “I am what I am” or “forgive me.”

[…]

I’m an outspoken defender of casual sexual culture, but there are times — like when encountering more traditional courtship — that it seems less about a pursuit of pleasure than an avoidance of actual intimacy.

[…]

It took me a while to realize that I wasn’t always getting what I wanted from hookups.

[…]

I’m conflicted about all this. I don’t believe that one’s sexuality can be broken like fine china, but I do think it’s special. I don’t believe that you should have to withhold sex in order to get what you want from a partner, but sometimes you really do get what you want when you wait, sometimes for entirely unexpected reasons. I don’t think sex on the first date dooms a relationship, and yet there’s a specialness in waiting until you’re comfortable enough with someone to get naked together while totally sober. I would never advocate a return to traditional gender roles, but courtship, actual effort, is refreshing.

This lucky flower-bearer got to pay for five sex-free dates with Ms. Clark-Flory in one week. Courtship is so rewarding. Remember guys, “drink responsibly,” “respect women” and send some “rice pilaf in the mail,” and some day all this can be yours:

Tracy Clark-Flory is ready to settle — I mean, settle down (image)

Meet Tracy Clark-Flory one last time, age 29, finally “settling down” (2013):

I was scared of intimacy and commitment until I wasn’t. It’s like they tell high school graduates: Take a year off and travel the world — gain some real-world wisdom before you settle on a major or a career. I got many colorful stamps in my man-passport. I spent time with people from all walks of life — from Benz-driving lawyers to out-of-work artists. There were pilots and writers and musicians (oh my!). I lived a million different lives with these men. Far from becoming addicted to novelty, I tired of it. I exhausted my curiosity. There are no dreamy “what ifs” left. All those drawn-out years of casual entanglements made it possible to settle down without feeling like I’m settling. I know exactly what I’m missing, and I don’t miss it at all.

Oh, it was a learning experience — and you’re finished learning. You could, of course, at 29, keep hooking up with the same guys forever, but you’re choosing not to. I see.

Contrary to the many arguments made about casual-sex culture teaching young people to pick up and run at the first sign of trouble in a relationship, my hookup years made me more accepting of my fiancé’s imperfections.

Feel that heat.

I first met him around the same time that I wrote that first hookup essay. I wasn’t anywhere near ready for him — and vice versa. Even if I could, I wouldn’t in a million years go back and shake my 23-year-old self and tell her that she’d already met her future fiancé. That would be to discount all of the experiences that I’ve had since. That would be to assume that I would be the same person — and the same partner — without those experiences, that I would have loved him the same.

Feel that warmth.

None of this is to say that I had everything right when I first took on the cause of casual sex in my early 20s — far from it. I wasn’t capable of admitting at the time my dissatisfactions and heartbreaks. I didn’t see the many ways that I would eventually find the casual sex norm limiting. (But none of those very legitimate concerns about hookup culture were communicated with nuance or honesty by its antagonists.)

Oh, shut your pie hole, you worn-out hag.

My engagement doesn’t prove that my hooking up was “right” or “good” — I don’t believe that getting hitched is the height of female achievement toward which all life activities should be geared — but it’s a reminder that the hookup hand-wringers are wrong, and not to be trusted.

“So, in a nutshell,” notes our unfeminist friend Free Northerner (2013):

Tracy Clark-Flory is the stereotypical, nay, archetypical, modern woman. She fucks uncountable alphas, ignoring the beta who likes her, throughout her years of youth and prettiness. She realizes how empty it all is, but only once the wall approaches and the good times are coming to an end, so she uses the last of her fading feminine charms to husband-up the barely tolerable beta.

And then of course there’s the infamous Roissy, characteristically blunt (2013):

It’s always those post-peak nubility women with slutty pasts who “require effort.” Sorry. If you want “effort,” you have to be worth it. Effort, like respect, must be earned. And a former “alpha fux, beta bux” party girl on the downslope of her beauty career nursing regrets about having given it away for free to DJs when she was younger, hotter, tighter is not a prize that many men with options will put much effort into wooing.

My condolences to the future Mr. Clark-Flory.

But who are these men? “Free Northerner,” “Roissy in DC” — scoundrels, no doubt, and very likely rogues. Ladies, stay back! You may not be able to control your swooning.

The secret’s out: there are these men, I kid you not, loose in the world, spreading their ideas — ideas, I hasten to add, in no way approved for public consumption by the Ministry of Truth or the Department of Information Sanitization! Whatever you do, don’t take this dangerous, sexist, doubleplusungood red pill (2013):

Those who “swallow the pill” maintain that it’s men, not women, who have been socially disenfranchised. Feminism is considered a damaging ideology and Red Pillers are quick to cite examples that bolster their points, some going so far as to argue that society is outright anti-male. Red Pill followers have their own politics, language, and culture. And they’re growing: Eight months ago, Red Pill had only 100 followers. Today, it has more than 15,000.

Now more than 40,000…

The Red Pill is a collection of ideas encompassed by what its subscribers refer to as the “manosphere,” a number of loosely-associated blogs that focus on masculinity and personal philosophy for men. At the surface level there’s nothing terribly contentious about this, but if you click around one or two layers deeper, you’ll find plenty of examples why chatter from this gallery regularly turns heads.

Whew. Okay. Whew. I am prepared to be horrified. Hit me.

Like this: “You are hating women because you have the wrong expectations for them. Don’t hate someone for something they CANNOT be. Women are, by nature, manipulative, attention-seeking, inconsistent, emotional, and hypergamous. Accept this truth. Once you do, you can game women for what they are… not what you want them to be.”

I WAS NOT PREPARED

But — but — that’s something not positive! About women! You can’t — you’re not allowed — I just — I can’t even… The mind recoils in horror!

It needs to be clear that there’s a spectrum to Red Pill attitude, as there is with any ideology. Some members seem genuinely interested in it as a way to get a leg up socially, to break out of their proverbial shells. But on the other (much louder) end are members who come off as fundamentalist, those more likely to hold ideas about sex, politics, and society that would make a feminist cringe.

You see? You see what you’ve done, you with your — red pill? You’ve hurt a girl’s feelings, and that will not stand! Don’t you know that girls are equal now?

This post lays out a point-by-point explanation of why Red Pill exists. Many men “have trouble finding physical and emotional intimacy” and are given “terrible advice” as they try to remedy the situation. Red Pillers don’t want to isolate themselves from women per se, they want to “understand [them], have sex, and understand why ‘game’ works in our society and discuss its ramifications.”

They’re talking, these “Red Pillers,” speaking quite freely, about — oh, whatever pops into their heads! Unlicensed advice, unofficial opinions, roaming wild, without a single academic department or any other kind of regulatory agency in sight. Would it kill them, really, to run it by a feminist professor first? Oh, well, apparently you don’t need a master’s degree in critical gender theory to understand men and women anymore. I guess even a non-Marxist should be allowed to talk about human nature!

Hate-facts? Sure, why not, just throw them in — as if politically incorrect reality could ever trump social justice! What a sad, strange world we live in.

I will now take a short break, because the constant sarcasm is warping my brain.

Meanwhile, feminists are in crisis mode over this awful, awful pill (2014):

So my brother just went through a really nasty divorce and recently I have seen him post a few links on Facebook to ‘Return of Kings.’ I don’t know if he is aware of what the red pill is or if he just had the misfortune of stumbling upon that festering shithole filled with the dregs of society.

Should we expose them for the first-degree thought-criminals they are (2013)?

The community that characterize [sic] this misogyny call [sic] themselves [sic] the Manosphere, an interlocking network of blogs for “men’s rights” activists (MRAs), pickup artists (PUA) and some online gamers. Unlike the mainstream conservative conceptions of women, the views espoused by the manosphere harkens [sic] back to what can only be described as a proto-fascist [sic], and surprisingly, is becoming more popular on the internet.

[…]

This in a sense has always been the refuge of hate groups, to keep their mode of operation secret, even if this now means making their beliefs a semi-secret as well. Thus, the best [sic] we have to confront these kinds of attitudes is to make them known to the public.

(Oh please sir, don’t popularize us! Anything but that!)

Or should we simply ban them from the Internet (2013)?

A man name [sic] Ken Hoinsky recently launched a Kickstarter campaign to raise $2,000 to publish Above The Game: A Guide To Getting Awesome With Women, a collection of essays on the “art” of the “pickup” he’d written on forums like Reddit. His pitch is a fairly standard zero-to-hero story with a hefty dose of resentment. “I grew up in a small suburb. I sucked at sports and spent a lot of time playing video games and messing around on my computer,” Hoinsky writes in his proposal. “I was always good at making connections with others, but I was riding purely on instinct. Always the nice guy, my first three girlfriends cheated and dumped me for the other guy. Ultimately I ended up getting pretty good with women, finding love, and living life.”

[…]

They include such charming suggestions as: “Decide that you’re going to sit in a position where you can rub her leg and back. Physically pick her up and sit her on your lap. Don’t ask for permission. Be dominant. Force her to rebuff your advances.” […] Or, as Malone [some blogger] put it in a call to report the project to Kickstarter in the remaining hours before the deadline closed, “This guy is no longer just being weird and creepy on the internet… I am offended as someone who believes in the platform, and more importantly I am offended as someone who believes women shouldn’t be treated this way, and that people who say otherwise CERTAINLY should not profit off saying they should.” So what could Kickstarter have done? The crowdfunding site might have been able to remove Hoinsky’s proposal on the grounds that it fell under the category of “offensive material (hate speech, etc.); pornographic material; or projects endorsing or opposing a political candidate.”

Hate speech! After all, nice guys know better than to be sexually aggressive (2013):

Together with the casual misogyny of the seduction community — women are regularly referred to as “targets,” “HBs” (hot babes), and “warpigs” (physically unattractive women) — the most disturbing thing I encountered was the idea that when a woman says no it doesn’t really mean “no” at all, but rather “not yet.” Assuming one has executed a successful “seduction” and persuaded a woman that your lodgings are the best place to carry on getting to know each another, the next step according to “the game” is to outflank a woman’s “anti-slut defence” — a socially conditioned response to the fact that society holds promiscuous women in low esteem — and take her to bed.

The horror! Meanwhile, in the red pill world (2012):

I went on a first date with a girl who likes to get fake raped. Needs to get fake raped. It came up early, as these things often don’t — I forget what we were even talking about beforehand but she came out with how she had to dump a guy because he was too much of a pussy to choke her. She was saying that it’s a symptom of the decline of manliness basically — men are too pussified to hold a girl down and smack her around, and that’s what women really want. Her, anyway. To get choked once in a while and held down and fucked even if they say no. It felt like a let’s-get-this-out-of-the-way-early thing. And it kind of felt like a don’t-stop-fucking-me-when-I-say-no-later kind of thing.

Well… some girls are just crazy like that. I mean, a nice, normal girl would never fall for a Red Piller! She can tell right away there’s something wrong with him (2014):

So I found TRP a few months ago or so and started to see RP behavior in my ex bf who I’m still talking to. […] Anyways, I’ve talked to him about TRP and TBP stuff lately and I HATE that he does the kind of shit they advocate. The thing is though, he can be the sweetest guy ever, and when he is, I do everything for him… make dinner, clean his house, little sex kitten, all of it. It’s stupid to me that Terpers think this kind of behavior gets them anywhere, cuz when Shawn does it, we just end up fighting. He always manages to convince me later though he’s sorry, etc, etc. Has anyone else start to see TRP behavior in a SO or someone they’re dating? How do you deal with it?

I imagine they deal with it in a similar way: complain a lot to their friends, then head over to “make dinner, clean his house, little sex kitten” — you know, “all of it”?

Now, there are some nice guys left in the world. Don’t worry: they’re learning (2014).

It bothers me that this stuff actually works. I don’t mean to be obnoxious about this but it disturbs me, on a fundamental level, that women respond to a brash, insulting type of man. I have gone out two weekends now with this approach, once with a woman that perceived as “easy” and the other with a distinguished career woman (a formerly idealized type) who I viewed as “out of my league” and I have, in both instances, experienced “success.” (Blowjob in the first instance and a phone number in the other.) Bear in mind that I am still very new. Yet… This bothers me dudes. I’m happy that (by pretending not to give a shit about women) said women actually give a shit about me but it is still hard to comprehend.

Well, you know what they say:

He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man.

Life, as ever, finds a way. Men, it seems, are adapting after all — just not the way feminists want them to. So how about women? How are they doing? Adapting? Competing? Evolving? Or just whining a lot about how awful men are?

“I’ve tired of hookup culture’s dictatorial reign over modern courtship,” wrote the aging, sagging Tracy Clark-Flory. “It doesn’t feel so free when it doesn’t feel like an intentional choice.” Aww — hey, wait a minute, that’s crazy talk! Remember, everyone, feminism (according to feminists, who couldn’t possibly be lying or biased) is all about choices — which is why we need to socially condition all women to be as promiscuous as possible, and socially condition all men not to think any less of them for it.

Jaclyn Friedman, a self-proclaimed “slut,” would like you to know that although “sluthood” is technically a “choice,” it’s not “just” a choice: it’s the “liberating, healing, soul-fulfilling” choice — and don’t listen to anyone who says otherwise! By giving you options, they’re trying to take away your “choice” (2010):

I’m telling you this because it’s important for everyone to understand: Sluthood isn’t a disease, or a wrong path, or a trend that’s ruining our youth. It isn’t just for detached, unemotional women who “fuck like men,” (as if that actually meant something), consequences be damned. It isn’t ever inevitable that sluthood should inspire violence or shame. Sluthood isn’t just a choice we should let women make because women should be free to make even “bad” choices. It’s a choice we should all have access to because it has the potential to be liberating. Healing. Soul-fulfilling. I’m telling you this because sluthood saved me, in a small but life-altering way, and I want it to be available to you if you ever think it could save you, too. Or if you want it for any other reason at all. And because even if you don’t ever want sluthood for yourself, you’re going to be called upon to support a slut. I’m telling you this because when that happens, I want you to say yes.

Julie Klausner, unsurprisingly, is another ambassador for sluthood (2010):

Julie’s take? Do what makes you feel good, because in your 20’s that is what it is really all about.

[…]

Julie is definitely someone who makes me feel good about eventually turning 30, not just because she’s so great, but because she has assured me that if you live your 20’s like you should, your 30’s are much more calm and make a lot more sense. “It’s literally like someone flips a switch. You calm down, you have different expectations, the drama isn’t as interesting anymore and you don’t indulge it,” Julie said. “Drama for the sake of drama is not interesting anymore. At a certain point you’re like ‘Am I really going to just hook up at a party? I’m 29!’”

Another learning experience outgrown at exactly 29. I see.

And you’ll get the same take from relationship “expert” Amy Dickinson (2010):

Your guy might be the best guy in the world. He might be perfect for you. But if you can’t tame your restlessness, then you should take a break.

Now, Ms. Friedman’s piece promptly garnered hundreds of positive comments.

“Thank you for validating my feelings and fears,”

“This article makes me want to BE YOU!”

“I am in your exact state right now…you have inspired me!!!!”

“Perhaps I will try out your path to healing,”

“I am on the edge of where this idea germinated for you, and I’m so thankful to be given such a generous and open option to consider for myself,”

“I have found this article at precisely the right moment in my life, when I have made the decision to embark upon my own Adventure in Sluthood in order to heal myself,” and the obligatory

“women’s right to sluttiness should be socially accepted” — because of course the problem isn’t what women do; it’s how men feel about it.

My three favourite comments (and by favourite, I mean most horrifying):

This was a great read and I don’t know how to respond because I feel so conflicted. Your post is absolutely amazing but I guess it just points to how much I have internalized “shame” that for me this seems so foreign.

In other words, her instincts are screaming DON’T DO IT, but she’s so browbeaten by feminist doctrine, she thinks human nature is a patriarchal “shame” conspiracy.

This really came to me at a good time, I’ve felt that this was pretty much my story. I have slept with now 8 guys, the most recent being a bigger deal because A. it was a guy i’ve been interested in for three years and B. he has a girlfriend. I have been saying over and over how i want a real relationship, but this has reminded me that i should have no regrets and keep on moving forward.

“Moving forward,” racking up those big numbers. Eight now! “No regrets.”

AMAZING writing. I really appreciate having stumbled upon this, as it has really made me wonder about my own life — I am 22 and have been in a serious relationship for two years. He’s amazing, and I think he might be “the One,” but he is the only man I have ever slept with. This bothers me because I am quite confident that if we were to ever break up, I would undoubtedly embrace “sluthood” — and I really feel like I may be missing out on something that is important for defining who I am. I discovered who I am sexually through my relationship with him. But I love him to bits so this is just something I will need to wonder about for the rest of my life? *Sigh* if only I had slutted it up earlier.

Mission accomplished, Ms. Friedman: you’ve tricked a young girl into believing she has to dump the man she loves and slut it up in order to define who she is.

Jaclyn prefers that men not commit to her (image)

Yes, casual sex, far from being “socially corrosive and ultimately toxic to women,” is actually a mighty “engine of female progress,” according to Hanna Rosin — “one being harnessed and driven by women themselves” (2013):

To put it crudely, feminist progress right now largely depends on the existence of the hookup culture.

(Note that progress for feminism is not necessarily progress for women — much like progress for a cancer is not necessarily progress for the host.)

Sure, some women complain about the culture, but that doesn’t mean anything:

One sorority girl, a junior with a beautiful tan, long dark hair, and a great figure, whom I’ll call Tali, told me that freshman year she, like many of her peers, was high on her first taste of the hookup culture and didn’t want a boyfriend. […] But then, sometime during sophomore year, her feelings changed. She got tired of relation­ships that just faded away, “no end, no beginning.” […] When I asked Tali what she really wanted, she didn’t say anything about commitment or marriage or a return to a more chival­rous age. “Some guy to ask me out on a date to the frozen-­yogurt place,” she said. […] But the soda-fountain nostalgia of this answer quickly dissipated when I asked Tali and her peers a related question: Did they want the hookup culture to go away — might they prefer the mores of an earlier age, with formal dating and slightly more obvious rules? This question, each time, prompted a look of horror.

You see, feminists, there’s no need to worry: her social conditioning kicks in at the first mention of “a more chivalrous age” — that is, whatever make-believe fantasy version of history they’re teaching in college these days (in which, for example, feminism created “the right not to be owned by the man you marry”).

Let Hanna Rosin tell you what you want (image)

In a 2010 study, sociologist Anthony Paik asked: “Are partnerships that begin as ‘hookups,’ ‘friends with benefits,’ or casual dating relationships less satisfying and rewarding than serious sexual involvements?” Set aside, for a moment, his findings — not that we have any reason to trust the social pseudosciences (Issue 28). First consider the analysis we get from the “sex-positive” feminist collective.

Take, for example, Anna North at Jezebel: ‘Yes, Reader, You Can Find Love After All Those One-Night Stands!’

Women don’t have casual sex because they’re desperate and damaged — often, they do so because they want casual sex. […] Sex and love are incredibly complicated things and we can’t even agree on what a hookup is, so what’s the point of making blanket pronouncements about what sex does and doesn’t mean? As the Iowa study points out, it’s not even always possible to separate casual sex from relationship sex, since one can become the other. So why are we still arguing that the former will destroy your soul?

You can’t define casual sex, so it doesn’t exist, and we should all have more of it.

Kay Steiger at Feministe: ‘Another Defense of Hooking Up — This Time, With Science!’

Hear that, ladies? You can be like Samantha from “Sex and the City” and still get that ultimate relationship! But for all the stereotypes about women getting warned of the dangers of hooking up, I’d argue that it’s actually the reverse that’s the danger. It’s not sexual freedom and casual hookups that are disastrous for women. After all, as [sic] Jaclyn Friedman found hooking up to be liberating. What is disastrous for young women is that they’re raised with cookie cutter expectations about what their sex lives will look like.

[…]

The good thing is that I think this narrative is slowly changing. People these days (at least most normal, rational people I meet) are starting to view hooking up as a natural part of their general sexual experiences. […] Now that’s not to say that women don’t suffer emotionally sometimes because of a bad hook up. Sometimes they do. (I’d almost argue that encountering an asshole or two in the realm of hooking up is necessary for young women so they can improve their bullshit detectors later on.)

Oh, so you’re glad all those “bad boys” never called you back. I see. Since these mostly self-deceptive notions derive from these women’s conscious minds…

All right, I think it’s fairly clear what feminists would like the study to have found. Unfortunately for them, here is what it actually found:

Relationships that start with a spark and not much else aren’t necessarily doomed from the get-go, new University of Iowa research suggests. In an analysis of relationship surveys, UI sociologist Anthony Paik found that average relationship quality was higher for individuals who waited until things were serious to have sex compared to those who became sexually involved in “hookups,” “friends with benefits,” or casual dating relationships. But having sex early on wasn’t to blame for the disparity. When Paik factored out people who weren’t interested in getting serious, he found no real difference in relationship quality. That is, couples who became sexually involved as friends or acquaintances and were open to a serious relationship ended up just as happy as those who dated and waited.

Oh. So you have to be “open to a serious relationship” first. No kidding. Funny, I don’t remember reading much about that in the “sex-positive” feminist press.

Reuters (not feminist, likely honest): ‘Better to wait if you want real love: study.’

Most of the 56% of 642 adults questioned in the study who said they had waited until they got serious before they had sex reported having a high quality relationship. The number was higher than for the 27% of people who had sex while dating casually and the 17% who were intimate while in a non-romantic relationship. “There’s something about the characteristics of people who wait before sex that is linked to higher-quality relationships,” said sociology professor Anthony Paik of the University of Iowa.

Women don’t have casual sex because they’re desperate and damaged…

Paik, who reported the findings in the journal Social Science Research, said the research suggests that the courtship process acts as a screening mechanism. “The debate is ‘why can’t we have sex now?’ The expectation is that sex should occur very quickly. But doing so, you’re losing out on some information that might be useful,” he explained in an interview.

The good thing is that I think this narrative is slowly changing. People these days are starting to view hooking up as a natural part of their general sexual experiences.

The reason more people who have sex in a non-romantic relationships report lower quality relationships has more to do with who we are than when we chose to have sex, said Paik. Certain people are simply prone to finding relationships less rewarding, and they are more likely to have sex in casual relationships, he added.

“Prone to finding relationships less rewarding” — or maybe, just maybe, they’ve been taught, by “sex-positive” feminists of questionable intellectual integrity and dubious psychological stability, that “sluthood” is “liberating” and “soul-fulfilling,” and all the “normal, rational people” are doing it.

It’s got to make you wonder what women would choose if “sex-positive” harpies weren’t constantly shrieking and spitting at them in the media (2013):

When I talk to real women, as I did in researching my book on sexual freedom and 20-something women, I hear young women’s mixed feelings about relationships. Some young women deeply desire meaningful relationships with men, even as they feel guilty about those desires. Many express the same sentiment again and again: “Why do I, a young and highly educated woman in the 21st century, value relationships with men so highly?” To do so feels like a betrayal of themselves, of their education, and of their achievements.

Feminist progress right now largely depends on the existence of the hookup culture.

Like Hamilton and Armstrong’s respondents, many young and aspiring women with whom I spoke felt as though it were counterproductive to their development to prioritize a relationship with a man. This is a new phenomenon that goes against the grain of centuries of female socialization. Historically, women have been encouraged to value relationships, often at the expense of their own aspirations. Today’s young women are part of a new generation of highly educated women who are, of course, still socialized differently than are men, but who feel they ought to focus on their career goals in their 20s, potentially at the expense of developing a relationship. All the women I interviewed felt this pressure, and many expressed anxiety over their desire to prioritize a relationship.

Right, obviously: it’s social conditioning that makes women think they want relationships, whereas they naturally want to “focus on their career goals” and pursue meaningless sex with strangers. It would be crazy, not to mention sexist, to suggest that women naturally want relationships, so it takes years of “sex-positive” social conditioning — the “cookie cutter expectations” of the likes of Friedman, Steiger, North, and the young Clark-Flory — to make them feel this mysterious “anxiety.”

Just ask certified feminist science genius Amanda “Buttfuck” Marcotte (2012):

We all like to imagine we’re special snowflakes and that our choices and desires are not shaped by social forces. You see this ridiculous belief in everything from libertarianism to “choice feminism”, where women throw a fit and say that they freely chose to stay at home/shave their legs/take their husband’s name, and feminists who say that these choices were shaped by a patriarchy are meanie bears that don’t understand that they came to these socially conforming behaviors through a unique and totally independent thought process that was in no way reflective of larger cultural pressures. For some buttfuck reason, Americans have absorbed (oh irony) this belief that admitting that culture shapes your desires somehow makes you a weak and insipid person.

[…]

The good news is I think this cult of rugged individualism is fading away, and younger generations seem to be much more accepting of the possibility that our desires are generally social in origin, and that’s okay. In fact, that’s a good thing. After all, if society is teaching something that is hurting us, we can get together and start changing our culture so that society teaches something else.

Start. We can start. Well, I guess I’ve got more good news, Amanda: your “sex positivity” cult has a fifty– to eighty–year head start on “changing our culture” by applying various “pressures” through the education system and the mass media.

Marcotte, in Steve Sailer’s words, “notoriously combines self-absorption,

lack of self-awareness, vast reserves of hate, and dimness” (image)

No, it really hasn’t occurred to Amanda that she herself is applying powerful “cultural pressures” to enforce “socially conforming behaviors” in women. That is because Amanda Marcotte is too self-absorbed (one might say solipsistic) to examine her own ideology (feminism, of course). She can only regurgitate it on other, unsuspecting women — while pretending it’s a product of her own “unique and totally independent thought process that was in no way reflective of larger cultural pressures.”

As Emily Bazelon put it (2013):

I didn’t read The Feminine Mystique precisely because it had seeped so deeply into American culture that I figured I had already digested its message.

Trust me, Ms. Bazelon, you had.

Finally — I cannot resist — we have feminist “libertarian” Cathy Reisenwitz, who would like to make it illegal to criticize women for being promiscuous (2013):

Say my actions are completely and totally cooperative, but frowned upon. Maybe I’m doing heroin, or having sex with lots of dudes. What right then does anyone have to coerce me by threatening to criticize, ridicule, shame or ostracize me?

What right indeed.

I’ll give the last word to The Last Psychiatrist (2013):

I know what you’re thinking. You’re worldly, you’re cynical, your skeptical. You don’t go for all this love crap…. You’ve figured out that love was a construct pushed by the patriarchy to keep women tied to the home, to deny them orgasms with multiple penises and vaginas; to prevent them from getting jobs, money, power. Am I right? Ok, then let’s play by your rules, let’s say you’re right that love was used to keep women down — then what does today’s suppression of love signify? Could it be that the abandonment of love doesn’t also serve the system’s purpose? Or is only the former the trick, the latter a discovery made by your genius + sophistication + expert reading of human emotions? You think you’ve figured out that true love doesn’t exist, that it’s all been a kind of romantic lie sold by TV and the media, that real life isn’t like that; but what I am telling you is that you didn’t figure this out, you were TOLD this. Now, constantly, by every modern TV show, by Lori Gottlieb and the zombies at The Atlantic, by your friends, by your parents — the trick was to get you to think you figured it out on your own. […] The system’s ideal woman is the single mother, she’s produced with her uterus and is willing to go all in on production/consumption, she has no choice. I’m not saying she wants to be a single mother, I’m saying that’s what the system wants her to be. That’s feminism. You can get married too, as long as he’ll make it so you get in at 8.

Well, look on the bright side: at least young women are having lots of fun under the new, “sex-positive” regime — aren’t they?

Let’s review the situation on the ground (2011):

In today’s lousy economy, men can take comfort in knowing that there is one sought-after good that is becoming steadily more affordable: sex. Women are jumping into the sack faster and with fewer expectations about long-term commitments than ever, effectively discounting the “price” of sex to a record low, according to social psychologists. More than 25% of young women report giving it up within the first week of dating. While researchers don’t have a baseline to compare it to, interviews they have conducted lead them to believe this is higher than before, which increases the pressure on other women and changes the expectations of men. “The price of sex is about how much one party has to do in order to entice the other into being sexual,” said Kathleen Vohs, of the University of Minnesota, who has authored several papers on “sexual economics.” “It might mean buying her a drink or an engagement ring. These behaviors vary in how costly they are to the man, and that is how we quantify the price of sex.”

[…]

Sex is so cheap that researchers found a full 30% of young men’s sexual relationships involve no romance at all — no wooing, dating, goofy text messaging. Nothing. Just sex. Men want sex more than women do. It’s a fact that sounds sexist and outdated. But it is a fact all the same — one that women used for centuries to keep the price of sex high (if you liked it back in the day, you really had to put a ring on it). With gender equality, the Pill and the advent of Internet porn, women’s control of the meet market has been butchered. As a result, says Mark Regnerus, a sociologist at the University of Texas at Austin, men are “quicker to have sex in our relationships these days, slower to commitment and just plain pickier.” The issue is partly one of supply and demand, and it begins at US colleges, where 57% of students are women. With such an imbalanced sex ratio, women are using hookups to compete with other women for men’s affections. Once they get out of school, the pool of successful, educated men also is imbalanced, and the bed-hopping continues. Regnerus likens the price of sex to the housing market. Too many foreclosures in one community, and the price of neighboring homes start to plummet. This is why single women in New York sometimes feel as though sex on the first date is a given: According to the market, it is. “Every sex act is part of a ‘pricing’ of sex for subsequent relationships,” Regnerus said. “If sex has been very easy to get for a particular young man for many years and over the course of multiple relationships, what would eventually prompt him to pay a lot for it in the future — that is, committing to marry?”

Admirably summarized. So how’s that working out for women?

‘Sexes differ over one night stands’ (2008):

Men revealed they felt more content, sexually satisfied and confident after meaningless sex, whereas women said they were more likely to feel used and that they had ‘let themselves down.’ For some women, one reason for agreeing to the one-off encounter was because they hoped there was the chance of a longer term relationship.

‘Men and women take home different regrets after sex’ (2013):

The three main regrets for men: being too timid to approach a possible partner, not being more sexually adventurous when young and not being more sexually adventurous in their single days. The main regrets for women include losing their virginity to the wrong partner, cheating on a present or past partner and moving too fast sexually. “The consequences of casual sex were so much higher for women than for men, and this is likely to have shaped emotional reactions to sexual liaisons even today,” [UCLA social psychology professor Martie] Haselton said in a statement.

Recall how casual-sex supporter-turned-skeptic Tracy Clark-Flory eventually admitted she “faked her way through nearly every climax.” This is not uncommon (2013):

Natasha Gadinsky, 23, says she doesn’t have any regrets from her years in college. But the time she hooked up with a guy at Brown University does come close. After his own orgasm that night, she said, he showed no interest in her satisfaction. The next time they got together, it happened again. He “didn’t even care,” said Ms. Gadinsky, a health care case manager in New York City. “I don’t think he tried at all.” He fell asleep immediately, leaving her staring at the ceiling. “I was really frustrated,” she said. Like generations before them, many young women like Ms. Gadinsky are finding that casual sex does not bring the physical pleasure that men more often experience. New research suggests why: Women are less likely to have orgasms during uncommitted sexual encounters than in serious relationships.

[…]

Dr. [Justin R.] Garcia said, “We’ve been sold this bill of goods that we’re in an era where people can be sexually free and participate equally in the hookup culture. The fact is that not everyone’s having a good time.”

Out of that 40 percent, there are maybe 20 percent that we would consider — oh, wait, he’s not talking about men. (Come on, you know what “equality” really means.)

I wonder if women’s choice in men might be playing a role here (2009):

The research doesn’t bode well for the late-night booty text, one-night stand, or random fornication in the fraternity house as pathways to an orgasm. In the one-on-one interviews included in the study, one man explained that with his girlfriend, “definitely oral is really important [for her to orgasm],” but that with a casual hookup, “I don’t give a shit.”

But I digress (and frankly don’t give a shit either). Emotional suffering trumps physical dissatisfaction — and listen: ‘Silence on Valentine’s Day’ (2014).

Under the hook-up regime, women who want a man’s attention are expected to dress provocatively and show up at a fraternity house or bar. After drinking too much, some guy will suggest they go somewhere and hook up, which can consist of anything from deep kissing to intercourse. The men are not attentive during or after the one-night stand. Less than half the women have orgasms, and the men frequently ignore the hook-up partner entirely if they should meet again on campus. Most college women are not happy about this state of affairs. This would be clear to any observer who could sit in on my sex-differences seminar during the week when we discuss contemporary courtship or its absence. This past fall, I asked 16 female seminar participants if they personally knew — not knew of, but knew — a woman who they thought had been very seriously harmed emotionally because of hook-ups. Every hand went up.

Steven Rhoads, Laura Webber, and Diana Van Vleet enumerate ‘The Emotional Costs of Hooking Up’ in the hateful, sexist Chronicle of Higher Education (2010):

For the past 12 years, I have taught a course on sex differences to college juniors and seniors. When we talk about relationships and sex itself, most of the men, sometimes sheepishly, indicate that they enjoy hookups — but the vast majority of the women are unhappy with them. Time and again, women see their girlfriends’ post-hookup traumas, even if they themselves manage to avoid such outcomes. […] What is remarkable is that even women who write books about their sexual adventures and want to defend their sexual freedom end up telling the same story. In The Morning After: Sex, Fear, and Feminism (1994), Katie Roiphe speaks of feeling “almost sick with the accumulated anonymity of it, the haphazardness, the months and months of toweled men.” In Lip Service (1997), Kate Fillion recounts how she retroactively decided she was in love with every man she had had sex with, and how the power she got from sex “was the power to cause myself emotional pain.” Cindy Chupack, an executive producer and writer for the HBO series Sex and the City, gives us the details of her sexual escapades in The Between Boyfriends Book (2003) but confesses that she wants to be more than “a notch in somebody’s bedpost”; she is looking for a husband. None of this would surprise John Townsend, an evolutionary anthropologist whose extensive research has led him to believe that many women go through an experimental stage when they try casual sex, but that they almost always end up rejecting it. For women, intercourse produces feelings of “vulnerability” and of being used when they cannot get the desired emotional investment from their partners. In Townsend’s studies, that occurs even among the most sexually liberated women. Despite their freethinking attitudes, their emotions make it impossible for them to enjoy casual sex.

[…]

My female students tell me that the emotional pain caused by casual sex goes largely unreported by women, because they are often ashamed that they care about men who treat them like strangers the next morning. They don’t want the men involved or the rest of the campus to know about their tears.

Speaking of “sexual adventures,” you’ve probably heard of Karen Owen and her PowerPoint “fuck list” of Duke University athletes (2010). Do you happen to know who got her highest score? He was the only one who looked her in the eyes and made her feel like he actually cared about her (which, of course, he did not):

He was the first guy I have hooked up with that kept an intense level of eye contact throughout the hookup, which honestly brought the entire experience to a level of hotness that I had never before experienced.

Amelia Sims is a sophomore at Emory University (2014):

Last night I stood with my friend at the corner of a fraternity basement during a party. She was “risk managing” for the first time at a mixer and stood aghast at the sight before her: a dark basement, flashing electric lights, techno music, and college students physically entwined “dancing,” but actually wallowing in an atomistic stupor. She stood silent for a while. It’s hard to speak, let alone think in this type of atmosphere. Then she commented, “Everyone looks so lonely. How can people treat each other like this? I never thought about it like this before… Is this what I look like?” Stone cold sober for the first time at a party like this, my friend could see the lonely longing in the eyes of the people dancing. The shiver of repulsion that ran down her spine told her that something was wrong about the human relationships on display in the basement. There was something jarring and fragmented about them. Though generally college students are critical of the “hook-up culture,” it’s hard for them to pin point why. Our culture glorifies “sex positivity” and demonizes anyone who suggests some types of consensual sex could potentially be destructive. It’s easy to say the “hook-up culture” endangers college relationships and prevents the cultivation of healthy relationships between women and men. But why is this? We know intuitively that consent is not enough. It’s easy to affirm that since sex is good and a gift, and that hooking up is a kind of sex, then it follows that hooking-up is also good and a gift. But when we know people who have been through the emotional hangovers of one-night stands and no-strings-attached sexual relationships, how can we be indifferent to what these kinds of relationships are doing to our friends?

[…]

When we hook up, we try to separate what should always be intertwined; when we don’t respect the design of our bodies, we end up with physical, emotional, and psychological pain. Sex is too valuable to treat just like any other act in the human experience. If we want to criticize the hook-up culture then we also must refuse to accept the lie that consensual sex is always positive sex.

Meanwhile, at the University of Pennsylvania (2013):

“You go in, and they take you down to a dark basement,” Haley, a blond, pink-cheeked senior, recalled of her first frat parties in freshman year. “There’s girls dancing in the middle, and there’s guys lurking on the sides and then coming and basically pressing their genitals up against you and trying to dance.” Dancing like that felt good but dirty, and like a number of girls, Haley said she had to be drunk in order to enjoy it. Women said universally that hookups could not exist without alcohol, because they were for the most part too uncomfortable to pair off with men they did not know well without being drunk. One girl, explaining why her encounters freshman and sophomore year often ended with fellatio, said that usually by the time she got back to a guy’s room, she was starting to sober up and didn’t want to be there anymore, and giving the guy oral sex was an easy way to wrap things up and leave.

[…]

A friend of hers, Kristy, shared a story about a different kind of coercion. She had been making out with a guy at his house, not sure how far she wanted to go, when he stood up and told her, “Get down on your knees.” At first she froze. “I was really taken aback, because I was like, no one has ever said that to me before,” she said. Then he said something like, “‘I think that’s fair,’” she recalled. When she still hesitated, he pushed her down. “It was at that point that I was like, ‘I’ll just do it,’” she said. “I was like, ‘It will be over soon enough.’”

Who raises these girls? Jennifer Moses tries to come to terms with it (2011):

A woman I know, with two mature daughters, said, “If I could do it again, I wouldn’t even have slept with my own husband before marriage. Sex is the most powerful thing there is, and our generation, what did we know?” We are the first moms in history to have grown up with widely available birth control, the first who didn’t have to worry about getting knocked up. We were also the first not only to be free of old-fashioned fears about our reputations but actually pressured by our peers and the wider culture [my emphasis] to find our true womanhood in the bedroom. Not all of us are former good-time girls now drowning in regret — I know women of my generation who waited until marriage — but that’s certainly the norm among my peers [my emphasis]. So here we are, the feminist and postfeminist and postpill generation. We somehow survived our own teen and college years (except for those who didn’t), and now, with the exception of some Mormons, evangelicals and Orthodox Jews, scads of us don’t know how to teach our own sons and daughters not to give away their bodies so readily. We’re embarrassed, and we don’t want to be, God forbid, hypocrites. Still, in my own circle of girlfriends, the desire to push back is strong. I don’t know one of them who doesn’t have feelings of lingering discomfort regarding her own sexual past. And not one woman I’ve ever asked about the subject has said that she wishes she’d “experimented” more.

Does the anonymous (woman) author of this unsent letter seem happy to you (2014)?

You’ve asked me lots of things, but not this one. Do I take sugar in my tea? Would I like a spare toothbrush? How did I get into the job I’m in? Did I miss you? What did I think of the movie? Would I like it if you did that to me? But you’ve not asked me the big question. Why am I like this? Why did I tell you you couldn’t have me yet, and then almost immediately change my mind? Why could I shamelessly beg you to fuck me, but I couldn’t answer when you asked me how I’d like it best? Why can I only make eye contact with you when your cock’s in my mouth? This is what you don’t know about me yet. The first man I ever had sex with never asked me how I’d like it best. He’d tell me to suck his cock, until I choked and couldn’t carry on, and then he’d fuck me until he came, and then he’d get dressed and he’d leave. Once, in front of me, he fucked my roommate, and then me, half-heartedly at her behest. Afterwards he kissed her goodbye. Later, I begged him not to sleep with my virginal best friend, so he stopped fucking me and tried to fuck her instead. This is what you don’t know about me yet: besides him and you I’ve fucked half the city. I have crept home through pre-dawn blackness after screwing a guy who gave me MDMA and then came on my face. At uni, I missed class because I was on the other side of the city with two middle-aged French men, fucking them on a campbed, until one kicked me out because his wife was coming home. I’ve been fucked up the ass by a guy who lived on his friend’s sofa, whilst the friend played XBox through the open door. I have got down on my fucking knees in the fucking street and sucked cock and stumbled home with cum on my dress. I did not learn the names of any of these men. I have done things I am really, really not proud of, and I can’t forget any of them. The last guy I had sex with, before you, was a month ago. My best friend. We were drunk. It was a mistake. Halfway through, he said — this means nothing to me. My heart didn’t break — I’m not in love with him — but it chipped, a little, again. He wouldn’t kiss me. When he finished he rolled off me and went to sleep, leaving me lying beside him, staring at the ceiling, in my best brand-new party dress with no underwear on, and he wouldn’t look me in the eye in the morning. That’s who I am. That’s what you don’t know about me yet. Nobody’s ever held me after sex before: you didn’t know that. When you asked me what I liked, I couldn’t answer because I don’t know: nobody’s ever asked me if I liked what they were doing to me before. They just kept doing it. When you wake up in the morning and look at me and smile, I can’t look you in the eye because I’m scared I’ll see regret in your face. I don’t know where I stand with you, exactly. I tried not to sleep with you straight away, but I didn’t know what else to do: you told me you wanted me and that was enough, I knew you had to have me, because that’s how it works; but then you still wanted me, afterwards, and that’s where I’ve lost my way. There’s this other guy. And he’s sexy, and older, and he started off friendly and funny and sweet — and then he learned that I was easy. Now he treats me badly and I hate that. I hate how used I feel. And if you tell me I’m yours and you want me to be yours alone I will, I’m sure I will, get the courage from that to tell him I don’t want him. No, he can’t have me, just because he wants me, because I don’t want him to use me and discard me: I want to be yours. But I know you weren’t looking for anything serious and I don’t want to lose you, I don’t want to lose you just because I can’t tell him I don’t want him on my own. So I’ll text him pictures of my tits and tell him how hard he makes me cum, and I won’t feel anything at all, except maybe a little bit sick. And I’ll lay my head on your chest and kiss your collarbone and eat the toast you’ve made me and wonder if this is what happiness feels like. This is what you don’t know about me yet, because I can’t tell you. I’ll have to tell you, one day, I think. Parts of it anyway. But I can’t tell you yet I can’t tell you yet I can’t tell you yet and it’s eating me up.

How about Mackenzie Newcomb, whose ‘Letter To A One-Night Stand’ was expertly deconstructed by Aimless Gromar (2013)?

I have a question for you, how do you avoid being called a slut? Was it the v-neck I wore that made you treat me like a piece of meat, was it too juicy for you? Did my floral dress scream “fuck and chuck”? Or maybe I never stood a chance at all. There is evidence that in order to be “wifed up” one must be a size zero waist, and bleach blonde. Not only that, but she must be the perfect combination of sexy and “bring home to mom.” In order to be pursued as a girlfriend, one must not be too skinny, but must be in excellent shape. She must know how to apply makeup flawlessly, in order to look like she does not wear any at all. One must also have enough personality to entertain you, but not so much that I become annoying. Unfortunately that leaves those of us who do not match this criteria to fend for ourselves on a Friday night, trying to play “hard to get” while the tequila in our blood is trying to get the night boiling. Translation: I did what they told me to do. Why isn’t it working? They said I would be just like the guys are. They said I could treat sex like it didn’t matter, and that I wouldn’t loathe myself. I did what they told me to do