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In what some (the author) likely consider a groundbreaking assertion, University of Texas sociology professor Mark Regnerus is warning women that no one buys the cow when it gives the milk away for free.


In an extraordinarily trollish essay for the Wall Street Journal, excerpted from his book on the same subject, Regnerus makes a lot of sweeping generalizations about how the decline of marriage is a result of women boinking with impunity. He starts out with this quote from a 24-year-old guy named Kevin, a man of age who knows all there is to know about romantic and sexual relationships:

“Girls are easier to mislead than guys just by lying or just not really caring. If you know what girls want, then you know you should not give that to them until the proper time. If you do that strategically, then you can really have anything you want…whether it’s a relationship, sex, or whatever. You have the control.”


Nasty, Regnerus admits, but it works. And if it works, why would any guy ever stop lying to every woman he meets or treat them as people with any actual value? You can only get a guy to hang with you long enough to respect your humanity if you hold sex just out of reach for as long as possible, like a little bonbon in reward for eye contact.

To make his point about what dumb bimbos ladies are, Regnerus asks a girl named Kristin if men should make “sacrifices” for sex. She gives him a confusing answer (because wtf does that even mean) and he draws a damning conclusion:

Kristin rightly wants the men whom she dates to treat her well and to respect her interests, but the choices that she and other women have made unwittingly teach the men in their lives that such behavior is noble and nice but not required in order to sleep with them. They are hoping to find good men without supporting the sexual norms that would actually make men better.

My vagina is for teaching a lesson. If you’re not learning, I’m doing something wrong—to all of society!!

This cheap sex isn’t happening just because women are stupid and give the fuck without demanding a candlelit dinner first. It’s the result of technology, apparently. The two “technologies” Regnerus names are birth control—which he admits has been around for 60 years, so it’s unclear why family planning is a modern culprit—and pornography:

Online porn has made sexual experience more widely and easily available too. A laptop never says no, and for many men, virtual women are now genuine competition for real partners.


This is so confusing. Should I never say no, like a porno on a laptop that Kevin is jerking off to? Or always say no, so he respects me more than the porno and doesn’t marry it instead?

As deluded and backwards thinking as DOCTOR Regnerus is, he does have a point: many women have fucked a guy like Kevin at some point in their life. Someone who manipulated you, or took advantage of your feelings, or who just turned out to be an asshole womanizer. It happens. Just be glad you didn’t play whatever hold-out game Regnerus is suggesting. You might have ended up being married to him.