But there is a way to improve supply: give dignity to prostitution.
Sex work leads to some very strange dynamics, because often the Johns are desperate for intimacy, but they are paying for women that provide zero actual intimacy (because it is usually entirely faked.) I am sure there is some ideal world where prostitution could satisfy emotional needs, but in my admittedly very limited knowledge it doesn't.
Prostitution has been legal in my country since 2003, however it is still stigmatised for both men and women (at least for my demographic, and I haven't noticed any difference for other demographics.)
I sometimes walk by the red light district.
One time I seriously considered having sex with a sex worker.
I talked to multiple of them to find a click and I was appalled by all my interaction.
I realized that I wanted intimacy leading into sex.
What they offered: strictly penetrative sex and nothing else.
As I got older, another issue arose: to what extent is intimacy actual intimacy when you are paying for it?
Intimacy implies someone caring about you and you caring about him/her. That suddenly means it has an ethical component of idealism attached to it.
For me anyways.
I must say the experience varied a lot. About half were mechanical and just felt like they were trying to get my money. That feels pretty hollow.
But I've also had some really great experiences where I felt like we had a genuine connection. I grant that this is not "real" intimacy in the sense of "they care for you", but it did feel something like chemistry or attraction.
And finally I have not tried this but have read enough anecdotes suggesting that you can get intimacy while paying in good sugar daddy-sugar babe relationships. That won't be cheap though.
On first watch, I thought, awww, semi-sentient AI fumbling toward love. On second watch, I thought, there's nothing here that replicant K doesn't want. He wants to destroy the console. He wants to destroy the antenna. That it came from her voice doesn't change that, especially not when the advert for Joi - a Wallace product - is "Everything you want to see, everything you want to hear." There's no AI in love, there's only K, has been all along. Joi is an extremely well-adapted product.
My assumption was that the experience would somehow be cheapened because I was paying for it, but that wasn't the case. I came to the conclusion that my limbic system doesn't really know the difference.
Maybe I got lucky. A similar experience could have felt pretty bad if the girl was clearly only trying to get tips, but in this case it worked out.
https://orgs.law.harvard.edu/lids/2014/06/12/does-legalized-...
These are all big problems we ain't gonna fix in 5 years or 10.
I also wager a portion of the people who feel they "need but can't get sex" may also learn that what they desired wasn't what they actually cared that much about.
In this regard, I guess one can argue that prostitution is a crutch to a much larger problem that may never truly be solved.
In the context of "first world lower income", I'd wager there's a loose correlation. i.e the incel movement is one mostly formed from a frustrated lower-middle/middle class (which in the world context, means many americans for the sake of discussion). Another comment in this post heard something similar as well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27041400
I'd be interested in any studies that disprove this notion. I'll admit most of this comment is conjecture.
Better yet, guys need to learn to be the kind of man women want to fvck. They're not obligated and attraction is non-negotiable. Reality can be harsh. Guys need to treat themselves with dignity and put themselves together.
I think there's room for some down to earth, responsible men to try and fill this space. Right now the "teach young men how to be" space is mostly filled with misogyny and terrible pick up artists.
I think there's room for some down to earth,
responsible men to try and fill this space.
Right now the "teach young men how to be"
space is mostly filled with misogyny and
terrible pick up artists.
It's a shame because there is absolutely a need for this.
I think the PUA has poisoned the space. TRP concepts I find quite good taken as a whole, but a lot of guys are focused on the wrong things for the wrong reasons. At its core, TRP says to put yourself together and everything else will follow, but the everything else is NOT suppose to be your goal. Some of the ideas there like AWALT are toxic when taken literally (as many do) but the point is that as human animals everyone has the potential to be or do certain things. Same for many of the other tenets of it. As one guy said, TRP is a map but not the territory.
But I agree a lot of folks miss the big picture of TRP and get lost. Much like reading NMMNG sometimes produces narcissistic a-holes instead of better people.
TRP concepts I find quite good taken as a whole
[...]
At its core, TRP says to put yourself together and
everything else will follow, but the everything else
is NOT suppose to be your goal.
Some of the ideas there like AWALT are toxic when
taken literally
I'm not asking that facetiously. Sometimes an online forum, official or no, is not an accurate representation of a community as a whole.
Anyway, if it is an accurate representation, I would not describe TRP concepts as "good taken as a whole." The vast majority of top-voted posts are super explicitly sexist: https://www.reddit.com/r/TheRedPill/top/
Some of the ideas there like AWALT [All Women Are Like That]
I would most certainly agree with the "get your shit together" elements of TRP, at least. And while I wouldn't be bold enough to call stoicism the one true way, there's a strong stoic aspect to TRP thought and that's generally how I roll. However, that's not some kind of unique TRP concept and there's no real reason to turn to TRP for it unless you really require your stoicism to have a heavy dose of toxic sexism.
>there’s a vast difference between a person who believes the stated beliefs of a group as opposed to a person who holds membership in a group as a defining part of their identity. Imagining a conversation with someone who generically believes women should be treated well is a much different experience than imagining the same conversation with person who boldly declares themselves a feminist; the same is true for what you’d expect from a talk with an MRA.
Always seems to come down to good intentions, bad actors that make such "identities" dangerous. Even if it's an otherwise honest person that just wants some self-help advice.
(Hmm, I think I just got more of a handle on what it is that makes me uncomfortable with "identity politics".)
Different people want different things. Prostitutes want money. Maybe "being the kind of man women want to fuck" includes being the kind of man prostitutes want to fuck, that is, being willing to give them money for sex.
The problem we are discussing is that some people aren't desirable for some reason they don't know how to do something about. Reality is harsh, that's why in order to get to the bottom of it you need more nuance. A lot of men out there want you to draw them a picture with crayons that depicts what "put themselves together" means. If they knew what it meant they'd do it in a heartbeat. Now the one thing they don't understand, that's not necessarily a solution to their problems but would still help them understand, is that there's not a one size fits all crayon drawing of that it means. Absolute statements like yours and the one you're replying to don't help much if at all.
I don't think that includes paying for sex.
Also to your comment "Different people want different things. Prostitutes want money." That's not what prostitutes want, it's what they need from a practical point of view. When you're just trying to get by, you do things you don't want to do in order to get what you need. Now the higher end ones that make big money probably don't need it, but I don't claim to know what their motivations are.
"The problem we are discussing is that some people aren't desirable for some reason they don't know how to do something about."
That we can agree on. My point with the crude comment is to alert them to that fact. Most people don't want to change and will reject the idea that they need to. You gotta smack em with the idea pretty hard sometimes.
> I don't think that includes paying for sex.
A) That's what you think. Who died and made you God if defining "dignity"?
B) You think that, in large part, because of the stigma associated with prostitution; attitudes like yours are what that stigma is.
C) That's why the original suggestion was to remove the stigma around prostitution. (If that could be done, then you possibly wouldn't be thinking the way you are now.)
(Emphasis mine)
Possibly. DNA analysis shows that for every 17 human females that reproduced, one male reproduced. Meaning that quite high rates of polygamy, rape, or other unbalancing factors were the norm in human history.
http://awakeningtimes.com/8000-years-ago-17-women-reproduced...
http://econintersect.com/pages/analysis/analysis.php?post=20... Figure 5
"In contrast to demographic reconstructions based on mtDNA, we infer a second strong bottleneck in Y-chromosome lineages dating to the last 10 ky. We hypothesize that this bottleneck is caused by cultural changes affecting variance of reproductive success among males."
Saying that the average man reproduces less than the average woman seems to fit the facts as presented in the paper. I've not read other papers that may refute that one though. This is not my area of expertise.
It's at its strongest in a 19 year old, "dorm room" context. These times mean a lot to people, but in practicality this is a short period of time at the end of adolescence. Overall in life, relationships are not generally like a market. There's no "50% of the girls shagged 50% of the guys" stuff to make it like one. Mostly people are in monogamous relationships. Discrepancies (in the article) are smaller and are from dating patterns between age brackets.
In any case, why analogize? Think of it as a culture. Dating culture. Marriage culture. Late 40s hookup culture. Whatever "failures" exist are cultural failures.
If it really was mostly a market situation, the market would clear.
This is part of the function of anti-bigamy laws and frowning upon promiscuity, is it not?
“It's a fact...that in societies like ours sex truly represents a second system of differentiation, completely independent of money; and as a system of differentiation it functions just as mercilessly. The effects of these two systems are, furthermore, strictly equivalent. Just like unrestrained economic liberalism, and for similar reasons, sexual liberalism produces phenomena of absolute pauperization . Some men make love every day; others five or six times in their life, or never. Some make love with dozens of women; others with none. It's what's known as 'the law of the market'...Economic liberalism is an extension of the domain of the struggle, its extension to all ages and all classes of society. Sexual liberalism is likewise an extension of the domain of the struggle, its extension to all ages and all classes of society.”
https://www.overcomingbias.com/2018/06/comparing-income-sex-...
> Most who expressed outrage at my post, even most in the mass media, did not offer counter-arguments to my analogy.
> They were instead content to identify me with sex-poor people today willing to do or sympathize with violence in order to advocate for sex redistribution.
> Such ‘incel’ advocates were said to be personally deeply icky, and therefore so also were any policies they advocate, and also anyone like me who did not attack they and their policies immediately with extreme prejudice.
Also, that 18-29 chart is about people looking for a relationship. The data about actually-having-sex [1] used different age ranges, breaking up 18-24 and 25-34. It shows a spike of no-sex in 18-24 men, which evens out with women once they're into the 25-35 range. The article didn't use the handy graph in figure 1 from the study which was quite informative: [2]
[1]: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle...
[2]: https://cdn.jamanetwork.com/ama/content_public/journal/jaman...
My hypothesis is that this is because of a pretty significant gap in EQ and maturity between young men and women. Also women’s prime reproductive years (physically) are from late teens to early 30s. Men’s prime years to be able to support their partners is usually starting around 30s. Makes sense when you think of it like that.
Based purely on that figure, we can reasonably say that after age 18-24 men and women are about as likely to have had sex with at least one person in the last year (within the error bars of each other), with men being more likely to have had sex with more than one person in the last year.
It’s an economy of sorts (age, looks, height), but it also follows the financial security aspect. Inequality creates a class of people that hoard desirable traits
> When social norms dictated that you must be married to have sex, every woman and man paired off and got to have sex, however low quality and in however unhappy of a marriage
Might we see a return to conservative values here?
When social norms dictated that you must be married to have sex, every woman and man paired off and got to have sex, however low quality and in however unhappy of a marriage. I’m not sure this world is an improvement.