Introduction
"Generally, ordinary guys can go years between relationships with ordinary women, because they are constantly meeting (in everyday life) very few women, very few of whom ever find them (the guys) attractive. [..] Holly's Magical Vagina Power blinds her to the experience of a totally average guy who's just middling employed, middling-looking, and middling charming. Bruno's and Bookworm's (and my) experience of how (almost) no women see them and how few connect with them is a real truth about the experience of ordinary men that you constantly elide with the "PUA bad, grr" act."
-Eurosabra
Data
The sex ratio at birth in the USA is about 105 boys to 100 girls. Boys are slightly more prone to die young, however, so for the age range 15-30 the ratio is 1:1 and at older ages there are more women. As an average for the population as a whole, there are 95 males to 100 females. (CIA World Factbook)
Statistics on homosexuality vary widely (and often follow the "one drop rule" that if someone reports any history of same-sex sex or attraction they're counted as gay), but generally seem to agree that there are more exclusively homosexual men than women. The Janus Report on Sexual Behavior, for example, reports 9% of men and 5% of women are homosexual.
I couldn't find any documentation on the prevalence of polyamory that wasn't written by a crazy person, but I believe that it's not really super common. I mean, it's like 20% of everyone I know, but I live in weird circles, I'm guessing it can't be more than 2% of the population, and even fewer are in polygynous arrangements where multiple women are exclusive to one man.
In "Patterns of Asexuality in the United States," presented at an American Sociological Association conference, the authors conclude that 0.7% of men and 0.8% of women report being asexual. They also mention that 12% of men and 11% of women report no sexual contact in the last 12 months.
So let's crunch those numbers (well, assumptions) for young adults in the US, and we get... 100 available straight women for every 97.9 available straight men. Of course that's extremely rough and there's other reasons a person could be off the market, but on the whole these data support the frankly obvious conclusion that for every wanting cock there's a willing pussy. In fact there's slightly more than one.
Analysis
I want to stop hearing all this fucking bullshit about how women can get laid and men can't, because there's the same goddamn number of women looking for cock as men looking for pussy. And every time a woman gets cock, a guy gets pussy. It is not possible for straight women to get laid more than straight men.
In pickup rather than partnership contexts it's difficult to disprove the "a few super-promiscuous guys get all the pussy" theorem so popular among self-pitying couchfucks, but (just based on personal experience, anecdote, and Earth Logic) the vast majority of sex is partnership, not pickup. It's obvious that in monogamous heterosexual partnerships, men and women have exactly the same amount of sex.
Also, please note that women are reusable, and a woman who is "taken" for a night by a super-promiscuous man will be right back on the market the next night. (Or a couple weeks later if he really burns her.)
Because most people require more than just availability from their sexual partners, some people will end up celibate against their wishes, but note that this is a bi-directional problem; for every man sitting at home alone sighing, there's a woman in the same position. Not only do men have the same amount of sex as women, women have the same amount of not-sex as men. Incel women are less likely to be vocal about it, however, because culture encourages them to blame their own lack of attractiveness rather than demand men accept them as they are.
Conclusion
Men get laid just as much as women. If you don't get laid and are unhappy, this is your problem, not a gender issue. Being "incel" is the fate of the picky, shy, or socially inept, not of the male. And implicitly blaming women for cruelly making themselves unavailable to you is super creepy and I wouldn't fuck you either if I heard you saying that shit.
Yes. Thank you.
ReplyDeleteHmm...I don't know if I agree with the way you're presenting this, as though the ratio of men to women explains how there couldn't be a problem.
ReplyDeleteI think the point a lot of guys make has nothing to do with that, but rather some men have the idea that a man will sleep with whomever, and a women is incredibly selective, thus they (the complainers, who are considered by society to be undesirable men) are not able to get laid as often as an equally "undesirable" girl.
But then, I have a problem with this idea in a different way than you do. First off, they present it as though women not fortunate enough to meet society's standards of attractiveness aren't hindered by this: they can still sleep with lots of people. This is false. False I tell you. Because when a guy is talking about an undesirable girl, she is still within a category of age and relative attractiveness outside of which no sexual woman exists in his mind.
Furthermore, the idea is that the kind of sex guys want is here and now, and the kind that women want is after more of a relationship. Well, the girls who want the here-now sex will sleep with you, sure, and lucky them I guess, but what about the ones who want a relationship? Have you ever wondered if they've though about the unfairness? "It's much easier for a man to have the kind of sexual relationship I want (monogamous, in a loyal relationship) because that's what lots of women want. Man. How unfair." So, to those women, the fact that they are theoretically more available for limitless boink-n-runs means NOTHING.
You think that there aren't a SHITLOAD of forgotten women, wishing they would be found desirable? You think they don't see TV shows where an ugly, lazy husband has a supermodel wife and think, "I'm not even good enough for him. I might as well not even exist"? You think they don't realize that women are told that they are valued sexually based only on their looks ("He doesn't care about your personality." Trust me, they hear it), and say to themselves, "If I were a man, I could work on my personality, but I can't help the looks I was born with"?
What about the fact that a woman who wants a casual encounter has to think to herself, "Will he stop when I say 'no'? Will he hurt me? Will he call me a whore (I know some people are into that)? Will my friends and family think I'm a slut if they find out?"
So, uh, basically, numbers aside, when a titty-whiner boy complain about how "it's so much harder for guys trying to get laaaaid :'(" I laugh as I turn and walk away from him.
Selina - You have a valid point; if we assume that women have lower sex drives and are more likely to be voluntarily celibate rather than sleep with an unattractive male, then it is possible there are more involuntarily celibate men than women.
ReplyDeleteHowever, this strains the meanings of "voluntary" and "involuntary"--if you are alone on a desert island with a pig, are you "voluntarily celibate" if you don't fuck the pig?
I would consider anyone who hasn't found a suitable partner incel for the purposes of this goofy psuedo-research, and define "voluntary celibate" as only those people who have decided they won't sleep with anyone. Therefore my conclusion that there are the same numbers of incel men and women stands.
I don't know if I'm quite following you, so forgive me if I have this wrong, but are you saying that you group women who can't find someone worth having sex with in the same category as men who can't find anyone who will have sex with them (as opposed to women and men who don't want sex with anyone)?
ReplyDeleteBecause, speaking strictly of hookups, doesn't that support the idea that women have higher standards/it's harder to get them to fuck you?
Not to say that I don't think this is grossly exaggerated by ignorant entitled douchebags, I'm just trying to understand what you're saying.
Selina - I don't think it's possible to be in a situation where no one, literally no one will fuck you. Everyone who says "no one will fuck me" really means "no one I want will fuck me." Because there's always some freak out there, right?
ReplyDeleteSo all incels, male and female, whether they do a lot of turning down or none at all, are really in the "no one I want will fuck me" boat, and I don't think it's useful to draw a distinction based on "pickiness" within that group.
I also think a lot of guys underestimate their pickiness when they say that they're not choosy, they'd sleep with any slim 25-year-old blonde underwear model.
Well right, that is what I was getting at towards the beginning of my first paragraph, and there I have to completely agree with you.
ReplyDeleteI think when someone goes out of their way to say "no one will sleep with me," they mean exactly what you say. I was just being nitpicky about the logistics, but I am still in agreement with your idea.
I may have more to say about this later, but for now I'll note only that I don't like being used as an example to back Eurosabra's arguments.
ReplyDeleteBruno - Yeah, I wasn't actually aware that you were invisible to women and nobody ever liked you ever. The things I learn from people who don't know you.
ReplyDeleteWell, this one definitely wins "blog post title of the day" in my RSS feed.
ReplyDelete*laughs*
"I would consider anyone who hasn't found a suitable partner incel for the purposes of this goofy psuedo-research, and define "voluntary celibate" as only those people who have decided they won't sleep with anyone."
ReplyDeleteSo suppose (this is not entirely hypothetical) that I decide not to have sex until I'm married. Is my celibacy voluntary because I've decided I won't sleep with anyone at this stage in my life, or involuntary because if circumstances were different I could be married already?
Now dial back "married" to "in a relationship with someone I've had time to get to know and trust" and this describes a fairly large set of people, including (q.v.) many of the Ordinary Guys with Girlfriends.
It might be more useful to think of all celibacy as voluntary. If you were willing to fuck anything that moves, something that moves could surely be found. Which is not to blame Frustrated Dude for having standards--he just needs to recognize that he's limiting his selection by choice, and make that choice in a way that reflects what he actually cares about. If this makes him celibate, fine! He's owning his celibacy, instead of blaming it on forces beyond his control. But I suspect he'll find that "blonde Swedish underwear model with a 22-inch waist" is not all that important.
Mark Z. - Maybe it would be best not to divide celibacy into "voluntary" or "involuntary" at all.
ReplyDeleteI don't blame frustrated dudes for their own frustration, but it bothers me when they completely externalize it. When I say "it's your problem," I don't mean "you suck," I just mean that it's not anyone else's problem.
You're wrong for reasons which any simple reading of REAL evo psych (Baumeister and Tice, "On Female Sexuality as a Resource", for example) will reveal. There is a lot of under-the-radar harem-building such that you can't assume one man/one woman pairs just because each hetero sex act requires a male and a female participant. That being said, the Yes Means Yes blog deconstructed the commodity view of sex much more simply.
ReplyDeleteI am actually fairly familiar with claims of female sexual invisibility and find that it involves the usual factors, namely membership in a fairly marginal subculture, shyness, and either lack of conventional attractiveness or a willful disregard for appearance norms, coupled with an inability to read implicit social messages and body language.
I think PUA has an ideological over-investment in rape culture because of its desire to be a total explanation of all things sexual, combined with woman-blaming. This is of course a noise-to-signal ratio problem, and short of engineering a cultural revision of straight men's mental maps in the aggregate, I don't see what can be done. Of course, I can also maintain that the rape-culture aspect of PUA is something done elsewhere, badly, by other men, bad men, and there are enough voices in The Seduction Community (Juggler, Style, Ross Jeffries) stressing enthusiastic consent as a minimum standard, whatever their other bombastic rhetoric.
I think that this effect is very closely related to your Venn Diagram a few posts down. Take any one person, me for example. There's going to be people that I'd like to fuck, and people that I don't want to fuck. Out of each of those two groups, there will people in them who will want to fuck me, and who won't want to fuck me.
ReplyDeleteTo me, it's always made sense that the only sexually realistic and satisfying combination is the subset of people who I want to fuck who also want to fuck me. I've known people who made themselves quite unhappy by wanting to fuck people who had absolutely zero reciprocating interest.
As you've pointed out earlier, if a person is dull, has poor personal hygiene, and/or a creepy/abrasive/non-existent personality, then the number of people who are going to want to fuck them starts to drop, fast. Additionally, if a person's so picky that they only want to fuck the people with the most idealized physical form, then they're greatly limiting the number of people that they want to fuck.
A lot of the bitching, moaning, and gnashing of teeth that I see and hear around me comes from people who do things that reduce/limit/minimize the number of people who would ever want to fuck them, while at the same time only wanting to fuck a very small subset of the entire population. These people are pretty much "pricing themselves out of the market", and the worst part is that this appears to be the same group of folks (PUAs, "nice" guys) who just won't shut up about "game" or the idea that a woman is somehow actually "harming" a guy or intentionally being mean by not wanting to fuck him.
I'm with an awesome partner. We were close before we became physically intimate, and I would not swap them for endless stream of gorgeous supermodel pornstars. If my partner had only wanted to wanted to fuck the most physically beautiful or perfect people, then they wouldn't have wanted me.
What's the point of making your life tough, I guess, unless you also get to bitch about it and blame everyone else?
Actually, this post got me thinking about some things, and I started running scenarios and doing a bunch of math... While I cannot supply some exact figures because I did not have reliable statistics or estimates to work with, it seems that the "whiners" are actually correct in one sense but are looking at things completely the wrong way!
ReplyDelete(Note that when I use the word "sex" here it also includes "non-platonic romantic relationships".)
1. Let's ignore non-heteros for simplification. Let's also assume that the genders are unbalanced, and on the average men want sex more often than women (probably true, though if so then the difference is small).
2. Assuming ideal conditions (non-ideal conditions appear to affect women just as much as men, which proportionally cancels things out) men will, on the average, not quite get as much sex as they 'need' (read: would fully satisfy their sex drive) due to the imbalance.
3. However, it appears that hornier men actually get, on the average, a bit more than their "fair share" of the "available sex" in proportion to their 'needs' simply because they're "on the market" more often, though the difference is fairly small in any scenario that even remotely resembles reality.
4. Let's assume, as was the result of one of my scenarios (a probably exaggerated one, but useful for illustrative purposes), that an "average" man gets sex once every 12.5 days, and a "super-horny" man who 'needs' sex five times as often gets it once every 2 days. Shock! Somebody's getting 6.25 times as much as me! Must be hogging the women! Totally unfair!
5. However, it's only "unfair" from an absolute perspective, as if sex were a commodity which should be divided equally (and among the casual-sex crowd, as if the women should be divided equally) - but from a proportional perspective, while the hornier men are on the average slightly better off, they're also mostly not getting enough either.
6. I suspect a lot of the whiners have considerably below average sex drive, since they seem mostly willing to hold out for perfection despite the odds against it... if so, and if you altered reality to make things "fair" in an absolute sense for them, it would screw over almost all the other hetero males big time.
I had to look up what incel meant.
ReplyDeletehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Involuntary_celibacy
What a load of bollocks. Sure, being unlucky in love leads to depression; been there, done that. But that article paints it as some kind of syndrome.
As a classical, stereotypical case of the male incel (nice guy syndrome), I have four words for people who "suffer" this "condition": grow some fucking balls. I am not being condescending. Trust me, guys, I have been there for the vast majority of my adult life.
Involuntary celibacy may also lead an affected individual to have an existential crisis.
Dude. My entire life has been an existential crisis. I entered high school and became obsessed with my worthlessness and insignificance.
And despite that, I have grown balls. I have made the risk of asking someone out a few times, and I've succeeded. I know my standards are high (smart, thirst for knowledge, funny) but they aren't unrealistic, I haven't compromised them, and I have done it.
See, this here incel clawed his way out of that rut. To do that you have to stop blaming everyone but yourself, and change.
Oh, also:
Low-status heterosexual men may become involuntarily celibate due to polygamy and serial monogamy by high-status men, leaving a shortage of attractive, eligible, fertile women.[23]
...
What? Buh-what? WHAT? That... oh jeez. My head.
Low-status heterosexual men may become involuntarily celibate due to polygamy and serial monogamy by high-status men, leaving a shortage of attractive, eligible, fertile women.
ReplyDeleteSweet fucking Christ, that's obnoxious.
I love how the underlying assumption for PUA seems to be that all the men who are 'high status' have dozens of women who only sleep with them. IE, a harem. In modern American society, it doesn't fucking work like that. The vast majority of women (and men!) who are going to be faithful to one partner expect their partner to be faithful in return. Naturally, there are philanderers on either side of the gender line, but it's been my experience that all other things being equal women cheat just as often as men.
Every single guy I know who sleeps with multiple women on a regular basis isn't 'keeping them to himself'; all or most of his female partners also have multiple partners.
Owen - I know my standards are high (smart, thirst for knowledge, funny) but they aren't unrealistic,
ReplyDeleteThis reminds me that I have to do a post on the hoary old "blonde 25-year-old swimsuit model" that we all love to hate, and how she's the purview not of men who are jerks or socially-conforming, but of men who simply don't know what they want. It's the "I'll have what he's having" of sexual preferences.
Aebhel - It makes me think of how I've slept with a "high-status" type guy who's had 30 or 40 female partners.
Him, and 20-odd other people. It turns out that after I fucked him I still had a vagina.
I was on a message board where guys were whining that chicks aren't into casual sex as much as dudes are...and of course guys perceived this as women having all this power because, as one of them said, "women have sex and men want it". Like sex is a gold coin I carry around in my pocket.
ReplyDelete1) For me to have sex, I need a damn partner.
2) I (and a lot of other women I know) would be way more into casual sex if we weren't afraid of getting raped, getting pregnant, getting stigmatized as a slut, etc.
So the way I see it, if chicks aren't putting out it's mostly because so many guys are douchebags. :P
Actually club-and-college cultures in LA/NYC/DC feature pretty explicit harem-building. Anarchist, Punk, Hippie and Kink poly communities are probably much more egalitarian and probably more woman-friendly. The PUA cynics are right.
ReplyDeletePUA's aren't cynics, they're delusional asshats who would like to consider themselves cynics because it's a vast improvement over their actual personalities. They see that extremely attractive and/or wealthy men can get away with treating women like shit and think 'oh, well, clearly the way to a woman's heart is to treat her like shit'. They have a zero-sum approach to human relationships. They view sex as a commodity and woman as puzzles to be solved rather than fellow human beings.
ReplyDeleteI've been to NYC. I've been to LA and DC. I have good friends and/or family living in LA and NYC, and somehow all the men I know living in those locations manage to attract partners of their preferred gender without losing out to Mister Alpha Studmuffin's Arabian Nights-style harem.
Sexually active women who are not in relationships do not typically tie themselves down to one man who has a dozen other women on booty-call duty. This is the sort of crap PUA's tell each other to justify why nobody wants to fuck them.
I had to go back to Eurosabra's original comment in order to make any sense of this. I'm still not sure I really get it.
ReplyDeleteYes, if there's hetero sex taking place, by definition some dude and some chick are both getting laid. (This is also why significant gender differences in numbers of partners are impossible.) But that has little to nothing to do with the sensation of being ignored by women.
Feeling desirable is at least as much of a goal as actually getting laid. We all want a generous "wants to fuck me" circle on Holly's Venn diagram, no matter how small its overlap with the "I want to fuck" circle. And on that count, in my experience, women come out way ahead.
That's largely a product of our coulture: Men are trained to signal, and women are trained to look for signals; men may be bad at interpreting signals, and women may be worse at sending them. It's unreasonable to expect a different outcome, but what I understand rationally isn't much comfort when I feel like a sexual nullity.
(Rationally, again, I have nothing to complain about. But telling me shit like "some guys never get laid at all" is the equivalent of telling someone with a disappointing job that he could be working with a gun in his back for a bowl of rice a day. And that guy has access to career advice, networking, sample resumes, continuing education and so on that generally have no analog in the dating world. [Using the same analogy, PUAs are the real estate millionaires who show up on late-night TV offering to share their secrets with you.])
Yeah, I never did understood how people can be oblivious to the basic math that, if the ratio of men seeking women to women seeking men is 1:1, then finding a sex partner by definition can't be easier for women than for men.
ReplyDeleteI do think there's a difference between voluntary and involuntary celibacy, but it gets slippery when I try to define it. Was I involuntarily celibate during those times I didn't have a partner but wanted one? Did it become voluntary because I wasn't willing to commit 100% of my free time to looking for sex partners? Did it when I gave up trying at all?
I think one of the other things that goes on is that a lot of the complaining guys feel that there's no reliable way for them to go about finding a partner; the perception is that a woman can "put herself out there"--go to a bar, or a party, or on Craigslist--and provided they're willing to lower their standards enough have a very good chance of finding a partner, whereas a man who does this won't.
I'm not sure how true this is in general, but I will say that for most of my twenties I had a very difficult time finding partners, and I definitely wasn't looking for the "blonde 25-year-old swimsuit model." I just couldn't figure out what else I could be doing that I (and every other single guy around) wasn't doing already.
Eurosabra - What aebhel said; there's no city in the US where men commonly build harems. If a guy does have a lot of women on speed-dial (which most sexually active guys even in LA don't, and which shouldn't be your first goal if you don't have a sex life at all now), they most likely have a healthy speed-dial of their own.
ReplyDeleteI used to live in LA, man. There might be some weird rarefied culture of about 300 club kids who live that way (although frankly I doubt it), but the other 5 million guys there are largely Ordinary Guys with Girlfriends.
Bruno - If it helps, I'll fuck you any day I have time for the drive. Add one to that side of your Venn diagram and feel better. :p
Okay, so you are obviously not living in the same subcultures as I am in LA/NYC/DC, or women are following PUAs around to become part of their harems, or (most likely) both. So we are not looking at the same phenomena at all.
ReplyDeletePUA was invented to give men a reliable means of looking for partners, that it gives some of them a reliable means of getting partners is just icing on the cake.
Sorry, Eurosabra, but I need more than your reassurance to believe those harems exist. I should have encountered them at some point, or at least encountered someone who's encountered them. Instead, I know a handful of guys who practice PUA stuff, some of whom sometimes have a girlfriend.
ReplyDeleteThe distinction between seeking and finding partners is utterly lost on me too.
If we're going to talk about "REAL evo psych", I'd like to point out that the definition of a harem species in biology is one in which the male monopolizes more than one female by physically preventing other males from having any access, and her from going after it. It's not actually in a female's fitness interests, when more than one male is around and males have no minimal investment in raising, to be faithful to the harem-owner- it's in her interest to maximize the genetic diversity of her offspring and social ties within the larger group.
ReplyDeleteLions are a classic harem species; the only benefit the lionesses get from the males that happen to be the ones in her pride are a given time are a higher chance that that season of her cubs won't be killed off by a new invading male or coalition of males seeking to take over the harem.
Describing successful pickup artists as "harem owners" and then saying they are "overly invested" in rape culture when you have quite literally defined rape culture as the end of successful pickup artistry is not exactly a shining defense.
And if this culture of harem-owning men and women who apparently willingly follow them around giving them exclusive sexual access is a real one restricted to a specific subculture that you alone in a discussion group of diverse sexually active men and women have experienced... maybe you need to find a different fucking culture to participate in.
I have pretty extensive experience with the deformations Middle Eastern human societies undergo with REAL harem-building, and Western club-hopping mimics it closely enough that, by and large, urban men are accurate when they complain of woman-hoarding. What it really means is that there's a minimum social buy-in of money, coolness, or hipness to get laid at all, unless the women who speak your specific sociolect are willing to be flexible on those issues or are attracted to physically-average men. It's JDate writ large, where 80 percent of the attraction is leveled at 20 percent of the participants.
ReplyDeleteIt's more that feminism has described pick-up as rape culture, since approaching strangers is viewed as a sexualization of neutral social space, and hence rape, as in Kate Harding's famous "Schroedinger's Rapist" thread. I'd refer you to the famous Denise Romano for a not-particularly-convincing discussion of pick-up as rape.
Unless you want to enter into the subculture of "unattractive awkward people who avoid human contact" there is no other subculture than pick-up if you are trying to meet attractive strangers in the public sphere. You can match a few external identifiers like shoegazer or jock culture, but you still have to get them.
Eurosabra - woman-hoarding.
ReplyDeleteI am not a thing. A guy who's "hoarding" me isn't keeping me in his goddamn basement, he's dating me. My status isn't "withheld from other men," it's "happy with this man."
What it really means is that there's a minimum social buy-in of money, coolness, or hipness to get laid at all,
You know what, yeah. Wah wah wah, but you do have to have something to offer a partner, and that's not an injustice. I date guys because I like something about them, not because they exist and I owe everyone an even chance.
80 percent of the attraction is leveled at 20 percent of the participants.
No. This just ignores the whole Ordinary Guy with a Girlfriend phenomenon, where, really, 80 percent of the attraction is leveled at 80 percent of the participants, with tiny fractions of superstuds and superlosers on the fringes.
approaching strangers is viewed as a sexualization of neutral social space, and hence rape,
No, but talking like women are a pubic commodity of which you are unjustly deprived is a frequent precursor to rape.
Unless you want to enter into the subculture of "unattractive awkward people who avoid human contact" there is no other subculture than pick-up if you are trying to meet attractive strangers in the public sphere.
There's the subculture of being a person. Most guys aren't PUAs and most guys--just numberically out of everyone--have partners.
Seriously, look around you. About 90% of all Americans will get married eventually--and I don't think 90% of Americans are PUAs.
there is no other subculture than pick-up if you are trying to meet attractive strangers in the public sphere.
ReplyDeleteThis is the problem I was talking about; I don't mean to single you out, Eurosabra, but you're a good example of someone who just doesn't isn't aware of any other way to actively try to find a partner.
Seriously, look around you. About 90% of all Americans will get married eventually--and I don't think 90% of Americans are PUAs.
Holly, I see your point, but I'm not sure that "eventually will get married" is the best metric here, as it equates the person who's perfectly happy with their love life at all times and gets married to whom they want and when, and the person who endures miserable loneliness for years or even decades before eventually finding a partner. (And excludes those people who find a partner but don't marry them, but the point would remain even if we used "long-term relationship" or "relationship of their choice" rather than marriage.)
I don't know, I've just been sick of getting it from both sides: the "have nots" telling me that my experiences with loneliness and being single didn't count because I wasn't completely alone 100% of the time, and the "haves" telling me that it wasn't reasonable to want to meet someone interested in me more than once every few years.
Again, I don't think "lid for every pot" suits people with otherwise normal social lives who only find someone interested in them every few years. Fine-tuning your radar for detecting interest is a laudable goal, and as someone who was always an extrovert and always good at meeting strangers in public, I found pick-up brought my usual social rituals from the realm of "connecting with friends" to "connecting with potential significant others." I was also a lot nicer person back when I was more naive and assumed one of my friends would eventually be interested. I was also a lot more physically able and relatively economically privileged, too. I think Bookworm-type dry spells are a sort of "infra-pick-up" issue, in that I think JFP might have no trouble meeting people to be (possibly very close) friends with but getting someone romantically interested is a challenge.
ReplyDeleteNice typo on "public commodity."
Eurosabra - There isn't a lid for every pot. But there are a lot of lids and a lot of pots, and being unable to get lidded is a personal and social-skills issue, not a gender one.
ReplyDeleteThere are absolutely people who can't get laid--what I question is the assumption that this is a one-sided male problem with a gender-role-based solution.
"We all want a generous "wants to fuck me" circle on Holly's Venn diagram, no matter how small its overlap with the "I want to fuck" circle."
ReplyDeleteOh Jesus fuck no. No no no no no.
I want a small "wants to fuck me" circle. Tiny. A couple-few people tops. Maybe I'm being excessively literal about it, but anyone who gets their head to 'wants to fuck me' without clearing that want with me for okayness scares the everliving shit out of me. At best they should have the courtesy to not hassle me about it, if they're going to go there; I don't want to know unless we have the sort of relationship where such desires have been agreed to be appropriate.
I see plenty of attractive people in the world, even people I am at some level attracted to. I do not want to fuck most of them. Hell, I don't even know most of them.
It is a male problem because virtually all women will still be approached (a real problem for women who identify as asexual, lesbians, or gender separatists) whereas there is no similar dynamic for men. In a system dependent on male initiation of courtship, men will have to perform the male gender role in order to have any hope of success. For men who cannot, learning to perform this role is vital.
ReplyDeleteI do have the problem that rape culture is the noise-to-signal ratio of pick-up. Only if straight women were already safe to express their sexuality in an uninhibited fashion (for those who wish) would pick-up not face the problem of always being "too much" male desire in the public sphere, such that men would be willing to hang back and read signals. (Someone would signal interest often enough that the shortfall would not feel like NEVER being desired.) Until then, go read Hugo Schwyzer's post "On Never Feeling Hot."
Eurosabra - Lots of women don't get approached at all, actually. If a woman is not the "woman means young and attractive only" kind of woman, she most definitely won't be fending 'em off.
ReplyDeleteAlso, being approached only by people you don't find attractive is no help at all.
if straight women were already safe to express their sexuality in an uninhibited fashion
They still wouldn't fuck everyone who wanted them, because that's not just "inhibition."
Eurosaba, have you visited planet earth much? I don't know what dream world you live in but nothing you says reflects the reality of people I know personally, or young people I've observed studying and working on college campuses for the last 10 years.
ReplyDeleteI remember when I was young and stupid enough to hang out with douchebags, they would complain about exatly what you complain about. They were generally slovenly, didn't take care of their bodies or minds and both physically and mentally unattractive, but they whined that girls were never good enough, judged other women, and complained that women (who really were just plain too good for them) never approached them and always went out with richer or more attractive guys. Well you know what, most of those girls were actually going out with nicer, smarter, funnier, or sexier guys. By sexy I don't mean physically attractive, I mean actually emotionally and physically arousing in their mannerisms and actions.
If you're too lazy to try to meet women and see them as people, it's no wonder you're having trouble getting laid.
As I said, I'm an extrovert who has never had trouble meeting people, and my cynicism and over-investment in PUA culture has never been apparent to any woman who actually dated me, nor has any woman actually in a relationship with me ever given me less than rave reviews. Nor does anything other than my visible disability mark me out as different. If anything the problem is a combination of being seen as too aloof when I belong to a low-status-nerd subculture (subsidiary university employee) seen as too bland. I was a lot more pleasant person when I was more open and more naive and more trusting that one of my friends would eventually be interested, and now I'm both much more aggressively sexual and more acerbic, and I get laid. What I don't have is the godlike power over women that masculine, brutal men like Paul Janka (an old friend) develop, or the ten-women-doling-out-their numbers-a-day draw of my former roommate, Randy Josselyn. A minor TV role, half-forgotten, combined with immense physical beauty, will get you whatever you want.
ReplyDeleteI think i'd just point out that even though there are actually more men than women, as your statistics indicate, you present no analysis of the frequency distribution of getting laid; perhaps there are a few guys who get laid substantially more, and so the average joe perceives a drought. This isn't to say I think you're wrong; given my fairly recent past, I'm in no position to say "wah, girls get laid and guys don't". I'm just tossing in a viewpoint that should be countered because it is also incorrect.
ReplyDeleteEurosabra said, "I think JFP might have no trouble meeting people to be (possibly very close) friends with but getting someone romantically interested is a challenge."
ReplyDeleteBWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Geez, I let this place slide off the back end of "too much Internet, too little time," and look what happens.
Since you're talking individual examples/anecdotes (with names, yet!), Eurosabra, you might consider that JFP's approach is demonstrably more successful than yours.
I dunno, JFP's currently remaining unpaired AFAIK may make him happier than my current partnered status, and he may (technically speaking) spend less time and effort meeting people per pairing, but happiness is an individual issue.
ReplyDeleteEurosabra - SunflowerP is laughing because she's in a relationship with JFP...
ReplyDeleteYeah, but she's 48, unless her profile is lying, and he's 30-mumble, so by Roissy/PUA definition he's ipso facto a beta dating his mommy figure.
ReplyDeleteAgain, if they're happy, more power to them.
I'm probably someone's "mommy figure", but not JFP's, unless age difference alone, and not anything about the actual relationship dynamic, is the defining factor. Which has interesting implications if the age difference is in the other direction. I'd suggest, instead, that this might indicate a flaw in a definition that relies on universalizing a demographic statistic rather than on lived experience.
ReplyDeleteThat wasn't the only thing I was laughing about, though; I was also amused at the part about the purported challenge. Y'see, I don't depend on male initiation of courtship, and a good thing too, because I'm the one who ran across him in the blogosphere - I had to make some kind of first move or he wouldn't even have known I was there, much less that I wanted to get to know him better.
Of course that doesn't address his experiences other than this instance, but I'll let him speak to that if he wishes to do so.
also, per "no one will fuck me"-if you have the cash, baldly, you can pay someone to do it. If that's all you really want, I think it's a better solution than playing all these tortured games, frankly.
ReplyDelete