but not in the way that you think

As all things in Hellworld do, it begins with a tweet. 

It may not need explanation, but the original post was in response to a discussion in which Ben Dreyfuss expressed his befuddlement that men even care at all about how many other men a woman has slept with. 

I find that something like this happens very frequently. Some extraordinarily out of touch person, usually a celeb, points to some human emotion or response that was, until only yesterday, not just reasonable, but practically universal, and says, “I just don’t even understand how someone could think this.”

Suddenly, people are put into the awkward position of having to defend very basic principles that they have gotten used to taking for granted. As a result, they tend to do a lot of stumbling when they make that defense because they probably aren’t very practiced at it.

I’ve gotten a fair amount of practice though, so I’m going to explain why this entire discourse is ridiculous in a way that hopefully will allow people to stop getting turned around by all of the bad faith and manipulations that go into the topic.  

The salient detail that is always ignored inside of this discourse is that there are two essential categories of men involved in this discussion and they can be distinguished by what they are attempting to get out of the relationships they pursue with women. 

The first type we could call the Teds. 

TED

Ted is ultimately looking for love, and not just love, marriage. He wants to be a husband to a wife and he wants his marriage to be a good one. Maybe he thinks of it mirroring his parents’ marriage which he remembers fondly from his childhood, or maybe he saw his parents’ marriage fail and imagines and longs to do it right. The point is that Ted is on the level, and in this one respect (if no other) Ted is exactly the kind of man that marriage-minded women are looking for. But in all other regards, Ted is pretty average. Maybe a little above average, but he is certainly no 10% man. 

Ted may and probably does often approach sex promiscuously in this same “no strings attached” way as it is socially encouraged, and to this extent, he truly is hypocritical when it comes to his concerns about the number of men his partner has been with. 

But this is because, on some level, he believes that sex is different from eating a good meal or enjoying a dance with someone, that it is something that bonds people together and forms a core of romantic relationships that people may have with one another. And when he thinks of making a long term commitment to one woman, he has an idea of the space that he wants to occupy in her thoughts and history and he knows that this is compromised by her affairs with other men. 

He knows that whether she even means to do so, she will compare him to her other sexual partners, and will think about them in relation to her current sex life with him. He also has enough self-awareness to understand that he is no superhero in the bedroom, that as a simple matter of fact, there are men that are better sexual partners than him, and that if a prospective wife has been with those men, and even more so if she sought them out for this exact reason, then it affects how he would feel about his relationship. 

But Ted will probably not talk about this openly because he is likely to know that if he does he will be called “insecure.” 

Insecurity

Insecurity is a funny concept in our culture because it is often sexually dimorphic. If a man does something that is coded as insecure, it is read as a moral or psychological failure. It is either something to be shamed or something to be treated, but rarely something to be treated seriously. 

If a man were to honestly state that his partner’s sexual history makes him insecure, he would likely be told something to the effect that he has no right judge things that his partner did prior to their relationship, or that he needs to trust that she is with him because she wants to be and that this should prevent him from being bothered by her prior history. He will be reminded that “trust is the foundation of a healthy relationship” and the implication will be that by even asking the question, he has sabotaged what would otherwise have been a successful relationship.

It’s interesting that both of these are essentially moral impositions (and false ones). It is simply untrue that we cannot or should not judge a person for past actions, there is no basis for saying so and the fact that anyone finds this convincing is frankly incredible. As for the importance of trusting a partner, yes, trust is a good thing to have in a relationship; however, it does not follow that all relationships merit trust. 

Trust is a thing that either exists or does not based on the shared history of the individuals involved. A person can make an argument that they have shown characteristics and behaviors that make them worthy of trust, and to the extent that they’re right, they would have good reason for arguing that a partner’s lack of trust was unreasonable and might legitimately point to some defect in their reasoning or personality. HOWEVER, if the thing being discussed is a behavior that has made trust less reasonable, then complaining that trust should be given anyway because it’s good for a relationship is the reasoning of an idiot.

I feel silly explaining this, but I have seen enough public examples of people failing to navigate this simple logic that I am convinced it’s necessary. Trust is something you either do or don’t have based on whether you’ve earned it. If a person can make a compelling argument that they have earned trust and are not being given the trust that they have earned, then it’s legitimate to say that the lack of trust signals some problem with the other party. But when the thing under discussion is a behavior that has a direct negative impact on trust, arguing that you should be given trust anyway because it’s a necessary component of a relationship is obnoxiously stupid.

All of this is made doubly ironic by the fact that women often advise each other not to be honest about their body count. Ladies, why don’t you TRUST your partners enough to give them that information? “Seems pretty insecure. Who hurt you? lmao!”

Both cases serve to illustrate how even men’s legitimate insecurities are hand-waved away. Whereas, in the case of women and girls, insecurity is a matter of the utmost importance. We hear constantly about the need to abolish toxic beauty standards that are “harming” women and girls. We are told that we need to be “body positive” and affirm people’s gender identities for the same reason.

The entire point of Naomi Wolf’s The Beauty Myth (a book that propelled her to instant stardom and may have been as influential as Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique) was that the insecurity that women experienced due to social beauty standards were so harmful that society itself needed to radically altered in order to amend it.

And today, we see everywhere the results of a society-wide social engineering project aimed at eliminating the insecurity of women. If women are insecure, it is a social and moral evil. If a men are insecure, it’s always a personal problem.  Even the fact that many women are manifestly insecure about their body counts is not held against them in the way that it is for men. Predictably, it is held as a sign that society is patriarchal and must be altered. C’est la vie.    

All this obvious hypocrisy notwithstanding, Ted still keeps most of this to himself. It’s not just the possibility of social shaming. He’s been so thoroughly conditioned by three generation’s worth of cultural propaganda that he can scarcely admit these things to himself. Ted’s an “enlightened” man of the 21st Century. He believes in women’s bodily autonomy. He may or may not call himself a feminist, but he would probably own most if not all all of their more common political and cultural positions if you asked him. This, to him, is just being a decent person.

And so he struggles to admit that he does actually care about the number of people a prospective wife might have been with. But these truths continue to exert their influence from the shadows of his unconscious.

Maybe it comes out as him maintaining a certain distance in his relationship or being withholding from his girlfriend or wife, or (and this is probably the most likely and commonplace of the options) maybe he just never commits. Maybe he strings a woman along for years without ever marrying her. Since women complain about exactly this behavior frequently, I would think that they might be interested in the reasons why it happens. 

The No Marriage Situation

There’s a old stand-up by Patrice O’Neal that I often back to in which he explains all of this pretty well. I’ll include the clip, but here’s the gist. A man may be sexually attracted to a woman without having whatever is required to be sexually attractive to her. No one objects to this and it is considered incontrovertibly true that a woman should be able to choose her sexual partners based on whatever standard she chooses. However, there seems to be some cognitive stumbling when it comes to acknowledging the very obvious other side of this coin:

Men get to choose who they are going to commit themselves to by whatever standard they choose.

“Just because I’m loveable,” continues O’Neal, “doesn’t mean you’re lovable too…You didn’t do for me what I did for you to make you feel that way.”

In the consent-based moral paradigm that we embraced along with the Sexual Revolution, there is literally no legitimate complaint against men refusing to give women the commitments that they think they are entitled to. All the complaining that we see is based on moral confusion in which one set of moral axioms is applied to one situation and a different set is applied to the other.

STEVEN

But when we focus on Ted, we’re leaving out the other half of the conversation. We’ll call him Steven, for no particular reason.

Steven is not at all insecure, and if Ted were to publicly voice his discomfort with body counts, Steven would be one of the first and loudest in saying that Ted is simply afraid that he “doesn’t measure up.” But saying this, Steven makes it appear as if by being less insecure than Ted, he does a better job of “measuring up” (this is the language that is always used for obvious reasons) than Ted does and this is the reason that Ted is insecure and Steven is not. Ted’s admission of insecurity actually lowers his value and attractiveness as a man for exactly the same reason that he was insecure in the first place. 

But Steven is no sexual virtuoso either. He is, in fact, substantially worse in this regard than Ted. If compared along this one axis, Ted would actually come ahead of Steven by a wide margin. However, this fact does not impact Steven because he regards sex and the people that he has it with in an altogether different manner than Ted.

For Steven, sex is a purely hedonic activity. He may occasionally see it as playing some part in bonding, but he is more likely to think of it as akin to mutual masturbation. And his partners are just momentary dance partners. His performance is not of any serious importance because, to the extent that he can secure other dance partners (even if that requires him to share sexual videos of other people without their consent to a 19yo OnlyFans pornographer) he has little concern with any of them.

This is why he’s not insecure when it comes to the number of previous partners his partner has been with. As long as he gets his from the sexual encounter, it is practically irrelevant how he measures up to her other partners. She simply does not matter enough to him to care. 

Collectively, though, women seem to have a difficult time understanding this. Some of them have even become so confused that they have convinced themselves that carrying about body count is the mark of a fuckboy.

It is literally the opposite. Fuckboys don’t care at all about your body count. Why would they? They aren’t invested in you. They have no intention of staying with you–that’s what makes them what they are.

Why This Conversation Stays Retarded

My assessment is that the general public does not want to acknowledge the realities involved here. There is a plurality of groups that are leveraging social approval to pressure men into outwardly approving of women’s “right” to be sexually liberated. This occurs because our culture is currently very uncomfortable with imposing any restraints on female self-interest out of a fear of being “patriarchal.” And it is also true that a lot of the men who care about women’s body counts really are hypocritical in their approach to the sexual marketplace and should be condemned for their hypocrisy. However, no amount of social shaming or accusations of hypocrisy are going to get men to make commitments to women. What we wind up with is yet another game-theory defection cascade — a scenario in which both groups pursuing their maximal self-interest leads to a breakdown in cooperative behavior from the other parties and less optimal outcomes for everyone. 

Most women want to be in loving committed relationships with men, but do not want to acknowledge that their actions vis a vis promiscuous sex may work against that desire. Because of this, they are driven to put pressure on men to outwardly approve of their promiscuity and right to do what they want with their bodies, while suppressing any discussion of men’s preferences with shaming tactics like calling them “insecurities.” The fuckboys are then happy to endorse this because it makes it easier for them to get what they want.

People often fail to see how social norms may work against desired social outcomes, or how existing ideals may be the result of sophisticated social arrangements. I suspect that many of those people who eagerly embraced the Sexual Revolution didn’t think that the new norms that they wished to impose on society would negate the possibility of committed marriages. There is generally a certain level of optimism during these changes which imagines that because the imagined future will be so much brighter than the benighted past, the people of that future will also be superior and less likely to respond to selfish incentives. The reality is of course that anything that moves the cultural dial in the direction of individualism will make people more self-interested and more likely to respond to these kinds of incentives. 

In the current arrangement, both sexes want to have their cake and eat it too. Women want to have a period of sexual freedom and experience and not be judged for it when they come to the end of that period and wish to “settle down” with a man who is willing to offer them the same level of commitment that men of a previous generation offered their mothers. Men, on the other hand, want to enjoy (and on one hand encourage) the advantages of a sexually libertine female population (and add to it whenever possible) while still being able to select a relatively chaste partner when the time comes. 

What would be best for both groups is to acknowledge that to the extent that they desire or think they may at some point in the future will desire a committed sexually exclusive relationship, they need to quit their involvement in the sexually promiscuous dating market. The advantages of sexual restraint are well-documented. However, this realization has so far been avoided by trying to offload the consequences of female promiscuity onto men by shaming them for having preferences against it. At the same time, men continue to participate in the for-the-streets-ifying of massive numbers of women. And though the research that I’ve seen suggests that men may have more sexual partners than women before their ability to pair bond is significantly degraded, the difference isn’t large. 

Neither sex is more wrong than the other. If this debate were allowed to proceed naturally, both parties would quickly realize that securing what they desire from the other sex requires them to restrain their own sexual behaviors. However, since the 2010s we have seen the rise of an entire cottage industry of cultural propagandists devoted to suppressing any critical discussion of women’s behaviors. In this they have been aided by men who would like to benefit from the open sexual marketplace that sex-positive feminism encourages and others who are simply not intelligent enough to understand the score and are guided by a well-meaning but ultimately stupid sense of boomer chivalry. 

The situation will continue to degrade until all of these perverse interests are recognized and booted from the conversation.