Susan Walsh, the slut-shaming, chart-making dating guru behind Hooking Up Smart, has made yet another chart! This time, it’s a flowchart attempting to diagram “the anatomy of a hookup.” While not quite as impressively incoherent as her infamous flowchart trying to explain the dire economic costs of sluttery, or as plainly incorrect as her diagram purporting to show that hot dudes get all the sex, this one is impressively daft nonetheless. I suggest you click here to see it full-size.
Well, I’ve followed all the various little arrows around on the chart, and as far as I can tell, her point is that if you have sex with someone, this may not result in true love for all time. There’s a shock. In other words, all these little boxes and arrows are intended to draw our attention to the fact that, as Cliff Pervocracy has put it, “every relationship does either end or continue. I salute your tautological genius.”
The other thing to notice about Walsh’s chart is that she apparently can’t conceive that people can remain friends, or even become friends, after sex. As Walsh loves to remind her female readers, having sex with someone doesn’t automatically make them fall in love with you. But it doesn’t make them automatically hate you or want to have nothing to do with you either.
So I present to you a somewhat more simplified hookup flow chart, which nonetheless manages to cover the possibility that people who hook up with one another can sometimes become friends afterwards.
Super Obvious Note: All friendships and relationships may at some point come to an end, or change into something else.
Despite the clear flaws of Walsh’s chart – it’s a strange mixture of obviousness and obliviousness — many of Walsh’s readers hailed it as a work of genius. One anonymous commenter wrote:
I don’t think there has ever been a better visual representation for the hookup that shows its futility from the woman’s point of view.
Sassy6519 agreed:
That diagram looks as pleasant as trying to cross a minefield.
And that, of course, is the real message Walsh is trying to get across with her (probably deliberately) muddled chart: hookups are scary!
As Walsh put it in a comment:
The point of the chart is really to highlight the odds of getting to dating via a hookup. Studies say 12% of the time. All those yellow and red boxes are just a visual representation of those odds.
Of course, in Wash’s vision, not “getting to dating” is apparently as bad for women as getting an STD, or finding out the guy you’re fucking is a feminist, or something.
Ian Ironwood agreed with her analysis, more or less, but urged his fellow dudes to exploit the situation for their own advantage:
Men are starting to learn their own value in the dating world. They’re beginning to learn Game and use women’s desire for a relationship as leverage. And that means that they’re raising their expectations (which sucks for feminists, who are constantly trying to lower women’s expectations of themselves while raising it for men) and getting a lot more canny about just who they want to spend their lives with.
Men are, indeed, the keepers of commitment. It’s the masculine equivalent of our “virtue”, our ability and willingness to ally ourselves with one woman (or just a few). Those fellas in the Puerarchy who are still hooking up like mad, y’all are the rest of that leverage. With Game-savvy PUAs pumpin’ & dumpin’ like it’s on sale, they provide a bleak alternative to pursuing commitment with a quality dude, which means his value as a high-status male goes up with his willingness to commit. But that also means his expectations of his future bride go up as well.
Guys, recognize your value to women, and use it to your advantage. Remember, a woman in a crappy relationship enjoys higher status in the Matrix than a woman without a relationship, all things being equal. They crave the validation they get from their female peers in the Matrix more than they even crave the romantic connection. That provides a tremendous amount of leverage for the dude who understands that.
Other dudes, nonetheless, still feel that women are too icky to deal with. Herb put it this way:
[I]f there is one lesson Game types and MRA should be pushing it is this:
“A man needs to be ridden by a woman as much as a bicycle needs to be ridden by a fish.”
And yes, I changed it from “have” to “ridden by” for a reason. In the combat dating era, especially in marriage 2.0, men are saddled and ridden too often.
You don’t need a woman in your life to be a man or be complete. …
If you physically need sexual contact there is no shame in deciding the way women have organized the current SMP is a losing game and just turn to the world’s oldest profession (which too many women let themselves become even if they don’t realize it)
You know, if you’re running a dating site ostensibly to provide useful information for young women, and your most enthusiastic commenters are either PUAs hoping to use that information to better exploit women, or MGTOWers looking for more excuses to denigrate and dismiss all women, maybe you’re doing something wrong.
Friend-of-Man-Boobz Ozymandias tried to inject some good sense into the discussion over there. Unfortunately, very little of it stuck.
EDITED TO ADD: I added a quote from Walsh.
1) I’m pretty sure that the relationship state machine isn’t necessarily deterministic (unless you include death but that doesn’t really fit in a machine with this narrow of a scope)
2)She doesn’t indicate what variables change to cause a change in state.
3)She should merge the duplicate states into single states that have many access points.
PS: I just made up the term “relationship state machine” and I sincerely hope it’s not a term that people use seriously.
PPS: Although, it might produce some interesting data to have people draw the “relationship state machine” to see how various people think relationships work.
The people at Hooking up Smart believe that all men want no strings attached sex, and that all women want long term, monogamous relationships. How then do they explain gay men that have long term relationships and marriages, or lesbians that prefer casual hookups?
I so need to incorporate that sentence into my daily life.
Also, the hell does “Round 2” mean? Is that a second hookup? If so, shouldn’t it be blue?
I guess she gets he point across, but it’s suboptimal and ignores a number of cases, I’d give it a C-
based on what we’ve seen from susan walsh, i would assume the answer is that they’re all already sicko deviants and no amount of flow charts can help those people
also, i love the dude over there who’s like ‘yeah, ozy, your poly, nonbinary lifestyle doesn’t seem to stop you from being a decent person but um… you’re an outlier!’
Yeah, I’m thinking the response would be “of course we were talking about straight people!”
Cause I mean, everything is about straight people. Duh. *fumes*
From the awful poem that cloudiah posted, “No need for love if love is just pleasure.” This is the problem, the idea that there is something wrong with “just” pleasure. It is like they are unclear on what the word pleasure means.
Right here is another important life lesson learned by observing MRAs: The more you plan and strategize and analyze dating, the harder it gets. Just talk to people! If you want to do stuff with them, ask them! It’s honestly that simple!
i actually like the first four stanzas of that poem, but after that it got awful real quick.
I thought NSA meant no sexual attraction. It seems a good reason for the sexual relationship to fade, or (less good reason) to dump the person. (why be mean?) But then, they could actually be friends afterwards.
But why would no strings attached lead only to fade or dump? You can develop love and attachment and even (gasp!) strings, otherwise known as plans to do stuff in the future together.
But then, why am I trying to see reason in a Walsh-o-Graph? It’s all based on stupid, non-existent absolutes. Men only, women only want X, where X is defined by her ass.
My favorite part is that, despite obviously manipulating the number of red vs green boxes with things like the “round 2” nonsense (why not include round 3? or rounds 4 through 10? If any of those go poorly you can point them to another scary red box!), she still fails to accurately represent the “statistic” she wanted to. About 30% of the boxes are green, over twice the scary, scary number she wanted to convey.
Just the fact that the poem was called “A Shining Pearl” was enough to make me hate it. I should be more forgiving, since I wrote TERRIBLE poetry as a child. I am so glad that was in the days before the internetz, so no one can dig it up to shame me with it.
Oops — child in the above should be teenager. My childhood poetry was rather good.
“men are saddled and ridden too often.”
*sigh* If only…….
/kinky sex pervert
@ BlackBloc Thanks for the clarification; I was worried that I communicated poorly.
If Susan Walsh or pop culture are to be believed then Seattle is a magical backwards fairy land populated by commitment happy men. Romantic comedies did not prepare me for this!
Why does the National Security Agency keep getting involved? That’s what I want to know.
katz: There is No Such Agency.
XD
So wait, does NSA mean No String Attached, No Sexual Attraction, or National Security Agency?
BlueBee is confused.
Also, I’m pretty sure her chart lacks probability.
Kyrie, Cliff: you guys don’t get it. The probability of each pair of outcomes for a given item on the chart is 50/50. YOU CAN TELL BECAUSE THE BOXES ARE THE SAME SIZE.
Duh.
[blockquote] If you let him do it, love you? He will! [/blockquote]
Is this supposed to be performed out loud? Because without visible punctuation, it’s going to sound like a line from Yoda Was My Wingman.
Another problem with this chart is that it doesn’t take into account that EVEN IF you actually are interested in dating, ‘fade’ isn’t necessarily a worse outcome than nothing. I ‘hooked up’, to use the parlance, with someone I knew online, and within about an hour of meeting her in real life, I was MASSIVELY crushing on her (I still am, she’s awesome!) and would have loved to be dating her. It wasn’t anything more than just-friends funtimes for her, so that didn’t happen, but I don’t regret the experience. It was fun! A lot of people don’t get the chance to have sexytimes with their crush like that, so I feel really happy that I got to.
Huh, I thought that was how you did quotes. Oh well.
Steph, just replace the square brackets with the angled ones (greater than/less than).
I don’t think Susan Walsh is all that bad, compared to the Spearhead, Manwomanmyth, Paul Elam, and the various psychos who follow their blogs. Unlike these guys, Walsh doesn’t actually HATE women. But I do think your chart is WAY better.
Um. I am kind of uncomfortable with people assuming this guy is conservative and/or sexist based on nothing more than him apparently not enjoying one-night stands. I can see criticizing the fact that he didn’t act for clarification before the sex started to make sure he and his partner were both on the same page, because it definitely makes much more sense to ask about such things in advance than to assume anything, but there’s a pretty big difference between “apparently took too long to communicate his expectations clearly” and “obviously thinks he should get to own people.” And, I mean, maybe he was a jerk about it – I can’t tell from the tiny bit of the story we got, but obviously if he was a jerk about it then that warrants criticism. I just don’t see anything in “we started to have sex, then I clarified what I wanted, and he said he didn’t want that, so we stopped having sex” that makes either party look like a bad person, and I am generally really, really, really uncomfortable with anything that criticizes people for stopping sex they don’t want for any reason.