Happy Halloween! The LA Times has decided to celebrate the unholiest of holidays with a convoluted op-ed from conservative ideologue Charlotte Allen using Halloween as an excuse to bash both sluts and slutwalks. Because, you know, if you dress like a slut – whether to protest rape or to go to a Halloween party – it’s like you’re begging to be raped. Bad feminists! Bad Halloween revelers dressed as sexy nurses!
Here are a few of the more coherent passages from the piece:
[T]he SlutWalk feminists are in denial of a reality that is perfectly obvious to both the women who favor “sexy” for Halloween parties and (although perhaps not consciously) the SlutWalkers themselves. The reality is that men’s sexual responses are highly susceptible to visual stimuli, and women, who are also sexual beings, like to generate those stimuli by displaying as much of their attractive selves as social mores or their own personal moral codes permit. … It’s no wonder that SlutWalks have quickly outstripped (as it were) Take Back the Night as anti-rape protest. Women get another chance besides Halloween to dress up like prostitutes!
Just watch out, ladies, because dressing sexy is like waving a red flag in front of a bull, with your wallet hanging out!
[T]he vast majority of rape victims are under age 30 — that is, when women are at their peak of desirability. …
[T]he fact that rapists tend to target young women rather than grandmotherly types suggests that in the real rape culture (in contrast to the imaginary rape culture of some feminist ideology), the faux-hos of Halloween and their SlutWalker counterparts marching in their underwear — like a man walking at night with a bulging wallet — should be careful about where they flash their treasure.
So thank you, Charlotte Allen, for once again showing just why the Slutwalks are necessary in the first place.
Jill at Feministe has an excellent response to Allen’s nonsense, which points out that while, yes, younger women are more likely to be victims of rape,
Younger people are also the most likely group to be the victims of aggravated, non-sexual assault. … In fact, younger people are victimized by violent crime more often than older folks as a general rule. A person between the ages of 12 and 24 is six times more likely to be the victim of a robbery than a person over the age of 50; about half of people who report being the victims of aggravated assault are under the age of 25. Men are much more likely than women to be the victims of violent crime. In every age group, black people are the most likely to be the victims of violent crime.
So yes, it is true that younger women are more likely to be targeted for sexual assault than older women. But it’s not because of The Sexy — unless hormones and hard-ons are what are causing criminals to choose their (mostly male) targets for robbery and assault also.
So, really, the only really safe costuming strategy for young people on Halloween, regardless of gender, is to dress up like an old white lady. Might I suggest Dame Judi Dench?
Probably not interested in dating dudes from The Spearhead
Newsflash from the frontlines of the gender war: Apparently some of the ladies are getting tattoos!
Luckily for us, The Spearhead is on the case. In a recent post titled “Ruminations from Seat 22D,” Spearhead guest poster Lyn87 reported on an encounter with one of these ghastly creatures:
I recently took a long trip for work and spent a lot of hours in the air. One of my fellow passengers really stood out in my mind: a 20-something lass a few rows ahead of me. She is a natural-born beauty in that “launch a thousand ships” kind of way – slim, near-perfect symmetrical features, piercing blue eyes, and a shapely body. She is, simply, stunning. But there’s more to this story than a retired soldier admiring an exquisite example of female flesh young enough to be my daughter.
Well, we’re off to a really creepy start here.
It was actually her tattoo that first caught my attention.
Oh, that’s where we’re going. This is going to be one of those “women with tattoos are whores” kind of story.
She was wearing a low-slung top that revealed a HUGE eagle inked across her chest and extending down under the front of her shirt. And then I noticed her hair – what little there was of it. I’ve always kept my hair short, even by military standards, and her hair was shorter than mine.
Tattoos and a short haircut! Excuse me for a moment; I think I’m getting the vapors.
Few things de-feminize a woman more than buzzing off her hair, which is why it is considered to be shameful in many societies. She was wearing ratty, ripped jeans and far too much costume jewelry.
I can’t believe we let women leave the house in such attire.
And then I noticed the piercings.
Not the piercings!
As I stood six inches behind her for several minutes waiting to de-plane I counted seven, and that was just what was visible. I wondered what else she had done to herself. A tramp-stamp is a given, but who knows what other “body art” was hidden out of my view.
We can only imagine. Some Matisse prints? A mural in the style of Diego Rivera? A reproduction of Michelangelo’s David? One of the plates from Judy Chicago’s Dinner Party?
[M]en like me, the kind of man women say they want – responsible, courteous, masculine, respectable, upwardly mobile – [avoid] women like her even as long-term girlfriends, let alone wives.
I’m pretty sure that women like her — or like most women — are not much interested in men who are not only old enough to be their father but who also read The Spearhead.
[I]a person goes to great lengths to project a certain persona, especially in a way designed to attract attention, it says something about him/her. I asked myself what would cause the stunningly-beautiful young woman on my flight – at the height of her Sexual Market Value – to do that to herself? Women dress for us, so what does she intend for us to infer? I’m easy? I’m rebellious? I can drink you under the table?
Maybe: “If you’re the sort of misogynist creep who’s going to jump to weird conclusions about my character based on my tattoos, my piercings, and even on the length of my fucking hair, and then write about it at length on a site overflowing with similarly misogynist creeps, I’d rather not have anything to do with you?”
But Lyn87 seems unable to understand why anyone would want to send such a message:
I can think of no message that her chosen facade would convey that would be in her long-term interest. In a few years after her looks fade she is likely to be just another tatted-up skank wondering where the good men are.
Wherever these “good men” are, I’m pretty sure they aren’t reading or writing for The Spearhead.
It didn’t have to be this way. In a different social environment a woman like her would have learned to be (gasp!) feminine. She would have observed the older women in her surroundings and absorbed benevolent patriarchy in the air she grew up breathing.
Oh lord.
With her beauty she could have married above her economic station and lived a comfortable life. We can’t know if she would have been happy, but she almost certainly would have had stability, security and comfort.
Hey, who needs happiness when you’ve got patriarchy!
But she doesn’t live in that society; she lives in a “Slut Walk” society, thanks to feminism. When she chose the “Suicide Girl” look nobody stopped her.
Um, who exactly is supposed to stop her from dressing and looking how she likes?
Now she has mutilated herself with enough ink and metal trinkets to repel the kind of man most likely to give her the life she wants, because no matter what she does to the outside of her body, she will eventually want what women have always wanted on the inside – stability, security and comfort.
Hmm. Could it be that she’s not actually interested in the life a man could “give her,” and perhaps more interested in the sort of life she can, you know, give herself?
The fruits of feminism: what a waste.
Only if you’re a narcissistic misogynist who thinks the world revolves around his preferences.
Next up on The Spearhead: Airline peanuts — Tool of they Gynofascist Matriarchy?
According to some MRAs, this guy doesn't care about rape
Ugh. No jokes this time, just an appalling little exchange on Reddit’s Men’s Rights subreddit. First, a Redditor called xbyiu offers some unsolicited, and pretty pig-ignorant, thoughts about SlutWalks. The basic thesis:
Personally, I think a lot of feminists just don’t care about rape victims. They’d much rather see women as a whole being a victim of the patriarchy and fight against that sort of abstract idea then deal with the reality of rape, which can be fought against with simple tips on how to protect yourself.
Hold on; it gets worse.
To this the r/mr regular EvilPundit replied (in a comment that, last I checked, had gotten three times more upvotes than downvotes):
I’d go even further, and say that many feminists love rape. For them, it’s a perfect way to demonise men in general.
If rape didn’t exist, feminism would invent it. In fact, feminism does invent a lot of rape, with its imaginary statistics such as “1 in 4”, and so on.
In other words, feminists don’t really want to prevent rape. But most rape is imaginary. So feminists are trying to not prevent something that doesn’t much happen anyway. Brilliant.
A note on the “1 in 4” thing: EvilPundit’s insinuation that it’s an “imaginary statistic” is a common MRA talking point. It’s not imaginary, but it’s not quite accurate either. The one-in-four number comes from a study conducted in the 80s by researcher Mary Koss: based on a detailed survey of college women, she found that roughly one in four of her respondent had been a victim of rape or attempted rape since the age of 14. This is often simplified – and distorted – into “one in four female college students are raped while in college.”
In fact, Koss’ survey found that one in eight college women answering her survey, not one in four, had been the victim of completed rape. Other studies have reported numbers not far off from this. The National Violence Against Women Survey, for example, found that roughly one in six of female respondents reported being the victim of rape in their lifetime.
The fact that some people have misrepresented Koss’ study doesn’t mean that her findings are “imaginary.”
I’m not even sure why I’m writing all this, given that as a feminist I presumably don’t care at all about rape.
The SlutWalks have not just driven many MRAs to distraction; they’ve also driven one of the bloggers at the Gates of Vienna to set aside her usual Islam-bashing for a few moments to take on the awful bullies marching in the SlutWalks. Yes, bullies, for how else can we describe young women who go out of their way to highlight their foul sexiness whilst denying their bodies to the helpless males who happen to catch sight of them?
According to the blogger who calls herself Dymphna:
Women who walk around in slutty clothing in order to “voice” their opinion about male sexual aggression are indeed acting out a hugely immature power trip. … Call it for what it is. Strutting your stuff and daring anyone to stop you isn’t real freedom. It’s a sneaking, sadistic bully-girl game.
So evil is the behavior of these slutbullies that if any man decides, upon catching sight of one of them, to grope or otherwise assault her, well, she’s at least as much to blame as the dude who lays his hands on her.
If the act of strutting your stuff results in an equal reaction, a girl must take at least half the responsibility for whatever transpires as a result.
Dymphna seems to mean this quite literally, suggesting that a slut who gets assaulted should be charged
as an accessory before the fact — i.e., if some dolt grabs her, then at the very least she is his partner in crime. And the offense in which they both participate is a serious transgression against civil order. Sadistic provocation is a breach of the peace.
Ironically, Dymphna the blogger has apparently named herself after Saint Dymphna, a 7th century Irishwoman who, legend has it, was murdered by her father after she refused to marry him.
In the light of Dymphna the blogger’s airtight logic, we have to wonder if Saint Dymphna was wearing something really, really slutty. I mean, what else could have inspired her father’s foul desires?
No need to dilly dally around with jokes; let’s just get right into it:
One of the most controversial subjects in America’s churches today is pants on women; but there is NO controversy if you believe the Bible. 1st Timothy 2:9 clearly instructs women to dress MODESTLY, i.e., of good behavior. A woman’s clothing says MUCH about her character. I guarantee you that women who approve of abortion (i.e., murder) also see no problem with women wearing pants.
Except, one presumes, while they are getting these abortions.
At this point the author, one David J. Stewart, quotes disapprovingly from a song by rapper Chingy, also on the subject of pants, specifically jeans. I won’t bother to quote all of the lyrics; you can get the gist of Chingy’s thesis from this brief excerpt:
Damn Girl
How’d you get all that in
Dem Jeans
Dem Jeans
Here’s the video, if you wish to double-check this transcription.
Stewart continues:
Only a rebellious woman, who deliberately disobeys the Word of God, would wear pants. … Pants on women are adulterous in nature, and cause men to lust and sin. Jesus made this clear in Matthew 5:28, “But I say unto you, That whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart.” Women who wear pants deliberately cause men to lust, and commit the sin of adultery. …
The average person today scoffs at the idea that Rock-n-Roll, Satanism, and immoral sex go hand-in-hand, but they certainly do. When Rock-n-Roll came to America, so did pants on women become mainstream. Naturally, feminism, witchcraft, abortion, and homosexuality came as well. Rock-n-Roll is straight from the pits of Hell. ALL rock-n-roll women wear pants.
Ah, but it turns out we haven’t really wandered too far from the manosphere after all – and not just because of the mention of feminism. No, what strikes me about Stewart’s argument – aside from the fact that it is completely batshit – is that it is not really very different than the arguments advanced by the critics of the Slutwalks: that the “immodest” dress of women causes men to “lust and sin.”
One of the most common complaints I’ve seen in the writings of the antifeminist slutwalk critics is that women want to “do what they want to, and dress how they want to, without facing any consequences,” as if women who dress in ways these men find arousing have in fact committed some sort of sin that requires punishment from, if not God himself, then from the rapists of the world.
The slutwalk critics invariably insist they’re simply passing along useful advice to women – don’t dress slutty or you’ll get raped – but the talk of “consequences” (and the choice of that word) shows pretty clearly that the real impetus behind the strangely vehement attacks on the slutwalks is the desire to punish women for dressing, and more importantly, doing “what they want.”
Say what you will about the folks behind Jesus-is-Savior.com, but at least their position on the evils of pants is consistent with their overall fundamentalist ideology. The slutwalk critics don’t really have an excuse.
EDITED TO ADD: And, conveniently enough, here’s some douchebag on Reddit making this exact slut-shaming “argument.” Pro-tip: I don’t think “responsibility” means quite what you think it means, dude.
Ah, Reddit, always reliable.
Thanls, ShitRedditSAys, for pointing me to this. And to MFingPterodactyl for the sensible response.
The dude at What Men Are Saying About Women – you may recall him as the inventor of the MRA two-dot period – remains my favorite illiterate MRA blogger. To be fair, the illiteracy is really just the icing on the cake of his ridiculous opinions. In a recent post he wrote about a new study that purports to show that there is more sex in countries with greater gender equality. (Probably true; the study itself, probably bullshit.)
Here’s the two-dot blogger trying to make some sort of point about it all:
Feminists have always promoted shagging as some type of recommended behaviour that should be allowed at random without limitation or indeed have any limits attached to it. Probably explains why most of the feminist mangina sites have little tags like “I support Porn” or “I support BDSM” as they would heartily agree that the promotion of free sex on demand would allow them unlimited access especially if there is a feminist female involved. Brainwashing does apparently have it positive side..
What surprises me the most is the lack of information concerning sexually transmitted diseases of all types. Those nasty disease like HIV or those others that munch your body at random. Not really something you want to be told after a night of debauchery with some slut feminist ( they promote themselves to be sluts now) willingly spreads her legs for some horizontal tango..
So apparently having more sex is bad because feminists..
And then you get AIDS..
And sentences should always be ended with not one but two periods..
Oh dear. The Spearheaders are talking about the Slutwalks again. The discussion may be the worst on the subject that I have run across so far. Some of the lowlights:
They’re high functioning children with sexual power and they don’t want you to forget it. They’re outraged that just because a young woman dresses and acts in a sexually provocative manner, that she might receive unwanted attention from young men that don’t appeal to her.
She should be able to dress like a street whore and abuse alcohol to the point of delerium and they feel compelled to lecture us on how that doesn’t mean this is an advertisment to be sexually harrassed, sexually assaulted or heaven forbid raped. …
They want the “RIGHT” to dress as sexually provocative as they want to without being constantly annoyed by lowly beta males. They’d prefer you not “sexually victimize” them, unless you’re hot and they’re into you, then it’s totally OK. …
Remember this: She didn’t bother to get dressed up for the likes of YOU. Her hope was a worthy athelete or Hollywood star might notice her and talk to her; not some weak, pathetic loser …
“We’ve got the sexual power, the power of consent, the gate keeper of the holy vaginal crevice. See our bouncing propped up cleavage, our long legs and glorious ass protruding from those heels? You want it don’t you?
….ha, ha, ha…you can’t have it because I SAY SO! Because I have THIS power over you, lowly little man. Bow down to me and beg me a little, I might even let the others see me talking to you, without calling the cops.” …
This isn’t feminism, it’s flaunting female sexual power in the faces of men.
You’re seriously complaining that woman have the “power of consent!?” EVERYONE has the power of consent. No one male or female is obliged to have sex with anyone they don’t want to. That’s, you know, rape. It bothers you that women are the “the gate keeper[s] of the holy vaginal crevice?” Who the fuck else should be the gatekeeper of a person’s vagina other than the person whose vagina it is? The mind reels. But apparently the 50+ upvoters of this piece of abhorrent nonsense aren’t bothered by any of this.
While perusing FB last week I came across the newest deviation of this mentality which is going topless. … And they want to cry about rape? They need to cry but only because people said enough is enough and started to belt them on their asses.
Women need to be controlled and on a very, very short leash. They’ve been given every right, every option, every opportunity to be something and what do they do with it? Abuse and manipulate it with reckless abandonment and incessant demands.
I wouldn’t worry too much about these Slutwalk sows.
They have no redeeming features. None.
They cannot figure out that if you dress like a whore, you deserve to be treated in a disrespectful manner. Even conservatively dressed mentally retarded women can figure this out and conduct themselves with more propriety and intelligence than these Slutwalkers … .
Rape is now the extra tax women charge men if some how their unsatisfied with whatever arrangement was made before or after any encounter in or outside of marriage.
Demirogue (in a second comment) complaining that “overvalued pussy is all [women today] have to offer and only to certain men.”
Anonymous age 69 explaining that “rape laws were intended to protect women of good character, from being sexually violated,” not “to protect promiscuous sluts .”
And more, much, much more. Many of the worst (including most of those quoted here) have many dozens of upvotes. Go read the thread yourself, if you think you can stomach it.
There are no arguments to rebut here; I can only repeat the basic message that the slutwalks are trying to convey: no one deserves to be raped, no matter what they are wearing or how much consensual sex they engage in. Even if they show some cleavage or prefer athletes and/or rocks stars to so-called beta males.
Let’s say you’re a young, horny, lonely heterosexual guy. You’re walking to the store to buy some, I dunno, pretzels, and you see the woman of your dreams walking arm in arm with some hideous toad of a man. You say to yourself: how is it that a nice guy like me can’t find any girl who will return my phone calls, while ugly boy here seems to have won the girlfriend jackpot? If you’re Joe Jackson, you write a song about it:
Pretty women out walking with gorillas down my street
From my window I’m staring while my coffee grows cold
Look over there! (Where?)
There’s a lady that I used to know
She’s married now or engaged or something so I’m told
Is she really going out with him?
Is she really gonna take him home tonight?
Is she really going out with him?
‘Cause if my eyes don’t deceive me,
There’s something going wrong around here
A lot about the world seems desperately wrong when you’re young, horny and alone. But maybe in this case there is something that you’re missing. Maybe the ugly dude is charming as fuck. Maybe he’s a brilliant thinker. Maybe he’s awesome in bed. Maybe she’s shallow and materialistic, and she likes him just because he’s rich. Or maybe there’s nothing redeeming about the guy – intellectually, sexually or financially — and the woman in question simply has horrendous taste in men. It could be any of these things.
But here’s the thing: no matter how wounded you feel, whom this woman goes out with is really none of your business. She doesn’t have to have a good reason to be going out with him. It’s not your call. The world doesn’t owe you a hot girlfriend, and this particular woman has the inalienable right to go out with whoever she chooses, even if you personally feel ill at the thought of them doing it. Women you find attractive aren’t obliged to date men you think are appropriate for them.
A lot of guys in the manosphere seem to have hung on to this young-man’s anger and sexual jealousy. But instead of somehow turning their resentment into a catchy song, and then moving away from the rock world to a more jazz-inflected sound, these men cultivate their resentments. And talk about them endlessly.
Soon they’ve developed the uncanny ability to demonize any woman who makes any romantic choice – other than picking them. If a “hot” women is dating an ugly dude, well,
He must be rich! All women are filthy golddigging whores! She’d never give a decent, hardworking beta like me a second look!
If the same woman is dating a conventionally handsome man, the reaction can be just as strong:
She’s a shallow bitch! They always go for the alphas! She’d never give a decent, hardworking beta like me a second look!
Weirdly, a lot of manosphere dudes also get angry about the sexual and romantic choices of women they aren’t interested in at all. If a woman they don’t think is all that hot is with a conventionally handsome man, it’s still the woman to blame:
Ha! She’s punching above her weight class, looks-wise. I guess any bitch can get laid, while a hard-working beta like me doesn’t even rate a second look. But eventually he’ll dump her and I will laugh and laugh. Live it up now, bitch, because you’re going to end up alone with a bunch of cats!
This is the thing that’s weirdest to me. Getting worked up about a woman you like who’s dating a loser? I can understand that. I did that, a lot, in my twenties. But quite a few manosphere dudes – and women like Susan Walsh who are manosphere-adjacent – seem somehow deeply affronted by the notion that any women could hook up with a man either lower or higher on that universal 10-point hotness scale so beloved by PUAs and other manosphere dudes.
Walsh speaks of “equilibrium” in the “sexual marketplace” (or SMP as she and her fans like to abbreviate it), and seems to consider any deviation from it to be a moral failing – of the women involved. (The slut-shaming is strong with this one.) Her idea of “equilibrium,” as I mentioned in my last post on her, is one in which fives date fives, tens date tens, and female sixes and sevens know better than to try to get the attention of male eights and nines by wearing low-cut dresses and “slutting it up.”
But here’s the thing. If you’re going to try to mix economic terminology into your dating advice, it helps to actually know what the terms mean. Market equilibrium, as Wikipedia handily summarizes it,
refers to a condition where a market price is established through competition such that the amount of goods or services sought by buyers is equal to the amount of goods or services produced by sellers. This price is often called the equilibrium price or market clearing price and will tend not to change unless demand or supply change.
Guess what? Insofar as the dating world is a marketplace, it’s already at equilibrium. Potential daters size up their prospects, and make a guess as to who is and who isn’t “in their league.” Those who are aiming too high (setting their price too high) and not hooking up with anyone (selling themselves) may end up lowering their standards (lowering their price) to make a sale (get laid). Some products (people) appeal to a wide demographic; others to a nice market. Some have better marketing then others. Some products look good at first glance, but turn out to need a lot of repairs. All this is mighty familiar to students of economics. This is how markets work.
Of course, the dating world is even more complicated and messy than economic marketplaces. But in a lot of ways it really does act like one.
The interesting thing here is that Walsh and her followers aren’t thinking like capitalists at all. Essentially, they’ve decided that they know better than the SMP they so love to talk about, that their imaginary 10-point scale should predict who chooses whom better than those who are actually doing the choosing. That’s not capitalism; that’s a Soviet style command economy. It’s not the way marketplaces work, and it’s not the way the dating world works.
Guys: if no one is buying what you’re selling, you could try to change what you’re selling so that it appeals to buyers more. Or if you are confident in your product you can simply wait until a more discerning buyer shows up.
Or you could sit by yourself stewing in your own bitterness and blaming everything on the bitches. Much like the jealous narrator of David Bowie’s classic Queen Bitch, only much less sexually ambiguous. And, frankly, much less appealing. In this song, Bowie manages to make sexual resentment somehow glamorous.
I would like to apologize for talking about this song and bitter manosphere dudes in the same sentence. But I’m still posting the video. This is Bowie, in 1972, performing it live, and fucking killing it:
Happy day! Susan Walsh has drawn another diagram! Loyal readers of Man Boobz will recall the last time that Walsh, a would-be relationship expert who blogs at Hooking Up Smart, tried her hand at diagram making. It wasn’t pretty. In an attempt to sketch out the economic costs of sluthood, Walsh cobbled together an extravagantly convoluted mess of a flow-chart based on little more than a few bad assumptions and what she insisted was common sense.
Back in the old “leave it to Beaver” days, Frost argues, virtually all men and women paired off efficiently with partners who exactly matched their level of hotness, as charted on the infamous ten-point scale beloved of pickup artists and other such creatures. Fives married fives, nines married nines, and even lowly ones were able to find true love and hot ugly sex with others as unfortunate as they were. As Walsh puts it, attempting to make all this somehow sound vaguely scientific:
This system worked pretty well in achieving equilibrium with respect to SMV (sexual market value).
Naturally, neither Frost nor Walsh offer any evidence that any of this was true. Which only makes sense, since it, er, wasn’t.
Let’s set that aside for a moment and move on to our current fallen state, post-sexual revolution. Now, apparently, a small minority of hot dudes score all the chicks, from nines on down to threes. Everyone else spends their lonely nights alone with their hands and a choice of vibrator or fleshlight.
Here’s where the diagram comes in. It’s a doozy:
From "Hooking Up Smart."
Now, Walsh doesn’t actually explain how she knows this (or, rather believes it, since it clearly is not true), or why exactly she thinks the sexual revolution is to blame. But Frost does, sort of. With the sexual revolution, he argues,
the social convention of monogamy starts to break down. Women are free to do what they want, and they quickly realize that the men they can persuade to have short-term sexual relationships with are much, much more attractive than the men willing to marry them. Attractive men are free to eschew marriage, and instead maintain a harem of rotating friends-with-benefits and one-night stands. Super-attractive men (professional athletes, rock stars, bloggers) can spend every night with a different coterie of young, attractive women, railing lines off their ass cheeks and banging them senseless.
Sounds great for men. And not too bad for women either, who get to shag NHL players and bloggers instead of their ho-hum husbands.
Wait a minute. “… and bloggers?” Bloggers are now the alpha males? I wish I’d known this sooner!
But every woman who elects to join a harem, must necessarily leave a lonely man behind in the great mating scramble. … The men at the bottom are left to their RPGs and porn.
So there you have the effects of the sexual revolution on men: Great for the few, awful for the teeming masses.
Well, there’s a certain logic to that argument. It’s just not, you know, true.
Walsh and all the manosphere dudes who’ve convinced themselves that 80% of men have been left sexless have it backwards: as a handy FAQ at the Kinsey Institute points out, only about 10 percent of men don’t have sex during any given year. The average frequency of sex ranges from more than 100 times a year for those in their teens and twenties to about 70 times a year for those in their 40s.
But what about the ladies? Frost explains that they suffer too, especially those unfortunate enough to be mega-hotties. Frost seems to base this conclusion almost entirely on the sexual history of one Betty Draper. This seems a very small sample size to me. Also, she’is fictional. But that doesn’t stand in Frost’s way:
What about the top woman? The ultimate hottie? Previously, she had the top man all to herself. She literally could not have asked for anything more, assuming as I do that women naturally gravitate toward sleeping with the one man who is their best option at a given time, while men are only as faithful as their options. Suddenly, her man is beset by hussies, plying him with offers of cheap sex. How does Betty Draper feel about the breakdown of monogamy in her world? …
Now [the top women] must choose between sharing, or settling for a man far below her previous catch. Meanwhile, uglier women can choose between monogamy with a man far above her previous level, or a shared slice of one of the top men. She is unequivocally better off, as the hotter women are unequivocally worse off.
Frost concludes:
The Sexual Revolution harms attractive women, and unattractive men. It benefits unattractive women, and attractive men.
Betty Drapers of the world, unite!
Naturally, none of this is the fault of men. It is, Frost and Walsh apparently agree, the fault of all those mid-level bitches slutting it up with the top men. It’s all their fault that the ladies at the top and bottom are getting left high and dry.
Indeed, it’s high time that the hottest hotties stood up for their rights, Frost argues in a second blog post:
It never seems to occur to the hot girls of the world that the sexual revolution is the cause of their troubles. Without it, the best that a top man could do is find a top woman, and devote his life to her. In our present dystopia, he can find that top woman, and rip her heart and soul to pieces by maintaining a harem of flings on the side.
If it wasn’t for the legions of female 7′s and 8′s throwing themselves at the male 9′s, the female 9′s could have their men all to themselves. But in the world as it is, they will always be competing with the omnipresent availability of cheap and easy sex.
Were the hot women to regain their hot pride, sluts and feminists alike would quake in their boots:
The greatest fear of the feminists is that desirable women like yourselves will wake up the lies they’ve been fed, embrace their feminine modesty, and cast the harsh light reality on of the fat, shrill, used-up slutwalkers and middle-aged divorcees.
What of the not-quite-hotties? Walsh has some harsher advice for all those “mediocre sluts” out there riding that alpha asshole cock carousel. She writes:
For less attractive women, an objective assessment of market value is essential. That can only be realized by evaluating which men are interested in dating you rather than banging you.
In other words: mid-level ladies, you’re still losers. Eventually, you asses will get fat, your skin will get wrinkly, and the alpha assholes will grow tired of banging you. So what are you poor gals to do? Walsh offers this grim assessment:
These are the hard truths of the Post Sexual Revolution era. There are a few winners, and many losers. It is difficult to see how equilibrium can ever be regained. For now at least, your only option is to think carefully and realistically about your personal life goals. Make sure the choices you’re making get you closer to them.
(Confidential to Susan Walsh: You do know that using terms like “equilibrium,” like you’re some sort of sexual economist, doesn’t actually make your bullshit true?)
Given that everything in Frost and Walsh’s posts here is such unmitigated bullshit, I think I have some better advice for women of all hotness levels (if they haven’t already figured this out for themselves): stop taking relationship advice from a woman who wants you to hate yourself.
And speaking of bad choices: those smileys? Oy. Strive for elegant simplicity, not tacky clutter.
NOTE: Chuck on Gucci Little Piggy has written a response of sorts to this post. I’ve replied on his blog here. But there is something distressing going on there: Someone has posted several rude comments there under the name “Man Boobz.” THAT PERSON IS NOT ME. If any of you are responsible, STOP IMMEDIATELY. I’ve asked Chuck to ban that person and delete the comments.
EDITED TO ADD: Chuck changed the name of the commenter to “not man boobz.” That makes sense to me.
