I generally really agree with this take. But I will say that the impact of ivory tower ideology around sexual liberation is a minor factor in these kinds of situations. The reason women engage in casual sex or porn style sex is a lot less because of abstract ideology, and a lot more because some man is extremely motivated to try to persuade her to engage in these acts. There are a lot of men that when they see the possibility of some kind of sex they seek, they will act unethically to obtain it. They will lie, manipulate, string a girl along, pry with drugs etc etc. What they do is not necessarily a crime, but they do know better.
If you want to say that society ought to teach women such that they know better than to fall for these tricks, fine. But then don't be surprised if a lot of women express very negative sentiments towards men because as long as there aren't consequences to men for behaving this way, they will keep doing it.
I think you’re right but the ideological indoctrination destroys women’s defenses. Some manipulation leading to sex will happen regardless but the norms against being a slut are a countervailing force.
Maybe at that age, because she has so little life experience. It's also that this isn't something that women spend much effort warning other women about. Mostly women band together so that men are held accountable for rape, which includes Valenti style mob justice where they band together against any and every man accused of rape. Somehow women are more prone to doing this publicly than they are of teaching women to avoid dangerous situations. However, please note that women do teach other women to avoid dangerous situations with little fanfare. My sorority brought in educators to tell women how to avoid spiked drinks. We always went to frat parties in groups where some women were very vigilant about keeping various men away from girls in the group.
Generally, mostly women warn other women about what long term relationships to avoid, because this is usually more damaging that any short term sexual liason these days given that abortion is available and STDs are treatable. For example, it was common for older silent generation women to warn women of my millennial generation to make sure they had an education and a way to support themselves if they became a SAHM, in case their husband left them or became abusive. It was not common for older women to warn younger women not to have casual sex. Now that I too am a matron, I admit that my inclination is still to warn younger women about what long term relationships to avoid, not to avoid casual sex. I too feel that spending years with men that refuse to propose and such things is the thing to look out for. I feel less motivation to warn young women about the dangers of casual sex because my instinct is that they will figure that out quickly on their own, and a man who spend a night or two with you and then moves completely out of your life usually creates very little problems in the long term.
This is the part that Richard leaves out (because of course). While I'm very against false accusations, the fact that a non-zero amount of men are rapey assholes is a pretty important factor here.
I think a prevailing implicit attitude is that women are supposed to have superior social intelligence to men in a way that allows them to avoid this. Artistic tropes where women break guys out of their social shells, socially repair families, and socially motivate men to do something with their lives, are widespread. Women go into social jobs more, they naturally think about people more, and they play the primary role when it comes to parenting. Women ruthlessly judge other women that violate social norms and miss social cues.
There is something unnatural and odd about a woman who has weak enough social skills to where she is easily able to get manipulated by members of the socially inferior sex. This is probably part of why this stigma exists, as women easily getting manipulated by men in this way implies that she might not have the social skill to raise kids effectively.
Isn't the opposite more true, women are naturally more conflict averse, more people pleasing and more compliant. This is usually brought up in wage gap conversations where women are less likely to negotiate a raise. Women being more agreeable and less likely to stand up for themselves makes them very vulnerable to sexual coerction and being pressured into sex, which results in the type of rape scandals this article is talking about. Wanting to be well liked and socially accepted also leads many young women into dangerous sexual situations if they have mostly male friends
An extremely small percentage of women gets manipulated into NSA group sex, from what I can see. Mostly women get manipuated into having sex with a guy they really like who does not really like them in return. Almost all the women I know who were not locked down by like age 25 have been in that situation. Most women get over it. A couple I know are extremely pissed off about it years later, but one of them has been happily married for a long time now.
The evidence is gradient based. So a woman getting pressured into group sex is in a vacuum a sign she has subpar social skills for a woman but for an individual woman there might be more contextual details in her life in a way that changes the picture. A woman who has mostly robust social skills but a few savvy men slip by them are usually not judged much. The concern here is that women with poor social skills often lead to invisible externalities that compound over time: a teenage son has a bad stretch and she didn’t see it coming and doesn’t know how to react, she doesn’t know how to motivate the husband to keep and expand his ambition, so on and so forth. So people develop heuristics that indicate a woman has this deficiency and judge women based on them.
In my sorority experience and in my 20s, the women other women judged harshly for sluttery seemed to be doing it because of some kind of mate competition thing, rather than judging sluttery in principle. Of the few girls who engaged in group sex at my college, one was a girl who was exclusively interested in black men. She only went to the black frat. This was highly unusual for the college I went to, where most girls secretly would never date a black guy. Anyway, this girl into black guys was hardly judged at all. No one gossipped about her, despite by how flagrant her behavior was. We had these whiteboards on our dorm doors, and her whiteboard was filled to the brim with notes from black dudes asking her to come over.
No one cared what this girl did. She was generally well liked by other girls. My take on this is if a woman only seeks casual sex with men other girls have no interest in, they will not care. At the same time, some girls who were sleeping around a lot were gossiped about constantly even though it was not necessarily group sex. My guess is that they were providing easy sex to men that other girls had some interest in or something.
So I don't really think its a judgment that reflects a woman's social skills. From women at least, it's a judgment against potential man stealing or cheapening the value of sex to desirable men.
Interesting. We might draw an analogy to men who are submissive, intimidate easily, and opt for hobbies like collecting action figurines or playing World Of Warcraft. These men receive surprisingly little judgment from other men because they are ‘out of the social game’: they are low status, not romantic threats, not going to beat you out for an internship or a job. In comparison, men who try to appeal to women based on qualities of emotional sensitivity, friendship, and emotional openness, while having lots of friends, often get heavily stigmatized by more stereotypically masculine men. But I think a man who looked at this and concluded it is better to be the first type of man than the second type would be mistaken. The first man is not viable on the romantic market place and will not be considered as a possible serious friend by 99% of men. He will not get much sympathy by anyone about anything. The ‘like’ he gets from other men will be very shallow.
The NYT article you cite does not, in any way, destroy her credibility. It presents nuance, and takes the reader through the evolution of how she went from feeling bad about what happened, to a fuller understanding that she was not the only one to blame. She allows that she consented to part of it, and that drugs made them all behave badly. Nuance is required here, not bandwagon.
The NYT article presents a pretty clear picture that what she did was consensual at the time, but that she wanted to revoke her consent retroactively to avoid reputational harm.
I think it's pretty clear that she consented to sex with the first two guys, but not to whatever happened with other men entering the room while she was semi-conscious on Ketamine. I don't know how much experience you have with K, but typically someone high on K isn't really in a state to consent to anything, and it sounds like she did a lot of K.
She consented to guys 4-7 snorting ket off her body, though I'm not sure if this was before or after she snorted a bunch of ket off guy 2's erect penis.
They really don't. Sex while both parties are intoxicated to some extent is quite common. It's usually fine and as such goes unreported. But given biology, it's usually the man who pushes the encounter along, which creates an asymmetry by allowing the woman to later claim she was "raped" despite both of them being in an equally impaired state of mind. Most women don't do this, but some will if they want to repair their reputation, or for simple $$$.
I suspect the sexual double standard rests on another fundamental of human nature rather than ev-psych, which is that human beings try to cap each other's status. They especially dislike it when people obtain status by doing things other people want instead of playing social status games. This is why we see slopulist hostility to entrepreneurs who get rich starting successful businesses and union hostility to workers being promoted by quality of work instead of seniority.
Slut-shaming can be seen as the same status-capping strategy, where women try to prevent other women from gaining status by being sexy and having sex. Shows like "Sex in the City" are similar to "Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous" type shows in that they are examples of the mask falling off. The former award promiscuous women status in spite of slut-shamer attempts to reduce it the same way the latter award status to rich people despite leftist attempts to reduce it.
There are some differences in the details. In particular, slut shaming has a paternalistic aspect where those doing it try to frame their behavior as protecting women from status reduction. By contrast, people rarely tell someone making a lot of money that they need to stop for their own good because everyone hates rich people (although you do see milder forms like telling them they will never know if their spouse loves them for themselves or for their money).
We will probably never be able to eliminate slut-shaming for the same reason that we can never eliminate envy-driven hatred of the successful. But it is still worth fighting to reduce it for the same reason envy is worth fighting. Efforts by feminists to do so should be lauded.
I think where evo-psych plays a role in my explanation is where I argue that we try to cap the status of people who gain status by "doing things that other people" want. Evo-psych argues that men usually want sex more than women, so heterosexual women find it easier to gain status by having lots of sex than men do.
One thing I think evo-psych is less clear about is the precise mechanism by which evolution makes men want sex more than women. Proponents of evo-psych generally seem to assume that men simply evolved to like and desire sex more than women do. However, another possibility is the orgasm gap: men evolved to orgasm more easily than women, so even if both sexes like and desire sex the same amount, men will pursue it more because it is more likely to be a positive experience for them. Or perhaps both explanations have some truth to them.
Wait - what? What about your long campaign against believing women who regret may-December or boss-employee relationships? I’m so baffled by your response here.
You’re all in on “women make non standard choices for relationships and sex all the time and we should believe it’s what they wanted.” But now all of a sudden, you believe this woman’s distress is genuine, genetic, evolutionary behavior?
The way more obvious explanation is that she’s in a subculture that cannot believe a woman would choose what she chose, and they’re punishing her for doing it. The way out they’re giving her is to agree it was non-consensual. But there are other subcultures in America where she could have female peers who would not be giving her such a hard time.
An issue here is that as we’ve de-Christianized as a society, there’s no force remaining that discourages men from pursuing casual sex except for the threat of rape accusations. While it’s true that plenty of guys were trying to have sex with girls they just started dating back in the 1950’s, that kind of behavior was not glamorized up and down in mass media like it is today. As a society we just surrendered to “guys will be guys.”
The moral of the story if you are a girl is don't take part in group sex or a gangbang if you're not prepared to be called a slut by every other woman you know the next day (the guys involved will likely not keep your secret and will brag to everyone they know).
The moral of the story if you are a guy is don't take part in group sex or a gangbang unless you are highly confident that the girl is not going to turn around and accuse you of rape a week later after she has had some time to think about it.
Call me a puritan, but I just think sex should be reserved for committed romantic relationships. Certain people really really really want to justify and normalize casual sex and polyamory, but it's clear that it just doesn't work and more often than not leads to hurt feelings, emptiness, and tragedy.
Well said. If one ends up in a bad situation due to being drunk as a skunk it is better to shut up and move on. I’ve done stupid things when drunk and never tried to ruin someone else’s life over it. I also learned not to drink to excess and with random men. And heavens - now the kids are doing ketamine at parties ?
I generally really agree with this take. But I will say that the impact of ivory tower ideology around sexual liberation is a minor factor in these kinds of situations. The reason women engage in casual sex or porn style sex is a lot less because of abstract ideology, and a lot more because some man is extremely motivated to try to persuade her to engage in these acts. There are a lot of men that when they see the possibility of some kind of sex they seek, they will act unethically to obtain it. They will lie, manipulate, string a girl along, pry with drugs etc etc. What they do is not necessarily a crime, but they do know better.
If you want to say that society ought to teach women such that they know better than to fall for these tricks, fine. But then don't be surprised if a lot of women express very negative sentiments towards men because as long as there aren't consequences to men for behaving this way, they will keep doing it.
I think you’re right but the ideological indoctrination destroys women’s defenses. Some manipulation leading to sex will happen regardless but the norms against being a slut are a countervailing force.
Maybe at that age, because she has so little life experience. It's also that this isn't something that women spend much effort warning other women about. Mostly women band together so that men are held accountable for rape, which includes Valenti style mob justice where they band together against any and every man accused of rape. Somehow women are more prone to doing this publicly than they are of teaching women to avoid dangerous situations. However, please note that women do teach other women to avoid dangerous situations with little fanfare. My sorority brought in educators to tell women how to avoid spiked drinks. We always went to frat parties in groups where some women were very vigilant about keeping various men away from girls in the group.
Generally, mostly women warn other women about what long term relationships to avoid, because this is usually more damaging that any short term sexual liason these days given that abortion is available and STDs are treatable. For example, it was common for older silent generation women to warn women of my millennial generation to make sure they had an education and a way to support themselves if they became a SAHM, in case their husband left them or became abusive. It was not common for older women to warn younger women not to have casual sex. Now that I too am a matron, I admit that my inclination is still to warn younger women about what long term relationships to avoid, not to avoid casual sex. I too feel that spending years with men that refuse to propose and such things is the thing to look out for. I feel less motivation to warn young women about the dangers of casual sex because my instinct is that they will figure that out quickly on their own, and a man who spend a night or two with you and then moves completely out of your life usually creates very little problems in the long term.
This is the part that Richard leaves out (because of course). While I'm very against false accusations, the fact that a non-zero amount of men are rapey assholes is a pretty important factor here.
I think a prevailing implicit attitude is that women are supposed to have superior social intelligence to men in a way that allows them to avoid this. Artistic tropes where women break guys out of their social shells, socially repair families, and socially motivate men to do something with their lives, are widespread. Women go into social jobs more, they naturally think about people more, and they play the primary role when it comes to parenting. Women ruthlessly judge other women that violate social norms and miss social cues.
There is something unnatural and odd about a woman who has weak enough social skills to where she is easily able to get manipulated by members of the socially inferior sex. This is probably part of why this stigma exists, as women easily getting manipulated by men in this way implies that she might not have the social skill to raise kids effectively.
Isn't the opposite more true, women are naturally more conflict averse, more people pleasing and more compliant. This is usually brought up in wage gap conversations where women are less likely to negotiate a raise. Women being more agreeable and less likely to stand up for themselves makes them very vulnerable to sexual coerction and being pressured into sex, which results in the type of rape scandals this article is talking about. Wanting to be well liked and socially accepted also leads many young women into dangerous sexual situations if they have mostly male friends
An extremely small percentage of women gets manipulated into NSA group sex, from what I can see. Mostly women get manipuated into having sex with a guy they really like who does not really like them in return. Almost all the women I know who were not locked down by like age 25 have been in that situation. Most women get over it. A couple I know are extremely pissed off about it years later, but one of them has been happily married for a long time now.
The evidence is gradient based. So a woman getting pressured into group sex is in a vacuum a sign she has subpar social skills for a woman but for an individual woman there might be more contextual details in her life in a way that changes the picture. A woman who has mostly robust social skills but a few savvy men slip by them are usually not judged much. The concern here is that women with poor social skills often lead to invisible externalities that compound over time: a teenage son has a bad stretch and she didn’t see it coming and doesn’t know how to react, she doesn’t know how to motivate the husband to keep and expand his ambition, so on and so forth. So people develop heuristics that indicate a woman has this deficiency and judge women based on them.
In my sorority experience and in my 20s, the women other women judged harshly for sluttery seemed to be doing it because of some kind of mate competition thing, rather than judging sluttery in principle. Of the few girls who engaged in group sex at my college, one was a girl who was exclusively interested in black men. She only went to the black frat. This was highly unusual for the college I went to, where most girls secretly would never date a black guy. Anyway, this girl into black guys was hardly judged at all. No one gossipped about her, despite by how flagrant her behavior was. We had these whiteboards on our dorm doors, and her whiteboard was filled to the brim with notes from black dudes asking her to come over.
No one cared what this girl did. She was generally well liked by other girls. My take on this is if a woman only seeks casual sex with men other girls have no interest in, they will not care. At the same time, some girls who were sleeping around a lot were gossiped about constantly even though it was not necessarily group sex. My guess is that they were providing easy sex to men that other girls had some interest in or something.
So I don't really think its a judgment that reflects a woman's social skills. From women at least, it's a judgment against potential man stealing or cheapening the value of sex to desirable men.
Interesting. We might draw an analogy to men who are submissive, intimidate easily, and opt for hobbies like collecting action figurines or playing World Of Warcraft. These men receive surprisingly little judgment from other men because they are ‘out of the social game’: they are low status, not romantic threats, not going to beat you out for an internship or a job. In comparison, men who try to appeal to women based on qualities of emotional sensitivity, friendship, and emotional openness, while having lots of friends, often get heavily stigmatized by more stereotypically masculine men. But I think a man who looked at this and concluded it is better to be the first type of man than the second type would be mistaken. The first man is not viable on the romantic market place and will not be considered as a possible serious friend by 99% of men. He will not get much sympathy by anyone about anything. The ‘like’ he gets from other men will be very shallow.
Also, let’s not forget about the money. Someone told this woman she could get big bucks here and that is what she looking for.
Indeed.
The NYT article you cite does not, in any way, destroy her credibility. It presents nuance, and takes the reader through the evolution of how she went from feeling bad about what happened, to a fuller understanding that she was not the only one to blame. She allows that she consented to part of it, and that drugs made them all behave badly. Nuance is required here, not bandwagon.
The NYT article presents a pretty clear picture that what she did was consensual at the time, but that she wanted to revoke her consent retroactively to avoid reputational harm.
Many such cases.
I think it's pretty clear that she consented to sex with the first two guys, but not to whatever happened with other men entering the room while she was semi-conscious on Ketamine. I don't know how much experience you have with K, but typically someone high on K isn't really in a state to consent to anything, and it sounds like she did a lot of K.
She consented to guys 4-7 snorting ket off her body, though I'm not sure if this was before or after she snorted a bunch of ket off guy 2's erect penis.
She was probably high by the time she "consented."
It's a grey area. She is responsible for her actions. But so are the guys.
Would a decent Christian gentleman have "sloppy-thirds" sexual intercourse with a drugged up girl at a party? My Sunday School teacher would say NO.
Standards work both ways.
>Standards work both ways.
They really don't. Sex while both parties are intoxicated to some extent is quite common. It's usually fine and as such goes unreported. But given biology, it's usually the man who pushes the encounter along, which creates an asymmetry by allowing the woman to later claim she was "raped" despite both of them being in an equally impaired state of mind. Most women don't do this, but some will if they want to repair their reputation, or for simple $$$.
I suspect the sexual double standard rests on another fundamental of human nature rather than ev-psych, which is that human beings try to cap each other's status. They especially dislike it when people obtain status by doing things other people want instead of playing social status games. This is why we see slopulist hostility to entrepreneurs who get rich starting successful businesses and union hostility to workers being promoted by quality of work instead of seniority.
Slut-shaming can be seen as the same status-capping strategy, where women try to prevent other women from gaining status by being sexy and having sex. Shows like "Sex in the City" are similar to "Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous" type shows in that they are examples of the mask falling off. The former award promiscuous women status in spite of slut-shamer attempts to reduce it the same way the latter award status to rich people despite leftist attempts to reduce it.
There are some differences in the details. In particular, slut shaming has a paternalistic aspect where those doing it try to frame their behavior as protecting women from status reduction. By contrast, people rarely tell someone making a lot of money that they need to stop for their own good because everyone hates rich people (although you do see milder forms like telling them they will never know if their spouse loves them for themselves or for their money).
We will probably never be able to eliminate slut-shaming for the same reason that we can never eliminate envy-driven hatred of the successful. But it is still worth fighting to reduce it for the same reason envy is worth fighting. Efforts by feminists to do so should be lauded.
This explanation doesn't do a good job of telling us why people shame women for being promiscuous but men not so much. Evo psycho does.
I think where evo-psych plays a role in my explanation is where I argue that we try to cap the status of people who gain status by "doing things that other people" want. Evo-psych argues that men usually want sex more than women, so heterosexual women find it easier to gain status by having lots of sex than men do.
One thing I think evo-psych is less clear about is the precise mechanism by which evolution makes men want sex more than women. Proponents of evo-psych generally seem to assume that men simply evolved to like and desire sex more than women do. However, another possibility is the orgasm gap: men evolved to orgasm more easily than women, so even if both sexes like and desire sex the same amount, men will pursue it more because it is more likely to be a positive experience for them. Or perhaps both explanations have some truth to them.
Wait - what? What about your long campaign against believing women who regret may-December or boss-employee relationships? I’m so baffled by your response here.
You’re all in on “women make non standard choices for relationships and sex all the time and we should believe it’s what they wanted.” But now all of a sudden, you believe this woman’s distress is genuine, genetic, evolutionary behavior?
The way more obvious explanation is that she’s in a subculture that cannot believe a woman would choose what she chose, and they’re punishing her for doing it. The way out they’re giving her is to agree it was non-consensual. But there are other subcultures in America where she could have female peers who would not be giving her such a hard time.
This is a very good advice.
An issue here is that as we’ve de-Christianized as a society, there’s no force remaining that discourages men from pursuing casual sex except for the threat of rape accusations. While it’s true that plenty of guys were trying to have sex with girls they just started dating back in the 1950’s, that kind of behavior was not glamorized up and down in mass media like it is today. As a society we just surrendered to “guys will be guys.”
The moral of the story if you are a girl is don't take part in group sex or a gangbang if you're not prepared to be called a slut by every other woman you know the next day (the guys involved will likely not keep your secret and will brag to everyone they know).
The moral of the story if you are a guy is don't take part in group sex or a gangbang unless you are highly confident that the girl is not going to turn around and accuse you of rape a week later after she has had some time to think about it.
Call me a puritan, but I just think sex should be reserved for committed romantic relationships. Certain people really really really want to justify and normalize casual sex and polyamory, but it's clear that it just doesn't work and more often than not leads to hurt feelings, emptiness, and tragedy.
Everyone should be orthodox Jews. Completely crazy that goyim live this way.
Excellent points!
One guy from the fraternity has been fired over this. Already.
there's being a slut, and then doing whatever it was that she did. Not the same.
Well said. If one ends up in a bad situation due to being drunk as a skunk it is better to shut up and move on. I’ve done stupid things when drunk and never tried to ruin someone else’s life over it. I also learned not to drink to excess and with random men. And heavens - now the kids are doing ketamine at parties ?