Women have harems too

The term “slut” is a female-specific insult referring to a woman with loose sexual mores. Egalitarians are frustrated by the supposed fact that no insult with equivalent social sting applies to men, which, like all double-standards, is just not fair. The unfairness of it all has become so acute that, taking their cue from militant homosexuals, sluts now literally organize themselves into parades proclaiming their sluthood. The only way to rid themselves of the unfair and hypocritical stigma associated with their evil behaviour is to shout to the heavens that evil is good and good is evil. Otherwise they’d have to do that whole repentance thing; and what fun is that?

The manosphere, impressed by the unfairness of the double standard and doing its level best to help, has proposed that there actually is a roughly equivalent insult for men: coward. This is a useful comparison in terms of the social sting of the evaluation: a man labeled coward bears an approximately equivalent social sting to a woman labeled slut. It is also useful because sluthood is unladylike behavior and cowardice is unmanly behavior, generally speaking.

But sluthood refers to specific concrete behaviors and attitudes, while cowardice is a much more general category. Furthermore, cowardice is not a specifically sexual behavior. So we may be able to gain a deeper insight into what is going on in the modern dysfunctional intersexual dynamic if we look at the male side of the dance a bit more concretely.

The punch line for those who need a motivation to read my further rambling – or a reason not to – is that from an intersexual behavior standpoint, the male equivalent of a slut is the beta orbiter. Modernity has turned sexuality into a buffet: what used to be a loving commitment for life to a particular person, where sexual intimacy and provision formed the mutual society of a family, has turned into cafeteria sexuality wherein people are encouraged to assemble their ideal virtual mate from the disparate contributions of different real people. Like the slut who gives away her sexuality on the cheap, accepting sexual attention with no commitment or provision, the beta orbiter gives away his provision and commitment without any corresponding receptivity to his sexual attentions.

In what follows I will use the term “sexual attention” to refer to those interactive behaviors wherein a woman takes a man seriously as a potential mate. I will leave it deliberately vague; but it doesn’t have to imply escalation to intrinsically immoral behaviors. As usual on this subject I am attempting to clarify the theory: how well or comprehensively that theory corresponds to reality is something about which I’ve expressed any number of doubts myself, though I do think it is useful as a foundation for discussion.

The theory of hypergamy proposes that the top (say) 20-ish percent of men are more than willing to shower sexual attention on the top (say) 60-ish percent of women[1]. That doesn’t mean that the average male nine is generally willing to marry or commit to the average female six: just that he is willing to give her sexual attention. So at one point in the buffet line the average socially functional female six can scoop some male eight or nine onto her social plate.

Because the modern world is a sexual cafeteria the notion of monogomous pairing in marriage to one partner for life is largely dead, and as a result the modern woman can assemble her ideal virtual man from the disparate contributions of different real men. This results in a situation where most young women find it relatively easy to attract sexual attention “above their marriage grade”. They become accustomed to finding the men actually in their marriage grade unattractive.

Beta orbiting is a male behavior which is symmetrical to slutty female behavior: mirror image graphics could probably be drawn. (I haven’t thought through exactly what they would look like, but if there is interest I may give it a go). The key difference is found in the premise (goes the theory) that women are the gatekeepers of sexual attention, while men are the gatekeepers of commitment and provisioning. In the modern sexual cafeteria attractive women are generally willing to accept some providing attention from less attractive men, while rejecting their sexual attention. Attractive men, on the other hand, are willing to shower sexual attention on less attractive women while rejecting commitment to those less attractive women.

In addition to being a form of lie on the personal level this results in a very dysfunctional social dynamic, especially as virginity-at-marriage becomes almost nonexistent. Women become accustomed to sleeping with men who would never marry them; they find the men who are willing to marry them unattractive. And even when a woman has managed to stay chaste she has become accustomed to getting male sexual attention well above her marriage grade.

What this gets us to is a definition of slutty behavior that doesn’t require a reductionist accounting of certain kinds or numbers of sexual acts, and at the same time is not reducible to some ineffable interior disposition or attitude. Slutty behavior is when a woman accepts sexual attention from a man without any corresponding commitment and provisioning. This raises another interesting point: the female version of caddish behavior is the LJBF (lets just be friends) acceptance of the unrequited attentions of beta orbiters.

Just as the cad doesn’t feel a social sting for having his harem of sluts, LJBF-girl doesn’t feel a social sting for having her harem of beta orbiters. And what follows, I think, is that things will just keep getting worse unless and until fewer women engage in slutty behavior and fewer men engage in beta orbiting behavior. Shaming the cads isn’t going to work.

____________

[1] For the sake of simplicity my graphic only shows a single slice of what is actually a set of multidimensional gradients. The ‘picture’ viewed from the point of view of an average male nine and an average female six will look different from the picture viewed from the perspective of an average male seven and an average female four; but the relative shapes of everything, and the intersexual dynamic it generates, remain more or less how I’ve drawn it.