Sluttiness and Game really are empowering, or crime does pay redux
April 5, 2014 § 51 Comments
I’ve made the point before that – even though morality means getting what you want teleologically – that because morality involves constraints on behavior, someone unconstrained by morality can, in the short term at least, achieve greater material prosperity than someone who is constrained by morality.
A woman who hikes up her skirt really can get more drinks and other gifts showered on her. A woman who dresses modestly really doesn’t get as much attention and validation. A woman who flaunts her sexuality really can have an easier time landing a prize husband than a woman who doesn’t, especially in a society which doesn’t frown upon that behavior.
Sluttiness and Game really are empowering for plain or boring women and nerdy or socially inept men – even if only on the margins, and even when the ‘effectiveness’ doesn’t exceed placebo. So typically they resent ‘naturals’ that is, people who are more successful than they are without sluttiness or Game. Criticizing sluttiness – and not just the kind of sluttiness that is proximately directed at fornication, but sluttiness more generally – feels disempowering to plain or boring women because it actually is disempowering to them. Criticizing Game – and not just the kind of Game that is proximately directed at fornication, but Game more generally – feels disempowering to nerdy or socially inept men because it actually is disempowering to them.
Property rights really are disempowering to the poor, at least proximately.
But that doesn’t mean that theft is good, or that Christians should participate in an arms race to the gutter.
Zippy Catholic 
One generation discovers that with contraception sex before marriage can sometimes lead to good marriages. They then have kids who they tell about sex before marriage.
And then their grandkids have sex before highschool.
Anyway, in the latter half of the last century, Whites were really concerned about excessive fertility leading to overpopulation. Besides contraception and abortion, a Hugo Award winning science fiction book in the ’70s suggested homosexuality to avoid overpopulation.
It’s clear that the overpopulation problem was more than solved. Were they entirely wrong that it was a potential crisis?
peppermint:
Human beings are very attached to the idea that they can predict the long term consequences of social policy. Personally I am more confident in the predictions of the groundhog on Groundhog Day.
it’s just so easy to say the future is unpredictable so let’s just do what we always have done. Though actually, looking at the fertility rates in the US, instead of the entire world, I think we would have been happier maintaining our historical social norms.
A woman who hikes up her skirt really can get more drinks and other gifts showered on her. A woman who dresses modestly really doesn’t get as much attention and validation. A woman who flaunts her sexuality really can have an easier time landing a prize husband than a woman who doesn’t, especially in a society which doesn’t frown upon that behavior.
There’s a false dichotomy here. A woman could easily choose to wear very flattering clothes that make it absolutely clear she’s got a sexy figure while leaving the details to the imagination. That’s not flaunting, it’s just dressing to get the attention of men. There’s a legitimate place for it if she’s single and looking for a husband or dressing the way her husband likes her to dress for him.
Sure, women who dress modestly will get less attention, but it’s not the false dichotomy you present. It’s not “be modest and get ignored; be a slut and wallow in male attention.” I’ve been around plenty of very conservative Protestant women who dress modestly and somehow make themselves look more attractive than most club sluts.
Mike T:
No there isn’t. I think you may mean that it is difficult to define the bright-line difference between slutty behavior and non-slutty behavior on the margins, which is true. Many moral categories don’t have ‘bright line’ boundaries, and sluttiness (that is, unchaste behavior) is one of them.
The question for Christians then becomes whether it makes any sense to get as close to acting slutty as possible without actually crossing the bright line boundary and acting slutty. The answer is obviously “no”, since that approach would only work if there actually was a bright line boundary.
If you aren’t studying up on methods to act slutty and making an effort to act slutty, and in fact are making an earnest effort to act modestly and chastely, then the chances of accidentally acting slutty are pretty low. But of course that approach is not very empowering.
You’re missing the point. It’s possible for a woman to be modest and not send signals that shout “I’m a boring, sexless woman who’ll probably be a frigid bitch in bed.” But you’d never know that from your blog post or the attitudes of many women who claim to be modest and chaste.
I think you are missing the point, Mike T. It is possible to make money without stealing too. But enforcement of property rights is, in fact, disempowering for those who are not ‘naturals’ at making money.
Peppermint:
Desmond Morris, a zoologist, also advocated homosexuality and sodomy in general to fix overpopulation, but he concluded that such a thing would have dysgenic properties, as only the educated urbanites would adopt such behaviors. Even in a homogeneous population, it would continually be the least educated who would go forth and multiply.
In our economic climates, population growth is the main driver of economic growth. That is, without any consideration for the quality of the population. Production is overwhelming automated, land can be harvested by a tiny few, the rest of the people are free to play politics at work. Consumerism doesn’t require much producers, which explain much of our pathology. We do not feel useful, especially the urbanites, so they can advocate euthanasia nowadays. For what else matter except comfort?
Immigration is great to preserve, temporarily, a urban financial oligarchy and keep vast masses of busybodies on makework programs. The thing is, revolt against feminism is not something that dates back to the current crop of radicals. It existed a century ago, but it was upside-down. Eugenics was overwhelmingly born out of the anguish that liberated women in the workforce were the best and brightest who were not reproducing anymore. leading to the conclusions that if it was only the poor that kept the population growth going, the consequences would be dire.
I don’t think this was logical then, but I do believe the cynics and nihilists who use Game may be helpful to accelerate the return to more traditional mores, showing Modern Women their folly. Otherwise, we will fall back to Paganism and eventually legalize polygamy. Can you restrict female sexuality without authoritarianism? That’s the key question for me. It’s institutional, cultural and moral.
How can you bring this back in an egalitarian/anarchistic environment?
“Prize husband”, srsly? Men are women are different, btw. Men prize women’s chastity almost above all else: a woman’s N = 0 is worth a lot in the sexual marketplace, and worth very much more in the marriage marketplace. Not so with men; in fact the opposite is true for men.
jf12:
You do have a talent for missing the point.
Also it is clearly false that modern men in general prize women’s chastity above (e.g.) looks and sexual availability. That is a manosphere myth. The sluttiness of modern women is just as “market rational” as men’s growing reluctance to marry, etc. Modern women act slutty as a materially rational response to SMP/MMP realities.
Strange, I thought, that most people around manosphere think of naturals as men, who use a Game without having to intentionally learn it. But without this misinterpretation your point wouldn’t be as compelling, I guess…
Pilgrim of the East:
That is because they are not thinking with precision.
A naturally beautiful woman doesn’t need to act slutty to get male attention. An ugly girl does — she needs “girl game” in order to compete against, or become the equal of, the naturally beautiful girl.
Acting (and dressing, etc) slutty doesn’t make her actually more beautiful, but it frequently does achieve a kind of material equality with the naturally beautiful woman.
[Some] ugly women of course have used sluttiness to compete for as long as the human race has been around — to achieve a kind of material equality with naturally beautiful women. Following the leadership of women in this regard, some modern men are adopting the male equivalent of sluttiness – Game – to try to achieve equality.
I wrote:
This of course encourages the more beautiful women to start acting slutty in order to recover their advantage: the arms race to the gutter I mentioned in the OP.
-Like-
A naturally beautiful woman doesn’t need to act slutty to get male attention. An ugly girl does — she needs “girl game” in order to compete against, or become the equal of, the naturally beautiful girl.
Acting (and dressing, etc) slutty doesn’t make her actually more beautiful, but it frequently does achieve a kind of material equality with the naturally beautiful woman.
And this is a perfect example of why I think your arguments miss the mark. Male sexual interest in a woman is almost entirely one-dimensional. It’s entirely based on her beauty and can only be diminished by having a personality so annoying that it makes being around her frustrating or painful. So a slutty woman achieve a modest simulacrum of equality by being so sexually available that men ignore the beauty because getting laid is just that much easier with the slut. However, it doesn’t change the fact that in a serious way it is literally impossible for her to effect lasting and meaningful socio-sexual status increase.
That last point is demonstrably not true of men because looks are important to women, but not to the extent that they are to men. There are plenty of ugly men who have it together and have beautiful women find them genuinely attractive. There is literally no normal man who finds an ugly woman genuinely attractive.
A socially inept nerd who hits the gym hard, learns to stand up for himself, learns how to be better in social situations and gets a career going can go from a socio-sexual 3 to 7 in many cases. That’s just not true of women except maybe in the outliers.
So a fat girl with a bitchy feminist personality can’t make herself more attractive by hitting the gym, improving her attitude, and learning some domestic skills?
“It works, but it’s immoral.”
God made people this way, and recognizing that and going on to use that knowledge – evil.
God made people in such a way that they usually respond to threats of being murdered. Does it follow that is is morally acceptable to threaten to murder people: that threatening murder is an amoral “tool” which can be used for good or evil?
Bryce-
So God made man with Original Sin and thus caused our fallen nature?
Ok….
Is it your suggestion that any instance of action which consciously takes into account incentives and psychology is immoral? e.g. paying employees with money so they do work.
Bryce Lalibterte:
I’ve never said or suggested anything remotely like that.
So you are saying there are instances where acting on the basis of one’s understanding of human psychology and behavior isn’t immoral per se?
I didn’t say anything about that whatsoever.
Then let me put it bluntly: Do you believe that acting on the basis of one’s understanding of human psychology is immoral per se?
What does that have to do with slutty behavior?
If you don’t want to actually entertain a dialogue, you could just say so at the beginning.
Bryce Laliberte:
OK, let me be clear:
I have no interest in a dialogue with nominalists who insist that every time a man goes to the gym or uses psychological knowledge or does something to improve himself as a man it is an instance of Game, and that therefore Game is sometimes good and should not be criticized. The reason I am not interested is because the prior commitments of nominalists make dialogue impossible.
Great minds thinking differently.
http://dalrock.wordpress.com/2014/03/31/rationalizing-sluttery-as-a-path-to-marriage/
“Prize husband,” srsly?
jf12:
I suggest that when it comes to women using sex to get commitment you should take the “red pill” and accept the unhappy reality that it frequently works.
Zippy,
women, and women-only (basically …), think it works. Everyone else, which would include men for the most part, thinks women use sex to get sex from alphas from whom commitment cannot be rationally expected, and women use the *promise* of sex to get commitment from betas who are eager to exchange commitment for sex.
jf12:
Hopefully on reflection you realize that it is contradictory to say that women don’t use sex to get what they want and then follow up with an explanation of how women use sex to get what they want.
Yes, unfortunately I have come to understand that this is a myth. I’m sad about that, too, because I would have liked for this to be true.
However, I am in no hurry to correct this myth; let men say this if they want, even if it isn’t true. Young women who hear this may change their behavior if they believe that it is true; it would be best if women stopped (or didn’t start) slutting around out of moral conviction, but even if they only stop (or don’t start) out of concern that men won’t like it, this is still a good thing in my estimation. Every sex partner a woman has increases her risk of contracting an STD or ending up pregnant outside of marriage.
Sunshine:
Where (different) pretty lies flourish.
[…] his own blog which I can no longer find seemed to use the term this way. Bryce (a fellow target of calumny here) who is anything but a sloppy thinker or writer, uses the term that way. Heartiste has been using […]
Zippy, April 7:
With regard to women using sex to get commitment, that depends on what one means by “frequently” and “works”.
deti:
The whole “alpha f**** beta bucks” understanding of the SMP/MMP is predicated on that “working” “frequently”. If women using sex to secure commitment didn’t work frequently (without the scare quotes) then why does the manosphere narrative have all of these betas wifing up post-wall carousel riders?
In fact isn’t that exactly what you publicly claim, as part of your whole shtick and online persona, happened to you personally?
Zippy:
Sex for commitment strategies by women don’t frequently work because they do not usually secure commitment from men who are sexually attractive to the women using the strategy. Rarely, a woman will hit the jackpot. But usually it fails.
AFBB is not synonymous with “sex for commitment”. AFBB describes pursuit of sex with attractive men with commitment being at most an afterthought; then a clear shift in strategy where the objective is locking in a husband. Sex may or may not be involved, but usually is involved, in the “beta bucks” side. Sex is dangled as a carrot before the beta and he is told to wait for it; so as to mimic “sex for commitment”. So I can see how one might confuse the BB of AFBB with sex for commitment.
Sex for commitment is simply what used to happen under marriage 1.0. Its flip side is commitment for sex, which men (used to) pursue. It implies a more even trade than AFBB.
Additionally, what you’re describing as “sex for commitment ” is actually the “beta bucks” side of AFBB.
we could say that “beta bucks” or “sex for commitment ” “frequently works” if it resulted in marriages which stayed together and if it resulted in marriages in which the wife is/was sexually attracted to the husband. As has been reported in the ‘sphere, a lot of these marriages bust up, usually because if lack of attraction; and a lot of those which stay together are plagued with difficulty.
deti:
There is probably a term for your favorite fallacy (there might not be, beyond simply “equivocation”, because it is so ridiculously irrational that it might not have occurred to anyone with an actual education to formally define it as a fallacy).
But I’ll spell it out for you again, at least for the benefit of any readers.
The fact that people don’t get (especially retrospectively) exactly what they want in totality for all time when using means M to accomplish end E does not mean that they don’t use means M to accomplish end E.
In other words, it is silly for you to say that women don’t use sex to get commitment and then go on to explain details in the dynamic (as you understand it) of how women use sex to get commitment. Saying that they “don’t get the commitment they want” or whatever doesn’t help you. Factory workers may not get “the money they want” – in your strong sense, meaning that they end the transaction completely satisfied for all time – when they go to work, but they are still using their labor to get money.
I explained this to you before when you contended that women can get sex easily but men can’t. You equivocate in that argument because what you really mean is that women can get some, any sex easily while men cannot get the sex they want easily. I pointed out that most men would have an easy a time purchasing sex that they don’t want, so harping on how most women can get sex that they don’t want any time isn’t a particularly interesting point. (In fact here you argue against yourself in that old discussion, since you suggest that women only very rarely get the sex they really want — sex with the hot alpha in the context of his total commitment to her in marriage).
Women use sluttiness to achieve proximate goals all the time, and it is as successful as any worldly strategy at achieving proximate goals. The fact that proximate worldly goals are ultimately unsatisfying is built into reality. It doesn’t mean that you can’t make money by committing robbery.
Your usual basket of equivocations doesn’t even coherently address the point, let alone call it into question.
Ha. Now you’re arguing something else. Yes, women do try to use sex to get commitment. I didn’t argue that point. I didn’t say women don’t try to use sex to get commitment. What I take issue with here in this thread — and what you haven’t really addressed– is whether sex for commitment frequently works. It doesn’t, for the reasons I stated.
deti:
Nobody suggested that you did.
And then you went on to explain when and how (in your understanding) it actually does work, much like labor works to generate income. As sunshinemary pointed out to you some time ago, most women use sex to get a marriage commitment and most women marry: it follows that for women using sex to get a marriage commitment works most of the time. As with any sociological market reality that may change at some point; but it is certainly still true now.
Take the “red pill” and accept the truth you see right in front of you. Let the pretty lies perish.
Or, put more simply, you’ve created a straw man and taken down a position I didn’t take. I didn’t say women don’t try to use sex to get commitment. I said it doesn’t frequently work. You seem to believe it does.
But ok. If you are saying sex gets a typical woman marriage to a man she doesn’t love and isn’t attracted to ; and it gets her a “commitment” she will probably destroy if and when it suits her, then yes, sex for commitment “frequently works”.
Query whether a “commitment” she can so freely and cavalierly break and escape is a “commitment” at all.
deti:
It seems to be the case that you came here and commented on my post. Nothing I write is about you unless it is actually addressed to you.
I am not saying any of those things. I am saying the things I’ve actually said, including of course those things where I’ve pointed out where you are equivocating.
Are you suggesting that she is not getting commitment from him? That also contradicts the manosphere narrative about marriage being a huge risk for men, etc.
But that is also assuming that you aren’t equivocating.
Zippy:
I am saying that sex for commitment doesn’t frequently work , because the “commitment” illusory and temporary at best. It is not binding on her in practice , a fact we both understand.
That is not “commitment” at all.
Deti:
So you are equivocating. She is in fact successfully using sex to get commitment to her by him in your model of reality, but because that destroys your assertion to the contrary you equivocate to mutual commitment.
But unilateral commitment is still commitment, and it is what she uses sex successfully to get, so – even stipulating all of your own premises – you are asserting simultaneous contraries.
If you believe unilateral commitment is still “commitment” sufficient to constitute a marriage commitment, then I don’t see what further there is to discuss.
[I’ve never said or implied any such thing. But if you keep banging the gong maybe nobody will notice your equivocations. – Z]
Meanwhile, in reality world (which is Bizarro world), women get operations to pretend to be virgins, in order to get husbands.
Deti
Can you clarify what you mean here? This confused me because my understanding is that “commitment for sex” means she requires the man to give commitment to her in exchange for sexual access (or continued sexual access). So the fact that she can then break the commitment isn’t really relevant here, is it? The fact that she later doesn’t want from him any longer what she originally required of him (commitment) doesn’t seem relevant to whether or not modern women use (premarital) sex in order to secure commitment.
Also, there seems to be two different kinds of “commitment for sex” and the distinction is important.
1. Marriage 1.0 – he has to marry her to have sex with her; she is chaste before marriage.
2. Now – they start having sex and maybe even move in together; at some point, she starts dropping major hints about marriage, which might include saying to him that if the relationship isn’t heading toward marriage, she wants to break up so she look for a man who is interested in marriage. If he proposes, she has successfully used sexual access to snag a man. If he doesn’t, she has failed to use sexual access to snag a man.
Something like 85% of American women, including virtually every woman you are likely to speak to in this corner of the web, used some version of this to land her husband. For women my age, this was a highly successful strategy (immoral, but successful) regardless of the quality of husband that was acquired. And isn’t sex-for-commitment the means women use for AFBB, too? Very few “betas” are waiting until the ring hits her finger to sample the goods.
There is something else going on with women who are trying to lure promiscuous (“alpha” in sphere parlance) men into commitment. I posted an old article from Spin magazine two days ago which I’ll be using in a future post to discuss what I think it going on now with women who are engaging in this behavior. I think there is more to it than what has thus far been discussed in the sphere, but I won’t get into that right now.
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