This articulates something that feels quite truthful, but one has to take care not to assume that every sexual phenomenon is biological.
For example in the States, in matching tools like group dating events and dating apps, men typically outnumber women by a sizeable margin. One could ascribe this to biology (with women as the choosing sex, like we see in a lot of primates and other species). I had to reconsider this when I saw some pictures from a group dating event among Chinese international students at my university, in which the women outnumbered the men! I was told by a Chinese person this wasn't uncommon for such events in China. I found out later that group dating events in Japan are similar in terms of gender balance as well.
I would very much like to hear some hypotheses for the reasons for what seems to be a pretty big cultural difference. To me it casts a bit of doubt on the author's narrative of "women have it and men want it" -- in some cultures, it seems like women want it too.
A small gender imbalance can become greatly magnified. For example, in a hypothetical town of 100 hetero adults comprised of 55 men and 45 women, perhaps 40 women will decide to settle down with the best 40 men into happy committed relationships. The 15 remaining single men will be left to compete for the 5 remaining women. Here, a population-wide gender ratio of 55:45 turns into a dating-pool gender ratio of 3:1.
Blink 182 snuck a lyric into one of their songs that I think describes what's been happening in the American dating scene: "Nobody likes you when you're 23." People in college generally like dating other people in college, but after graduating, women tend to prefer to date someone a few years older than them who has their life a bit more together, an established career, might be a notch more mature, etc.
This leaves a permanent glut of guys in their early-to-mid twenties who nobody really wants to date, so they clog up all the dating apps and throw off the gender ratios. These guys should probably be pairing up with older women (where a similar glut exists), but for whatever reason, I suspect most younger men and older women aren't much interested in each other.
Have you tried this? Obviously, law of small numbers and whatnot, but as an early-20s male who's gone on multiple dates with older women, I repeatedly felt disrespected or ignored in conversation. It's as if I bored them. Some outright told me they prefer to date men older than them.
And maybe I'm boring! But when I date younger women this doesn't happen. So, in my experience, this does not work and I won't be trying again soon.
As I mentioned before, the dynamics can get weird. Things that someone in their early 20s occupy their thoughts with are often very different than someone in their 30s.
That said, we all figured out how to make the most of our time together, and the sex was really good. I’m not going to pretend like these were deep relationships — that was not what I was looking for, and I don’t think that was their focus either. The focus was mostly companionship and intimacy, and I think that we accomplished our goals on that front.
> but after graduating, women tend to prefer to date someone a few years older than them who has their life a bit more together, an established career, might be a notch more mature, etc.
This is one those things that's important to keep in mind. If we compared like for like a 20-something and a 40-something man, the 20-something many would probably do very well.
But a 40-something man have had 20 extra years to learn how to interact with women, gain experiences, gain education, advance a career, so it's rarely a like for like comparison.
I mean, I personally can't blame the women who rejected me when I was younger. I know exactly what I was like.
Of course some will have physically decayed, but the spread of womens physical preferences for men is pretty wide, and many men still look more attractive to a large proportion of women in their 40's than their 20's.
> This leaves a permanent glut of guys in their early-to-mid twenties who nobody really wants to date, so they clog up all the dating apps and throw off the gender ratios. These guys should probably be pairing up with older women (where a similar glut exists), but for whatever reason, I suspect most younger men and older women aren't much interested in each other.
This is also massively exacerbated by dating apps that have no interest in redressing the issue, by allowing womens match queues to build up to the point that most of the women you swipe on will never see your profile, and allowing people to keep swiping on huge number of people in one go.
E.g. my ex wife told me at one point that she'd once signed up for Tinder's premium service out of curiosity and found she had several thousand matches outstanding. It's in Tinders interest to keep showing women who keep getting swiped even as their queues grow large enough that they'll never work their way through those queues.
At the same time this number is massively artificially inflated also because those most struggling to get a match are incentivised to keep trying to match with a huge number of people.
If these apps cared about their users and only showed profiles to other users that didn't have a huge queue of outstanding matches, and also put caps on the number of outstanding/unseen swipes, it wouldn't improve the number of matches much, but it would likely increase the proportion of swipes that leads to matches by drastically reducing the number of swipes.It would also show users who are actually realistically available. Maybe it'd make more people widen their search criteria.
Of course the problem with this is that it runs completely counter to the interests of dating apps, which are best served by encouraging desperation to get people to pay for premium services.
I am building a dating app that prioritizes UX over short-term profitability. The roadmap includes this feature, matching users with people who are likely to respond and preventing users from getting too many or too few connections.
Good luck to you with that. I hope you succeed, but I also fear that it's a really tough one because the lifetime value of a dating app user is pretty low to start with (most people are only active for a few months, and many never come back - you can see this in the pricing structures for these apps where the per-month fees for premium services drop off drastically with longer periods, and where some offer lifetime memberships that cost only a few months worth of individual upgrades). On the upside, if you manage the PR well, pushing the angle that it's quality and connections that matters and that your competition are all borderline scams in how they pretend you have a chance with far more people than will ever see your profile might well get you enough attention to keep user acquisition costs low.
Just don't sell out to Match like everyone else seems to be doing...
Well, but that clears up for that cohort of guys, doesn't it? They get older (and hopefully get their act somewhat more together), and then the younger women are interested in them.
Yes, exactly - it's just an explanation for why it seems like there is a big pool of not-yet-married men chasing a small pool of not-yet-married women on dating apps. It's literally what's happening: as long as older men prefer to date women younger than themselves, and younger women prefer to date men a bit older than themselves, and there is a hard divide between the college and post-college dating worlds, single men will outnumber single women, and the dating app experience will be vastly different between genders.
Article author here (also I wrote that article a while ago and I don't remember if it's good or not)
In the China example, I'd guess there's other factors. Women do tend to compete and men tend to be choosers in some circumstances; the 'women as selectors' thing is a result of certain conditions that are super common, but not absolutely true always.
My dominant hypothesis here is maybe that "dating" in asian cultures is a prerequisite to something that benefits the woman over the man (e.g., more likely to end in marriage than sex). It's common to see this in very conservative cultures where sex before marriage is strictly forbidden; what a guy can look forward to going on a date is finding a woman to settle down with, which is less advantageous to him than in western cultures where he can have sex without commitment.
> It's common to see this in very conservative cultures where sex before marriage is strictly forbidden; what a guy can look forward to going on a date is finding a woman to settle down with, which is less advantageous to him than in western cultures where he can have sex without commitment.
Hmmm… interesting hypothesis, possibly directionally correct, but the details are off by quite a bit imho.
1. Neither China nor Japan are particularly conservative about sex, specifically in terms of sex before marriage.
2. The issue about what the hoped for outcome with dating is closer to accurate, but with caveats. If people, especially relatives, know about the date, then there will be non-stop pressure about marriage. Sometimes that pressure is hopeful and positive, and sometimes it is critical and negative. If it’s more of an anonymous date (in that family are in the dark), very common in the larger cities like Tokyo or Osaka, then there is much less pressure from family and (sometimes) friends.
3. Sex without commitment is trivially easy in both Japan and China, especially in cities. One has to pass the relatively low threshold of the woman’s anti-slut defense (hate to use this “red pill” term, but this is exactly what it is), which is usually as simple as treating the woman with at least a modicum of respect.
4. A lot of single women in Japan and China have two goals in dating. The first is the potential to meet someone who will provide them with equal or greater status than they currently have. Often time this is a very high barrier, since being an office worker or business owner while having minimal living expenses while living at home can be a pretty posh life. Second, when they realize that the pool of well-off, nice, fun men is relatively small, they start seeking sex dates more aggressively (and sometimes surreptitiously due to family).
5. From the guy’s side, dating can be tricky. Dating that leads to a path of marriage can get very expensive very quickly (courting, weddings, marriage, and kids can all be very expensive). Dating for sex/companionship is doable for the guys who are good at it, but there is that small issue of where. Again, casual dating can get expensive quickly. People get creative, and if you’ve lived in Japan or China you probably know what I’m talking about, but there’s nothing easy about it. Rarely as easy as bringing a woman back to your place, which is very common in the US.
I definitely think you are on to something. However, while I don't know about China, in Japan I do know that premarital sex is not stigmatized and even first-date sex is not unheard of. It's true that marriage is seen as a benefit to women in Japanese society (women face severe career barriers in Japan), however I am hesitant to paint it in terms of "women date/provide sex just so they can get married," given not only their attendance at matching events, but also the prevalence of host clubs, yumejoshi, and other symbols of female sexuality that don't seem to be as common in the West. Women don't get anything out of that type of thing other than fun.
Just looking at number of people from each sex in a group date scenario most certainly doesn't tell you much about the big picture in a culture.
In east asian cultures, there's a very strong pressure for females to get married and have children. In China, there's also cultural desire to have male children - to the point people will abort girls enough to make a lopsided distribution of 51.3% males vs 48.7% females (by comparison, US has 49.2% males vs 50.8% females). Coupled with increased female participation in the work force over the past few decades, this leads to many females having unrealistically high expectations for romantic partners, or rebelling against the notion of being involved in a romantic relationship at all. Another thing worth mentioning is that in east asian cultures, femininity is also greatly associated with homemaking skills like cooking. See for example the concept of Yamato Nadeshiko in Japan.
So for females there, there's a really complex dynamic of parents pressuring young women to marry (either because of old fashioned marital values or because they selfishly want grandchildren, or both), ideologies that men are the head of the household and/or the carriers of family legacy and conversely the idea that ideal women are good homemakers, contrasted with an unprecedented level of financial freedom and choice of partners for females.
If anything, I think looking at east easian cultures only reinforces the OP's argument that there is inherent lopsidedness in cultural values and that men and women behave in a myriad of ways that can be explained well by cultural perception of gender roles.
I’d compare birth rates of men to women. Comparing number of men and women existing isn’t super great. The number of women grows with age because men die younger for various reasons. In the USA, men outnumber women until age 40. Guess what ages men and women tend to look for relationships? Below 40.
Men are birthed more than women just naturally and exist in greater numbers in the world until about age 40. (Many men dying due to suicide and suicide related incidents which don’t get labeled as suicide)
You can look up the age breakdown[0]. For ages 20-30, there's over 110 males for every 100 females in China. That's 1 in 10 males that cannot physically get a female partner of similar age (and recall, we're talking about one of the most populous countries in the world). Point being: anecdata about group date events is dwarfed by population statistics.
Yeah, that's also a fair way to go. I suggested birth rates because it's easier to go with for people rather than qualifying everything but a bunch of adjectives.
It can be worse for individual cities as well - such as San Francisco - where the ratio is supposedly closer to 115-130:100 depending on how you slice the population. (e.g. if you select only for single people between 18-35 rather than including married couples in the stats)
If women in east Asia actively seek out partners because they feel pressured to get married, could it also be said that men in the West actively seek out partners because being a single man is seen as loserish or otherwise low-status? I'd buy this being a part of it. I also don't want to discount more intrinsic motivations too. Most people have a sex drive regardless of any obligations felt from society -- that is an undoubtedly biological component.
As someone who has lived in Japan and China, I can say that I have seen this happen.
I have also seen a similar phenomenon at Ivies (at the undergrad level) if you exclude the athletes, so it’s not even a race or national culture thing.
Imho, the short answer is that it is the way a large portion of that sub-population is raised - lots of study, very limited socialization (esp. wrt the males), very few positive male role models who are like them in home life or in popular culture.
Men do outnumber women on apps but I think you'll find it's actually very difficult these days to get men to attend dating events like speed dating even in western countries.
This article answers its own question in the rather insulting tone it takes. Why would men go to these events if the women who go there are dismissing most men as not "eligible"? Maybe it's true, but when that is the impression, it helps cement the stigma she describes.
It also, I think gets to the point that where women as described in the article often see thing like speed dating as a "girls' night out", to quote the article, to most men these kinds of events are purely functional. I would have considered going to speed dating events if I didn't find dates in other ways. But it's far down my list of things I'd consider, because it constrains the number of people I can interact with to a set of people where only a small number is likely to interest me from the outset. If your goal is to have a "night out" it might well be productive. If your goal is to meet someone to date, it's only productive if you struggle to introduce yourself and need a crutch to do so. And so you get the guys the article writer describes who have done this because introducing themselves is far out of their comfort zone.
I have no data to back this up beyond the anecdotal (ex. "Christmas cake" women stigma in Japan), but a possible explanation is ageism differences between the cultures. E.g. American men may be less age-selective than their Chinese or Japanese counterparts, which would naturally lead to gender composition changes in dating events that target people in demographics older than early 20s.
No, but I think what they're getting at is that since these events are usually over 30 anywhere, you will see a lot more women show up in cultures that consider that age "undateable".
The student dating event I described was among university students, so 18-22 age range. Japanese goukon are usually among the working crowd, but they're not exclusively for >30.
The Theory of the Disposable Male is central to any discussion on gender politics, the sex/reproduction marketplace, and practical feminism/tolerance in society. It almost never is considered because it is somewhat sympathetic to the male gender.
The theory is most applicable to animal populations, but researchers in this field do think the human race was subjected to the same phenomenon so our instinctive social behavior is still subject to it, and of course the biological economy/energy of male sperm and female eggs/wombs is the same as most mammals.
Online dating matches the tenets/predictions. My only complaint with it is that it doesn't really address societal structure in humans once they are raising children. It's mostly a theory that explains "single culture" and animals with shorter lifespans or less shared rearing of offspring.
So for this group meetup, let's look at whether men or women decide it's worth it to go to it.
In this group meetup situation, men and women will immediately "rank" their opposing peer group. Everyone does this.
Of course certain members of the opposite sex will often quickly be apparent at the tops of the rankings, the (yes, tiresome) "alphas". The difference comes down to how men and women act on those rankings.
The women know they can find a man if they settle. Disposable Male theory states that basically 70-80% of women successfully procreate. But they will "hold out" for a higher value male since they can always walk down their ranking and find someone to fertilize them.
The ratio of successful male procreation per the Disposable Male is in the 20-30% range. So 70-80% of males in biological times were "dead ends".
Women operate with a 50% "desperation differential". And the only way the numbers line up, is that the high value men are procreating multiple times. Thus lower value women will have the opportunity to procreate with "higher value" men, or can walk down their choice list until they find someone.
In a group dating situation, this will probably lend to 30-60% of men realizing quickly that none of the women are interested in them. At all. They'll all wait out for a higher value, or go somewhere else to try to find another high value.
The lower value men know that less numbers / options / context / immediate ranking will benefit their chances. So don't show up to group events where you'll be stack ranked immediately, or there's no point in investing the time.
Now, modern (mostly) monogamy really messes with the instinctual behavior. Men likely have a much better shot at procreating, and women need to compromise a bit more to find a mate.
But man, when it comes to Tinder and the like, it is full one alpha males attracting most of the interest from women, and women ignoring men at their level. The old okcupid pre-match data seems to corroborate this quite well.
Something that I think is particularly interesting (and that is not immediately obvious from the post) is that the author used to do porn, and is considering doing it again. She's written about how that really fucks with your self-image, the experience of online stalkers/harassers, and also how porn basically saved her from homelessness at one point – and that she really enjoys making it.
She's intimately familiar with the power – and costs – of The Thing.
Ugh. I think this whole post starts with a flawed premise.
It may be true that heterosexual men want sex. But so do heterosexual women and homosexual men and women as well, as well as those who are somewhere in the vast spectrum between these identities. The question to consider then is why does male heterosexual lust get special consideration?
For example, consider the framing of calling the ability to reject male advances "power". Anyone can reject sexual advances from others for any reason, but it's rarely framed as a special position of "power" other than when applied to heterosexual male advances.
Women definitely want sex, but it's not as urgent because they usually know that it's easily available for them.
I taught English overseas right after college with other people from the states and it was the first time I saw women sexually frustrated. The local guys were too shy to approach the female teachers and most of the male teachers were going after the foreign women. It was also the first time I had women actively approach me, which shows you a completely different side of women than if you're an average guy (and showed me how where you live can VASTLY change your value).
Even then it's different - I doubt the teachers you interacted with would have been satisfied with one-night stands. They're still expecting a long-term monogamous relationship, and are bound to be very upset if that doesn't happen.
Eh. It varies a lot. But my own experience interacting with these groups is that I think what they want is everything. They want a ONS but they also want someone who wants more with them. They want the option for more but then to reject it.
Basically, they want to feel desired for more than just a ONS but then reject it anyway. I think many people are like this but it’s very prevalent with women I’ve interacted with…
"It may be true that heterosexual men want sex. But so do heterosexual women and homosexual men and women as well, as well as those who are somewhere in the vast spectrum between these identities. The question to consider then is why does male heterosexual lust get special consideration?"
Who do you think has more sex: lesbians, or gay men?
OK so now that we've settled that men have 1000x more sexual lust than women, let's ask ourselves, are there more gay men or straight men? Straight.
"The question to consider then is why does male heterosexual lust get special consideration?"
Probably because most sexual lust is male heterosexual lust.
Just because a lot of people are responding to you with what I can only call low key trolling, a look at the scientific evidence[0] says
A large body of scientific research documents four important gender differences in sexuality. First, on a wide variety of measures, men show greater sexual desire than do women. Second, compared with men, women place greater emphasis on committed relationships as a context for sexuality. Third, aggression is more strongly linked to sexuality for men than for women. Fourth, women's sexuality tends to be more malleable and capable of change over time. These male-female differences are pervasive, affecting thoughts and feelings as well as behavior, and they characterize not only hetero-sexuals but lesbians and gay men as well. Implications of these patterns are considered.
I've got to question the good faith of people who pretend to think that gay men and lesbians have similar amounts of sex.
The effect size -- even if I let you cherry pick citations (in a field experiencing a reproducibility crisis, no less) -- is several orders of magnitude smaller than the parent poster asserts (1000x).
According to your own sources it's an effect that is literally closer to "women are bad at math" than "men are taller than women". Literally. The comparison of effect sizes for those three things is right there on the first page. And for a proxy that your own source chose.
Again, parent asserted 1000x. 1000x. And you post an article with an effect size that's absolute garbage data in any field outside of psychology and assert "Science!". To defend a post claiming 1000x.
Or, in your words: stop arguing in bad faith, troll ;-)
> Who do you think has more sex: lesbians, or gay men?
It depends the couple. Also depends on what you mean by "more" and what you mean by "sex". Is a once-a-week 4+ hour naked cuddle session with occasional touching/stimulation more or less sex than a multiple 10 minute BJs every day?
I would tend to say "obviously more". A longish session once a week is probably fairly common for lesbian couples and multiple short sessions -- but on the order of a few a week as opposed to a few a day -- is probably fairly common for gay men.
My genuine belief, having spent almost all of my life surrounded by lgbt folks, is that if you define "sex" in a way that isn't pathological, then lesbians probably spend more time on sex than gay men.
(I also STRONGLY suspect there's a heavy overlap between people who think "it's not sex unless my dick is wet the whole time" and people who have trouble finding consistent sexual partners.)
> OK so now that we've settled that men have 1000x
LOL where did we settle on that? I agree with OP. Women enjoy sex (gasp!).
If you call a massage a form of sex, who has more sex, gay men or lesbian women?
Gay men. A massage isn't sex, even if that's what you call it.
For what it's worth, I'm a bisexual man who's had multiple relationships with both men and women. I had more sex with the lowest-sex man than I did with the highest-sex woman, even when you do count cuddling as sex.
What is sex? What is lust? (The questions are rhetorical, but the point is that these terms tend to be defined in ways the exclude lots of queer foreplay.)
But, yes, a massage where both people understand the energy is building toward/from sexual stimulation is definitely part of sex. Foreplay is part of sex. I can't think of any definition of sex that excludes foreplay and that is, for the purposes of this conversation, useful.
If "women don't want sex", but we define sex as functionally equivalent to "someone's genitals are touching another person", well... idk. Maybe women just don't want really shitty no foreplay sex? Surprise, surprise, right?
> For what it's worth, I'm a bisexual man who's had multiple relationships with both men and women
Ditto and opposite experience. It's almost like people are different enough that gender-based generalizations are almost entirely unhelpful.
My original post says a couple blowjobs "per day", not "per week". I'm confused. If anything, I'd expect you to call bullshit because that number is too high (it was meant to be hyperbolic).
But you also willfully misread my other comment, so shrugs.
I don't think men want sex substantially more than women. What causes an imbalance, IMO, is that women value casual sex substantially less than men for a variety of cultural and biological reasons and women's value in the casual sex marketplace have a much flatter distribution and is also front-loaded when you look across the age spectrum. This means most women either can pretty much get casual sex whenever they want or at least have lived through a phase where they could. Meanwhile, most men will never live through a period where casual sex is as easy to get as it is for the median woman at her prime, which may permanently alter the perspective of many of them and cause them to consider casual sex more valuable, regardless of their actual level of sexual desire.
The problem is that the framing of male lust as a fixed constraint to be satisfied screens off a lot of hypotheses. For example:
* Maybe societal beauty standards are causing people to have unrealistically high expectations, thus shrinking the dating pool and making it harder to satisfy everyone.
* Maybe the average male lust has been artificially increased by something (porn? waifu gacha games?) and needs to be brought back down.
* Maybe female lust has been artificially suppressed by something (I’ll refrain from speculating on what), and matching will work out if it’s brought back up.
Or maybe literally every human experiences sexually frustration soemtimes but certain types of men have been so coddled that they blow up their smallest discomforts into Big Societal Problems That Must Be Solved.
> Who do you think has more sex: lesbians, or gay men?
what is the answer to this question supposed to be? is there some stereotype that gay dudes have more sex than lesbians? i haven't found any clear trend here anecdotally.
There's no true equivalence, because the effect under discussion is a matter of magnitude. The simplest illustration I can think of is that there is a large market for average-looking call girls, but only a small market for any-looking gigolos. There is no symmetry either between the extent to which men and women are motivated to pursue sex, or the extent to which they're receptive to it. It isn't to say that there is no demand/desire in the other direction (or direction(s) in the case of queer individuals), just that the other direction isn't the one that has a big impact or causes the common problems.
Male lust is higher than female lust. In the case of homosexual lust, on average people are matched: coarsely speaking, supply of sex equals demand of sex. Heterosexual lust introduces an assymetry: demand of sex outstrips supply of sex. This creates effective monopoly power.
No, not remotely equally. We have a literal measure of this. Think about it: Sex work would be impossible if what you're saying is true. The demand for having sex with women is astronomically higher than the demand for having sex with men.
It is possible there just a lot of men who vocally express their inability to deal with their unrequited lust and feel a sense of entitlement to have their urges satisfied. Women could want sex just as often and just as badly as men, but are culturally less prone to express and feel entitled to it than men.
I'll believe the market over these theories espoused with zero supporting data. If women wanted sex enough, they'd buy it at a higher rate than they do (which is essentially not at all) regardless of cultural norms.
That market is different since people with billions decide who gets to be a politician, not voters. The consumers are the PACs, lobbyists, etc. not the voters. The voters are the product.
My point isn't to present a definitive explanation, my point is that you cannot assume an explanation based on the market price, which is the only evidence you have to fit your narrative.
I'm not assuming anything, I'm concluding what I must based on the evidence. You have some countervening evidence, then we change the conclusion. Otherwise, Occam's razor. Just because it could be more complicated doesn't mean we should believe it is without evidence.
A metastudy above concludes the same thing using unrelated data anyway [1]. Men masturbate much more than women and the effect size is greater than most all other psychological differences.
There is no such thing as a "voting market". At the least, where is the skin-in-the-game? or itemised quid-pro-quo?
> if they were simple to understand
The rules of pool are simple to understand, that doesn't mean the game is easy to master.
Trading is a matter of predicting the market - that is not what is being described here; is is not being predicted that women pay less for sex, it is known from the market already.
Because most people are heterosexual. If this was an article on health problems for overweight people who make a significant amount in the west you could say they’re not giving enough exposure to underweight people who should be equal represented.
Having said that - for a short time in a young woman's life she is highly desired by men of all age groups. How can you take 50 year age range of of men who think they can (and should) get 5 year age range of women?
But if a woman survives this 5 year period then relationships with men can be balanced and satisfying. Men still want women and women still want men, but it seems to be balanced.
I just realized what bothered me about the article. It assumes the entire relationship between men and women is purely transactional. It is not. I just reread the article and the woman is a stripper. It figures.
> The question to consider then is why does male heterosexual lust get special consideration
Male lust is given special consideration because it is the overwhelming majority of the lust expressed, leading to all the problems this article discussed. Perhaps it is a US-only thing.
There is a way out of this conundrum and it is absolutely not to double down on traditional gender roles or to throw our hands in the air and say "it's evolution!". That way is to embrace and encourage sex work, to be open to non-monogamy and other non-traditional arrangements, deprogram ourselves from all of our subtle and not-so-subtle slut-shaming, stop pretending the naked body is illegal and sex is bad or dirty, stop dramatizing and fear-mongering over the impact of STDs, and just generally embrace a broader, vaster and more open perspective on sex and romance and intimacy.
This is partially because of a good thing, that less people die from AIDS than they used to. Mainly it's because HIV can't be cured though, which means you live your entire life with a weakened immune system.
We need more STD awareness, not less. Especially not dismiss STD awareness as "fear-mongering". Especially if you want to explore society models with less monogamy.
OP might have attended school in a conservative state where STD misinformation was used as part of an abstinence-only propaganda machine in high school health courses. That sort of STD fear-mongering is in fact unhelpful (because it's exactly that: fear-mongering without actionable advice).
But you're right. As you move away from monogamy, sexual health becomes more important rather than less.
When monogamous, you can kind of address the question of health once and mostly forget about it for the duration of the relationship (modulo a few exceptions -- HSV-1 and Hep are transmissible outside of sex, any sort of blood-blood contact should be thought of as roughly equivalent to unprotected sex, etc; you get the point, though).
When non-monogamous, you have to think about STDs more like COVID in 2020 -- constant masking and regular testing as the default, and if you want to let your guard down it requires some special effort.
That's a fair point. What GP said came across a bit wrongly though, almost sounding like a covid denier just for STDs. STDs are a real thing, and they have profoundly negative impacts upon society.
As to those teaching practices, they are horrible. Yes, in theory, "in the lab", abstinence does prevent STDs. But this doesn't work in real life. It can't ever inform the STD avoidance strategy taught to pupils, as enough people will have sex no matter what is taught to them. If they don't know how to reduce STDs when having sex, they will spread them more.
The reaction should not be to discard STD avoidance though, but to do it properly. Which is sadly tougher in places in which promiscuous behaviour is shamed, as they usually have less availability for STD testing, buying protections, and people might feel ashamed or even be ostracized to seek out such places.
It's not going to work. Even in a perfectly open society, people won't have sex with just anyone. They will choose their partners. This means value judgement which implies hierarchies which establishes power structures. Inequality is inherent. There will be highly promiscuous people at the top and involuntary celibates at the bottom.
This is roughly how actual polyamorous dating pools work. If anything, the bottom of the distribution has a more difficult time in polyamorous settings.
That’s a nice idea but how do you do credit assignment for childrearing purposes? Sadly even in modern society, sex is not entirely unliked from reproduction and we still expect, often legally demand, fathers invest resources in their children. I thought part of the deal with monogamy came from ensuring stable male parental investment and a good way to achieve this is through monogamy as a proxy for fatherhood.
Birth control is what holds the whole thing together, that's the implied part that's not usually mentioned. I grant that IQ 145 people can get together and subconsciously arrange an equitable polycule childcare system, and they don't realize why that would be a problem for anyone else. Moving away from exceptional cases, you have what are more or less roomates, and they manage to stay roomates through birth control.
If you're wondering, "what happens to people that have a good gut feeling for fairness, but who aren't smart enough to subconsciously work out how 5 people are going to take care of a child, and who want kids," then the answer is, they are the vast majority of the population and they're not going to fit the non-monogamous system unless massive inequality (see bronze age) forces them there.
You are promoting your own ability to reason over hundreds of thousands of years of accumulated evolutionary and cultural wisdom. I doubt you'll come out on top.
There are good reasons for stigmatizing nakedness, fearing STDs, conceptualizing sex as something that should exist in monogamous, emotionally close relationships, and so on. That's not to say tradition is infallible, only that dismissing it altogether is a mistake.
That history and cultural wisdom was based entirely on the oppression and subjugation of women. So, of course many straight men will be swayed by those arguments. But objectively speaking, all of this collective wisdom has created a situation where women still suffer constantly at the hands of men, and men aren't happy either, and are arguably increasingly unhappy! If you want to continue down that path, good luck.
I think you meant "subjectively speaking". I don't agree with the way you conceptualize human history as gender struggle. It seems incorrect to me.
I don't think we have any option than continuing down the path. Reforms and changes are necessary but we aren't going to create a better way of living by abandoning the past. Our ability to meaningfully critique tradition depends on our treating it as a series of intricate answers to complicated problems, which is what it is.
> to be open to non-monogamy and other non-traditional arrangements
The "males have a hard time finding dates/sex" is just as much a thing in poly communities. In fact, I consistently have a harder time dating women when I have a steady partner than when I'm single. If anything, ENM makes the lives of men who struggle in singles dating pools even more difficult.
The basic problem I've seen, over and over and over, is that many men don't know how to form normal relationships with women. Even in situations where sex is... more liberated, for lack of a better term... those men still have a really hard time getting past first dates. Unsurprisingly.
There's also a strong overlap between this cohort and men who don't have female friends.
I think there's probably something deeper than "women don't want sex" going on here. There's a big cohort of men who aren't desirable as sexual partners and want to blame society instead of changing themselves. Non-monogamy doesn't solve that problem. Hell, I'm not even sure that legalizing sex work could solve that problem.
That's what we've done, isn't it? Marriage rates are declining and non traditional arrangements are increasing. Traditional gender roles have been pretty firmly condemned, at least people who advocate for them. There are few places in public where advocating for them wouldn't be considered sexist. This really isn't anecdotal, you can see it with data that traditional gender roles and marriages are generally declining.
Do you have any proof that the imbalances described have been decreasing as either belief in traditional gender roles and marriage rates have declined?
The picture I was trying to paint is much more radical than that. There are emergent phenomenon that come from less judgement and more openness that I would argue can subvert the paradigm you're describing. But yeah, part of the idea is that if we remove the endless barriers we have embraced that deny us sex and intimacy, we will all have access to more sex and intimacy. We may also find that we want more and different kinds of sex and intimacy, which may in many cases lead to a reduced demand for straight sex.
The radical-ness of this doesn’t stem from the moral implications, it stems from how reality-denying it is. Young people have discarded the taboo of sexual promiscuity for at least a few generations already. But you need more from relationships than just sex, which is why we have the concept of “settling down” eventually to have a long-term, committed partnership.
Sexual compulsions are very influential, but people almost universally find relationships revolving primarily around sex to be completely unfulfilling (eventually).
> Because women supposedly would be giving out more "sex favors"
Yeah, supposedly in such a society people would no longer be discriminating when it comes to sexual partners. They will have sex with anyone and everyone. It's a fantasy.
I've even seen feminists arguing this. "Feminism is good for men too, they get more sex!" Except the unattractive men are never invited to the party.
I find it kind of amusing because I tend to use sexual attraction as an example for when communism will fail - because it is unrealistic to assign everybody a mate of equal attractiveness. You can give everybody the same shitty house and roughly the same shitty job, but unless you clone people, they will not be equally attractive.
Amusing, because the communists actually thought of it, and come up with this solution: that everybody should just be willingly give sex to everybody (or another variant, that everybody should just considered to be equally attractive).
For example here in Germany there was the famous "Kommune 1" in the 60ies, and they had the mantra "Wer zweimal mit derselben pennt, gehört schon zum Establishment" - meaning if you have sex with the same woman twice, you are already the enemy.
I don't think that is the "freeing of women" that its proponents claim it is. Quite the opposite, it is the ultimate "utilization" of women who lose the rights over their bodies.
Amusing concept, isn't it? Sex and reproduction as resources. Inevitably the issue of fair redistribution comes up. I saw articles talking about this posted on HN once:
Capitalism doesn't escape this either. The notion that you'll find a good wife if you work hard and become successful is ingrained into men since early childhood. It's magical thinking, of course. No such guarantee exists.
>There is a way out of this conundrum and it is absolutely not to double down on traditional gender role
In my comment I touched on traditional gender roles vs egalitarianism. I too agree that we should absolutely not revert the changes. But one must admit that the traditional gender roles had an appropriate balance.
>or to throw our hands in the air and say "it's evolution!".
That's difficult to change though. The bell is ringing and there's no unringing.
>That way is to embrace and encourage sex work, to be open to non-monogamy and other non-traditional arrangements, deprogram ourselves from all of our subtle and not-so-subtle slut-shaming, stop pretending the naked body is illegal and sex is bad or dirty, stop dramatizing and fear-mongering over the impact of STDs, and just generally embrace a broader, vaster and more open perspective on sex and romance and intimacy.
Very long sentence lol. The majority of the world criminalizes sex work as well as even porn. Yet ironically those places are also far worse off. Japan is clearly a prime example.
STDs are certainly a complicated subject. Each individually represent a small percentage of risk but together isnt addition, it's multiplication of risk. It's compounding interest as it were.
I think we are looking at it incorrectly. This is outside real control, in fact efforts to control will always result in the opposite result as expected. This is kind of something jordan peterson goes over, in an attempt to fix gender inequality has resulted in greater gender inequality.
We likely can only measure and monitor what's happening. Where does this balance go now that the balance broke. Men are going to benefit greatly here. Is that what we want? Is that a good thing? I suspect not.
Pretty sure an anthropologist would disagree with you there. Humans for the most part have not been monogamous until recently. There are many historical examples of men who have sex with multiple women in the tribe and many examples of women who have sex with other men besides their partner. And yes, my language was intentional to point out that historically it was expected that a woman had one partner but a man could have many.
Not all societies today even value monogamy. In France some consider the President weak if he doesn't have at least one mistress. And in fact the same thing in America.
This is still monogamy - its just social monogamy rather than genetic. Many animals are socially monogamous, especially among primates and some monkeys are even genetically monogamous.
Let's be honest you're trying to use a nature to excuse behavior most find unacceptable - there's risk residue if Christianity in that. I see this a lot in these appeals - you're essentially arguing that if you can show someone thing is natural it's beyond question. However, anthropologists admit that most human societies have developed monogamy of one form or another, with exceptions only for rulers.
Worked for who exactly? An entire gender that has, for almost all of history in almost every society, been ignored, oppressed, controlled and frequently raped by men? Hardly.
For almost all of history in almost every society both man and women have been ignored, oppressed, controlled. Things have drastically changed in Western world. Not sure we need to impose a Brave New World style "utopia".
I'm not sure we should assign monogamy as the culprit for the bad things that have happened to women. There are plenty of men who don't ignore, oppress, control or frequently rape women who are happy to be monogamous, and women seem to prefer it if you haven't noticed.
We're not out here trying to convince men that being able to have sex with multiple partners throughout their lives is a good idea -- that part comes naturally to us.
Whereas men have simply been killed in droves. Are you sure women had the worse part throughout history, or do you just not care about the fate of men?
If the overriding concern is placing blame, it is probably better for it to be mostly self-directed so as to adjust standards of behaviour. Rationalizing why an out-group is responsible for all the sufferings of the in-group becomes easier the more one engages with it.
What is the point of this comment? The topic that was being discussed was
>I’m betting on monogamy since that has worked for thousands of years.
The reply asked worked for who? Then out of nowhere you're talking about men being killed in droves. Are you saying that monogamy didn't work for either gender (one that lost their freedom and and the other that lost their lives)?
See, your comment makes sense and is a valid point. I do agree that the world was a more violent place and I don't think monogamy is the reason that women had it bad (most likely has to do with a patriarchal culture and an uneducated population).
Theirs is a borderline flame bait comment that added nothing to the discussion.
The ideas presented here don't really account for the fact that in many cases, the men who do the most damage in terms of sexism and misogyny are those who are already married or otherwise have ready access to sexual partners.
They are not necessarily chasing sex. They already have sex. In at least some cases, they're quite satisfied with the sex they have and aren't looking to cheat on their wives.
Yet we still see sexism and misogyny coming from this group.
Why?
Because sexism, while it might be caused sometimes by an unfulfilled desire for sex, is fundamentally distinct from that desire, and it can exist on its own, regardless of how much sex a man might be having.
The power imbalance obviously comes directly from a difference in demand. The only thing that would fix this is to increase women's sex drive or decrease men's sex drive. We know they are very unequal because prostitution is 99.99% done by women which tells us exactly what the demand is. We have already literally quantified the difference.
From what I understand, a difference would have originated due to the danger and cost of pregnancy which can be as low as zero for men and as high as 100% for women (it can literally be cause death and they can be entirely abandoned.) This mostly ended with birth control, better healthcare and child support-like laws, but the unequal drives did not.
It's an interesting perspective. Due to a confluence of paraphilias I find myself in possession of 'the Thing' in regards to a female friend who does not have 'the Thing' in regards to me. I've never been in a position of having to deny a woman 'The Thing', and it's odd how much more uncomfortable it was than denying gay men 'The Thing'. I would assume that's partially because I assume gay men who shoot their shot with straight men are more comfortable with rejection than straight women, and partially because I have a self-image as a straight man, so I have no second thoughts about a man having 'the thing' in a non-obvious way. That might help explain why some cultures are so different in regards to how 'the thing' is dispersed.
What I find particularly interesting about my experience having 'the Thing' is how instinctively I want to properly commoditize it. I can't price it out in monetary terms, but I have a very close estimate of what would be a balanced level of mutual vulnerability. Very strange feeling, and I wonder how much of it is my personal idiosyncrasy and how much is a natural instinct for anyone who has any version of 'The Thing'.
Probably not without sounding like I'm making things up, but sure. She has, and is a member of a community of people who have, a fascination with drinking human blood. She's asked to drink mine and I find myself uncomfortable with the prospect of giving something that personal away. I've never really thought about what I'd sell a blood sample for, but I know it would be a different price if I were to sell it for medical purposes as opposed to this one. It feels wrong to put a price on myself in that way when I don't understand the need it would be fulfilling.
However, I happen to be interested in diy bio experiments and intrigued by the secrecy of the community she's a member of. If she and another member were to provide me with the results of DNA tests, and give their blessings to my trying to find genetic idiosyncrasies they share, I'd consider that a fair trade for providing small amounts of blood every so often.
I don't think that's the case. There will of course be counter-examples, but the ratio is so massively different that it might as well be one-sided. If a specific power dynamic is split 90/10 between the genders then that's a pretty strong underlying cause regardless of the fact that the other 10% enjoys the same thing.
We can argue about the ratio but that doesn't actually matter. Whether it's 50/50, 90/10 or 99/1. We only care that the alternate case does occur genuinely (and we should exclude cases where it happens as satire or a political statement).
One of the reasons why I like the host club example is because it's a business in demand, it has a big focus on privacy and it has an audience that choses to be there. The female patrons of the host club aren't there to put on a performance or make a political statement.
Put another way. Let's take nursing, which tends to be female dominated. Do you think the female/male power balance still occurs? Does it occur in the same way? Is it flipped?
A lot of male nurses report sexual harassment problems. That suggests to me that the underlying cause is not an innate male/female power structure. There is some other root cause at play.
I think you misunderstand the dynamics of, for example, host clubs. Women don't generally go to hosts seeking primarily sex - they tend to go seeking fantasy love & engagement-based interactions. Articles like [1] shine a bit of light on it.
I'm genuinely having trouble following your logic on this issue - it seems fairly obvious that heterosexual males are highly desirous of sex with attractive women, which creates a power dynamic based on that desire.
Female escorts often engage in fantasy and what is basically affirmation therapy for their clients. That doesn't mean men aren't seeking sex anymore than the alternative holds for women.
Women do tend to engage in sex with hosts [1].
> it seems fairly obvious that heterosexual males are highly desirous of sex with attractive women, which creates a power dynamic based on that desire.
You're affirming the consequent. If men desiring women creates a power dynamic, and if that power dynamic is why men desire women.. we have a logical issue. The power dynamic cannot be it's own origin.
If we can show that the power dynamic exists in situations where women desire men - and I think this is both obvious and we have - then it clearly has some earlier origin. It is not the root cause.
I tend toward a kind of moderate defeatism, where you accept that for the foreseeable future, men are going to face a dystopia of constant rejection, and women are going to get way more romantic attention than they ever wanted (a lot of it shallow). Sex is just one (probably the most glaring) example of the whole "men compete/women choose" power dynamic.
I'm not arguing for some weird Spartan-style separation of the sexes like the MGTOW/TRP people say. Most people are going to be happier having relationships; it's just a necessary suffering of life, like looking for a job or getting dental care.
On the positive side, things do start to equalize as people get into their 30s and 40s, because women face the time pressure to have kids. But I wouldn't say it evens out all the way.
power comes in many sizes. small largely inconsequential power during an evening at a party, or the power of a clerk in a bureaucracy are both power, albeit small (short-term) power. They're both power
It is real power though. Did you just read the WSJ article about the McDonalds CEO who was denied a $100 million severance package because he was caught having sex with employees?
Why is there so much talk about sex bots? Every time this problem comes up, people bring up sex bots. This article elides the problem that technology is currently dozens of years away from robots capable of anything even remotely resembling actual sex, if that is even possible at all, by qualifying that they would have to be “amazing” and “realistic”. To me that is still missing the point. People aren’t just starved of sex, they are also starved of intimacy, romance, connection, eroticism, whatever. If your mother dies and I “solve” this by presenting you with an amazingly realistic mom bot, at best you’ll laugh me out of the room and at worst our relationship will be forever soured. Sex bots cannot fill the holes some people apparently think they can. They can replace or complement “ceci n’est pas une sex” aka “porn”. They can help you masturbate. They can’t replace “sex with a person”.
I think they get brought up so often because they reliably make everyone uncomfortable. They make men uncomfortable because we imagine being so lonely it seems like the best option, and they make women uncomfortable because they wonder whether that's really the extent to which men value them. And of course, realising we're insecure enough to have thoughts of that nature makes it doubly uncomfortable.
They make everyone uncomfortable because everyone knows they are the answer in the end but it shifts women out of a role. Things are taboo for a reason.
A robot seems far away. VR seems closer but right now men are falling in love with women providing the faux girlfriend experience through fan experience sites, cam girls, custom videos.
FWIW, I think this happens the other way too. There is no shortage of attractive single influencer dudes on sites like TikTok and Instagram who post endless videos which are various combinations of:
- talking earnestly about mental health and how much therapy has done for them
- tears and vulnerability, especially around the hurts they've experienced in past relationships they now describe as having been "toxic"
- questioning their own self-worth and wondering aloud if they are lovable at all
- emphasizing the importance of flags/non-negotiables in relationships and encouraging viewers to cut out partners and family who don't measure up
- being "fun" and joking around, including about things like how much they enjoy getting kinky, giving oral sex, etc
None of this is bad on the face of it, but it is kind of a question mark when the comment sections for this kind of content are choc-a-block full of married women posting crown emojis and openly expressing their wish that their partners could be more like the persona being depicted by the content creator.
And neither am I judging the semi-anonymous women who connect with this kind of thing, but I think it is probably filling much the same gap for them as something like porn/OF does for straight guys in terms of unmet emotional needs— it's just that it's the stereotypically female needs that it's catering to. And it probably has many of the same potential pitfalls in terms of risks to real-world relationships when the line between fantasy and reality is not clearly understood. For example, I'm aware of a few cases involving a creator like this where women met up with him and ended up quitting the community altogether because it was just too jarring trying to square what they'd built up of him in their mind with what he was actually like to hang out with in person.
I find the Onlyfans era fascinating because it causes an even steeper 'winner take most' dynamic among women than the 80-20 distribution among men on sites like Tinder. The 'simp-shaming' trend seems directly analogous to 'slut shaming' in that the criticism seems to be someone placing too low a value on their own sexuality.
> People aren’t just starved of sex, they are also starved of intimacy, romance, connection, eroticism, whatever.
If someone is starved of all human connection, their life is going to suck either with the sex bots or without them.
But not all people are in such extreme situations. Some have many "friends without benefits", and a sex bot might address the remaining need. Or there are partners who have different sex drives, and a sex bot might make their lives perfect.
People can get _really_ attached to artificial objects. I think you might be (horrifically) surprised how effective it would be, if the stigma was dropped.
It's just a misspelling, they meant sex dolls. Sex dolls are currently available, massively used, and constantly improving. Don't overestimate guys' desire for love talk and such. That's a real threat to women's power. Every night a guy uses a doll is a financial loss to the nearby massage parlor.
Interestingly enough there are cultures where the problem was solved using method #1, and they tend to be matriarchal type cultures where women are not monopolized by a single person sexually but are free to do whatever they please. (From what I've read, grain of salt). So on some level the power imbalance itself might be said to come from patriarchy.
The status quo is often justified though by an egalitarian argument: that is, if you let things happen "naturally" you would see all of the women end up with 30% of the men and the rest would be left with nothing.
I've read about this before but I not buying it. I think someone is pushing an agenda with this "explanation" because it is a defeatist stance.
The strongest stallions getting all the women while everyone else is stuck with their VR girlfriends. Totally not a thing on a global scale because we are getting more and more. No, don't cite me aging population stats. They may be real but the math doesn't work out with your 30%
I will say this is the experience of myself (male) and the men I know in the bay area.
Those of us with the right combination of desirable traits have a choice of partners, scheduling a few dates a week with attractive women is no big deal if you're in that group. Conversely, my friends without such a combination struggle to get a date at all even if they trying to date "down" or "at their level" (I recognize these are crude terms, not sure how else to express the idea). Most of these men are pleasant and have decent jobs but they appear to fall below some line where they're considered for dating unless things evolve very naturally within a longer platonic relationship.
My understanding is that this is largely the reality already in the dating marketplaces we can measure (dating apps). At least every study with dating app data I have seen shows a small minority of men get the vast majority of female attention.
When I brought up the argument I had in mind a case based on income inequality, that some rich guy was able to support 3 women, something that you'd imagine was the case in the time when my namesake and his followers codified Christian ideas of monogamy.
There are many young people today who believe there is also an inequality of attractiveness at work which is, I think, a newer concern.
Are you sure about that? Involuntary celibacy actually predates all of these ideologies. The phenomenon was identified in the late 90s, by a female researcher no less.
It seems to me these ideologies are just an attempt to make sense of the suffering.
And they impact you even if you are "married with children"
One of my son's friends fell under the spell of an incel preacher who goes as "Wheat Waffles". He refuses to hang out with my son because my son is taller and more handsome and thus inevitably "mogs" him.
Waffles is running a pernicious cult complete with a catechism and what I saw looks a lot like Scientology disconnection.
Do you know whether any of those cultures had the potential for wealth differentials among men the way we do today? The only cultures of that nature I heard of were either communal or men literally couldn't own more property than they could carry themselves.
> "The first seems to be present in more liberal, hippie-esque communities I’ve been in. In some circles, all the men seem to be satisfied, and all the women seem to have a lot of sex with a lot of people. I’m extremely curious about what are the causal factors of these types of groups. They seem to have solved the problem."
Anecdotal evidence, but this gels with me. I lived in Denver/Boulder for a long time, and Boulder was one of the few places I've ever been where the concept of groupsex/threesomes and non-monogamy wasn't strange at all.
Have several friends in tech that it turned out privately had lots and lot of groupsex or other such kinky things. Generally, with a dedicated friendgroup who had partners, where this was a habitual thing.
I don't consider myself hippie or what you'd term neo-liberal (I've done a lot of psychedelics and if I have to paint myself into a corner, it'd be "Libertarian") but I've also had non-monogamous relationships.
Not sure what exactly it is but it boiled down to me not having insecurities about the relationship and viewing sex as mostly hedonism. There's no logical reason for two people to deny each other the opportunity for more sex besides "I don't want you to."
Romanticism and love aren't things I equate with sex, and sex isn't something I do to someone because I love them, to phrase it another way.
This mortifies most people I've mentioned this to, and they can't seem to come to grips with it. It's not for everyone, that's for sure.
I mean, this seems like stating the obvious but are they not less likely to be homophobic? Polyamory is a heck of a lot simpler when people have flexible sexuality.
Ah, you know this actually hadn't crossed my mind. That's a good point, yeah it definitely takes a comfortable sexuality and a very tolerant/open view of sex to sign up for escapades in a room with your friends and their partners.
I could definitely see a strong correlation between homophobia and animosity towards groupsex involving more than one male.
Indeed, I've seen the "No way, that's gay!" reaction before.
However, most of my male friends who seem upset at the thought of a partner not being monogamous somehow were fine if the scenario involved one guy and multiple women.
I don't really understand what level of mental gymnastics goes on for such a level of brazen double-standards to occur, but hey, I'm not here to judge anyone's sexuality or stance on adult acts.
Not to say that it's "right" as that is a complex question, but this double standard is logical from a biological point of view when taking reproduction into account. I wouldn't say homophobia is the only explanation.
> However, most of my male friends who seem upset at the thought of a partner not being monogamous somehow were fine if the scenario involved one guy and multiple women.
these seem disjoint? I care a lot about a partner of mine violating explicit boundaries that have been set for our relationship. I don't care much what boundaries others have or whether they choose to cross them; that's their business.
I think the point was that the boundaries are often not symmetric. I have also met many more men who are perfectly happy with polyamory -- as long as they are the only man. If people want asymmetric boundaries that is of course always their business. And plenty of those men were hippies too, to be sure.
But I've also seen a lot of guys go seriously crazy in the eyes at the concept of another naked man in the room even if there are ten ladies.
Maybe there's an explanation for that other than homophobia, and I won't judge anyone for it as long as they're transparent and honest with their partners, but it's clearly unbalanced. We can try to blame biology or something but I don't see why it matters what the source is if it's harmful today.
I've seen references to studies that imply it's largely a function of social inequality. The more egalitarian a society is, the data seemed to suggest, the more likely women were to engage in casual sex with multiple partners. Not sure how that relates to the Denver/Boulder area which I think of as quite capitalist, but maybe there are wrinkles either the studies I saw or the descriptions of Colorado I heard didn't capture.
We should think carefully about the tools various cultures use to deal with sex. Ultimately, sex is about children, humans are a species that reproduces sexually. Even if there's no chance of pregnancy, the chemicals and emotions involved are premised on the possibility of pregnancy.
> The first seems to be present in more liberal, hippie-esque communities I’ve been in. In some circles, all the men seem to be satisfied, and all the women seem to have a lot of sex with a lot of people. I’m extremely curious about what are the causal factors of these types of groups. They seem to have solved the problem.
One of the basic functions of a culture or civilization is to reproduce itself through multiple generations. These communities do not last over long periods of time.
I strongly agree with your statement. Free sex and love are fine as long as there are no consequences. But sadly even with all our technology there must be consequences since we don’t know of any other way to propagate the species into the future.
For the advocates of sexual libertinism I have a question: how do you ensure male parental investment? As a society we value it and often legally demand it. I certainly could not argue for the alternative. How do you assign fathers under complete sexual liberation? A common thread is that somehow you socialize childrearing but I am seriously skeptical of the scalability of that approach beyond small tribal societies.
Society raises children. The state provides qualified parents for children which allow the parents to work and live and keep spending. You could say parents belong with their children but parents outsource raising a child now to daycare, school and social groups.
"This [desire for sex] is how we’ve continued the human race for thousands of years"
This article is about the road leading up to children and how people select each other. How we raise children today is completely different from our past and deserves its own article. Not to mention sex today doesn't always involve pregnancy for everyone.
> either we all start giving away the Thing until it’s no longer a rare commodity, or we invent amazing sex robots with good mobile joint movements and realistic audio sounds.
It will always be a rare commodity because sex is costlier for women (because of pregnancy). These discussions seem to always miss that basic game-theoretic dynamic.
Part of the story of men and women is that a women's sexual value is at a peak very early (let's say 18) but a man's sexual value peaks later (at least 30+).
The sexual invisibility many men feel as teenagers is a trauma that will live with them for the rest of their lives.
> Okcupid’s data scientist cofounder did a bunch of research on this and confirms your assertion
said assertion:
> women's sexual value is at a peak very early (let's say 18) but a man's sexual value peaks later (at least 30+)...sexual invisibility many men feel as teenagers...
OKcupid data scientist cofounder says in that article:
> Women generally like a guy to be the same age as them up until the guys hit about 40. But when you flip it around, when you look at how men perceive women, it's pretty much a just straight ticket vote for 20, which is the lowest age I looked at in my data set
So young men aren't invisible according to this data. And:
> This is just measuring people's opinions, not what they actually go out and do. What you see when you actually look at what people do, you see the realism set in. So these 40-year-old guys ... they people they actually have the courage to actually go out and message are a lot older: it's 30, 35-year-old women
So stated value is 20, but in actual practice women older than this are also doing just fine.
In practice though, 15–30 year-old single women get much more romantic attention than e.g. 45–60 year-old single women do. Some older women miss the kind of attention they used to get when they were younger (while some are indifferent, and some are relieved).
Many young men feel rejected/alienated. By age 35 or 40 men have often figured their life out (figured out what they want, found a partner, become more effective at approaching people, whatever).
I haven’t heard any men in their 30s or 40s mention that they aren’t being chased around by eager suitors the way they used to be. And I haven’t heard any women in their 20s complain that they can’t get a date however hard they try.
OkCupid is one of those dating sites that have a high bar to entry (you need to invest a lot of time in just creating your profile), so that people who are there are looking for serious relationships.
If you did the same analysis for Tinder you would probably see that guys 35+ do message girls under 21 years old A LOT, but that isn't meant to last, both sides are typically just looking for casual sex.
Good news is that one of the OKCupid cofounders (the one who wrote those original data science blog posts) ended up writing a great book called Dataclysm[0] that expands on top of that earlier research + tons of completely unrelated and interesting research and analysis. It is really well written, the writer definitely has his way with words, and his analysis is very careful and reasonable. I heavily recommend.
Back to the original point I was trying to make, in the chapter of the book on that topic (as opposed to his earlier data science blog posts), he uses not only OKCupid data, but Tinder and other dating apps as well. I remember there were a few small outliers, but in general that trend from the original data science blog posts still stands. Oh, and he also explicitly compares his old analysis vs. his present one. Definitely an interesting topic, and the book, luckily, applies similar rigor to a bunch of other topics completely unrelated to dating dynamics.
Most important, many women start off with little urgency to have children, but at some point in time it becomes clear that their fertility span is limited. Then they feel a tremendous feeling of urgency and often aren't happy with their prospects.
Observe the growth of subs like https://www.reddit.com/r/FemaleDatingStrategy/. It was satirized as "FreeDinnerStrategy," since one of their overt mantras is that the man should pay for significantly more than half of expenses in a relationship. The overall goal is to extract as much benefit, money, sex, status, from a man as possible, and consider them resources in life more than anything. They demand that a man not have any female friends. The difficulty they run into is finding a guy who's solid in his life while allowing himself to be walked all over like this by his partner.
The front page of that sub currently has a meme about women feeling a need to pay for the first date so that men don't feel they are owed sex. As a hetero dude who was recently doing a decent amount of casual dating, I can tell you that this is a very common fear. I would say that you are possibly missing the message.
edit: honestly, five minutes of casually browsing that sub, and I don't see a thing about "men should pay for more than half of a relationship" or anything about "extracting value."
Seems like a sub that's really into respecting oneself outside of the context of a boyfriend, and women unpacking and de-normalizing the toxic behaviors of previous partners.
I feel like you're trying to make that sub into something it is not. Why is that?
Submitted 1yr ago, 177 upvotes when the current front page is ~1000. I wouldn't call it "the point of the sub."
I just think it's super reductive to look at that sub and decide that the problem is that women are golddiggers. That place speaks to a lot of the fear, frustration, and disappointment that, anecdotally, plague many women's dating lives.
> That place speaks to a lot of the fear, frustration, and disappointment that, anecdotally, plague many women's dating lives.
Of course dating is difficult for women. But it's also difficult for men, and that doesn't excuse misogyny.
The obvious conclusion is that there are large groups of both men and women who have very unhealthy and sexist ideas about the opposite gender. How many women on that sub have actually talked to real men about these ideas? "If you wouldn't date a drug addict, don't date a man who watches porn"? Seriously?
Communities like FemaleDatingStrategy are just as bad as incel or MGTOW communities — just a place for sad people to outpour their bitterness and sexism into an echo chamber. Except places like FDS pretend to be feminist, so they get a pass. But they really, really shouldn't, and I hope one day society will see that.
> Communities like FemaleDatingStrategy are just as bad as incel or MGTOW communities — essentially just a place for sad people to outpour bitterness and sexism in an echo chamber.
Yep. There is a reason for why users of that subreddit are commonly referred to as "femcels" by people outside of it.
Lol, that's not "just" what your first comment said. You said: "Seems like a sub that's really into respecting oneself outside of the context of a boyfriend, and women unpacking and de-normalizing the toxic behaviors of previous partners." Your original comment is still up there, directly contradicting what you've now pivoted to. You scanned the sub and couldn't find something that it took several other people less than five minutes to track down.
TRP and FDS both use past lived trauma to justify toxic ideologies. The frustrating difference is FDS is feted in the mainstream media, while TRP is considered terrorist adjacent.
I don't disagree that both are toxic in their ways (see also: internet communities), but how many women do we see committing terrorism while spouting FDS-derived ideology?
For what it's worth, all AFAIK the terrorists you're referring to came from the incel-sphere as opposed to TRP.
But more substantively, basically all terrorists are men. This is true of terrorists from every group: white nationalists, black nationalists, Muslims, Christians, Trump supporters, Bernie supporters. If there ever is a terrorist spouting FDS ideology, he will be a man. The particular toxicity of the ideology has nothing to do with it.
All true, I'm just saying that the reason TRP (which is for sure adjacent to the incel sphere; I'm sure the Venn diagram between the subreddits for the two is closer to one circle than two) is considered "terrorist-adjacent" is because they're adjacent to terrorists.
It is not the "not getting sex" that is traumatic, it is that that experience equates to "I am not lovable" for many men. It's particularly harmful when you see proof that other people are "lovable" and you're not. You feel like there is this world that you're permanently shut out from. Talk about it with adults and successful kids you get told "not to worry about it", "be yourself". You have a problem shared with many other people but you feel alone because (until recently) this problem hasn't been acknowledged.
These negative emotions persist into your college years, 20s, and even longer and sabotage your success with women and domestic life not to mention work and all areas of your life. Even when something good happens your are inclined not to believe it because of what you have internally and the resulting effect is self-reinforcing.
Sure but that’s still bullshit. Teenagers are not feeling they’re unloveable because all of the local teen girls are being swooped up by 30 year old dudes. They may suffer those crises including being unlucky with love and suffering self confidence issues, but 30 year old dudes specifically are a tiny tiny effect on this.
People always get confused with "different people who are different ages at the same time" with "the same cohort which changes in age at different times". Also my explanation was not the best even if it caught some essential features.
I'm not saying that those boys are in competition with 30 year old men, but that those same boys are going to be in a materially better situation when they are 30 years old -- yet they might not be able to take advantage of it because they will still have that deprived and resentful little boy inside.
> Teenagers? How many teenage women do you know of that are fucking 30+ year old men.
Not many teenage women go for 30+ year old men. But many women do prefer men who are sufficiently older than them that the combined effect for young guys is noticeable.
Anecdotally as someone who is now 46, I feel like the attention from much younger women has kept increasing. Additionally the attention has shifted. If a 20-something woman shows interest in me it's almost always sexual rather than a woman looking for a relationship. My dating life is so much easier today than it was when I was 18-20. Heck, it's still easier to find dates today than it was in my 30's.
With hookups through the internet young women are easily preyed on by older men that know the right words and have the resources to carry it out. Traditionally women would be married to older men, if anything their families found it fortunate to have a "stable man". Only recently has it become more taboo but also the easiest to execute.
Unless things have changes since I was a teenage boy (and they might have, that was 30 years ago!), teenage girls are interested in a very, very small subset of available teenage boys while being visibly, publicly disgusted by the rest.
"interested" or "has access to"? most teenagers meet other teenagers in or through school, where they are rigidly separated by year in most activities. it's not surprising they date people exactly their age when that is the majority of people they encounter day-to-day. by college, it seemed to me that the guy was often at least one to two years older in hetero couples. of course, same year was not uncommon, but I can't remember a single case where the woman was more than one year older than the man.
It's less depressing if you consider that this happens because Tinder and the like are about the worst you can possibly make things for men, in that women will tend to compromise on looks very easily if you display other qualities but sites like Tinder makes it very hard to project those qualities. In other words, not succeeding on Tinder is a poor indicator of success in arenas where you get to display more personality.
While true to some extent (you can’t really bypass ugly though) - real life is becoming more and more like Tinder. A lot of women I’ve met treat people in real life like it’s Tinder.
People have always sorted by first impression in contexts where that's all they have to go by. That's been a thing in e.g. night clubs etc. long before Tinder.
But for my part at least I've seen no indication that people treat people in real life like it's Tinder once they get to know you first. I'm not even sure what treating people in real life like it's Tinder would look like unless you're basically putting yourself forward before having had any meaningful interactions with them first.
it feels like only 5–7 years ago this assertion was 100% taboo and you wouldn't hear it anywhere but male sexual advice circles, which naturally meant that there was a certain stigma attached to said assertion. it also feels like this was entirely common knowledge at some point in the recent past, maybe only a few decades ago, yet I was raised to be entirely ignorant of it and I know I'm not alone.
as a young, then-virgin, then-sexually-frustrated man, coming across knowledge like this felt like learning important, key rules to the game you're playing halfway through, while people are screaming that these rules weren't actually in the game anymore, because they never should have been in the game to begin with, and that's why nobody told you.
now it's the top-voted comment on a top story on the front page of a website whose average community views would certainly not be described as "traditional" or "conservative" ...yet here we are.
it's very interesting to observe shifts in acceptable discourse and society in general within the span of my lifetime. who knows where we're headed next?
Women have gotten dramatically more powerful within the US culture in the past 30-40 years. Versus men they're more highly educated, they have higher literacy rates, they drop out of school at lower rates, they live longer, and under the age of roughly 40 they now out-earn men while working fewer hours (and that will continue to spread upwards into the older age bracket; aging-out older male corporate management types and other white collar professionals (eg doctors, dentists) are the only thing holding that in place for now).
I'd expect the present trend to continue for at least another 10-20 years, with a large gap being created between the well-being of the median & average man and woman in the US (in the favor of women). The potent education, employment and income trends alone practically guarantee that outcome. Not much is being done to correct the growing imbalance, so by the time there is enough widespread cultural give-a-shit at a large scale, the gap will be substantial and it'll take a long time to correct (if it can be corrected for given the labor automation employment dynamics that are inbound).
The trend will make competent men that have something going for them, that much more valuable. As more men fall behind, men that don't gain value by scarcity.
Someone writing advice in a major Norwegian newspaper got into "trouble" for making this argument in their advice column a while back. Part of the problem is that it's hard to express this in a way that doesn't feel like an attack on women and avoiding coming across as an entitled attitude when expressed by men. But it's also getting really hard to ignore that there's a disconnect - for both many men and women - between what they believe their "value" is and what their value is in the eyes of prospective partners.
Trying to nail down a specific number seems like a fools errand that will output a number just below whatever age before people start picking up weight and qualifiers that make them less desirable (like "single mother"). Sure you get a number but that number isn't going to be very useful for applying to anything.
I just want everybody everywhere to occasionally step back and consider how that is the "why" of all of this; our society is set up, or has evolved (devolved?) into this place where people must consistently ensure a steady supply or source of money for mere survival, and from that is where the generally natural thing of sex and how it works among the genders et al creates these imbalances which can be converted into money. It's hard to understate how deep this goes; e.g. marriage et al.
I mean, there are some people you'd prefer to befriend/date/marry over others, right?. your criteria is probably not just money; you might care about physical characteristics, intelligence, character, etc. to the extent your criteria overlaps with others', something like a market emerges, though the prices are not denominated in dollars. "value" is kind of a crude word to use, but it's a useful abstraction to answer the question of why some people have very many options in friends/partners and some have very few.
In most places, it's verboten to consider the experiences of sexual relationships as as starkly gendered as they are, and even rarer for anyone to say that the social structure of sexuality is anything more complicated than men oppressing women. Treating romance as the highly contextual reality that it is is a good and useful thing.
These threads are doomed to go sideways because for the most part only frustrated male software engineers show up to them. It's the same dynamic as the feminist groups that produce their kind of toxic dialogue; people who have life sorted out don't show up to talk about it and what's left are people with varying degrees of idiosyncrasy.
I'm saying that if you're trying to understand dynamics of power and sex and your conclusion is that the big issues are men are traumatized because nobody liked them as teens and older women ask for too much, you're so far off the mark from the real world that there's no point in trying to explain the disconnect. My comment wasn't to educate anyone, just a beacon for anyone else who is disheartened by the collective psyche of the folks who post about women on HN.
None of this is disputing the broad gendered trends in "sexual value" (ew) by the way - aging is social hell for women as far as I can tell.
> None of this is disputing the broad gendered trends in "sexual value" (ew) by the way
> aging is social hell for women as far as I can tell
So what you're saying is you actually agree with the notion that older women are less valued and therefore have less leverage and power than younger women.
I don't know about the teens thing but if we accept the above as true then women overestimating their own worth is well within the realm of possibility. So how come you say it's "so far off the mark from the real world"?
You'll catch some h8 for that accurate assessment. How many of the theories posted here have been workshopped with an audience of women? Do some of the people posting even know enough women well enough to ask them to check if their ideas about women are not absurd?
"The sexual invisibility many men feel as teenagers is a trauma that will live with them for the rest of their lives."
... meanwhile according to this logic women are only valuable when they're just out of puberty and then they spend the next 70 something years invisible but yes let's talk about male trauma
First, it’s natural to expect children to be more traumatized by an event than adults.
Secondly, the period before and after a peak is a slope, not a sudden drop into nothingness. This means that a thirty year old woman is not “sexually invisible”. Similarly 40 year old men aren’t invisible either even though they supposedly peaked at 30.
I don't think he's dismissing that it's probably terrible for the women it happens to, too, but it's worth noting that when it happens to teenage boys, it happens while they're still developing, trying to deal with everything else that goes along with being a teenager. Presumedly by the time it happens to adult women, they're a bit more mature than the average teenager, and somewhat more equipped to process it.
Sigh, what's up with the online insurgence of angry men that blame their inner misery on lack of sex they deserve?
I didn't even try to have sex as a teenager, and I'm happily married now, no psychic problems. Honestly, I got more PTSD from playing basketball at PE classes.
>A catcall isn’t just a catcall, it’s a symbol for the entire social structure around the power exchange of sex.
The traditional gender roles were well balanced. throughout recorded history there were differing cultures and different approaches but it was generally balanced; but egalitarianism since roughly the 1960s broke this balance. Economically and culturally this has been one of the best things we have done.
However, that's what broke the balance on things like catcalling. Virtually nobody is doing it anymore and that's kind of a problem. It's worse, now we have tinder and tremendous amounts of high quality porn. The women's 'thing' has drastically reduced in value. Even if we want to get back to the balance, we cannot anymore. We must now find a new balance.
>Sometimes I feel like women who are trying to end the game don’t realize that the game exists because women have the Thing, and people want the Thing and aren’t getting it.
Oh yes, those folks who want to break the game don't understand the situation at all. Worse yet, this effort is not only doomed but the effort itself will only make the game worse in their eyes.
This is the complicated part. We have moved to a new balance and I'm not sure what this balance is or will become.
A catcall isn’t just a catcall, it’s a symbol for the entire social structure around the power exchange of sex. It is no longer a compliment – an acknowledgement of the desirability of their Thing – but rather an insult, a claim that they are only desirable for their Thing.
Catcalls on the street are fine, because they are 100% okay with being a one dimensional sex object to strangers.
That's what the article said on the subject. Some women see the catcall as a compliment, others dont.
This is the balance. This isn't toxic masculinity being eliminated. This is men not being interested in 'the thing' and therefore the balance shifts accordingly. Men are thusly some amount more powerful and in control.
Here's kind of a big caveat as well. There's a wall on this balance. There is a point in which there's too much risk in sex and you will never catcall. When catcalling ends, it's because we are at that wall.
Moreover, now what are the consequences of being at the wall? Negative birthrates when excluding immigration. Huge increase in open border immigration. Reversal of abortion rights is certain. Birth control will almost certainly get banned.
Obviously 'catcalling' aka free speech isn't the problem. It's just a clear canary in the coal mine.
I'm reasonably confident that feminism argues women aren't "supposed" to birth babies, it'd be their choice, it'd also be their choice to go to work with children if they want to. The empowering part would be that you have a meaningful choice instead of the traditionally immense social pressure for women to always have children and always stay at home if they do.
Stay-at-home mothers are routinely cited as proof for the systemic oppression of women, so it seems quite a stretch to interpret it as simply wanting women to have a choice. They clearly value some choices higher than others.
It's true that they prefer women to decide against children, but the point was, they think women stay at home because they are forced to do so, when really it is one of the privileges they get in exchange for giving birth.
As for the pressure - who does that? Not employers, they lose valuable employees if women switch to stay at home motherhood. What are the repercussions for not having children?
The only pressure is from friends and family concerned about women's well-being if they don't have kids. It's like complaining that people experience pressure to save for old age or to exercise and eat healthy.
These days it is more likely that you have to justify staying at home, especially with all the daycare options available. In France it is normal to return to work after three months. Here in Berlin you get to hear questions if you stay at home longer than a year.
It's not "being reduced to", it's just an announcement of sexual attraction. What exactly does "object" even mean in that context? Do men also catcall sex dolls, which are actual objects?
I think this is a very white, cisgendered view of the problem. If you fit within the mainstream beauty standards, great! You have some power over men and I think that’s awesome. If you don’t, most of the guys interested are fetishizing the things that make you not part of those standards. They’re looking for someone to fulfill a porno fantasy, not a partner.
As a trans woman who passes for cis, I can tell you that lots of men want to sleep with me, but far fewer want to have a real relationship with me after I disclose that I’m trans (and from talking to women of color, this is not unique to trans women). There’s no power there other than transactional. So I’ve had to learn to always be on guard and find ways to filter out the fetishists to meet the men who aren’t ashamed to date me.
>They’re looking for someone to fulfill a porno fantasy, not a partner.
That seems pretty obvious considering one want is a subset of the other. If I’m physically attracted to you but not in other ways, I can still want to have sex with you. That’s a single box to be ticked, whereas “potential partner” is the title of the entire checklist. Surely this is a ubiquitous phenomenon that applies to mainstream beauties as well. In fact, you’ll hear them complain about it, too, as described in TFA.
I think the subtext is "a lot of men want to sleep with me only because I am a trans woman," and then are freaked out by the idea of actually dating her, which is an extremely common occurrence for trans women.
There is, as OP alluded to, a very strong fetishization of non-white, non-cis women.
Yeah, very much so. Once you hit your 30s people are looking for more than hookups. I have cis girlfriends who have a much easier time finding decent guys. Heck I have no trouble finding them, they just don’t stick around after they find out I’m trans. I basically just gave up on men my age and date guys ~10 years younger since they don’t seem to have as much of a hangup about it.
> but far fewer want to have a real relationship with me after I disclose that I’m trans
I'd guess most of the men that are looking for a "real relationship" are doing so because they want to find somebody to have children with, especially at 30+. In general they are not going to invest time and energy into building a relationship with someone that lacks the proper organs to conceive a child.
I’m not sure what your point is. You seem to have the Thing the article mentions and appear to be in the group of people who don’t like the game.
What I read here is just that you’re just as discriminatory as the people who you complain about. I don’t see any mentions of race in the article and what it describes applies to most cultures and every race.
Stop being racist and maybe people will stick around after receiving the Thing.
What? The OP is trying to look at the premise of the post through a lens of race – non-white women are often fetishized by white men for their non-whiteness. I mean, shit, look at... any porn site. And they're right – fetishization makes for a totally different dating experience, a different experience of The Thing.
Where is the racism here? Is just mentioning the idea of race somehow racist?
Actually, yes, kind of the whole point - the concept of race is racist. And "looking through a lens of race" is racist too.
(EDIT : the OP doesn't mention race though, so the blame might be actually more on the answerer.)
The whole concept is not only scientifically flawed (and so was largely abandoned by anthropologists, who prefer to use the much more culturally than genetically defined concept of ethnicity), but has also resulted in untold suffering in the 19th and 20th centuries.
Not that fetishization of skin color isn't an issue, but affirming the validity of race by using it to think about this issue is guaranteed to make matters worse.
Race as a biological imperative of some sort is absolutely hogwash. What race you are seen as says nothing about who you are as a person or what you are capable of. On that we agree.
Race as a sociological phenomenon is very real to those who experience it. Fetishization of race in sex is demonstrably real as well and not limited to women.
Regardless, race isn’t really the important part — it was just an example. You could replace race with any number of descriptors of a person (weight, height, etc) and it doesn’t make it feel any better to be fetishized; it’s not two people having sex, it’s one person having sex with an idea. Ideas aren’t supposed to have feelings, dreams, or agency.
Some combinations of these sociological states are just a lot more likely to be fetishized (and porn sites have the stats on that!) And when they are, it changes the power dynamics around sex significantly.
What would you call it when someone is obsessed with race and views skin color as paramount? Squeezing everything through that lens and making judgements on that basis.
Looking to examine an argument through the context of physical appearance, in an article about physical appearances, does not speak to me of obsession or "squeezing."
We're talking about fetishization, sexual gaze, and power dynamics. It would be irresponsible to not talk about the role that race plays in this conversation.
> It would be irresponsible to not talk about the role that race plays in this conversation.
Hard disagree. What you're saying reminds me of Seinfeld’s "Not that there's anything wrong with that" suffix and "I'm not racist, but" starter. You don't have to mention things that are obvious, you're just making the conversation awkward.
I fail to see how talking about race (keep reading) changes anything about the the concept at hand: People want you because you have "the Thing, and maybe only the Thing."
"Being an Asian woman" itself can be the Thing, that's still covered by the article.
Are you serious right now? Do you think white women are not fetishized by black men and Asian men? I live in Asia and let me tell you something…
Both your comment and the parent are racist because you’re applying common issues to “white men” while they’re really not limited by race in any way whatsoever. Whether this or that race is fetishized by which race is completely irrelevant in the context of the article.
Fetishization is absolutely relevant in the context of the article. It completely changes the power dynamics associated with sex, which is what the article is about.
And I absolutely do believe white people can be fetishized! But this article is written in the context of a white person living in a predominantly white society. My main argument is that her experience is not generalizable to the wider population, who experience the power dynamics of sex very differently.
For example in the States, in matching tools like group dating events and dating apps, men typically outnumber women by a sizeable margin. One could ascribe this to biology (with women as the choosing sex, like we see in a lot of primates and other species). I had to reconsider this when I saw some pictures from a group dating event among Chinese international students at my university, in which the women outnumbered the men! I was told by a Chinese person this wasn't uncommon for such events in China. I found out later that group dating events in Japan are similar in terms of gender balance as well.
I would very much like to hear some hypotheses for the reasons for what seems to be a pretty big cultural difference. To me it casts a bit of doubt on the author's narrative of "women have it and men want it" -- in some cultures, it seems like women want it too.