Friday Ephemera

“But reading some ‘feminists’ now, one often gets the sense that they are not so much against men and women being held to different standards, as they are against the idea that anyone should be held to [any] standards whatsoever.”
I don’t agree. Henry’s link shows they advocate men being held to standards of speech and behaviour that they define.
I had an epiphany while walking home the other night. Nothing’s changed. The old stereotype was that men were strong and rational, while women were weak and emotional. The current stereotype is that men are cold and violent, while women are intuitive and oppressed. We haven’t replaced one set of stereotypes with another set – they’re the same stereotypes, just spun slightly differently. Hence feminism’s main concern these days seems to be ensuring that men watch their mouths when speaking to a lady, just like they did in Victorian times.

If you shame the men, and get 50% of them to quit somehow, now the remaining 50% just sleep with twice as many women, who have to be even sluttier to get the smaller group of men. It doesn’t work. It only works if you shame the women; if there are 50% as many slutty women, then the men will have to work harder for them, possibly requiring commitment to get sex, thus reducing the sluttiness of the remaining 50%.
Hang on, how on Earth does that work? Surely if there are 50% as many slutty women then they will just each sleep with twice as many men, and you’re back in the same situation as with the men?
I didn’t realise that the suffragists wanted (when they began campaigning) universal suffrage for women; I assumed that they wanted suffrage to be extended to women on the same basis as for men, ie, with things like property requirements in place (of course, by the time they succeeded, there was universal male suffrage, so the goalposts had moved in that respect). I must confess it’s not a period I am an expert in, though (and I still think they would be appalled at what their cause has ended up as).

@ D:
Women have the supply, men the demand — very few women desire sex for its own sake to the extent that men do.
Are you communicating with this blog via a wormhole in time from the late 19th century or is there some other explanation for this rather eccentric statement? Or is it an allusion to a line from a character in the popular TV show Mad Men?
Excuse the sarcasm (lowest form of wit, etc.) but do you sincerely believe then line excised above? I’m genuinely surprised if so.

Dear D,
I feel compelled to respond to your claims, not least because the crux of what you are saying here is not so very different – hardly different at all in fact – from claims that we are living in a ‘capitalist white supremacist patriarchy’.
While I concede that culture is to a considerable degree shaped by biological and evolutionary pressures – and certainly to extent much greater than that which social constructivists are willing to allow – the inductive approach that you have taken here is based on such a narrow slice of observable experience that you have come to completely the wrong conclusions.
It seems to be clear from what you have written that the examples you choose are not so much illustrative of your point(s) but the foundation on which you have based them. For instance, you say:
The generally accepted female commodity is sex, while the male commodity is commitment and resources … [Women] generally don’t approach men, generally don’t buy them drinks, pay for dinner … women are the supply for sex in this particular marketplace.
Unlike much of the current wave of western feminists, I don’t believe that society at large objectifies women, though you certainly are doing so here. I do not say that this is willfully misogynist – though there are certainly many who would – but nevertheless what you have presented here is a specifically male perspective (and from a specific type of male).
If you truly believe that women (on the whole) do not feel physical desire but primarily seek the promise of loyalty and material gain, how on earth do you explain the following phenomena:

The exuberant and overwhelming passion adolescent women have for Hollywood heart throbs (Leo Di Caprio etc.) and/or models and singers in boy bands – are you absolutely sure they are driven only by desire for these men’s material wealth?

The usually more mature women (40s-50s) from rich western countries who form relationships with much younger men (20s-30s) from the developing countries, the so-called ‘beach boys’ of West African coastal resorts and elsewhere. Although relatively few in number, how do these women fit into the economically rationalist scheme you outline above?

Affairs in which a single woman pursues, sometimes over many years, a married man – a relationship in which she may be unlikely to gain much in the way of material resources and in which, by definition, there is no real offer of commitment. You could argue here that mistresses do ultimately seek commitment but the onus is still on you to explain what would make an already married man desirable according to the motivations you have attributed to women.

Attraction to criminals – I’m afraid I don’t have to hand specific examples of this, but needless to say it is very well known that many (not all, but many) women are powerfully attracted to men who are known or believed to have committed violent crimes and/or have served prison sentences. Murderers – including murderers of women – are apparently bombarded with marriage proposals from women on the outside. Obviously, you could just write these women off as insane but I think you will find that this is just an extreme form of the attraction to the ‘bad boy’.

Related to the two previous points, why do known serial philanderers often find themselves the object of attention to a significant number of women? I could mention the example of Russell Brand, though you may repudiate that example due to his celebrity. But in British newspapers, the tabloid press often tell stories of non-celebrities which involve a male ‘Love Rat’ who has been having casual affairs and/or who is involved in multiple relationships simultaneously.

It should be needless to say – though apparently not in this case – that women are also known to cheat on steady partners. Given what you have written above, I suppose you would simply brush that off (and no doubt applying the term ‘slutty’ as you did above in the process). But there are multiple reasons why (some) women cheat. A particularly interesting one is what could be called ‘cuckoo cheating’ – by which I mean a woman in a steady relationship but who has been unable to conceive with her committed partner/husband, who takes matters into her own hands by getting pregnant to another man. Again, I don’t have the references readily to hand but women cheating on their partners for this purpose is far, far more common than is generally allowed. Put it this way, if you see someone who looks markedly different from the other members of his/her family – it is entirely plausible that there is a good reason for that being so.

Furthermore, because you have not considered women’s internal motivation – you have described them from the outside as objects only – you have completely overlooked the possibility of female-female competition for the single, desirable so-called ‘alpha’ male.
Such men really do exist and they are very much pursued by women, sometimes quite overtly. This being the case, your proposal that men alone are somehow suffering from a limited supply of women is completely reversed – from the female perspective. Men are, after all, quite literally ‘suppliers’ as you put it and not all men can offer the same quality of ‘supply’.
The fact that, as you put it, women ‘generally don’t approach men, generally don’t buy them drinks, pay for dinner’ simply means that you have misunderstood the particular courtship rituals associated with men as being the only type of courtship ritual there can be – which is nonsense. Perhaps it is generally the case that women in western culture don’t woo men buy offering to buy them dinner or a drink but that is quite wrong to assume that they therefore do not woo men at all – they most certainly do.
It’s obvious that women have an expectation that they will get something in return for sex. They feel cheated when that doesn’t happen (see the many, many studies …
Please send me the links to these studies – I would be very intrigued to see when they were written, who commissioned them, what methods were used and who was in the cohorts.
For men, sex is reason enough for itself.
This is simply untrue – many men are just as interested in settling down with a long-term partner as women are. Perhaps not all the time, or at all ages/stages of their lives, but nonetheless the overwhelming majority do sooner or later look for something more than just sex.
Equally, there are plenty of women for whom, at one point or another in their lives, ‘sex is reason enough for itself’
The difference is obvious from the fact that men are willing to pay for sex while women are not … prostitution would be far different … [if women desired sex to the same extent as men]
Even allowing for that fact that you (and I) are painting in broad brushstrokes here, you have again considering the question from a very narrowly male perspective. To conclude that women do not feel physical sexual desire as strongly as men do on the grounds that they very rarely visit male prostitutes is completely absurd. In fact, it is as absurd as a claim that men do not experience desire as intensely as women do on the grounds that men are far less likely to own a dildo than women are.
As was the case with courtship involving dinner, you have again arrived at a false conclusion by judging women’s behavior according to how similar or different it is from that of men.
feminist nonsense meant to minimize the differences between the sexes
There is quite a lot of nonsense coming out of contemporary feminism and I also agree that there are differences between the sexes, though nothing like to the extent that you appear to do.
I apologise if I appear to have been hectoring you (assuming of course that you haven’t given up reading this long ago that is!).
But I feel quite strongly that to a very considerable degree homo sapiens have a great deal in common with another, regardless of gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, and physical and cognitive abilities. This is at least one reason why I find the divisiveness of identity politics so corrosive and why I object to it.
As I think I mentioned above, the statements you made share the same divisive perspective on the world as those who think we live in a ‘capitalist white supremacist patriarchy’ and thereby give it credibility.
N

Nik, D’s expounding what is known as sexual economy theory. While it has some relevance to the counterexamples you mentioned, it’s not a discussion of women’s sexual desire as much as it is their patterns of sexuality and why social control structures for sex (like “slut shaming”) exist. There’s no doubt at all that a considerable portion of the female sex have sex drives on par with those of their male peers–but their strategies for satisfying that sex drive are very different, and entwined with the differences in female and male courtship and mating strategies. Male courtship strategies are designed to demonstrate their abilities as a provider; female courtship strategies often rely on their availability for romantic engagement and willingness to commit to a single man. Women woo men just as men woo women, but their strategies–as you rightly observe–are different because what they offer in a committed relationship differs. This article about sexualization by Jesse Marczyk gives a very good introduction to this idea, I think.
Of course, as the social world changes at an increasing pace, and more women become self-sufficient without a male partner, courtship strategies will undoubtedly change–but for a very long time in the history of human evolution, it was the case that men provided and women bore children, and that’s what our cognitive modules that deal with social signalling are primed for.
That said, I don’t think saying, “women and men have fundamentally different mating strategies” is in fact divisive in the way identity politics is; it’s as much an acknowledgement of biological reality as “women are on average smaller and lighter than men”. It contains no ethical statements about how we should treat men and women relative to each other, just information about how they are in the world. In fact, in many ways, identity politics try to collapse or deny those differences except for the most trivial ones that permit its proponents to mark groups out and isolate them–because it’s easy to understand why women aren’t often soldiers if you know that they’re not typically as strong as their male peers (or as primed to fight without being immediately threatened), but it’s difficult to call it unfair discrimination unless you say those differences don’t matter in a profession that requires strength and a willingness to fight (or worse, that they don’t exist, we’ve just been making them up!). Once we know what those differences are, though, we don’t need to be wedded to them as saying anything about the morality of letting women be soldiers–just that there’s reasons why they’re less likely to succeed.
And so on and so forth for any other potential difference in the sexes, or between races, or whatever you can name. Acknowledging the existence of those differences allows us to decide when differential treatment on their basis might be valid or justified, and when differential treatment is just discrimination and should be done away with.