A healthy man produces more sperm cells every single hour of his adult life than a healthy woman produces eggs in her entire lifetime. And not just slightly more, but orders of magnitude more.
A healthy woman blessed with a long life will ovulate for approximately four decades, at a rate of one egg each month. If all her eggs are frozen and artificially inseminated, then with the help of surrogate mothers she may realize 480 births. That is a hard upper bound. By giving birth the old fashion way, if she made it a priority, she might manage one pregnancy a year and have 40 births in her lifetime.
A healthy man blessed with a long life will, starting at puberty, produce hundreds of millions of sperm each day throughout his entire life, the number gradually declining in his old age. If all the sperm he produces in his lifetime are frozen and used to impregnate women through artificial insemination, the number of women that can thus be impregnated vastly outnumbers the number of women on planet earth. He effectively has no upper bound. By impregnating women the old fashion way, he could easily manage one woman per day. Of course, in his youth he could manage several women per day, and in his old age maybe only one woman every few days, but if he made it a priority, he might realistically average one woman per day for sixty years or even longer for a total of about 22,000 births in his lifetime.
Consider also that childbirth poses a severe health risk for a woman and that it imposes a severe toll on her wellbeing even in the best of outcomes. Unsurprisingly, women do not find the prospect of maximizing their lifetime number of births as described above to be at all appealing, even if they had no other considerations in life.
Impregnation, on the other hand, poses not even the slightest risk or hardship for men’s health, and most men would relish the prospect of attempting it anew each day with a different woman, if only such women could be found.
If you could do something 22,000 times in your life, with no risk involved, you would not be overly concerned about who you did it with. On the other hand, if you could only do it 40 times, and each time involved a considerable risk to yourself, you would be very picky indeed. Even if there were no other differences between men and women besides this difference, this alone would explain most observed behavioral differences and social conventions. In particular, it would explain why women are so choosy when it comes to men, while men regard nearly every female of their species as a potential sex partner. Consider the classic dialogue from “Some Like It Hot,” where Jack Lemon and Tony Curtis talk about their first day in public dressed as women:
JERRY (throws the instruments disgustedly on one of the beds): Why, that dirty old man!
JOE: What happened?
JERRY: I got pinched in the elevator.
JOE: Well, now you know how the other half lives.
JERRY (looking in the mirror): And I’m not even pretty.
JOE: They don’t care -- just as long as you wear skirts. It’s like waving a red flag in front of a bull.
A lot of men are going to say something like: No way, I wouldn’t want to have sex with a lot of the women I meet, yuck! But in fact, you looked at each one and considered sex with her. You actually imagined yourself having sex with her for at least a split second before reaching your conclusion regarding her. That is a lot farther than most women get with you. Most women do not even look at most of the men they meet for even that split second. When women talk about “men,” they aren’t even talking about you and your friends, because they’re looking right past you. They’re talking about a very small number of other men.
Female choosiness limits men’s options and raises the cost of sex to men, while men’s undifferentiated readiness increases women’s options and lowers the cost of sex to women. In fact, considering how desperate many men are, many women effectively have negative costs to sex: They have to constantly exert some effort to avoid having it. When women talk about the importance of keeping abortion legal, they often sound as if they are afraid of becoming pregnant by accident at any moment. This sounds bizarre to male ears. It’s like being terrified that you might suddenly climb Mt. Everest without meaning to. But apparently this is how sex really happens to women, even completely ordinary looking ones.
Men spend their lives in scarcity. Like Tantalus, they are surrounded by beautiful, shapely, fragrant, succulent fruit that makes their mouths water and their insides burn with longing. It dangles and jiggles constantly right in front of them, but if they try to touch it they may lose their jobs and reputations or even end up in jail. Women, too, spend their lives in scarcity. But it is a different kind of scarcity. They too are surrounded by fruit, endless mountains of fruit, but it is a different kind of fruit. They can touch it all they want, but most of it is rotten. They don’t even see it as food, but as malodorous garbage. Paradoxical as it may seem, they are just as desperately hungry as men are for something good.
Double Standards
Much is made of the hypocrisy by which promiscuous men are regarded as studs while promiscuous women are regarded as sluts. Morally, they are equal, but every other way they are not. Thieves are all immoral, but still some are more impressive than others. A thief who breaks into the most guarded vault of the central bank and steals a rare diamond protected by interlocking lasers is impressive. A thief who takes an unsecured wooden cash box from an honor-system farm-stand on a lonely roadside is not. In the one case, every possible measure has been taken to deny you access to something, but you got it anyway. In the other, the only thing in the world keeping you from it was your own inner resolve not to take it. No one is going to be impressed that you lacked this resolve.
Promiscuous men are held in high regard by other men because most men would like to be more promiscuous if only they could. This is not a social construction, but follows directly from the already mentioned abundance of male gametes relative to scarcity of female gametes. It is a textbook case of supply and demand of real materials. You cannot change this through “education” just as you cannot change market supply or demand by rigging prices.
Subsequently, the situation among women is precisely the inverse. All women know they could be as promiscuous as they had the slightest inkling to be. But women tend to see women who are more promiscuous than themselves as scammers or grifters. They see the (relatively more) promiscuous women as diluting the mating market by vying for attention from men who would otherwise be out of their league. These women are held in low regard by other women. This is really no more “socially constructed” than pointing out that people wear warm clothing in the winter and light clothing in the summer. It only seems “hypocritical” if you completely disregard the differences in temperature.
There can’t be even one woman who is not capable of realizing how disingenuous this complaint is about a slut/stud double standard. If women really wanted to, they could end this double standard instantly by shunning promiscuous men. But women will never do this because they like promiscuous men. That is why those men get to be promiscuous. The only resolution women ever want for the “double standard” is for their own promiscuity to be likewise valued. It’s like claiming it’s a “double standard” that real money is valuable but Monopoly money is not and pretending not to notice that real money is so much harder to obtain than Monopoly money. The tipoff that deep down you understand this is that you never demand that real money should become worthless, you just want your Monopoly money to be accepted as legal tender.
The opposite of a slut is not necessarily a lady. A spinster may be a lady, but no woman aspires to be a spinster. Neither is it a successful career woman. As much as Marie Curie is cited as a role model, precious few women ever attempt to spend their lives toiling in obscurity as she did, even today. The opposite of a slut is not a virgin, either. Women make a big deal out of men wanting women to be virgins. But what men really want women to be is: young. They prefer young women to be virgins, but not necessarily older ones. A thirty-year old woman brings little additional value by having remained a virgin. And at some age, the value of virginity becomes negative. As F. Roger Devlin put it: “...there are two ways for women not to be monogamous: by having more than one mate and... by having less than one.”
The female counterpart to a stud is a woman who secures marriage or publically avowed investment from a high-value or high-status man. That is the rare and difficult thing that women aspire to but that few can accomplish. Women who can secure such public commitment from multiple men are not considered sluts either, but are particularly remarkable. Think of Cleopatra and Livia, Lucrezia Borgia and Emma Hamilton, Alma Mahler Gropius Werfel, Elizabeth Taylor, Marilyn Monroe, or Kim Kardashian. Those women got respect. What makes a woman a slut is not the number of her male lovers, but the suspicion that some of them may not have been so high in value or their investment in her not so substantial or so public. This is why nothing makes a woman look more like a slut than her own attempts to conceal her past. If the men she doesn’t want you to find out about had been at all impressive and had taken her at all seriously, she would instead be boasting about her past experience with them and could realistically expect to be admired for it.
It’s possible that even a woman who has never had sex with any man but her husband could feel like a slut. This could be true if she perceived her husband to be of very low value and in particular if she perceived that no other woman found him attractive. It could also be true if her husband refused to be seen with her, or demeaned her in public, and in particular if he showed his preference for other women over her in public.
It’s seldom pointed out, but for men, public commitment with a high-status woman is not much to boast about. Neither the millionaire who marries the trophy wife nor the man who marries the accomplished female scientist or CEO is particularly valued for it. It is precisely the promiscuous man who is the celebrity. Casanova and Don Juan are household names in a way that Prince Philip and Dennis Thatcher are not. Pierre Curie might have been more famous if he hadn’t been married to Marie. It is more or less the inverse of the shame/fame dynamic as it applies to women. In terms of shame and abasement, there are men who are the male equivalent of sluts. However, they are not to be found among promiscuous men at all, but in realms of male experience that have no female counterpart. These are the losers and pervs and simps, the men who have no access to women, who must beg for sex or pay for it, male feminists and passive romantics, henpecked husbands, porn addicts, cuckoldry fetishists, and on into ever sadder forms of male debasement... But women do not think to look among such men for examples of male brokenness because these are not generally ways women become broken.
A “double” standard by definition has two sides. The slut/stud dynamic only looks unreasonable if you look at one side and expect it to be a replica of the other. So you never learn what the other side is really like. You might as well complain about why an apple having a thick peel is considered undesirable, while if an orange has a thick peel, that’s just fine. Hypocrisy! But consider that oranges are usually peeled before being eaten, so a thick peel makes them no less appetizing, and may actually make the peeling easier. In fact, considered from the orange’s point of view, it’s a “double standard” that the apple is treated favorably for its thin peel.
Consider what is certainly the most bemoaned sexual double standard: that promiscuity lowers a woman’s marriage prospects, but not a man’s. Women will say: we don’t judge a man as less of a marriage prospect because he’s been sleeping around, therefore men shouldn’t judge us for it either. So since men do in fact judge women very harshly in this respect, men must be either inherently cruel-hearted, or else have been socially conditioned to be so.
Viewed from a male point of view however, promiscuous women indeed make poorer marriage prospects, all else being equal. Since a woman pursues promiscuity not as an end in itself, but in order to gain access to men who will not commit to her, if follows that men who will commit to her are the ones who are less valuable in her own eyes. Furthermore, since women often do not realize this until later, they often end up feeling abused and even traumatized. Consequently, they are less likely to fall in love later in life, less likely to be faithful, more likely to be hung up on exes that got away, more likely to divorce, be mentally unstable, lacking in discipline, and possessed of an unstable thrill-seeking or vengeful nature.
Men might even wonder why women don’t avoid promiscuous men for the same reasons. But that question is never asked because when we consider sexual double standards, we approach them from the female point-of-view. This is because the biggest psychological difference between men and women is that men learn very early in life that women are acutely different from them, while women spend their entire lives insisting they are the same as men. Women are usually the first to cry “double standard” because they tend to see any evidence of a difference between the sexes as some kind of malicious trick.
In reality, neither gender is more rational or more kind-hearted than the other. Women value promiscuous men because promiscuity in men is an indicator of rare ability. You can complain that it is a “double standard” that men should not likewise value promiscuous women, but promiscuity in women is obviously never an indicator of rare ability. Furthermore, women know women are picky, so they interpret promiscuity in a man as a sign that he is valued by other women. This does not work the other way. Men know men are not picky, so they interpret promiscuity in a woman merely as a sign that she is particularly accessible to other men, not that she is particularly valued by them. And since men pursue promiscuity as an end in itself, men who are successful at it tend to be more confident and comfortable in their masculinity. It is precisely the less promiscuous men who are, all else being equal, more likely to be the maladjusted bitter-enders hiding in the shadows in denial and self-abasement.
The “double standard” is simply the result of completely different incentive structures, but it is usually presented as if the female incentive structure is the default one and why oh why can’t men just act as if they’re subject to those same incentives too?
Do you really not get it?
If you saw people standing in a line stretching around the corner for a hot dog stand or a pizza joint, you would instinctively think: That must be some great pizza, that must be one a hell of a hot dog. After all, anybody can afford a hot dog or a slice of pizza and they’re readily available anywhere. If people are waiting for so long to buy a particular dog or slice, it must be because it is an unusually good one.
But consider people standing in a line around the block of a real estate office that sells high-end homes or a luxury car dealership. You would not necessarily think: Those must be exceptionally high quality mansions or Lamborghinis. You would think: They must be on sale. One does not normally see lines around the corner for such items because the vast majority of buyers cannot afford them. Discerning buyers might even suspect something must be wrong with those rock-star cribs or Lambos if they’re suddenly so affordable, maybe they’re salvage or have flood damage, but hey, for cheap enough, who cares?
No one would say: Double standard! Double standard! Why don’t you assume the hot dogs must be on sale and the Lambos must be the most awesome Lambos ever built if people are willing to wait in line? You know damn well why. Because hot dogs are nearly free anyway and no one would line up for them unless they were very special and most people could never afford a luxury item except at a steeply reduced price and wouldn’t mind if it were damaged goods. So stop it with the fake outrage already.
It’s also worth pointing out that none of these double standards are the result of “society” or “culture” or “religion.” It doesn’t matter how you raise or educate young men and women they’re going to come up against these facts sooner or later anyway. No amount of brainwash will change the fact that hot dogs are cheap and Lamborghinis are expensive. And everything else follows from that.
Perhaps the only double standard viewed by default from the male perspective is the idea that women are not interested in sex, or are interested in it less than men are. Of course this is not at all true, but that is how it appears to many men because most women are not interested in sex with them. It’s as if a man who couldn’t afford a Lamborghini concluded that the Lamborghini corporation just must not be interested in ever selling any cars. Why else would they price them so high? Well, they’re certainly not interested in selling any to you.
If you’re a woman and you want to understand how a promiscuous woman appears as a marriage prospect to a man, stop thinking of how a promiscuous man appears to you. Instead, think of a man who has been involuntary celibate all his life, who begs women for sex by trying to convince them he will be the most loyal boyfriend, but who only gets any when he pays for it, and then asks those women to have sex with other men so he can watch. Or think of a man you suspect prefers porn to real women. Think of a man who masturbates in secret and gets bossed around and laughed at by his wife in public. Does knowing that a man has spent his life in any of these ways make you more or less likely to want to marry him? Well, that’s how a promiscuous woman appears to men. That is how she has chosen to spend her life. I know what you’re thinking, girl: that’s different because that part of your life is over and you’re not promiscuous anymore. You’ve changed. Well, the needy pervy henpecked porn guy has changed too, he says. Just give him a chance...
Promiscuity in men and in women may be called by the same name, but under the surface something very different is going on. Men like promiscuity because it is what they actually want out of life. They don’t care if all the women they get are low-value and don’t remember them the next day. But promiscuity is too difficult for most men and they are humiliated when they try and fail, or more commonly, when they’re too scared to even try. So they collapse inwards and turn to cheap substitutes like porn, giving women money, and being pussy-whipped. At first, these things give men the illusion they are getting what they want, but they are soon dragged down to shame by them. Women, on the other hand, become promiscuous precisely because for them it is so easy. In particular, it seems to them an easy shortcut to a series of potential commitments from high-value men, which is what they really want. They are only humiliated when they realize this is not actually what they got. Sluts, male or female, are not shamed by “society,” so much as by their own belated recognition that they have wasted their lives on something that has proven valueless and has limited their prospects forever.
If there is a unified non-double-standard definition of a slut, it is someone who couldn’t get what they really wanted because it was too difficult, so they turned instead to something easy that gave them the fleeting illusion that they were getting what they want. Later, the bubble burst and they are revealed as broken losers.
Your Cheating Heart
There is likewise no moral difference between unfaithful husbands and unfaithful wives. Certainly the damage they do to their families is equal. Even the locutions they engage in, the lying, the denying, the hiding, the blameshifting, the gaslighting, occur along similar lines. That’s why they call it “cheating.” But their motivations are different. Cheating husbands are trying to build harems, while cheating wives are trying to jump from one harem to the next. This is in fact the “natural” state of humanity when “artificial” monogamy is not enforced. A man knows he’s not going to realize his potential 22,000 births out of one woman, so he’s adding more women to his production line. Cheating husbands may have to spread their time and assets a little more thinly, but they usually continue to actively pursue sex with their wives. Men are looking to increase the quantity and genetic diversification of their offspring, with quality being in a distant third place. A husband is probably more picky choosing a wife than choosing a side piece, because of the higher long-term costs involved.
Note how common it is that wives are astounded at the low quality of women their husbands cheat with. Success and social dominance attract women because they signal genetic quality. So women just assume these same qualities are also what make women attractive to men. But men don’t care so much about a woman’s success or social dominance. There are four things that attract men: hips, boobs, youth, and availability. These correspond respectively to the four things needed to produce viable offspring: childbirth, nursing, fertility, and access. The last of these four items is the one women have the most direct control over. An otherwise plain woman can close any competitive advantage held by a more glamorous woman by simply making herself more obliging and more available. This usually works greatly to a wife’s advantage because she is usually the one who is most available to her husband. When men don’t cheat on their wives, this is usually why. But should the availability calculus for any reason start to tilt the other way, the husband’s behavior likely will, too. This might happen because the wife decided to make herself less available, or because the husband becomes more socially prominent and other women decide to make themselves more available.
Monogamy is unnatural for women, too. But a woman is not trying to increase her lifetime number of births. She is after all working with a predeterminedly small number. She is trying to either improve on or at least to diversify the genetic material of any future births that remain to her. Her first step then must be to ensure that she doesn’t “waste” any births on low quality men. Potential future births are just so precious that they completely determine a woman’s attitude to men. Most men she will never consider as potential gene donors and she keeps them at arm’s length. The very thought that they might look at her “that way” makes her uncomfortable. Even a faithful and successful husband may at some point be reclassified by his wife into the category of the great undesired. And the trait of availability never works in a man’s favor. On the contrary, an overly available husband risks seeming to his wife like her factotum or household appliance. Once this shift has taken place, the husband will find that if he gets too close to his wife, she will find him genuinely repugnant. She may not actually be planning additional births, but she’s hedging her bets. She wants to make sure that if she does have more children, it’s not with him.
A woman’s disgust at the thought of risking a birth with an undesired man is so powerful that the mere memory of such a thought is nauseating and embarrassing. When a woman falls out of love with a man, she will often deny ever having wanted him, even going so far as to convince herself that it never happened. I don’t think a man ever flinches like this at the memory of having wanted a woman, no matter how badly things go later on and no matter how many other women he has had. The memory of having wanted her as she was then will always remain pleasurable to him.
If a wife who doesn’t want her husband is content to fantasize about better men, or for other reasons doesn’t want to risk her marriage, she might remain with her husband for years, restricting physical contact with him to the absolute minimum she can get away with, often zero. Such wives were in the past called “frigid” and are today sometimes described as “low libido.” Both terms are misleading in that they suggest some kind of medical condition or abnormality. In fact, such women are usually perfectly normal and healthy in mind and body. They just don’t regard their husbands as sexually desirable. Perhaps a more accurate term is “denying wife,” not only because she’s denying her husband sex, but because she often denies that this is what she’s doing. Denying wives are much like cheating wives in that they have effectively unchosen their husbands as genetic providers. The consequent avoidance, lies, and manipulation are very similar to cheating behavior.
Such wives may still wish to keep a husband around for financial or logistical reasons or as a social “beard,” what we might call the peripherals of marriage, but he is no longer the important man of her inner life. In many cases he never was. A husband is a household appliance, performing some financial, logistic, or social function. A lover is the genetic makeup of your children. An appliance can be replaced, your children’s genes cannot, and a woman only has a very few chances at genetic recombination in her life. Hence a woman may be more picky choosing a lover than choosing a husband. If she can’t find a better man of flesh and blood, or if she fears losing peripheral services provided by her husband, she may bite the bullet and have sex with him the minimum number of times necessary to produce a child. Full-fledged cheating will take place only when she figures that her husband will probably not leave her if he finds out about it, or that she will easily be able to obtain more peripheral services elsewhere.
Men, too, will cheat only if they estimate their wives will not leave them or if they are confident of easily obtaining more women elsewhere. Everyone always says “it just happened,” but there is always more calculation involved than anyone will admit. This is why reconciling with a cheating spouse is almost always a very bad idea. It tends to reaffirm their initial assessment that they could indeed get away with it.
Even in this age of women outpacing men in the workplace, women often marry for the peripherals. They often still prefer a man who earns more than them, who will allow them to leave work when they have children, who is reliable even if undesirable, or who provides some kind of social prestige or familial convenience. But no matter how good the peripherals, if the core sexual center of the marriage is not aligned with the woman’s preference of genetic material, then denying and cheating are likely to result. The issue here is potential future births, not necessarily actual ones. So it makes no difference if one is infertile, uses birth control, or engages in sex acts that don’t involve penetration. To become at all sexual with someone is to indicate that you welcome in your mind a future child with that person. If this thought is not welcome, then sex and anything leading up to it will seem disgusting. For reasons that should by now be clear, such thoughts are hardly ever disgusting to men. Monogamy is unfair to men in that it expects them to never have these thoughts about women other than their wives. But it is unfair to women in that it expects them to always have these thoughts about their husbands. Cheating husbands are being overly generous with their gametes, denying and cheating wives are being stingy.
Rejection
Women are terrified of undesirable men approaching them. Men are terrified of desirable women rejecting them.
When women reject men, there’s a dread in their eyes like they’re staring at a decomposing corpse and a judgment in their voice like they’re speaking to a child molester caught in the act. The mere thought of wasting a birth on a sub-par genetic exchange is so terrifying that it is not enough to reject the man. She cannot feel safe until his sexuality itself is expunged.
Men have a hard time understanding this because they have no such fear themselves. The number of possible births available to a man is effectively infinite, so they have a hard time seeing how someone could become so distraught over the potential loss of just a single gamete. If a man accidentally impregnates an unattractive woman, then whatever other trouble this may cause him, he can remain absolutely certain that his ability to impregnate future women is not in the slightest way impaired. But if a woman is impregnated by an unattractive man, a very large portion of her future chance to procreate has been destroyed forever. So she is scared out of her wits by this possibility in a way that he is not.
If you’re a man and you really want to understand how terrified women are by this, imagine learning that you will never be able to have relations with any woman ever again. Imagine being castrated and forced to be a passive homosexual. If you have children, imagine discovering that your children were actually fathered by other men. Imagine that your wife reveals to you that she actually planned for years in advance to trick you into thinking they were yours while going to great lengths to guarantee they were not. The feeling of nausea and panic you might feel about any of this is more or less what women feel whenever you or any of your loser friends get near them. You may wonder what one sense of horror has to do with the other, but they are one and the same. It is the horror of facing genetic oblivion.
Women, on the other hand, have trouble understanding why men are so “insecure” about paternity, homosexuality, celibacy, castration, etc. because they themselves are simply not subject to the terror of any of these things. Celibacy for women is purely a choice. Homosexuality for women is purely a choice. Rivalry with other women is never for access to men but only for relative position. Women do not fight to the death and there is no woman who can’t get herself some man. Even the most hated women can enter the harem of a valuable man if they choose and can get pregnant just as easily as his highest-ranked women. Women are never punished with castration because their fertility is too precious a commodity. And women always know who their own children are.
If you’re are a woman and you really want to understand how terrified men are by these things, imagine you go into labor and enter a hospital to give birth. You require general anesthesia and when you come to, you are told you have delivered triplets. You are overjoyed and begin a new life nursing and rearing your little brood, although you are somewhat puzzled that they don’t look like you. Several years later, your husband tells you that actually he murdered your baby while you were under because he finds you unattractive and he didn’t want any child of his to be so ugly. He then replaced it with three children he had sired with three other women whom he considered beautiful. But these women had very busy schedules and had trouble expressing milk, so they decided to use you as a wet nurse and nanny for free. The hospital and the courts colluded with all this after deciding it was in the children’s best interests and that your husband’s “reproductive rights” were sacrosanct.
When men reject women, it is usually tactical: they don’t want to get themselves in trouble so she’s not worth it. Or more commonly, they tell themselves this because they’re scared. But interest from even the most hideous woman will not arouse in a man the resentment and repulsion that interest from even an average man arouses in most women. A man may take a pass on some women in real life, but never in his dreams. At some level, no man ever really rejects any woman.
A woman may occasionally use tactical rejection as well. This may be done to hide or deny a genuine desire of her own. Maybe she is biding her time and wants to know more about him or just doesn’t want him to think she’s “easy.” Or maybe she doesn’t want to risk her marriage. Or perhaps she does not see the man’s sexuality as credible and merely intends to leverage his interest for her own ends. When tactically (non-forcefully) rejected by a woman, it is actually in a man’s interest to up the ante and make clear that if she doesn’t decisively reject him, her body is on the line. This either forces a genuine rejection or reveals genuine desire on her part. But men are terrified of doing this, and women know it.
Heaven and Hell
Paradise for a man would most likely be a world where he could approach any woman with the certainty that she would be highly motivated to have sex with him. It is important to understand that what is heavenly about this scenario is not that the women in it are particularly attractive, but that they are universally available. In other words, what is heavenly is not that a man could choose any woman he desired, but that he could choose all of them. It must also be noted that for such a scenario to work, either no other men are present, or, if they are, they are not desired by any woman. Preferably, none of those other men should even be capable of desiring any of the women.
You might think women would be similarly happy in a scenario just like that but with the genders reversed. After all, women go wild at male stripper shows. However, three things make the male stripper scenario very different: (a) the men are exceptionally good-looking; (b) they behave in an overtly confident sexual manner and, perhaps most important of all: (c) the women in the male strip joint vastly outnumber the men. Do you think any woman would enjoy male strippers no matter how good-looking they were if she were the only woman present? And imagine if the rest of the audience consisted of timid men who were all watching her and waiting for her to become aroused because they’d heard that chicks dig male stripper shows...
Paradise for a woman would actually be something very similar to paradise for a man, without the genders being reversed at all. As long as the women significantly outnumbered the man and all sufficiently desired him, it would not even matter so much what he looked like. And the same stipulation must apply that no other men be desired by the women or be capable of desiring them.
As those other men become capable of sexual desire, this same scenario for women soon begins to resemble hell. This is true not only because the desire of undesirable men scares a woman, but also because of her fear that some of the other women might actually desire some of those other men. If a woman perceives that other women don’t desire the same man she does, it introduces doubts as to the desirability of her own man. This explains the highly sexualized behavior women display in male strip clubs, as well as the screams on the Ed Sullivan show when Elvis went on. It also explains why a woman loses interest in her husband when she has to live alone with him.
Men like female strip clubs and almost certainly frequent them more than women frequent male strip clubs, but this is simply because men like sexual attention from attractive women. Whether these women are also attractive to other men does not figure into it. Neither is the presence of unattractive women intimidating. If a man walked into a strip club and found that he was the only man present, it would in no way diminish his enjoyment. And if the rest of the audience consisted of ugly women who were all watching him and waiting for him to become aroused because they’d heard guys get horny at strip joints, well then this would begin to resemble paradise.
Hell for a man would actually be something very similar to hell for a woman, without the genders being reversed at all: the male strip club with only one woman in it and the rest of the audience consisting of undesirable men. And the more undesirable the man, the more hellish it would be for him.
The Axiom of Choice
Consider a completely ordinary woman who wakes up one day and decides that on this day she will have sex with a particular number of men. All she has to do is announce her intention, and the men will be lining up, no matter how high a number she has chosen. Of course, she cannot expect to get every individual man she would like, but she can get any arbitrarily large number of men. The only reason this kind of thing rarely happens is that few women want to do it. But even the most ordinary of women could do it if she so desired.
No man has ever lived who could do this thing that any ordinary woman could do. Even the most desirable, virile, and successful man would have to limit his ambitions somewhat. He would have to work a lot harder than the aforementioned ordinary woman. He could not simply achieve his results by announcing his intentions. He would have to target each woman individually, convince her that he’s for some reason interested in her personally, put up with some of her games, etc. It would take him longer and he would probably have to satisfy himself with a smaller number of women. Consider further that this is what virtually every man would like to do. The reason most men don’t attempt it is only because they know they don’t have a snowball’s chance in hell.
The purpose of this little thought experiment is to demonstrate that in all sexual relations that take place in the world, it is women who choose men. It cannot be otherwise given that men will consider almost everyone but have very few options and women have nearly unlimited options but will hardly accept anyone.
Men try to impress women, yes, but the woman makes the choice. She does not make her choice public, but it is her choice nonetheless. A man who approaches a woman has either learned beforehand that the woman has chosen him, or he is a fool who is in for a rude awakening. If a woman has not chosen you, no amount of trying to impress will win her. When a man appears to be choosing a woman he is really only recycling her decision back to her. It’s sort of like money-laundering or rebranding. It is often misperceived as being the choice itself, but that is just cargo cult logic. To the naive islander, it may appear that the man with the earphones holding the orange sticks conjures an airplane out of an empty sky. But of course the plane doesn’t land because of the orange sticks. It lands because it has for some prior reason decided to land at that location. It could have chosen any other airport in the world and safely assumed men with sticks would be there eagerly waiting.
Yet popular culture going back quite a long way tells men that they are the choosers. Not only that, it encourages them to double down on their failures, to pledge themselves to women who have no interest in them and win them over by constantly proving their worth in the manner of a knight errant or the twelve labors of Hercules. I suspect most men who have found happiness with women will admit, at least after long reflection years later, at least to themselves, that it was the women who chose them. A woman who wants you will work to make things easy for you, why should she make it hard? A woman who sets you Herculean labors is either trying to get rid of you or is using you for her own ends.
We all have this mental image of a man “seducing” a woman with smooth talk and witty banter or whatever. I don’t think women can be seduced. I think that what such a skilled man is really doing is testing to see if the woman has already chosen him or not. He’s making half-advances to provoke her into revealing something. Does she really mean to reject him? Or is she just scared or shy or enjoying pretending to be so? He feints and retreats to see if she’s relieved to be rid of him or anxious for his return. He’s not seducing. He’s deducing. And most of his deduction lies in calculating his chances before he even makes the approach. In most cases, he will probably not even bother to approach because he has deduced that his efforts will be better rewarded elsewhere. I suspect that women like to imagine they’re being seduced so as to relieve themselves of admitting to the decision, but this is not what’s really going on. Jealous men also like the idea of seduction because it allows them to believe that their wife or girlfriend or love interest was “seduced” away by some unscrupulous brute.
I think the most valuable skill a man can have lies not in being able to impress women, but in being able to tell when women have chosen him. Unless you are one of a very few individuals, most women will never be impressed with you no matter what you do. For the rest of us, there is at least one woman somewhere who will be impressed, but a fat lot of good it will do us if we can’t tell her apart from other women who never will be. Women don’t volunteer much information. They’re waiting for you to recognize them individually, so they can feel special. If you can tell which one is waiting for you, you don’t really have to do much else. If you can’t tell, you will waste your whole life making burdensome and costly overtures to women who will never care if you live or die.
The Birth of a Legend
We live at the tail-end of several hundred years of myths of romance and seduction. Men grow up assuming that you see a woman and decide you like her and then commit to making her yours. She still doesn’t like you? Try harder... Don’t be a quitter. There is a powerful stereotype of a man getting down on one knee to propose to a woman, jousting and fighting duels to win her... So where does this ridiculous myth come from? It smacks of Disney and of Hollywood, but there’s something medieval about it, too. Roman emperors and kings of Israel did not go a-courting or pledge their undying love. There’s also something aristocratic about it. A peasant might marry the daughter of the peasant next door, but Sir Gawain goes on a quest. Like other fashions that begin in the upper classes, it probably caught on as a handicap, a form of showing off. If you already have droit de seigneur over all your peasants’ women, you can afford to go on a quest for perfect beauty. It’s like wearing clothes that are impractical for manual labor as a way of showing off that you don’t have to do manual labor. Later, the same fashion catches on among the lower classes, who can’t afford the handicap but adopt it anyway to make it look like they can afford to. It’s like that song by The Kinks: “She’s bought a hat like Princess Marina’s... She wears it when she’s scrubbing the stairs” Consider again the Cinderella story: the prince goes on a quest to find the one woman whose shoe fits the glass slipper. A prince might get away with a ridiculous quest like that. He can afford to, since he can assume most women already want him. But woe betide the humble yeoman who employs such a strategy. Imagine Simon the pie-seller showing up with a slipper and demanding that the woman who fit into it should marry him. He’d be thrown out with the slipper and all his pies. Yet this is the default strategy many modern men assume.
There is also something decidedly feminine about this quest for the perfect mate. Virtually all women can safely assume, at least when they are young, that most men have an interest in them. So they do the choosing. Maybe women imagine that men are doing the same thing. So the culture of chivalry develops as women acquire leisure. First it developed among the nobility in the middle ages. Eventually it extended to other classes in the industrial era. That is why fairy-tale stories live on in Disney movies and romance novels and chick flicks, because in them desirable men behave as women would behave, on a grail-like quest to find sexual perfection.
But men are not looking for perfection in women, they’re looking to accumulate women. Any choosing they do when they marry or form long-term relationships is in the nature of cost-benefit analysis and cutting their losses for strategic purposes. At the same time, men know they need to appear to be choosing women. Women don’t like to make their choices public. The man appearing to make the choice publicly is whitewash for the woman’s actually making the choice privately. Prince charming likely had a whole room full of glass slippers of every size and shape. Whatever the woman, he would select the appropriate slipper and take it to her, so she could experience the illusion that he had been on a quest solely for her.
Women are the collective Gregor Mendel of humanity, selecting which genes will be passed on to the next generation, yet they never own their decisions. They just passively fall in and out of love. They get seduced, affairs just happen to them, or they’re suddenly just not in the mood. The people firmly in control of human genetic programming claim to have no decisive faculty. As far as I can tell, there are only two exclusive functions men perform: producing sperm cells and owning women’s decisions, not making the decisions, just owning them. In this sense, Nia Vardalos’s mother was right: man is the head, but woman is the neck.