Link: http://archive.is/rQK3g

The central argument holds that women have effectively been duped by a sexual revolution that persuaded them to trade away the protections of (and from) young men. In return, they were left even more vulnerable and exploited than before. Sexual liberation, goes the argument, primarily liberated men—to act as cads, using women for their own pleasures and taking no responsibility for the emotional wreckage that their behavior created. The men hold all the cards, and the women put up with it because now it’s too late to zip it back up, so they don’t have a choice. But this analysis downplays the unbelievable gains women have lately made, and, more important, it forgets how much those gains depend on sexual liberation. Single young women in their sexual prime—that is, their 20s and early 30s, the same age as the women at the business-­school party—are for the first time in history more successful, on average, than the single young men around them. They are more likely to have a college degree and, in aggregate, they make more money. What makes this remarkable development possible is not just the pill or legal abortion but the whole new landscape of sexual freedom—the ability to delay marriage and have temporary relationships that don’t derail education or career. To put it crudely, feminist progress right now largely depends on the existence of the hookup culture. And to a surprising degree, it is women—not men—who are perpetuating the culture, especially in school, cannily manipulating it to make space for their success, always keeping their own ends in mind. For college girls these days, an overly serious suitor fills the same role an accidental pregnancy did in the 19th century: a danger to be avoided at all costs, lest it get in the way of a promising future.

At Yale I heard stories like the ones I had read in many journalistic accounts of the hookup culture. One sorority girl, a junior with a beautiful tan, long dark hair, and a great figure, whom I’ll call Tali, told me that freshman year she, like many of her peers, was high on her first taste of the hookup culture and didn’t want a boyfriend. “It was empowering, to have that kind of control,” she recalls. “Guys were texting and calling me all the time, and I was turning them down. I really enjoyed it! I had these options to hook up if I wanted them, and no one would judge me for it.” But then, sometime during sophomore year, her feelings changed. She got tired of relation­ships that just faded away, “no end, no beginning.” Like many of the other college women I talked with, Tali and her friends seemed much more sexually experienced and knowing than my friends at college. They were as blasé about blow jobs and anal sex as the one girl I remember from my junior year whom we all considered destined for a tragic early marriage or an asylum. But they were also more innocent. When I asked Tali what she really wanted, she didn’t say anything about commitment or marriage or a return to a more chival­rous age. “Some guy to ask me out on a date to the frozen-­yogurt place,” she said. That’s it. A $3 date.

But the soda-fountain nostalgia of this answer quickly dissipated when I asked Tali and her peers a related question: Did they want the hookup culture to go away—might they prefer the mores of an earlier age, with formal dating and slightly more obvious rules? This question, each time, prompted a look of horror. Reform the culture, maybe, teach women to “advocate for themselves”—a phrase I heard many times—but end it? Never. Even one of the women who had initiated the Title IX complaint, Alexandra Brodsky, felt this way. “I would never come down on the hookup culture,” she said. “Plenty of women enjoy having casual sex.”

For an upwardly mobile, ambitious young woman, hookups were a way to dip into relationships without disrupting her self-development or schoolwork. Hookups functioned as a “delay tactic,” Armstrong writes, because the immediate priority, for the privileged women at least, was setting themselves up for a career. “If I want to maintain the lifestyle that I’ve grown up with,” one woman told Armstrong, “I have to work. I just don’t see myself being someone who marries young and lives off of some boy’s money.” Or from another woman: “I want to get secure in a city and in a job … I’m not in any hurry at all. As long as I’m married by 30, I’m good.”

The women still had to deal with the old-fashioned burden of protecting their personal reputations, but in the long view, what they really wanted to protect was their future professional reputations. “Rather than struggling to get into relationships,” Armstrong reported, women “had to work to avoid them.” (One woman lied to an interested guy, portraying herself as “extremely conservative” to avoid dating him.) Many did not want a relationship to steal time away from their friendships or studying.

Armstrong and Hamilton had come looking for sexual victims. Instead, at this university, and even more so at other, more prestigious universities they studied, they found the opposite: women who were managing their romantic lives like savvy headhunters. “The ambitious women calculate that having a relationship would be like a four-credit class, and they don’t always have time for it, so instead they opt for a lighter hookup,” Armstrong told me. The women described boyfriends as “too greedy” and relation­ships as “too involved.” One woman “with no shortage of admirers” explained, “I know this sounds really pathetic and you probably think I am lying, but there are so many other things going on right now that it’s really not something high up on my list … I know that’s such a lame-ass excuse, but it’s true.” The women wanted to study or hang out with friends or just be “100 percent selfish,” as one said.

There is no retreating from the hookup culture to an earlier age, when a young man showed up at the front door with a box of chocolates for his sweetheart, and her father eyed him warily. Even the women most frustrated by the hookup culture don’t really want that. The hookup culture is too bound up with everything that’s fabulous about being a young woman in 2012—the freedom, the confidence, the knowledge that you can always depend on yourself. The only option is what Hannah’s friends always tell her—stop doing what feels awful, and figure out what doesn’t.

Throughout this article, you'll see a few things: the attempt at normalizing slutting around (usually masked under the claim that women are trying to study, pursue a professional career or wanting to become mature), concern at the direction sexual revolution has taken, a sense of doubt at their decisions to go through hookup culture, a want to find a monogamous relationship, a desperate need to rationalize to themselves and to everyone around them that feminism (and hookup culture) is empowering, blame shifting all these concerns as men not measuring up to the “high standards” of women and the fact that they would rather have that to the evil patriarchy where they will have to forsake their freedom and be slaves. None of this is new.

Promiscuity is not something women have to get rid off their system to become mature. The whole idea of "Oh! They are young and wild. Let them get some aids scares and pregnancy scares. That will set them straight" is, needless to say, madness. CC riding has a lot in common to drug addiction. It is a habit. It is not something you lose. It is something you condition yourself for. You condition yourself to become a traumatized, paranoid, soul destroyed thing that is devoid of youth, innocence or submissiveness. The common rationalization we hear for this behavior is that it makes women mature and tough, but this is overlooking the fact that it is women who look for mastery in men. Men look for helplessness in women and that is what makes them endearing to men.

If you notice the tone of the article, you can observe your typical tradcon excuse (“Women are wonderful. It is the evil men who tempt these angels and lead them to sin”) laced in with the usual feminist “strong, independent women” narrative. This is how women rationalize to themselves when they are oscillating between following the feminist dream and their natural impulse of longing for a better man.

Let’s take hookup culture (since that is the primary focus of this article) for an example. We know hookup culture is a lose-lose scenario all around, except for non-monogamous guys, nymphos and man hating lesbians. Apex men can pump and dump as many women as they want but cannot form a family with a loyal, undamaged woman. Beta men cannot get many women and cannot find a loyal and undamaged woman. Women get pumped and dumped. Since feminism demands women to be “strong and independent”, women are not only tempted but also mandated to slut around to be in line with the collective. The spin then becomes that it was men who formulated this evil plan and tricked these innocent angels to act like shameless sluts. Their rationale is not that they went against their own nature, but that they all want to be better men. And when this fails, they blame men for not being better men than they themselves aspire to be so that they can feel comfortable marrying the best man. This backwards logic comes from women’s envy of manhood and their desire to be like men. If you think about it, would it not be far easier to just be feminine and to submit to a man? But since feminism cannot allow that and is based on usurping men’s power, women are in a tricky situation where they not only have to gangster up themselves to become man-like, they also have to find a way to satisfy their desire to marry a man who is better than them. Is it any wonder most women are severely depressed?

As much as I understand their problems, I cannot sympathize with them since they created this problem for themselves. As an example, notice the framing of monogamy vs hooking up as a lose-lose situation in the article. The framing here is that since you lose either way, why choose the boring option instead of the less boring one. While men tend to uplift each other, women tend to drag each other down in an attempt at self-assured degeneracy. If the both of them are sluts, then she is not going to feel bad about it. If she proactively shames the traditional girl for not being slutty, then she has successfully reversed the frame. Also notice that ultimately every single slut desires a beta bailout and takes it for granted that it will happen for her. Even when these degenarates go against and villify the old social contract, they depend on it greatly for a bailout. The reason women fuck around without any concern is based on their hope and certainty of a beta bailout.

Everything discussed here is typical for people who belong to the upper middle class or above, which is where most of the women showcased in the article belong to (This is not to say poor people are any better. We will get to that shortly). They exhibit the behaviors we can come to expect from people on this level. My belief on conspiracis is that there are not many true conspiracies. Most of them fall under the category of people behaving selfishly to get maximum benefits at the expense of others.

I remember seeing an article sometime ago which was talking about how highly educated women who got married in their late 20s to mid 30s were the ones to stick to a marriage long term as opposed to women who got married early. The actual reason for this is that her value has gone down and her potential to branch swing along with it. The advise in that article was not for all women to stick to their commitments and to take it seriously. The analysis was that these select people were doing something right and that they need to be copied by everyone. This is not possible. This is like asking an average Joe on the street to compete with Donald Trump. Trump is what he is because he had a huge headstart over a lot of people, owing to his family. We often see this mismatched advice being pandered as wisdom. Popular dating advice falls under this category. Most of the women showcased here are spoilt rotten. Whatever they consider is good for their situation and background is not going to be good for an average woman. Nor will it ever be attainable. Looking at Sex and City from this perspective, you see it for what it is. A fantasy for upper middle class women who were bored thanks to their secure life and lack of struggle. This is how a lot of average women completely ruined their lives. They were following an imperfect, impossible, impractical and unsuitable model to begin with. And as soon as they started blowing up their marriages, an industry formed around it, making it more lucrative and the situation even worse.

It is my belief that you only grow when you face struggle. Fair weather does not make for a capable captain. We all know that people, women especially, start looking for excitement if they lack struggle. If you don't create drama for your girl, she will create it for the both of you. Isn't that what feminism has been all about? Men, meaning well, made women too secure and they created drama for everyone. The more I read, the more I think about it, the stronger my convinction becomes: If there is no higher ideal you can strive towards, if there is no struggle to shape you then you will define your own struggle. And for most people, this will be anything but a higher ideal. Humans are selfish beings. Our psychology and our instincts are not equipped for the long term. Our mental makeup was built for harsher times where there was always an uncertianty of survival. As a result, we always go for the short term gain over the long term ones. This is why we want to eat chips more than salad. Short term vs long term. All the self improvement that is being advised for men and women these days is still based on hedonism. There is very little higher ideal and very litte long term discipline. Most advice we hear these days are ways to survive in a shitty situation. Not many are ways to overturn it. You cannot expect to have the white picket fence after having been pumped and dumped your entire adult life. Similarly, you can not expect to find a good girl when you surround yourself with sluts.

Young men and women have discovered a sexual freedom unbridled by the conventions of marriage, or any conventions. But that’s not how the story ends. They will need time, as one young woman at Yale told me, to figure out what they want and how to ask for it. Ultimately, the desire for a deeper human connection always wins out, for both men and women. Even for those business-school women, their hookup years are likely to end up as a series of photographs, buried somewhere on their Facebook page, that they do or don’t share with their husband—a memory that they recall fondly or sourly, but that hardly defines them.

Members of this sub might remember the 35 year old spinster who had a collection of video tapes of guys she “loved”. Not only was she unable to settle for a beta bux, she ended up blaming everyone but herself for being alone. Contrary to what women believe, cock carousel does not build character. Women these days are slowly facing the reality that actions have consequences. Let them.