Bella Thorne, the Disney star who earned $1million on her first day on OnlyFans. Credit: Bella Thorne
What’s wrong with trading youth and beauty for resources? Today #MeToo has framed this dynamic mostly in terms of abuses by powerful men. But while I’m sliding comfortably into middle age these days, I can remember the thrill of being a perky young woman and getting older men in positions of power to do things for you.
I also remember, in the last City job I held, watching with grudging admiration as an office receptionist on her second job sidestepped the entire corporate hierarchy to be appointed company secretary on a six-figure salary, with her main qualification being (as far as anyone could tell) her close personal friendship with one of the senior brokers.
If you’ve got it, why not make use of it? In the digital age, that means you’re an idiot if you’re satisfied with posting thirst traps on Instagram instead of monetising your simps on OnlyFans.
Founded in 2016 and used by (predominantly) women creating and selling “adult” content, OnlyFans doesn’t publish reports on its visitor numbers, but the company’s headcount appears to have trebled over the course of 2020. Its Twitter following has grown by 84% over the same period, and Insider reports that the website has seen a 75% month-on-month increase in signups since April this year.
We shouldn’t be surprised. The period between July and September saw 181,000 new UK redundancies, the most brutal spike in job losses since the Great Crash in 2008. On top of this Matt Hancock’s Q&A this week confirmed (albeit obliquely) that under Tier 3 restrictions there’s no shagging allowed unless you already live with your sexual partner. So as coronavirus has annihilated offline jobs, along with our scope for in-person socialising, a digital meeting point for attractive-but-skint young women and lonely men with money to spare was bound to grow in popularity.
And alongside articles discussing OnlyFans, alongside other “creator” sites, there’s also been a drive to normalise online “sex work”: even the London freesheet Metro has published a how-to guide for would-be OnlyFans entrepreneurs.
So what, you might ask. At least if they’re generating the content themselves, as Ariel Anderssen points out, OnlyFans gives would-be erotic models considerably more scope for control of their content than is often the case. By comparison with PornHub, for example, a website notorious for its laxity in taking down footage even of underage rape, this is surely an improvement?
But the meteoric rise of OnlyFans is less a story about the market for sexy images, than it is about two trends with apparently only an oblique relationship to sex: social atomisation and stagnating youth employment.
Both these phenomena long pre-date the Covid era. Loneliness has been much discussed in recent years, with the ONS reporting that the number of people in the UK living alone went up a fifth between between 1999 and 2019, from 6.8 million to 8.2 million people. This isn’t just the elderly: the majority of this increase is driven by the number of men aged between 45 and 65 living alone.
Nor is the shrinking of employment opportunities for the young a Covid-era phenomenon. In 2016 the BBC was reporting stagnating graduate wages, while a 2018 ONS report shows that non-graduate young people fare even worse. But Covid has brutally accelerated this trend: the BBC reports that young people are most likely to have been furloughed, as well as being hit disproportionately hard by redundancy, and make up a third of new Universal Credit applicants. The TUC reports that women aged 25 and under have been at the greatest risk of job losses during the pandemic.
But just as it’s accelerated other societal fractures, such as educational inequality, the pandemic has leaned into both these trends. But again, you might ask: so what? Isn’t OnlyFans just a formalisation of a sexual “marketplace” we’ve always had, in which young women trade dewy skin and luscious curves for resources?
Certainly this “marketplace” notion is a well-established idea today. In fact, it’s a view of men and women that crops up both in feminism and, curiously, also in anti-feminism. For example, in the bleak worldview of “incel” (involuntarily celibate) men, marriage is understood as ‘a system of legalised prostitution by which a man bribes a woman with food/drink, resource security, emotional security, amazing sex, and often a place to stay. This in exchange for letting him have regular sexual intimacy and to know who his children are’.
But in case you imagined that feminists are keen to challenge this perspsective, think again. Viewing committed relationships as indistinguishable from prostitution is a well-worn feminist argument. Radical feminists only? Wrong: Teen Vogue, the bible of intersectional pop-feminism, assures us that far from being exploitative, “Sex work is real work”. And many young women who use “sugar baby” websites to meet and earn “pocket money” from wealthy older men in exchange for sex frame what they’re doing as feminist empowerment.
This is all backed up by a popular understanding of the sexes borrowed from evolutionary psychology, in which men compete for the opportunity to spread their DNA, and women compete to attract the man with the best chance of supporting children, within an overall sexual “marketplace”.
Women, in this view, put out mainly as a way of securing resources. If we feel uncomfortable about “sex work” it’s really our unease at the way exchanging money is just saying the quiet part out loud. According to Cathy Reisenwitz, a “sex-positive” writer and campaigner: “Most female whorephobia comes from us (mostly unconsciously) viewing sex workers as scabs in the sexual marketplace. Women are afraid that if men are allowed to easily, safely buy sex they won’t commit to financially supporting any one woman for life.”
But does this actually give a good account of what men and women want? It’s not at all clear that we’ve always seen sex as a marketplace. A keyword search of Google’s database of millions of books, for example, shows “dating marketplace” practically unheard-of before the 1970s, at which point — along with “sexual marketplace” — it begins to grow rapidly in popularity. Ngram isn’t perfect, but the results suggest that thinking of sex in market terms is a trend that’s been gathering pace for decades. And yet in the grand sweep of human culture, a few decades isn’t a very long time: if we didn’t think of sex as a marketplace before the 1960s, why are we so keen to treat it like one today?
Because for all that it’s become a common cultural trope, it’s also not clear that a “dating marketplace” describes what men and women actually want. I’m too old and married to have first-hand experience of dating today, but a straw poll recently among twenty-something friends suggests the reality might be more complicated than the raw sexual Thatcherism implied by the “marketplace” trope. For example “Matt” (not his real name), a 26-year-old straight man dating in London, described a situation radically unlike the one set out by incels or sugar-baby feminists.
As Matt sees it, it’s not so much young women as young men today who yearn for a relationship: “men seem to ‘settle’ into okay-ish relationships more than women do,” he told me, “because the competition is so fierce and they basically cling to something that is acceptable, but not what they really desire. Women seem to have more choice, and can dictate terms more.”
But for Matt, this isn’t about sexual access. Rather, it’s another sign of ebbing possibilities for his generation: “An occasional point of conversation among my male schoolfriends is to moan about the fact that most of our dads were married/having children at our age,” he said. His is a bleak vision not just of sexual prospects for his generation, but of the prospects for everything. The failure to settle down is just “another reason for our generation to wonder why we are so useless”.
Pop-science invocations of evolutionary psychology in the context of dating advice tends to assume the “males seek sex, women seek commitment” model. But if Matt and his friends are anything to go by, this vision of men as rampant, lubricious, DNA-spraying horndogs just isn’t the whole picture.
And indeed, once you delve into actual evolutionary psychology it’s clear that the field is far more nuanced than “pop” representations would suggest. This paper, for example, makes the case that the “males compete, women choose” model of mate selection just isn’t the whole human story, because in reality men don’t just impregnate women and then disappear. Rather, humans of both sexes on the whole prefer to cooperate on raising families.
From this perspective, the dominance of a “marketplace” understanding of intimacy doesn’t reflect reality so much as colonise it. And this hyper-focus on a competitive, transactional dynamic that is really only part of the story comes at the expense of cooperative yearnings that are in fact equally valued – by both sexes. And by formalising the competitive picture of a “sexual marketplace”, OnlyFans contributes to this crowding-out of cooperative human intimacy by synthesising something a bit like it as a product for paying subscribers: an aspartame version of intimacy, sweet enough to hit the pleasure centre but of questionable long-term health benefit.
Thus OnlyFans virtualises, and monetises, the complex and shifting field of desire, longing and human connection in a form perfect for the lockdown-era social landscape of atomisation, loneliness and unemployment. It’s a perfect “dating marketplace”, reproducing the most asymmetrically competitive, transactional elements of male/female desire, without any need for mutuality, generosity or — crucially — for human touch. It’s a truly 21st-century vision of love.
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SubscribeMany journalists seem unable to comprehend the idea that a man could want a monogamous long term relationship so they tie themselves in knots with reference to oats-sowing and DNA dispersal.
The success of OnlyFans is the natural outcome of the fact that many young men cannot find a partner as they do not fit the ever more demanding criteria of young women. The result seems to be that women will go through a succession of boyfriends, none of which match up to the ideal vision of manhood they have been told they deserve until they reach their late thirties when their biological clocks force them to “settle” for whomever they happen to be with at the time in order to procreate while they are still able to do so.
This cycle will continue until the awfulness of it for both sexes becomes apparent and the many appeals of monogamy for both sexes as an alternative become cool again.
Or a war comes, war usually resets shit.
I would argue that young men also have unrealistically high standards. 60 years ago a woman had to merely be attractive and nice to find a husband. A husband could support a wife and family on one salary. But due to inflation women are now expected to have a career. So men are seeking someone attractive, nice, and with the brains and ability to hold down a high paying job AND find time to have children. Needless to say, such women are few and far between.
There have been many articles and studies that reinforce the asymmetric nature of what each gender values. Here is a direct quote from the Psychology Today website:
“Generally speaking, men place more importance on beauty, while women value social status and access to financial resources”.
I take your point that today’s economic landscape may mean that men would prefer their partner to have a job but what that job is appears to be relatively unimportant.
A husband could support a wife and family, until women entered the job market, thus halving the price of an individual’s time and effort.
Not quite so. The combined income of a couple today is, in real terms, far above that of a married man in the 1950s, when most people didn’t own their own houses, run cars, or have foreign holidays, to name just three things. If they were content to live at 1950s standards, most couples today could live on one salary.
I’ve never been to a jobsite/plant/factory where a male earned more than a woman at the exact same job. Yourself ?
I think you’ll find that the switch to a fractional reserve system leading to the increasingly diminished purchasing power of money is more responsible than the things you mention. Then add on women entering the workforce (which occurred at the same time). Double whammy.
The only men I know who care about their potential wife’s earnings, are the ones who want her to earn a similar amount to themselves, so they don’t lose everything in a divorce; and who can blame them with a near 50% failure rate.
No man has ever said the woman needs to be highly paid. Our standards haven’t changed much at all. Women are the ones writing dating profiles like “I have 4 kids, but YOU need to have a great job and be over 6 foot”
I would say that this is true of both many young men and many young women, and it reflects what they are hearing in the culture about what a marriage is supposed to be like. It’s simply not realistic.
Old proverb: “Marry someone ugly. They’ll never leave you”. Old Welsh proverb: “For every crow, there’s a crow.”
Or as the Calypso song goes,
Some months ago in the US, there was a story full of pearl-clutching and hand-wringing among professional women lamenting the lack of financially-suitable male partners. And yes, the issue was financially-suitable. It’s as if everything that the early feminists talked about was cast aside and that men are again no more than the sum of their wallets. Beyond that, nowhere did those stories bother to consider how this circumstance came to be.
No eggs indeed: https://www.youtube.com/wat…
Guess what. Many men with partners also enjoy porn. As do many of their partners. The success of 50 Shades of Grey – the books and movies – should have debunked that myth.
This ridiculous notion that pornography is only every consumed by sad-sack child-men unable to find intimacy needs to be put to rest
Are you suggesting to settle without trying?
Reading these comments… Whatever happened to the natural human yearning – in both men and women – for real committed love? Not just to be loved, but to love? And the hope that children might be part of the loving relationship, and a result of it? Of course the reality is complicated and a lot of things can go wrong. But it seems this basic desire and need is being ignored /sidelined /devalued in favour of a concept of pragmatic transactions. Do most people really operate this way?
I was wondering the same thing. Most other perspectives do seem pretty cold blooded.
The evolutionary interpretation of sex and mating is one level of explanation; but it’s not the only relevant one. And it’s not necessarily a reductive or reductionist explanation. Sexual love, for example, can be explained in genetic, neuro-physical, bio-chemical, evolutionary, ethological, ethical, mythical or even theological terms, and each level of explanation can complement (some of) the others. The world is complex, with different quantitative and qualitative complexities emerging at each explanatory level.
The sexual narcissism of women? Constant endless desire to be desired by the very top class of men and offense taken at those lower to pursue them. That puts a pretty strong damper on notions of love. It’s real of course but should be put in perspective as part of the larger picture, men really do pursue and women do really want to be pursued and they really are hypergamous, looking down on lower class men and feeling entitled to higher class man. It’s no surprise the dating sites show white men are in the highest demand from women of all ethnic groups or that it’s acceptable in casual conversations to denigrate men for their lower height or lesser economic status. Facing this condescension and arrogance from women will kill a lot or all of that spirit in a man and I can imagine it’s something similar for the women who are conventionally unattractive. Hard cold ruthless world it is.
Read Cosmopolitan for a few months. Job done.
Capitalism corrupts.
Having lived and worked in the Netherlands, I have a number of friends called Hans. They have taken the ingenious step of creating ‘OnlyHans’ in which they strut their very impressive stuff for the delectation of women all over the world. They are making a fortune.
I’m rather sceptical about the notion that human behaviour can be explained by such simplistic application of ideas from evolutionary biology. Humans have language and culture, by which they learn to use the collected knowledge and experience of their social group. That undoubtedly allowed the development of ideas such as acceptable/unacceptable to the group, liable to reward/punishment, and right/wrong. Let’s not get hung up right now on whether those distinctions are exactly synonymous — they exist and are powerful determinants of behaviour.
That brings me on to the second fallacy in the naive application of evolutionary thinking to individual behaviour: namely that individual gain or loss is the only determining factor. Since humans evolved in social groups, any evolutionary pressure must apply to groups as well, and that allows for the notion of an advantageous mixture of behaviours. It might well be, for example, that a group in which a proportion of males prioritised maximising their reproductive opportunities, while some other proportion prioritised maximising their offsprings development, was both evolutionarily stable and and had a competitive advantage over groups in which all males followed one or the other strategy. I’m reminded here of Maynard Smith’s work on Hawk/Dove and Bourgeois strategies in non-zero-sum conflict games.
As a psychologist, I’m equally sceptical about much of evolutionary psychology. There is another point: none of the influences on an individual’s behaviour can be taken as paramount. Genes, pheromones, culture, geography, etc, etc, can all have some influence on behaviour, but not all of it.
After being widowed in my late 50s, I met my second wife through a dating website. She was well beyond childbearing age, though we both had children already. According to the “pop” version of evolutionary psychology, I should have been looking for a young woman and she should have had no interest. In fact, we have been very happily married for 10 years now.
Based on my limited understanding behavior genetics has demonstrated that roughly 80% of the variance in behavioral traits and traits like intelligence among the population are due to variation in biology. The remaining 20% is somewhat of a mystery but one author has argued peer influence is definitely a component of that. Of course people also adapt to their environments in the best way they can. The same population with varying personalities stemming from their innate biology will act different in scarcity and abundance.
We spent centuries building on language, culture and collective knowledge and experience of the society to develop ideas and norms of acceptable/unacceptable behaviour and right or wrong and 50 years demolishing them.
I do not think we any longer any universal norms of acceptable or unacceptable behaviour or right or wrong. Remove these constraints and all that is left is individual evolutionary motivation.
There is a very interesting book about the preferences that men and women hold. A Billion Wicked thoughts is a book much more serious and deep going than its title (and sometime its language) suggests. It is the report of a scientific study of sexual preferences using the statistical information from internet usage and searches. A very clear picture arises that women are much more focused on relations and emotions (I’d never heard of fan fiction but that is the porn substitute for women) and man much more on visuals. It is surprising how this stereotype is actually enlarged in the differences in behavior between homosexual men and women. If you want to have an opinion in this area, reading this book should be mandatory. The tone is quite often humorous but the data is quite serious as far as I can see.
The interesting thing is that this book did not ask people about their ideas. People are notoriously dishonest and unaware of how they really are. For example, the nutshell summary of the evolutionary explanation of our different behavior would make men only interested in sex and women only golddiggers, not something anybody wants to admit to the self, let alone someone else. This article, and many reactions make imho this error in thinking. These evolutionary forces work on a much lower level than our conscious. Most women are really in love with the man they marry, it is just a lot more women fall in love with the better provider. And similar for men. It is not that men only want sex, but the attractiveness of a woman is very much influenced by how sexy she is. Although people deny these motivations because they do not see themselves, these forces have quite large influences in society.
And this author’s argument that the marketplace is a recent term is a tad disingenuous. There always was a marketplace but the more clearly defined roles of men and women did not require one to talk about. As many of our current problems, feminism turned the tables upside down, upsetting the subtle balances that society had found.
The open marketplace is caused by people trying to find a way in this new labyrinth. One of the unintended consequences of the success of feminism is that women tend to share to a small group of top dogs and leave the lesser gods to their porn on the Internet. Society created the institution of marriage and the social norms of monogamy to counter this natural trend. A society with many unmarried young men is very volatile. Jordan Peterson referred to these societal conventions as “enforced monogamy”, which was comically misunderstood by many a feminist.
I agree that being able to take an exterior perspective on one’s felt motivations is key with this. Not sure about the volatility of non-monogamous society in the west though, given the decadence of porn and bread and circuses. The bigger problem of the current settlement is women not reaching their desired fertility before the clock runs out for them.
The evolutionary psychology argument is best explained by Bret Weinstein; with two competing methods of evolution by men, both of which have survived until the modern era.
1) Men who aim to procreate with as many women as possible, with as little input as possible – on the understanding that at least some progeny would survive.
2) Men who procreate with one, or a few women and support them to ensure their limited numbers of offspring survive.
The current ‘dating marketplace’ serves only the first group, as online dating leads to a frequent and hook-up culture. It’s not surprising people like “Matt”, who want a relationship and are from the second group, are unfulfilled and stick with mediocre relationships..
Yes, but how? Let’s dissect this evolutionary psychology argument a little. The evolutionary perspective would be that a certain form of behaviour confers a selectional advantage: that is, that behaviours A and B are (to some extent) inherited, and that behaviour A would lead to a reproductive advantage over B: that is, a tendency to produce more offspring so that behaviour A is more common in the subsequent generation.
As started, this cannot explain the survival of both forms of behaviour. Over the thousand or so generations since H. Sapiens emerged, there has been ample time for an inherited behaviour with a clear selectional advantage to have displaced the less advantageous competitor.
These likely aren’t groups that have existed from the beginning of time, with the timescale probably best taken, not from the emergence of homo-sapiens but from the advent of farming (~12000 yrs), prior to this point the first group couldn’t have feasibly existed. The excess of food allowed for their Cad like behavior to exist; with some men not required to spend all day farming, they spent it making a move on fair maidens and other men’s wives.
Since it’s emergence both have been similarly advantageous. As time progressed external factors influence the balance, things like: famines, monogamy in religion, conquering hordes / war. However, neither of the two groups has had a distinct advantage necessary to see the other off for good.
It could also be that alternative strategies outside these two groups have not survived as you expect.
My final point would be that in the current environment, we may actually be witnessing a shift in the advantage, that the first group has over the second, of sufficient size to become the dominant form; think the levels of single motherhood, the low levels of marriage and prevalence of hook-up culture.
But that rather supports my point below. If neither of two behaviours has a competitive advantage over the other, then evolutionary biology has nothing to say about them.
Is it really so impossible to square, though? I mean, let’s say the pop-evolutionary psychologist are right, and most men would, given the choice, have tons of children with tons of different women. For most men, that would still be an impossibility, simply by math – there are the same number of women as of men, so there just isn’t enough women to give every man a harem. Given that, it only makes sense to have a stable relationship with a single woman instead unless you really are such a stud that you can attract women in droves – and most men are honest enough with themselves to admit that they really aren’t.
To be honest, my overwhelming (and, I admit, rather depressing) impression is that men are natural philanderers. We want one “main” female partner who we can commit to and whose children we prioritise, but we also want to run around cheating on her to really spread that DNA far and wide. But yeah, when it’s hard enough to attract even that first, main partner, we’ll settle for one and count ourselves lucky.
If men are natural philanderers, what does that make women? Women initiate most divorces in the world, they also have throughout history usually played up to more than one man.
Do both men and women not have choices that are independent of their inclinations? Surely most people do not spend their lives doing what they want?
I am sad to report that they, in fact, do. Not all, of course. But many.
I blame The Enlightenment.
Men may need to be “natural philanderers” because women have evolved to be picky. This being so, men need to try it on with as many women as they can so as to light on the small handful who will consider bearing their children.
If you want to put in evolutionary imperative terms, it seems that eight per cent of women admit their husbands are unaware that they are not the biological father of at least one of the children they’re raising.
That figure is exaggerated and it’s far lower of a percentage but still a serious and horrifying issue
I am not sure it is exaggerated. I have seen a huger figures published. I am not sure that ever one agrees that it is a serious and horrifying issue. There were moves some years ago to make it an offence for a father to secretly test DNA samples from their children, presumably out of concern that he might not be the biological father
The following 2002 quote attributed by the BBC to the then chair of the Human Genetic Commission rather gives the game away.
“A person may say what is wrong with a man knowing whether he really is the father of a child.
“But there are very real repercussions for a family when that is done, and the best way of doing it is through the proper legal channels because it can have an enormous impact on the child’s life, and on sibling’s lives.”
If the test is done secretly, repercussion only follow if it turns out the man is not the biological father. If it is done through the proper legal process repercussions are inevitable whatever the outcome. Further, the term “proper legal channels” is a disingenuous term. It means delay and expense and will typically require determination to see it through against determined opposition in front of an unsympathetic tribunal.
In other word “proper legal channels” is shorthand for make it as difficult as possible.
The figure I’ve seen is ten percent. In a relatively primitive state of social development, children were economically important because they could work, and having a sickly child not sickly enough to die promptly was a disaster. Having at least one child by a different male than the usual would be an insurance policy. Hence there would be some selection pressure for women to feel like going off the plantation now and then. Since the selection pressure on males would be to spread their genes far and wide, the women (except if locked up) would not have much trouble finding short-term partners. It’s the way we’ve been programmed by Evolution.
To be honest, my overwhelming (and, I admit, rather depressing) impression is that men are natural philanderers.
And who are they philandering with? For the most part, women, which makes this statement a bit curious. I doubt that many of us “want” a partner AND the ability to indiscriminately father kids with other women. People who cheat tend to do so because something is lacking in the marriage. It happens with married women, too.
I think men are naturally polygamous and this is really not possible for most men only the highest status men-and they do achieve it.
Historically far more males died without furthering their bloodline. Women were taken by the powerful/strong/rich and many didn’t get a look in. You can see this reflected today in those who are famous/rich. They have women throwing themselves at them aka Ron Wood, a mid 70s old crow with a young pretty wife. It’s no accident.
Emperors, kings and sultans usually had thousands of concubines at their disposals. While ordinary men worked as foot soldiers for these powerful men and they often died childless. This is the legacy we have inherited. Mormons still practice this reproductive strategy.
The apparent tacit approval of what amounts to no-contact prostitution still shocks me. Not because I am a puritan (quite the opposite, in fact…), but because these women that treat OnlyFans, monogamic prostitution and so many other versions of selling sex as a product are creating a world where male libido exists to be exploited. The fact that this exploitation can even work at all is undeniably reinforcing the painful perception that male libido is orders of magnitude higher than average female libido.
This would be just another disappointing fact of life, yet becomes downright confusing when we witness the wave of female resentment over men that cannot approach monogamy (and sexual sharing in general) as a balanced agreement! Women act infuriated when the libido imbalance between genders is pointed out, yet find no issue when they exploit it…
Given the circumstances, I’m surprised that people don’t realise the risk of AI sex filling-in more and more of this heavily politicised libido gap. If men eventually give up the dream of sharing their sexuality with women on an equal footing, a transfer to AI might become the only ticket for some sort of happiness. Sure, it does not offer the desired reciprocation/emotional connection, but at the same time there is no exploitation of imbalances, most men actually stand a chance to participate, etc. Anyways, time and development will soon reveal if I am delirious, or unfortunately right.
I always find it strange how resentful some women are of the success attractive women can enjoy because of their looks. No one ‘deserves’ or earns attractiveness, it is something you either have or you don’t. The same can be said about intelligence. Stephen Hawking is not going to get a job modeling for Calvin Klein anymore than David Beckham is going to win a Nobel prize for physics. But, so what? Would I like to have the brain of Dawin, the body of Arnie and the looks of Brad Pitt? Of course I would but I don’t so I just have to accept who I am. I don’t resent other men for being more attractive than I am, I just get on with my life.
Feminists seem to be fine with women using their unearned intelligence to get ahead in life but not so with their looks. Why is this? Jealousy, insecurity, greed? It’s hard to say but it’s notably rare to find a feminist who is attractive AND unintelligent.
If a woman is born with low levels of intelligence and high levels of attractiveness why should she have to put up with a low paid job? If a beautiful women wants to monetize her looks why are other women so intent on stopping her?
P.S. this is not a rant at the author, more a general point about the attitude a lot of women have to others who are more attractive than they are.
A great conundrum ie the human male female relationship
Males and females are different for evolutionary reasons only ie sexual reproduction which is considered as vital for the survival of most life forms -mixing up the genes
It’s a messy awkward and difficult process so the good results must vastly outweigh the bad
It seems to work as it has persisted as a process over millions of years
As this human male/female difference is increasingly glossed over by current liberal thinking problems will inevitably appear
For instance-if you don’t have progeny then males and females can be treated the “same”
The human race dies out however
No children.no grand children-last person puts the lights out!
You pays your money and takes your choice
Inequality in intelligence and attractiveness are quite horrifying realities of the cold and brutal word we live in. I take comfort in my faith and the promise of a merit-only based hierarchy in the end in either Paradise or hell. But for those who don’t have their focus on that, it is an utterly horrifying thing to come to terms with, perhaps the only end to their feeling of deprivation is realizing death will soon come to cancel it all.
“It’s not at all clear that we’ve always seen s*x as a marketplace.”
The issue isn’t whether or not we’ve identified it as a marketplace, but whether relations in the dating arena can be properly understood in those terms. For example in one paragraph the writer is dismissive of the notion and then in the next quotes a friend as saying:
“men seem to ‘settle’ into okay-ish relationships more than women do,” he told me, “because the competition is so fierce and they basically cling to something that is acceptable, but not what they really desire. Women seem to have more choice, and can dictate terms more.”
This describes a rudimentary marketplace, where people value something and obtain the best they think their resources will allow subject to scarcity. It is of course an imperfect way of understanding how romantic relationships are formed, but I don’t think the writer has convincingly debunked it.
I think the simplicity of the evolutionary biology perspective is deceptive. If you listen to someone who understands evolution, like Dawkins, he acknowledges that there are many things that can’t be accounted for by evolution. Humans are more complex than other animals and are able to think about the long term, complex effects of our actions, instead of just trying to spread genes. I mean it isn’t necessarily a good thing for men to get women pregnant. I think this simplistic understanding, trying to explain everything through evolution, could become a self fulfilling prophecy, where people think this is how they should be. I think men worry that women start taking this cynical, transactional approach and feel they need to be bought things and ignore whether they actually like the person, and there is no such thing as compatibility, only supply and demand.
I recall getting a girl pregnant. I was horrified. Why would a young man want the expense and hassle of kids?
But it worked out. Fifty years later we are still together. In retrospect, it was the best thing that ever happened to me.
PS Are you a Sussex Staker?
It’s a tiresome old trick to use percentages only. It leads one to suspect
OnlyFans is a micro-phenomenon, inflated for bait.
Being 21 I can tell you that Onlyfans is very much prevalent, and its only spreading, I’d say 1/3 of the women I know are either have an Onlyfans now or are considering one.
Thanks, fair enough. But one wouldn’t know from the figures given.
“…underage rape…”
As opposed to…what exactly? Overage rape?
As opposed to a consensual performance by legal adults.
At a time when leaders take to Twitter and TikTok, wearing a mask is one’s “patriotic duty”, and “heroes” are people who stay home, this makes perfect sense.
I’ve truly seen everything now.
Enjoy your dystopia.
It was one of the high points for me during the first lock down that for a change I was having a lot more sex than my children. Strangely that was not the case in lock down 2
It seems hard to refute the claim that the young women are increasing their power and making money out of it, when that’s exactly what they are doing.
Whether it’s feminist or not is secondary and, I’d say, a matter of opinion with no definitive answer.
The apparent tacit approval of what amounts to no-contact prostitution still shocks me. Not because I am a puritan (quite the opposite, in fact…), but because these women that treat OnlyFans, monogamic prostitution and so many other versions of selling sex as a product are creating a world where male libido exists to be exploited. The fact that this exploitation can even work at all is undeniably reinforcing the painful perception that male libido is orders of magnitude higher than average female libido.
This would be just another disappointing fact of life, yet becomes downright confusing when we witness the wave of female resentment over men that cannot approach monogamy (and sexual sharing in general) as a balanced agreement! Women act infuriated when the libido imbalance between genders is pointed out, yet find no issue when they exploit it…
Given the circumstances, I’m surprised that people don’t realise the risk of AI sex filling-in more and more of this heavily politicised libido gap. If men eventually give up the dream of sharing their sexuality with women on an equal footing, a transfer to AI might become the only ticket for some sort of happiness. Sure, it does not offer the desired reciprocation/emotional connection, but at the same time there is no exploitation of imbalances, most men actually stand a chance to participate, etc. Anyways, time and development will soon reveal if I am delirious, or unfortunately right.
https://www.youtube.com/wat…
I’d not heard of this site. Thanks for the tip.
There is no doubt that what we used to describe as sexual morality has taken a nose dive in the last couple of decades, but to be honest there were always women and to a lesser extent men who were well aware of their sexual power and made full use of it. In fact, that was the situation being described so eloquently by President Trump in the infamous “p***y” tape.
C’est la vie unfortunately, but more disturbing is the way that males are being ritually emasculated in this society, so to sink to a position of derision and redundancy, which will benefit neither sex.
“As Matt sees it, it’s not so much young women as young men today who yearn for a relationship: “men seem to ‘settle’ into okay-ish
relationships more than women do,” he told me, “because the competition is so fierce and they basically cling to something that is acceptable, but not what they really desire. Women seem to have more choice, and can
dictate terms more.”
Yes, but notice that it is young men who need to work for it. An aging woman loses her appeal very fast, 30 years old is basically Time to Panic for single ladies, and 35 year old singletons are in a catastrophic position. Yes, these women will find a man, but he probably would not have been first choice ten years earlier. The balance shifts and by age 35-40, men hold most of the cards.
Masterfully done! The lines below sum up capitalism
And this hyper-focus on a competitive, transactional dynamic that is really only part of the story comes at the expense of cooperative yearnings that are in fact equally valued – by both sexes. And by formalising the competitive picture of a “sexual marketplace”, OnlyFans contributes to this crowding-out of cooperative human intimacy by synthesising something a bit like it as a product for paying subscribers: an aspartame version of intimacy, sweet enough to hit the pleasure centre but of questionable long-term health benefit.
“But if Matt and his friends are anything to go by, this vision of men as rampant, lubricious, DNA-spraying horndogs just isn’t the whole picture.”
That this ever needed to be written – and, arguably it did not – is bizarre.
It is a good sentence. Described a type and situation very well.
Nope. I’ve read it twice now and I still can’t work out what it’s trying to say.
The nearest I can get is that it’s an unsurprising diatribe, by a usual suspect, against women who choose to do something of which she disapproves.
So flirting, and exploiting men is fine in the real world but the same sexualised behaviour is somehow wrong in the digital arena?
TL:DR anti-porn writer wants to have her cake and eat it
Funny how censorship works here. I wrote the same argument as you and my post never showed up. I am glad you succeeded in making this point.