Imagine, for a moment, an unlovable woman. She is beautiful, charming, smart, talented — and completely unlovable. Is this possible? You might assume she’s intimidating. Maybe, but for our hypothetical example let’s assume she’s not. Assume she’s missing some special ingredient.
Now let’s assume she’s missing this one special ingredient, but she also has some physical problem / deformity / or illness. If so, she’ll have a harder time finding this ✨special✨ ingredient because she’ll always be thinking in the back of her mind that maybe — just maybe — the root problem is her visible one. It’s especially tempting because the problem may not just be obvious, but also difficult to fix. If she can’t find love, maybe it’s because men can’t accept this thing about her. It’s a false belief, but who can blame her?
The state loves women (I really mean this), and can love them and care for them to a degree that few men can compete with. The state taxes every citizen and decides who gets what. It can and does provide healthcare, shelter, and food stamps. A man needs to work many hours, and the government takes 30% for redistribution. There’s plenty of wealth to go around, and she’s right to expect to be cared for. However, the reality is even the government can’t provide enough.
To men, we say it’s important to choose carefully who you marry. This makes less sense than you’d think. There are just as many men as there are women. There are not a million fish in the sea. There’s one person who is the most perfect match for you, and if you’re lucky, you won’t pair up with them. If you’re lucky, you’ll find someone who’s even better than a mere match. But even a match might end up being a terrible person. And what’s worse is it’s hard to tell the difference between her being a terrible person and her reacting to her situation. Men are taught to withhold love, but go for sex, and though it’s understandable, I think it’s the wrong approach.
Women need love. And if she can’t find a man to love her, where is she to go? Suppose she’s bad with money, in debt, and flakey. Suppose she’s this way for good and understandable reasons. She thinks men don’t love her because she’s in debt, and she decides to quickly fix this problem while she’s still young. Again, these aren’t the real reasons for why she’s unlovable, but never mind that!
Suppose she gets into sex work. Again, this is totally understandable for the same reasons that it’s understandable that men are attracted to porn and sex workers. Neither get what they want, but they both sort of fulfill their needs. In some sense, the problem with this is not that it’s “wrong”, but that it’s depressing on both sides. So the woman surrounds herself with depressing men, but can at least try to make up for it in the dating market, and yet her job affects her prospects. Men, when they find such women, are perfectly happy to get off to women they would never marry; they create the very problem they wouldn’t otherwise invite into their lives. But if the number of women in the sex trades increases, now they’re dependent on these men getting off to them. Nofap is a threat to their livelihoods.
What men worry about with sex workers is that they’re not the only ones getting to sleep with the woman; they hate to see her as a commodity. To some degree, their fears are warranted. Part of the problem is the fear of contracting a venereal disease, but this too is solvable with technology by doing frequent testing, etc. Birth control has revolutionized sexual dynamics, but paternity tests have revolutionized paternity confidence.
We can imagine solutions that help people develop real relationships with real people, rather than simulations on a screen for men, or the cold intimacy of the state apparatus for women. The state can only approximate the love women desire. It can only give you shattered fragments of the real thing, but can never heal your heart. Men can get off to porn, but again, a million shattered images of women can never add up to a real woman.
My solution to this is an architecture of sanctuary, and that'll be the subject of my next post.
Related: