Was time a factor in your

Was time a factor in your drop in success (or at least promiscuity) after you quit wastreldom? Because I know that I get laid far less often as an EMT than I did as a dropout, not because boys don’t like EMTs but because EMTs tend to get home two hours late smelling like someone else’s barf, with no desire but to wolf dinner and fall into bed. I just don’t feel like I have the hours and energy to be romancing all the time. It’s not never, but it’s less.

Wastrels are sexier than responsible people, and part of that reason is that they can devote a tremendous amount of themselves to sex, while responsible people have already committed a large piece of their pie to their responsibilities. I’ve had a few wastrel boyfriends in my day, and they’re great—they’re the kind of guys who will spontaneously decide that we should drop everything and road-trip to California, or spend all weekend in bed, or do things that are completely illegal in public. It’s sexy and wild and fun and completely incompatible with a “but my car payment is due Friday and who will feed the dogs” lifestyle.

Women are obviously going to vary a lot in how much they value sexiness versus responsibility, but one thing they won’t do is confuse the two. There’s a big difference between thinking “that guy’s rich… if I married him I’d be taken care of” and thinking “that guy’s rich… I just got SO WET.”

So the more self-reliant I am, the more confident I am that I can make my own way in the world on my own merits, the less I’m going to care how “responsible” (or any other trait besides direct attractiveness) my partners are. I’ll feel free to pick the guy who really turns me on.

In other words, the more powerful women are, the better the chance poor schlubs have with them. If MRA-types want to get laid, they should be doing their best to get women into fabulous job opportunities.

[You are, as always, wise beyond your years, Holly. Now that you mention it it all makes sense. And yes, when you have no other schedule or responsibilities you can put 100% of your time into someone else. And when you’re working there’s no time and no (mental) space for that. Very cool explanation! —fl]

My dad went to college after

My dad went to college after a stint in the US Navy (which was what made it possible for the son of an immigrant coal miner with a 6th grade education to go to college) and he said that being older and more worldly was like having a set of x-ray goggles through which to view the college social behavior, including the myth of sexual scarcity and the constant trying to measure up against a fictional standard of “the other guys”...he said he couldn’t imagine how hard it must be going through that time of life without that perspective and grounding.

So I think the time/wisdom/life experience and just getting comfortable in your own skin makes a huge difference…the more you let go of the outside images/standards, the more content you become with your own life and what you have/who you are. And other people pick up on this, and it makes me you more attractive and they seek you out, so the two things reinforce each other. And the converse is also true…the more you try to measure yourself against some fleeting better fictional life, the more bitter and grasping and insecure you become, the more people pick up on that and pass you by, which makes you more bitter and grasping and envious of others. Seems pretty simple in theory, but it sure isn’t in practice…which is why we’re having this conversation :/

Figleaf, I agree with you

Figleaf, I agree with you (and Holly) a lot more than I agree with the MRAs, and your two rules of desire are right on target. That said, I don’t think you understand where the the men who are attracted to MRA philosophies are coming from. These aren’t the men who are having some sex in their teens and twenties and still feel like they’re losers. These are straight men who in their thirties and forties and up have maybe kissed one or two or zero women in their lives. While I absolutely think that these men can benefit more from certain strands of feminism than from an MRA philosophy, I think they can benefit a heck of a lot more from therapy and medication. Human contact is a basic need, so that you start to act strange after a few days or weeks without a conversation another person; the social interactions you do have (say with the cashier at the grocery store) become strained and ponderously significant.

On a side note, the complaints about men only wanting to date out of their league bother me. Yeah, there’s something ugly with only giving a chance to women within a certain tiny slice of body types, but loneliness and isolation hurt whether you’re more attracted to skinny bubbly women or fat sarcastic women (like I am). And on the other side, women of every conceivable body type and personality are rightly wary of dating troubled, desperate men.

For what it’s worth I’ve met some straight women with mental illnesses and isolation who have parallel views of what men are like and what they want, and while they may not become WRAs they can find a brand of feminism that reinforces their unhelpful beliefs. I’m not trying to excuse bad MRA behavior on that account, honestly. I’m only saying that lonely, troubled, mentally ill people deserve our compassion more than our scorn, regardless of gender.

Hmmm. Interesting post,

Hmmm. Interesting post, possibly even more interesting responses, especially jfpbookworm’s reflections on men who feel themselves to be long-term have-nots. I would like to hear more along those lines. (Can I persuade you to expand this into a blog post? You’re still in my google reader … hint hint!)

I agree that there’s not some massive sexual utopia out there waiting for men who stop staking their self-esteem on seducing a supermodel. As a woman, I’ve known plenty of men who are smart, confident, and … never going to be anything more than my friend (leaving aside the fact that I’m in a monogamous relationship). Confidence helps, but chemistry is still essential. I absolutely agree that the chances of having sex – and good sex! – improve if we stop burdening it with so much extraneous crap.

However, I’m pretty sure I’m not the only woman who’d be looking for more than just wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am if I were single again. I wouldn’t expect every potential partner to be my soulmate, but I’d want to like him enough to enjoy conversation in between the sex. And honestly, I’ve never known anyone who could ring my bells on the first go-round like he could on the tenth or fiftieth time. Part of gaining experience is knowing what you like and how to ask for it – but also realizing that I’m unlikely to get it in a single night or weekend. And so the pool of men whom I’d regard as possible lovers probably would be a small fraction of the potentially available men. I say that not because I’m a supermodel myself, but because I’ve learned through experience that sexual compatibility is more complex – for me at least – than figleaf describes it as being from his perspective. I know full well that most of the men from the most active period of my youth were not great matches for me, sexually. We each gave and received something (with a couple of exception that weren’t fully consensual). But that doesn’t mean the sex was always worth repeating.

Figleaf, I think maybe part of what grates on some of the male readers isn’t so much your defense of feminism as it is this statement, which may come across as arrogance rather than confidence, especially for those men whose experience has been harder than yours: “I’m pretty sure I could be a lot more sexually active these days. With a fair number of partners — maybe more than I ever was partners with in my wildest days.”

Maybe so. But how much of that is a simple result of becoming a sex blogger, and thus the recipient of interest from women you’ve never met? How much of that is in fact due to sex bloggers becoming a projection screen for fantasies, whether they encourage it or not? Would you make the same assumption if you hadn’t ever posted naked pictures of yourself and gotten all manner of erotic responses from women?

And how easy would it truly be to find lovers in your real life (as opposed to the virtual world) given that you’re enmeshed in all kinds of networks – old friends, fellow parents at school, business contacts, etc. – that might make a sexual liaison very complicated at best? As we grow older, it’s not just that we have less time due to responsibilities; we also tend to inhabit a world where fewer people are available for hookups or relationships, unless you want to meet people expressly for sex (and use online services like OK Cupid or Ashley Madison or whatever) or are willing to try out the bar scene and possibly set your sights on people who are much younger. That last tactic – going for much younger women – might work better online than in real life, where most twentysomethings tend not to go for men thirty years their senior. And I somehow doubt that the bar scene would be your cup of tea. Certainly a woman your age would have a much harder time finding casual partners than you would, so there’s also a gendered dimension to your assuming it would be easy for you.

I think that those of us who’ve been coupled for decades can perhaps forget how complicated life can be when you want a partner, but don’t have one. That’s not to detract from your important point about how the constructs of masculinity can make men unhappy no matter how much sex they’re “getting.” It’s just that those long periods of involuntary celibacy can be really painful, and moving beyond them might require change in several dimensions for the folks who are stuck in them. (Let’s not forget that some of those folks are women, too!)

[“It’s just that those long periods of involuntary celibacy can be really painful, and moving beyond them might require change in several dimensions for the folks who are stuck in them.” Oh boy can they! The “suffering” I mentioned experiencing any time I wasn’t hooking up was nothing compared to the empty years where I passionately wished I could connect with someone! As you very succinctly put it, getting out required changes in several dimensions for me. Those changes included geographic (I moved from a bedroom community in rural Tennessee) to educational (I started going to college at age 26) to employment (I went from a “The Office” like career in fast-food management to dishwasher and student-aid jobs) to attitudinal (I started asking questions — if not finding answers — about power, gender, authority, and social theory) to, finally, psychological (I stopped hiding out at home because I didn’t think I had enough car/money/apartment/whatever to be interesting to members of my opposite sex.) And, as you say, it’s not like that just worked overnight either.

But here’s the thing: I wasn’t doing all that so I could find a partner. I was doing it because I discovered there was this whole world between wandering wastrel and corporate-ladder nose-to-the-grindstone drone. I also discovered, almost after the fact and assisted by some non-MRA men’s-consciousness writers, that the model I was using — almost kill yourself with work and boredom so that later you can finally be entitled to stuff you want and think you’ll deserve neither satisfies nor really even works on any level. Not compared to a more balanced approach where success is measured by something other than how “high-class” your car or house or partner is. I’m not saying this is perfect, by the way — I’m still bumbling around and, as of the recent economy and at my age, I may run out of career opportunities before I run out of expenses (yikes!) But overall I’ve been a lot happier than I’m pretty sure I’d have been had I stayed home and done what so many of my peers did.

Finally (my this is getting long) re-reading that sentence speculating about how “wild” I thought could be if I tried sounded a lot more confident, and arrogant, than I felt. There’s no way I’d literally want to try hooking up with someone completely new every other weekend anymore, which is what I think I sounded like I was saying. Nor do I think I could even if I wanted to. But it’s also because as you say there are a lot of genuinely wonderful people my age — way more than I imagined as a youth — with outlooks similar to mine. Mine now I mean, not mine back then when I thought the only possible, conceivable alternatives were one-weekend stands (however convivial and however how much friends you became after) or marriage for life. Thanks, Sungold. —fl]