Sexual ethics and institutions

Dating

The Odds are Good & the Goods are Great is a fun think piece about het dating

My suspicion is that the majority of my women friends who had bad relationships had partners who chose them, rather than the other way around. If you are 100% passive in the dating market, your partners will be drawn from the set of ‘the kind of people who wants to date you’. If you are 100% active, your partners will be drawn from the set of ‘the kind of person you want to date’.

Iwan Bloch’s Sex life in England:

A STUDY of the British Don Juan affords us some highly interesting psychological insights into the character and distinctiveness of the English man of the world who became the prototype for the French and German novels of the nineteenth century. One primary characteristic of the British Don Juan, which thoroughly distinguished him from the worldlings of Latin and German lands, is the cold, brassy repose with which he indulges his lusts. This to him is much less a matter of passion than of p&de and satisfaction of his sense of power. The French or Italian Don Juan is driven by a fiery sensuality from conquest to conquest; that is the chief motive for his deeds and mode of life. The English Don Juan, however, seduces for the sale of experiment; he pursues love as a sport. Sensuality plays a secondary role and in the midst of ecstasy the coldness of the heart peers through terrifyingly.

• Hypergamy, Incels, and Reality suggests the sexual inequity that Jordan Peterson rails against is not supported by evidence.
• Alternatively, Isabel, why is modern dating so hard?
• An Interview With Naama Kates, Who Turned Her Fascination With Incels Into A Darkly Riveting Podcast

Pornography

See pornography.

Sex work

I am curious about the incentive mechanisms of sexual political economy.

The Rhode island experiment (Cunningham and Shah 2014) is an intriguing case study.

• Prostitution decriminalized: Rhode Island’s experiment
• Study: Rhode Island accidentally decriminalized prostitution, and good things happened
• When Rhode Island accidentally legalized prostitution, rape decreased sharply

The reduction in disease from decriminalization of prostitution is not surprising. The reduction in violence is uncomfortable for my assumptions for a variety of reasons.

Alternatively, a treatise arguing that sex work must always be sex-slavery, Prostitution, Liberalism, and Slavery.

Ideology

I enjoyed Ozy Brennan’s advice, Kink. Hi.:

All human sexuality is weird and embarrassing and vulnerable and politically incorrect. It’s not something we kinky people have a monopoly on. I guarantee you if you could read the minds of people having the sweetest and most loving vanilla sex, it would turn out their sexual interests are related to their insecurities and their body image issues and their yearning for intimacy and all kinds of other stuff you’d be uncomfortable telling the Starbucks barista about. Sexualities are sort of like dreams: they take all the strange awkward uncomfortable bits of you that aren’t fit for public consumption, mix them together with that TV show you watched and your favorite shoes and your third-grade teacher, and produce some unrecognizable and nonsensical yet mortifyingly revealing slop.

That’s one of the reasons that talking about sex is hard. You’re like “here are all my weird uncomfortable bits, fellow human! Please don’t judge me.”

And it’s also one of the reasons that a lot of political ideologies don’t like sex. Sex is stubbornly politically inconvenient. You can get a woman to wear combat boots and no makeup, to split the chores fifty-fifty and practice Health at Every Size, to have a flawless political analysis and to organize at her local domestic violence shelter — and her sexuality will still go “you know what would be hot? If I got a boob job. Just. Giant fucking tits bouncing all over the place. That would be hot.”

Living apart together

I just found out my lifestyle is called living apart together. I wonder if there are any useful tips from other people who do that?

• Couples living apart together and why it works
• Vicki Larson, 3 Myths About Living Apart Together Relationships That Need to End

My favourite example from history is Tove Jansson and Tuulikki Pietilä

• Tove Jansson Falls in Love ‹ Literary Hub
• Tove & Tooti: a beautiful exploration of Tove Jansson's love and life

Poly people

Ozymandias’s sex positivity articles are intersting, e.g. Your Partner Dating Lots Of People Is Less Scary Than You Think It Is.

Marriage

To read: Schacht and Kramer (2019),Henrich, Boyd, and Richerson (2012),Schacht and Bell (2016).

Incoming

• Hypergamy, Incels, and Reality
• A Throuple’s Tricky Geometry

References