You're Figuring It Out
You are zeroing in on the source of your problem. Hookup culture is a huge part of your problem. It is one of the main reasons that men are not in a line out the door, competing to be the one who gets on one knee and gives you a ring. Follow the breadcrumbs and you will see that the true source of it all is pornography. Hookup culture is ultimately a consequence of male pornography consumption.
The First Compromise
In the 1950s, young women who decided they wanted married would be married within 3 months or less. When I was a kid in the 1980s and early 1990s, the game had changed. Women were having to wait a little longer for marriage, and men were not having to wait as long for sex. This is not a concession that women would have chosen to make.
Playboy magazines, VHS players, and the section of video rental stores that was behind a black curtain had made men feel a less acute need for women. Women had to give in just a little and put a little more on the bargaining table to get a good man.
As of the late 1980s and early 1990s, there was no such thing as a Tinder app in any form. If there had been, women would have had nothing to do with it. There would be a handful of female users on the whole app and a gazillion men, who would get tired of having no success with the women, that they outnumber at a ratio of 5,000:1. Hookup culture to a large degree involves women betraying their own nature.
Enter The Nightmare Zone
The hellscape that currently women face largely came into being in the 2000s. What changed? Women didn’t change. There is nothing new under the sun. Men didn’t change either, in terms of how we are built as human beings. The game changer was widespread access to broadband internet, and pornography very rapidly being at the tip of every man’s finger 24 hours a day.
The cliché’ in my teens and early twenties was “women need love. Men need sex.” It is very much a reflection of reality. The truth is that everyone needs everything, but it is a man’s sexual drive that gets him out of the door to go looking for a mate. That is the biggest factor for most of us, particularly when we are young.
There was an arms race in the newly exploding porn industry, to see who could capture the biggest audience by making the most extreme stuff and offering it for the least price. This inevitably resulted in everything under the sun being available to the masses, completely for free. The companies make money from ads.
Just Think About It - You Will See
The way to understand what happened subsequently is to use this analogy- think in terms of men being crack addicts for sex and women being crack addicts for love; you will see how this will inevitably unfold.
Men have a bottomless pipe to connect to, at any time they wish, that delivers the purest, best, most industrially enhanced and refined product conceivable at no cost. Women, having a constellation of needs, that are collectively called “love,” are still in the same situation they were in back in the 1950s.
The technological breakthroughs that occurred in the 1970s through the 1990s, and the technological revolution that happened largely in the 2000s, did not provide women with an artificial supply of someone getting to know them, sharing experiences, having a best friend, venting about their day, and being understood and appreciated as a human being, to give a selection of typical female needs.
Women don’t have a potent, always available, streamlined source of what they need, as men do. In their love lives, women are still stuck in the technological dark ages.
How The Nightmare Unfolds
What is going to happen in a state of affairs like this, in which men’s wants are perpetually satiated and women are still starving? The women who are starving will be driven to pander more and more to the preferences of the men. One can only starve for so long until they become desperate. One at a time, more and more women will adopt a mindset that they will do what they have to.
They will balance their own preferences with the need to get a man in a very challenging environment. They will betray their own nature, and subject themselves to emotionally painful and even damaging experiences, in service of getting a man. The one thing that *is* on their side is that most men still prefer a real woman over one made of pixels on a computer screen.
As individual women adopt this mindset, they unintentionally create their own arms race. They start a competition to see who can hand over the most to men, on a silver platter, without the men earning it. The men will chronically devote their attention to the highest bidders, and the average bid on offer will become insanely high as a result.
It is basically a competition to see which women are the most desperate, which results in more and more women becoming more and more desperate over time. It is a vicious cycle and a spiraling that is bound to have terrible consequences.
The Vicious Cycle Amplifies The Hell Effect
When more and more women, who are more and more desperate, hand men more and more of what men want on a silver platter, it doesn’t help women at all. It just rigs the game that much more in the favor of men. The men get used to sitting on a bounty and not having to hardly work for it at all. They are *less* inclined to invest in a woman than they were when the whole thing started.
In the present, men have access to an unfathomably large selection of pornography. No individual man can consume it as fast as the people making it can churn it out. Every niche has been filled. No desire that any man has, no matter how exotic or unusual, is without a selection of 100s or 1,000s of freely available images and videos.
Then they have Tinder, an app that is ideal for facilitating hookups in which the man puts nothing on the table. They have every other internet app and service that can be used to select from a menu of potential short-term mates. Quite a few have women they are stringing along for the sake of something that they fully intend on ending.
The Feast, The Leftovers, And Libfem Retorts
When men are given a feast like this, women don’t get paid back in kind. The men enjoy the feast they are given and then leave the women to deal with the mess they made. Women get only the leftovers if they get anything at all. It’s a raw deal if I’ve ever seen one.
I can already hear the objections. There will be people who try to dodge the matter at hand, by saying that I am taking an overly pessimistic and cynical view of men, suggesting that all men care about is sex. To that I will say please look at the world that surrounds you.
Men who use women’s bodies as part of a hedonistic, high life lifestyle are a dime a dozen. Inherent in the ethos “sex, drugs, and rock & roll” is that all three of those have the same purpose.
Beyond them, no, I do not believe that all men care about, regarding women, is sex. What is also very evident is that when men’s sexual desires are persistently satiated, too few of us see any value in settling down with one woman for the long term, which is what almost all women ultimately want. Too many men make no effort to get to know any woman, and in absence of that, they are given to dreaming of a life of variety, such as the one that comes across their computer screens.
A Better Time & More Libfem Retorts
Compare that to the 1950s. Think of the time when if a young man wanted to see what the pretty young woman down the road’s breasts look like, his only option was to get down one knee and ask her to be his until the day that he died. In a world without any catalog of alternative breasts for him to see, would not he, and she, be playing an entirely different game? That is the game we were all intended to play. What we have here is technology disrupting a balance that once existed in nature.
The next objection will be that I am being “sex negative.” I’ll expand more on this later, but please tell me where I have judged anyone for anything.
Then I will have people whose first impulse will be to make commentary on “changing social attitudes and values,” “women being liberated,” “empowerment,” and a bunch of other blah blah blah about our society and our culture.
A Tuned In Guy's Own Heartfelt Retort
There is the signal and there is the noise, and I have little interest in attending to this pointless chatter in the background. I am writing this because I see women in pain, living in a world that has become less and less attuned to their needs over time. It is their hardship that strikes a chord in my heart and that agitates my sense of injustice. What does all of that nonsense have to do with them?
I can tell you quite confidently that, to these women who are dying on the inside almost every single day, people who speak of evolving social mores and “empowerment” seem totally disconnected from the reality that they live. It sounds like a bunch of academic fruit loops trying to tell them that the devastation they feel is a good thing, a sign that the world is making progress.
You Are Beautiful - Be Kind To Yourself
There will be women who read this, and who beat themselves up mercilessly, as they recognize some of what I have described in their own lives. There will also be women who feel hurt or offended, by the tone of this article, in which I create a feeling that the only acceptable form of sex between men and women is that which takes place in a long-term relationship or a marriage.
Even as that feeling is palpable to me, it is merely a byproduct of what I have written. It is not what I wish to convey, nor is it my personal belief. There is a song “girls just want to have fun,” and that sentiment is certainly part of the picture of some of what happens in social life. Sex is something that can and should be lighthearted and fun; that is unless you like to live another way, in which case your way of living is also perfectly fine.
I am not here to hand out a checklist of what kind of freely chosen behavior is acceptable or unacceptable. I am not here to audit anyone’s life. I am especially not here to diminish anyone’s value as a person.
It's Your World And No You Are Not Crazy
A woman’s affection has value. What she chooses to with it is her business. There is nothing wrong with giving someone else something that has value completely for free, just because you like them or just because ____ (you fill in the blank). A woman’s affection also has value *for her*, and it is absolutely her right to give her affection to another for the sake of her own needs. There is no need for anyone to be judged, in comprehending the reality of what I have described.
One thing that I *do* want to say, to the women who read this and who feel that a man has gotten something from them that he did not adequately value, or that he did not fully pay for- you are not crazy. That you feel that way is an appraisal of a reality that really exists. That reality is part of how you are fundamentally composed as a human being, and it is fundamental to the basic fact that men and women exist.
Please Listen
What I must tell you, and the best advice I can give you, is this: have mercy on yourself. That you have sacrificed your own preferences, in a pursuit that arises from a basic hunger in your being, is not a sign of your weakness, and you are not weak. It is a sign of your humanity.
Desperation and desperate measures are a normal human reaction to chronically unmet needs. If it is a crime or a moral failing to be a human being, in this crime we are all equally culpable. You are no more deserving of this hardship than am I or anyone else.
It is not that you have failed yourself or that you have failed other women; it is that the world has failed you. The world has failed to adequately value your wellbeing and your needs as a human being.
It is no accident, that so many women and girls, as of the past 10 or 20 years, are in a mental health crisis, while finance industry executives are flourishing as never before, or at the very least as they always have. It is a consequence of the needs of finance industry executives being a priority of the people who write and enforce laws, while the needs of women and girls are mostly not a consideration.
Stay Tuned For More
The male of your species, to a great degree, has turned against you. Men have turned against you because we live in a world in which we can. I will write more, one day, and address the question of what can you do about this, to get what you want and need in life. For now, please keep your head up and be kind to yourself.