The first 3/4 of this are excellent, but the final 1/4 doesn't answer the central question - why should men pay on dates? Your reasons are completely symmetric. They apply to both parties. As with most gendered advice, it's not so much bad advice as it's unnecessarily gendered. Anyone of any gender should be willing to pay for those reasons!
Genuinely, as someone who always moves to pay but sometimes hasn't had to, I believe it does just come down to gender. We live in a society that is gendered. We both know what those expectations are when we sit down. How we respond to those expectations is noteworthy. This is why it is notable information if a woman recognizes the gesture or offers to pay. It is also very notable information if a man seems to be the type to throw a fit over being on the short end of the stick!
I can definitely see the argument here, but as a British Gen Z-er I would make three countervailing observations about my own experiences in my generation:
1. The nature of student budgets combined with the rise in online ordering, self checkout and bar service means that for the majority of us, about 90% of the food we purchase is done so on an individual basis prior to receiving it, even in groups (eg everyone making separate McDonald’s orders before sitting down on the table together). This usually means there is no ‘bill’ at the end to settle nor an especially communal ordering process other than one or two ‘sharer’ items, so not only would it be unusual to do anything other than pay for what you have, but it would usually be actively difficult to manage.
2. An increasing amount of dating either occurs through apps or through escalated friendships - as such, rather than one person asking the other person out, they instead tend to be more mutual agreements to go on a date. This means there isn’t really as much of a sense of one person being the ‘requester’ and so carrying an obligation to return the favour by paying for food.
3. There is an obvious shift in gender norms. Whilst I think this is overstated when it comes to dating (most women would still probably expect and want to be the pursued rather than the pursuer), it is much more pronounced when it comes to things like paying, where the notion of a gendered expectation would be considered silly and strange. The man may still end up paying, but there will *definitely* be some ironic jokes from both parties about ‘patriarchal expectations’ and “how come you think women aren’t capable of paying?! 😜” if he does.
These three factors I would say therefore combine to mean that for our generation, the instinctive expectation we would all have would very much be for everyone to pay for what they had, and anything beyond that would be unusual and noteworthy (even splitting the bill evenly would honestly be considered weird and dumb unless there were specific items you explicitly shared).
That doesn’t necessarily negate your points, but it certainly means that any case of a man paying on the basis of being a man will seem much less expected and honestly much stranger. I will admit to be fair that I don’t have that much extensive experience on our dating scene, but my experience in social situations in group settings would certainly corroborate these observations.
"Embracing the modern leftist view that men are gross as a way to excuse this unfairness, and rewriting that narrative under the genre of economics"
as i read that, i thought you are not fair to Brangus and somewhat strawman him. after reading all the post i think you are doing something else. you are projecting.
there is Progressive view that to some extend hate men (and also white, and hetero, this is part of bigger pattern). you describe this position well, and oppose it rightly. but also, this is not Brangus position. it;s look to me that you rounded Brangus's position to the silimal, and more popular position that you know well.
but he did not rewrite leftist position, and it's important the right economic views come also from other narratives, other emotional stands. you may object to them too, but differently. i saw ZERO men-is-disgusting views in his post, and think it's unfair of you to project those views on him.
the way i understand his position (i read the post, but didn't re-read it now, and it's mostly on prior understanding of this position. i may as well do the same error i accuse you of doing -rounding him to the nearer position similar to his i know) is this:
dating is mutually-benefiting arrangement. it wouldn't happened otherwise, like any market interaction in free market, and like any interaction in free market, it's positive in expectation to both sides.
nevertheless, there is no symmetry. men want more sex then women, and so, in the marketplace, women have more bargain power and choice, and could go with other man.
i really believe that for people with more positive narrative about market, this way of thinking is not as awful as you see it. and, and it's really important, all his attitude assume that the sex is net-positive and desired for the woman!
the analogy is woman who chose the best chocolate for the least money. she can prefer other one, but if it was free she would take any. there is a HUGE difference between seeing yourself as chocolate , competing with other sort of chocolate (this one is dark chocolate with orange tease, this is just plain 70% chocolate , this is extra-dark 85% chocolate). and seeing yourself as disgusting.
it's important, where you place the zero point! and i think it's untrue and unfair to see it as "she can chose the other chocolate, that is cheaper, or have nice coffee taste, what make your chocolate the best?" as "you are disgusting, you need to provide value by money".
You’re right that this triggered that sensitivity of mine, and it’s what I was reacting to. It may be that I was strawmanning Brangus as a way of rejecting my own past. In which case I thank him for acting as my foil when he didn’t deserve it. I do, however, think that reducing human interactions into economic terms is moderately dehumanizing, and is particularly bad to do in emotional relationship situations. A woman may be more charmed by a man who pays, as he’s fulfilling the male half of the gender-dance competently. But putting it in terms of “she has many options and is picking the one with the lowest price-tag” is degrading to both the man and the woman.
i think it bad if people learn to believe the market-framing is man-is-disgusting framing. the market framing may be bad (i'm ambivalent about that, and will write why), but it's definitely different thing. and one of the things the define the market way of looking on things, to me, is that it's very... technical, unemotional, like solving equations, and so incongruent with the disgust of men-are-disgusting frame.
it's... very decouple-y frame. and the thing i like in decoupling is the ability to not have emotional baggage about things.
***
I'm not actually thing there is a men-women divide about the market thing? most people agree with you about reducing things.
my own opinion is... you know about the research with Israeli daycare? when adding fine for being late make more parents late to take their kids back, but cancelling it doesn't make it come back to what was before?
the market reaction is the fine was to small, and it should be bigger until the workers become indifferent, or even prefer parents be late.
but the cool thing about this paper is the way it demonstrate how market-relationship can replace human ones, in a way that is hard to fix.
and this is my best guess to the way people react to strongly to the market framing.
because from my point of view, this is what it is. and i somewhat annoyed i don't have a good term to talk about... not the book market, but the book market, and free stories online not-market, and fanfics not-market, and glowfics not-market. but... (trying to vaguely gesture at something.)
the way i see it, market-frame is just one of the ways to look on things. like saying the thing is red, or blue. it's bad to reduce thing to it's blueness, and be unable to see the thing is also big, and very heavy, and spherical, and all the other things about the thing.
but also... the thing is, actually, blue? and there are people who can't see it's blueness without it replacing all other things. and for them, it's better to ignore the blueness.
but there are also people who can do them both. to change framings. to look at the blueness and then go look at the bigness and heaviness. and there is a mental move here, that i don't know who to point, that i think have something to do with decoupling in general. the ability to see things from market-framing without it being degrading.
and i wish more people had it, and also, that more people could have... being able see it as an option. being able to separate, to decouple, the market-seeing from the emotional baggage of degrading.
for me, it's like there are religious people who see homosexuality as innately degrading. you can... just not.
and i don't think market-framing is the right framing to go dance with. but not because it;s degrading. and i don't think the woman try to pick the most cheap option, actually, i think she try to satisfy, not maximize, actually.
but it's not discussion that is possible to have in a place where most people thing the framing is degrading.
and this inability tend to make people blind to some dynamics, and unable to talk about then sanely.
"The far bigger thing that’s bad here is the assertion that one party (the woman) has inherent value, and the other party (the man) must find something external to compensate for his lack of value. This is not Brangus’s failing, this is a core load-bearing part of the modern leftist worldview."
Why is it leftist? This is bog standart traditional gender roles
From what I was told, the view on the right is that only men have value and do important things, and women are considered an underclass that’s kept around for housekeeping and sex? But I was told this by people on the left, so I dunno, maybe it’s nothing like that.
the Patriarchy say that woman have value only for Being (and should be passive and don't do things in the world) while men have value for Doing (and should go and do things, to earn manhood and place in the world).
woman fought for the right to do things, and i see your writing as the symmetrical fight. in the same way we need men fighting for the right to be stay-at-home fathers to complement the feminist fight for women right to work outside the house, so after the women got the right to Do and not only Be, men need to fight for the right to Be and not only Do.
That’s not really what men are told by the patriarchy. The patriarchy tells them that they are wild beasts and everything gross and they must brutally control themselves before they can be worthy of love—listen to the manosphere, they’re constantly berating guys as negative examples “stop being a pussy” etc. That’s how we tell ourselves we mold men—no, that’s how you mold canon fodder willing to die in war.
Once you achieve self-discipline, however, and demonstrate masculine norms consistently, then you’re rewarded with women. Women are often put on a pedestal as holy objects. But this isn’t psychologically sustainable for boys, so it often has the opposite effect—guys fail at performing masculinity, realize it’s impossibility but we’re not permitted to be anything else, so it’s all directly funneled into anger and resentment, rage and depression which translates to shit behavior and shit attitudes.
There is genuine, pure entitlement, especially among upper classes, but much of the worst behavior is directly the result of shame and feelings of inadequacy. Honestly, much of the feminist Left is completely unempathetic to men so they could never understand it. Don’t listen to Left or the Right on gender. They’re unbalanced and too caught up in ideological battles to be useful to society.
But let's take this view that "men have value ". Why in that case woman wouldn't pay for a privilige to spend time with a man? Like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dowry
> This is the way. Who pays for dinner is the least important thing anyone is finding out. Default to paying and get on with figuring out if you actually have mutual desire, because otherwise the amount of energy diverted away from discovering that is not worth the price of dinner.
So you want illegibility? Fine, that’ll be part of the transaction; the market can provide that, too.
> Ruby objected to this advice on fairness grounds.
> “I think it would be better if there wasn’t an expectation that guys would always pay, and if they all coordinated to not do this we could break that expectation, but each individual guy is incentivized to defect on this in order to increase their chance of getting the girl”
Nothing in that reasoning explains the asymmetry. Each individual girl is also incentivized to give one or more guys more of what they want so she can have more of what she wants, which pressures other girls to give more for less. The traditional way to coördinate against this is slut shaming.
> First, female demand for _good_ sex vastly outstrips supply.
So it’s a market with peaches and lemons. The economics still works.
> More importantly this reduces people to two variables on a supply-demand graph. One party brings sex, one party brings money, and economics sorts out the details.
That’s an inessential simplification. Both parties can bring sex, money and other things, but the market, doing its job, shows us empirically that, on average, one party’s sex is much more valuable to the other than vice versa, so the only way for voluntary and non-fraudulent transactions to happen at large is for the other party to bring much more of something else, typically money.
> this is a core load-bearing part of the modern leftist worldview. Women are not asked what they bring to a date, they do not need to find some way to justify their presence. The fact that they are there at all is valuable.
The fact that men are willing to pay for the privilege of being with them shows that is true. Left, right, calling someone a mysogynist and so on is just different ways to decorate this same fact.
> This is the economics of disgust. The man is trying to “get” the woman to “give” him sex. He must overcome his inherent repulsiveness to get something she doesn’t want to give.
Not necessarily disgust, though it can be. The economic argument works regardless of the sign of the variable representing how appealing or disgusting the man is to the woman, as long as she’s much more appealing to him.
> Is the man’s time valuable? Are there other things he could be doing? Is the woman getting any joy out of the interaction?
It’s not whether his time is valuable or whether she’s enjoying the interaction; it’s whether his time is less valuable than hers and whether she could be enjoying some other interaction or lack thereof more. By taking the deal, the man is implicitly accepting that his time is indeed less valuable than hers. This makes all the sense in the world biologically, considering pregnancies and limited fertility windows.
> Men should only date women who like men.
Don’t blame the market for that. If one party doesn’t actually want the transaction, then no price is high enough, which should be a clear signal to move on.
The transaction happens whether you think about it or not, and whether not thinking about it is part of it.
where a woman entrepreneur describes people withdrawing their bids to invest in her company if she doesn't sleep with them. If you are happy with that as the default state of the world, continue thinking of human relationships in fungible market terms.
Why do you blame “this argument”? According to that post, the investor wasn’t really interested in investing in the project; only in having sex with her, even if he had to buy it, but he didn’t want to do it too overtly. With simpler and more honest communication, they would have realized earlier that neither was actually interested in anything the other had to offer, at least at the moment, and they could even have stayed on good terms. A society with less market ick and rationality ick would have helped.
Unless you are proposing that women start telling men "I will sleep with you after you buy me $X worth of dinners" or men lead with "I expect you to sleep with me in exchange for $Y worth of dinners" than you are not arguing for greater legibility. Arguing for illegibility that makes both sides angrier/sadder is not a market solution, it's a failure wrapped in cargo-cult econ flavor.
I’d already acknowledged that the market can provide illegibility to those who want it. In the post you linked to, illegibility only wasted their time and soured their professional relationship.
If a woman is certain as soon as she sees a man that she’s willing to have sex (or just literally sleep?; talk about illegibility) with him after he buys her $X worth of dinners and not a cent less, sure, why not tell him? The hypothesis just seems very unrealistic, so we shouldn’t expect to see this behavior any time soon.
I love how you point out the devaluation of men; that was beautiful. Brangus's points on this issue don't make sense, though a lot of his advice I think is quite good (the other I disagree with personally is hitting on tons of random people).
I have to agree with Wes though: Your arguments for men paying don't imply the claim, since they equally apply to women.
"But on the first date the party who did the asking out should do the courteous thing and pay." - This seems to be the stock answer, but I think it is most used as a way to support the traditional arrangement of men paying without saying that's what you're doing. We all know that men are expected to ask someone out, so this de facto is saying that men should pay ~95% of the time. Additionally, the argument fails on the face of it. If I asked someone I'm building a new friendship with to dinner, for instance, there would be no expectation of payment. So clearly being the one to ask doesn't generally imply that courtesy necessitates that you pay for them.
There are certainly plausible arguments that could be made for why men should pay, but I don't think these are those. At least they are a better attempt than Brangus's original ridiculously weak argument of "just do it" lol.
I think another thing that's important to note is that the the expectation for men to pay is culturally specific. My understanding is that splitting the bill on the first date is the norm in some parts of Europe.
Personally, my view is that men paying on first dates might have made sense when there was a big financial gap, but now it doesn't. I agree with the belief that it's defecting against other men, but also that it's anti-feminist because it enforces the idea that men should be financially dominant. I think we need to either commit to genuine financial equality or return to a more traditional society, but trying to mix both dooms us to failure.
How we solve this in Denmark (although splitting the bill is still really common) is that going out to eat is expensive so it doesn't happen on the first several dates. At most, you pay for a coffee. A really common date is literally just a walk.
I always thought men pay because before women and men know each other men want the date more than women. Also men want to convince the other party to have sex with them.
The thing about all of this topic is at some point you need symmetry. Both parties should not get the feeling they got scammed. And if you get scammed move on
A man should pay on dates because generosity is attractive to women and makes them feel special and cared for by you, more than it makes men feel this way when women do it. (INB4 Wes, this is a sex difference and not merely cultural.) It also usually costs him less, as a percentage of log(income), than it does her. The rule that men should pay maximizes total utility in the general case.
If your case is specifically different, then do the best thing in your specific case, of course. But do so knowing that many women who prefer equality would still be made happier by a man overriding her stated preference and insisting on paying anyway.
The first 3/4 of this are excellent, but the final 1/4 doesn't answer the central question - why should men pay on dates? Your reasons are completely symmetric. They apply to both parties. As with most gendered advice, it's not so much bad advice as it's unnecessarily gendered. Anyone of any gender should be willing to pay for those reasons!
Genuinely, as someone who always moves to pay but sometimes hasn't had to, I believe it does just come down to gender. We live in a society that is gendered. We both know what those expectations are when we sit down. How we respond to those expectations is noteworthy. This is why it is notable information if a woman recognizes the gesture or offers to pay. It is also very notable information if a man seems to be the type to throw a fit over being on the short end of the stick!
I can definitely see the argument here, but as a British Gen Z-er I would make three countervailing observations about my own experiences in my generation:
1. The nature of student budgets combined with the rise in online ordering, self checkout and bar service means that for the majority of us, about 90% of the food we purchase is done so on an individual basis prior to receiving it, even in groups (eg everyone making separate McDonald’s orders before sitting down on the table together). This usually means there is no ‘bill’ at the end to settle nor an especially communal ordering process other than one or two ‘sharer’ items, so not only would it be unusual to do anything other than pay for what you have, but it would usually be actively difficult to manage.
2. An increasing amount of dating either occurs through apps or through escalated friendships - as such, rather than one person asking the other person out, they instead tend to be more mutual agreements to go on a date. This means there isn’t really as much of a sense of one person being the ‘requester’ and so carrying an obligation to return the favour by paying for food.
3. There is an obvious shift in gender norms. Whilst I think this is overstated when it comes to dating (most women would still probably expect and want to be the pursued rather than the pursuer), it is much more pronounced when it comes to things like paying, where the notion of a gendered expectation would be considered silly and strange. The man may still end up paying, but there will *definitely* be some ironic jokes from both parties about ‘patriarchal expectations’ and “how come you think women aren’t capable of paying?! 😜” if he does.
These three factors I would say therefore combine to mean that for our generation, the instinctive expectation we would all have would very much be for everyone to pay for what they had, and anything beyond that would be unusual and noteworthy (even splitting the bill evenly would honestly be considered weird and dumb unless there were specific items you explicitly shared).
That doesn’t necessarily negate your points, but it certainly means that any case of a man paying on the basis of being a man will seem much less expected and honestly much stranger. I will admit to be fair that I don’t have that much extensive experience on our dating scene, but my experience in social situations in group settings would certainly corroborate these observations.
"Embracing the modern leftist view that men are gross as a way to excuse this unfairness, and rewriting that narrative under the genre of economics"
as i read that, i thought you are not fair to Brangus and somewhat strawman him. after reading all the post i think you are doing something else. you are projecting.
there is Progressive view that to some extend hate men (and also white, and hetero, this is part of bigger pattern). you describe this position well, and oppose it rightly. but also, this is not Brangus position. it;s look to me that you rounded Brangus's position to the silimal, and more popular position that you know well.
but he did not rewrite leftist position, and it's important the right economic views come also from other narratives, other emotional stands. you may object to them too, but differently. i saw ZERO men-is-disgusting views in his post, and think it's unfair of you to project those views on him.
the way i understand his position (i read the post, but didn't re-read it now, and it's mostly on prior understanding of this position. i may as well do the same error i accuse you of doing -rounding him to the nearer position similar to his i know) is this:
dating is mutually-benefiting arrangement. it wouldn't happened otherwise, like any market interaction in free market, and like any interaction in free market, it's positive in expectation to both sides.
nevertheless, there is no symmetry. men want more sex then women, and so, in the marketplace, women have more bargain power and choice, and could go with other man.
i really believe that for people with more positive narrative about market, this way of thinking is not as awful as you see it. and, and it's really important, all his attitude assume that the sex is net-positive and desired for the woman!
the analogy is woman who chose the best chocolate for the least money. she can prefer other one, but if it was free she would take any. there is a HUGE difference between seeing yourself as chocolate , competing with other sort of chocolate (this one is dark chocolate with orange tease, this is just plain 70% chocolate , this is extra-dark 85% chocolate). and seeing yourself as disgusting.
it's important, where you place the zero point! and i think it's untrue and unfair to see it as "she can chose the other chocolate, that is cheaper, or have nice coffee taste, what make your chocolate the best?" as "you are disgusting, you need to provide value by money".
You’re right that this triggered that sensitivity of mine, and it’s what I was reacting to. It may be that I was strawmanning Brangus as a way of rejecting my own past. In which case I thank him for acting as my foil when he didn’t deserve it. I do, however, think that reducing human interactions into economic terms is moderately dehumanizing, and is particularly bad to do in emotional relationship situations. A woman may be more charmed by a man who pays, as he’s fulfilling the male half of the gender-dance competently. But putting it in terms of “she has many options and is picking the one with the lowest price-tag” is degrading to both the man and the woman.
i think it bad if people learn to believe the market-framing is man-is-disgusting framing. the market framing may be bad (i'm ambivalent about that, and will write why), but it's definitely different thing. and one of the things the define the market way of looking on things, to me, is that it's very... technical, unemotional, like solving equations, and so incongruent with the disgust of men-are-disgusting frame.
it's... very decouple-y frame. and the thing i like in decoupling is the ability to not have emotional baggage about things.
***
I'm not actually thing there is a men-women divide about the market thing? most people agree with you about reducing things.
my own opinion is... you know about the research with Israeli daycare? when adding fine for being late make more parents late to take their kids back, but cancelling it doesn't make it come back to what was before?
the market reaction is the fine was to small, and it should be bigger until the workers become indifferent, or even prefer parents be late.
but the cool thing about this paper is the way it demonstrate how market-relationship can replace human ones, in a way that is hard to fix.
and this is my best guess to the way people react to strongly to the market framing.
because from my point of view, this is what it is. and i somewhat annoyed i don't have a good term to talk about... not the book market, but the book market, and free stories online not-market, and fanfics not-market, and glowfics not-market. but... (trying to vaguely gesture at something.)
the way i see it, market-frame is just one of the ways to look on things. like saying the thing is red, or blue. it's bad to reduce thing to it's blueness, and be unable to see the thing is also big, and very heavy, and spherical, and all the other things about the thing.
but also... the thing is, actually, blue? and there are people who can't see it's blueness without it replacing all other things. and for them, it's better to ignore the blueness.
but there are also people who can do them both. to change framings. to look at the blueness and then go look at the bigness and heaviness. and there is a mental move here, that i don't know who to point, that i think have something to do with decoupling in general. the ability to see things from market-framing without it being degrading.
and i wish more people had it, and also, that more people could have... being able see it as an option. being able to separate, to decouple, the market-seeing from the emotional baggage of degrading.
for me, it's like there are religious people who see homosexuality as innately degrading. you can... just not.
and i don't think market-framing is the right framing to go dance with. but not because it;s degrading. and i don't think the woman try to pick the most cheap option, actually, i think she try to satisfy, not maximize, actually.
but it's not discussion that is possible to have in a place where most people thing the framing is degrading.
and this inability tend to make people blind to some dynamics, and unable to talk about then sanely.
"The far bigger thing that’s bad here is the assertion that one party (the woman) has inherent value, and the other party (the man) must find something external to compensate for his lack of value. This is not Brangus’s failing, this is a core load-bearing part of the modern leftist worldview."
Why is it leftist? This is bog standart traditional gender roles
From what I was told, the view on the right is that only men have value and do important things, and women are considered an underclass that’s kept around for housekeeping and sex? But I was told this by people on the left, so I dunno, maybe it’s nothing like that.
the Patriarchy say that woman have value only for Being (and should be passive and don't do things in the world) while men have value for Doing (and should go and do things, to earn manhood and place in the world).
woman fought for the right to do things, and i see your writing as the symmetrical fight. in the same way we need men fighting for the right to be stay-at-home fathers to complement the feminist fight for women right to work outside the house, so after the women got the right to Do and not only Be, men need to fight for the right to Be and not only Do.
Yes, I think this is so. :) It's nice to be read this well
I advise you to read this speech
https://www.zeugmaweb.net/articles/patriotism.html
Sorry it took me so long to get to reading this. It's a good essay, I like it. It also certainly asserts that men have value.
But is it inherent one? Or the one they need to find?
That’s not really what men are told by the patriarchy. The patriarchy tells them that they are wild beasts and everything gross and they must brutally control themselves before they can be worthy of love—listen to the manosphere, they’re constantly berating guys as negative examples “stop being a pussy” etc. That’s how we tell ourselves we mold men—no, that’s how you mold canon fodder willing to die in war.
Once you achieve self-discipline, however, and demonstrate masculine norms consistently, then you’re rewarded with women. Women are often put on a pedestal as holy objects. But this isn’t psychologically sustainable for boys, so it often has the opposite effect—guys fail at performing masculinity, realize it’s impossibility but we’re not permitted to be anything else, so it’s all directly funneled into anger and resentment, rage and depression which translates to shit behavior and shit attitudes.
There is genuine, pure entitlement, especially among upper classes, but much of the worst behavior is directly the result of shame and feelings of inadequacy. Honestly, much of the feminist Left is completely unempathetic to men so they could never understand it. Don’t listen to Left or the Right on gender. They’re unbalanced and too caught up in ideological battles to be useful to society.
But let's take this view that "men have value ". Why in that case woman wouldn't pay for a privilige to spend time with a man? Like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dowry
> This is the way. Who pays for dinner is the least important thing anyone is finding out. Default to paying and get on with figuring out if you actually have mutual desire, because otherwise the amount of energy diverted away from discovering that is not worth the price of dinner.
So you want illegibility? Fine, that’ll be part of the transaction; the market can provide that, too.
> Ruby objected to this advice on fairness grounds.
> “I think it would be better if there wasn’t an expectation that guys would always pay, and if they all coordinated to not do this we could break that expectation, but each individual guy is incentivized to defect on this in order to increase their chance of getting the girl”
Nothing in that reasoning explains the asymmetry. Each individual girl is also incentivized to give one or more guys more of what they want so she can have more of what she wants, which pressures other girls to give more for less. The traditional way to coördinate against this is slut shaming.
> First, female demand for _good_ sex vastly outstrips supply.
So it’s a market with peaches and lemons. The economics still works.
> More importantly this reduces people to two variables on a supply-demand graph. One party brings sex, one party brings money, and economics sorts out the details.
That’s an inessential simplification. Both parties can bring sex, money and other things, but the market, doing its job, shows us empirically that, on average, one party’s sex is much more valuable to the other than vice versa, so the only way for voluntary and non-fraudulent transactions to happen at large is for the other party to bring much more of something else, typically money.
> this is a core load-bearing part of the modern leftist worldview. Women are not asked what they bring to a date, they do not need to find some way to justify their presence. The fact that they are there at all is valuable.
The fact that men are willing to pay for the privilege of being with them shows that is true. Left, right, calling someone a mysogynist and so on is just different ways to decorate this same fact.
> This is the economics of disgust. The man is trying to “get” the woman to “give” him sex. He must overcome his inherent repulsiveness to get something she doesn’t want to give.
Not necessarily disgust, though it can be. The economic argument works regardless of the sign of the variable representing how appealing or disgusting the man is to the woman, as long as she’s much more appealing to him.
> Is the man’s time valuable? Are there other things he could be doing? Is the woman getting any joy out of the interaction?
It’s not whether his time is valuable or whether she’s enjoying the interaction; it’s whether his time is less valuable than hers and whether she could be enjoying some other interaction or lack thereof more. By taking the deal, the man is implicitly accepting that his time is indeed less valuable than hers. This makes all the sense in the world biologically, considering pregnancies and limited fertility windows.
> Men should only date women who like men.
Don’t blame the market for that. If one party doesn’t actually want the transaction, then no price is high enough, which should be a clear signal to move on.
The transaction happens whether you think about it or not, and whether not thinking about it is part of it.
This argument leads to situations like the one described here - https://vortexgoddess.substack.com/p/guest-post-a-fucked-up-setback
where a woman entrepreneur describes people withdrawing their bids to invest in her company if she doesn't sleep with them. If you are happy with that as the default state of the world, continue thinking of human relationships in fungible market terms.
Why do you blame “this argument”? According to that post, the investor wasn’t really interested in investing in the project; only in having sex with her, even if he had to buy it, but he didn’t want to do it too overtly. With simpler and more honest communication, they would have realized earlier that neither was actually interested in anything the other had to offer, at least at the moment, and they could even have stayed on good terms. A society with less market ick and rationality ick would have helped.
Unless you are proposing that women start telling men "I will sleep with you after you buy me $X worth of dinners" or men lead with "I expect you to sleep with me in exchange for $Y worth of dinners" than you are not arguing for greater legibility. Arguing for illegibility that makes both sides angrier/sadder is not a market solution, it's a failure wrapped in cargo-cult econ flavor.
I’d already acknowledged that the market can provide illegibility to those who want it. In the post you linked to, illegibility only wasted their time and soured their professional relationship.
If a woman is certain as soon as she sees a man that she’s willing to have sex (or just literally sleep?; talk about illegibility) with him after he buys her $X worth of dinners and not a cent less, sure, why not tell him? The hypothesis just seems very unrealistic, so we shouldn’t expect to see this behavior any time soon.
The best strategy for men is to promote check splitting in the discourse then defect and pay for dinner when you’re on a date with someone you like.
I love how you point out the devaluation of men; that was beautiful. Brangus's points on this issue don't make sense, though a lot of his advice I think is quite good (the other I disagree with personally is hitting on tons of random people).
I have to agree with Wes though: Your arguments for men paying don't imply the claim, since they equally apply to women.
"But on the first date the party who did the asking out should do the courteous thing and pay." - This seems to be the stock answer, but I think it is most used as a way to support the traditional arrangement of men paying without saying that's what you're doing. We all know that men are expected to ask someone out, so this de facto is saying that men should pay ~95% of the time. Additionally, the argument fails on the face of it. If I asked someone I'm building a new friendship with to dinner, for instance, there would be no expectation of payment. So clearly being the one to ask doesn't generally imply that courtesy necessitates that you pay for them.
There are certainly plausible arguments that could be made for why men should pay, but I don't think these are those. At least they are a better attempt than Brangus's original ridiculously weak argument of "just do it" lol.
I think another thing that's important to note is that the the expectation for men to pay is culturally specific. My understanding is that splitting the bill on the first date is the norm in some parts of Europe.
Personally, my view is that men paying on first dates might have made sense when there was a big financial gap, but now it doesn't. I agree with the belief that it's defecting against other men, but also that it's anti-feminist because it enforces the idea that men should be financially dominant. I think we need to either commit to genuine financial equality or return to a more traditional society, but trying to mix both dooms us to failure.
How we solve this in Denmark (although splitting the bill is still really common) is that going out to eat is expensive so it doesn't happen on the first several dates. At most, you pay for a coffee. A really common date is literally just a walk.
I always thought men pay because before women and men know each other men want the date more than women. Also men want to convince the other party to have sex with them.
The thing about all of this topic is at some point you need symmetry. Both parties should not get the feeling they got scammed. And if you get scammed move on
The reason is that women didn't used to have money, duh
A man should pay on dates because generosity is attractive to women and makes them feel special and cared for by you, more than it makes men feel this way when women do it. (INB4 Wes, this is a sex difference and not merely cultural.) It also usually costs him less, as a percentage of log(income), than it does her. The rule that men should pay maximizes total utility in the general case.
If your case is specifically different, then do the best thing in your specific case, of course. But do so knowing that many women who prefer equality would still be made happier by a man overriding her stated preference and insisting on paying anyway.