No hidden catch, no strings attached, just free love
The problem you are overlooking is the equal protection thing which is the basis for a democratic society. The law isn't comfortable with definitions of crime that apply only to some people and not to others. If it's illegal for, say, an adult man to have sex with a 14-year-old girl, then to keep things fair it pretty much also has to be illegal for an adult woman to have sex with a 14-year-old boy. If you start trying to work in exceptions for gender, or for physically attractive people, that creates a slippery slope problem. Plus the definition of "gender" itself is not always clear. What if a pedophile gets gender reassignment surgery to turn himself into a "woman," and s/he continues to prey on children?
Sexual asymmetry reaches its
greatest heights in sitcoms. In a typical formulaic sitcom, a fat
working-class shlub is paired up with a hot slender wife. This is
vividly illustrated on the site "The Hot MILFs of Network TV".
Feminists and other progressives seem to find this setup unrealistic,
ridiculous and even offensive. And I totally agree with them, since it is
unrealistic and ridiculous and it's about time that somebody spoofs it.
But even so, I have to wonder what precisely is so "unrealistic" about
this typical sitcom setup if we deny that economic terms such as
"scarcity" and "supply and demand" could ever possibly be applied to
the sexual market, that is, the arrangement under which men and women
freely try to pair up with a member of appropriate sex who then has a
similar freedom to either accept or reject these advances.
If
pairing up in relationships is essentially a random process that "just
happens" and it is offensive to even suggest that economic factors
could somehow constrain or affect it, wouldn't a fat working-class joe
be just as likely to land a
hot babe wife as some handsome and successful surgeon or entrepreneur?
Furthermore, if love really is a random process and everybody has
diverse preferences and desires so that there isn't much correlation
between what different people find attractive, how can the concepts of
a "hot babe" or a "handsome man" even exist? Pretty much everybody
agrees on what is attractive, and they agree even more unanimously on
what is unattractive.
It
seems to me that somebody is trying to eat and save their cake here: on
one hand, they try to act all holy and denounce the concepts of
attractiveness and sexual market as meaningless, but on the other hand,
they then appeal to these concepts to denounce something else. Once
again, when chasing the rabbit, the hunter is blind to mountains. It
should also be noted that many feminists who complain about the
unrealistic sitcom husbands tend to take great offense in the perfectly
analogous observation that a fat and dumpy woman probably won't be able
to find herself a top-notch husband. And she won't, because these
top-notch men have higher-quality women willingly wanting to pair up
with them, so it's not exactly a difficult choice for these men.
Assortative mating is as cruel as the cavalry is brutal, to paraphrase
the old chestnut a little.
(As a side note, for an even more humorous illustration of the feminist double standard, go to their site "The Real Hot 100"
and try to find even one nominee there that feminists consider "hot"
and who is even fat, let alone obese or morbidly obese. Funny how
quicky the idea that everybody is "beautiful" vanished when it became
necessary to demonstrate that feminists are beautiful. For the same
reason, good luck trying to find a T-shirt "This is what a feminist
looks like" bigger than a size 10.)
Some people also seem to
have a deep misunderstanding about the terms "economics" and "market",
believing that these entail and necessitate the use of money, which in
turn causes them to think that the term "sexual market" equals
prostitution. But economics is simply the study of choices under
scarcity, and "market" is a situation where participants can make
offers to each other and accept and reject these offers. And not only
is the sexual market under which people try to find relationship
partners clearly a market in the economic sense, but it is one of the purest, most free and most unregulated markets out there!
For example, unlike in the job market, you are allowed to freely
discriminate against others based on their race or whatever other
attribute you want, and they have no legal recourse against you. That's
why the results of this free assortative mating tend to be so very
predictable in the statistical sense, so that, for example, we see the
most undesirable people of both sexes pairing up with each other, and
can tell quite a lot about somebody simply by knowing what their spouse
is like. After all, anybody with a slightest bit of common sense can
immediately understand what the expression "she could do better" means
when it is applied to their friends, no matter how hard they otherwise
deny the existence of attractiveness and sexual market.
The term
"sexual market value", which was originally thought up by The Danimal,
seems to be especially offensive and howl-inducing, since it implies
that different people have different value to other people, which is a
severe thoughtcrime these days. Perhaps this concept would be made more
acceptable if it could be somehow phrased using more acceptable and
less judgmental (i.e. less accurate) words. We need an euphemism that
means the same thing but can be used in public. So for this reason, I
have a very simple request for every twentysomething woman who is
reading this and who considers the term "sexual market value" to be
offensive: could you tell me what is the term or concept that you
use to refer to the fact that an unemployed fat middle-aged man has no
chance whatsoever to pair up with you, and the fact that him hitting on
you is automatically offensive by itself? I know, he is "disgusting"
and all that (and you are "ageist" and "sizeist"), what is the name of
the exact quality that is too low in such a man?
Sitcoms use these beautiful wife/average-Joe husband pairings for a reason. Keep in mind that sitcom audiences are primarily female. To keep women watching, the producers need to show things that women want to see. Consider, next, that one of the biggest fears women face is that their husbands or boyfriends will cheat on them.
These unusual sitcom pairings are comforting to women on a subconscious level because it means the men are unlikely to cheat on their wives, after all they'd never find mistresses who are as hot. In other words, these shows draw in and retain women by soothing one of their innermost fears, even though there may be limited applicability to real life.
Peter
Iron Rails & Iron Weights
Posted by Anonymous | 12:37 PM
With all due respect, I think that your statement:
Girls are valuable and boys are not, and sex is something that women possess and give to men, as everybody with any common sense instinctively understands: girls are protected more than boys for the same reason why diamond stores are protected more than rock quarries.
is incorrect.
The "double-standard factor" here is the sex of the perpetrator, not the sex of the victim (yes, I do consider the boy a victim, but that's an issue for another post). If a male teacher sexually abused a young man, I think that the outcry would be the same as if he had abused a young woman. Likewise, if Deb LaFave's victim had been female, I doubt that people would have any more a negative reaction than they did with a male victim. (I previously discussed this here.
Posted by Glaivester | 9:10 PM