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Epictetus comments on Open Thread, Apr. 13 - Apr. 19, 2015 - Less Wrong Discussion
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After talking it over with some friends recently, I have given serious consideration to crossing over to the Dark Side by seeing a legal prostitute in Nevada this summer to try to have just one successful sexual experience in my life (at the age of 55).
I discovered an interesting spread of experiences in talking to these friends, guys around my age or somewhat older. One of them had a sex-negative upbringing like mine, and he said he had his sexual debut in his early 30’s, but with a woman he knew socially. Another told me that he started to see prostitutes in his teens, and that he has had a lot of experiences with them.
I wish I didn’t have to do this so “late in life,” according to current definitions of human lifespans, and with a prostitute. I couldn’t make this happen organically, in the social environment I grew up in 40 years ago; and I have a lot of empathy for the younger men who have had faced similar problems which have interfered with forming sexual relationships starting at appropriate ages. (I know this sounds out of character for me, because I don’t feel much empathy in general.)
What about She Who Must Not Be Named? You might happen to know her. She provided the opportunity for my first and so far only sexual experience in 1994, but I couldn’t get an erection with her in that situation to save my life, just from the lack of conditioned responses for doing so for the first time in my 30’s. (I talked to a sex therapist a few years afterwards who explained this to me. Basically young men’s first sexual experiences, assuming they can get them, help to calibrate the equipment; and I didn’t have that calibration. Nothing wrong with me medically, though.) Because this woman insists currently on slandering me in public in my absence at inappropriate times and places for reasons which don’t make much sense, I have an additional incentive just to hit the “reset” button with a prostitute and pretend that the 1994 incident with her never happened.
As for my Dark Side comment, sex involves the irrational. I don’t want you to get the wrong idea about my parents, because I had a happy childhood in general. My parents just conveyed to me a negative view of sex, and they had inadvertently damaged my sexual development by making me ashamed of sexual expression. But then my father died six months ago, and lately I’ve had the thought that I don’t have to live up to his standards of a “good boy” any more. He certainly wouldn’t have approved of my seeing a prostitute. But with his permanent absence, I don’t have to worry about his opinion of me from now on. And I admit the irrationality of my former way of thinking about this while my father lived.
I have some additional reasons for doing this – why not have more than one reason for a major change in your life? Not just to resolve finally the sex matter, but also:
To improve my position in the male hierarchy. Hey, advancedatheist has become a regular guy now. He has shown strength of character by overcoming a difficult personal challenge. Welcome to the men’s club, and better late than never.
To add the experience to my “Lazarus Long résumé.” Cryonicists want to stay alive so that we can continue to have experiences. Well, what would you call seeing a prostitute, especially if you have never done that before?
To start the process of developing better social skills for dealing with women in general. My current inexperience and discomfort with women mean that I give off weird “tells,” as Texas Hold’em players say in their context, that women can pick up on that apparently make them feel uneasy about me. If I can gain some basic level of sexual confidence by having some sexual experiences with other women after a successful experience with a prostitute, I should start to give off a better variety of tells when I encounter women socially that might make them more receptive towards me.
Farther down the line, I have aspirations of writing at least one novel, so I would like to develop the experience base for writing about sexual relationships in a novel that wouldn’t sound implausible or ridiculous. I can sometimes tell when I read a story that the author tries to depict a feasible action that he clearly hasn’t done in real life, like shooting a firearm. Sex scenes in stories have the same requirements.
I probably have more to say about this, and I may address them in your replies.
I'm half your age and I've also been strongly considering using an escort to just get it over with, for many of the same reasons you listed. I'd rejected the idea in the past because I didn't want to resort to prostitution, but the more I think about it the more I feel that's more a product of my own vanity than any moral reservation (especially since I stopped being a Christian around the new year).
I don't foresee anything happening in the near future that's going to significantly improve my chances.* On the contrary, I've noticed a steep decline in prospects since leaving the dorm room environment in college. My social circle does not contain any known prospects. I figure I could wait for a random encounter, try some kind of online dating service, spend my evenings frequenting bars looking for a casual encounter, or use a prostitute.
* There are certain aspects of my situation which differ from yours and regarding which I have made some progress in the last few months. However, the issues with anxiety and inexperience still remain and are unlikely to fix themselves.
Well, whatever you do, please don't go on an omega male rampage like Elliot Rodger last year.
I just find our boy-rearing practices odd. We can see starting in middle school, or its equivalent in your country, which boys readily attract girls. They get girlfriends early, they get the best looking girls, they get more girls in general, and they start having sexual experiences and relationships in their teens.
The rest of us as young men, by contrast, receive the seemingly well meaning advice from our elders to "develop ourselves and wait," so that perhaps, possibly, some day, conceivably, young women will give us a turn with them. I know this happens because I heard this crap from my mother at that age.
Funny how our elders don't tell the naturally bangable boys that they have to "develop themselves and wait." At best the elders might advise these youngsters to slow down and bang more carefully to prevent unwanted pregnancies. But otherwise these guys can do pretty much whatever they want with girls because the girls let them with their parents' complicity.
It looks almost as if a tacit understanding exists that adults need to set the sexually unfavored boys aside somehow so that they don't get in the way of the bangable boys, who have the pleasant task of breaking in, sexually speaking, the girls in their generation. The rest of the young men have to wait until these girls, now young women, have to turn to them, reluctantly and without enthusiasm, for their "mature" relationships and sexually sparing marriages.
It's not a conspiracy, they just don't know what to tell you.
Early sexual experience is bad news. This is mostly due to common causes. Parents (ala EDT) might be hesitant to push their offspring in that direction, and at the very least (ala CDT) they probably don't want their offspring to pair up with an early-breeder. This is particularly (perhaps only?) true of parents with traits that tend to produce those very offspring who aren't getting laid in middle school.
Multiple reasons for this.
Partially, as Ilya said, it's difficult to explain. Some fathers do not have any good strategy; maybe they just had a lucky set of circumstances once, so their advice is for you to wait and hope that a similar lucky situation happens to you, too. Some fathers do have a good strategy, but are bad at explaining it by words; being a good teacher is a skill that many people simply do not have. Expecting a mother to give a reasonable advice does not make sense; unless she is a lesbian, she has no experience in the area of picking up girls. Her opinions in this area never had to pay rent, so they don't have to reflect reality.
The remaining part is that other people do not care about your utility function as much as they do. Just because you don't get pleasure from sex, it does not make their lives worse. Only your complaining is annoying. The advice "develop yourself and wait" simply means "quit annoying me".
It seems to make evolutionary sense to not help other people's sons reproduce.
Mothers who manage to come up with good pick-up advice for sons might wind up with more grandkids on average. To the extent that accurate pick-up advice (or the ability to think of accurate pick-up advice) passes from one generation to the next, I'd expect parents to have otherwise-mysteriously accurate pick-up advice.
Not my mother. I tried to talk to her about my dating problems in my early 20's, and Mom came up with, "Ask out the fat and ugly girls. They don't have boyfriends."
Needless to say, this "advice" astonished me, and in a bad way. You don't normally expect your mother to express open contempt towards you.
I have a friend who is very sexually experienced. I asked him how he did it and he said, "Lower your standards".
To be sure, even if the selection effect I mention is non-negligible, it evidently isn't strong enough to drive pick-up knowledge to fixation.
I suspect I'm missing something but I don't discern that in what you quoted (although it does sound simplistic & exaggerated).
Well, if you would have started with the less attractive girls, you could have gained more confidence and experience and slowly progress towards the more attractive ones. Imagine a parallel universe where you did exactly that. Which one of these universes would you rather be in, now?
(I am not sure if "starting here, then progressing there" was a part of the original advice, but I am trying to be charitable here. It is not necessarily a bad advice, maybe just not explained sufficiently.)
Also, the "fat and ugly" doesn't have to be taken into extreme. There are many average girls without boyfriends simply because the boys around them fight for the few most attractive ones. Some of those boys will lose in the competition, and those who win will often get a spoiled princess that will probably cheat on them soon because she will get many attractive offers.
If you go for "average in attractiveness, but has a few traits that I personally prefer (traits that are not generally popular; such as being a nerd)", you can get rather close to the optimal outcome... and yet as an overconfident young guy this would probable seem to you like settling down, because you imagine getting a princess plus the traits you personally prefer. Which is not impossible, just less likely, especially if are not one of the most attractive guys. (Similar advice applies to women, too; and most of them also hate to hear it.)
If only my mother had told me that. She could have said, ask out the average looking girls, preferably ones within a range of healthy weight, and then when you get your experience and confidence built up, try working your way up. And I would have found that advice helpful and constructive, and a signal that Mom thought that I had a shot at getting some of the better things in life.
No, in the context she meant that she thought I didn't deserve any better. When I told this story to my friends at the time who had met my mother, they came away with the same impression. Decades later Mom wonders why I never had a girlfriend, I never got married and she doesn't have any grandchildren.
Mom's advice made no sense for another reason: How could I get sexual experience with fat and ugly women if the physiology on my end refused to cooperate?
All along I would have wanted to have some sexual experiences with average looking, even "nerdy," women. But apparently in this iteration of the Matrix I had an unreasonable goal. So in my 50's I have to budget money for a trip to a legal bordello in Nevada.
My father was 31 when he married my mother, aged 19, in 1958. I was born in November of 1959, so I don't think Grandpa Langley had to stand behind Dad with his shotgun at the altar or anything like that. Dad told me very little about his adult life before he married Mom, and I suspect he just had little to tell in terms of experiences with women in his teens and 20's. He might even have been a virgin when he got married.
Yet he had a pharmacy degree and he worked as a pharmacist, so he knew more about biology and medicine than most men in his generation. He must have filled prescriptions for contraceptives as well, so I can't attribute his discomfort with advising me about sex to ignorance. That leaves relative inexperience as an explanation.
I suppose religion played a role in this sex-negativity, but we stopped going to church (a Southern Baptist one) when I was 14 (I never inquired into the reason, and I didn't miss it); and the family just wasn't overtly religious afterwards.
The most "bangable boys" as you put it is a constantly shifting target. The most successful boys in high school are the ones who are naturally good-looking and extroverted. As you grow older, income and conscientiousness play bigger factors. A guy with no money is perceived poorly by dates and will frequently be left with only one night stands. An undisciplined guy will gradually pack on weight and this will hurt his chances. Introverts, with practice, will get better at forcing themselves to make small talk and the extrovert advantage will diminish. Hard-working guys will have a higher income and stay in better shape, and can force themselves to learn how to approach girls in the right way. There are some constants like height, but a lot of your life choices can dramatically increase your chances. Genetics are a factor, but any guy with well above average intelligence born into a first world country (IE 90% of the LW community) already has been given the two biggest advantages possible.
I wonder about this. It wouldn't surprise me if popularity at 15 strongly correlated with popularity throughout life.
Losing your virginity at a young age seems to predict increased sexual experience, but not in a good way. More akin to what you're referring to:
I'm not sure how they're distinguishing between short-term and long-term because I can't find an ungated copy. It also seems to be the case that our society discourages sex at an early age. I certainly don't envy the kids who were most sexually active in high school.