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* High American [economic] inequality

Absolutely that exists, and I used to be more optimistic that with enough cultural shift that would go away and the problem would be solved, but now I am skeptical.

There's just tons of writing on women against frustration with changing cultural norms around casual sex that doesn't mention stigma at all, and I just can't hand-wave all that away as "subliminated stigma", as convenient as that would be!

You're right, but I don't think "just go to a sex party" scales up. There is simply way more male interest in such things. (Though yes, a lot of men would chicken-out last minute too.)

A gestalt of 3rd wave feminisism is "maybe if women are liberated, they will be hornier like men", and there was a huge amount of cultural messaging in this direction. It does not work, and as the interview entails, there is a lot of resentment from the women feeling like they were being propagandized to enjoy a hookup culture that didn't not fulfill their needs.

Either

1. men need to get less sociosexual 2. women need to get more sociosexual 3. wayyy more men need to come out as bi 4. or money needs to change hands.

We've already more or less tried and failed at 2 per the above, no one has a clear proposal for 1, 3 would be great but unclear how high the ceiling is, and then there's 4.

I would love to avoid 4 if anyone could actually come up with a serious proposal on how to massively increase sex party attendance / polyamory / etc. without money changing hands, but I am not seeing it.

That's bad reasoning

- Sex work is much more dangerous because it is illegal

- Legal sex work could lead to increased trafficking when there is so much unmet demand for legal immigration, but abundant legal immigration would solve that

- The people currently seeking out illegal sex work, or seeking it out in countries were there is more violence against women in general, are probably much more prone to violence. Increasing the size of the industry would result in a "regression to the mean" among johns

The porn problem is a bunch of people subtlety rewire their libidos in anti-social ways over time. That is involving orders of magnitudes more people than those that currently beat sex workers, and men and women alike (as the interview makes clear). A good legal prostitution system would have be:

1. Still quite expensive

2. No "pimps" or anything of that nature

3. Sex workers higher their own private security, run their own brothels, little reliance on police (who are likely to continue to be misogynist fucks regardless of how the law changes)

Basically poorer men, instead of going to cheaper brothels where the workers are treated worse, would have to "save up" for fewer trips to still-expensive establishments where 2 and 3 are still abundantly true. High American equality does also make this a challenge, for sure.

The issues at play are really fundamentally about heterosexuality.

The gay male money-free casual sex market "clears" --- grindr does in fact work. The (unpaid) heterosexual casual sex market will never clear regardless of app design, there are simply not even women interested in not enough casual sex for it to be any other way.

Whether its 2024 voters freaking about inflation (despite it being lower than in other countries), or the rise of the manosphere since hetero dating apps, Americans in particular are very consumer oriented society that freaks out when consumption desires get impeded. Somewhere, between many culture forces (porn, 1990s-2010s sex positivity, hookup culture discourse divorced from reality, hip hop lyrics (?!) the end of the Hayes code (?!), straight men's "needs rising in the hierarchy" rose to include much more casual sex than previous generations aspired to....and now the cat is out of the bag.

A lot of the discourse around this reminds me of say, gentrification discourse. There is a wish that the demand would just go away, that we could rewind the clock to when straight men were less horny, or fewer wealthy professionals wanted to live in the urban core. Neverminding that the former is a lot more sympathetic a goal than the latter, it feels like pipe dreaming divorced from actual tactical thinking about the size of the problem and therefore what remedies are actually sufficient. Actually rewinding the clock is, at least, really hard.

Capitalism has been invading the domestic sphere for decades. It's the same process as, say, less home-cooking and more takeout or restaurant trips too. (And in that case, freeing women from the kitchen is unambiguously good!)

In the housing case, the moral and correct answer is "just build more dense housing" --- allow supply to meet demand. In the straight casual sex case, the analogous answer is "just legalize prostitution", but the morality is admittedly less clear cut. Personally, I think we should try it, as all the other answers seem deeply seriousness given the scale of the problem. Better to do something that might actual work, then half-ass things that will certainly fail while the problem gets worse.

It would probably be way healthier to ban porn and legalize prostitution, than ban prostitution and legalize porn. Much harder to get into the dehumanization mindset trap in person.

The interview repeats the common aphorism "sex sells", but it should follow it up "sex sells other things". Sublimated desires into other categories this way doesn't seem good either.