Manosphere Math

At the end of every summer, as the new school year approaches, I go out on a tour of manosphere spaces to collect terrible memes and videos relating to gender and sexuality, to use in my course lectures. It's a strange activity, and inevitably leaves me torn between eyerolling chortles and genuine horror.

It also leaves me scratching my head at the internal contradictions.

Let's consider two different image posts I encountered this week. We'll start with this one:

This image was paired with the following text: "'A lock that is opened by many keys is a broken lock. A key that opens many locks is a Master Key' ladies you are that lock preserve your value. Men you are that key gain experience to acquire your value."

Yes, it's the classic misogynist double standard. But let's consider the math!

If an ideal man has sex with 800 women, while an ideal woman has sex with just one man, or at least a very small number of men, then in this universe there exists a small number of women with a vast number of sexual partners. They are the "sluts," whom men despise. But also, their services are necessary in order for men to gain in value! Since all men are presumed to want to have sex with many women, and to need to do so to gain masculine credibility, the "sluts" are vital to men as a class, while the "virtuous" women who save themselves for a valuable man are vital only to the one man who marries them. The "sluts" have a martyr-like position. They sacrifice themselves and their value to grant value to men who will not value them.

Now, let me show you another recent manosphere social media image post, this time incel in flavor and AI slop in nature:

Whew. OK, according to the incel post that this AI image illustrates, there is a whole different sort of mathematics of gender and sexuality operating. All men want a "high-value woman," who is defined primarily by her "hotness." "Hotness" is comprised of being young, fit, busty, feminine, pretty, and "fresh." "Freshness" means having had few sexual partners, so a low "body count" is in the calculus, but it's not the only definitive measure of "value"--looks and youth are central factors. Men are said to all want a hot woman. Ideally, a 10 on a scale of 1 to 10. 

The problem, according to incel lore, is that all women want a "top-tier" man, a 10, as well. But because women control access to sex, they engage in "hypergamy." That is, they get to have sex with men of "higher value" than their own, resulting in, say, every woman rated a 7 or higher only having sex with the small number of men rated 10, while, say, women rated 4-6 can access men rated 9. That leaves the 80% of men with a value of 1-8 only being considered by women rated 1-3, and it is treated as a given that no man wants those low-value women (including the men rated 1-3). 20% of men get to have sex with all the women worth having sex with. That's what they mean by "hypergamy" (which really means a man marrying many women, but we'll just let that slide).

What's interesting is how men are portrayed in this image. According to the traditional narrative of the double standard as understood at the start of this century, men want to "play the field" for as long as possible, while young women want to get married as soon as possible, and enter sexual relationships hoping in vain to win a ring from men who have no intention of awarding any until they're at least 30. But the incel narrative flips that narrative on its head. It says that young women can get sexual access to top-tier men, and they love that sex. They're not looking for marriage! They "ride the cock carousel" as many times as they can. Meanwhile, the average good guy can't get any woman at all, because any woman worth having is having a great time with the small pool of alpha chads. And look at that image--they are portrayed as very good guys! One offers flowers, the next an engagement ring, the third a Bible, and the fourth a house. But these admirable, valuable gifts are ignored by the women going around on the carousel of sexual bliss. Most men are left as incels, despite their willingness to be monogamous and provide for a high-value wife. 

But there is a reckoning to come! You see, women are said to lose value naturally over time just by ageing. But today, say the incels, women lose value much faster, because they lose their "freshness" by acquiring a high body count. Sex wears down their value, just as it did in the first pick-up image we saw. Their once-tight bodies and vaginae become loose, and they no longer have sufficient value to access the highest tier of men. As they approach 30, they realize their biological clocks are ticking. And they decide that playing the field is no longer for them--the time has come to settle down. That's a flip of the classic description! 

In the classic tale of the double standard circa the year 2000, sad women who had been dutifully having sex hoping for an engagement ring are ecstatic when they finally get one from a man who has given in and decided to bow to the ball and chain of marriage. What happens when women finally decide to settle down in the inverted incel narrative is a matter of debate among incels. Should they swallow the humiliation of taking a woman who spurned average men until she spent her value on higher-status men and lost her freshness? Perhaps, but a marriage based on humiliation of the husband will likely be a bad one for both parties, they moan. Or will women suffer and live regretful lives alone, because the good average men stopped waiting for them and "went their own way" (that is, decided to repudiate sexual relationships, in essence going from involuntarily to voluntarily celibate and escaping incel status thereby)? That is often framed as the better, self-respecting course in incel discourse.

What is interesting to me is that we see reverse images of mathematical reality in the two different sectors of the manosphere represented by these two image posts, though both the players and the incels agree women are behaving badly and will experience an earned comeuppance for having sex with multiple men. In the first storyline, a few low-value women have sex with hundreds of men, with the men gaining value thereby. In the second, a few men who started with high value--the alphas and looksmaxxed moggers--have sex with hundreds of women, with the women losing value thereby. Those descriptions of the world can't both be true at once!

The reality, of course, is that neither is true. Both descriptions of the mathematics of contemporary American sexuality are false. The typical American of any gender has neither 800 partners nor 0. Different surveys produce somewhat different numbers, but the average American has perhaps 7 partners, and there's not much of a gender gap. The manosphere narratives are just-so stories! What is interesting is that while the player and incel narratives agree that women's value depends on them having as few partners as possible, when it comes to whether most women in fact do that (as the players say) or in fact do the opposite and ride the "cock carousel" (as the incels claim), you get opposing pronouncements. The manosphere math doesn't add up.