Narayan and his close male friends are all around the same age. They’re all elite guys working in tech and finance — and all either dating to marry, or already married. In what amounts to an informal 21st-century marriage brokerage, they and the wives of already-married members of their friend group collude to track down potential partners. But they’re picky — and Narayan is blunt about the criteria. It’s not just about being educated, ambitious or pretty. ‘Guys who say they don’t care about their wife’s sexual history are straight-up lying,’ he tells me. All the men in his group, he says, would strongly prefer their future wives to be virgins on marriage. Some categorically rule out women who aren’t: ‘No hymen, no diamond’.
The emergent Bloomsbury set goes Totally Rules Girl after all this time? :-)
ReplyDeleteThe names, after all, are a huge hint as to the writer's social intentions.
Such fun we could have with this milieu.
"Oh Aldous? Aldous? Attention! Be here now! Is Mary Sarojini leading you astray on The Island? Be careful, Aldous, in the 21st Century they would call you a lolicon for such thoughts!" :-)
And Isherwood? Don't ask, don't tell. :-)
But seriously, there's an angle to all of this that the author of the article never noticed: the normalisation of extreme hypergamous and hypersexual behaviour.
So today you have this environment of extremes passing itself off as "normal" while traditional behaviour is being passed off as some kind of paraphilia, or in some cases an anti-paraphilia which may itself be a proxy for a paraphilia.
One example of this I've mentioned elsewhere: the idea of "demisexual", which is sexual attraction only to people where there are deeper connections and long-term associationsm, and a near complete lack of it toward anyone else.
What I didn't say is that this is a kind of defence for the naturally K-selected to avoid r-selection in its mass expression: by behaving in a way where sex doesn't happen precisely on the third "date", in the manner of the suffragette denizens of "Sex and the City", the individuals select for higher K-selection and encourage groups around them to do the same.
But "demisexual" is a way to denormalise a set of behaviours that's existed as normal before an era of extreme hypergamy and hypersexual behaviour, in which "holding back" is seen as a kind of "asexuality" rather than a very normal and traditional response to nearly everyone else out there having sex on their mind far too often.
As for many of the "asexuals" out there, I have to ask: "asexual" relative to what?
I suspect plenty of them would seem normal enough if it weren't for the background radiation of hypersexualisation causing everyone to act like too much is never enough, and that their requests in the main would take the form of kindly being left alone, which is an attitude I favour in general.
But there could be a Neo-Victorian movement like the one in Neal Stephenson's sci-fi.
Imagine a cultural snap-back to Victorian engineering and what it could do today with hundreds of newly minted Isambard Kingdom Brunel grade engineers moving about.
Imagine the possibilities where people imagine what great things their children could do instead of imagining how fantastic the sexual pleasure happens to be right now.
Western Civ embraced Bentham, got drunk on the logic of universal happiness, and failed to recognise that it'd managed to get its foot trapped in the existentialism of Sartre while stumbling toward universal bacchanalia.
This was a perversion that was never meant to last.
As for the finance/tech guys that the author mentioned, I have an easier route to understanding: it's all about Zahavi and his research on the "handicap principle".
These finance/tech guys try to signal that they have higher value by engaging in these behaviours.
For many of them, it's a route to disappointment because they lack many of the other covert signalling mechanisms to be able to pull off the confidence trick.
And yet they'll still try because they understand that Gresham's Law was always deceptive.
According to the article, all the names are invented. But yes, wh8ring around is only seen as an achievement in the West. While Western men are proud of their women's s8xual "freedom", men of other tribes view them with extreme and increasing contempt.
ReplyDeleteAlso, I don't believe that Sartre or Bentham are the chief source of all our problems...
ReplyDelete