Another day, another sweet book deal for a woman who lambasts her former slutty self as unloveable, and renounces sex (because men don’t love women they stick it to). Reading this interview with Hephzibah Anderson, the author of Chastened, I realized something about the women trotting out the “no one will marry sluts” line—-they are the flip side of the “pick-up artist” world.
At first, this seems like a weird thing to say. PUAs are all about the casual sex, right? But if you look a little deeper, you see the born-again non-sluts and the PUAs are singing the same tune. David Wong at Cracked describes the PUAs this way:
They believe the male/female relationship is adversarial in nature, and that sex is a way of conquering you.
Agreed. And that is exactly the attitude taken by the champions of chastity:
Did you pinpoint what changed in a relationship after sex? Was it a perceived shift in the power dynamic, was it one-sided or mutual?
Yes, I felt that I needed so much more from them. And, to me, it felt like I needed much more than my right. At the end of the year, I would be able to say, “Well, that’s ridiculous.” I think we’ve lost any sense of healthy emotional entitlement. I think if you go to bed with somebody, it is a kind of bond; it’s not nothing, however much we try to say it’s nothing. Whether you’re a man or woman, you’re absolutely in your rights to expect there to be some kind of emotional gain.
In both cases, the relationship between men and women is basically seen as a game of Capture The Flag, or in this case, Capture The Pussy. Of course, in this weird game, once a man touches the pussy with his weiner, then he basically wins possession, and has All The Power. Of course, men don’t like women—-who would?, since women are fundamentally unlikeable in this misogynist worldview—-so when men have all the power, they choose to use it by abandoning women. So the only way women win the affection of these cold-hearted men (which we’re supposed to want, because they’re our social superiors and merely being in their presence should be good enough for us) is to hold out on the pussy. In this case, she trots out examples of guys she’s dated who married other women, and I think we’re supposed to assume those women were better defenders of the Pussy Flag. I think that’s about right, though I may be hazy on the rules of Capture The Flag. But I absolutely understand the perceived rules of Capture The Pussy. I also understand how much fucking money is flying around for women who are willing to play the fallen woman who has learned her lesson in public.
Well, I like money, so I’ve been thinking that maybe it’s time to write a book about how I put my vagina on lockdown and found love and the kind of self-respect that only comes from self-flagellation and ring-hungry desperation in the process. I envy the title “Chastened”, which makes literal the subtext of all these books. So, I thought I’d call my book “Bitch-Slapped: How Locking Up My Vagina Brought Me Success, Love, And Perfect Teeth”.
There are some obstacles to overcome. The largest is obviously my boyfriend, who is all about me getting lucrative book deals, but is concerned that the necessary thesis—-that my wanton feminist ways have left me loveless and manless—-could be construed as insulting to him. I’ve tossed around the idea of kicking him out and only seeing him on the sly, but the cats have raised objections to this, having grown quite fond of him after living with him for most of their lives.
Perhaps I’m overthinking this. After all, reality has never been an obstacle when it comes to the argument that men can love you or fuck you but they can’t do both. These books are all sold on the premise that you can un-fuck yourself into a wedding gown, but the writers neglect to produce husbands, fiances, or long-term boyfriends as material evidence that their strategy worked. This should probably be troubling from a marketing perspective, but it ends up being more of a ha-ha sort of thing.
I joked to a friend a couple months ago, “Oh, God, this book’s coming out again. Maybe I should just hire somebody. Even my male friends took on the part of fiancé for that happy ending, however cynical we are, we still…But I think in a way it makes it more informative, and makes it more the experiment I was thinking of, because I’m implementing these lessons that I’ve learned. And I’m actually quite happy, actually quite content. There’s been a lot less sex, but more romance. And a lot more emotional closeness.
Sorry, but that’s unsatisfying. When you start off with, “I quit having sex because I kept seeing all these dudes marry women that weren’t me, so I changed strategies,” people are going to expect some results beyond a vague claim of “emotional closeness”. You know how phony baloney diet books are sold with a picture of the author contrasting their old pants with their new tight-fitting jeans? For the sex diet books, I feel that a husband standing next to you is the equivalent of your new blue jeans. Dawn Eden is in the same sad situation, after her book The Thrill of the Chaste.
Since the sex diet genre books don’t even reach this level of pseudo-proof, there’s probably no reason for me to give up my boyfriend or sex to write a book about how giving up sex made men quit running screaming away from me. Hell, I probably don’t even need to work that hard, just copy/paste large portions from other books and change a couple of details. And then watch the money roll in.
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Word.
And of course you could make some cash with a hastily-written bitch-slapped memoir - but I suspect there’s also a dissertation in here somewhere. Or several.
The lack of self respect and self direction these women evidence in public (for profit) is indeed disturbing.