Just finished the article.
My response: Yep, that's Ivy League dating in a nutshell.
Girls who insist that anything romantic is a distraction or an obstruction but who in less than a decade will be complaining "where have all the good men gone?"
Girls sharply focused on chasing credentials, going out of their way to avoid relationships even with men they like since they're always sure they can "do better", launching into regular feminist complaints about the greek/frat/hookup culture but simultaneously fueling it with their own insistence on "nothing serious" and general preference for sexual relationships with guys they admit they don't even really like on a personal level (only on a sexual one).
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Now, she said, she and her best friend had changed their romantic goals, from finding boyfriends to finding “hookup buddies,” which she described as “a guy that we don’t actually really like his personality, but we think is really attractive and hot and good in bed.”
(keep that quote handy for the next time some wise-ass feminist tries to argue that it isn't common for young women to look for "bad boys" and the whole "women hate betas/nice guys" thing is overblown)
What is ironic is that so many expect things to be different. They figure that the Ivy League is where all of the smart girls are, and naturally assume that the hookup culture would be less prevalent there than at a more normal school where people are less academically focused and far better at partying.
It is the opposite. The more intellectually/socio-economically average girls are the most open to relationships. The phenomena describe in this article are driven primarily by the culture of America's female intellectual and/or socio-economic 1%. The wealthier and/or smarter the girl, the more likely she is to break down the nature of relationships like this:
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“We are very aware of cost-benefit issues and trading up and trading down, so no one wants to be too tied to someone that, you know, may not be the person they want to be with in a couple of months,” she said.
Ask her why she hasn’t had a relationship at Penn, and she won’t complain about the death of courtship or men who won’t commit. Instead, she’ll talk about “cost-benefit” analyses and the “low risk and low investment costs” of hooking up.
“I positioned myself in college in such a way that I can’t have a meaningful romantic relationship, because I’m always busy and the people that I am interested in are always busy, too,” she said.
“And I know everyone says, ‘Make time, make time,’ ” said the woman, who spoke on the condition of anonymity but agreed to be identified by her middle initial, which is A. “But there are so many other things going on in my life that I find so important that I just, like, can’t make time, and I don’t want to make time.”
In the meantime, from A.’s perspective, she was in charge of her own sexuality.
“I definitely wouldn’t say I’ve regretted any of my one-night stands,” she said.
“I’m a true feminist,” she added. “I’m a strong woman. I know what I want.”
At the same time, she didn’t want the number of people she had slept with printed, and she said it was important to her to keep her sexual life separate from her image as a leader at Penn.
“Ten years from now, no one will remember — I will not remember — who I have slept with,” A. said. “But I will remember, like, my transcript, because it’s still there. I will remember what I did. I will remember my accomplishments and places my name is hung on campus.”
Such a typical Ivy League female.
The closer you get to environments where women like this are common (mostly Ivies and a handful of other elite schools), the emptier and less satisfying the gender relations become. These women are some of the most difficult and frustrating to interact with. At my school it was very common for men to simply give up on their female classmates and quit seeking relationships with them altogether. It wasn't just the losers and herbs doing this-many of the guys I spoke to who claimed to have "quit" on the girls at my school were athletes, members of top fraternities and taps at the schools elite secret societies. Even the men who get what they want from these women don't want them, and you can see part of why above.
They inspire apathy-after a while, you'd rather just not bother anymore.
As an Ivy Leaguer, I can tell you that I've never been a) more sexually frustrated myself and b) surrounded by more sexual frustration than at my school. This article outlines a very big reason why: relationships are rare and when they do exist, they are too often just totally empty.
I
wrote recently on the male response to this in the Black Hotness thread, detailing how this dynamic impacts the black community. The discussion was about why "well-to-do" black men seem so unwilling to settle down early once they get out into the real world. My answer essentially blamed that on a version of the dynamic described in this article, which is magnified in the black community due to a) the shortage of such men (black men are less likely to go to school and find gainful employment than any other group of men) and b) the de-emphasis of relationships in the young black community (ex: "no cuffin in the club").
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This ratio reality gives those few black men with their life in order a lot of power. They are in high demand (from ALL races of women) and very short supply.
Their experiences as youth influence how these men use that power. I find that a disproportionate number of this nation's "well-to-do" black men were men that black women didn't find all that interesting during their school days. They were men that were probably a bit more relationship-oriented in their youth than other guys their age, but were not appealing enough to get black women their age to fore-go their fun and independence in their prime years.
This experience (regular rejection, lack of sexual power, etc), I find, enhances the temptation for these men to play the field a little longer when they get older and finally find the tables turned.
I've felt it happen to me in my four years at college. I arrived fully expecting (and wanting) to find a future wife. I took this more seriously than most of my peers and, as a result, found girls practically running away from me even after showing some initial interest. I would ask some girls out only to have them respond in the negative and justify it with their desire to "meet other people".
After a while I slowly began to adapt. Most of the girls I pursued were in "have fun" mode, and most of my male peers were not nearly as serious as I was. I found myself discovering forums like these and opening my mind to new ideas and possibilities, discovering the reality of just how many young, attractive, interesting, and intelligent women there were out there. I began to open my mind to the idea of traveling and meeting a large number of them while having fun doing so. I began to open my mind to the idea of maybe not being the married family man I'd been raised to be during my 20's, and instead spending that time building my career and just having fun meeting all of those people.
In short: if you can't beat them, join them.
I entered college seeking a relationship and planning to be married not more than a few years after graduation. Having now swallowed the red pill, I'm coming toward the end of my college career with no real intention of getting married before my mid 30's. In fact, most of the scenarios I imagine involve me "settling down" properly at around 40-45.
I suspect that a lot of "well-to-do" black men (a group I suspect I'll probably join) went through the same process I did.
The problem is that upwardly mobile black women want to dictate the way this process goes. By essentially closing themselves off to anything serious early on in their lives, they force a lot of the men they will later seek to settle with to adapt to a more casual way of seeing things during their youth. This happens in the way that I described above and I will tell you, having gone through the process, that it isn't easy to reverse. Once you've swallowed the red pill, you don't turn back. Your blue-pill desires essentially die.
Then, after they open themselves up to something more serious in their later years, these women start hoping that some of those men are still around with that old blue-pill mindset along with all of the other qualifications (gotta have a degree, no jail, be straight, dress well, be athletic, etc, etc) that they want. They would not have given up their prime years (18-23 or so) for those men, but they hope that those men will give up their prime years (28-40 or so) for them.
The article is titled "She Can Play That Game To". That title almost makes it sound like these women are just getting back at men and beating them at their own game, but that's not really the story. Many men enter colleges like Penn looking for relationships. It is the women who decide that they'd prefer not to go in that direction.
Men then do what I described in that quote above from the Black hotness thread: they adapt. By the time these same women change their minds and figure the time to get serious has come (usually at 27+ when their prime years are just about done), the men are in a different place themselves and the cycle continues.
I'm sure the same is true of non-black men as well, as this well known graphic indicates:
Women are making their decisions and writers like Hanna Rosin are cheering them on, but men will adapt and there probably will be consequences.
Most of these girls will probably just have to learn this the hard way.