Playing Horseshoes with Regan
If both sides say you're wrong, you probably are
Regan Arntz-Gray recently dropped an article entitled I See Horseshoes Everywhere, where she claims the far left and far right maintain similar views on three topics:
whether women can freely consent to sexual activity
the ethical / strategic validity of racial identity politics
whether men and women should be understood as adversarial
Regan is entirely correct to identify a horseshoe dynamic in how these issues are understood and discussed in the broader discourse. Unfortunately, she fails to recognize that her bland and uninspired takes on these subjects are much worse than the competing solutions proposed by “extremists” on either side of the aisle.
Assessing the above points, our hyphenated friend downplays legitimate concerns raised by both the right and the left, and fails to substantively engage with complex or challenging proposals for change from either side. Instead she mostly clings to the status quo and offers unsatisfying platitudes that don’t address the issue at hand.
In this essay I’ll go through each of her points in detail and explain how Reganite Individualism fails to provide a satisfactory path forward. I will then contrast her approach with the Waltrightist ideology of Intersectional Identitarianism, and describe how my transactional and coalitional tactics would prove vastly more effective at building a vital and robust civilization that meets everyone’s needs.
We’ll start with the problem of consent, which Regan tackles in her essay Women must choose between liberty and protection. In this piece she argues both the right and left are wrong to adopt a worldview that expects less sexual agency from women:
It used to be those to my left who were most concerned about young women being coerced into sex, but lately I hear this more from women to my right. The worry is similar, that young women are often pressured into having sex that either they don’t really desire at the time or know, in some way, isn’t good for them. But the explanations for why they have this sex are different. Those to my left question whether women can meaningfully consent in situations involving a power imbalance and the more radical claim that sexual choices, “under patriarchy, are rarely free”1. Those to my right worry about women having sex out of “politeness”, which they see as a downstream consequence of liberal sexual norms coupled with relatively higher female agreeableness. The left-wing concern is that consent is complicated when sexual partners are of different ages, incomes etc. and more broadly that all of women’s sexual choices are complicated by their feelings of responsibility for men’s pleasure and their fears of male violence. The right-wing concern is that in a sexually liberal culture, with few guardrails, and in which women are told sex is empowering, men’s desire for casual sex ends up dominating.
She contends that women need to take more responsibility for their sexual choices:
We simply cannot have it both ways. We cannot be equal, liberated, and at the same time claim an inability to make our own decisions. This is true regardless of whether we lay the blame on “patriarchy” or on “sex differences”. [...] While I accept that women are on average more agreeable, that doesn’t exempt us from internalizing the consequences of our actions. Just as men being subject to more violent impulses doesn’t exempt them from being held accountable when they act on those impulses. [...] I expect that while sex differences contribute to these situations these behaviors are also influenced by social expectations. Women need to hear that they are agents, expected to be held responsible for their actions and inactions.
While Regan’s paragraphs are as vast and merciless as the great white north she calls home, one cannot help but admire how she positions herself rhetorically in this article. She does a great job being everyone’s friend. She primarily channels that individualist, tough love “bootstraps” mentality that’s always been catnip to center right guys, but also throws in *just* enough qualifications about affirmative consent and natural sex differences to avoid alienating feminists and traditional conservatives. If you want to build a respectable and moderate coalition, this approach seems perfect.
Almost too perfect. There’s kind of a “A+ English term paper” quality to this piece. You can’t write in an honest or interesting way about sex when you’re this sanitized—especially when calibrating your argument not to offend 3-4 very distinct factions.
Rayguns Aren’t Gay is smart and thoughtful enough to understand the basic contours of a difficult issue, but she isn’t the least bit willing to jump down any of those dark smelly rabbit holes that might end somewhere unsavory. And that’s why she ends up with such a banal and unsatisfying resolution that will only appeal to people who didn’t think this was a problem to begin with.
Regan insists on a neat and tidy solution, but I doubt any of the sex negative feminists and tradcons who actually think this is a problem are going to see her proposal as a genuine path forward for young women. Their concern is that women can’t consent because they have less agency, while Regan’s response is to simply assert that women have sufficient agency and Boomerishly exhort other women to go prove it by taking greater responsibility for their sexual decisions.
The problem with this approach is that even if women *were* capable of willing themselves into greater agency, simply telling people to change their behavior (let alone their outlook) is seldom a realistic solution to any social problem. Almost nobody can orchestrate a widespread voluntary change in behavior unless they’re a hugely charismatic religious figure or a general during total war.
Just saying “be better” never works—deliberate changes to social mores are always downstream of deliberate changes to some material / institutional incentive structure. Crucially, we already have such an incentive structure for sex, within which people are constantly demonstrating their revealed preferences. Unfortunately, one of these preferences is the astonishing lack of sexual agency seen in most modern women.
In the next section I’m going to document examples of this lack of sexual agency.
But first I need to provide some context into my own background so you can properly understand how my vantage point enables me to speak with authority about female nature (particularly when I’m attempting to contradict an actual woman).
First—I am a very right wing guy insofar as I value hierarchy and vitality, but I’m not at all “traditional” in temperament or lifestyle. I’m an atheist, I enjoy living downtown in a high rise surrounded by Jews and Cubans, I’m fine with the gays, and I have a protective attitude towards slutty women. So I’m not coming at this from the perspective of some dour tradcath who wants all the thots to obey Jebus or whatever.
Second—to use the Jungian nomenclature, I’ve always had a strong anima (basically “inner woman” or “feminine side”), and this makes it easy for me to develop intense friendships with women and understand the female mind. This in turn has made me especially interested in “women’s issues”—particularly the things I see causing women intense pain that feminists cannot or will not address.
Third—I have spent the last few years living a tremendously promiscuous lifestyle, and my body count is probably around ~115 right now. I don’t say this to brag (and don’t even view it as an achievement; once you can get one woman you can probably get a hundred if you just live in a city), but rather to drive home that I’ve sexually interfaced with an incredibly broad swath of the female population, and can accurately speak to the behavior and sensibilities of women across many different temperaments, backgrounds, social classes, ages, and levels of experience.
This is significant because during pillow talk a woman will frequently tell you about her past, her most memorable sexual experiences, and even her inner demons and traumas. Very frequently she’ll share things with you she’s never even told her friends and family. You’re just some random guy, so what does it matter if you know this shit?
It turns out quite a lot, because a high openness autist like me will quickly start noticing patterns in girls’ answers, which quickly turns these discussions into a sort of ad hoc anthropological research project.
And it doesn’t take long before it hits you that most of these women are really not well.
Note I’m not just talking about the slutty girls here. I’ve met tons of girls with a single digit body count who basically have permanent trust issues because some asshole wasted their best years in a four year long “engagement” before breaking up and immediately marrying some 24 year-old (typically won with the salary / house / confidence that Fiancée #1 helped him build under zero legal protection).
This is an incredibly common story, and I’ve come to realize a lot of guys are psychotically deliberate about doing this to girls. To my mind this is a lot worse than one night of ambiguously consensual pushy sex. Hell, it’s probably worse even than flat-out rape. If a guy did this to my daughter I would castrate him.
But we need to understand this specifically as a way that low agency creates negative life outcomes for women. Because it’s definitely not like these girls weren’t warned first—literally all of them report that their dad told them “why buy the cow when the milk is free?” or some other such Boomerism. The thing is none of them fucking listen.
When a woman in her mid 20s is in love with a guy she sees as husband material and doesn’t feel like she’s settling, she becomes so cartoonishly submissive that you honestly need to make a constant effort *not* to take advantage of her. It seems a huge proportion of girls will just trust a dude absolutely and completely fail to protect themselves at 26, and then at 29 they’ll end up single with an enormous axe to grind against men for the rest of their days.
This is clearly an instance where women are dangerously unagentic and straightforwardly need to be protected from their own girlish stupidity. You simply need to change the material incentive structure.
To that end, I suggest that women should be able to sue men for alimony over a period equal to twice the engagement if she’s older than 25 and he breaks off any engagement that lasted over a year. Then if she’s older than 30 make it four times the engagement.
Incidentally, this would be a great way to get young single women voting Republican.
But how should we think of female agency specifically in regards to casual sex?
First we need to adopt a compelling mental model for sexuality. And to that end I come from a very different place compared to your typical rightist, because these days my starting point isn’t Thomas Aquinas or Andrew Tate or even Camile Paglia.
It’s the radical feminist and coal-poaster extraordinaire Andrea Dworkin, who spat perhaps the single hottest and most incisive take of the twentieth century:
“All sex is rape.”
