17 Hookup Culture and Mass Romantic Incompatibility

Nothing contributes so much to modern ennui as the collapse of romantic life across the developed world.

Statisticians paint the subject in stark terms— people are having sex less, marrying less, and, presumably, falling in love less often. Our broader culture views the whole issue more dubiously; generally, the problem is cast as either a self-help issue— a series of millions of discrete problems to be resolved discretely by taking the time to work on yourself—or as an illusion, a natural resettling which is an artifact of the collapse of the institution of marriage. The message a young single person in an average milieu receives is a synthesis of these two points, a few firm-handshake-esque platitudes combined with assurances that, eventually, it will “happen” for them.  For those that dip their toes into the deeper waters of online analysis, too many answers compete for too few questions; everything from irreligiosity to misogyny to microplastics to feminism is presented as the source of our dissatisfaction.

The tools we explored in the practical tools section of the BlogBook, and the history we’ve explored in this section, give us a better window into the question of what’s behind the evident collapse of our romantic faculties. Through a dispositional analysis of people as whole individuals, combined with a scrutiny born from years of unwilling participation in the sexual marketplace, this chapter aims to expose the morass of our society’s sexual dysfunction to the light of solve.

We’ll begin with an investigation of the historical roots of our present situation, through the death of the housewife and the collapse of society into mass romantic incompatibility.

Next, we’ll take the lay of the land as it currently sits with a survey of hookup culture, spanning its origins in 3c pathology, its dynamics, and the strategies individuals resort to in evading it.

We’ll conclude with some personal advice— Framework-derived stratagems for gaming a broken system and riding the wave of our collapsing society.

Mass Romantic Incompatibility— How We Got Here

As seen in The Alchemy of Pathological Compatibility, opposites attract. This was the mechanism by which romantic life operated at the height of the capitalist Antithesis era. Men, as the productive agents of society, were inculcated 2n3c en-masse. Starting in the 19th century, women were inculcated 2n3o to match them, through a regimen of systematic neglect.

This regimen was founded on misogyny, of course, an unwieldy body of untruths which purported that women were naturally submissive, unsuited to the strictures of Capitalist public life. That this was false has been conclusively demonstrated by the seven or more decades during which women have been inculcated 3c en masse, and have gradually begun to outcompete men in the public arena. But for all its injustice, the arrangement was an incredibly stabilizing force for the Liberal democracies under which it flourished.

For our purposes here, it’s essential to understand that the pathological compatibility upon which Western romantic life was once premised was not illusory or false. 3c inculcation created within men a bottomless desire for validation; 3o inculcation gave women a bottomless desire to be supported. The construction of a legal apparatus by which women were forced to rely on men for financial support reinforced the 3o conditioning which made these people suited for each other. The result, so long as you were one of the lucky majority to be inculcated with the “proper” form of derangement, was an immensely satisfying pathological exchange. Men provided for their families materially through exertion and conformity; they were rewarded in proportion to that material providence with the adulation of their spouses. In the process, households were led by complementary pairs who, when they combined their powers of reasoning, approximated the equanimity of one 2n3n adult.

That bourgeois culture elevated romantic love into a transcendental answer  to all of life’s problems has been the subject of incredible cynicism in the years since the counterculture began. The roots of this cynicism are easily spotted, and  spring from uncracked irrationality. Haute bourgeois 3c-conformists view 3c as the fundamental nature of both man and woman; to them, the role of a housewife could only ever be a horrifically constrained, dependent, claustrophobic one. To admit that any significant body of women ever thrived in the role would be a betrayal of the worldview which holds 3c to be fundamentally non-pathological. Petit bourgeois 3c-conformists take the contrasting view, that 3o is the fundamental nature of woman. To admit that transcendental romantic love was once the norm, but is no longer, would be to admit that the nature of women has been deeply changed, which would violate the misogynistic worldview to which they still subscribe. Both of the classes which produce culture are therefore inclined to write off peak-capitalist notions of romance as unrealistically saccharine, a position which self-critical post-60s counterculture has been all too happy to concur with.

However, any disinterested investigation of the romantic crisis afflicting our culture will quickly come to understand that the sense of betrayal which echoes through it cannot be illusory. The notion of romantic love as a transcendent force is hardly an invention of capitalism, but the expectation of experiencing such love certainly is. Over the course of the 19th and early 20th centuries, a deep and abiding entitlement to romantic fulfillment has pervaded our culture; to write this off as a memetic invention of Hallmark and RKO would be far too contemptuous of the public to align with the principles of the Framework BlogBook.

Luckily, as stated previously, pathological compatibility provides a ready mechanism by which generations in their millions might have loved and lost. Women were once inculcated 3o en masse and pulled away from public life to dwell within an interior periphery carved out of society; when the pressures of total war began to threaten the collapse of individual nation-states, women were thrust back into public life through factory work while their men were sent to fight. Female participation in these roles exposed the evident untruth of the misogyny which upheld their 3o conditioning, and so people stopped inculcating their daughters 3o.

Of course, these people did not then begin inculcating their daughters 3N; the majority of the population were and are 3c individuals, and many of them still possess an uncracked 3c worldview. No, beginning around the 1960s, women have been increasingly inculcated 3c, the same as men. The results of this great experiment in gender-neutral child rearing are obvious in retrospect— women are just as capable of manifesting conformity, risk-averse tendencies, and an unlimited lust for validation as men. They have also been disastrous. We have created a nation of swaggering Don Drapers in their dishonest, conflict-averse, glory hungry millions, with no judgmental, jealous, dependent spouses to rein in their excesses and validate their accomplishments.

Subconscious strata of the 3c collective comprehend the lack, reeling at the injustice as their achievements go unremarked upon and their exertions pile up uselessly; but to comprehend this problem intellectually would be to repudiate the irrationality which 3c conformity is in the first place, so insofar as the death of the housewife has entered into cultural cognizance, it has been obscured by rationalization and skepticism.

Worse than the mere lack of class of dependent 3o validators however, is the presence of a superabundance of 3cs. Per the rules of pathological compatibility, identical dispositions are mildly repulsive, because both parties compete for the same (seemingly) scarce resources.

2n3c individuals view all interactions through the lens of validation— maximizing their own. They conform to the standards of others and are reluctant to contradict anyone. Within a pathological bargain— and this is true for all eight pathological dispositions— romantic love is almost always arrived at as a domain of the repressed mind, a place where an individual should feel safe to consciously express their repressed desire. For 3cs, this repressed desire is the drive for validation; they crave the admiration and approval of their romantic partners, and feel entitled by dint of intimacy to express this desire explicitly. They promptly find this desire returned to them. Both members of a 3c couple bear within them a bottomless desire to be admired, and every minute spent doing the admiring is a loathsome, unjust repudiation of the bargain they have made with their subconscious mind. The initial communication from upper mind to lower was that romance was a situation in which they would be safe to reveal their true desires, but the presence of competition within this most intimate domain reveals that romance is anything but safe. At the very best, romance between two individuals of identical pathologies is a non-starter; at worst, it’s a nasty shock to the system^[1].

However, human beings don’t exist merely on the level of their pathology— their stack of methodologies spans the height of the Ladder of Sublimation, from brute physical lust to love to life-partnership. If the repulsion between the sexes were major, it’s possible that society already would have collapsed into some sort of steady-state^[2]. But in the face of the urgent imperatives of the lower levels of sublimation, the mild repulsion which results from couples in competition with themselves is borne and withstood— for a while. Couples pair off, against their own misgivings. At first, marginally, through the elaborate rituals of hookup culture; later on, in their 30s, desperately, settling quickly in the face of the looming infertility and death which their 3c pathology had heretofore enabled them to ignore.  Eventually, they are met with two options: to divorce, or to dramatically scale back their understanding of what the human experience has in store for them^[3].

This is an incredibly common state of affairs— the default— and is the most devastating consequence of mass romantic incompatibility. Defined narrowly, MRI is the present overabundance of 3c individuals, who are dispositionally incapable of getting along together romantically. The most salient consequences of MRI are these:

• Hookup Culture
  • This phenomenon will be discussed at length in the next section of this chapter.
• Falling birth rates
  • Generally, bourgeois media institutions will attribute this phenomenon to whatever political hobby-horse their masters are invested in. For the left, this means poverty, “financial insecurity”, Late Stage Capitalism. The fact that starving peasants across history have had more children than they could handle by default neatly falsifies this hypothesis. Even its more sophisticated form, the notion that people don’t want to bring children into a world with “no future” (because the speaker is no longer guaranteed a white collar 9-5 and a house in the suburbs by dint of their parent’s occupation) doesn’t stand up to much scrutiny. For the right, this means irreligiosity; it’s certainly correlated, but, according to Nietzsche, God died sometime in the 1800s, and for all that secularism has been rising since the Enlightenment, birth rates rose until the Baby Boom. No, the real cause of the decline in births— if you really look at people closely, and pay more attention to what they do than what they say— is that men and women just don’t much like each other anymore: MRI.
• Diminished Youthful Excess
  • This fact isn’t readily apparent to mainstream culture— which finds narratives of our slide into decadence and sin useful for pushing a wide variety of agendas— but young people are living less than ever before. They’re having sex less often, losing their virginities later, doing few drugs, driving less, working less ,you name it. In the face of contraception, Free Love, and the Sexual Revolution, this is an extraordinarily paradoxical state of affairs. Doubtless smartphone addiction has something to do with this— youth is a powerful narcotic, and it would take an equally powerful narcotic to counteract it. But, for all that, it seems implausible that 4 generations of marital misery haven’t taken their toll on the human capacity for joie de vivre. Our culture has tasted love; how many generations of incompatibility would it take to make us forget it? And if we never manage to forget it, what’s to stop us from retreating from life altogether?

I could continue to pile up evils at the foot of MRI, and no doubt I will. But this document is meant to be a transcendental manual, and so it is time for us to focus our analysis on the manifestation of MRI most relevant to those of us still active in the dating market— hookup culture.

Hookup Culture

First, I’d like to outline some straightforward limitations here: I’m going to describe hookup culture in its purest form, as it exists among young (ages 18-30) 3c people in urban settings. For various reasons which can be readily abstracted from chapters like The Four Classes of American Politics and Capitalism’s Apotheosis in Fascism, these conditions apply to a much lesser degree among other groups of people and in other settings. Keep this specificity in mind— we’re illustrating an ideal type, not a universal pattern.

Hookup culture, as it currently exists, is rooted in the optimistic borrowing of the present against the future. 3cs are able to appreciate death only very abstractly; on the 3rd level, the level at which long-term relationships are calculated, Eros-painted life assumes the form of an eternal summer, a Now which will stretch on Forever. As a result, 3cs hate confinement within explicit relationships, abstracting such arrangements into visions of deathless eternity, where mistakes compound endlessly. During the Capitalist antithesis, these tendencies were perfectly countered by a mass of 3os, who perceived life as a short, tempestuous storm and longed for promises to lean on. Since these women have vanished, the 3c distaste for formal relationships rules the day from youth until infertility begins to rear its head, at which point hookup culture is cast aside and desperate lunges are made towards matrimony (marriage having been validated as a format for raising children too indisputably to be foregone).

The 3cs which make up the bulk of urban civilization view the informality of hookup culture not just as an expedient means by which to balance the imperatives of sexual desire against a paucity of attractive life-partners, but as a just and necessary arrangement. They themselves detest being bound by anything— as 3cs, they shuffle constantly between the prisons they construct out of other people’s expectations, and jealously guard any freedom of movement they can wrest from the world. Being uncracked, 3c individuals apply the Golden Rule to this principle— they view imposing exclusivity on someone as a moral failing, an imposition which can only be justified by extreme circumstances^[4].

This sense of distorted justice is the source of the “situationship”; not, as Boomers tend to assume, a libidinous, male unwillingness to commit to a single sexual partner. Young people simply aren’t having enough sex for informality to be rooted in the exercise of lust; it isn’t uncommon for a situationship to stretch on, de-facto monogamously, for months or even years. The “traditional” role of women in bringing an end to such an arrangement, or preventing it entirely by refusing to have sex until promises of exclusivity have been exchanged, would be an imposition which their 3c natures can but abhor. Whether they want exclusivity or not, young 3c women are utterly, dispositionally disinclined from demanding it.

The fear of “catching feelings”, likewise, doesn’t just reflect Zoomer fear of embodying attachments which lack a pathway for expression due to the collapse of the institution of dating; it reflects an active hostility on the part of the 3c person towards binding emotional ties, and a converse fear of tying others. To express something like love, to reveal such a profound vulnerability, is implicitly a demand for reciprocity, a means of forcing someone to capitulate to your will out of respect for this vulnerability. At best, such an admission would be a horrendous breach of the détente by which sexual relationships are disentangled from onerous restraint; at worst, their vulnerability would be exploited, as the knowledge of their feelings emboldens their partner to pump them for more validation.  They therefore try their hardest to avoid actually feeling anything for their sexual partners.

To continue our myth-busting, “option paralysis” is a much less potent constraint on sexual selection than is generally assumed. The presence of multiple potential partners can easily be resolved by comparing their possession of trivial goods— and failing that, mere proximity. Strangers are largely an undifferentiated quantity, and the paralysis which prevents online dating-app users from pairing off is less a case of failing to make a connection after giving someone a shot, and more one of never giving anyone a shot in the first place. Really, it’s the dread of knowing from experience that the majority of individuals you encounter will be incompatible with you (whether you yourself are 3c, or simply not 3o) which prevents people from taking action to match with one another. The subconscious “pull” which gives vent to the repressed drives and overwrites the 3c-dominant security impulse simply isn’t there, leading men to engage with dating apps primarily carnally (since their sexual impulse is strong enough to overwhelm the dominant mode) and women, barely at all.

With these constraints established on the ground floor— young people aren’t looking for life partners because they’ve forgotten that they’re going to die, they feel that asking each other to commit to exclusivity is morally wrong, they view the expression of emotion as tantamount to asking for exclusivity, and what connections they do take a chance on are always incompatible and unfulfilling— the superstructure of hookup culture which has been erected atop them was bound to be a ghastly one.

Generally speaking, in practice it takes the form of a crude marketplace for validation. 3c individuals crave validation more than anything— to be seen as good and valuable. This applies as much to bourgeois women as to bourgeois men, and in a sexual context, bourgeois women have a great deal more leverage, because men are simply more motivated by sex than women^[5]. Therefore, for the young 3c people embedded in hookup culture, sex is a process by which women trade physical gratification for that most valuable quantity, validation— in this case, the feeling of being beautiful and desirable. Sex is therefore brief, transitory, resentful, and utterly unromantic.

This exchange of validation for sexual access is a deeply unhealthy one, because it is founded on an extremely unsustainable exchange. What a woman who demands validation in exchange for sex is doing is constructing a simulacrum of a 3o man to be with. The man she hooks up with— inevitably, a 3c one— is casting aside his own 3rd level desires so that he can cater to hers, in order to engage in what is, for him, essentially an elaborate form of masturbation.

A real 3o man would find this whole arrangement deeply satisfying, because his self-esteem is sky high and needs no babying, his self-importance is precipitously low and is gratified to see his words have such an effect, and (having no compunctions about making demands of people) he is willing to leverage this interaction to gradually maneuver the relationship towards the formality he craves.

A 3N man, by contrast, would find the exchange distasteful, because it reveals an irrational lack of equanimity on the part of the woman; how distasteful he finds her pathology will be a question of how self-aware she is about it (whether she is cracked) and how many better options he has available to him (dispositionally, probably none).

The 3c man whom she is actually sleeping with, however, finds his position humiliating in the extreme. He has almost certainly concocted an interior bargain by which intimacy rewards him with access to his repressed desire for validation— but to achieve physical intimacy, he has been forced to betray this bargain, mingling the intoxicating effects of lust with deep entrenchment in his dominant mode, catering to her desire for the validation which he experiences as a continuous duty. This state of prostration creates within him a sense of significant resentment; his subconscious mind wrestles to free him from the situation, and whenever his lust is satisfied he will attempt to disentangle himself from it.

This male resentment renders hookup culture problematic for the 3c women, and they approach this problem through a consistent strategy: they make themselves more physically and sexually attractive.

This tendency towards the escalating performance of female sexuality while actual sexuality declines is a significantly paradoxical one; many observers have been driven to the poetic in explaining it, concocting pretty postmodern notions about the substitution of the performance for the real, the sublimation of physical life into digital simulacra.

The real explanation is more prosaic, more game-theoretical: bourgeois women love to be validated, they feel a duty to conform, they fear being shunned, and they hope to gain the privilege of an exploitable office. Investing themselves deeply into the cultivation of their physical appearance accomplishes all of those things: it gains them validation from impressed onlookers; it renders up a trivial good which keeps them in good standing with their group; it’s a “safe” domain of activity within the boundaries of bourgeois propriety, which no one can censure them for pursuing^[6]; and it grants them more sexual leverage, which they can use to force men into the submissive, affirmative state they require.

Young 3c women generally pursue two strategies by which they can augment their sexual attractiveness.

The first of these is simply to become more physically beautiful— diet, exercise, skincare, etc. This pursuit, in the typical 3c manner, is attributed inevitably to external pressure and described as a “standard” to which they must conform. That it is in fact an internally-arrived-at solution to a discrete problem they face in the process of harvesting validation renders this notion somewhat galling to one’s sensibilities, but it is not otherwise remarkable.

The second strategy is more complex, and requires some explanation.

The Madonna/Whore paradox is touted as one of the perennial injustices of the female condition— keep in mind, because media, academia, and all of the organs of public life and expression are dominated by the bourgeoisie, it is really an injustice of the 3c female condition. Depending on how it is framed, men either expect women to be at once sexually pure and sexually experienced (an impossibility) or they categorize women automatically as sexually pure or sexually experienced (an unjust reduction of their personal qualities). Either way, women are confronted with a dilemma.

Men absolutely do this^[7]—to varying degrees; dumb men do it in particular— but in analysis, the choice of whether to engage with it is never presented as a choice at all. The 3c condition, male or female, is to experience a limitless lust for validation, a condition 3cs hold to be universal. To present a person with two, mutually contradictory routes towards achieving validation is, to the 3c mind, a grievous violation of their integrity; within the eternal summer, regrets pile up forever, and every road not taken lingers in memory until the end of time. This is the rationale by which these male preferences are understood to be misogynistic.

At any rate, the stratagem by which 3c women engage with this dichotomy is simple enough, because the actual chart of aggregate male preferences is straightforward. They are attracted to pure, virginal madonnas most of all; after that, they like dangerous, exciting, sexually knowledgeable whores; and last of all come women anywhere in the middle.

Given these preferences, bourgeois women are left with an obvious strategy— to paint themselves as virginal and pure for as long as that is practical, and then to jump hard in the other direction towards an air of sexual experience. This strategy is borne out; however, it results in a bit of a crab-bucket effect. The less credibly-pure a woman is, the more she is incentivized to ensure that the purity of her rivals is similarly besmirched (Keep in mind, 3c women are in competition not for sexual access to 3c men, but for the validation they can extract from them. It plays out the same as actual sexual competition would, except the most likely outcome is that no one gets laid at the end.) The result of this crab-bucket effect is sex positivity.

I mean this more or less literally. The sex positivity movement, by which gradually more extreme sex acts from anal sex to strangulation have been progressively “normalized”, clothes itself in the language of academia but is fueled, on the ground, by the sexual-validation arms race between 3c women. What is important is not the performance of any of these acts—for 3cs,  actual sex is always a secondary concern to the validation extraction which precedes it, just as every disposition contorts sex into a vehicle for their pathological desire— but their rhetorical embrace. The rhetorical embrace of kinky sex accomplishes two valuable goals for women; enhancing their own apparent sexual prowess on the one hand, and creating a highly sexual environment on the other, in which more virginal 3c women are motivated by the imperatives of conformity to compromise the purity which keeps them at the top of the validation-heap.

However, this dialectic of sexual permissiveness has a terrible side effect. The performative sexualization of young 3c women has not occurred in a vacuum— obviously, it would be useless in extracting validation if it had. Young men have been watching this progress with keen, obsessive interest, and, in the process, have developed a much more expansive understanding of their sexual options than was heretofore available to them^[8].  Many of these young men are 3c, and are therefore extremely anguished and resentful of the fact that they are forced to always give compliments in the sexual realm and never receive them. And so we have explained one of the last remaining mysteries of modern sexual mores— why sex has grown increasingly violent, even as actual incidences of sex have diminished.

Furthermore, I feel that this tendency of young 3c men to give vent to their resentment of their partners in the bedroom is likely to blame for the astronomic rise in young women’s fear of sexual violence. In a developed world where sexual violence has been cratering for decades, young women are more afraid of men than ever before. Generally this fear has  been attributed to the consumption of True Crime media which has ticked up at the same time; this is a mimetic explanation, and I’m disinclined to believe it— I’d just as soon attribute the former to the latter, that True Crime media has exploded in popularity because, to a novel extent, the female sexual experience is tinged with violence, and an awareness of men’s physical strength. This fear is pervasive, and often borders on the extreme; I recently saw a video of a young woman who always checks beneath her car with a flashlight before getting in, because she once heard about a woman getting her ankles slashed by a hidden rapist with a knife. What was remarkable was not so much that the comment section was affirming her fear, but that this affirmation was too vehement to be merely performative. If you spend much time in young people’s company, the facts are apparent: young bourgeois women are actively embodying and acting on a fear of male sexual violence, and where a belief manifests in actual behavior, I’m inclined to believe there’s a material change behind it. The immense resentment of the body of 3c men against their female counterparts, enacted both materially and rhetorically, is sufficient to account for this change^[9].

So, this is the lay of the land for modern romance. Hookup culture, the logically necessary product of mass romantic incompatibility, is a system by which 3c women leverage their sexual attractiveness to extract validation from 3c men in exchange for physical gratification. In the process, women throw themselves into sexual competition with each other, men foster a deep sexual resentment at the betrayal of their subconscious sexuo-romantic bargains, women get beat up by these same men who are taught to expect violent sex as a matter of course, society grows more and more performatively sexual, and at the end of the day almost no one actually has any sex, because they’re all too scarred, scared, and emotionally brutalized.

Opting Out Part 1— Extant Strategies for Escaping Hookup Culture

The most common means of opting out of hookup culture is the simplest— waiting until your 30s, and rushing headlong into marriage before time runs out. I have yet to personally experience this stage of bourgeois life; doubtless, 3c men leverage their longer reproductive window to force 3c women into gestures of submission even more elaborate and demeaning than those that result from hookup culture. The whole thing is likely very tawdry and petty, and if I ever have the displeasure of watching my peers go through it, I will insert a diatribe here to equal the first.

The great inconvenience of hookup culture is that its very existence irradiates the dating landscape. So long as the default romantic interaction is a constrained, glancing, unsatisfying exchange of sexual validation for gratification, the safest option is to assume that all romantic and sexual relationships will bear such a fraught character. Individuals of all dispositions are forced to be much more conservative with their time and attention than they were during the days of monogamous courtship. If you insist on strict boundaries of romantic and sexual exclusivity, you run the risk of offending the sensibilities of a 3c who views such demands as onerous on their face; if you fail to enforce these boundaries, you run the risk of getting strung along indefinitely  by a 3c looking for a cheap source of validation. Actually dating in these conditions is a game of carefully picking one’s way between these tripwires, starting situationships and then weighing how much of your dignity to sacrifice in their maintenance.

For many people— not a majority by any means, but a sizable minority— this complex game just isn’t worth the effort. These people choose to opt out of the dating market. Some give it up entirely; a larger number hold off until the dust clears as their cohort enters its 30s; and the largest number continue to play the game pro-forma, but never really invest the effort required to achieve a real sexual or romantic relationship.

The absence of these people puts enormous strain on an already stressed dating market. The conditions of hookup culture favor incidental, marginal sexual connections, and these sorts of connections are much more appealing to men than to women. Social spaces and dating apps are therefore utterly crowded with men looking for sex, love, or something in between, while a larger proportion of women give up and stay home. This overabundance of men puts even more pressure on the women that remain, causing even more of them to give up and go home; the inevitable life cycle of any social space is therefore constrained by the inevitability of this collapse. Insofar as “Third Spaces” have collapsed in American life, it is for this reason. Social spaces and events are forced to reckon with the reality of hookup culture either by playing along with it, seducing bourgeois women into attending with the promise of validation and then serving these women up to a profitable male clientele (the night club model), or by resisting it successfully, creating an environment so businesslike, so overtly hostile to human connection, that no one with less than a hobbyist’s enthusiasm for the actual business can stand to remain there (the gardening club model).

One of the alternative explanations of hookup culture is a model called “hypergamy”, in which attractive men amass large numbers of low-commitment partners, and unattractive ones are left lonely. These theories— generally, misogynistic ones attempting to harangue women into lowering their standards without stopping to consider the source of the behavior in the first place^[10]— tend to attribute the problem to a fundamental misalignment of female preferences with reality. They assert that women are only attracted to men with trivial attractiveness a degree or two above their own; as a result, the men at the bottom of the heap drop out of proceedings, which further constrains the supply of men, concentrating female attention more and more on the upper levels above their “station”. When the collapse of marriage stopped the regular removal of men from the sexual marketplace, this misalignment greatly empowered the most attractive men, giving rise to hypergamy.

I have three objections to this model.

The first is that this hypothetical removal of men from the dating market is something I’ve never observed; it’s been strictly the converse. Men are far more likely than women to head out to a bar or join a dating app to take shots in passing, which they never expect will actually work. The absolute glut of men in every potentially sexual space is evidence enough that a shortage of women is to blame for the state of things; such a shortage should produce the opposite phenomenon to hypergamy, men competing for the attention of women who are out of their league.

But I don’t believe that the sexual marketplace operates according to such brutal efficiency, because of my second objection— trivial goods are not the be-all end-all of dating. They play an essential, highly influential role in the spur of the moment, late at night decisionmaking which makes up the bulk of hookup culture, true; but individuals who make their way through that initial filtering perforce, like fellow students and coworkers, are granted increasing latitude in terms of their trivial attractiveness in the formation of relationships, to the extent that they are pathologically compatible. That such latitude is so rarely employed in the successful formation of relationships indicates that compatibility is lacking.

My third objection is a historical one. If female preferences for men are sufficiently unrealistic as to cause them to prefer a marginal relationship to a trivially attractive man over an exclusive relationship, why did society ever develop monogamy? Inevitably, the theory’s reasoning will employ mimetics from one of two angles— either monogamy was a mimetic solution to the violence which emerged from hypergamy, spread and enforced by religion; or female sexual preferences have been distorted by mimetic feminist affirmation such that they’ve grown misaligned with the reality of their sexual value. I doubt the existence of mimetics, and I believe monogamy is biologically essential to our human character, so I am unswayed by this reasoning.

Nevertheless, beneath the misogynistic bloviating, the hypergamy theory does supply a potentially informative nugget of solve. Many of the men who withdraw from the dating market reach the end of hookup culture in their 30s as virgins, or at the very least extremely sexually inexperienced. Women, by contrast, are far more likely to have participated in a series of unsuccessful flings, in which they were used sexually by men who wouldn’t romantically escalate. Which gender has gotten the better of that exchange I’ll leave it to you to decide.

If one is disinclined towards the nunnery and lacks the patience to wait out one’s 20s in loneliness, a further alternative to hookup culture presents itself: polyamory. My thoughts on polyamory are complicated, strident, and the product of a great deal of close up observation. As such, I’ll reserve them for another time.

Opting Out Part 2: Framework-Informed Methods of Avoiding Hookup Culture

Hookup culture is a fundamentally 3c phenomenon, and we are not all of us 3c.

If you are 3c, the two routes to avoiding hookup culture are to actively seek out 3o individuals with whom you are pathologically compatible^[11], or to remove your 3c disposition. Unless you achieve one of these feats, hookup culture will, sad to say, remain the best-fit method by which you can play out the time between your youth and the scramble towards marriage; it has been arrived at through an expansive process of social evolution.

But for those of us who would prefer not to play the game, several strategies recommend themselves.

The first is to take a page from the bourgeois women at the core of hookup culture: make yourself as beautiful as possible. Hookup culture lends itself above all else to brief, fragmentary collisions. If you operate within a bourgeois milieu, all of your sexual energy will be channeled by bourgeois propriety into “appropriate” venues. You will find yourself reluctant to approach potential partners in the gym, the library, and the workplace, and this reluctance will be rational; 3c individuals detest being tied down, and to express romantic or sexual interest in an environment where something besides sex is at stake is to tie someone down. The notion of being forced to navigate unwanted interest at any place to which they bear a material relation is utterly loathsome to the bourgeoisie, so they will endeavor to make the expression of this interest in these contexts as unpleasant as possible; on a collective level by creating rules and norms against it, and on a personal level by reacting with hostility and anger to unwanted advances. As such, any collisions with compatible partners you make will be brief, uncertain, and play out mostly on the low-level fields of conflict embodied in the trivial goods. Obtaining these goods will ensure that you are in the best position to progress past the early stages of acquaintanceship into the territory where pathological compatibility takes hold.

Of course, if you aren’t looking to optimize your chances of finding a pathologically compatible partner, the search is much more straightforward. Neutral dispositions are maximally compatible, and  anyone can convert themselves into a neutral disposition by undergoing the Framework Process. Simply undergo the Framework Process yourself and achieve a neutral disposition. Then select any partner you’d like, on the basis of whatever criteria you care about, and persuade them to undergo the Framework Process themselves. Once both of you have expunged your pathologies and bear a neutral disposition, in your lack of pathology you will be pathologically compatible, and the problem will be taken care of. This is my second strategy, though I admit it might be a little more daunting than I’ve made it seem here.

My third strategy is more a matter of procedure. One of the most grievous pitfalls of hookup culture is to be stuck in a situationship in which one partner wants an exclusive relationship, and the other does not. This might seem like an insoluble interpersonal difficulty, but situationships are at their root a 3rd level phenomenon, and it is possible to dissolve them through the imposition of 3N morality. The technique is this:

1. At the beginning of the relationship, propose a trial period of one to three months, during which you will be sexually and romantically exclusive.
2. If either of you decides to leave the relationship for any reason during this time, no harm done; you will agree to end the relationship at once without any resistance or anger.
3. But the arrangement will be made public, and if either of you violates it by infidelity or clinginess, you will be subject to social acrimony.
4. At the end of the trial period, a conversation will take place, where  you decide whether to continue the relationship or to split up— again, without anger or any harm done.

Ideally— though I admit this isn’t very romantic— the arrangement should be gotten in writing, because these provisions are not yet sufficiently culturally legible to produce the requisite social acrimony without evidence.

This system is a means of saving yourself from the two varieties of exploitation attendant to informal relationships on the 3rd level. The first, 3c variety of exploitation occurs when you want an exclusive relationship, but the other party refuses to clearly commit or renege. The tool by which such ambiguity is rendered painful is the threat of infidelity; this arrangement weaponizes 3c fear of shame in order to deprive the other party of that tool. The second, 3o variety of exploitation occurs when you enter into a relationship under the impression that it will remain informal, but the other party escalates the relationship into life-partner territory and expects you to do likewise. The arrangement weaponizes 3o insistence on fulfilling their stated commitments to foreclose that possibility.

Much of the function of the agreement arises from the fact that, so long as you don’t intend to engage in either of the behaviors it disincentivizes, adhering to it is trivial. In this way it serves twice as a hedge against potentially abusive actors— in the first place, because they will refuse to agree to it; in the second place, because in agreeing to it, they will be unable to adhere to it.

As for timing, I suggest bringing this up either before or directly after the first time you sleep with a new partner, depending on when you expect that the leverage you need to get the whole proposal out without being laughed at will peak^[12]. If they don’t agree to it, then it’s straightforward enough to wash your hands of the situation; they’ve demonstrated that they intend to take advantage of you in one way or another.