First let me start with the disclaimer that I am non-sexual/asexual virgin in their 20s, So I’m not as arrogant as to think that virginity is important and those who aren’t interested in sex are not ‘functionally normal’ and need a health check. There are plenty of things which are significantly more important than sex to various people.Different strokes for different folks.
With that said, I think the thread should use the Isla Vista shooter, Elliot Rodger ‘The Virgin Killer’ as the comparison to other lonely average men. Call him a ‘coward’ or a ‘spoiled brat’ but when it comes to his struggles the whole thing seems comical and almost unimaginable. I felt great sympathy towards the innocent men and women murdered and that isn’t a laughing matter. But looking at the guy, he seemed like the least likely to have trouble losing virginity. He had money, a decent sense of fashion, material things, and did not appear in social conventions as being completely ‘‘off’’…and he still didn’t lose his virginity. Not even first base! How? There are practically 14yr old teen boys who are absolutely average/below average with average social skills who get sex from various girls and get adult teachers having sex with them and some even get married later. Whereas this guy? With all the money?
Some might say his misogyny and narcissistic entitlement made him undateable but let’s be honest, we probably know violent and misogynistic who sexually assault or rape women and have no trouble dating and keeping partners or getting them to return back.
Now getting back to the normal population. What causes some men or perhaps even women to have trouble losing virginity in their early years? Assuming that they have some interest in sex/romance and are not driven to extremes hiring a prostitute?
I would have been active much earlier if I could have figured out who to ask and how to ask her. I probably had many opportunities that I did not recognize.
But then I became an absolute asshole in college and had no problems.
It appears to me that your description of Eliot Rogers as not being completely off is a little off the mark. He had been in psychiatric treatment since he was 8, and actively rejected everyone who had befriended him, wouldn’t take his meds, and was socially isolated to an extreme degree.
No doubt an angry loser can get laid, but one has to make some kind of minimal effort. It doesn’t sound like he even did that.
Sure, the average or below-average person can usually find someone to hook up with. But it isn’t automatic for anyone.
A lot of people have higher standards than they have any right to hold. If you’ll fuck absolutely anybody, then you won’t have a hard time getting laid. If you have standards, sometimes it’s tough to find someone who rises to those standards and is also willing, especially when you’re no great catch yourself.
This is huge. We have threads and threads on folks with relationship woes that, in the pithy words of one poster, amount to:
I knew a very nerdly old guy who had finally gotten married to an equally nerdly woman when they were both in their 40s. First marriage for both. His comment: “She’s the first woman smart enough for me to love who was dumb enough to love me back.” Vice versa also applied as far as I could see.
It seems that he never even asked a woman out on a date! He dressed in fancy clothing, and had a fancy car, and he apparently thought that was enough. Unfortunately, the human mating game rarely works that way. Women can successfully find a mate simply by making themselves look pretty and waiting for a man to ask them out.
Elliot Rodger was like someone who dressed for a job interview, but never turned in a job application, and then complained that nobody would hire him.
There’s no indication that he ever even asked a woman out on a date! He dressed in fancy clothing, and had a fancy car, and he apparently thought that was enough. Unfortunately, the human mating game rarely works that way. Women can successfully find a mate simply by making themselves look pretty and waiting for a man to ask them out, but it doesn’t work that way for men.
Elliot Rodger was like someone who dressed for a job interview, but never turned in a job application, and then complained that nobody would hire him.
I don’t know if it’s even “standards”, per-se for some men, but rather wanting to do it with women who want you for yourself, instead of because you’re a warm body at closing time, or because they have low self esteem and are trying to fill some kind of void (heh!) through you.
That was basically me through college; never really had a “girlfriend”, but had plenty of chances to just get laid, but none of them were the kind of thing that would have made me feel good about myself.
Did these women approach you or did you approach them. I’m sure though that you had a small group of friends you were in contact with. Rodger didn’t seem to have any of that.
I’m pretty sure that even less attractive and less popular women still won’t approach guys in the majority of cases. Especially introverted and quiet men like Rodger. I don’t think loners ever get asked out. I don’t know how it is for loner women, but I’m sure that a guy who has an normal sex drive but no friends and wants women to ask him out will never get laid. No matter how polite, attractive, or intelligent he is.
Lots of unquestioned assumptions — on the part of guys like Elliot Rodgers themselves, and on the part of people who consider these questions.
Also, no doubt, on my own part, of course.
…but I’ve been in a position to examine some of the generally-unexamined assumptions because of how they affected me personally.
Heterosexuality is different from homosexuality in several socially and politically charged ways. Some of them we’re pretty conscious of: homosexuality has a history of having been treated and regarded as sinful, criminal, deviant, sick, etc, and gay and lesbian people have been subjected to witch-hunts and violence and workplace discrimination and so on — we’re pretty much aware of that, I think, these days.
But heterosexuality is also different in this way that goes below the radar for lots of people: it’s not merely a normative mainstream form of sexuality in which male-bodied people and female-bodied people form sexual relationships, it is a highly gendered form of sexuality in which roles are allocated according to which sex you are, with massively different expectations and massively different interpretations of the same behavior. This is not true of homosexuality: you do not get confined to a specific role in flirting and foreplay and negotiating a date and so on based on what sex you are.
That’s part of why conservative society reacts to it as a threat, in fact.
Anyway, back to heterosexuality. Some male people (probably including Elliot Rodgers, and probably including the proverbial whiny “nice guys”, among others) are a poor fit for the scripted male role in heterosexual courting and flirting and making out and so on. They do it badly. They do it resentfully. Or they don’t do it and see large parts of that role as being “un-nice”, sexual aggression and initiative in particular being among them, and then they resent that their inclination to be no more forward and no more inclined to take sexual initiative than what they perceive women doing tends to leave them out of the activities.
I didn’t know Rogers in any sense beyond reading about him when he shot some people, but it does not appear he was a good fit for any kind of courting at all.
You have to put forth some kind of effort, even if it isn’t traditional courtship behavior. He didn’t even try.
There’s a song out now called “Sit Still Look Pretty”. I like the song, but as a courtship strategy, it might work for women who are pretty or even average. But for men, it doesn’t. “I’m a nice guy, why don’t women ask me out?” is not a question with a pleasant or affirming answer. “I’m a crazy loner with serious mental issues, why don’t women ask me out?” even less so.
Yeah. It was one of those DOH! moments and I realized I had just made it all too complicated and probably missed a bunch of opportunities. And then after that realized we make much too much of it all. As far as I can tell losing your virginity is nowhere near the major experience people think it is beforehand.
Do you subscribe to the “blank slate” view of human nature, that human sexual behavior is entirely a social construct? Is there any society in the world, either in the present day or throughout recorded human history where a men can quietly sit back and expect a woman to initiate the relationship?
I think mostly shyness and lack of confidence. This prevents the approach from happening, and even if it does, there seem to be few people out there who find a lack of confidence attractive and would reciprocate.
Among straight males there’s also often the lack of understanding of women and treating them as an alien species. Don’t really know why this happens… I don’t think it’s usually any kind of actual malicious misogyny, but maybe related to it to some degree as far as established social attitudes etc.
femmejean, this is the second thread that I am aware of where you discuss Elliot Rogers and his personality issues. Why the obsession?
That said, you really must understand that in any spectrum of human behavior, he is going to be on the very very far far FAR end, very far end. I frankly don’t think it is useful, beyond trivia, to consider him as indicative of anything greater.
I think another aspect is once a guy gets past a certain age if he has never been laid he starts to fixate on the issue, become desperate, and women can smell desperation from a mile away. Any time when I was younger that I went out to a bar or a party or something with the objective of getting laid I failed miserably, every time I actually “hooked” up with a woman was when it was unexpected and I wasn’t trying to score.