The Man Who Would be Thursday opines:
…look for someone at
a church in an urban area. For example, evangelicals in downtown
Toronto are there because they really believe, while those in rural
Alberta perhaps less so.
He also adds (and explains why):
…find yourself a cute but not spectacular 22 year old with a bachelor’s degree.
P.S. The biggest indicator that a girl is a virgin is her insistence that she wants a guy who is a virgin himself.
Hat tip goes to Robin Hanson, who discusses Thursday more generally.
For a current undergrad, does Tyler recommend the local Campus Bible Study?
Why would anybody prefer a virgin?
1. First time is a mess.
2. It takes a while until she figures out how to move.
3. If she has waited that long, she is probably a pretty boring person.
4. She will never figure out how good I am compared to ROW.
dvd, look up Tyler’s writings on self-deception
I think a high concentration of virgins is in economics departments.
All manner of things come into play here in
a cultural and religious context. Not many think
about the Immaculate Conception now but it was
a potent idea. Parthenogenesis. The Holy Ghost.
Some possibly unexamined mysteries there.
Strindberg, the Swedish dramatist, was obsessed
with the emotion that while maternity is certainty,
paternity is speculation. No one really knows
if the putative and real father are the same.
See “The Father.”
I have thoroughly enjoyed this blog since I found it a few months ago, precisely because it tends to stay “on topic”. By covering this sort of trash, you are on track to becoming like every other blog out there that thinks they can mix both serious, thought-provoking discussion with pointless articles they’ve received from their old college fraternity brothers.
Disappointed and curious as to exactly how this discussion leads anyone to “Small steps toward a much better world.”
-Mark
Its an exclusivity thing not an inadequacy thing.
You have something no one else ever had.
Its also a huge signaling plus for someone looking for a truly monogamous relationship. This person who protected themselves for so long is much more likely to be of a mindset that supports monogamy (i.e. there’s more to life than that, its not the be all end all of experiences, etc).
And also, come on, everyone has some desire for purity of varying degrees..
Just like real dirtiness can get somebody excited, so could real purity. There is no more pure signal in the sexual partner market.
I think another big indicator she is a virgin is if she’s never had a boyfriend in her life. Any girl that’s had a boyfriend isn’t a virgin or isn’t going to be a virgin much longer before she marries.
Another place to find virgins is overseas in conservative muslim countries, like Turkey for example. That’s where I found my 24 year-old beautiful virgin wife, and I was a 29 year-old virgin when I married her. She’d never had a boyfriend or even held hands or kissed another guy before. I never had a girlfriend either, although I had a few dates, and I’m a non-religious libertarian. The comment from “Michael S” above is correct. It took us a month after our quick marriage to figure out how to do it. She bled after I finally “entered”. Since then we’ve had sex about 365 days a year except for the 4 or 5 days a month during her period or when our kids don’t go to bed early.
Newt,
I don’t believe male virgins are involumtary. You should see me. I could pick and choose, but I chose to stay a virgin not for religious reasons, but for utilitarian ones. I didn’t want a disease, be falsely accused of rape or have kids out of wedlock with someone I wouldn’t marry and pay child support. I never masturbated either (honestly). Partly I was so in to learning, working, reading, sports, working out, and hanging out with friends.
@A Student of Economic Geography:
Be careful of these posts where TC gets really into blogs about alpha males and virginity and such. He turns really icky really quickly… not as bad as Robin Hanson, but still icky.
looking inside the brain of sex-o-phobe freaks is interesting, if icky. it’s like a kaleidoscope made out of puke.
it also clues you in on the other half of the market for the speed seduction / ladder theory / aggrieved jerkoff loser product lines out there.
I wouldn’t characterize any of Tyler’s posts on sex or gender relations as “icky.” (Some of the comments, on the other hand…)
If you’ve been reading Tyler for a while, it’s clear that he’s a huge romantic and that his motivation for posting on such topics is that he wants to help people find love and sex (preferably together).
to even further clarify, saying “i want to find someone who shares my values” isn’t icky. it seems drearily normal, even.
but virgin shopping? which races offer you the best chance of finding someone who is untouched and offers advice like “Look for a someone in the 6-8 range for looks” because, well, women aren’t people you want to connect with but a preferably untouched conduit for your seed. that’s so wrong on so many levels that it’s difficult to approach, like someone wearing a halloween costume of hitler raping a child while flying a plane into the wtc and kicking a puppy. which facet of messed-up-ness do you address first?
Alvin: “I chose to stay a virgin not for religious reasons, but for utilitarian ones. ”
A utilitarian calculation considers the benefits as well as the costs of a course of action. You appear to have given no thought to what you are missing out on, while absurdly overstating the expected costs of sexual activity.
Kind of off point, but after British Columbia, Alberta has the 2nd highest percentage of agnostic/atheists in Canada (24%).
Have to agree with Mark and dhex. Ewww.
But even worse is the fact that the Thursday post doesn’t have any actual evidence in it. The survey in the first para is unlinked, despite a request in the comments. And every other ‘fact’ in the article is just his opinion.
“A 6 or a 7 is much more likely to be a slut than a 9 or a 10″. His source? “According to Roissy and other pickup artists…”. Oh. Right.
Is this really a post of any interest? Or just a creepy rant?
Darren,
Why would I lie about masturbation to people I don’t know and who don’t know me? The closest I came I guess was waking up with a hard on on most mornings.
About the utilitarian calculations, I guess I had no idea about how “great” the benefits could be unless and until I actually “did” it. Since losing my virginity, I’m glad I abstained. It would have been 15-20 minutes of pleasure versus problems for the rest of my life (the shame of having child out-of-wedlock, harm to reputation by being falsely accused of rape or contracting disease, etc.) It’s not worth it. You can avoid all of that by waiting till you get married.
“I can’t see how it belongs.”
Um, Tyler wrote a book in which the subtitle begins with “Use Incentives to Fall in Love…” and you are surprised that he sometimes blogs about romantic relationships? This sort of content has always been here — I know, as I have been reading this blog since shortly after its debut in 2003. (YOU KIDS BETTER GET OFF MY LAWN!)
This blog is mostly about Tyler and Alex applying economic thinking to a variety of topics, including many topics outside the traditional realm of economics. One aspect of economic thinking is how people respond to incentives — and people respond to incentives in all aspects of their lives, including romantic relationships.
Looking at how changing the incentives for church attendance (the presence or absence of social pressure) affects who attends (people who go because it’s “normal” vs. people who go because they truly believe) is an economic question. Speculating on the statistical relationship between incentives/reasons for church attendance and possibly related variables such as virginity is an econometrics question (if we had the data set). It’s an interesting social science research question that someone could follow up on; as Steven Levitt has demonstrated, economists have a lot of great tools for approaching social science questions that fall outside of the traditional realm of economics, too.
As far as whether it’s somehow “icky” to want to know the answer to this question — Some people would prefer to date/marry a virgin, for whatever their reasons. Often these people complain about the difficult of finding a virgin, given modern mores. Why not pass on information or theories that would help them find what they’re looking for? It seems like everyone would be better off: People who want virgins will have an easier time finding virgins. Virgins will be more likely to be found by potential partners who will appreciate their virginity instead of seeing it as a social handicap. And people who don’t want to date virgins and don’t want to date people who only want to date virgins will be less likely to date people from either group, since more of them will now be busy dating each other. Everyone wins! How is this not a small step towards a better world?
If you think that effort should instead be focused on convincing people who want virgins that they shouldn’t want virgins, consider this: almost all of modern American pop culture drives home the message that virginity is not only no longer a prized characteristic in a potential mate but is actually a handicap to be gotten rid of as soon as possible. Yet some people still persist in wanting virgins — it seems for these people, their preferences are pretty well set and thus are unlikely to be changed by a blog post or comment.
Really, the only thing you can fault Tyler for here is his assumption that most of his audience is bright enough to realize that he is merely presenting an interesting theory, and that we’re capable of making the connections I spelled out above without excessive hand-holding on his part. Sadly, as this blog has grown in popularity and the ratio of econ nerds to laypeople has shrunk, this may no longer be true. I hope that Tyler and Alex realize that the increase in negative feedback on posts like these reflects more on the changing composition of their audience than on the quality or relevance of their content.
I agree with Jacqueline completely. In my opinion, this was the most interesting topic in at least the past couple of months, along with the “beauty” topics and I hope you guys continue to post more like it.
As an aside, I’ll never understand why a man wouldn’t want to marry a virgin. I can understand not wanting to date one, but marriage is a whole nother thing. So it’s difficult and messy initially, but it’s definitely worth in the long run. You have peace of mind when you go to work every day or on travel knowing your wife is modest, has self-control, and (I’m guessing here) that the virgin-before-marriage wife is not looking at other men or has any ex-boyfriends trying to track her down.
Alvin is such a slut.
“As an aside, I’ll never understand why a man wouldn’t want to marry a virgin.”
this sentence neatly – if inadvertently – captures what’s so fucked up about the marriage of the speed seduction troglodytes to american jesus-fu.
it’s a bit like the tv show bridezillas. (bear with me here)
bridezillas is filled with people who are fixated on their weddings. everyone, including the groom, is generally secondary (because they pick only the most hideously selfish jerks as they make for “good” tv), if on the map at all.
these people are not planning for a future partnership; they’re planning a party that just happens to have a relationship attached to it. that’s icky too, and more than a bit tragic if you take the notion of marriage seriously. it’s especially tragic if their approach to family planning is as lax as their approach to planning other major facets of the future.
people are not solely the sum of their sexual experiences. in fact, it would probably be helpful to tattoo this on the face of every speed seduction “community member” out there, religious or not, and in reverse so they could read it every morning in the mirror.
it’s bizarre to read things in 2009 that talk about how if you didn’t marry a virgin a man should somehow be paranoid when going to work because if your wife isn’t a virgin before she marries, she’s going to cheat on you. which is a very tragic attitude to have if, again, you think of women as people rather than potential vectors of disease and – eventually – divorce. or at the very least you should be worried because obviously if she gave it up once, she’ll give it up a billion times afterward, like mcdonalds.
it’s sad. it’s fixating on sexuality as the be all and end all determinant of future behavior, measure of self-worth and a kind of prize in and of itself. it alternates between treating sexuality like a source of nuclear waste and yet the answer to all life’s problems because if you can just find someone “pure” enough, you won’t ever have to worry about the problems that plague human relationships and romantic entanglements.
my other obvious objection was that the thursday blog’s treatment of this subject is also cartoonishly racist. southeast asians = sluts. the good asians (japan, etc) are “more white”. to quote:
This may seem contradictory, as NE Asians are among the least religious people on earth. However, if you can find an attractive NE Asian Evangelical, chances are you have hit the jackpot. Even some non-religious women in these groups are virgins into their late twenties or even late thirties. My own theory is that this is at least partially due to genetics. NE Asians just tend to have a lot more conservative temperaments overall than do white or black people. One should not entirely discount culture here though, as Asian culture tend to be a lot more focused on tradition and family honour than white culture.
The same does not necessarily apply to all Asians. Philipinos and Thais have personalities a lot closer to the white average than do Japanese and Koreans. Notice that both countries are known for their prostitutes.
it’s a great impression of what godless urban fun-havers like myself stereotypically think the rest of america is like, especially the jesus people. sadly, it seems to be genuine, rather than some complicated, over-explained joke.
yeeesh.
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