On MySpace and Sexual Competition

A year or so ago, my son got a MySpace account. Being a dutiful father, I got one, too, just to see what it was like and to monitor what was going on. What I saw blew me away. A large portion of MySpace is a soft-core porn site. The stuff my son likes are the indie bands' music and videos, but almost universally, the girls' profiles are exercises in soft porn.

I tsk-tsked and tut-tutted and felt the whole country was going down the tubes. How could these girls do this? Then I picked up a copy of Boys Adrift. That book addresses how young men are doing progressively worse in terms of careers, education and marriage. I'll post more on that later, but in a partial nutshell, their time and energy is being spent on video games and porn. Those two industries are designed by sophisticated professionals to take as much time and money from boys as possible.

The porn part opened my eyes to what was going on with the girls on MySpace. It's no longer a case of competing with Judy down the street for a guy's attention, it's a matter of competing with Judy and with terabytes of porn. In order to compete, the girls have to sink lower and lower. In the book, the author quotes one girl he interviewed as saying something to the effect of "If I don't dress like this (she looked like a model out of Maxim) then no one is going to notice me at all."

Putting these two things together, along with the sexual revolution which removed all taboos from recreational sex, it's no wonder there's a marriage problem in the country. However, it's not all bad news.

If you turn the problem on it's head, I would argue that a boy that was reasonably athletic and ambitious and managed to stay out of the clutches of the porn industry would have an enormous competitive advantage in getting the right girl. In essence, most of his competition has taken themselves out of the picture by succumbing to the temptations around them.

That's not a bad lesson to teach your sons.