Another day, another sweet book deal for a woman who lambasts her former slutty self as unloveable, and renounces sex (because men don’t love women they stick it to). Reading this interview with Hephzibah Anderson, the author of Chastened, I realized something about the women trotting out the “no one will marry sluts” line—they are the flip side of the “pick-up artist” world.
At first, this seems like a weird thing to say. PUAs are all about the casual sex, right? But if you look a little deeper, you see the born-again non-sluts and the PUAs are singing the same tune. David Wong at Cracked describes the PUAs this way:
They believe the male/female relationship is adversarial in nature, and that sex is a way of conquering you.
Agreed. And that is exactly the attitude taken by the champions of chastity:
Did you pinpoint what changed in a relationship after sex? Was it a perceived shift in the power dynamic, was it one-sided or mutual?
Yes, I felt that I needed so much more from them. And, to me, it felt like I needed much more than my right. At the end of the year, I would be able to say, “Well, that’s ridiculous.” I think we’ve lost any sense of healthy emotional entitlement. I think if you go to bed with somebody, it is a kind of bond; it’s not nothing, however much we try to say it’s nothing. Whether you’re a man or woman, you’re absolutely in your rights to expect there to be some kind of emotional gain.
In both cases, the relationship between men and women is basically seen as a game of Capture The Flag, or in this case, Capture The Pussy.