without their enthusiastic buy-in, the system would completely unravel

April 8, 2025 11:39 AM

depending on your personal philosophies, you’ll see the beautiful young women in question as empowered, exploited, or something in between. regardless of your stance, the hot girl economy will keep on running. the only thing that might disrupt business as usual is if RHRGs stopped buying in and started warning their younger counterparts about the trade-offs. but do they want to? or, when all is said and done, do the benefits still outweigh the costs? i asked a few RHRG friends (who prefer to remain anonymous) the following question to assess their thoughts on the matter. from inside the hot girl economy
posted by chavenet (58 comments total)

For those who'd like to know before deciding if they want to read the article or not, RHRG stands for "really hot regular girl."
posted by tinydancer at 11:55 AM on April 8 [18 favorites]

Articles like this make me feel almost fortunate for my teenage girls--who to me, it goes without saying, are the most amazing and beautiful beings to ever walk god's green earth--that they don't slot into the current "really hot" category.
posted by El Curioso at 12:02 PM on April 8 [10 favorites]

tinydancer: "For those who'd like to know before deciding if they want to read the article or not, RHRG stands for "really hot regular girl.""

Also - the transaction being discussed within does not involve sex as a rule.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 12:18 PM on April 8 [5 favorites]

I would never think of myself as "ugly" - I know that I have a vaguely pleasant face, maybe even could aspire to "cute" when I was younger. But since the last time I was a size 10, I was about age 10 and my glasses are so thick that they have their own gravitational field -- wow, this is a world completely outside of anything I've ever experienced. I'm guessing free food at a grad school event doesn't count.

------------

having dealt with the obligatory, "what if it were me", the communist-turned-social-democrat in me can't help but think that the really unhealthy part of this practice isn't the patriarchy, it's the excess wealth and cash. How is it that we live in a world where someone might spend $2000 - let alone $50,000 - on a casual evening out? How is this not just obscene?

I know, it was ever thus. It's just that it's all getting worse. I have absolutely no shade for these young women enjoying a bit of the luxury, but I'm just depressed at the world where a few people have this amount of money to throw around.
posted by jb at 12:21 PM on April 8 [28 favorites]

Reminded of a post I made about It Girls in the NYC social scene. This is fascinating to me. I’ve always wondered exactly how hot girls are produced on command for parties—models would be too expensive, escorts too expensive and not really necessary for set decoration.

Whether the RHRG economy allows a girl to come into her own as an influencer/socialite/artiste or even just get an MRS degree, I’ll never know. I’m too old to learn, and I was bad at knowing even when I wasn’t. I was at best a modestly hot girl and never got invited to this sort of party.* I would have liked a look-in, but only once.

—
* OK once I got an invitation, but it was just a favor to a friend who [long story redacted] and I was one of a bunch of girls who got it although we logistically couldn’t go. But I felt super special for a hot second.
posted by Countess Elena at 12:23 PM on April 8 [7 favorites]

I have a friend who used to be one of these women. One evening we went out for dessert and drinks, and when our check came I offered to pay. My friend said, "Don't worry about it, this guy on twitter said he'd pay, so I'll get both of us."

"Is this someone you're dating or just a friend?" I asked.

"Oh no, I don't know him," she said.

"Did you send him pictures or something?" I asked, meaning, is he paying you for nudes you sent him?

"No. He just thinks I'm hot so he sends me money to go out sometimes," she said.

I still don't understand this story. Many beautiful people are truly living in a different world than the rest of us.
posted by birthday cake at 12:32 PM on April 8 [31 favorites]

This is modern-day Bridgerton.
posted by medusa at 12:33 PM on April 8 [7 favorites]

I mean, if society weren't so grossly unequal, I'd just say whatever, this is basically like people who enjoy going on roller coasters or eating peppers so hot that they cause pain - people like to do things that seem incredibly boring and unpleasant to me, whatever. If we had just, like, 80s levels of wealth inequality this wouldn't be that troubling; it's troubling because it's a gross outgrowth of gross inequality and a sphere where gross almost-certainly-fascist-adjacent men connect and compete.

I dunno, I had some genuine nightclub adventures back in my young day, and I wasn't even in the top 50% attractiveness-wise. You can do cool and amazing and fun things and go to cool underground spaces and meet artists and weirdos and outside-the-law types and dance until you're ready to fall over while being pretty homely, I've found, and you can even have friends and hook up with people.
posted by Frowner at 12:34 PM on April 8 [31 favorites]

Fascinating. Thanks for the validation; I've suspected there were machinations like this is the shadows for a long time, but never saw any proof of it until now. Just wish "steph :)" didn't hate her shift key.
posted by Rash at 12:34 PM on April 8 [5 favorites]

Incidentally, I once saw a tweet (secondhand) that said, “Being a 23-year-old girl must feel like having seven billion dollars in your pocket.” This idea was getting extremely dunked on, because no, no it does not. But I guess if you thought that parties like this were what every 23-year-old woman could have for the price of a little makeup and a nice outfit, you might believe such a thing.
posted by Countess Elena at 12:38 PM on April 8 [9 favorites]

The system works for you while you’re on the right side of it and it’s a rude awakening once they spit you out.
posted by St. Peepsburg at 12:44 PM on April 8 [18 favorites]

In the aughts I had a couple of male friends who migrated to NYC, who had many female friends who were what this article would call RHRGs. The girls would often invite us to come to what were then SUPER exclusive clubs, they'd convince the promoters that even though we were men (something that the clubs did not want more off), we would bring a sketchy authenticity to club or some shit that The Money would think was cool. We would get to drink for free and party with our friends which was cool but was never as actually fun as some of the DJ'd house parties or dance nights at the bars our friends worked at home. It always felt off to me and I could NEVER understand somebody paying for bottle service, even though I was making lots of money doing sketchy things at the time. At some point one of the girls we were friends with broke the whole thing down for me - that EVERYTHING - the hot girls, the fawning promoters/concierges, the glitzy and/or sleazy and/or sketchy vibe of the club, the sanctioned drug dealers on site, every single thing about the clubs was calculated to attract super wealthy men, make them feel like they were cool and attractive (they weren't), and separate them from their money. Nobody cared about running a venue that put on good shows or whatever. It was a fleecing operation, barely a step above the con from the "The Sting".
posted by youthenrage at 1:07 PM on April 8 [54 favorites]

The system works for you while you’re on the right side of it and it’s a rude awakening once they spit you out.

IDK, I guess it's easy to get used to being accessories to the wealthy, and expecting the rest of life to be like that, but these are RHRGs, often in college with normal future plans, and clublife tends to have an expiration date anyways. It's probably just worth some nice stories to be told among friends, as long as you can avoid the sexual assaults. That part was blithely downplayed, as though all these wealthy people used to getting their way are polite and pleasant.

Also IMO the payment in liquor and proximal access sucks, and most probably figure that out quite quickly.

"while sex itself is certainly a motivator for the men bankrolling these lavish outings, it can’t rationally be the sole one — otherwise, they would be paying for sex workers’ services directly. "
I can think of a few reasons wealthy people wouldn't openly pay for sex with sex workers, so not sure about this. Also who is to say they don't, in private?
posted by The_Vegetables at 1:08 PM on April 8 [6 favorites]

But I guess if you thought that parties like this were what every 23-year-old woman could have for the price of a little makeup and a nice outfit, you might believe such a thing.

Oh, I know what I was doing wrong! I forgot the make-up. And the outfit - unless a Sluggy Freelance t-shirt counts as a "nice outfit".

Also, at 23, I was more likely to be in a library than a club.. or at home surfing Metafilter...
posted by jb at 1:17 PM on April 8 [6 favorites]

The other thing I think about: it's very hard for women (and/or young AFAB people) to get past the idea that their worth is their looks. I had no looks and felt like I had very little worth - the few times I did get invited to things because I was young (if you're young enough, you at least sometimes don't really have to be hot) I was eager to go (and then really bored) because it felt like I had passed some kind of test of at least not being an absolute disgusting failure. But it wasn't because those things were fun! They were boring, it was creepy, sometimes it was scary because I felt like I was one step away from really aggressive pressure to have sex with men I viewed as much, much older.

Now, I know that there are hot people who just take all this in stride - they are so confident in their intrinsic value and their ability to negotiate the system that it's just more "of COURSE I get in for free, I'm hot" stuff. But a quirk of mine is that I make friends easily with people much better looking than I am, probably because they can immediately tell that I won't hit on them, and I've been friends with several people so good-looking that I literally witnessed traffic stop as they walked by, and not all of them were immune to the "my worth is my looks" stuff either. There are people who are incredibly good-looking who really still believe that they are worthless, who have trouble with friendships and relationships, who get targeted by people who don't care about them except because of their looks, who feel that they are not interesting to anyone except because of their looks, etc. (And one reason they valued me as a friend was because we had actual things in common and had stuff to talk about, and when you're in your twenties that is not always the case.)

What I'm saying is that people can definitely do and enjoy things that I think are boring and icky, and I have faith that there are plenty of girls who inexplicably enjoy hanging out with finance bros and old rich guys for nothing more than some booze and a ride to the venue, but I also think this is one of the many things that suck because they hinge on women believing that their worth is their looks. It if were just gross men being exploited by savvy young women, which is how we like to frame this, it wouldn't matter - but my experience of extremely good-looking people has been that at least half the time, it's young women who don't in fact cruise through the world with an iron sense of self and who don't in fact have a great time being treated like they're valuable solely because of their appearance.
posted by Frowner at 1:29 PM on April 8 [18 favorites]

Rash: "Just wish "steph :)" didn't hate her shift key."

Wouldn't she be Just wish "steph :0" then?
posted by 922257033c4a0f3cecdbd819a46d626999d1af4a at 1:36 PM on April 8 [16 favorites]

a table of rich guys will drop anywhere from $2,000 to $50,000 on a few bottles in one night, as alcohol is marked up by as much as 1,000%. obviously, this degree of wasteful spending is not done just for luxury’s sake. it’s all part of a wider, more primal spectacle.

Always keep in mind that the wealthy will absolute kill you in cold blood the second you reveal yourself to be a threat to not their lives or loved ones, but to the slightest aspect of their lifestyle.
posted by AlSweigart at 2:34 PM on April 8 [7 favorites]

Or become a liability. See also, Epstein.
posted by AlSweigart at 2:34 PM on April 8 [3 favorites]

I mean my question is, how much more likely to be assaulted or abused is a Really Hot Regular Girl than a Regular Regular Girl who lives, works, and plays in proximity to men in a city that's not popular with the jet set?
posted by jy4m at 3:05 PM on April 8 [5 favorites]

The other question is, if all the RHRGs quit playing, would anybody else be better off?
posted by clew at 3:15 PM on April 8 [1 favorite]

This has been going on for a long time, and back in the old days it could be a lot worse in some cases than anything I've heard about recently.

Back in the 20th century one of my exes taught English in jr. high for a while, and in some kind of all girl after school session, it came out that a group of her wilder and better looking 8th and 9th grade girls had been hired to be nude waitresses at an extravagant party hosted by the most flamboyant auto dealer in that part of the state.

I recognized his name and knew his face from his late night TV commercials, and as far as I know the Law never caught up with him — almost certainly because they never went after him in the first place.
posted by jamjam at 3:16 PM on April 8 [9 favorites]

For a deeper look at this, I liked The Dig: Very Important People w/ Ashley Mears:

I really did want to be fair to the people that I research. I approached it with not moral outrage but curiosity. How is this possible? What's the logic that sustains this world?

When I interviewed the spenders, the clients who were buying bottles, I would recruit them either through promoters or through other networks. Or I would recruit them just in the club. We might go to dinner beforehand with a promoter or I'd just be standing next to them in the club. The music is very loud. The lights are low. It's not conducive for good conversation, but I would get their contact information and ask to follow up. I would explain that, "I'm a writer and I'm interested about nightlife. I'd be really curious to know what you think of all of this." When we did interviews, it would be in a quiet coffee shop or it would be at their office.

In interviews, these rich people would describe their own spending as quite measured. Modest by comparison. They'd always put it in a comparative perspective— they're not the worst spender, they're not the biggest whale. Or they would describe their current consumption in reference to former self: "I did this when I was young, but now I'm mature and I know better." They do share, I wouldn't say outrage, but a moral unease with spending in this way. Everybody knows that ostentation violates a basic middle class, widespread norm of how to be disinterested. Furthermore, status is a sensitive good. It's not something that you can buy easily. The moment that you do, you lose status. You're seen as a status-seeking kind of person, and therefore shallow and inauthentic. Everybody embraces this discourse of authenticity now.

[...]

Some of the clients that I interviewed would also talk about the importance of being in a VIP club for them to bond with other people in their office. Or they would see it as an efficient means to go out. Especially for people who are working in finance. You know, they're working 60 hours a week or more. They don't have an abundant amount of time to meet women themselves and to assemble a party themselves that they would want to be at. But the VIP club is organised in a way that they can go share the tab. $10k split shared between five bankers becomes much more reasonable in their minds. In those quiet moments of interviews, I could capture how rich people themselves are quite uneasy with this form of consumption.

posted by ftrtts at 3:18 PM on April 8 [17 favorites]

This has always been true.
posted by kittens for breakfast at 3:22 PM on April 8 [2 favorites]

Great article! I was also thinking of that great episode of the The Dig as I read.
posted by latkes at 3:27 PM on April 8 [2 favorites]

But the VIP club is organised in a way that they can go share the tab. $10k split shared between five bankers becomes much more reasonable in their minds.

I don't really think that $2k-$50k for a normal single table should be taken too seriously. $50m is about $125k-$200k a day so $50k would be 50% of such in such "hot club's' daily revenue. That would mean the average regular person would have an average tab of about $15. That's pretty low. That's not much more than the average person spends at McDonalds. If you adjust it to just occuring on Friday & Saturday, you barely get to $25 per person.

The numbers are way off, either the top line revenue number or the number of people who have giant tabs. Not to say that no one does, but it's pretty rare, probably a few times a year.
posted by The_Vegetables at 3:36 PM on April 8 [1 favorite]

IMHO the empowered/exploited question is not very interesting - one can be both! I think most people are attracted to power even as we are not born with a sophisticated analysis of what power is. So along with free dinner, it does seem like the pretty girls here get to have the experience of being part of what is hyped as an exciting social scene and feel that proximity to wealth and authority that so many crave.
posted by latkes at 3:41 PM on April 8 [1 favorite]

Cocaine.

That's a primary motivating factor for many of the RHRGs, and it rather quickly becomes a primary motivating factor for a lot more of them. This article is committing a certain level of journalistic malpractice by not bringing it up. It's not "the chance to party it up with bottle service paid for by unattractive older men," it's "the chance to party it up with cocaine paid for by unattractive older men."
posted by outgrown_hobnail at 4:06 PM on April 8 [28 favorites]

Came here basically to say that, outgrown_hobnail. It’s part of the reason that party promoters are some of the sleaziest guys you’ll ever encounter in your life.

And the furtive dance around drug use — even though everyone knows at a glance it’s going on — and Prohibition-limited access to drugs infects everything in these scenes with its squirrely-sleazy transactionality and turns outwardly festive environments into grim waiting rooms.
posted by smelendez at 4:25 PM on April 8 [7 favorites]

I’ve always wondered exactly how hot girls are produced on command for parties—models would be too expensive

I thought it was pretty much an open secret that only the top models like Cindy Crawford (dating myself . . .) or Rosie Huntington-Whiteley or etc. make any real money, and pretty much everyone else makes peanuts. (Or the work is so irregular that you might only get 1 high-paying gig in a month and you still gotta take whatever else you can get to fill up your bank account.) So I would think that in the pre-Insta days you could get a dozen or so actual models to show up for about the price of a couple of VIP bottles of booze.
posted by soundguy99 at 5:11 PM on April 8 [6 favorites]

I grew up presenting male, being tall and gawky and weird, and always, always, always being the one who wanted, instead of the one who was wanted. In my 20s I came out as trans and became a club kid, and I was surprisingly cute in a funky way. And all of a sudden, boom, I was wanted. I found myself getting a lot of attention from guys (wrong sex for me, but thanks!) and it was... educational. Guys were sweet and pathetic and scary. Sometimes a guy would start sweet, then become pathetic when I said no, then become scary. Sometimes guys would look at me as if I wasn't quite real, as if I was just the package for what they really wanted, something inside of me. And sometimes, I'm ashamed to say, I would find myself getting offended if a guy hit on me and I thought he wasn't quite in my league, as if I had a real prize on offer and he'd made an insultingly low bid. I knew that kind of thinking was bullshit, I'd been the one who was sick with want, but being the one who is wanted can do things to you.

I could see how too much of that kind of attention could make someone go nuts, or make them a monster. Being treated like a pretty pretty princess was horrifying, and addictive. It's an experience I wish every man could have, just as I wish every woman could know what's like to be on fire with lonely, frustrated lust, to have a big dumb dick burning a hole in your pocket while you try to work up the nerve to ask some poor girl on a date. I don't know how men and women can ever really hope to understand each other, until they've been on both sides of that.

Ah, your poor cisgender fools.
posted by Ursula Hitler at 5:25 PM on April 8 [31 favorites]

we would bring a sketchy authenticity to club or some shit

Oh man, loquacious and I have been on the outskirts of one of these things, at the Beverly Hilton right after the Golden Globes. Alas, neither of us were pretty enough to get in to any private parties. So instead we gorged ourselves at Trader Vic's, then just wandered around drinking and smoking weed in the hotel lobby like assholes. Good times!
posted by ryanrs at 5:30 PM on April 8 [4 favorites]

every single thing about the clubs was calculated to attract super wealthy men, make them feel like they were cool and attractive (they weren't), and separate them from their money. Nobody cared about running a venue that put on good shows or whatever. It was a fleecing operation, barely a step above the con from the "The Sting".

I am not sure the good looking young people get off so easy

What a waste
posted by ginger.beef at 5:54 PM on April 8 [2 favorites]

> rash: "just wish "steph :)" didn't hate her shift key."

the trick is to turn on caps lock then keep the shift key mashed down

also: for reals though even if i hadn’t been doing this particular typographical schtick for so long i believe that I would still automatically be interested in the thoughts of anyone who writes in lowercase, since in my experience lowercase writers tend to be interesting and thoughtful in a very particular numinous but real way that i have trouble describing. it may just be demographics stuff though? like it seems like a generational thing, like, all lowercase seems to signal bookish-early-Internet-adopter-late-gen-x-early-millennial pretty hard. this might just be a hallucination, though

also: these days it indicates a certain amount of care put into the writing because it is a real pita to do on mobile devices

additionally: cocaine is a bullshit drug and a total ripoff
posted by Sperry Topsider at 5:58 PM on April 8 [3 favorites]

counterpoint: cocaine is amazing and not even that expensive if you only do it a couple times a year

(but if you do it every weekend, your tolerance will go up fast)
posted by ryanrs at 6:11 PM on April 8 [3 favorites]

dear metafilter,

is cocaine bullshit [y/n]

sincerely,
posted by Sperry Topsider at 6:38 PM on April 8 [8 favorites]

I've had all of the experiences of a RHRG as a U of Iowa grad in NYC in the 90s. I remember stuff like
Men flashing their watches at me and me not knowing what kind they were.
Not having to pay for things - like literally men acting like if you smiled at them that was payment.
Getting my ass grabbed by bike messengers, sung to by construction workers, getting the low whistle.
Men talking to my breasts.
Being served first at bars by just looking at the bartender.
Being told there was "always a first class ticket" for me if I wanted to tag along.
Lots of weird business dinners that I do not think were business dinners, they were auditions and opportunities to suss me out as prey.
Being invited to be "plus one" to film events etc.

All of that is long gone and I don't miss it, but it was a certain type of power. Maybe a type of power similar to being a nice object people want to put on a coffee table or like a cute pet. It is an interesting experience I didn't ask for or work for, so it left me sort of nonplussed.
posted by Word_Salad at 7:12 PM on April 8 [13 favorites]

I mean I was trafficking weed and hanging around with mostly other drug dealers at the time. So the “gritty authenticity” we brought to these events was mostly just looking like people who had drugs on offer, and most everybody did the drugs, especially The Money but everybody else too. I KNOW some people involved in the scene developed drug problems, whether they were in on the con or not but that was all incidental to the ultimate goal - separating rich dbags from their money.
posted by youthenrage at 7:16 PM on April 8 [5 favorites]

COCAINE IS THE CAPS LOCK FOR REALITY!
posted by TheWhiteSkull at 8:08 PM on April 8 [21 favorites]

dear metafilter,

is cocaine bullshit [y/n]

sincerely,

If nothing else, it's a hell of a drug....

(Well, someone had to say it).

Speaking of bottle service, it's worth noting that YOLO, the "bro club with bottle service" that replaced longtime music venue Slim's in San Francisco (and was probably hoping to be the SF equivalent of the clubs referred to in the article), is itself closing after one last "finale" this weekend. Don't know why it's closing or what will replace it (for all I know it could be Bro Club 2.0), but can't say I'll shed any tears for its passing. (Probably says something that it lasted about a tenth as long as Slim's did).
posted by gtrwolf at 8:28 PM on April 8 [4 favorites]

Metafilter: Everybody knows that ostentation violates a basic middle class, widespread norm of how to be disinterested...turns outwardly festive environments into grim waiting rooms
posted by Reasonably Everything Happens at 8:39 PM on April 8 [3 favorites]

In Eastern Europe a chain of clubs just skipped all the middlemen and went straight to slipping roofies in the rich guys' drinks, then they'd be asked to pay for bottle service they didn't remember ordering. The other shortcut was having RHRGs being the touts outside who'd reel in rich single men. A more simple and honest business if you will.

For the Eastern Europe / UAE intersection of that world, Girls To Buy is on Netflix and shows how easy it is for a RHRG to fall into actual sex work. I agree the article is skipping over a lot.
posted by I claim sanctuary at 9:48 PM on April 8 [8 favorites]

I wish every woman could know what's like to be on fire with lonely, frustrated lust

What, you think we don't? The RHRG are a minority of a percent.
posted by freya_lamb at 1:41 AM on April 9 [16 favorites]

I'm sorry, but this article omitting the economics of drugs and leaving out sex work makes it kinda gross, as it serves to legitimize the whole subculture. Cocaine is ahelluva drug, and cocaine addiction is no joke, and if you're not a stockbroker or make those kind of wages somehow, how do you pay for it at addict level quantities when your assets are of your face, your body, your time, and your attention?

Look, I'm sure there are women who join a promoters harem as a hobby, don't make it a vocation, and then just age out and exit the scene gracefully. But I've also seen people get addicted and trapped in that lifestyle and fall down that rabbit hole.

A discussion of the economics fails without discussing drugs and sex work, and this didn't claim to be a cautionary tale, but yikes there might want to be one.
posted by fragmede at 4:31 AM on April 9 [8 favorites]

Can we have a week where we swap the RHRGs and the RCMP and they just live each other's lives and do each other's jobs for 7 days? Just because it's 2025 and we desperately need something like that? Like instead of Hot Girl Summer we can have Canadian Horse summer this year? Or is that just the cocaine talking?
posted by rikschell at 5:26 AM on April 9 [15 favorites]

Like instead of Hot Girl Summer we can have Canadian Horse summer this year?

I always did have a thing for Dudley Do Right.
posted by Literaryhero at 5:57 AM on April 9 [1 favorite]

I wish every woman could know what's like to be on fire with lonely, frustrated lust, to have a big dumb dick burning a hole in your pocket while you try to work up the nerve to ask some poor girl on a date.

I have been a girl who burned with lust and was tormented with it, who looked at the boys in high school with almost savage and unrequited want, and who suffered accordingly when they dismissed me or, more likely, ignored me completely.

I have also been a woman in a bad marriage who longed and desired and could no longer bear being used by my husband, for many reasons, one of which was queerness. And again, a woman who did not have sexual contact with another person for the 16 years I was single. Oh, how I wanted, and how I also bore the weight of knowing that society had a lot of very bad things to say, and a lot of mockery, for any woman over 40 who did so.

Female desire is not any different from what you describe, and I wonder how you, who have crossed the divide, do not know this. Think of the spectrum-y, or simply unpretty, girl in her university classes dreaming of Chalamet, or Bieber, or perhaps only the boy sitting across the room (all those fangirls are not engaged in only the music, you know; it is a springboard to a deeply sexual fantasy life played out in webs of female friendships). And she's been lonely and desperate just as you describe. Very few girls are pretty enough to get the kind of attention in TFA, and for them it can be, as my astonishingly beautiful younger relative once said, a curse. Not joking, either; she told me once that because of her appearance, no-one "allowed" her to have any problems, because beauty is supposed to solve everything when what it often brings are.... complications and, if you take certain bargains, exploitation.

We are not all that different, and it's low-key insulting to read that you wish "every woman could know what it's like to be on fire with lonely, frustrated lust". We know. Oh damn, do we know. Look past the pretty girls to the overwhelming number of us who have aged out of beauty or who never had it. Our inner lives matter too. And our fears and desires are similar; it's called the human experience.
posted by jokeefe at 12:19 PM on April 9 [26 favorites]

I wish every woman could know what's like to be on fire with lonely, frustrated lust

I wish every man who has ever assumed women DON'T understand this feeling would finally get that the reason we do is because not all of us are Hot Girls that these selfsame men passed on
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 12:23 PM on April 9 [9 favorites]

Or, you know, what Empress just said.
posted by jokeefe at 1:54 PM on April 9 [3 favorites]

Also: "Ah, your poor cisgender fools."

Ursula, (if I may), being trans is many things, some very difficult, some wonderful; but it doesn't make you superior to anyone else. IMO.
posted by jokeefe at 2:00 PM on April 9 [1 favorite]

OK, I did not say that no women know what it's like to be fucked up with frustrated lust. I am really really anti-gender essentialism, but I think I can safely say that more men are fucked up with frustrated lust than women are, and men tend to respond to it differently. I mean, incels are a thing, for example. And...

No. I'm not doing this with you again, Metafilter. I'm not gonna respond to stuff I didn't say, get into a big BS flamewar that eats a couple of my days, and then watch my comments get deleted. This ain't 2014. I'm old and sick and the mean men are on the march. So, just, no.

I wish every man who has ever assumed women DON'T understand this feeling would finally get that the reason we do is because not all of us are Hot Girls that these selfsame men passed on

Just a tip: When a trans woman says something, please do not ever respond with something like, "Oh, I just hate it when men say stuff like that..." I'm going to assume you weren't deliberately misgendering me and I am getting the hell out of this thread.

(remove from activity.)
posted by Ursula Hitler at 2:33 PM on April 9 [7 favorites]

Here's the thing as I see it: many, or most, people experience desire, but nobody experiences desire outside of a social context. Ursula is absolutely right to describe the distinction, but the distinction exists not because men and women are in any way different, or desire differently, it's because we're participants in a society that places us in gendered classes: men want, and women are wanted. The absolutely bizarre world described in the article, bizarre to the point that the young women describe how definitionally incredible their experience of it is, couldn't exist without that fundamental binary being stronger than the emotions we feel individually.

There's a real reason men, described as a class, don't understand female desire, cannot, and will never, understand it, and it's because there's no social context in a patriarchy to men being wanted, or desirable; and the texture of our desires is set in markets where the contours of power run in one direction only. Wanting, despite how the incels may feel about it, is the active role in a binary relationship, and to give that up is a very subversive and difficult thing.

That conventionally beautiful young women would describe some perceived power of being pretty as a 'curse' isn't surprising, just as to be young and attractive is no freedom from the social fact that men want and women are wanted. These rich men in the article know the fact so powerfully that despite all their status, they understand the only way they can perform their gender is by spending tens of thousands of dollars on displays of desire, and creating an abstracted nightclub culture of frustrated wanting, which works at their own expense, creating their own scam. They must, at some level, know there exist rich women their own age, but nobody's free here.

When I was a young man, a young woman told me, hey my parents aren't home this afternoon, come around after school for a cup of tea. So I went around, and, a bit confused, drank a cup of tea, said thank you, and then went home. It took me decades, until well into adulthood, to understand why she was so very, very, angry with me. I had no context to understand how she might have felt, any more than I would have understood water running uphill.
posted by Fiasco da Gama at 5:11 PM on April 9 [6 favorites]

Here's the thing as I see it: many, or most, people experience desire, but nobody experiences desire outside of a social context. Ursula is absolutely right to describe the distinction, but the distinction exists not because men and women are in any way different, or desire differently, it's because we're participants in a society that places us in gendered classes: men want, and women are wanted.

There are social mores, and then there are unavoidable, irritating realities. Human beings transcend their gendered expectations all the time, if you look. The absolutely frustrating thing to which I reacted here is Ursula Hitler airily asserting that, despite her own lived experience as a trans woman, she wishes that all women could experience her memory of the frustrations of masculine desire as if we don't experience exactly the same thing. Yes, we are constrained by different social structures and, you know, that thing about maybe getting pregnant, the new mostly reliable freedom from which is such a novel idea--within my own lifetime--that society is still fighting about it. Of course we learn to constrain our desires or direct them to impossible fantasies (using the "we" very generally here). However, Ursula has abandoned the thread, so I'll leave my criticism there.

"Men want and women are wanted" in fairy tales and instruction manuals and movies and in the rigid lineaments of gender roles. But those are not descriptions of how people actually act: for that try literature, or just watching closely. That many men seem unable to perceive the inner human lives of the women around them is depressing, though far from surprising.

There's a real reason men, described as a class, don't understand female desire, cannot, and will never, understand it, and it's because there's no social context in a patriarchy to men being wanted, or desirable;

How awful to assert that men don't understand and will never understand female desire. Surely actually knowing women helps? Try having a conversation with one, such as we are engaging in now. I will tell you that I find male desire pretty transparent, and that's because I understand it from my own experience. Or ask young gay men about the social context in which they are objectified. Life is complicated, and you are painting with a very broad brush here.
posted by jokeefe at 5:47 PM on April 9 [6 favorites]

jokeefe: "I will tell you that I find male desire pretty transparent, and that's because I understand it from my own experience"

Ahhhh but this is what I'm saying: you also understand it, and find it transparent, because everyone's general understanding of other people's general experiences comes from the extraordinary patriarchy that creates the contours of wanting in the first place, because female desirability is definitional, and male active power simply is, with all the rest opaque. Just as other potential male experiences---men not wanting, or wanting to be wanted, or simply wanting people other than the conventionally young and attractive---exist in places beyond cultural possibility, invisible, impossible, not transparent, and require transgressing gender norms to achieve, even to one's self. And that's hard, because we all really do act in ways set by culture regardless of our own desires in the matter, because it's in the nature of a gender norm to be powerful. It's as you say, our fears and desires are similar, but we don't get to choose the cultural language we express them in.
posted by Fiasco da Gama at 6:19 PM on April 9 [1 favorite]

In my 20's I knew a RHRG - who was all the more alluring as she didn't know it (or at least pretended very well she was not clearly doing a lot more than flirting). Humans are so complicated.

In uni riding a lift, a similar-age very plain classmate turned to me and, apropos of nothing, said 'plain girls have to work harder sexually at getting and keeping guys' - which is sad, and which thought was brought back from reading Empress' comment. I've usually found intelligence more alluring than 'hotness', also hot has a kind of time limit.

Fiasco I've had a few 'cup of tea' events as an adult, one from a friend 'my husband's at the other end of the farm' (a very large farm so a very slow 30Km away), obv. she was not getting what she needed, which is also so sad, and she'd clearly worked herself up to suggest this - I was so surprised as it totally contravened her public image. But morality and fun aside I didn't look forward to being dismembered by a literal giant if it came out. Either way this ends friendships, and a kind of separateness afterward either way.

Are there RHRBoys too? A male friend when I was 15 was a female magnet (and as unsporty as myself) - and continued thus into his mid-20's, females were simply drawn to him, ignoring hundred of others. Some people have an indefinable 'it'.
posted by unearthed at 11:46 PM on April 9 [1 favorite]

There totally are RHRBs.

There's a -- frankly not too dissimilar -- thing in some rich gay guy social scenes, with young guys partying free, hanging out on boats in the summer, etc., until they get bored with it (or the scene gets bored of them).

There's a different thing for the very small share of straight guys who can combine very good looks and high charisma to a perfect degree necessary to be predicably "desired more than desiring" in the way that an ordinarily good-looking woman is. I'm not one of them for sure, but I've known a few over the years, and the stories they tell are (for a regular guy) simply out of the world. It's pretty alien because most of the time these guys won't talk about it and women certainly don't talk about it with (the remaining 99.9% of) men, and there's almost no media narrative about it. Movies and TV love to depict incredibly good looking men having ordinary or even sub-par romantic connections, for whatever reason. (Mad Men's depiction of Don Draper is one of the few serious efforts to depict that kind of guy.)
posted by MattD at 12:34 PM on April 10 [5 favorites]

They must, at some level, know there exist rich women their own age, but nobody's free here

The number of independently wealthy women is pretty small; independently wealthy young women even smaller. It would be incorrect to assume that the numbers are equal. There's also no need to get caught up in fanciful stories- stats show people (mostly) marry within their social class. It's not like Hollywood actresses (as a proxy for young, wealthy women) are dating regular joes. They are dating and marrying equally rich dudes.

I'm not one of them for sure, but I've known a few over the years, and the stories they tell are (for a regular guy) simply out of the world.

Me either, but I've had friends who are. It's pretty similar to being a RHRG, in that women throw themselves at you. Your average woman man not ask out your average guy (as per gender conformity) but average and above will be pretty direct with a RHRB. That totally makes sense.

I think it's kind of interesting in that as soon as you pass out of college age, where and when the majority of unmarried women go and the majority of unmarried men go for fun tends to diverge. That's why the ratios of these places kind of have to be manufactured, either blatantly with RHRGs or with differences in cover charges and gendered promotions. It'd be interesting to see if women spend more time at home or other places than men, proportionally.
posted by The_Vegetables at 1:46 PM on April 10

It'd be interesting to compare reactions to this article and the world it describes with reactions to Anora
posted by Saxon Kane at 3:01 PM on April 10

There's a -- frankly not too dissimilar -- thing in some rich gay guy social scenes, with young guys partying free, hanging out on boats in the summer, etc., until they get bored with it (or the scene gets bored of them).

This sounds a lot like the story arc of the great Crusaders song 'Street Life'.
posted by jamjam at 3:26 PM on April 10