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On E-Girls
I may be young, and I may spend too much time staring at screens, but I’m decidedly out of step with the bleeding edge of Internet culture. Only when Facebook became passé did I give in and make an account (which I seldom use). I’ve yet to touch Tik-Tok, and I doubt I ever will. All for the best, I think. But some friends just alerted me to a new-ish trend in the digital world: the so-called “e-girl” (or “e-thot,” in slightly less polite parlance).*
An e-girl is a young woman who sells feigned affection online. A customer gives her money, and she pretends to care about him by sending him pornography, seductive videos, personalized letters, or even presents. Yes, you read that correctly: A not-insignificant number of men are willing to pay random women on the Internet to give them attention. (Some even justify their pathology as a form of “providing.” “I’m doing my duty as a man!” they say. “I’m providing for her!”) This isn’t entirely new. I once read that the most popular offering among upscale brothels, for example, is not sex as such, but the whole romantic package — a nice dinner and a night on the town, followed by a consummation of the short relationship. The e-girl model makes a digital simulacrum of this available to every sad schlub with a laptop and an Internet connection. Can’t find a girlfriend? Just buy a fake one. Or try a dating simulator.
Actually, it’s even worse than that. Some guys seem to prefer e-girls to their flesh-and-blood equivalents. Floating around the web is an infamous Reddit post written by a 20-something woman whose live-in boyfriend threw hundreds of dollars at e-girls, even going so far as to buy his favorite one — but not her, his real girlfriend — a Christmas present. Despite being in a nominal relationship, he felt the need to purchase attention anyway. Blame feminism, I guess. (Sargon of Akkad certainly does.)
Just like that, the market has stolen yet more territory from the order of the sacred. The commodification of human relationships continues apace. First came pornography, which commodified sex. Next came online dating, which commodified the means by which humans form romantic relationships. Then came social media, which commodified the non-romantic parts of social life and turned us all into performing seals. Now, even ordinary affection is something to be bought and sold. What’s next? Sex dolls? AI “girlfriends”? My fashionable and tech-savvy brother tells me that “VTubing” is the hot new thing. The future is turning out to be Wall-E, minus the environmental degradation.
I’ve yet to see the conservative commentariat address this particular addition to the pile of modern social evils. They seem to think that pornography is the greatest single threat to marriage, family, and ordinary old-fashioned love; and it probably is, for now. But e-girls will have their moment in the sun. After all, this is the world the Soroses and Schwabs want: a global techno-utopian feudal order in which the docile peasantry consumes and then perishes, and does nothing else. A world without conflict, scarcity, or striving. A world where love and affection are exchanged, but never earned. Is this the kind of world you want to live in? If not, then you’d better invest in the tangible while you still can. . . .
. . . Oh, wait. My mistake. You can’t invest in the tangible because there’s a virus circulating, and it’s just too dangerous. Never mind. E-girls and sex dolls it is, then!
* Apparently, the term “e-girl” is also used to describe the style of dress such women tend to adopt. I’m sure an Internet-culture purist would object to my terminology in this piece, but I don’t care. What else am I supposed to call these people?
Published in Culture
I assume they will. I think the China-coms will genetically engineer their populace for conformity, racial homogeneity. We should keep up with them by engineering for I.Q., health and some conscientiousness.
“Designed” implies a designer.
Designed implies a system that without being conscious selects for certain traits that are useful. Think of prices in a market economy. They exist without any single person knowing why and that system selects for things far better than any centralized planner could ever manage. The market system is an aggregate of literally innumerable forces in a chaotic and competitive system. Think of Adam Smith referring to the market as an invisible hand that selects for better products and efficiency.
The traits that were selected for millions of years among us homo sapiens are often in conflict with the better angels of our nature. Conquering other people to take their resources is an effective way to grow your tribe. Scientific reasoning wasn’t useful until the very late enlightenment at the earliest. In many ways, economics was zero-sum until advances in agricultural and trade around the same time.
We are conditioned by millions of years of evolution to think and behave in very bad ways. I see no reason why we should not remove these traits. We know why they were inflicted on us so we have passed the Chesterton’s fence test.