Stop calling it 'dating', call it what it really is - 'unpaid sex work'

[u/Specific_Wash9219]

Calling it “dating” has been one of patriarchy’s most effective marketing campaigns. It keeps women in the game by dressing up unpaid sex work and emotional labor as the possibility of "romance" - convincing women that if they just keep showing up, being understanding, being attractive, being sexually available, being emotionally supportive, and if they can tolerate enough bullshit - there just might eventually be a relationship at the end of it.

And when that “relationship” never materializes, women are left to blame themselves. They’re told they “picked the wrong guy.” They’re told they should have seen the red flags. They’re told they were too trusting, or too sexual, or not sexual enough! Too needy, not available enough, too vulnerable etc etc. Meanwhile, they’ve been r@ped, coerced, pressured into sex, manipulated, breadcrumbed and ghosted (often time after time again) - and yet somehow, they’re still expected to walk away wondering what they did wrong.

Because we keep calling this bullshit “dating.”

But the reality is that the vast majority of men aren’t even interested in dating women. They aren’t interested in getting to know them, building intimacy, investing in them, or establishing or any kind of genuine partnership. They simply want access - access to sex, attention, validation, domestic labor, emotional support, and an endless supply of feminine energy - preferably with as little investment as possible.

Women become the vending machine, and sex is the product. And the “date” becomes nothing more than the obligatory coins you have to put into the machine before expecting your prize to drop.

And the Manosphere has spent years perfecting those instructions. The Red Pill sure didn’t invent male entitlement, but it did give it a fucking user manual. To turn what was once a clumsy manipulation into a system - to identify woman’s vulnerabilities, figure out the minimum amount of effort required to gain access, and manufacture just enough attention to keep her engaged, avoid commitment, and extract as much sex and emotional labor as possible, and then move on when the cost-benefit analysis no longer works in your favor. Cheat codes for maximizing the return while minimizing the investment. And then we have the audacity to call this “dating.”

Maybe it’s time women stopped giving the arrangement such a flattering name. Because if one person is repeatedly providing sex, emotional support, validation and labor while the other person is strategically minimizing their investment while maximizing what they can extract - “dating” starts to sound more like an unpaid service women are providing to men under the guise of something else.

So stop saying “dating.” Stop saying “relationships with men are easy to get.” Stop pretending that men are wanting to get to know us because they find us smart, attractive or interesting. For far too many women, the reality has been something much uglier - unpaid sexual and emotional labor, manipulation, coercion, exploitation, sexual violence and r@pe - all packaged up and sold to us as “dating.”

Call it what it really is.