How Can a Woman Compete Against Sluts?

As you know, serious thinkers have demonstrated—at least they think they have—that men are disinclined to get married because they can get all of the free love they want without making a commitment.

What’s a girl to do? One blogger, named JudgyBitch decided to do something radical to compete for her man: she did his laundry. In terms that I have occasionally introduced, she acted like a wife. When women say that they reject the notion of being a wife, what are they really saying: that they would rather be a courtesan. After all, what else did they learn from reading Cosmo and from Women’s Studies 101.

How can a woman compete for men when men are constantly being tempted by women that she—not I—calls sluts. Excuse the infelicitous and slightly vulgar image:

What is a sensible, reasonable woman to do in the face of sluts throwing their vaginas around like confetti at a wedding? In truth, it’s not that hard to compete with sluts.  What you’ll need are some domestic skills and a sense of loyalty to match your man’s.

She describes a time when she and her eventual husband were both in college and when she asked him for the key to his room. He was out doing what students do and she was back in his room, doing what? Was she decking herself out in her finest negligee, strewing rose petals all over the room, lighting incense candles, preparing for an erotic encounter straight out of The Story of O? Not at all. Read it and weep:

I went to Mr. JudgyBitch’s room and collected all his laundry.  I washed it and then, using a piece of cardboard, folded it into beautiful Gap store origami and arranged it on his shelves perfectly.  He came home to a room that smelled of Tide and Bounce, with his shirts ironed and hung and his t-shirts lined up on a shelf with military precision.

How did her man react?

He fucking died.  He told me later that THAT was the moment he knew he would marry me.  We have a long standing joke about choosing me randomly, because Mr. JudgyBitch, handsome and tall, was quite a catch on campus.  He had been to a hot tub party at the Faculty of Law and acquired the number of a hot young law student who happened to share the same first name as me.  So he had two “JBs” on his cork board and he picked one to call one lonely Friday night, and it was me!

It’s all about economy. While free love is a surplus commodity, housewifery is a scarce commodity. If a young man finds a woman who wants to be a housewife and who shows it by doing his laundry, he is more likely to want to marry her right away. Of course, if a woman does not want to get married, she should under no circumstances do the laundry. Now, that was easy.

Anyway, it was not just about laundry:

During our 18 months at grad school, I continued to do his laundry.  I learned what he liked for breakfast and had a tray ready for him every morning.  I fetched him hot food when he was tied up in long meetings, got him coffee when he looked tired and rubbed his back after eight hours of lectures in a chair designed for someone six inches shorter.  I folded his laundry, made his bed and listened to his frustrations.

Of course, you are wondering what JudgyBitch got for all of this subservience. Besides, of course, a husband, three children and a stable homelife. She answers your question:

What did he do for me?  It doesn’t matter.  The answer is:  LOTS!  But we’re not talking about quid pro quo here.  If your first instinct was to set up a mental balance sheet and make sure all of YOUR thoughtful actions are being returned in EXACT PROPORTION to your outlay, you might as well give up now.  You don’t know shit about men, or relationships of any kind.

Here she makes the salient moral point. She did not keep score. She did not keep a ledger. She did not demand an instant quid pro quo. But, since she did not make demands, she received whatever he gave as something he wanted to give. 

Note also that she did not cook all the time. When they were living in China they never ate at home. Yet, he always knew that she cared:

What he DID know was that I cared about what he ate.  I cared if he was hungry.  I would not hesitate to trudge across campus in rainy, shitty weather to bring him a hot dinner.

JudgyBitch concludes, summing up the balance sheet:

And he loved me for it.  Sucks, doesn’t it?  Food, clean clothes, tidy room, sex and a shoulder to lean on.  Yep, it’s really that simple.

That’s how you compete with sluts.  Be a wife.  Be a woman.  Look at the man, and care about him deeply.  Don’t create a scorecard.  Don’t keep tally about who brought coffee to whom.  Let the balance swing in his favour dramatically.

What will you get in return?  Oh, just a husband.  A man who loves you completely.  Loyalty, protection, honesty, reliability, dependability.  A rock who will weather any storm for you.  Who lives for you.  As long as you live for him.

She got to be a wife because she wanted to be a wife. She is full time mother to her children. She has also advanced her education, if you care to know.

So, to respond to the social psychologists who pretend that women should be in despair of finding husbands in a marketplace where so many other women are giving it away for free, JudgyBitch explains:

That’s how you defeat sluts.  Because at the end of the day, sluts are in it for themselves.  They don’t give a shit about any particular man, and will toss whatever man they DO manage to snare under the fucking bus the second they think something better has come along. To hell with the man, to hell with their children, to hell with everything but their own insatiable desires.  For something they will never have.

Love.  True love.  It’s a verb, ladies.  Show it.  Do the fucking laundry.

And you thought that the "Rules" ladies, that is Ellen Fein and Sherrie Schneider were bad?