The Sexless Escort Service

Could it help cure the incel problem?

In which I present another wild and unlikely idea to cure various social ills:

I was listening to

Walt Bismarck

‘s podcast with

kryptogal

on as a guest (it’s a great conversation; you should give it a listen) and was talking to my husband about it. I was telling him that I started reading Walt’s Substack after having the same reaction as Kryptogal did to his post imploring conservative men to stop being mean to slutty women (alternately offended and cracking up laughing throughout). We ended up on the topic of OnlyFans and how no one who does complain about things like OF ever talk about the demand side of that particular industry. This led to a sort of lightbulb moment about another topic I’ve been hearing a lot of talk about lately that I think is important: mentorship for teenage boys and young men, the incel-adjacent or spectrumy guys, the awkward dudes and hopelessly shy nerds who for whatever reason have no role models or confidants, the ones who don’t have any idea how to attract a woman and whose rejections are causing them to become bitter and violent in myriad ways. The ones self-IDing as incels, or about to.

There have been plenty of people and methods used to target these types of men for mentorship and self-improvement. In recent years, at least since I’ve been paying attention in the early aughts, some that come to mind are Neill Strauss and his PUA troupe, Andrew Tate, and Jordan Peterson. Walt talks about how Millennial men need to step up and start mentoring these younger Zoomer guys, many of whom are only children or whose siblings are close in age due to many Zoomers having older parents.

Save for (earlier) Jordan Peterson and Walt’s male-to-male mentorship idea, the advice the other two give are largely misogynistic and superficial in nature and do little to help heal the growing rift between men and women, let alone the men themselves. While they may be successful at helping some guys get superficially hot and brave enough to have a one night stand with a hot chick once in a while, it’s not going to get him the kind of lasting and sustained interest and happiness in a real relationship that most people — including most men — eventually want. And if and when he does decide he wants that, he’ll have no idea how to operate in that manner after years of misogynist conditioning that women who want to settle down are not interested in, and his relationships will likely fail due to a number of issues with his communication style, his lack of anticipation for her needs, and maybe even hardcore-porn-based sexual expectations she may be uncomfortable with, among other things. The relationships that do last will probably be pretty toxic on both ends. They will continue to create the market for all the relationship advice reels and attachment style analysis videos currently in the social media feeds of every woman under 50.

What Went Wrong?

Everyone says it because it’s obviously and intuitively true: it’s the phones, it’s the lack of personal connection, it’s the porn, it’s the early puberty, it’s the social media. And while we figure out how to fix that problem, we need to do something to step in to help the ones who are emerging into adulthood fully incapable of handling normal human things like dating, work, independent living, and sex.

I talked about young women in my post about bringing back the Red Tent, so what do today’s young guys really need to keep them from their own poor side effects, like going off the misogynist deep end and relegating themselves to the life of the sad and pathetic and forever-single, awkward man?

Women. To clarify, these women wouldn’t be mentors on how to be a man (that’s what the Millennial dudes, older Zoomers, and dads and uncles and stuff are for), but mentors and active guides on how to look and act in a way that is presentable to women, and within society in general. A woman who is naturally aware of social cues and various conventions, and who is conventionally attractive enough to boost his confidence when they go out, but the service wouldn’t rely on the stereotypical and overdone “hot chick” as a matter of course. The service would pair people based on a variety of factors, and either party could refuse to be matched at any time.

What Could Go Wrong?

What’s in it for the women? Who would do this out of the kindness of their hearts?

Aristides

mentioned some possible drawbacks, this included, in some thoughtful comments on Walt’s recent Note on the idea:

Like I agreed later in my response, friends might help in some ways and are even preferable for those young men who can manage to find and keep them, but most of these guys already don’t have (m)any friends, let alone of the female variety, and that’s part of the problem. So we’d boost the incentive and simply pay them as dating coaches, similar to life coaches and personal trainers. They would be certified, maybe. The guy himself might pay her, the parents might pay for the mentorship as an extracurricular activity during high school¹, whatever. But what of the client base, and the baked-in competition of escorts who would likely be willing to accept extra money to simply perform the sex afterward? Like

Aristides

wonders,

Your biggest competition is going to be Escorts, and most men willing to pay a woman to teach them how to date would rather also pay extra to learn how to have sex.

Basically, this would be an escort service² — but yes, without sex. To leave sex out of it might sound like a silly idea if half the reason for the service’s existence is to prepare young, awkward men for relationships with women that will likely include it, but in reality, those things eventually just come naturally with the confidence and the right person. The goal here would be for women to use their skills with compassion and empathy to help train men on how to be attractive in all ways that naturally lead a woman to want to have sex with him in the first place. It would help boost his confidence. If all you care about is merely getting laid, then don’t use this pretend service that will probably never exist. Easy! Go find a Tate or whomever. I’m sure they’ll tell you how to peacock and neg just right to get some 8.3 into your bed for the night.

Not to mention, the legal and liability issues are just too complicated to want to take on. I’m sure someone would make it happen somewhere, but anyway, that’s not what I’m trying to propose here.

This is a good point, though: what of the competition? Well, for one, if that was working, the self-reported incel rate wouldn’t be as high as it apparently is. But like we fleshed out a bit in those comments, what if this new niche was absorbed by already-existing escort services? It would be a cheaper service, assuming the no-sex mandate of the “practice” service in particular was adhered to, and it would be done by women who were either already interested in escorting but without the anonymous sex parts, or women who had a temperament suited toward helping young men, maybe with a background in psychology or men’s studies or something similarly complementary.

Walt isn’t convinced of the efficacy of such a thing:

I don’t agree. For one, like I mentioned before, the women wouldn’t be coaching men on how to be men, they would be coaching them on how to both act decent in society, which, not to sound sexist, I think women tend to be a little better at intuiting (and probably more likely formally educated to be), and also in a way that attracts women, coming straight from the horse’s mouth. The women are being paid to be honest with these men and, ideally, the service would include a thorough compatibility check to ensure that the pairings were as similar in temperament and outlook as possible and matched around what each man would want to look for in a real-life woman outside the “practice” scenarios — someone who would be both suited toward him, and also realistic. The service would try its best to ensure that the women signing up for this job wouldn’t simply be in it to infiltrate and ideologically brainwash their mentees into whatever woke neo-feminism they subscribe to that week, but rather women who both understand and share common values with the men with whom they’re paired so that no lectures or eggshell-walking need occur.

The advice men give to other men has value in innumerable ways, but it doesn’t account for what those men don’t know or even what they might fall for. A guy might think he knows the surefire way to get a woman to orgasm, but has no idea the last 4 women he was with were faking it because they wanted to hurry up and get it over with because he was not in tune with her and what she also wanted. He might tell his buddies that acting like a domineering boss to the waitress got him laid that night, but doesn’t realize that only a month or so into that relationship, not much isn’t going to get him laid after a date, and repeating the behavior with servers, especially other women, in the future is going to be on the list of complaints she gives to her girlfriends when she contemplates breaking up with him 6 months later. She’ll tell him, too, of course, but he won’t know how to listen. No one taught him.

While there’s value in getting advice about relationships from other men and it should be prioritized, it is invaluable to also get it from unbiased, honest women. Someone you pay is more likely to give that to you, sometimes, than even the most well-intentioned friend who may not want to hurt your feelings. But either way, for both sexes, actually having these frank conversations is extremely valuable. It’s vulnerable, but it’s valuable. It helps us all be better humans to each other when we can empathize with one another.

To further the fishing analogy, my response from the comments sums up the rest of my idea:

Sexless because it would have to be marketable to normies, and legally it seems annoying and complicated, plus it could only currently exist in a few counties in one state if it were explicitly included. I'm sure there'd be plenty of additional “services” under the table that isn't on the official “menu,” however. But this is supposed to be different from a typical escort service and more of a training service.

And if the fish and the human trying to catch it spoke the same language (and if there was actually a benefit to the fish for being caught to incentivize it giving the advice), it would make perfect sense to ask the fish exactly what would attract him to your lure. He'd know best. The fisherman might know what's worked for him to catch them most often, but he can only guess what the fish is really thinking. His theories might be completely coincidental and half-baked and not work for everyone under most conditions. The fish could offer a plethora of custom knowledge and corrections of a lifetime of bad advice from other confused fisherman whose only real success was in a particularly diverse pond during a rain storm and he's been living on that high ever since. Or something.

Anyway, it needn't take the place of male mentorship, nor should it, but rather offer something else entirely. The way it sounds, elder Millennial and Gen Xer dudes aren't so interested in picking up that mentorship responsibility, anyway, and the increasing numbers of incels have no support or way out other than, you know, vengeful movie theater and nightclub shootings and shit. Maybe attractive and nice meatspace women would be a welcome change, if only to boost confidence.

In this service, the women and their clients would go on “practice dates” once a week or more for a set amount of time, and with a goal in mind. She would engage him in conversation and give him feedback about how he’s doing, whether he’s asking her enough questions to balance the conversation, whether he’s being polite enough to waitstaff or other people. She might take note of how much alcohol he drinks and advise him on a more socially-acceptable and safe amount, and help him with the signs of intoxication so that he doesn’t accidentally end up taking home a girl who’s had way too much to drink without realizing the state of her blackout³. Maybe the guy’s problem is just that he doesn’t really know social manners and just needs someone to literally practice with. Maybe it’s been so long since he failed to learn for the first time, for whatever reason, that he feels shame about starting so “late,” and avoids it with “real” women. This is a surprisingly frequent phenomenon among both men and women, as it turns out.

Of course there are objections to this being nothing more than reimagining a traditional escort service. As

Stephan Ahonen

notes:

And this is not an incorrect mindset that I disagree with; after all, I’m responding here to the main problem at hand, which is that society has turned dating into a screen-based cesspool that stereotypically benefits the women who loathe it while simultaneously leaving out even more men who would do far better if the social climate allowed men to pursue women safely in public again.

But I’m not writing my cheeky essay about how to solve the ever-existing and endlessly-written-about screen problem; I’m writing my cheeky essay about one way to help some of the young men already lost to it. That essay about the Problem With Screens would likely be less… cheeky. I’m sick of that word now. I’m not British enough for it and it makes me feel like Mary Poppins, but it is an apt word.

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Anyway, to keep these mentor women safe while they’re on their dates, there would be a number of safety mechanisms in place, such as maybe a bodyguard stationed nearby the “couple,” and all “dates” would occur in a public place like a restaurant or concert venue or something, so as to make the likelihood of forced sexual contact much lower. There would probably be a tracker of some kind that the women carried on themselves in case they did find themselves in trouble.

You know, I hate the transactional nature of this sort of thing and would prefer to see people just help each other out like the natural opposite-sex friendships that used to evolve before we all became screen and swiping dopamine addicts, but it just doesn’t always work that way. And it’s fun to imagine what a completely different world might look like if we just adopted a few new conventions, silly or formalized as they may sound.

This idea brings to mind the old trope of dads or uncles or whomever taking the teenage boy on their live to see a prostitute to get their first time over with. And, I mean, it's kind of like that, but like, leveled up. A little more… classy. Not to mention useful. I personally have a therapist and a personal trainer. I talked to a life coach once. The market exists for self-improvement, to be sure. Why not expand it to help a screen-addicted generation learn to become a little more human? And maybe help bridge the growing chasm between men and women?

Speaking again of Walt, he recently had

Nina Power

on and the conversation touches quite a bit on this. It’s a great listen. Give Nina a follow, while you’re at it!

Episode 49 : Nina Power

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1. Get ‘em early! But the clear potential legal shitshow is also why being explicitly non-sex is so important!

2. At least, no sex is implied here. If this became a real thing, there’s no doubt underground sex stuff would be happening in some of the otherwise-legal businesses, but for the purposes of innocent guy-training, I want to stick to no-sex when theorizing about this particular solution. The logistics and legal ramifications are too complex for this goofy thought experiment.

3. This obviously presumes he’s a good guy not looking to intentionally take advantage of someone.