Everything is Virgin vs. Chad

Many Such Takes Special Edition: The “Hookup Material” Reddit Post

I’m a bit late to the party on this one because I had some other articles that I really wanted to publish this week, but several people have asked me my thoughts on the infamous “Hookup Material” post that came up on Reddit (and subsequently, dominated Twitter all last week.)

This post, despite being fairly tame, is basically a nuclear bomb for discourse. It’s a simple premise: is it, or is it not, a compliment for a man to be told he is husband material but not hookup material?

I felt like this was pretty obviously insulting, but I saw a lot of folks (especially women) disagree. So I’ll try to parse what’s going on here, especially for men. Warning: this article will be full of sweeping generalizations, but that’s basically the only way I can write about this topic. Be warned!

Let’s start with the obvious reason the “husband material” comment is insulting: it implies a lack of physical attraction. You might be saying that can’t possibly be true, because you wouldn’t marry someone you aren’t physically attracted to. And while that’s generally true, there’s a difference between saying someone is husband material (implying that person is also hookup material- square vs. rectangle) versus specifying that they are husband material but not hookup material. I was surprised to see so many women incredulous about why that would be insulting.

It’s kind of like a “compliment” I’ve received a few times, where people have told me, “I was so wrong about you at first,” without clarifying what their first impression was. It’s assumed that their current impression is positive, or they wouldn’t be saying this at all, but it begs the question: what was so bad about me when we met?

But the reason this infected Twitter for a full week instead of dying after a few desperate engagement bait threads is because it got at something so central to dumb gender discourse on Twitter. A lot of the anger from men aligns with the belief common in the “manosphere” (think all the man-centric, and typically somewhat right-wing corners of the Internet—pickup artists, red pillers, incels, etc.) that women pursue a dual mating strategy. The idea hinges on a few theories, some of which I think are actually true, as much as I hate to hand it to some of the most annoying men on the Internet:

1. Men are significantly more interested in hookups and one night stands than women are. I’ve gotten crap for saying this because I personally haven’t engaged in casual sex but I feel like it’s pretty obviously true. Every hookup app is inundated with men. There is not the same market for heterosexual male OnlyFans content creators that there is for women. It’s significantly easier for a woman to find a hookup partner than a man, provided both are heterosexual. I’ll go a step further and say that almost any woman, including women who are not conventionally attractive, could find a willing sexual partner in 24 hours if they didn’t have high standards. The same is not true of men. I’m not going to get into why this is, whether it’s biology or social conditioning, I don’t really care.

2. There is a perception that women’s physical standards are higher for hookups than for relationships.