"What Does a Nice Woman Want from a Man?"

Advice for Our Sexual Culture Part VII: how to become a worthy Wife Guy, moving to improve your dating odds and whether sexual experience gaps really matter

Hello and welcome to Many Such Cases.

After a bit of a break, I am back with another round of questions and topics for Advice for Our Sexual Culture. You can submit yours for the next installment here.

Henry Miller in the pervert city of Paris

This week, I address the common claim that New York City is better for dating as a man than the Bay Area, digging in to whether our sexual culture really does differ by city and detailing a bit of what I love about New York. I answer the question of what’s on a hypothetical woman’s dating rubric, besides a guy who makes a lot of money, and what it takes to be the kind of partner who makes someone’s life easier by being in it. I also discuss a young woman’s sexual inexperience in an age gap relationship, and whether any of that is really cause for concern.

If you haven’t already, please consider sending in your own topics and concerns at the link above and becoming a paid subscriber to read on. Thank you all for being here.

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Hi Magdalene. I was wondering when you think it's advisable to move for dating. As a straight guy in Silicon Valley, it's rough out here! I'm a (legit) San Francisco native who moved to San Jose for a tech job after college. I've only lived in the Bay Area my whole 28 years of existence, so I don't know how much my chronic singleness would be helped by moving somewhere "better" for dating.

I've thought about moving to New York or somewhere on the east coast, where the gender ratio between young men and women is mostly even. Anecdotally, I've heard men online saying their experience of dating on the West coast vs East is night and day (I take it with a grain of salt). A change of scenery in general would be nice, but TBH my top interest in moving is to get my first girlfriend.

Overall, I like the Bay Area. I LOVE the proximity I have to nature trails in the city. The weather here is nice. I'd probably be irritated by Trump supporters in other parts of the country. Perhaps most of all, I have my own status quo bias.

I'm mostly interested in moving into another city, but I could see myself living the cottagecore life. Though living in rural areas can also limit dating opportunities. Anyways, I'd like your $0.02 as a New Yorker. — “28 M, hella Bay Area (duh), straight, ethnically ambiguous”

Throughout Tropic of Cancer, Henry Miller describes how sexual standards differ between Paris and cities of the United States. “I’ve never seen a place like Paris for varieties of sexual provender,” he says. There, whenever a woman develops some sort of physical abnormality — the loss of a limb, or the collapse of her nose from syphilis — she immediately becomes a prostitute. In America, a woman would rather starve to death than rely on the novelty of such a plight. In Paris, these sorts of disfigurements seem to be “regarded as an added spice, a stimulant for the jaded appetites of the male.”

Anyway, yes, you should move to New York.