Dating Is New & Was Considered Worse than Wh****g

Historically, what we now call dating was treated as lower-status than prostitution. The word “date” itself once meant visiting a prostitute. Then working-class “charity girls” undercut professional sex workers by trading companionship and intimacy for dinners, tickets, clothes, and nights out — a practice contemporaries called treating.

In this Based Camp episode, Malcolm and Simone Collins walk through the late-19th / early-20th century shift: cheap urban leisure (nickelodeons, dance halls, Coney Island), taxi dancers as proto-host clubs, shop girls hunting rich bosses, the rebrand of face-painting into “makeup,” the invention of “personality” and the It Girl, and 1920s petting parties. They argue modern dating is not an ancient institution that suddenly broke. It is a recent, low-commitment market that was controversial when it appeared — and that older courtship systems (family-supervised seasons, explicit marriage-seeking) may be more honest than ambiguous long-term dating.

Also discussed: why they treat dating as wife-hunting rather than “seeing where it goes,” why they want paying-for-dates destigmatized as traditional, and how RFAB can generate period-accurate 1920s stories.

Episode Transcript

[00:00:00] Malcolm Collins: Hello, Simone. I am right off learning a historical fact that blew my mind, which is that historically what we today call dating was seen as lower than prostitution-

[00:00:16] Simone Collins: Wait ...

[00:00:16] Malcolm Collins: until incredibly recently, up until the 1920s. Even our word date Historically meant visiting a prostitute.

[00:00:30] Simone Collins: I thought it was like an, an assignation or a something else.

That’s great. An

[00:00:35] Malcolm Collins: assignation?

[00:00:36] Simone Collins: Like, a rendezvous.

[00:00:38] Malcolm Collins: No, it did mean that. But you would never use it for a romantic rendezvous. You used it for business rendezvous. And then it began to be used to mean seeing a prostitute, and then it began to become applied way later during this period where dating had this bad reputation, to seeing what was called a charity woman.

[00:00:59] Simone Collins: A charity- So, and- A cha- what’s a charity woman?

[00:01:02] Malcolm Collins: W- it’s what today we would call a woman. Okay. So,

[00:01:06] Simone Collins: What, what... Oh, okay. Okay. Just, yeah. Okay. I’ll, I’ll say the main thing- What, spell this out for me.

[00:01:09] Malcolm Collins: This,

[00:01:09] Simone Collins: I’m

[00:01:10] Malcolm Collins: so confused ... differentiated a charity woman, okay?

[00:01:12] Simone Collins: Okay.

[00:01:12] Malcolm Collins: So a charity woman would expect a man to pay for food or an activity.

[00:01:20] Simone Collins: Okay.

[00:01:20] Malcolm Collins: And she would often court multiple men before getting married. Now, today this sounds like a woman. So we’re gonna go- Yes ... into what alerted me to this. We’re gonna go into the Wikipedia article on this. And even though, the the reason I cite this is even something as lefty as Wikipedia was like, “Oh yeah, this was considered a super, a bad thing to do.”

We’re gonna go into the campaigns- Oh ... to arrest these women. We’ll go into what prostitutes were saying about these women, ‘cause they absolutely hated these women. They completely disrupted the way prostitution worked. And we’ll go into why this transformation happened. And I think it’s important to keep this in mind when we live in a world today and people say dating markets are no longer functioning, and they act like something that has existed since the beginning of time just collapsed all of a sudden.

Instead of something that’s existed for less than a century collapsed, and what we should do is go back to older mechanisms of dating, like arranged marriage and dating markets like the season, which we are attempting to rebuild. So fun stuff here. Let’s go right into it. So what alerted me to this is the RFab dev, like the only other human who works on it other than Simone and I Bruno reached out with this concept where he wanted us to go into the history of dating.

Specifically the claim that dating came from prostitution or was even frowned on by prostitutes. Specifically because it took business from them And it goes on. The term dating did emerge from prostitution and so did the general practice in the early 20th century. Charity girls were deemed competitors who undercut the wages of prostitutes.

Basically, easy girls who weren’t formal prostitutes figured out that they could blur the lines by getting dinners or so on paid for. Now, what’s really fascinating is the invention of dating as we understand it and think of it as like this wholesome 1950s practice today would have in its time been seen as extremely or eerily parallel to OnlyFansing today E.g.,

getting m- multiple men to pay for stuff for you while being an informal sex worker. I- i- in just a new way using new technologies.

[00:03:48] Simone Collins: I guess that makes sense. Yeah. Yeah. People sort of, like, being angry because someone’s coming in and undercutting them professionally. When they’re like, “What? I work for this,” and then there’s a bunch of tourists who [00:04:00] don’t actually need the money but just want a free dinner.

[00:04:02] Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Okay And who are like, “Well, I didn’t know I could just put nudes of myself online and people-” “... would give me money. Let’s, let’s do this.”

[00:04:08] Simone Collins: Oh, no.

[00:04:10] Malcolm Collins: I hear this one theory that OnlyFans was, like, predominantly paid for by dads to see their daughter’s friends. And I was like, “That is telling on yourself, buddy.”

[00:04:23] Simone Collins: That... Mm. Mm.

[00:04:25] Malcolm Collins: But maybe. I mean, I’ve, I’ve seen the movie, You still haven’t seen it. What, what’s it called? Beauty, beauty something. Oh.

[00:04:31] Simone Collins: American Beauty?

[00:04:32] Malcolm Collins: American Beauty, yeah.

[00:04:34] Simone Collins: Seems depressing. I don’t like depressing movies.

[00:04:36] Malcolm Collins: It’s not that depressing-

[00:04:39] Simone Collins: Mm ...

[00:04:40] Malcolm Collins: if I’m gonna be honest. Mostly because all of the characters are so pathetic and unlikable- Girl,

[00:04:45] Simone Collins: that sounds-

that you

[00:04:45] Malcolm Collins: don’t really feel bad for them.

[00:04:47] Simone Collins: I don’t wanna watch something about pathetic, unlikel- I’m, I’m really struggling- It’s, it’s a movie about- ... with TV and movies right now ... the birth of the urban

[00:04:52] Malcolm Collins: monoculture, if you, if you wanna call it anything.

[00:04:55] Simone Collins: Why would I want to watch that?

[00:04:56] Malcolm Collins: And how it destroys people’s lives.

[00:04:58] Simone Collins: I wanna watch attractive, competent people who are good at their jobs. Is this so hard to do? Is this so difficult?

[00:05:05] Malcolm Collins: But to continue here. Modern people don’t fully realize, but paying for a date isn’t providing, it’s confirmation that you can provide. Mm. It isn’t trad, it’s low-grade prostitution and always has been.

Dating is paying for companionship with sex as an unspoken bonus. The old criticism that men would expect sex if they took out a woman was fair, but it ignores the truth that the reason men expected this wasn’t because they were jerks or sexist, but because that is what dating was about. What’s really fun is, so when I dove into this, and, and this is one of these topics where I’m just not gonna be able to read all the primary sources I wanted to read on this, ‘cause there was just so much evidence on this.

But there was one academic research that cited a guy from the 1920s, I think it was, like, 1925, talking about how he paid, like, $1.50 for a girl, and she didn’t even let him do any heavy petting. Oh, dear. And that was the expectation, and he was quite upset about this

[00:06:08] Simone Collins: Huh, $1.50

[00:06:11] Malcolm Collins: That is how it went back then. But basically all of this is confirmed, and it’s dramatically worse than you think, exactly like yesterday when somebody reached out to you.

Today, we treat long-term dating as a precursor to marriage, but it’s not. The difference is in the commitment. If two people act as fully committed, then they’re married regardless of paperwork. Modern dating, though, is long-term persistent companionship without commitment. It’s harsh, but long-term low-commitment dating is just prostitution, always has been.

I’d agree with this. If you treat dating in the conventional format, it’s very unlikely to lead to marriage. If you look at the way that Simone and I dated I sat her down first date, what’d I say?

[00:06:51] Simone Collins: Not looking to date. I’m looking to find a wife. That is what you said. Yeah. You really, I guess, weren’t dating.

You were wife hunting.

[00:06:59] Malcolm Collins: Yeah.

[00:07:01] Simone Collins: Wow. Okay. Yeah.

[00:07:05] Malcolm Collins: Mm-hmm. And it meant that everything was structured very differently.

[00:07:08] Simone Collins: It did.

[00:07:09] Malcolm Collins: And the way you thought about every step was very different because it was, we are waiting to see if you clear being good enough to be a wife for me. Mm-hmm.

[00:07:19] Simone Collins: Mm.

[00:07:20] Malcolm Collins: But let’s dig in In the social context of dating this is by the way Wikipedia I am reading, lefty coded Wikipedia- Okay

brainwashed Wikipedia here. Dating, treating is the practice of com- providing companionship and intimate activity in exchange for entertainment, outing, gifts, and other items of monetary value. The activity was prevalent in large areas of the United States from the 1890s to the 1940s, and was commonly engaged in by young working class women.

As treating became more widespread, the activity acquired the label charity, and young women who engaged in the more risque [00:08:00] aspects of the practice often became called charity girls. Although some reformers in the early 20th century equated treating with prostitution, the young women who engaged in the activity strongly rejected this view and drew strict distinctions between the two, as women still do.

Doesn’t mean they are different, it just means they draw distinctions between the two. Oh, no. In the same way for Mormons, butt smex isn’t smex because it’s in the butt. And everyone else in the world is like, “That’s still smex.” Right. As social dating between the sexes became more standard in the 1920s, treating began to blend in with the system of dating by the 1940s.

No, we just stopped treating it as a social taboo is what happened. The specific language of treating largely disappeared. This was by the 1940s. So when you see those sweet dating scenes in those 1950 Leave it to Beaver or whatever, that had only become normalized 10 years before those scenes took place, and only had begun to become thought of as something other than prostitution 10 years before those scenes took place

[00:09:14] Simone Collins: That’s really crazy. I mean, ‘cause I, I, I don’t know, I thought it was more traditional than that. Well, both because I saw all those instructional videos on dating from the 1950s and ‘60s. Yeah. But then also because I guess I never really thought through the realities of the London season, because in the Regency Era, there was what you could think of as a dating culture, because a certain elite class of society would converge in London and then have this series of events where everyone would be getting together.

But it’s actually really not. It’s not two people getting together for a private meeting.

[00:09:50] Malcolm Collins: Yeah.

[00:09:51] Simone Collins: It was families hosting balls, where a bunch of people would come and be in a room together, super, super highly supervised, and then women of marriageable age would a- wait for men to come visit them at their houses- Exactly

with, with their families around In their,

[00:10:08] Malcolm Collins: in their living room with their families around. Yeah. And most of the communication happened via letter.

[00:10:13] Simone Collins: Mm-hmm. Yeah, if, if anything was private, it was in a letter. That’s... Wow, I, I just, it never occurred to me that this idea of one-on-one male-female romantic meetings really didn’t exist until the ‘50s.

And I guess that’s because in the ‘50s it would seem too creepy- ... to do cu- like, arranged marriage. But at the same time- I don’t know, the communities had gotten too big for just people to marry whoever was at church. What, what do you think?

[00:10:50] Malcolm Collins: No, no, no. I, I, I think that this has all specifically come down of the evolving urban monoculture in its earliest stages, ‘cause that’s really when the urban monoculture began to evolve with this idea of, “But I want to hook up with women, and if I don’t do this, I don’t get to hook up with women.”

And as soon as a woman began to engage in charity girl culture, men outside of charity girl culture are going to have a harder time hooking up with her or are going to see her as worthless. But more and more women realize they can hook up with men who are out of their range for periods by engaging in charity girl culture.

[00:11:28] Simone Collins: Hmm.

[00:11:30] Malcolm Collins: This was the beginning of the, you know, 20% of men get 80% of women category.

[00:11:36] Simone Collins: So you’re arguing, similar to demographic collapse, and everyone’s like, “Oh, it was all caused by phones and social media,” and you’re like, “Look, this started with the Industrial Revolution.” You’re kind of saying something similar- Mm-hmm

with the laziate problem of, of dating, the, the broken dating markets. You’re like, “No, it began as soon as dating existed.”

[00:11:56] Malcolm Collins: And the 19 flappers. It wasn’t the [00:12:00] smartphones. Well, really the 1920s those women started doing this. But everyone- Yeah ... understood it was a bad idea then.

[00:12:03] Simone Collins: Oh, the flapper era. Yeah, everyone knew that flappers were loose girls.

Anyway, but yeah, then I guess it became socially

[00:12:09] Malcolm Collins: acceptable. Disgusting flappers. We will rebuild society, Simone, you and me alone with the force of sheer willpower- ... until we build something that works to replace this nonsense.

[00:12:21] Simone Collins: All of it. All of it.

[00:12:23] Malcolm Collins: We will replace you. That’s the family motto.

[00:12:28] Simone Collins: Framed in our sunroom.

Great.

[00:12:31] Malcolm Collins: Gotta tell the kids.

[00:12:33] Simone Collins: True.

[00:12:33] Malcolm Collins: We really gotta w- wanna get the other one, repeated blunt force, framed somewhere in a live, laugh, love. I would

[00:12:37] Simone Collins: really like that. Yes. Let, let’s just do it. Oh, you’re right.

[00:12:39] Malcolm Collins: I’ll make a note.

[00:12:40] Simone Collins: Yeah. Thank you. Just send me an email and I’ll I’ll get it done. We’ll just order it from the same guy.

We should make merch someday.

[00:12:49] Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Okay, so- We will replace you signs ... I mean, but we have RFab. RFab’s kind of like our merch.

[00:12:53] Simone Collins: Yeah, but you can’t buy a stupid live, laugh, love picture frame that says, “We will replace you.” But whatever.

[00:13:01] Malcolm Collins: All right. So let’s get into the etymology and usage as determined by Wikipedia.

Yeah. The word treating began as a political term with the practice of providing, understood as a means to influence people and gain benefits. In modern usage, it’s generally defined as the act of providing food, drink, or entertainment to an individual or group at free of charge. The word’s use as a verb in a social context is believed to have originated in the male sphere of saloons when individuals would treat each other with another round of drinks.

Yeah,

[00:13:28] Simone Collins: my treat.

[00:13:28] Malcolm Collins: Arou- yeah. Around the turn of the 19th century, young working class women who were seeking language for their interactions and bartering with young men adopted the word. Similar to the activity in a saloon, the practice of to treat evolved to mean providing of something by a man to a woman, the woman being the recipient of a, quote-unquote, “treat.”

And I think one thing that we can do immediately in terms of a cultural difference is to begin to stigmatize women expecting men to pay for dates for them.

[00:14:01] Simone Collins: Absolutely. Dates should always be 50/50. Or better

[00:14:04] Malcolm Collins: yet, free. You always went 50/50 with me, or you always asked to at least. I often insisted on paying because I saw it as traditional.

[00:14:10] Simone Collins: You often insisted as the gentleman. Yeah, you paid for our very first dinner even. Yeah. You, you almost always insisted. But

[00:14:14] Malcolm Collins: I think treating it as non-traditional is really important. Being like, “No, traditionally this would be thought of as you being a prostitute. And so I want to protect your dignity within the techno-puritan community.”

[00:14:26] Simone Collins: Right. “

[00:14:26] Malcolm Collins: As such, I will not pay for you because that would mean that everyone would see you as a prostitute going forward.”

[00:14:33] Simone Collins: Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. You don’t want there to be any insinuation of impropriety, and if there is... And, and also I think it’s, it’s important to teach kids that every exchange, y- you- there is no such thing as a free lunch.

If someone is giving you something, they want something. And it could just be, you know, the delight of seeing you grateful a, for a gift or something. But if it, if it is a romantic context meal and they are paying for it- Mm-hmm ... they are expecting something. And it... I, I wish that people were more explicit with me about that when I was younger

[00:15:06] Malcolm Collins: You are such a, a sweet person.

B- Too autistic sometimes I’m glad I’m here to protect you, because you, you need somebody to protect you from the world. Your autismal view of reality, the tism really makes you like a little lamb wandering out into- ... a sea of wolves.

[00:15:23] Simone Collins: Not understanding. Look, the more of us there are, the closer we’ll just get to a sustainable wonderful society that makes sense where everyone just says what they think- The tisems?

and feel. Yes.

[00:15:33] Malcolm Collins: Well, you gotta breed the army.

[00:15:35] Simone Collins: Look, do you understand how much better everything would be if people didn’t... It’s, it’s like the, what were the, who were those people in Galaxy Quest who were shocked by this concept of lying, and they, like, whispered amongst each other-

[00:15:47] Malcolm Collins: Yeah, I remember those aliens

“This heat, lies.” That’s you. That is 100% Simone.

[00:15:51] Simone Collins: Yes. And then they, like, don’t understand it, but they understand that it happens, but they never see it, and it’s really hard.

[00:15:57] Speaker 9: . My name is Jason Nesmith. I am a a- [00:16:00] actor. We’re all actors. He doesn’t understand. Explain as you would a child

We lied.

[00:16:18] Simone Collins: I

[00:16:19] Malcolm Collins: love that our kids have your radical honesty but are still, like, very rough people. Yes. I was recently watching the Kidnap the Sandy Claws song with the little trick-or-treat kids- Oh my God

from the N- Nightmare Before Christmas. Yes. And I realized the way those three interact is the way our kids interact.

I wanna do it. Let’s draw straws. Jack said we should work together. Three of a kind

[00:16:42] Malcolm Collins: Like, very much teamwork, but also constantly, like, ragging on each other and being quite rough with each other.

[00:16:50] Simone Collins: 100%, yeah. And just the way Titan always attacks from above. She’s so little.

Yeah. But when she hits you, it’ll be from above somehow.

[00:16:59] Malcolm Collins: All right, let’s, let’s go over the origin of this.

[00:17:01] Simone Collins: Let’s.

[00:17:02] Malcolm Collins: This is fascinating. Treating came about with the birth of leisure time in the late 19th century. Hmm. It emerged about the same time as cheap amusements in cities gave working class men and women opportunities to enjoy new aspects of city life away from cramped tenements and noisy oppressive workplaces.

Hmm. For young women, the issue was how to afford the new entertainments, and one solution which materialized was treating. In the late 19th century, inexpensive entertainment venues such as public dance halls, amusement parks, and Nickelodeon movie theaters emerged and flourished in large American cities.

At the same time, changing social morals allowed more young women who previously had to be escorted in public more freedom to go about or on their own in same-sex groups. Although cheap amusements were a major draw, going out for young working class women still proved difficult due to their low wages, a portion of which- Was more often than not handed over to support the family.

The lack of money issue was dealt with in various ways. Some women refrained from going out altogether or limited going out to special occasions, while others depended on friends or their male counterparts to finance the entertainment pleasures. Inevitably, as more young women regularly went out and found it necessary to depend on males for their entertainment and fun, as such, the practice of treating by young working class women emerged.

So this involves a few things that are worth just helping people understand. First, the idea of, like, entertainment that you could just spend a bit of money on and enjoy with other people really did not emerge until this period. There is a perception that it was always around, and it was not always around.

Really the first major innovation that allowed for this was Britain’s penny trains. So for one day a week, what would happen is the trains would run for a penny, and people would use this to go from their city to the very first, as they began to develop and evolve vacation towns, often beaches and stuff like that.

And this is where you begin to have this idea of, oh, I can pay a little bit, like even as a working class person, and do a recreational activity. Then, as I talked about a, a, a nickelodeon, if you’re not familiar with it, is you, you pay a nickel and you’d see a movie. Basically meant the movie theater of this period.

[00:19:24] Simone Collins: Often preceded by newsreels, so it’s how you also knew what was happening in the world.

[00:19:28] Malcolm Collins: Yes. And you had public dance halls where some of them were truly public, but most of them you paid. And this was very different than, like, the, the dance halls of the, the olden days where it would be, like, arranged by a family and everyone would come and you’d receive your, you know, “Oh, I got my invitation to the ball.”

You didn’t need an invitation to these balls often. You just go and dance. And so, many of these activities... And then amusement parks as well. This is where you have the, like, the original Coney Island began to be developed. Oh, [00:20:00] wow. This is where you had the spin-up of things like freak shows.

This is where you had circuses really began to roll out en masse. The idea of, of, of an activity, right? And the idea of an activity really began to develop because of, do you know, Simone? We’ve talked about it before.

[00:20:20] Simone Collins: The Industrial Revolution? What, what? No, we already talked about- The

[00:20:22] Malcolm Collins: rise of wage labor for the first time.

[00:20:25] Simone Collins: Oh yeah, so the Industrial Revolution. Yeah, the fact that, like, people had these jobs, and you would go to it, and then I guess starting in the early 1900s, you started to get a S- a f- a Saturday, or no, sorry, a Sunday off, and then you would get a Saturday off. Yeah. Yeah,

[00:20:39] Malcolm Collins: and you’d have money. Mm-hmm. And before that just wasn’t the way it worked.

Mm-hmm. All- everyone’s household would be their own business, and you- Yeah ... would naturally reinvest any additional capital into the family business. Of

[00:20:47] Simone Collins: course. Of course.

[00:20:49] Malcolm Collins: But now you had men leaving their families to go work in the city, right? And this didn’t really exist before this, as we’ve often said.

The idea of a nuclear family really didn’t exist until, like, the 1920s because wage labor didn’t exist until the 1920s in, in masses.

Mm.

And women, even when they did work, which, you know, often was incredibly a limited opportunity for them, they earned dramatically less than men. Now, why this isn’t the case today, it was the case then.

So if they wanted to participate in these activities, they genuinely needed men to pay for them or their family to pay for them, and many women coming from working class families asking the family was not realistic. But these working class young men now had free cash, which was something they didn’t have historically.

Now, if you still do this today in a society where men earn the same amount of women, which they do, everybody who is watching this, if you haven’t seen people debunk the pay gap myth, I don’t know where you’ve been on the internet since the last 20 years. Like, that there’s still people I’ve heard sometimes say this, and I’m like, “What are you talking about?”

Oh,

[00:21:54] Simone Collins: no, anyone who’s progressive is gonna say, especially progressive and, and females are just gonna

[00:21:59] Malcolm Collins: keep saying it. Young women earn more than young men now.

[00:22:02] Simone Collins: Look, it doesn’t matter. They’re s- going, they’ll, they are still going to say it. It doesn’t matter.

[00:22:06] Malcolm Collins: They’re just brainwashed. They don’t care what’s true.

They just

[00:22:11] Simone Collins: wanna say the thing. Well, and it’s probably going to become increasingly less of a pay gap as fewer women have children because that was the largest driver of the pay gap, because women were just choosing lower paying but more flexible jobs as they entered parenthood. But if girls just relinquish parenthood at increasingly higher rates, we are gonna see an even lower, like, actual pay gap when you don’t adjust for that choice.

[00:22:33] Malcolm Collins: Yeah. The the practice of treating ranged from the innocent bartered exchange to more scandalous. It was seen as a harmless activity when conducted between a steady couple, and more risque when performed on a casual basis.

Hmm.

Often, the treating exchange was a tacit understanding with nuanced communication.

However, even with little communication, young women were understood that they were indebted to a certain extent to the men who treated. Like any interaction between a couple, whether tacit or not, sometimes it went smoothly with each party pleased with the outcomes, and other times it did not.

Occasionally, because men were sometimes tricked by women who skipped out after being provided a meal or an evening out, the exchange was more direct. For example di- a man asking directly what he would get in return. Unlike prostitution, in the treating exchange, there was no guarantee that the man would get what he wanted.

Young women who wanted more from the exchange, clothes, shoes, jewelry, or payment of bills... Note this even began to develop all the way back then.

[00:23:35] Simone Collins: Payment of bills?

[00:23:37] Malcolm Collins: Did you not know that a lot of, in, in like the Black women community this is super common? Then

[00:23:41] Simone Collins: you’re a kept woman. That doesn’t, you’re not...

[00:23:44] Malcolm Collins: What, this is common in dating culture today if you’re not dating white people. I have seen Latina women expect this. I have seen Black women expect this in TikToks and stuff like this. Like, the, the expectation goes like this. I’ll explain how they argue it.

[00:23:58] Simone Collins: Okay.

[00:23:59] Malcolm Collins: They say, “Do [00:24:00] you know how much I spend doing my hair?

Do you know how much I spend on my mails, my nails? Do you know how much I spend on my makeup?”

[00:24:06] Simone Collins: Dudes don’t care about that.

[00:24:08] Malcolm Collins: No, men don’t, but they believe that they’re owed for it.

[00:24:14] Simone Collins: Why don’t they just say, “Maybe don’t do that anymore”?

[00:24:17] Malcolm Collins: I’m sure a lot of men do, but then the women stop dating them

[00:24:24] Simone Collins: They should probably be cucking them Because

[00:24:24] Malcolm Collins: there’s other men in these minority communities who will pay for this nonsense.

[00:24:28] Simone Collins: That’s, you, you know what? Men need to go on a strike. They need to they need to go on a pay strike.

[00:24:33] Malcolm Collins: I, I, I will- Don’t do this ... say that what makes Simone shocked about this is if you are a middle upper class or upper class white person in America, at least within our generation, nobody...

If you’re, like, shocked by this, that, that I would say that, like, this is a weird thing to do, nobody does that. Nobody does that. If a woman asked me to pay for her bills, I would... And I remember once a woman did, but she called herself a sort of prostitute when she said it, right? Like, she understood that in our culture, in American white culture, that’s seen as prostitution, to ask a man to pay for your bills.

[00:25:10] Simone Collins: Was this in college? When wa- when did this happen to you?

[00:25:12] Malcolm Collins: This was after college. It was a girl I met on OkCupid.

[00:25:16] Simone Collins: Wow. Okay. What did you say to her? Was that the end of your-

[00:25:22] Malcolm Collins: Oh, yeah. That was the last time I dated her ... liaison? I was like, “I don’t- Okay ... I don’t, I’m not really interested in this.” But I appreciate that she was really upfront about it.

[00:25:27] Simone Collins: No, the upfront, yeah. No, I mean, that’s, that’s really clear. I mean, as I’m thinking about this more in the context of the, like, dating videos that were presumably played in middle schools and high schools in American institutions in the ‘50s, the, the kind of dating that was described there was more like play dating.

That, you know, it was you know, you, you would be going just out for fun, typically in group settings, public places, with a young man from your school, but it was only considered serious if you were going steady. And it was fully understood that you would not be having sex. That, w- like, it was super clear.

Mm-hmm. Th- this is, so I guess it was kind of understood that- Yeah,

[00:26:09] Malcolm Collins: but, but even in the 1950s videos, I remember them telling you to, like, pay for the girl’s lunch or dinner.

[00:26:14] Simone Collins: Yeah. No, that, that is true. Yeah. Men were, were expected to pay, which is interesting.

[00:26:21] Malcolm Collins: And if you go to the 1920s to continue with this, how was that seen?

Hmm. Treating was predominantly practiced by young working class women. It was seldom taken up by young women of middle class or upper class means, as members of those classes generally could afford their own entertainment. Right. So you see, this was seen as a low class thing to do the, very exclusively.

[00:26:38] Simone Collins: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, ‘cause I guess, yeah, if you are a wealthy woman of means, it would be kind of pathetic for you to let someone else- Yeah,

[00:26:48] Malcolm Collins: To have your family not pay for you, right?

[00:26:49] Simone Collins: Wow. Yeah. Hmm.

[00:26:51] Malcolm Collins: The activity was largely confined to large urban areas of the United States, as cities contained with entertainment val- venues and offers, as well as a degree of anonymity against prying family members and watchful neighbors.

Treating differed from gold digging in that there was mainly a dating practice utilized to enjoy the entertainments and pleasures of city life, and to acquire perhaps some desired personal items. To be sure, some women took charity a step further, but finding a wealthy man to marry or becoming a mistress was generally not the goal of the treating exchange.

[00:27:27] Simone Collins: Hmm.

[00:27:28] Malcolm Collins: Now, treating this as a societal problem. As the practice of treating by young women became more and more widely known, it attracted the attention of reformers and vice squads who were alarmed by the activity. I was reading, and me, like military bases, they explicitly had patrols for women who were doing this.

It was considered-

[00:27:46] Simone Collins: Really?

[00:27:47] Malcolm Collins: Yes. I

[00:27:48] Simone Collins: mean, it sounds kind of like the patrols that you’ll see in a super orthodox Jewish community as well, that’ll kind of police dress codes and stuff.

[00:27:55] Malcolm Collins: Yeah. N- n- nothing less than outright prostitution. [00:28:00] Entertainment venues such as dance halls, where young men and women interacted, came under close scrutiny.

Hmm. The taxi dance halls, where the young women hostesses could be danced with for a modest price per dance, usually 10 cents-

[00:28:12] Simone Collins: Oh ...

[00:28:13] Malcolm Collins: drew the particular ire of reformers and were shut down.

[00:28:16] Simone Collins: That sounds like a host club. Hold on. That is, that is like a proto-host club. What is going on?

[00:28:20] Malcolm Collins: I need to know more about this.

[00:28:21] Simone Collins: Yes.

[00:28:22] Malcolm Collins: We’re going to the Wikipedia game for a taxi dancer.

[00:28:24] Simone Collins: Yes.

[00:28:25] Malcolm Collins: Okay.

[00:28:25] Simone Collins: Taxi dancer. I’ve never heard of this before. But okay, so it’s like you rent a taxi, you’re renting a dancer, and that’s why they called them taxi dancers? Yes. Okay.

[00:28:35] Malcolm Collins: Hmm. A taxi dancer is a dance, a paid dance partner in ballroom dance. The taxi dancers work sometimes for money, but not always, on a dance-by-dance basis.

When taxi dancing first appeared in taxi dance halls in the early 20th century in the United States, male patrons typically brought dance tickets for a small sum each. When a patron presented a ticket to a chosen dancer, she danced with him for the length of the song. She earned a commission on every dance ticket she received.

Though taxi dancing was for, for the most part disappeared in the United States, it’s still practiced in some other countries.

[00:29:10] Simone Collins: It’s called a strip club

[00:29:12] Malcolm Collins: It has its origins in the Barbary Coast District of San Francisco, which evolved from the California Gold Rush of 1849. Oh. In its heyday on the Barbary Coast, it was an economically thriving district inhabited by mostly men who, who...

frequented by gold prospectors and sailors from around the world. The district created a unique form of dance hall called the Barbary Coast Dance Hall known as the 49ers Dance Hall, in which Barbary Coast Dance Hall female employees danced with male patrons and earned their living from commissions paid for the, the drinks they would encourage their male partners to buy.

So exactly like a host club. It was about-

[00:29:48] Simone Collins: It was a host club. Oh my God. We did it first. Yes. Okay. That’s crazy. It makes sense, of course. In, in communities like, I’m sure mining communities and others, if you don’t wanna go all full brothel, something like this. It’s also more affordable to pay for a dance than to pay for more than that.

[00:30:09] Malcolm Collins: Okay, so here’s what it felt like to do. Okay. So you’d go and you’d buy a collection of tickets, right? Mm-hmm. And in the hall, the taxi dancers were usually gathered together behind a waist-high rope or rail barricade on one side in the corner of the room- Oh ... and as such, were not permitted to freely mingle with the patrons.

Because the male patron selected his dance partner, the dancers had to appeal to him for their quar- from their quarantined position. These are like, like, like

[00:30:35] Simone Collins: cattle This produced a

[00:30:36] Malcolm Collins: competitive... Like cattle, like a competitive situation, and on slow nights, which were not uncommon, the taxi dancers often cooed or coaxed to draw attention in their direction because they got commissions.

[00:30:47] Simone Collins: Oh.

[00:30:48] Malcolm Collins: In time, and with more experience, a dancer usually developed some sort of distinctiveness or mannerisms in their dress or personality to attract a male patron. Those who did not were often not successful. Once selected, yeah, they’d be like the ditzy one or the aggressive one.

[00:31:02] Simone Collins: Yeah, or the yandere one or the-

[00:31:05] Malcolm Collins: Yeah

[00:31:05] Simone Collins: aloof one. And yeah, okay, okay, okay. Hmm.

[00:31:09] Malcolm Collins: Once selected, the taxi dancer tried to build a rapport with her patron so he stayed with her dance after dance. Successful- Host club. Taxi dancers usually had a few patrons who came to the hall solely to dance with them- Mm-hmm ... for long periods.

[00:31:23] Simone Collins: Host club.

[00:31:24] Malcolm Collins: In some of the less reputable establishments, the dancing at times was particularly close.

The dancer used her thighs to make the partner erect and encouraged to continue, e- e- even.

[00:31:37] Simone Collins: Well, okay, so they’re taking it a little far.

[00:31:41] Malcolm Collins: That’s a fascinating practice

TIL, right?

[00:31:46] Simone Collins: That’s

[00:31:46] Malcolm Collins: crazy So patrons who tired of dancing but wished to continue with the dance partner usually could do so. A selection in the dance hall with tables, chairs was reserved for this purpose. It was called talk time, [00:32:00] although other terms were used. In 1939, , at the Honey Lane Danceland in Times Square, the free to sit and chat with a dancer was $6 an hour, a princely sum for the time.

At Honeymoon, although the dancer and patron were able to sit side by side, a low fence-like structure separated them due to public regulations. It was not uncommon for taxi dancers to date patrons they had met in the dance halls, and this was generally acquiesced by management

[00:32:31] Simone Collins: Hmm Hmm. I don’t know about this Malcolm, but-

[00:32:41] Malcolm Collins: That is interesting.

[00:32:44] Simone Collins: I had no idea. Why has no one mentioned this before? This is so interesting.

[00:32:48] Malcolm Collins: The sociological study. Oh my God. So the sociological study goes over the, the language that they use, like the slang that they use. So here’s some fun ones, okay? They

[00:32:57] Simone Collins: had slang. Okay.

[00:33:00] Malcolm Collins: A black and tan, a colored and white cabaret, buying the groceries, living in a clandestine relationship.

Class, the term used by Filipinos to denote taxi dance halls. Fish, a man whom the girls can easily- I’m going to class ... exploit for personal gain. Fruit, an easy mark. Hot stuff, stolen goods. Lineup, the immorality engaged in by men and a girl. Make, to secure a date with. Mark, a person who is gullible.

Money chaser, a man interested in taxi dancers or quiet girls. Oh,

sorry. Monkey chaser.

[00:33:36] Simone Collins: Oh.

[00:33:36] Malcolm Collins: Monkey shows, burlesque shows by chorus girls. A nickel hopper, a taxi dancer. A nickel hopper.

[00:33:44] Simone Collins: Nickel hoppers. Dancing for a nickel. That’s great. A nickel hopper.

[00:33:48] Malcolm Collins: On the ebony. This is when you dated outside your race with taxi dancers.

[00:33:52] Simone Collins: Oh. Oh my goodness

[00:33:56] Malcolm Collins: Picking up, securing after a dance engagement with a taxi dancer.

A punk, a n- n- a noviate or uninitiated youth or girl usually referring to an unsophisticated taxi dancer.

[00:34:08] Simone Collins: Hmm. One who doesn’t have her whole spiel yet.

[00:34:13] Malcolm Collins: That is, that is wild. I’m glad we went over that.

[00:34:16] Simone Collins: That is so crazy. I am delighted, yes. Wonderful.

[00:34:20] Malcolm Collins: Okay, okay, okay. So, the next best place I found an article on this, ‘cause I found, like, 30 different articles on this.

And let’s go to the shop girl. This is from a New York Post article on this.

[00:34:33] Simone Collins: Okay.

[00:34:35] Malcolm Collins: We- th- this- it, it, it goes to the, the shop girl here, which is sort of going to the next phase of this. When, while dating finally became acceptable, it wasn’t exactly liberating for women. If the American dream for men was to work and become a success, the equivalent for women was to get a good job and marry a rich boss.

Frances Donovan, a University of Chicago trained sociologist who taught at Camelot High School on the city’s South Side in the 1920s, interviewed senior girls about their plans after graduation. Before I go further, that’s what you did, Simone. You got a good job and married your boss. That’s what every woman needs to do.

[00:35:11] Simone Collins: There you go.

[00:35:13] Malcolm Collins: I mean, we started the company together, but obviously because women are naturally subservient, you started in a subservient role

I’m only saying what we all know. I mean, come on.

[00:35:24] Simone Collins: It’s just the truth. It’s just the truth.

[00:35:28] Malcolm Collins: Weigler writes, “’I would like to be a stenographer,’ one wrote. ‘I’m going to be an executive secretary and marry the boss,’ another wrote. The other alternative was for women to take jobs in high-class department stores where rich men were likely to shop.

These women were known as shop girls.” Oh, fascinating, and I love the idea of becoming a secretary specifically to hook up with whoever hires you, right? Like, when you are going for your job interviews, you’re literally thinking, “Do I wanna have sex with this man?”[00:36:00]

That is wild. And also the idea of, “Well, how do I find a rich man? I’ll go to work at an upper class store.” And I think it’s, this is why there was that really hard for women to get jobs at upper class stores for a period.

[00:36:14] Simone Collins: Mm.

[00:36:14] Malcolm Collins: Because women went there to hook up.

[00:36:16] Simone Collins: Yeah. Yeah, it was this competitive place, and also probably, like, women would basically work for free just to get the opportunity, the access.

[00:36:24] Malcolm Collins: And became shop girls, as they were called. Oh

[00:36:26] Simone Collins: my goodness.

[00:36:27] Malcolm Collins: Donovan spent two summers working at a department store to research a book, and later reported she knew of several marriages and heard of a great many more where the husband was far above the wife as measured by economic scale. Magazines began, are, are running articles such as How Shop Girls Win Rich Husbands.

As an in-house newsletter for Macy’s employees in New York included a gossip column that tracked these courtships.

[00:36:53] Simone Collins: They... Oh, they were just that explicit about it. They’re like, “Okay, girls.”

[00:36:58] Malcolm Collins: This

[00:36:58] Simone Collins: is what we’re here for. “Go get rich men.” Wow. I mean, I guess it would be in their favor because it attracted very appealing young women to work there, and they probably worked at under market wages, so that’s great.

[00:37:13] Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Here’s a quote from one of the this, this internal magazine. I love it’s their internal company newsletter. Like, PR is like, “This makes it...” W- w- HR is like, “This makes us look great. This’ll help with retention.” So an example of what was written in it is, “Have you noticed a gentleman wearing spats stopping at Miss Holland’s counter every day, leaving spray of Lily of the Valley?

Best of luck, Ide.”

[00:37:41] Simone Collins: Adorable. Aw.

[00:37:43] Malcolm Collins: In order to attract rich men, shop girls were caught by the irony of needing to buy expensive items they sold- Hmm ... or needing to buy the expensive items they sold. In an odd way, the consumerist market marketed a form of progress. “In an earlier era, a girl of humble origins could not hope to look the, like the wife or daughter of a millionaire,” Weigel wrote.

“But a job in a department store or a laundry gave anyone opportunities to become well-versed in the science of wealth.” To that end, shop girls studied the well-to-do female customers seeking to imitate their look, which led to the business world to pronounce this a new type of consumer who sought little but to impress.

The cosmetics industry exploded in the 1920s, writes, writes, “Previously only prostitutes and actresses painted.” Victorians had viewed natural outla- outer beauty as a sign of clean living, but around 1900 and more and more women were starting to apply cosmetics. By 1912, the Baltimore Sun reported that, “Even respectable society women are seen on our streets as fashionable promenade with painted faces.”

[00:38:50] Octavian Collins: Wow.

[00:38:51] Malcolm Collins: To counter society negative expectations with painted faces, the cosmetics industry invented a new term: makeup. Oh, so it was called face painting before, and then it became makeup.

[00:39:01] Simone Collins: I really wanna bring back painting faces. That’s, ‘cause it is. It’s, it, I mean, it, it just is.

[00:39:08] Malcolm Collins: Yeah. They, they basically tried to make it sound virtuous.

By making yourself up, you showed that you valued your femininity, right?

[00:39:14] Simone Collins: Hmm. Yeah. But no, y- you’d be painting, especially these days.

[00:39:21] Malcolm Collins: Oh, absolutely.

[00:39:21] Simone Collins: It’s intense. Yeah. This is a fine art.

[00:39:23] Malcolm Collins: This is, So again, other things we should shame people for.

[00:39:28] Simone Collins: Wearing makeup. It has its place. For instance. It has its place.

Even, even in w- we’ll say sort of the remaining w- noble classes of modern day, like the British royal family, you’re not s- to s- for example, supposed to paint your nails any color than, like, ballerina pink. So they’re basically supposed to look to look manicured, but you can’t, like, do any flashy nail colors.

But you should probably maintain manicured nails. But Queen [00:40:00] Elizabeth II always chose to wear very bright lipstick because it made her more photographable, and she understood that, like, being distinct in photos was important. So I think there’s a line to be drawn but yeah, it’s tough. Yes. Look, it would be really tough for young women- Mm

to not do makeup now that filters m- make them realize what they could look like.

[00:40:26] Malcolm Collins: Filters are providing the new again, we’re going through a similar transition right now.

[00:40:32] Simone Collins: What do you mean?

[00:40:33] Malcolm Collins: Well, it’s not just that you have OnlyFans mirroring the, the invention of dating, but you have filters mirroring the invention of makeup.

[00:40:44] Simone Collins: Oh.

[00:40:45] Malcolm Collins: The idea of Photoshopping yourself used to be seen as an incredibly trashy thing to do.

[00:40:51] Simone Collins: That’s true. Oh, my goodness. Right. I hadn’t thought about that.

[00:40:55] Malcolm Collins: This was in our lifetime, Simone.

[00:40:58] Simone Collins: Yeah, Photoshop disasters were an institution now. All

[00:41:01] Malcolm Collins: right. Now we’re gonna study, not discuss, study the it girl.

[00:41:07] Simone Collins: Oh. W- in the context of dating?

[00:41:10] Malcolm Collins: Two other now familiar concepts also sprung up around the time. Previously, people sought to be known by traits that emphasize their morality, such as character and virtue. The concept of personality, which places emphasis on surface traits, had been regarded as negative in reference term of personality disorders.

Starting around the 1920, however, Waggle writes, experts began to grant that healthy individuals had personalities, too. And not every- This is wild, this idea of wanting to be known for, like, a unique personality. This mirrors the invention of the VTuber

[00:41:45] Octavian Collins: Hmm.

[00:41:46] Malcolm Collins: Or even the YouTube star. Look at us, personality.

I’m a, what, what am I? A, a- A

[00:41:53] Simone Collins: taxi girl? A taxi dancer?

[00:41:55] Malcolm Collins: I’m a taxi dancer. You guys pay me to, to do the taxi dance.

[00:41:59] Simone Collins: And to dance.

[00:41:59] Malcolm Collins: The taxi dance with your brain.

[00:42:01] Simone Collins: The tax- oh, God.

[00:42:03] Malcolm Collins: Sign up for our Substack or Patreon to get your taxi dance this weekend.

[00:42:07] Simone Collins: Oh my God.

[00:42:08] Malcolm Collins: And we also have weekend episodes for...

[00:42:10] Simone Collins: I hate you.

I love you so much, but oh my God, no. But yes, the, the, the weekend episodes are really fun. Carry on.

[00:42:20] Malcolm Collins: The concept began popping up in romance literature and articles about dating in the sense that personality was like painting, in a way a woman could make herself up in order to appeal to men. So women began to develop personalities outside of their virtuousness or wholesomeness to appeal to men, and this, you know, eventually ended in the Manic Pixie Dream Girl, right?

But this is where it started. Hmm. “In the context of dating, to have a good personality or simply have a personality meant to have charisma,” Wagelle writes. This was to assert whether you were selling handkerchiefs or selling yourself. Island Gwyn, writing for the Cosmopolitan in 1926, referred to personality simply as, quote-unquote, “it,” which was, according to Wagelle, a mysterious kind of animal magnetism.

“With it,” Gwyn wrote, “you win all men if you are a woman.” Oh, it was rizz. “And all women if you are a man.”

[00:43:13] Simone Collins: Okay.

[00:43:14] Malcolm Collins: It’s gotten rizz, is what it is.

[00:43:16] Simone Collins: Yes. S- s- another single syllable word.

[00:43:21] Malcolm Collins: Rizz. Gwyn’s article was adapted for a movie starring Clara Brown as a shop girl who has it, and the concept of the-

[00:43:28] Simone Collins: I pictured the clown.

I was like, it? This is not... Okay, shop girl.

[00:43:34] Malcolm Collins: The concept of the it girl was born. Bowes’ it girl of course, sought to marry the boss. In this case, the son of the store’s owner. Oh my cucking God, women of this period ha- were shameless. The notion of

[00:43:48] Simone Collins: it- What, nothing is cha- what do you... Women of that period.

[00:43:50] Malcolm Collins: All women, sorry, awalt.

A Walt

[00:43:56] Simone Collins: Look, if men... Look, men are also hypergamous. [00:44:00] Everyone wants as good as you can get , possibly

[00:44:03] Malcolm Collins: Well, to marry. Women also want as good as they can get for men, while me- men will take anyone. And somehow for men this is, like, a major issue that women are this way. And then some men are like, “I would marry anyone.”

And I’m like, “Well, then you kinda suck.” You know?

[00:44:19] Simone Collins: I, I have never heard a man say that he would marry anyone.

[00:44:21] Malcolm Collins: I’ve never heard a man say that either. Yeah. He would pick- But, you

[00:44:24] Simone Collins: know, me

[00:44:24] Malcolm Collins: hanging out with successful men, so...

[00:44:26] Simone Collins: I... No, I, I genuinely think men, especially these days, are well inoculated to the, the potential hazards of proximity to women.

Well, I’ll

[00:44:37] Malcolm Collins: put a little clip here that will you know, help, help men understand what they should be looking for in a relationship.

[00:44:45] Simone Collins: Hmm?

[00:44:46] Malcolm Collins: Yeah, I’ll send it to you. You’ll, you’ll find it funny.

[00:44:48] Speaker 4: I love this tree, and I love this stick, and I love this mole- No, no, no. That’s not how it’s done. He’s

[00:44:53] Speaker 5: made for

[00:44:53] Speaker 3: her.

[00:44:53] Speaker 4: And she’s made for him.

[00:44:55] Speaker 3: That’s the way it’s always been.

And it’s perfect.

[00:44:58] Speaker 5: And it’s pure.

[00:44:59] Speaker 4: That’s the way that all love goes. Like a flower, it grows and grows.

[00:45:03] Speaker 5: And it’s forever. And forever.

[00:45:06] Speaker 3: And now we all worship our king. Our king. Huh? Our king. His name is Malcolm. Our king. He is

[00:45:15] Speaker 5: the king of love.

[00:45:16] Malcolm Collins: It even ends with talking about their king, Malcolm, the King of Love.

[00:45:20] Simone Collins: Oh, my God. Okay, great.

[00:45:23] Malcolm Collins: Right?

[00:45:23] Simone Collins: Fantastic.

Fantastic. I

[00:45:25] Malcolm Collins: do- I, I feel like I’m in a simulation. This has to be a simulation, ‘cause there’s no way that this keeps aligning like this.

[00:45:34] Simone Collins: Uncanny.

[00:45:34] Malcolm Collins: The notion it can be developed led... Sorry. The notion that it can be developed led to the origin of another phenomenon, the dating advice book. Weigel tells of a 1915 New York Times article on a lecture by author Susan Cockcroft, who seized on the trend by writing books like What to Eat and When, and this now remarkable title, Beauty and Duty.

I like that one.

[00:45:59] Simone Collins: Beauty and Duty. “

[00:46:00] Malcolm Collins: Beauty is no longer a vanity. It is a, a, it is use,” Crockett said. “A waitress or a shop girl can be fired at any time simply because someone her boss found prettier than her showed up and asked for a position.” I wish we lived in that world still. As dating rituals changed, moral authorities panicked at every turn.

After petting came into vogue in the 1920s, for example, Weigel cites a Times article from 1922 with the title Mothers Complain That Modern Girls Vamp Their Sons at Petting Parties. “Those evil, evil modern girls,” the article ends.

[00:46:39] Simone Collins: What on earth is a petting party? That sounds horrible. Well- No one would go to a petting party.

That’s... No. Nobody wants that. W-

[00:46:51] Malcolm Collins: i’m looking it up, Simone.

[00:46:53] Simone Collins: Don’t. You really don’t need to. I I think I’m good. I mean, like, the, the greatest fear I have of going to a party is that there may be physical contact of some sort. A party that revolves around physical contact-

[00:47:12] Malcolm Collins: Petting.

[00:47:13] Simone Collins: Mm.

[00:47:15] Malcolm Collins: Not good. Actually, I’m, I’m gonna g- I’m going to Grok for this one, ‘cause I want a long answer.

I wanna really gross you out. Oh,

[00:47:20] Simone Collins: great. No. Mm. ‘Cause

[00:47:21] Malcolm Collins: what, what people were doing in the 1920s, probably not that bad compared to what we grew up with in Silicon Valley, but okay.

[00:47:28] Simone Collins: Hopefully it’s just ‘cause they had those really fun tassels on their flapper dresses, and it was just like, “Let’s fondle the tassels.”

[00:47:36] Malcolm Collins: So petting itself was a flexible term, and it meant prolonged kissing. Oh. For others, it included more-

[00:47:42] Simone Collins: That’s not petting, that’s kissing. It’s a kissing part. Can people word correctly

[00:47:47] Malcolm Collins: publicly? For others, it involved more intimate touching. It was a sort of peer-supervised sexual experimentation that both encouraged experimentation and created clear limits.

It, yet lung, bl- young people [00:48:00] explore without the risk of pregnancy, venereal disease, or the social consequences of going all the way. The phrase entered popular use around the 1920s. F. Scott Fitzgerald famously described the great current American phenomenon of the get it petting party in his Side of Paradise.

Newspapers soon treated it as a national scandal. Mothers complained that modern girls were vamping with their sons at these events, and authorities sometimes sent deputies out to country lanes looking to break up couples in parked cars. The automobile was central. Parked jalopies on remote roads became rolling bedrooms.

Other regional names include necking parties, mushing parties, fussing parties, spooning, and snuggle pupping. It was extremely common. Contemporary studies found by 1924, roughly 92% of college women had tried petting, and more than 90% of young people at dance young people at dances or in cars admitted to hugging or kissing

[00:49:01] Simone Collins: It’s not even...

Oh, this was before bucket seats. So that explains a lot.

[00:49:08] Malcolm Collins: This was when you had bucket seats, which made it easy to do this.

[00:49:11] Simone Collins: No, no, no. No. Bucket seats are where you can’t scoot across. Oh,

[00:49:16] Malcolm Collins: yeah, yeah. Individual seats. Yeah, yeah. This was before. I’m sorry. This was when you had the one long seat. Yeah. Mm-hmm.

Really designed for sex.

[00:49:21] Simone Collins: Yeah. Like in a good old Chevy Malibu. And

[00:49:24] Malcolm Collins: cars

[00:49:24] Simone Collins: were

[00:49:24] Malcolm Collins: much wider, remember.

[00:49:25] Simone Collins: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Wow. Okay. And they were real bouncy. Do you remember how bouncy they were?

[00:49:32] Malcolm Collins: I haven’t been in one of these cars except for, like, in museums.

[00:49:36] Simone Collins: Oh. They’d be bouncy. They’re like s- There, there were springs involved.

So-

[00:49:41] Malcolm Collins: Well, for a reason.

[00:49:42] Simone Collins: For a re- Yeah. No, I guess teens just sat in those were like, “I can only think of one thing when sitting in this seat, and I’m going to be borrowing the car tonight.” That is disgusting. I do not like this. Dating is bad, and I disapprove of petting, fussing, necking, s- p- puppy- Mushing

m- m- manu- what? Spooning, puppy spooning, double reverse. What

[00:50:10] Malcolm Collins: was it? Snuggle pupping.

[00:50:11] Simone Collins: Snuggle pup. Snuggle pup. No. We do not snuggle- You

[00:50:16] Malcolm Collins: definitely disapprove of snuggle pupping.

[00:50:17] Simone Collins: I really disapprove of snuggle pupping. Oh, my goodness gracious. You are

[00:50:23] Malcolm Collins: such a Puritan woman. I found the perfect wife to- Yeah

found this, this new cultural movement with. We will recreate the London season. This is gonna be awesome.

[00:50:33] Simone Collins: It really is. I, I’m looking forward to it. Yeah. If you’re

[00:50:37] Malcolm Collins: interested

[00:50:37] Simone Collins: in having your kids- Shout-outs to everyone

[00:50:38] Malcolm Collins: on our list ... in our dating network, please reach out to us. I would love to bring them on board.

Another thing that I’d note is do not mourn the collapse of dating markets. They were always degenerate. We have to create something new. We have to create something better.

[00:50:50] Simone Collins: Yeah, that’s, this is a very, like, white-pilled episode in the end, ‘cause they were never meant to be. Dating is disgusting. It’s worse than pros- It really is worse than prostitution.

Because the great thing about prostitution is you have a clear social contract with real value being ex- exchanged. And the problem is that dating is... It doesn’t only undermine those clear social contracts, but it, it intentionally introduces huge, vast swaths of ambiguity where there isn’t strong communication around the exchange that’s being agreed upon for an assignation.

Someone could assume that dinner is going to buy them Snuggle pupping when the other one thinks that it’s going to just, you know, be paid for with a hug or a peck on the cheek. And that is really bad You know, a lot of

[00:51:43] Malcolm Collins: women have developed the idea that they are just owed by the fact of being women, by the fact of showing up at a dinner-

[00:51:50] Simone Collins: Yeah, their, their

[00:51:52] Malcolm Collins: mere company

that’s their gift to the man.

[00:51:53] Simone Collins: Yeah. That them staring blankly at their phone for the majority of the dinner, but allegedly looking good [00:52:00] beneath their caked on contour makeup, their drag queen makeup. They

[00:52:04] Malcolm Collins: don’t even look that good.

[00:52:06] Simone Collins: Well, you really don’t like a, a makeup look so-

[00:52:10] Malcolm Collins: Yeah ...

[00:52:11] Simone Collins: there’s that. Well,

[00:52:13] Malcolm Collins: I love you, Simone.

Sorry.

[00:52:17] Simone Collins: Your alarm- ... this is why you co- you don’t wake up. You, you, you have the most relaxing alarm sounds. Like, this is what people listen to in spas when they’re trying to fall asleep or getting massage. I’m waking up these days. I’m,

[00:52:26] Malcolm Collins: I’m-

[00:52:27] Simone Collins: And you’re like, “I’m gonna set-” I’ve had an easy time- Yeah, I think you’re doing that naturally

[00:52:31] Malcolm Collins: because I have stopped eating, and it’s really helped me wake up early.

[00:52:35] Simone Collins: This, this is a very disturbing trend. I’m gonna thaw out some steak so that you’re gonna have to eat, because then you’re like, “I can’t waste good steak.”

[00:52:43] Malcolm Collins: Good. You get on that. But tonight I’m skipping.

[00:52:47] Simone Collins: Are you serious? I- It’s been how many days?

[00:52:51] Malcolm Collins: It’s been since the miscarriage. I just haven’t been hungry since then

So I’ll be fine. I, I, I just will get through it, and I am emotionally adjusting. Mm-hmm.

I’ll g- I’ll get- I’ll be fine. I’ll be fine Mm-hmm. Ish. Maybe anyway, for our fans I would really like to have you guys,

[00:53:27] Simone Collins: Let’s join the index. Just email us if you wanna be

[00:53:29] Malcolm Collins: on our list Oh, yeah. That or if you want to explore what it would’ve been like to go on a date during this period or to go to one of these parties or to exist within this changing part of world history, this is one of the things that Reality Fabricator, rfab.ai, would be really good for.

That’s true. You can use our story generation tools, even just selecting the 1920s as a date, give it a concept around a story in this. Use the instant story generator if you want it faster. It can create an intro for you that’s going to research the internet to be period-appropriate for you. You want a, a really well-researched piece, you could do the concept expander that even do the research dossier before it starts.

And then you can explore something that as a kid you know, if, if you go back 20 years ago, the technology for this just simply didn’t exist. But today you can live in an immersive textual story of what this would have felt like, and I’m really excited to be able to deliver that technology to you guys, and I hope you have fun with it.

And another fun news is a new version of Rhoads is probably coming out next week, so I’m really excited about that. We’re sorry for the short outage we had when it accidentally fell back to OpenAI that’s been fixed. That’s our base AI that can answer any question, you know, great for discussing these types of topics.

Just really, really excited to be building out new technology and being able to deliver that technology to you guys at a, that, that’s just significantly better than what you’re gonna find on, you know, Janitor AI or you know, FlowGPT or any of the major-- Web Soccer AI, FM. None of them come close to what we’re able to offer you, and I’m, I’m, I’m really proud about that, and I hope that we can continue to improve the experience for you through, you know, bug reports or anything you guys wanna report.

Make, make this really the best thing in the industry. And when- whenever you guys share or talk about or bring other people over, you know, it really helps us. So this means, you know, if, if you do like using the product, when you’re in those Reddits, when you’re in those Discords, and people are discussing, “Hey, I use this for like companion chat.

I use this for AI storytelling.” You know, reference us, be like, “This is where you guys wanna be.” Because that’s you know, capturing the public mind share is, is where you win this. And, and just our advertising campaigns have not been very successful even though the product itself has been growing a lot and the user base has a really high retention rate.

So, we’ve gotta f- we’ve gotta figure out, and, and right now all I can figure out is you guys

[00:55:58] Simone Collins: Thank you for everyone who tried [00:56:00] it out Thank you so much. I really like it. I use it every day. I don’t like playing any sort of games, so I don’t use any of those things. I use- You

[00:56:04] Malcolm Collins: use it for

[00:56:05] Simone Collins: Bible study

Super Stock. I use it for Bible study. Yeah, I made, I made a companion that is a biblical scholar who is an expert in all the different translations and the historical context And you run

[00:56:15] Malcolm Collins: her on one of the, the hardware so you can have her by your bed as you go to sleep.

[00:56:18] Simone Collins: Yeah, so I don’t have, like, a device that I have to, like, open up and turn on.

I just talk to my friend. And then I use Super Stock and Super Search a lot. It has a really good fact checker, and we’re even now recording a podcast on his podcast recording and editing software that has fact check built in. You can replace bad words with, like,

[00:56:40] Malcolm Collins: one click. You could upload a- I think the thing was one of those stupid TikTok songs that would violate vi- content violations.

Remove the song and replace it with your own song for very cheap, for pennies.

[00:56:49] Simone Collins: While still keeping the talking that’s in it, which- Yeah ... is great, ‘cause a lot of YouTubers I watch are like, “Well, I have to silence this whole thing ‘cause copyright,” and they don’t know that RFAB exists, and I should probably just start DM’ing people.

And yeah, anyway, thank you

[00:57:03] Malcolm Collins: everyone who tried it out. That’s actually a good idea. You could use an AI to find people who have complained about this.

[00:57:07] Simone Collins: Mm-hmm.

[00:57:07] Malcolm Collins: Cite their complaints and saying, “Why don’t you use RFAB?”

[00:57:10] Simone Collins: I will. I will. I

[00:57:11] Malcolm Collins: just- Give me a few more days of editing- ... ordered a current Gmail ... ‘cause to, to just improve the features a

[00:57:14] Simone Collins: bit.

Make sure it’s super smooth? Okay.

[00:57:16] Malcolm Collins: Yeah. But yeah. All right, love you.

[00:57:18] Simone Collins: I love you too. Did you move it up? I started at home,

[00:57:25] Octavian Collins: in, on easiest Look, look, I got the rook. I’m gonna kill the rook. I’m just gonna get my king. I’m just gonna Work down

[00:57:37] Malcolm Collins: Wow.

[00:57:39] Simone Collins: Ta-da

He’s happy

[00:57:45] Speaker 6: P- p- pause I can’t pause. Oh wait, I can. Never mind. P- p-

[00:57:57] Speaker 7: Where are you gonna fly, little bird?

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