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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   36040 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 20, 2023

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Feminism has no Scalable Answer for Female Promiscuity

The apex of consumerist-choice-Feminism just dropped: this product review disguised as a slutty memoir-thinkpiece in New York Magazine’s Strategist section (typically for product reviews and recommendations, I go there to find good sheets or sheet pans). The piece traces the writer’s life by the backpacks she uses: an overnight bag that she used to cart her things as a side-piece to various jerks for emotionally empty sex, to a laptop bag that held her work when she tried to ignore men altogether, to a small purse that was appropriate to her newly traditional role as a formal “girlfriend” to a “nice” guy. It’s the romanticized and thinkpieced arc of the feminist career woman, which I’m sure has already been “react”-ified and shouted down by various Red Pill commentators online. I’m not particularly interested in the woman-cum-backpack-reviewer at the center of the story, but rather in her portrayal of her new boyfriend, the “nice” guy she worries is too boring, and how he is portrayed as reacting to her actions. It raises the question for me: does Feminism actually have any realistic solution to how men should react to female promiscuity?

The author of the piece describes her relationship to her new boyf:

This new guy is single — a.k.a. actually available — hot, and nice. I used to think “nice” was an insult, or that if someone were “nice,” I’d grow tired of them, but with him, it excites me even more. [NB: She also states that she has been with him for FIFTEEN DAYS making the boredom question a little…strange]

I don’t know what’s going to happen with this new man. In fact, my past year of dating has made it hard to feel like anything good will happen. I’m pretty convinced I’m still destined to live a life jumping from affair to romance to affair. I’m self-sabotaging. I tell this new man about all of the men I’ve fucked over, who have fucked me over. I name drop. I body count. I say things with the screaming subtext of: Why would you want to be with me?

But this time, I realize what I’m doing. Sorry — this time he realizes what I’m doing. He says hearing about all of the guys I’ve slept with hurts his feelings and asks me why I continue to do it. This kind, goofy man makes me feel like I can apologize. Like I can tell him I lied. Like I can tell him that what I’m doing is obviously me trying to blow up whatever good thing we’re beginning to create.

The author presents her sexual and romantic history to her boyfriend, and he engages in heroic acts of self-abnegation to comfort her for hurting him. He reacts to her efforts to harm him with love and care. This is ideal partner territory, someone who loves you unconditionally and will react to any action with affection, totally unrealistic after fifteen days. This isn't any kind of scaleable solution. And I’m reminded of one of the great artistic works of consumerist-choice-Feminism: Sex and the City.

SATC gets unfairly scratched from midwit lists of great TV shows because the Chapo Trap House types who get excited about TV shows love unrealistic “masculine” fantasies of violent crime stories, and not romantic sex comedies. But SATC was critical to the birth of high concept TV, was a key tent pole that kept HBO making shows like Sopranos and The Wire, and presaged so much of modern culture that it’s a crime to miss it. My wife and I watched the whole series together just after we got married, late at night after studying or working, we joked that arguing about the characters was our “Post-Cana” sessions. What SATC was good at was asking really interesting questions, over and over my wife and I would argue late into the night and over coffee in the morning over which character was right and what one should do in that situation; what it was bad at was pussying out when it came time to face the answers. The characters would always be put into interesting situations, then saved from the consequences of their own actions in a way that sort of neutered the original dramatic/philosophical tension.

In a season 3 episode trenchantly titled “Are We Sluts?”; Big-Law attorney Miranda gets diagnosed with Chlamydia and has to list her sex partners so that she can call them and tell them that they might have gotten it from her. My wife and I counted the lines on the second sheet of notepaper, assuming it was a regular legal pad (and one man per line) she had sex with ~42 men. The character was 33 at the time, so using Slate’s handy slut calculator she is in the 96th percentile, so, yeah, up there. Miranda is naturally…concerned...by this realization, and how her boyfriend Steve will feel about it. Much of the episode is the characters debating the value of chastity and promiscuity, telling the truth, should it matter, etc. There’s a lot of tension around will this ruin Miranda’s relationship. She tells Steve and, guess what? Steve just laughs; I’m a cute bartender, my number is much much higher than that. Dramatic tensions wasted, values crisis resolved: Steve’s fucked a ridiculous number of women so Miranda having fucked a huge number of men is a nothing burger.

Similar plots are wasted later: protagonist Carrie cheats and ruins her relationship with her fiancé, only to have her adulterous partner actually chase her down years and partners later, champion-slut Samantha ultimately only settles down because her man puts in unrealistic efforts of understanding and care and loyalty. The show spends whole seasons asking questions, only to deus-ex the problems right out of existence when they want to make the characters happy. Smart enough to know there is a problem, not smart enough to come up with a satisfying realistic solution.

And this is what connected in my head reading that bullshit little dialogue in this advertisement-cum-confessional: Feminism knows that a sexual past can be a problem, but can’t imagine a realistic solution. Like so many wasted episodes of Sex and the City it is smart enough to understand that tension exists, but not smart enough to come up with a real solution. The only solutions presented are either Christ-like acts of self-control on the part of the male, or for the women to marry a man with an unrealistically high partner count himself. The supply of Christ-like and mega-player partners will never meet the demand, particularly as those men are not similarly limited. It simply will not scale: the solution to female promiscuity can never be greater male promiscuity except through fuzzy math. And those waiting for the one really good man who really loves her may be waiting in vain.

I’m not sure what a Feminist-compatible solution is, beyond rejiggering the entirety of masculinity and sex-positive culture to accommodate for it. I can’t imagine anything New York would print that would be a realistic answer, rather than a scolding “get better, men” that would achieve nothing but catharsis for angry women. A solution to this problem seems outside the Feminist range of imagination. 20 years after Sex and the City aired, promiscuous New Yorkers are no closer to an answer to that age old question: “Are we Sluts?"

For the confused: "Post-Cana" appears to be a reference to Pre-Cana, a Catholic counseling/training course done prior to marriage.

The feminist solution is obvious.

Women having one night stands and/or affairs are self-harming. The article you quoted acknowledges as much. Statistics on female orgasm in one night stands are consistent on this point, one night stands suck for women.

They are also harming women as a class. Even if you are a rare extreme outlier who regularly has satisfying ONS sex, you are normalizing the cultural pressure on other women to do the same.

As feminism is about improving the condition of women as a class, promiscuity is anti-feminist. Having an affair with a married man is anti-feminist (this should be obvious with even two seconds of thought - it is by definition betraying class solidarity)

Promiscuity is bad for the woman engaging in it, and bad for women as a whole.

But third wave feminism is all about empowering women to make whatever stupid self harming choices they want! Well, that's a very specific sub brand of "feminism" that frankly is not convincingly feminism at all, given it's other attempts to make obvious disempowerment of women "empowering". No, you can't have eyeliner sharp enough to kill the patriarchy, permanently deforming your feet with high heels isn't liberation, and having meaningless, orgasmless sex with men who have no respect for you will never be feminist.

does Feminism actually have any realistic solution to how men should react to female promiscuity?

Feminism's answer or 'solution' to any problem is always the same. Men have to be more and more accommodating, to the point of remaking men if necessary. If women are unhappy, that's because men (i.e. the patriarchy) are making them unhappy! Women feeling like sluts and devalued after years of sleeping around! That's only because the negative spooks the patriarchy is slut shaming you and trying to control your sexuality! Men have to learn to accept women's sexuality (sexuality, of course, means sleeping around)! Women feeling unfulfilled after 20 years climbing the corporate ladder and having no family? That's only because the patriarchy is trying to push you back into oppressive gender roles (at a abstract, psychic level if necessary if not discrimination can be found)! Men need to accept women can be girlbosses! Feminism is just a long list of demanding men accommodated more destructive behaviours from women and give them more.

Really, this is nothing new, this is how women have excerted influence for millennia. Women complains, men accommodates or makes changes. Moral panics. The difference is that feminism is leading women down a endless self-perpetuating death spiral, a train with no brakes. Other moral panics would reach a critical point and dissipate. Here, the dissipation that feminism is pointing at is women, men and society itself.

Really, this is nothing new, this is how women have excerted influence for millennia. Women complains, men accommodates or makes changes.

I really think this is so true, and true in groups, not just in one-on-one interactions with men. Feminists would like us to believe that women have been kept out of any public sphere of influence for all of history, but I do doubt this. For example, in ancient Rome, women took to the streets in 195BC to protest the lex Oppia, which was a wartime austerity measure to restrict the wearing of flashy garments. Spoiler: they were successful, and the measure was repealed.

Feminist history has always latched on to a superficial oppressor-oppressed analysis of gender roles and anthropology, rather than a natural order followed across most cultures and time periods throughout the world. History has become a battleground for the culture war, and current politics incentivises it.

I am forced to conclude that even though in an ideal world men would surely prefer their wife have fewer rather than more sexual partners in her past, they are not particularly committed to this as the primary or even a major criteria.

A common refrain in the manosphere is that, to understand women, you have to watch what they do, not what they say. Revealed preference and all that.

It's a valuable heuristic, but it cuts both ways. Waxing poetic about virginal, loyal tradcath wives is largely a performance for other men on the Internet and would be forgotten as soon as a pretty IG influencer expressed any interest.

It's a valuable heuristic, but it cuts both ways. Waxing poetic about virginal, loyal tradcath wives is largely a performance for other men on the Internet and would be forgotten as soon as a pretty IG influencer expressed any interest.

My wife's childhood friend is a virginal, loyal tradorth wife, so I've been invited to a few tradorth birthday parties and have been fed the choicest gossip. All I can say is tradness is inversely correlated with sexual adventurousness. Not saying there aren't trad wifes that consider their bedroom the temple where every rite honors the matrimony, but I'll bet most of their tradorth husbands will not cheat on them with someone who can do a striptease and a blowjob only because they will ejaculate prematurely.

The difference is, yes, actually if you go to some very conservative parts of the Midwest or still heavily Catholic partts of rural Texas, I'd actually bet you're right. I disagree heavily with those people's likely politics, but I don't doubt that most of them arre following the tenets of their religion. The problem is, those aren't the people on Twitter complaining about women having too many partners in college, but rather, it's basically dudes who spend too much time on Twitter that decided the sexual revolution was the reason why they didn't have a cute 19 year old to marry when they finished college (when the reality was, they'd be out of luck in 1962 as well).

but rather, it's basically dudes who spend too much time on Twitter that decided the sexual revolution was the reason why they didn't have a cute 19 year old to marry when they finished college (when the reality was, they'd be out of luck in 1962 as well).

Those particular guys might have been out of luck, but in general "having a cute 19 year old to marry when they finished college" was far more a thing in 1962 than now.

Mostly because only 10% of people finished college, so they were very high earning people with lots of social value. I bet the top 10% of college graduates who have any social skills at all, do fine.

If you dropped most of the people currently complaining about the sexual revolution leading to their lack of marriable women, and dropped them into 1962 with only their high school knowledge and no knowledge of the future to get rich actually wouldn't be as happy with their choices as they think they would be.

Mostly because only 10% of people finished college, so they were very high earning people with lots of social value

No, mostly because both the age gap at marriage and the average age for women at first marriage lined up with that better in 1962.

It's a valuable heuristic, but it cuts both ways.

I agree, but I think that when you take a broader perspective the more traditional view wins out - when you look back in history, men do actually act in a way that implies virginity is valuable, especially men with options (royalty etc). Men aren't going for virginal, loyal tradcath wives for a variety of reasons (demand outpacing supply being a big one), but we live in a rather anomalous period for gender relations historically. It seems to me like looking at men and their choices in the present is akin to looking at a consumate gourmand stranded on a deserted island and claiming that his diet of fish and coconuts reveals that he doesn't actually care about eating good, well-prepared food at all.

Do you know of a good primer to read that goes into the modern British upper class, or discusses how the aristocracy has handled the transition to the modern/post modern world? Curious to read more I don’t know much.

There's an old joke/proverb about women choosing their partner based on who they think he could become, and men choosing their partner by who they happen to be with when they get ready to settle down.

I don't think it's a rule, but it does explain a lot.

I've heard a variation of this joke, that a man marries a woman hoping she doesn't change, which she inevitably does, and a woman marries a man hoping he will change, which he inevitably doesn't.

I have never encountered a truly gorgeous, promiscuous woman in my social class who has had problems finding a ‘high value man’ (ie. handsome, outgoing, masculine, successful, whatever) to marry.

I think you are onto something. The original article makes it clear, that not her bodycount is the problem, but her self-undermining behaviour and her unability of maintaining a relationship (and probably her taste in men).

I never encountered a counter example where a man rejected a woman because of that. If it is truly an effect felt by women, instead of just being an assumption, maybe it is simply a selection effect? Promisciuous woman are meeting/are interested promisciuous men, so if they want to settle down the try to do it with someone who is less interested in that, but the problem is not out of slut-shamingness?

In a certain sense, if a guy feels that he was the one to actually tame the wild slut and was awesome enough to get her to settle, he can get extra validation from that. "She has all those men to compare me to and chose me as the best."

Problem that arises, at least in my opinion, is if she recounts all the wild stories and depraved sexual acts she engaged in with those previous men... and yet refuses to give the same to the current man because she's "not that person anymore." Now you've got the eternal frustration of knowing that some other guy has gotten your wife to do things she won't do for you, and the nagging doubt that she's denying things to you on purpose despite clearly being willing to do them in the abstract.

So it might be less about slut-shaming and more like shaming someone who sluts it up EXCEPT when it comes to the guy that actually commits. Its not that she's obligated to keep doing promiscuous and sexually adventurous things to keep the current guy happy, but there's no getting rid of the history of doing said things, and so the current guy can't help but be aware of what he 'missed out' on.

If he was also sexually adventurous in his younger years, maybe he has his own history he's bringing in and thus doesn't mind having a more mundane yet intimate sexual partnership because he can say "been there, done that" to the kinkier stuff. The current stats, however, suggest that women are getting more sex in their twenties than men are.

In a broader sense, I think females intentionally or not tend to use their early twenties to go out and experiment and be 'wild', and there are likewise guys (usually older) who know this and basically play around with women going through this phase, string them along for possibly years, then dump her when she hits her mid twenties. So you've got guys who get to spend their time having fun and 'spoiling' young ladies then passing them off, somewhat devalued, to other males who are now expected to accept these womens' past AND put up with the new, less slutty version of her who doesn't want to do all the weird stuff in bed that she previously sought out.

Sadly Porn discusses this phenomenon in excruciating detail.

What was his main take-away?

Replying to you again, I just stumbled across Rob Henderson's review of Sadly, Porn this afternoon and he presents its theses in a more digestible fashion than does the book itself:

The book makes a distinction between sexualized fantasy versus mundane reality by invoking two archetypes: the econ major and the sorority girl. Of course, an econ major can be in a sorority. But the book states “She can only be a fantasy if she stops being an econ major” and instead becomes a sorority girl. And if you do fulfill your fantasy by being with a sorority girl, and eventually marry her, the excitement wanes as you discover she is just an econ major. Even if she really is/was a sorority girl. Others see her as a sorority girl, they see an idealized image of her. They don’t see the mundane reality that you see, of her as an econ major. Thus, you feel deprived that only others get access to this idealized fantasy version of her.

A guy sees a woman and projects all these ideas and fantasies and preconceived notions of who she is. Then they sleep together, and he learns more about her. He no longer sees her in the way he did when they first met. But he realizes others see her that way. The book states, “It’s bad enough he can’t get his fantasy from the woman he loves, but worse is that, logically, everyone else can get it from her except you.” He sees her as the proverbial “econ major” but feels deprived because other see her as a “sorority girl.” Teach writes, “Even if your wish for a sorority girl is fulfilled she will quickly become an econ major—while (you perceive) she remains a sorority girl to everyone else.”

Teach says this also explains why some men react with fury upon hearing about their partner’s previous sexual experiences with other men:

“Her past always sounds more sexual not because she is now less sexual, but because he doesn't hear the past as continuity, the stories of the past are about someone else, before he turned her into an econ major and later a wife. The underlying problem that can't be solved is that therefore the real her, had she been left to her own desires, was the one in the past. That he has no access to, that only everyone else does.”

Fucked if I know.

If I was to hazard a guess, I'd say that he thinks men that get hung up on what the sex lives of their girlfriends/wives were like before the relationship started are pathetic, narcissistic and contemptible, and that hang-ups of this type are at the root of all kinds of modern relationship problems like porn addiction, dead bedrooms, cuckolding fantasies and infidelity.

So he advocates assenting to sin by making men culpable to their reflexive (if not spiritually informed) disdain for promiscuity in their would-be wives. He’s insightful but I’ll reject this out of hand. I might even risk saying it smacks of therapeutic self-cope like that of the man who directed Clerks with the girlfriend subplot.

I'll be frank with you: I found a lot of The Last Psychiatrist's posts almost uncomfortably insightful, but throughout Sadly, Porn I often felt like he was writing to himself as much as to the reader in his head for whom he had so much contempt and disdain.

I'm going to be a boring fence-sitter and admit that I think men who only want to date innocent pure virgins are kind of lame, but also that it's not completely unreasonable for a man's pride to feel a little wounded if his wife/girlfriend was perfectly willing to perform [SEX ACT] with previous partners but not with him.

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I think a lot of it is low self esteem, likely driven by an absent/weak/abusive father. Men in the baby boomer generation seem to have shit the bed generally on parenting well - women too of course but I think the male side gets discussed less.

All of the sudden after WW2 most of the masculine men died or had their mental stability shattered. We kind of lost the male role model in western society and we haven’t been able to have a positive view of masculinity since. Fathers are lost, and their children follow them into the darkness.

Meanwhile, my beautiful ex-VP (boss) got bored of promiscuity at 32, found herself a handsome 40 year old MD at another bank who was similarly tired of being a lothario, and settled down. They have a mansion on an island in Greece now, and two kids.

This is perfectly fine for the two of them, and I hope they are happy. Both of them are from a background where they have the social safety net to accommodate it when things go wrong. From a personal point of view for themselves both of them took the utility maximising option and that's OK.

However such actions have a societal negative externality. Firstly from all the other people they slept with who might have wanted to settle down and got their heart broken, those people suffered a negative hit to their utility. But in the grand scheme of things it's comparatively minor compared to the other negative externality they generate (people get their heart broken all the time, it's no big deal). Namely that humans are a monkey see monkey do species and we've completely dispensed with "do as I say, not as I do" even when it's better for people to "do as I say" and this promiscuity leading to a happy ending sends the lower classes a message that yes, they too, can sleep around and still do well for themselves in the end.

Naturally when the lower classes do so they are forced to face the pointy end of the stick your VP/MD pair had the looks/money to cushion away completely. This leads to significantly worse long term outcomes for them compared to if they had just been chaste, found a decent partner (note: decent, not perfect) and committed to life with them, come hell or high water.

At the moment it's considered vulgar for people to really point out that this marriage was successful despite the early promiscuity because there was "buy a mansion on a Greek island" level money standing behind it. Instead social messaging is that sleeping around has literally 0 effect on long term outcomes for (effectively) everyone. This just leads to people trying the promiscuity without the Greek island mansion money and getting burned. No different to a society where people with parachutes jump from airplanes all the time and enjoy the experience and encourage others to do so too because it is fun but its considered déclassé to mention the necessity of the parachute for this act because some people can't afford one. In such a society a lot of people who aren't smart enough to work out the criticality of the parachute but follow the social messaging end up going splat on the ground completely unnecessarily. The same is happening in modern western society.

The way we deal with negative externalities is to discourage them at a governmental/societal level via Pigouvian taxes, social shaming and awareness campaigns. However modern western society seems loathe to admit that there even exists a negative externality in this case despite the statistical mountain of evidence showing it primarily harms the poorest, the exact same group they profess to try and help the most. They say that the first step towards fixing a problem is admitting you have it. Until society openly accepts that we have a problem millions of people each year will continue to go SPLAT!

Do you think stable relationships are generally far easier with money? I’ve seen the opposite anecdotally but not sure about the data.

I think having enough money to be able to cover your "needs" and be able to handle negative consequences of your decisions is generally a positive to relationship strength, see e.g. an alcoholic who can afford rehab Vs can't, the relationship of the second one is more likely to fail.

You've convinced me to give watching SATC through with my wife. She loves the movies and has never seen the show, it was on when my sisters were of exactly the right age for it so I've watched a lot of it in the background, and we're light on TV to watch through right now.

The first half season they're finding their legs, the show follows the book really closely the first season and a half. Between scooter to the first wedding is the peak of the show.

I used to marvel at how well the men were written on SATC, until it dawned on me that the show was run and written mostly by gay men. They understood men from both empathetic and adversarial positions.

SATC gets unfairly scratched from midwit lists of great TV shows because the Chapo Trap House types who get excited about TV shows love unrealistic “masculine” fantasies of violent crime stories, and not romantic sex comedies. But SATC was critical to the birth of high concept TV, was a key tent pole that kept HBO making shows like Sopranos and The Wire, and presaged so much of modern culture that it’s a crime to miss it.

What SATC was good at was asking really interesting questions, over and over my wife and I would argue late into the night and over coffee in the morning over which character was right and what one should do in that situation; what it was bad at was pussying out when it came time to face the answers.

Dramatic tensions wasted, values crisis resolved:

Similar plots are wasted later

The show spends whole seasons asking questions, only to deus-ex the problems right out of existence when they want to make the characters happy.

Like so many wasted episodes of Sex and the City it is smart enough to understand that tension exists, but not smart enough to come up with a real solution.

Big brother and the bachelor are cultural touchstones and bill payers, as are dool and eastenders and home and away - that doesn't make them great tv. In fact I think you have identified exactly why satc doesn't usually make it onto the lists of prestige tv shows - it's a forty minute sitcom*. The characters don't face consequences for their actions, they are resolved through plot contrivances and contradictions. The wire, the sopranos, breaking bad - these shows are considered prestige because there are consequences for the characters' actions, writing wise.

At any rate you haven't convinced me I am missing out by not watching it, or that if I was more intelligent I would spend dozens of hours watching a show with plot holes so frequently that they are considered part of its structure.

*which is not to shit on sitcoms, many of which I love, they just aren't prestige tv, they don't elevate or transcend the medium the way those shows do.

I could do the same things with occurrences throughout Breaking Bad or (at least the later seasons of) The Wire; the difference being that when there's a yawning plot hole in those shows they shove a bomb into it or handwave corruption somewhere in the system as covering it up. An understanding boyfriend is a much more logical plot contrivance than a robot machine gun.

What is your list of top sitcoms? I just finished How I met your Mother with my partner and it was remarkably anti-feminist for so recent and so popular a show.

That is a good question. Personally my favourite sitcoms are of the "sitcoms are for comedy, get your drama out of here" philosophy, so my tops are Seinfeld, It's always sunny, 30 Rock, Arrested Development and Newsradio. But I think it would be crazy to make a list of top sitcoms that didn't include himym or Friends or Scrubs or The Office, all of which had hilarious moments and episodes, and much broader appeal than my first picks. And even now my list is being unfair to older sitcoms - I think sitcoms evolved pretty significantly over time though (not to mention the effect on comedy of the backlash against pcness that cim mentioned below), and it's hard for me to tell what jokes in say All in the family or The Jeffersons or Taxi or Cheers* I am biased by nostalgia to appreciate - they definitely don't get as many laughs from younger friends as newer shows do.

*Special mention for Frasier, which did an amazing job for four seasons of relying heavily on farce and still managing to find humour and surprises. Pity it went on for seven seasons.

Edit: ffs as I hit post I realised I was being geographically biased too - I've left out Blackadder, Linehan's shows, Extras, The League of gentlemen, Darkplace and The mighty boosh! For the Aussies, I didn't include Hey Dad for obvious reasons, and I never watched Kath and Kim, which is basically the extent of Aussie sitcoms. Welcher and Welcher? Aussie comedy seems to work better in sketch shows anyway.

I think the key element in that review is that he was watching it at night with his wife.

SATC is like porn to the female mind, I imagine that must have worked to get her in the mood.

Watching it alone as a man is like getting cucked by a gross, older woman.

Her best-selling book and the racy TV series it inspired taught a generation of women that they could ‘have it all’.

But Sex and the City creator Candace Bushnell, 60, has admitted that she regrets choosing a career over having children as she is now ‘truly alone’.

The pre-modern marriage arrangement is something like men offer physical protection and income in return for chastity, sex, and domestic labor. The marriage 'deal' is being renegotiated because the male contribution has been devalued; physical protection is provided by the state, women make 80% of what men make. Women's domestic labor has largely been devalued too with the exception of childcare. Women's chastity used to be essential to make sure she didn't end up a single mother in a world where agricultural labor was essential, and to indicate paternity certainty. Now we have DNA tests and birth control, female chastity doesn't serve some essential social purpose it's just something men like.

You act like accepting a 'slutty partner' is some unthinkable conflict with masculinity but for most of the past 1000 years would a high status man have accepted anything less than a virgin? Women have already parlayed increased economic power into different norms about how much female promiscuity is acceptable, and their relative economic power keeps increasing.

Like most Intra-gender competition, promiscuity is something of a collective action problem. If every girl in the village is a virgin the one who fucks one guy is unmarriageable. If everyone fucks ten guys then the girl with only one body is practically a virgin. The function of stories where "slutty" women get "it all" in this context should be obvious, they help coordinate reduced intra-gender competition to be chaste. As women and men's economic power equalizes you would expect women to have to cater less to male preferences overall, and the role of such feminist media to be coordinating and normalizing this.

This may lead some people to sort of 'overplay' their hand and stop catering to male preferences at all. The woman who sleeps with fifty dudes, the woman who gives up on makeup and shaving her legs, they're probably going to have to accept low status mates or be single. Whether women systematically holding out for too good of a deal is responsible for low marriage and childbearing rates over all is difficult to say.

While marriage rates overall have fallen they've fallen way more for less educated women. Women 40-45 with Bachelor's degree went from 85% married in 1968 to 75% in 2015, women with a high school degree fell from 80% to 60%. If feminist indoctrination at college and in upper-middlebrow media was the culprit we might expect the opposite. Maybe the issue is that non-college women are huge sluts, but I suspect that a big factor is that real wages for high school educated men have declined since the 1980's so there's fewer marriageable men.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.brookings.edu/blog/social-mobility-memos/2016/08/19/the-most-educated-women-are-the-most-likely-to-be-married/amp/

https://www.hamiltonproject.org/charts/changes_in_real_hourly_earnings_by_education

Women 40-45 with Bachelor's degree went from 85% married in 1968 to 75% in 2015, women with a high school degree fell from 80% to 60%.

Many years ago on a long-defunct tradcon blog, I saw this summed up as: marriage is becoming unavailable mostly for women who'd need it the most.

There's a large difference between having a high body count and repeatedly telling your boyfriend about it. The former can sometimes be ignored (and contra redpillers claims, has nothing to do with sexual desirability. Wife-material-ibility, perhaps) , the latter is an emasculating power play (fine, shittest).

At the heart of my disagreement with redpillers on female promiscuity however, is that I cannot bring myself to condemn women for what I take for granted. Trads, okay, they’re against promiscuity generally, no hypocrisy there. But redpillers apply trad arguments only to people who aren’t them. Sex harms your soul or something, unless you’re a man, then I guess it’s okay to harm other people? Their locks and keys analogy isn’t doing it for me. You can get treasure from some terrible locks, and some locks are pristine simply because there isn’t any treasure behind.

As far as I can tell, the male equivalent to the slut in the Red Pill worldview is the orbiter simp beta, who's mostly just as much of a duped loser as the other. When you think about it that way, it makes sense.

Men and women trade sex and commitment.

Simps cheapen commitment in the same manner that skanks cheapen sex. It's why they're seen as "losers". They do not value what they have enough to demand its value from others.

Or maybe, what they have just isn't valuable. Free stuff is usually shitty.

I cannot bring myself to condemn women for what I take for granted.

Men and women are nothing alike so this makes no sense. It's like a man saying women are hypocrites for wanting a man taller than them when they're only X feet tall. Nothing operates on logic here, so you can't suddenly apply logic to the male "hypocrite" case, everyone is a hypocrite.

I'm sure there are moral hypocrites out there, but from what I've seen of redpill arguments per se, the reason for men to be promiscuous and women to be innocent is simple: Men like innocent partners, women like promiscuous partners. Therefore if you are a man who wants to succeed, you should be promiscuous, and if you are a woman who wants to succeed, you should be innocent. Morality has nothing to do with it.

Suggesting that a man should be a virgin himself if he wants a virgin wife is like saying that he should have D-cup man-breasts if he wants a girlfriend with good knockers. It might seem fair in a moral sense, but as strategy it's gibberish.

Likewise, the question isn't whether a promiscuous man should want a promiscuous woman, the question is whether he actually does. The question isn't whether women should feel empowered and emotionally whole after a promiscuous sex life; it's whether they actually do.

Of course, recommending in favor of promiscuity for men and against it for women runs into the practical problem that the amount of casual sex has to add up somehow, even if it's never been exactly equal. But that's just as much a problem for modern feminism as it is for redpillers; if the hot guy who was juggling 5 different casual partners suddenly became Mr. Open Honest Commitment, the other 4 women he didn't pick would still have to re-asses their sex lives. As the OP says, there aren't enough mega-players to go around. The reason every promiscuous woman has slept with one is that they were sharing.

Likewise, the question isn't whether a promiscuous man should want a promiscuous woman, the question is whether he actually does.

You said his strategy was to have a high body count. So to get the non-promiscuous woman he wants, he should want promiscuous women. It creates a paradox in evolutionary terms.

Secondly, does he actually want a virgin wife ? Sure, if you ply me with studies showing promiscuity and infidelity are correlated, I’ll concede that less is better, I guess. But it’s not important to me like attractiveness is. Show me the man who averted his eyes from porn because it featured a promiscuous woman. And women’s love of men’s promiscuity is even less clear.

So to get the non-promiscuous woman he wants, he should want promiscuous women. It creates a paradox in evolutionary terms.

Not in the least? There is a long historical phenomenon of men with the ability (often higher status) plowing through great numbers of lower-status women, but with one equal-status partner/wife. In evolutionary terms, this is the apex of male evolutionary potential, both the high-investment of a stable, high-status partnership for one set of kids, plus a scattering of bastards across the status spectrum. An economist might call it a well-diversified genetic portfolio.

Does he want the promiscuous women or not ? It makes sense for him to have a non-promiscuous woman as a wife, just like it makes sense that she should be rich, politically connected etc, but how is that hard-wired ?

Camus says of Don Juan: "[When he leaves a woman], it is not because he has ceased to desire her. A beautiful woman is always desirable. But he wants another, and it is not the same thing."

Of course men are attracted sexually to sexually attractive/available women. Of course some percentage will take the opportunity of sex with a promiscuous woman, regardless of their intentions or hopes for a long term relationship. Of course some percentage of that will be fine with settling down with a formerly promiscuous woman, and some even smaller percentage would be fine with settling down with a currently promiscuous one.

Where you fall on this issue depends a lot on how big or small you think those various categories of behavior are.

Show me the man who averted his eyes from porn because it featured a promiscuous woman.

This comment makes it clear that you don't understand the argument being made by the other side.

If you did, the question you'd actually be asking is "show me the man who withdraws commitment and resource-provision from a woman when he discovers her promiscuity" - and that's a question that can actually be answered a lot more thoroughly.

Then I'll show you women who withdrew commitment when they discovered their husbands' promiscuity.

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During their marriage or before it?

Are you actually interested in having a conversation and understanding what the other side is trying to claim, or do you want to try and score sick burns instead?

The basic assumption they operate under "Men like innocent partners, women like promiscuous partners" is false, or marginal at best. So when you try to use anecdotes as proof of your universal law, I think a counterexample is appropriate.

Do you really not believe this? How many women do you know?

This isn't some oblique inference I've picked up or just assumed. From the dozens of actual mouths of horses, women do not want to lash themselves via marriage to a man with unknown sexual skills, preferences, and penis size. While men (bizarrely) tolerate hot dead fish for a long time, rolling the dice on ever having an orgasm from someone else just doesn't even pass the sniff test of rationality.

I'm not saying women only want lotharios with high body counts, but an untested virgin is a massive risk.

"Men like innocent partners, women like promiscuous partners"

Is true if you just add the statement with "traits associated with". A 22 year old who has had sex with 9999 guys, had her mind and body wiped to be equivalent to the 22 year old that lost her virginity at prom, eventually broke it off, and is now marrying her college sweetheart is probably just as appealing so long as the man doesn't know. But there is no such thing. A man who is promiscuous is high status because he can win women. A woman wants a man who can win women, because women are convinced by this. But the woman also wants to win him and end his promiscuity streak. If they could have a virgin that simply refused 100 propositions a day from hot actresses, they would pick him over the guy who slept with all 100. But again, they can't have that because it doesn't exist (aside from possibly Tim Tebow).

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The basic assumption they operate under "Men like innocent partners, women like promiscuous partners" is false

Wrong. Men have a preference for women with low partner counts when it comes to seeking long term relationships - but it isn't the only preference that they have. Individuals are complex and there are multiple factors involved in what makes someone a compelling choice as a partner. Partner count is just one of a galaxy of factors at play in any individual interaction or mating choice, and while influential, it isn't the only quality being looked at. Women generally prefer tall, wealthy and handsome men - pointing out that short, poor and ugly men can still find partners doesn't even reach the point of needing refutation because it does nothing to even address the point being made. Some women marry men who are shorter than them - this does not mean that there is not a general trend of women preferring that their partners are taller than they are.

Similarly, the notion that men are the gatekeepers of commitment does not mean that men have exclusive control over all relationships and their preferences are the sole determinant in how relationships play out. Jeremy Meeks and Leonardo DiCaprio are more than capable of turning women down for sex, and JK Rowling doesn't have to think twice when she turns down a local plumber's offer of making her his housewife and living off a portion of his income. This does nothing to change the broader general trends and isn't some "gotcha" for the view you're arguing against.

Redpillers have an inherent logic to them too. They don’t think men and women are the same so there’s no issue there. They believe men and women have different desires.

This is the a common opinion in most of the world and throughout history, not something specific to redpillers. Also notice that women are allowed to have different desires of their own, it's only when men have some desire that isn't matched that western misandrist society considers it problematic.

I am familiar with their logic, I think it poor and self-serving, but you're welcome to try and explain it. I don't believe men and women, the rich and poor, or you and I, are the same either. You need more than that to carve out an exception to a rule. The apparent reasons for the old exception have fallen away: the link between sex and pregnancy, the uncertainty of paternity.

The apparent reasons for the old exception have fallen away: the link between sex and pregnancy, the uncertainty of paternity.

The reasons we love sugar have fallen away. The evolved attitudes towards it still exist though and must be accounted for.

I don't believe men and women, the rich and poor, ...

Are you really saying that there is no difference between biological sex differences and social-economic differences? You seem to be employing a rather weak strawman...

I’m fairly certain you know their reasoning. We are an evolved species so the desires we have come from what was beneficial when we were evolving. So to maximize happiness you still with the rules when we evolved.

American legal system is still set up like uncertainty of pregnancy exists. You’re still going to pay if some other dude knocks up your chick. Along with all the other financial losses of splitting assets in divorce etc.

American legal system is still set up like uncertainty of pregnancy exists. You’re still going to pay if some other dude knocks up your chick. Along with all the other financial losses of splitting assets in divorce etc.

It's not an oversight. The state wants to foist as much of parenting as possible unto some private citizen and not itself, and women obviously want more freedom to leave marriages and so lobbied for more favorable laws.

No one is going to suddenly realize tech has changed the game and adapt because it's serving a pragmatic purpose. Well, people have adapted - in the other direction. IIRC France just banned paternity tests. This is not a failure to account for the lack of uncertainty, it's simply deciding the uncertainty shouldn't matter.

Or redefining the very marriage contract, from another point of view.

It's not an oversight. The state wants to foist as much of parenting as possible unto some private citizen and not itself, and women obviously want more freedom to leave marriages and so lobbied for more favorable laws.

Exactly. The system is built to ensure the child gets paid for, not to enforce paternity.

Telling men they shouldn't be worried about promiscuity because it's no longer linked with paternity certainty, is like telling people they shouldn't have sex because it no longer results in pregnancy when they use protection.

It's about how evolution wired our brains.

There’s two justifications for those preferences, pick one:

A) It’s hard wired. Counterexamples: men don’t act like it’s all that important, especially in their sexual desires, the most hard-wired of all, desires that bypass the brain entirely. Women do have problems with promiscuity in men.

B) There are rational reasons for those preferences. Answer: Those mostly went away with modernity.

It's not a complete binary, environment and genetics interact in very complex ways. But sexual jealousy is quite common in humans and other animals for obvious biological reasons, and to argue these are completely cultural is just insane.

Women experience sexual jealousy. Men want to have sex with promiscuous women. Evolution apparently wired you differently for fucking, and for the primordial institution of marriage, back in the savannah. Yeah it's very complex maintaining a theory contradicted left and right.

Women do experience sexual jealousy as well, not sure what your point is there.

Yes evolution is complex, pair-bonding did evolve and requires different investment as a strategy on the part of the male. All of this clearly happened and the different strategies can even be seen in different mammals, let alone the Savannah. Human males align with the different strategies and differ in their investment to loyal women vs promiscuous women.

Where is the contradiction?

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The apparent reasons for the old exception have fallen away: the link between sex and pregnancy, the uncertainty of paternity.

The "uncertainty of paternity" exception remains in effect because it's socially taboo to ask for genetic verification of paternity. And even so, the husband may still be liable for alimony after a divorce caused by infidelity.

It remains important to be convinced in the reliability of your partner before marriage. Low body count is an honest signal for that worry. (Although, like other honest signals, it's unreliable and can be faked.)

Those are good points, but the logic is mostly post-hoc for many men like me. This is about the most primal and fundamental instinct evolution has drilled into our brains. Even with 100% paternity certainty, non-virgin women disgust me.

This is about the most primal and fundamental instinct evolution has drilled into our brains. Even with 100% paternity certainty, non-virgin women disgust me.

That disgust doesn't seem likely to be from evolution though. The posited male evolutionary strategy is to impregnate as many women as possible, in a scattergun approach. Tribes conquered other tribes and integrated their women virgin or not. To put it bluntly, your genes do not "care" as long as the woman is fertile.

Your disgust then seems likely to be culturally instilled not from some in built instinctual urge which in fact the evidence suggests runs the other way. That men are sexually attracted to young, fertile women no matter their status or promiscuity.

Oh I would def bang non-virgin women, but marrying one when I could have a virgin is what makes me so uncomfortable. Men in the west assume they wouldn't be like this and it's not part of their culture anymore, but I've met some muslim converts and when they realize it's an option they quickly change their minds lol.

Also you're only partly right about the tribes conquering, some of the women who weren't virgins were sometimes killed. Sometimes all women were killed. It really depends on the circumstances. I'd love to steal a loyal woman from another man as part of my harem, but that's not the same to me as being with a woman who had promiscuous sex before me.

I agree the gene-environment interactions are very complex, but that hardly means my jealousy instinct is just culturally instilled, any more than the fact that we can pressure people into killing themselves means they don't want to survive.

I’m not particularly interested in the woman-cum-backpack-reviewer at the center of the story

Hmm yeah, she does have a lot of experience with cum backpacks.

I don’t think I could had done better if I were assigned to write a satirical article with “Coffee Emoji: Backpack Edition” as the prompt.

If that is the published version of the article, I wonder what her earlier drafts were like—

Her editors: And your article provides an insightful, analytical, and comprehensive review of the backpack?

Her: Backpack?

>In 2019 I tweeted, “Please G*d, Please don’t let me be a 30-year-old with roommates.” I am 30 and a half years old, and I hear sex noises that aren’t my own when I go to sleep at night, and I think about this tweet all of the time. I don’t have my own bathroom.

Self-censors the “o” in God ironically or not, but sees no issues about broadcasting her promiscuity.

>Recently, after I finished seeing a guy who had three other girlfriends, I started seeing another guy. This one just had one girlfriend. I thought, Must be love.

Another W for polygyny and female mate-choice copying. The cringe doesn’t really get better from there and I tapped out.

It raises the question for me: does Feminism actually have any realistic solution to how men should react to female promiscuity?

Yes, feminists do have realistic solutions, ones that they've successfully deployed over the past few years/decades. As evident from academia, pop culture, mainstream opinion pieces, to subreddits like AmItheAsshole and relationship_advice, and even supposedly more neutral ones like PurplePillDebate—women (and sometimes even men) will often express an opinion to the tune of:

You WILL propose to a woman after she's had her fun and is ready to settle down.

You WILL buy her an expensive engagement ring that she can show off to her friends, family, and coworkers.

You WILL give her the princess wedding of her dreams.

You WILL be happy. The past is the past. Nothing better than a woman with experience. Only incels would disagree.

Shaming, deplatforming, and pushing contrary opinions outside of the Overton Window can work in preventing men from comparing notes... and in getting women to believe that ugh, only shitty, toxic men are too insecure to date an experienced woman.

If men prefer female youth, beauty, and chastity, it’s because they’re shallow, controlling, misogynistic pedophiles. Women are Wonderful and don’t care about male height, strength, income, status, and/or ability to pull other women, but if they do it’s only due to internalised misogyny or because men are so shitty that women have to use those factors as heuristics.

Women are valid if they get the ick from short men, but it’s gross and problematic if men get the ick about committing to promiscuous women (such men are only telling on themselves).

Self-censors the “o” in God ironically or not, but sees no issues about broadcasting her promiscuity.

This is a Jewish thing. Jews traditionally interpret the commandment "Thou shalt not take the name of YHWH thy God in vain, for YHWH will not hold him guiltless that taketh his name in vain" as prohibiting inappropriate usage of YHWH as a personal name for God. The Jewish tradition deals with vague biblical laws by "putting a fence round the law" - i.e. unless there is a very good reason for pushing the boundaries of the law they set up social norms which prohibit anything that might be a violation of the underlying divine law. In this case, Jews never use a personal name for God at all - hence euphemisms such as HaShem (literally, "the name") or "The LORD" (used in small caps in the KJV and KJV-inspired English translations of the Old Testament where the original Hebrew has YHWH).

Christians are bound by the divine law against blasphemy, but not the Pharisaical fence against using a personal name for God, and in English Christians generally use "God" as a personal name for God the Father. So English-speaking Jews say G*d to make it clear they are not doing that. (So, wildly inappropriately, do some philo-Semitic Christians as a show of solidarity)

As a PMC white New Yorker who writes for a living, it is a safe assumption that Annie Hamilton either is a secular Jew, or lives in a social milieu dominated by them. So she is expressing allegiance to New York Jewish culture - presumably unironically - not trying to avoid blasphemy.

Women hate feminine men much more than short men. A man not having jealousy is a huge red flag to women at an instinctual level. These same women who say all of these lies on reddit go on to pull out their latest romance novel about some controlling man who does the opposite of what they say they like. Either that or rape porn. And these types of dominant men are the ones they are pulled towards in real life.

There is a reason Andrew Tate blew up, men with normal structured brains quickly latch on to these types of "misogynistic" ideas, which are essential for their survival and reproduction, and are actually secretly attractive to these complaining women.

I think the "solution" to this "problem" will be some combination of:

1. Women having relatively less casual sex and;

2. Men being relatively more comfortable dating and/or marrying women who have a higher number of partners.

How much we'll get of each one depends on the cost/benefit ratio for each party in question. Given the relative difference in rates of single men vs single women who are looking for a relationship I suspect we'll see relatively more of (2) than (1).

ETA:

Also not clear to me that a random article in New York Magazine or plot lines in Sex and the City represent comprehensive overviews of feminist thought on the topic.

It's not so much that my two data points represent a comprehensive overview of feminism, so much as I can't imagine an alternative statement that I could make without offending Orthodox feminism. It's impossible to imagine anything else nymag.com would publish.

I used to think “nice” was an insult

Years ago, I got so sick of being called "Nice" by women around me I eventually had a Do Not Call Me That moment. I now feel slightly vindicated.

/images/16794429084510765.webp

What do you mean? Did you start telling women to not use that word or did you break some glass?

This is akin to a trend I've noticed with promiscuous people in general. I'll call it the "promiscuity trap" and it applies equally to men and women, though women are usually more open about it. The vast majority of relationships begin with both parties in more or less the same position—they're looking for companionship and intend to get to know the other party better and treat the relationship as a going concern. This isn't to say that the occasional flings don't happen, but they're the exception and there's usually a specific reason. Sometimes the reason is benign, like you meet someone from another city while on vacation and there's chemistry but no long-term potential there. Other times, though, it's more sinister, like you just got dumped and are looking to feel good about yourself. But when most people engage in the second kind of hookup it's due to an acute emotional situation and doesn't become a habit.

People in the promiscuity trap tend to dwell in this second world all the time. They have a constant underlying self-loathing that has them seeking instant validation from a sexual partner. But since availability trumps compatibility, these relationships never last very long. And the inevitable failure only feeds into the self-loathing more. This whole process is compounded by the fact that promiscuous people tend to be around more promiscuous members of the opposite sex than average, but aren't really any less capable of developing genuine feelings for someone else. So if a promiscuous woman sleeps with a promiscuous guy and ends up liking him there's a good chance he'll only use her for sex and dump her as soon as the next opportunity presents itself, and if a non-promiscuous guy likes her there's a good chance she doesn't like him and just wanted sex. So of course the original author talks about how she fucked men over or they fucked her over.

By the time the stars align and they meet someone whom they like and who actually likes them back the cycle of self-loathing being validated and self-medicating it with sex ends, and they're left wondering how anyone could actually like them enough to genuinely want to spend time with them? I know about this because I have a friend who fits this pattern exactly, and when I read this excerpt my mind immediately jumped to her. Then I thought of how all the promiscuous people I know seem to fit the general pattern, and the whole theory coalesced. And yes, she's admitted to me that self-loathing has a lot to do with it.

This whole process is compounded by the fact that promiscuous people tend to be around more promiscuous members of the opposite sex than average, but aren't really any less capable of developing genuine feelings for someone else.

Is that true tho?

I've seen claims that promiscuity leads to diminished ability to pair-bond.

Surely, if gluttony leads to reduced insulin-sensitivity, reduced ability to feel satiated / reduced tolerance for hunger, temporarily or permanently...

Couldn't similar biological mechanisms apply for oxytocin or reward circuits?

Do they really have the same ability to start and sustain a loving relationship that they used to have before n attempts?

Maybe, but it's more complicated than that. We're talking about standard-grade promiscuity here, not nymphomania. The people I know who are like this are still, occasional hookups aside, still ostensibly trying to find a long-term partner. The problem is that they get caught up in the whirlwind period at the beginning of the relationship and quickly sour on the other person. Unless, of course, the other person sours on them while they're still in the whirlwind period, hence the self-loathing. This also explains why promiscuous people tend to describe normal "nice guys" as "boring". If you never get past the early stages of a relationship you're either in the period where the only time you see the person is on dates when doing fun things and in the bedroom, or you're so infatuated that doing absolutely anything together is exciting. Or both. If you're a self-loathing person who hates their boring life, the new person seems like a window into a better one. Except eventually the relationship progresses to the point where instead of drinking Bloody Marys on bright, beautiful Saturday afternoons you're at his house on a rainy Tuesday night while he watches the local news and YouTube videos about how to fix the leak in his dishwasher.

This is akin to a trend I've noticed with promiscuous people in general.

Your post very accurately described the movie "Trainwreck." Say what you like about Amy Schumer, that movie really captured a common contemporary female neurosis.

I mean I feel the modern moment makes it tricky.

I've done a lot of dating in the last year or two trying to find 'the one', whatever that means, and yet it's been my experience that if I'm not trying to storm the proverbial castle in terms of sexual and physical escalation within 2-3 dates that I'm going to get automatically discarded as a potential partner due to the women getting confused and ultimately talking themselves out of the interaction.

As a result, I've spun off more than a few cases where it's 2-3 dates in, we sleep together and then the relationship fails to happen for whatever reason. There's a lot of dealbreakers you can't really figure out on that small a sample, and yet I feel I have to put out or I'm not going to even get a chance to take things slowly. In an ideal universe I'd be perfectly happy if my current dating stanza involved me just actually getting to that stage with one woman (provided she was the The One) but yet to be competitive in the marketplace I need to swing myself around.

Congratulations. You reinvented measuring how good a programmer is by measuring how many lines of code he produces.

Bodycount is meaningless metric. Just some people are desperate for something to measure to be able to do a quick discard.

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Bodycount is meaningless metric.

What an interesting hypothesis. It'd be a shame if someone were to... test it.

Let's say I have a graph that shows "Divorce rate vs. number of pre-marriage sexual partners". Do you think the correlation will be positive or negative?

The answer may surprise you! (Lolno, it won't surprise anyone)

Without graph for hotness ... it doesn't mean much. An explanation for this graph is that the ugly and unfuckable are so out of options that divorce is pointless for them.

I don't understand your objection. If body count is correlated to divorce rate, then a high body count woman has a higher chance of divorcing you than a low body count woman, by definition.

Looking at an r=0.8 correlation and responding "Ah-ha but maybe the correlation would be r=0.9 if you control for hotness"... The fact that you can speculate on the existence of a hypothetical better study doesn't remove meaning from the existing study!

Lizzardspawn is saying that 40%~ of women polled with low body counts aren't divorcing because they can't abandon the one guy who was willing to take them. So, the common cause of low divorce rate and low body counts is desperation, rather than chastity or high relationship ethics.

I do not find this interpretation of the data convincing as, in my experience, 40% of women in their teens and twenties do not struggle to find partners willing to bed them.

On the other hand, a lower number of lifetime partners is probably correlated with marrying younger, which we know correlates with divorce risk on its lonesome. So having that graph in that direction means the effect is strong enough to overcome the correlation between early marriage and divorce.

Aella's recent survey showed women (and men) having many previous partners was the number 1 predictor for them cheating. Previous promiscuity is bad for the vast majority of people and their partners.

Also IIRC #previous partners is actually somewhat anticorrelated to physical attractiveness for women.

Let's say I have a graph that shows "Divorce rate vs. number of pre-marriage sexual partners". Do you think the correlation will be positive or negative?

That's not the divorce rate. That's the ratio of 30yo+ women who've had the same partner for the last five years. This is affected both by the divorce rate and the age at which they got married. Someone who has had only long-term boyfriends since she was 16 might look like this:

  • age: 34

  • number of partners: 3 (16-24, 24-31, 31-now)

  • in a stable relationship: no

Does this mean her current marriage will end up in a divorce? No, not really.

Let's say I have a graph that shows "Divorce rate vs. number of pre-marriage sexual partners". Do you think the correlation will be positive or negative?

Do you think that's mostly a direct causal relationship (having premarital sex directly increases the rate of divorce), or indirect (some common factor both causes people to have premarital sex and also causes them to be more prone to divorce)?

Perhaps a more direct intuition pump. Let's say we have a pair of 30 year old friends. Both are newlyweds (not to each other). One of the friends had 20 sexual partners prior to getting married, which is at the 80th percentile, and the other had 8, which is the median. We should expect the friend with the median number of partners to have around the median chance of divorce within 5 years (around 20% as far as I can tell), and the one at the 80th percentile to have a higher 5-year-divorce chance (~35% if my slightly sketchy sources are right, but the exact number isn't really important).

Now take the exact same scenario, but instead of friends they're identical twins. Do you expect that the twin who had more partners is 1.5x to 2x more likely to divorce within the next five years? I personally don't particularly expect that, just because I expect that divorce rates are quite strongly driven by heritable factors rather than environmental ones.

Do you think that's mostly a direct causal relationship (having premarital sex directly increases the rate of divorce), or indirect (some common factor both causes people to have premarital sex and also causes them to be more prone to divorce)?

Direct. The more pair-bonding you do with different people, the less you are capable of psychologically investing in the next one. And if you can't psychologically invest in your spouse, you're gonna have a bad time.

Still there's gonna be a bunch of cultural/behavioral confounders.

I don't doubt that there's a direct correlation effect, but I'd also be surprised if there wasn't a significant case of lower pre-marital partners amongst a plethora of cultural & religious groups who marry young and don't really divorce.

I don't think bodycount in of itself is a problem, but having a very high one is indicative of a bunch of other correlated factors.

I suspect that any study of very high body count women(say, top 5%) is going to be dominated by prostitutes, drug users, women who’ve engaged in survival sex, women with a history of mental illness, etc, and that that’s going to confound it all to hell. I also expect that that’s probably not a major affect for women at the 75th percentile.

Both extremes are likely gonna have a bunch of weird correlations, though.

but having a very high one is indicative of a bunch of other correlated factors.

Also, having specifically zero is positively correlated with belonging to a (sub)religion that takes "you don't divorce on a whim" seriously, and usually means your friends and family believe similarly. This is hidden in the discontinuity between 0 and 1, though the effect could be a minor one.

Oh, and the graphs don't necessarily separate one cycle of marriage/divorce from more than one, so women on their second, third, etc. marriages are pretty obviously going to have had more than one partner (unless that was why the marriage ended, but y'know).

The show spends whole seasons asking questions, only to deus-ex the problems right out of existence when they want to make the characters happy.

Forgive the quip, and I hope I will be able to engage more meaningfully with your really interesting questions, but: Women not facing the negative consequences of their actions isn't an omission on part of the writers. It's what makes it feminist fantasy. That is the feminist solution and it is indeed quite scalable as far as mainstream feminism is concerned. If not, well. Then the man-shaming will just have to continue until morale improves.

Do most liberal/apolitical men take serious issue with their partners having had a few previous boyfriends and 5 more previous casual partners? My impression is, generally, not really. Maybe something biological prevents most men from marrying someone with 100 bodies (although I doubt it, cultures are very flexible), but marriage rates demonstrate 5 bodies doesn't mean much. You note that these characters are '96th percentile', and most men avoiding long-term partnerships with the top 5% of sluts isn't a societal issue. So I don't think there's a societal issue here - we've already moved the needle a long way from 'parents checking for bloodstains on the marital bed'.

edit

Glancing at this, which is an interesting read otherwise, 2021 data still shows a median number of partners of 5. Dating apps might change the derivative, so maybe it'll take a decade to adjust, but idk. Trojan's survey is basically an advertisement and probably doesn't mean anything. GSS and similar sources of data would have 'number of partners, if in a big city', but i cba to check

Dunno if the meme has made it around the liberal agnostic spheres but these graphs are widely discussed in right wing circles.

Were there no women with 20+ partners in the surveyed sample, or were they all divorced?

Do most liberal/apolitical men take serious issue with their partners having had a few previous boyfriends and 5 more previous casual partners?

Given how politically charged the topic is, it's more useful to look at how people act rather than what they claim. Women lie downward about their number of sexual partners. Why do they do this if they don't feel the number lowers their status?

Do you believe women are just being paranoid?

but marriage rates demonstrate 5 bodies doesn't mean much

I don't think this demonstrates that. Relationship success for women is about quality of partner instead of whether they can marry. Or even exclude "for women" if you find that controversial. Lower your standards enough and practicially anyone can marry.

To you and @rococobasilica - yeah, there's some general dislike (potentially justified!) of higher body counts, especially for wives. But - how strong is that? It doesn't seem to be anywhere near what the OP implies. Anecdotally, while my right-leaning friends care a lot (imo too much) about body count, my apolitical or liberal friends either don't care about, or care a bit but not much about, for instance 8 past partners, for a wife - and it's somewhat hard to tell but their actions don't seem to contradict it. They'd, ofc, find 50 past partners unappealing, but few women have that so it's not a general issue. My experiences aren't universal obviously, social clustering is weird, but my guess is it's common enough, and the amount of caring about 8 past partners among non-conservatives small enough, that OP's worry about 'promiscuous women not finding partners because men aren't interested' isn't a big issue for feminism.

Why do they do this if they don't feel the number lowers their status? Do you believe women are just being paranoid?

No, it does a bit, just not that much. People lie about all sorts of things. Men lie about their height, everyone lies about attractiveness, even though everyone can already see them.

it's somewhat hard to tell but their actions don't seem to contradict it

It's important to realize that it may affect the men at a deeper level even if they get into relationships with these women. There are a lot of biological mechanisms at play to prevent men from wasting their energy on strategies that don't lead to survival, so these men may not give these women as much attention, focus on committing adultery etc.

"How many men you claim to have slept with in the past" seems like a difficult target for a 'biological mechanism'. Do you have any evidence/arguments for this, aside from 'its evolutionarily plausible'? There are a lot of much more likely evolutionary mechanisms that didn't happen, because evolution is complicated and random.

"How many men you claim to have slept with in the past" seems like a difficult target for a 'biological mechanism'.

Everything in human life is complex, so evolutionary targets and gene-environment interactions are always complicated, but that doesn't mean they don't exist.

And no evolution isn't just "random", I study it mathematically, it's meant to ensure survival and reproduction, and to assume it hasn't affected sexual jealousy, common in many animals, is just batshit crazy.

I can tell you what disgusts me about promiscuity and it's not necessarily body count, but imagining my woman giving herself to other men makes me want to vomit, so having a woman who hasn't had one-night stands is more important than absolute body count to me. I'd love to steal other men's loyal women though.

By 'random' I meant 'has randomness as a significant input'. I'm confident that "your women, at the moment or in the future, fucking another guy" is unpleasant for natural selection reasons. But the strength of the extension of that to 'your woman fucked another guy in the past' is probably mostly cultural - even if there is a natural basis to it, it's weak enough to be overridden (as opposed to the first example, which would be much harder to override)

Just off the cuff and if we're talking about a woman in her late 20s/early 30s: <3 is preferred but might raise suspicions about prudishness, 4-6 is expected, 7-10 is a slight argument against, >20 is close to an exclusion criterion.

Do most liberal/apolitical men take serious issue with their partners having had a few previous boyfriends and 5 more previous casual partners?

Their partners? No. Their future wives? Probably more so.

I think you’re way overestimating the promiscuity of the typical woman.

The first one was intended to be higher than average, to suggest that most non-culturally-conservatives don't care that much. from a cdc page i didn't read too closely, "Median number of opposite-sex partners in lifetime among sexually experienced women and men aged 25-49 years of age", Women - 4.3 (0.10), Men - 6.3 (0.39)", although one of those is 'my current partner', 5 is pretty close. Although 'liberal/apolitical' for my example means it'll be a bit higher than that.

Why does it need a solution or an answer? Men can either deal with it or not; if they don't, they're out of the sexual market, and if they do, well, they have access to sex and relationships. Women have the negotiating edge in the dating market, so they can set the price of entry to whatever they want. I'd also add that, anecdotally, most men in my social circles don't really care about n-count, going both by what they say and how they act (i.e. who they choose to date, where there's at least a dozen factors that take precedence).

Because there isn't a seperate 'women society' and a seperate 'men society' that are independent from each other where people from each society can voluntarily elect to interact just for a bit of fun. Nor is this some kind of financial transation for a novelty item where people can just pay the exorbitant price, or choose not to and suffer nothing for it.

This situation is incredibly dysfunctional to society and if it continues, it can quite easily become ruinous. And sure, yeah the 'market' will correct itself eventually even if takes the whole thing crashing and burning. I'm sure the Romans with their civilisation burning would have been comforted if they only knew that other empires will come after theirs.

Because there isn't a seperate 'women society' and a seperate 'men society' that are independent from each other where people from each society can voluntarily elect to interact just for a bit of fun.

Given the prevelance of single sex friendship groups and associations compared to evenly balanced friendship groups, there functionally are male societies and female societies. This state is further magnified when you leave co-ed environments: there are countless men in tech or women in nursing who have zero interaction with men that they were not already acquainted with before the transition.

This situation is incredibly dysfunctional to society and if it continues, it can quite easily become ruinous.

Yes it is, and I see not a single sign that this will improve. South Korea's gender politics and 0.78 birthrate beckon.

Given the prevelance of single sex friendship groups and associations compared to evenly balanced friendship groups, there functionally are male societies and female societies.

I get your point, but I am yet to meet a man or woman who can reproduce asexually.

Because there isn't a seperate 'women society' and a seperate 'men society' that are independent from each other where people from each society can voluntarily elect to interact just for a bit of fun.

Increasingly, that seems to be the arrangement we're heading for.

Not that such an arrangement is historically unprecedented. If anything, the idea that men and women should live in "one society" is the historical aberration. The traditional view was that a man's proper place was in the public sphere and a woman's proper place was in the private sphere. There was once a time in some European countries where a respectable woman couldn't even attend a play at a public theater, particularly if she was unchaperoned.

Of course, we've long since done away with the traditional constraints and norms surrounding marriage and sex that made such an arrangement workable.

It's a meme for a reason: women are the gatekeepers of sex, men are the gatekeepers of commitment.

The idea that women can just set whatever price they want and not end up childless spinsters is delusional. In the end there are only so many possible mates. And society used to recognize this and warn them against this common failure mode.

Society no longer warns them because that's been deemed oppressive. Quousque tandem?

Society no longer warns them because that's been deemed oppressive.

I agree with society. I think that having less of the "delusional entitled woman" genes in society, by the request (implicit and explicit) of their mothers, is the correct move in the long run- yeah, it sucks for the entitled women of today, and it will be worse for the men of today because those women are nowhere near their peak lifetime political power, but in 100 years things will likely be saner than they would have been had they been "forced" to reproduce as their parents were.

I think the eugenic effects of a significant number of women failing to reproduce are under-studied; I am cautiously optimistic that our grandchildren will be better off as a result but things will get worse before they get better as these women will probably try (and have time and money) to take that frustration out on everyone else before they die off.

Have you considered that this would select for women who listen to their parents, rather than for women who have the independent thought to realize their standards are too high(these things are probably anti correlated because independent thought is independent thought).

Im quite interesed in how the modern dating/mating landscape would affect genetics. My priors are that these things take 10000s of years to change not a generation or two. Perhaps consider an effort post?

Not an effort post, but consider that much of the phenotypic diversity we see in dogs developed over the last couple centuries. Selection can be surprisingly rapid.

Men can either deal with it or not

Except, as is regularly ignored, that is asking the wrong question. Miranda he 33 year old lawyer with 42 partners and chlamydia is basically guaranteed to be miserable for the next 45 years of her statistical life. She will have no, or at best many fewer children than she wants. She will not, statistically, be happy with whatever man she settles down with (if she finds one to do so with at all).

In other words, framing it as "men can just suck it up" is like looking at a rash of teenage girls cutting themselves and thinking, "well teenage boys will just have to deal with seeing scars on their girlfriends." Sure that is a secondary effect that negatively impacts the teenage boys, but the girls are the ones being primarily damaged, and they are the one's who we can treat. And then after that treatment the boys will have a spillover benefit of unscarred girlfriends.

The fictional Miranda ends up happy, IIRC.

Of course, that's a fantasy. But it's also a fantasy that promiscuous women end up unhappy; most don't, at least no more so than people have throughout history. People nearly always end up settling for a less-than-ideal partner, and most women, promiscuous or not, are able to do just that when and if they want to.

If your concern is how this affects men (that is to say, the unequal environment they face in dating), I share your concern. But trying to improve those men's outcomes by pointing to fantastical stories about how women are actually being harmed isn't likely to be effective, because it doesn't match reality.

But it's also a fantasy that promiscuous women end up unhappy

Women who marry later in life are more unhappy. Regardless of body count. They also typically will have a higher body count than the woman married at 25.

If your concern is how this affects men

It is also bad for men, yes.

But trying to improve those men's outcomes by pointing to fantastical stories about how women are actually being harmed isn't likely to be effective, because it doesn't match reality.

No, it does match reality. The more a woman lives her life like Miranda or Olivia Pope instead of June Cleaver and Marge Simpson the more likely she is, statistically, to be unhappy.

Donna Reed, she worked until she married and had children.

Her "real" marriage started at age 24.

Miranda he 33 year old lawyer with 42 partners and chlamydia is basically guaranteed to be miserable for the next 45 years of her statistical life.

I'm not convinced a counter-factual Miranda with 0 partners and 0 chlamydia at age 33 would have a particularly easier time finding a man who'll make her happy for the next 45 years of her life.

There's lots of references in the redpill-sphere of how high body count leads to infidelity, but that sounds like something very easily prone to mistaking correlation for causation. I think it's very plausible that women with high body counts have high body counts because they enjoy having sex with lots of different people, and that that desire was already present in them before they had sex for the first time.

As a famous sportsball coach once said "adversity doesn't build character, it reveals it".

Let's say you're right and that X% of women from birth will be unhappy in a relationship because they need sexual fulfillment or validation from multiple sexual partners. Because access to sex is easy for modern women, this X% will tend to have high N counts by age 33, moreso than the average person.

This makes things rather easier for modern men looking for partners. In earlier times, when women married as young virgins, you might have no clue if your wife would turn out to be Madame Bovary. In modern times, the Madame Bovarys of the world have already self selected, revealing their character by having huge N counts.

Which isn't to say that women with high N counts are always unsatisfactory partners, it just makes it more likely. It also applies to men. I'm nearly certain that men with high N counts are more likely to cheat. The difference here is that male cheating is less likely to have an emotional component which would torpedo the relationship.

I'd agree. I just don't think trying to make women have fewer sex partners in their youth is the right societal strategy. Trad men should be happy that people have their characters revealed. And for all the men who don't care, they don't lose anything partnering with those women.

No trad men don't get a good deal because even many better women may have had one or a few one-night stands at some point, or some form of casual sex. And to a trad man that is absolutely repulsive, taking care of a woman who gave herself away to some other man to use as an object of pleasure. Even a small number of ex-boyfriends also don't help, the woman may still be bonded to them.

Trad men may accept these women nowadays, but that's only because there is such a limited supply of truly good women.

I don't think the number of actual trad men is that much larger than the number of virgin women out there. Also I don't have much sympathy for this view point because trad men, and many other various types of conservative men, will rail and rail against women having casual sex, but don't have much to say about other men having casual sex. They might say they disapprove of promiscuous men too if you ask, but they never write long posts about how the quality of our nation is declining because of all the men out there sowing oats instead of settling down. Casual sex should be degrading the character of men just as much as it does women, but these types aren't taking a stand against men engaging in casual sex.

Trad men should be angry about men ruining more pure women. That said, men and women aren't the same. All the men can rail a few prostitutes, which is fine as long as they still devote themselves to, and take care of their wives.

I would expect the number of trad men is larger than the number of virgins, because there are so few virgins.

This "double standard" of men being able to bang prostitutes (not wives!) has been common throughout history. If you really want to see real double standard hypocrisy, see the billion other double standards that favor women. Like women not going to war, not having the responsibility to have children and respect their husbands, female adultery being glorified etc.

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I'm not convinced a counter-factual Miranda with 0 partners and 0 chlamydia at age 33 would have a particularly easier time finding a man who'll make her happy for the next 45 years of her life.

Of course, because she is 33. The problem is feminism's propagandizing that you can flip a switch from promiscuous sex fiend to stable mom + girlboss in your mid 30s.

I think it's very plausible that women with high body counts have high body counts because they enjoy having sex with lots of different people, and that that desire was already present in them before they had sex for the first time.

Of course its plausible, it is probable. It is also destructive, which is why we typically had rules and organizations attuned to limiting this self-destructive constellation of sexual impulses.

Of course, because she is 33. The problem is feminism's propagandizing that you can flip a switch from promiscuous sex fiend to stable mom + girlboss in your mid 30s.

A few girls got pregnant and got married in college when I was a student, and everyone was "eeeh, not the best outcome", but now that I'm older I kinda think college or the gap year before it might be the best time to have a child if you want a career as well, certainly better than trying to settle down in your mid 30s.

You finish high school, get married, get pregnant, give birth, spend the first six months with the baby, go to college. The college has daycare, and the classes are not 9-to-5, so you can spend more time with your child. By the time you graduate, the child is old enough to attend kindergarten and you can careermaxx and maybe even have another child later.

The biggest drawback is that most husbands will be college students as well. Too young and too dumb, and fatherhood doesn't trigger wisening up in men the way having a job and dependents does.

Indeed it would be interesting. I think the real issue is that once women get outside the brainwashing space of careermax girlboss feminism they are able to realistically evaluate how much that life sucks, and thus don't do it.

and, unlike work, you can take a semester off college and pick up where you left off.

I think it's very plausible that women with high body counts have high body counts because they enjoy having sex with lots of different people, and that that desire was already present in them before they had sex for the first time.

They enjoy having sex with lots of different people AND have the poor impulse control that prevents them from reining in this impulse for the sake of their future husband.

It's the combination of these 2 traits that's the marriage-killer, not just the presence of the first one.

The feminist solution is to throw out the relationship script and replace it with something or other, it’s best not to think about it too hard. No it isn’t vague it’s just making space for every woman to get what she wants whatever that is. Yes, obviously this will never happen and most feminists have a revealed preference for relationships.

Yes, obviously this will never happen and most feminists have a revealed preference for relationships.

The link between feminist activism and fantasies of living out traditional domestic arrangements is really fascinating to me and something that I think deserves more exploration - though I don't fancy my chances of trying to get a study like that done in modern academia.

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