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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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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.

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