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Notes -
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.
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.
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