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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 9, 2024

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Here's an interesting question that occurs to me, inspired by this post:

Is promiscuity worse when it's public or when it's private?

I'm inclined to think that we reached a social consensus that public promiscuity is worse than private promiscuity. ("As long as they keep it in the privacy of their own bedroom", laws against obscenity, etc.) But I'm also inclined to think that that social consensus is wrong. Yes, there are special types of damage done by public promiscuity - "normalization", corruption of bystanders, etc. But there are also special types of damage done by private promiscuity, and I'm inclined to say that they are much worse.

Everyone here can laugh it up about the men who'll marry these open prostitutes. But, y'know - at least they'll know what they're getting. It's not exactly a viable secret to keep. This doesn't seem, to me, nearly as corrosive to the social fabric as the general social expectation that even normie religious women will have some sexual history that they don't need to disclose to their husband.

My instinct is that it is actually better and less sexually immoral for a woman to be a clownish slut and publicly document a farcical orgy centered on herself than it is for her to act chaste and traditional but have a single one-night-stand she never tells another soul about. It is better to unconsciously offer oneself up as a cautionary tale about rough living than it is to consciously erode the trust between the sexes. I do not find that the cases like Aella blackpill me nearly as much as women in explicitly Christian/conservative contexts who accidentally let on that their morals are looser than they realize. It's like the difference people point to between Donald Trump, who's repulsive, but openly so, and a more classically dishonest politician.

A car's value plummets as soon as it's driven off the lot. Provided, I have no interest (in this metaphor) in purchasing a used car - but I have no quarrel with used car dealers, per se. It's about the integrity of the thing.

To make this argument work, you have to consider the problem with private promiscuity to be just that it's a lack of honesty. Then it's only that to the extent those involved placed some idiosyncratic value on avoiding the act. Many people have such standards (such as religious diet restrictions) which outsiders don't have much reason to care about.

On the other hand, if there's some intrinsic reason promiscuity is bad, women who do it publicly aren't only doing the same thing but honest. They're suspect because its publicity creates an added inappropriate relation, now with a public who shouldn't be involved at all, above the men involved.

None of this is to say you should be tolerant of the presentable slattern either...but treating it as just a matter of hypocrisy demeans the issue.