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It's actually insane to me to read the parade of guys coming to these comments to express that the criterion for less than six sexual partners is strange or puzzling or not fair. I grew up in a community in which sex before marriage was a scandal, where parents actually cared about it, and where the expectation was to wait until marriage, and I'm younger than most of you!
These attitudes were handed down directly from a Christian moral understanding of sexual ethics so it certainly shouldn't be surprising even if you disagree with it. So the response of "Huh?? So strange!" is baffling to me in a forum where so many are otherwise eager to go to bat for Christianity if purely for the sake of argument.
I must say I myself find strange the new pagan-Western ritual of engaging in a series of pretend-marriages wherein you cohabitate, have sex, and mix finances with multiple partners before you finally vow lifetime partnership to whichever one you happen to be with when you realize the window for children is closing. And then have your first child in your mid-thirties.
Are you sure that the people who "bat for Christianity" are the same people saying it's not a big deal in this thread? I do the opposite of bat for any religion, so what's it to me?
I already know you're the Indian doctor atheist transhumanist novelist. So if I ever generalize in such a way again you can be sure to exclude yourself from the group for the sake of my point.
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I agree with you that some people pretend not to understand why other men would want a virgin (or as close to virgin as possible).
That said, the US is no longer governed by traditional Christian mores. You may bemoan that and seek smaller communities where the norms remain, but it shouldn't surprise you that a lot of people nowadays genuinely do find it strange to care so much about body counts.
FWIW, I actually agree with you that this is fucked up and in my personal life I prefer something much closer to traditional Christian ethics even though I am not Christian.
I do not miss that being the law or de facto law, though.
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And yet, you still didn't actually answer the question, which is "why are we supposed to care so much?"- probably because you're just taking "traditionalist/Christian sexual ethics are correct in all cases" for granted and going from there.
You could even get there from first principles and evopsych as it applies to the majority of people in any given place and time; you could argue that the liberal approach converges on the Christian one from a risk-management point of view so reality bears out that you should live by those rules, or you could come up with something different than those.
Or you could just say you don't like it and that's the way it is (and at least maintain a modicum of intellectual honesty), then extrapolate from there, since for n = 1 that might not be a particularly strong argument.
Sure, speculate about my irrational motivations! Try to turn this into a debate about the object level while attempting to convince the audience that I've already tried and failed to debate the object level myself! Just don't act like you're surprised body count is a consideration among most men.
Again:
Are you surprised by faceh's inclusion of that criterion? I suspect you aren't really; and I suspect most commenters here aren't, despite the chorus of scoffs about its irrationality. My first comment was expressing shock that there are so many here to claim not to care, because they're the weird ones.
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Your native community's sexual ethics do not surprise me, in the sense of me being surprised that they exist. When I say that I don't understand, I mean that, while I abstractly intellectually can mentally model the inner experience of men who are different from me in this way, I do not share their feelings. It is similar to how, I like broccoli and some people hate broccoli. I can mentally model not liking broccoli, but I don't really understand it from the perspective of my own tastes, all I can say is "oh well those people's tastes are different from mine".
I see your rhetorical sleight of hand. This is not a small or long-forgotten culture that you're hand-waving.
Idk man. Thinking of my wife with another man is acutely distressing, and I'm not anxious to convince myself that it shouldn't be. Maybe that's just a matter of liking broccoli.
Thinking of a lover being with another man in the present or the future distresses me. Thinking of a lover being with another man before I even met her does not affect me in the least bit.
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