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PaperclipPerfector  9d ago (text post)   24514 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 20, 2025

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Sexual liberation cannot be half-stepped. Everybody gets to fuck, all together or paired up.

I'm not going to personally defend this perspective. I'm just here to point out that the data-based argument that samiam makes doesn't actually refute the "alpha fux, beta bux" argument as incels normally formulate it.

There are certainly philosophical arguments that can be made (really, that's more or less what's going on upthread), and I'm not even ruling out the idea that there's a data-based argument that does refute "alpha fux, beta bux", it's just not this one.

I am not an incel and disagree with many aspects of their arguments: the best I can muster is a "there but for the grace of God go I".

For the “cock carousel” theory to hold water, we would see a pattern of a large number of male virgins and/or men with only 1-2 partners, and a small number of males with a lot of sex partners. We would see women with a more even distribution of sex partners.

That’s not what we see: We see about the same number of male and female virgins, about 60% of the population of men and women have around 3-10 lifetime partners, and about 20 to 30% of both men and women have a lot of sexual partners (the reported number of partners female claim to have compared to men is lower, but we can normalize for that: around 30% of the men have 70% of the reported female sexual partners, and, likewise, around 30% of the women have 70% of the reported male sexual partners).

You forgot the disclaimer: both men and women have motivation to lie about self-reported body count data

The argument that people are actually engaging in a certain behavior, but lie when asked about it, is the kind of argument which quickly leads to conspiracy theories. Sure, they could all be lying, but that’s an extraordinary claim that requires extraordinary evidence.

That’s not my claim. My claim is that men have reason to lie upwards about body count, and women have reason to lie downwards about it. This is a well known effect in human sexuality research.

Alexander & Fisher (2003) https://www.amherst.edu/media/view/239672/original/Alexander%252B%252526%252BFisher%252B%2525282003%252529.pdf

I think my disclaimer is important when drawing conclusions from self-reported data about sexual behavior. I’m not committed to the “carousel” theory, as you argue against above, rather I’m surprised you would use that data without caveat.

I take that in to account.

“the reported number of partners female claim to have compared to men is lower, but we can normalize for that: around 30% of the men have 70% of the reported female sexual partners, and, likewise, around 30% of the women have 70% of the reported male sexual partners”

As long as there is correlation between the reported number of partners and actual number of partners, there is a pattern that there are about as many promiscuous women as promiscuous men. For 80/20 to be true, we would see just under 80% of men with low partner count and 20% of men with high partner count, but that’s not the pattern we see. 20% or so are virgins, about 50-60% have a handful of lifetime partners, and about 20-30% have a lot of partners. This is true for both women and men.

Current data can't refute "alpha fux, beta bux", because it emerges from the work of David Buss, and from Primatology as a whole. Once everyone agrees about how unregulated sexual marketplaces work, then we can have a serious discussion about what social policies could improve the situation.

I think the global sexual marketplace has way too much competition, which can be seen on dating apps, and in big cities. There is a massive difference in the level of romantic value men can offer in big cities. At the top, we have deca-millioniares and billionaires, extremely athletic men and male models, compared to men who are just average/above average. Considering that almost all urban young women are sexually liberated, and have access to the top men via dating apps, it's genuinely hard to imagine how these young women can go back to dating normal guys after this superstimulus. It's like going back to caffeine after doing meth.

I'm not sure if a restrictive solution would work. Can't turn a 'ho into a housewife, as the saying goes.

The mistake David Buss made in the 1990s to 2000s, when he was making a version of the “Alpha Fux Beta Bux” argument (to wit, Buss argued that women frequently cheat on their “beta provider” husbands to have children with “alpha bad boy” men which their husbands pay for) is that genetic testing, at the time, showed a high cuckoldry rate.

More recent and extensive genetic testing has contradicted that notion, showing only a 1-2% cuckoldry rate: Over 98% of the time, a wife’s child is fathered by her husband.

The modern version of Buss et. al.'s argument doesn't rely on cheating that results in a child. Reliable birth control (condoms), and even unreliable birth control (ovulation timing) will lower the rate of genetic cuckoldry. And this tracks with common sense from the unfaithful wife's POV. She doesn't want to get pregnant from her lover, even if that's where the evolved instinct to cheat originally comes from. And, this whole "alpha fux beta bux" argument only makes sense in zero-sum monogamy. It seems that all chimps in a troop both "fux" and "bux."

edit: removed a paragraph

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