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Culture War Roundup for the week of May 4, 2026

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I don't think the Wife of Bath or the Merry Wives idolise adultery - in so far as Merry Wives of Windsor has a villain, it is Falstaff and he gets his comeuppance in the finale. The point I am making is that they only make sense in a society where middle-class men couldn't lock up their wives the way middle-class Arabs do. Falstaff seducing another man's wife isn't good, but it is possible and Page and Ford have to worry about it, and ultimately given the nature of the society Shakespeare was living in and writing about, they have to rely on their wives' virtue to prevent it.

Early Modern cisHajnal Europe was much closer to your standard of "rather strict about policing women" than post-sexual revolution societies (but everyone agrees those are only able to exist because we have contraceptive tech that the Merry Wives didn't). But by the standards of pre-contraception societies, it was among the loosest.

The evidence of whether the actual nonpaternity rate has increased as a result of the sexual revolution is thin. There are a number of studies estimating Western nonpaternity rates over centuries by linking Y chromosomes to surnames - they all have small samples and large confidence bounds, but they converge on a range of 1-1.5%. Because of the methodology, this counts undocumented adoptions, including informal adoptions by stepfathers*, as nonpaternity but doesn't count cases where one male-line blood relative cucks another. See also this article about a Dutch research group that have reached the same conclusions more recently with a larger sample size and the added advantage of being able to cross-check against birth records rather than relying on surnames. They also cross-checked against a mitochondrial-DNA based estimate of nonmaternity (which you can't do with surnames), and discovered that nonmaternity is, as expected, vanishingly rare. The article says that the nonpaternity rate increased significantly in the 19th century (i.e. long before the sexual revolution) due to urbanisation - they say roughly 6% but don't give the error bars on the subsample.

The really hard part is estimating nonpaternity in the here and now. The taboo against unnecessary paternity tests means that the headline rate of nonpaternity from paternity testing (well north of 10%) is meaningless - it is an intentionally biased sample. To measure nonpaternity rates in cases where there isn't enough pre-existing suspicion for a DNA test to be ordered you need to get permission to test (anonymised, but paired) samples of father-child DNA taken for other reasons, like tracing genetic diseases. As far as I can see from the limited number of papers where people have got permission to do that, you get a nonpaternity rate of about 3% for the population as a whole, and 1.5-2% if you restrict the sample to unsuspicious cases. Which would mean that the sexual revolution reduced nonpaternity (presumably because cheaters use contraception) relative to the industrial-age urban baseline.

* I am aware that the manosphere considers this "pre-cucking", but it doesn't qualify under the conventional definition.

This is surprising, but given the difficulty of measuring such secrets it sounds like very meager information.

Maybe instead we could use the rate single motherhood as a proxy of looseness since that is much more observable. But of course that has its own problems, most of which is that measures enforcement on men rather than women.

Another big problem we haven't touched on which affects all these measures is widowing. Legitimate remarriage used to be far more common in the past due to higher mortality rates. And though the kids taking the name of their stepfather is not automatic in most western cultures, it wasn't uncommon to do so, not to mention kids conceived before such a legitimate marriage. And there is little way for us to measure this vis à vis cuckoldry with any systematic accuracy.