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There has been some new study recently showing that female promiscuity, just like male promiscuity, is limited to a small subset of the total population. Before I deleted X, I saw several posts asking why non-promiscuous men are still chasing the "hoes" (and are complaining about them) instead of concentrating on the majority of women that aren't. I want to propose a hypothesis.
But first, a digression. Imagine a happily married gay couple, Fred and Steve. It's Saturday afternoon, their adopted kids won't be back home for a couple more hours, all the chores are done, and Fred's looking bored and restless. Steve suggests a quickie to pass the time. Is Fred down for it? I would bet my money on yes.
Now replace Fred with Frida. Suddenly, the odds are completely different. I am not saying that all women are not into random acts of intercourse, but the proportion of them that are dtf is low enough that reversing the bet makes total financial sense.
What does this have to do with promiscuity? My hypothesis is that it's significantly correlated with overall sex drive in women. (Feel free to nominate me for the Ig Nobel prize.) There are some non-promiscuous, but libidinous women, except they don't stay on the dating market long, just like reasonably prices houses in good locations are almost never seen on Zillow. The visible parts of the dating market are promiscuous women and women with low sex drive. In the past the concepts of "putting out", "marital duty" obscured this dynamic, but modern women have been brought up knowing they don't owe anyone sex and don't have to hide their (dis)interest. And given that single lives are now easier than ever, why bother with trying to date such women at all? Better to concentrate on the visibly promiscuous women or on the age cohorts that are just entering the dating market, both of them have a higher share of women with a high enough sex drive.
Think of this in terms of encounter frequency. In both sexes there are those who are basically monogamous (perhaps sequentially) and those who are not. Call it r/k selection or whatever. Pareto says 80% of the variance comes from 20% of the population, so let's take that for some napkin math. 20% of the people, male and female, are accounting for let's say 80% of the dating sex that happens.
People in relationships aren't in this pool. They're having sex, or not, in the relationship. The dating pool though, is still 80% basically monogamous awkward chuds who are not good at dating because they only do it to get into a relationship. The difference is the female 80% can still bang one of those 20% of male sluts pretty easily, while the 80% of men in the dating pool are waiting to luck into a decent match. This is where both female and male resentments in dating originate.
Women because that 80% who are really just in it for a serious boyfriend/husband material get conned by the much more experienced 20% of guys who are good at dating, good at "game", and this in turn hurts their prospects for a number of reasons with their real target pool. Men because they just have a much harder time finding a sex partner if they're not willing/able to play the game and be a degenerate. Both men and women when dating are playing in a pool where a disproportionate number of the dates they'll go on are with the most predatory 20% of the opposite sex even though four out of five people in the pool don't want that. Most people don't spend all that long single and dating. The ones who do rack up crazy numbers, but it's in a pool of fish and sharks.
There is a real gap in sexual desire between men and women, though this shifts over time. It is worst below ~age 30, which is when most of this stuff is taking place. This, however, doesn't change, while the dating scene can be radically altered by social custom. What we need is some sort of badge for r-selectors......maybe a red "A"?
I've seen a chart recently that suggest it's not the case and the couguar myth is a myth. I think Cremieux posted it, but I forgot to bookmark the study itself. Men are the horniest at 40, women are the horniest at the left edge of the chart, which was 18, and their sex drive monotonically decreases with each year.
If that's what it says, you should discount everything else in that chart, the study it is based on and whoever thought it was legitimate.
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Personally, I don't find this claim remotely credible.
Yeah that claim is insane. Men have an insanely high sex drive as teenagers and it goes down over time. It doesn't peak at 40, you finally start to get a reprieve at 40.
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I don't believe that anyone is hornier than teenage boys. That's the age where "don't stick your dick in that" memes come from. Also fighting and the other risky and impulsive actions teen boys are notorious for.
I'm not so sure about women. Being horniest in the teenage years makes sense on the simple biological basis of being ready to reproduce correlating with strong impulses to do so, but there's a line of argument that the reduction of oestrogen after menopause increases the ratio of testosterone and can result in a subjectively higher libido.
Anecdotes are not data, but yes. When I was going through menopause, at the start suddenly it was like a second mini-puberty about arousal. Very damn inconvenient when you don't want to be horny, have no reason to be horny (pete's sake, this is the official end of childbearing years) and nobody to be horny for/with. It did wear off (thankfully) but I can imagine some women getting the burst of desire then and their libido spiking.
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I was going to say this as well. When he said, “… Men are the horniest at 40…” I shook my head and said “Uh. Yeah, no.” Not a chance in hell. You can’t even know how difficult clarity of mind was to achieve among my peers at a young age. Maybe in the modern age of microplastics and low T you can expect bizarre studies to emerge in the future. A young healthy and virile man though? Center stage of all the youthful energy.
Which may not be as bad as we were told, due to contamination in the lab from latex gloves? Maybe?
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Found the study: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-025-23483-0
I was wrong about the monotonicity of female desire, but women are the horniest in their teens, according to it.
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Routing around this was the entire point of reputation based traditional systems. But dating apps do not work on that basis, and people’s instincts are geared towards a different problem.
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