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Culture War Roundup for the week of May 18, 2026

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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.

One thing to note is that people generally have less sex as they age, which makes them less promiscuous. Promiscuity being limited to a small subset of the population, could actually mean that promiscuity is limited to young people. Assuming this population pyramid from Wikipedia is correct, people aged 20 to 30 (where I would assume most promiscuity happens) contain just north of 10% of the entire population.

So theoretically two statements could be true at the same time:

  1. Young people are generally very promiscuous.
  2. Only a small subset of the population is promiscuous (because people tend to settle down as they age).

Only a small subset of the population is promiscuous (because people tend to settle down as they age).

Many would disagree that it is possible to become less promiscuous, as you can't un-have sex with people and remove the viral-DNA load they deposited into your body.

I think most people would define "promiscuous" as "number of sexual partners in a given timeframe" i.e. a person who provides a number greater than X to the question "how many sexual partners did you have in the last twelve months?" It seems weird to me to describe as "promiscuous" a man who slept around in his early twenties, then decided to join the priesthood, took a vow of celibacy and hasn't so much as kissed a woman in decades.