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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.

Most promiscuous men are promiscuous because they associate with promiscuous women, rather than because they are extremely handsome.

This is an obvious but little stated point. While straight male attractiveness is surely correlated with partner/‘body’ count, because very unattractive men are unlikely to have had many or any partners, the most promiscuous straight men are rarely the most handsome; they are often just the horniest and most desperate. Often they are the most regular purchasers of sex. So the fat, aging long haul trucker might have a body count that puts many an NBA star or Hollywood leading man to shame. Ask him if all women are whores and, well, ninety percent of those he encounters might well be. The promiscuous male is not often particularly or necessarily reliable when it comes to ‘knowing’ women.

Much of the incel ecosystem involves activities that specifically overexpose incels to the small minority of the most promiscuous women. “Chadfishing” for example, where they post pictures of beautiful male models and then send vulgar or rude messages to the women who match with them (or just include them in their profile and see who they match with). Or the consumption of media by hustle bros and ‘looksmaxxers’ like Clav, who hang around OnlyFans prostitutes and Miami club rats. Even the original pick up artists did this: techniques like ‘street game’ hitting on a hundred women in public and then trying to hook up with the single one who seems receptive and gives them their number are tailor made to filter for 99th percentile promiscuity women.

The obvious reason why you might not want to take a pimp’s opinion “about women” is that he is exposed primarily to the behavior of only one very specific kind of woman.

techniques like ‘street game’ hitting on a hundred women in public and then trying to hook up with the single one who seems receptive and gives them their number are tailor made to filter for 99th percentile promiscuity women.

It does not even has to be that, you can filter for women who are currently in manic phase of their BPD or who want to get revenge on their boyfriend who literally dumped them an hour ago etc. This is also strategy of various sneaky fuckers who embed themselves in women's organizations - they are there exactly to use any opportunity they can get. It is just game of numbers.

Add on that these guys get the most practice at identifying the women who are vulnerable to this approach and thus the most skill at correctly timing and exploiting the opening.

They become adept at hunting a particularized type of prey, and as long as that prey is around in sufficient numbers, will find regular success, even if they'd strike out with 90% of other women 99% of the time.

True and the marketification of this kinda stuff has second-order effects where somebody who really really optimizes their approach to lovebombing or whatever can potentially really wreck the marketplace for everybody else. Girl A comes to expect unsustainable levels of game from somebody who's really really perfected their 3 date cycle and has zero intention beyond that, then gets released back into the market and stuff gets fucky.

Yep.

I optimized for a world where you generally had pre-selection of the people you dated because you knew them via your own social circles already.

Then I adjusted for the world where, okay, you don't know them, but you can at least consciously target your efforts towards people you expect you'd get along with and ignore the rest.

But the current world there's no way to optimize when all the information/feedback you'd need to actually adjust your approach is locked in the black box of the app, and you absolutely CANNOT trust women to accurately explain what appeals to them.

In my experience, the majority of guys that really ran up a bodycount weren't picky about the girls they slept with. It wouldn't surprise me if some had a sex addiction or self esteem issue.

I remember one guy who kept telling stories about how a girl he'd bag had big breasts and then a mutual friend would send a photo and you would see that the 'girl' was 40 years old and had 'big everything'. I never understood the appeal of going for unattractive women just to get sex. Mind-boggling.

'Fishing' stories of mass exaggeration were rife in the PUA community. You pretty much learnt only to believe people if you'd personally seen them walk out of a club with an 8+ on their arm.

Edit: Here's a professional athlete that went for some low hanging fruit. When the girl realised he was going for a 'slump-buster' and she'd never be able to wrangle him into a relationship, she went public in a pearl-clutching fake affront. The athlete (while not the best looking) could probably do much better, but is happy to settle for something average. He wouldn't be approaching girls like that on Tinder unless he had success doing so and was comfortable with the quality.

I feel like low-hanging fruit is a bit strong there. Is she Helen of Troy, no, but unless America's been totally upended by Ozempic to a degree that hasn't hit the rest of the world just being not fat or actively ugly gets you to a 4 in a lot of markets as a woman.

just being not fat or actively ugly gets you to a 4 in a lot of markets as a woman.

Roughly two thirds of women 18-35 are overweight. Just being not fat gets you to at least a five, probably a six. A non-fat, non-ugly girl in that age range is in the top 25% of available women.

Overweight and fat are different. IMO plenty of girls can be over a 25 BMI and not look fat. Obviously there's a cliff from there but yeah if you're non-fat, not actively facially ugly and in the beholder's preferred spot on the cleanskin -> body modification spectrum you're doing perfectly fine in mid twenties Australia and America.

I left plenty of space in that napkin math to account. I stand by my wild-ass-guess.

I feel like we're spiritually aligned. Just being not-fat, not-deformed and somewhat feminine presenting gets you to middle these days.

I'm reminded of a semi-viral twitter thread a week or two ago with a photo of a womens' MBA class or something about 'good luck finding husbands' and a pitched battle in the comments between 'they look kinda plain so they're 3's' and 'they have jobs, reasonable-range BMIs and they're not actively ugly they're 6+' in the comments

How the mighty have fallen.

I was actually regretting equivocating men (even high value men) getting fast food with sex addicts who think that any hole is a goal, but there should be some standards for the women we choose in our lives. Shouldn't there?

It's a marketplace. You can do a one-person strike from the sexual marketplace to protest the rise of tattoos and the expansion of waistlines but unless you have an Ozempic dartgun what can you do about it?

I mean sure but also anybody who's been on a dating app knows what the lowend looks like these days and it's a big girl or trans or really really alternate looks. That girl is okay

I guess this was quite awhile ago when a circle of friends were geneticists and a physicians assistant cohort. The with out a doubt best looking guy - only seen him with 6' D1 volley ball players - body count was 4. The - slightly pudgy normal looking guy - was at 28; also the guy who'd slept with a drunk much younger subordinate and would make low key passes at people's wives.