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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.
At the risk of sharing the Ig Nobel with you, it seems to me that men might be generally more interested in sex outside established relationships, or earlier in a relationship.
From an evo-psych perspective, this is certainly what we should expect. A female mammal invests quite some resources in her offspring, so genes which promote being picky about partners and mating only with the ones which seem to thrive most in their environment is an optimal strategy. For male mammals, the situation is different, because their investment in the process is comparatively tiny. (Obviously this varies widely between species, I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice, etc). One complication with humans is that it is non-obvious if a woman is currently fertile or not. In response, genes thrived in humanity which make men horny all the time, circumstances permitting.
For the genes in a woman, mate selection is akin to the secretary problem. Better to wait a few months than spending years raising a child with subpar genes. (Where subpar could mean 'bad at a silly Kensian beauty contest, like a peacock without any tail feathers'). From the perspective of the same genome in a man, it is still akin to the secretary problem, but on a very different time scale, here the genes would optimize for 'what is the best investment for a day's worth of testes production?'
Obviously this gets complicated by gene-culture interactions, a gene which will cause its carrier getting stoned for adultery or ingroup rape will not thrive too much, for example.
As a man who is by inclination (if not by opportunity) a slut, I imagine that male promiscuity is one or two standard deviations higher than female promiscuity. For example, I imagine that it would be very easy for me to arrange a hookup with someone with a similar hotness score as myself -- if I was willing to hook up with a guy, which is sadly not one of my kinks.
There are probably a few men around who are non-promiscuous to the point where "join a church, court a single woman from the congregation, marry her, have missionary PIV sex, figure out if it is good sex or you have any (non-sinful) kinks in common, have a few kids" is compatible with their sex drive, but most will probably be off better competing for women more interested in sex, at least in the short-to-medium term.
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