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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.

The most obvious parallel to Chastity is Violence, both in the sense that these are the two highest stakes human activities that can be done for fun or profit, and in the sense that engaging in them or not is both a huge sign of your character and totally ambiguous absent context.

A man who tells you he never gets in fights is telling you something about himself, but it's not clear what he's telling you. A man who tells you he does get into fights is telling you something about himself, but it's not clear what he's telling you.

A man who never gets into fights might be telling you that he's a peaceful man who values non-violence, that he stoically accepts and avoids situations where he would have to engage in violence, because he considers it a sin. Or he might be telling you that he is a weakling, a coward, a frightened pipsqueak who flees rather that confront an insult, that he has no sense of honor or right and wrong. Or he might be so manifestly large and intimidating that no one starts a fight with him because, seriously, look at the guy, he has no need to get into fights because his mere commanding presence intimidates wrongdoers.

A man who gets into fights might have heroic characteristics, he might have a highly developed sense of honor and right and wrong, he might be strong and brave enough to fight for those values. He might seek out "good trouble" rather than flee. Or he might be a violent psychopath who starts fights for no reason, constantly, who goes off the rails at the slightest imagined provocation. He might appear so small and weak that he is constantly being picked on and forced into fights. He might be a bitch who is constantly starting shit and saying insulting things to people to the point that they punch him.

Similarly, a chaste woman and a promiscuous woman are telling you things about their character, but it's not clear what.

A chaste woman might be a normal sexual woman with a highly developed sense of religious values and a strong will. Or she might have something medically wrong with her, have no sex drive. In the context of a religious community, she might very well be gay.

Similarly, a promiscuous woman might have a high sex drive. Or she might be of average or below average libido, but intensely submissive to her partners' desires.

Throw in that, lacking community and reputation to work off of, in an atomized urban community people only have the one decision to work off of: does he/she want to sleep with me? And that adds the possibility: if she doesn't sleep with me, it's because she isn't that attracted to me. If she does sleep with me, it might mean she's the town bicycle, or it might mean that she's super attracted to me. These are probably the worst/best outcomes possible, the worst thing that can happen to you is marrying a horny woman who doesn't like you, and the best thing that can happen to you is marrying a normal woman who thinks you're so hot she turns into a porn star with you. So it makes sense that men overweight them in the sample.

Context is key. We can draw a lot of this from social reputation in a community, we know the circumstances around what happened a little better, whether it's a fight or a fuck. But we don't really have that anymore.