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Feminism has no Scalable Answer for Female Promiscuity
The apex of consumerist-choice-Feminism just dropped: this product review disguised as a slutty memoir-thinkpiece in New York Magazine’s Strategist section (typically for product reviews and recommendations, I go there to find good sheets or sheet pans). The piece traces the writer’s life by the backpacks she uses: an overnight bag that she used to cart her things as a side-piece to various jerks for emotionally empty sex, to a laptop bag that held her work when she tried to ignore men altogether, to a small purse that was appropriate to her newly traditional role as a formal “girlfriend” to a “nice” guy. It’s the romanticized and thinkpieced arc of the feminist career woman, which I’m sure has already been “react”-ified and shouted down by various Red Pill commentators online. I’m not particularly interested in the woman-cum-backpack-reviewer at the center of the story, but rather in her portrayal of her new boyfriend, the “nice” guy she worries is too boring, and how he is portrayed as reacting to her actions. It raises the question for me: does Feminism actually have any realistic solution to how men should react to female promiscuity?
The author of the piece describes her relationship to her new boyf:
The author presents her sexual and romantic history to her boyfriend, and he engages in heroic acts of self-abnegation to comfort her for hurting him. He reacts to her efforts to harm him with love and care. This is ideal partner territory, someone who loves you unconditionally and will react to any action with affection, totally unrealistic after fifteen days. This isn't any kind of scaleable solution. And I’m reminded of one of the great artistic works of consumerist-choice-Feminism: Sex and the City.
SATC gets unfairly scratched from midwit lists of great TV shows because the Chapo Trap House types who get excited about TV shows love unrealistic “masculine” fantasies of violent crime stories, and not romantic sex comedies. But SATC was critical to the birth of high concept TV, was a key tent pole that kept HBO making shows like Sopranos and The Wire, and presaged so much of modern culture that it’s a crime to miss it. My wife and I watched the whole series together just after we got married, late at night after studying or working, we joked that arguing about the characters was our “Post-Cana” sessions. What SATC was good at was asking really interesting questions, over and over my wife and I would argue late into the night and over coffee in the morning over which character was right and what one should do in that situation; what it was bad at was pussying out when it came time to face the answers. The characters would always be put into interesting situations, then saved from the consequences of their own actions in a way that sort of neutered the original dramatic/philosophical tension.
In a season 3 episode trenchantly titled “Are We Sluts?”; Big-Law attorney Miranda gets diagnosed with Chlamydia and has to list her sex partners so that she can call them and tell them that they might have gotten it from her. My wife and I counted the lines on the second sheet of notepaper, assuming it was a regular legal pad (and one man per line) she had sex with ~42 men. The character was 33 at the time, so using Slate’s handy slut calculator she is in the 96th percentile, so, yeah, up there. Miranda is naturally…concerned...by this realization, and how her boyfriend Steve will feel about it. Much of the episode is the characters debating the value of chastity and promiscuity, telling the truth, should it matter, etc. There’s a lot of tension around will this ruin Miranda’s relationship. She tells Steve and, guess what? Steve just laughs; I’m a cute bartender, my number is much much higher than that. Dramatic tensions wasted, values crisis resolved: Steve’s fucked a ridiculous number of women so Miranda having fucked a huge number of men is a nothing burger.
Similar plots are wasted later: protagonist Carrie cheats and ruins her relationship with her fiancé, only to have her adulterous partner actually chase her down years and partners later, champion-slut Samantha ultimately only settles down because her man puts in unrealistic efforts of understanding and care and loyalty. The show spends whole seasons asking questions, only to deus-ex the problems right out of existence when they want to make the characters happy. Smart enough to know there is a problem, not smart enough to come up with a satisfying realistic solution.
And this is what connected in my head reading that bullshit little dialogue in this advertisement-cum-confessional: Feminism knows that a sexual past can be a problem, but can’t imagine a realistic solution. Like so many wasted episodes of Sex and the City it is smart enough to understand that tension exists, but not smart enough to come up with a real solution. The only solutions presented are either Christ-like acts of self-control on the part of the male, or for the women to marry a man with an unrealistically high partner count himself. The supply of Christ-like and mega-player partners will never meet the demand, particularly as those men are not similarly limited. It simply will not scale: the solution to female promiscuity can never be greater male promiscuity except through fuzzy math. And those waiting for the one really good man who really loves her may be waiting in vain.
I’m not sure what a Feminist-compatible solution is, beyond rejiggering the entirety of masculinity and sex-positive culture to accommodate for it. I can’t imagine anything New York would print that would be a realistic answer, rather than a scolding “get better, men” that would achieve nothing but catharsis for angry women. A solution to this problem seems outside the Feminist range of imagination. 20 years after Sex and the City aired, promiscuous New Yorkers are no closer to an answer to that age old question: “Are we Sluts?"
Do most liberal/apolitical men take serious issue with their partners having had a few previous boyfriends and 5 more previous casual partners? My impression is, generally, not really. Maybe something biological prevents most men from marrying someone with 100 bodies (although I doubt it, cultures are very flexible), but marriage rates demonstrate 5 bodies doesn't mean much. You note that these characters are '96th percentile', and most men avoiding long-term partnerships with the top 5% of sluts isn't a societal issue. So I don't think there's a societal issue here - we've already moved the needle a long way from 'parents checking for bloodstains on the marital bed'.
Given how politically charged the topic is, it's more useful to look at how people act rather than what they claim. Women lie downward about their number of sexual partners. Why do they do this if they don't feel the number lowers their status?
Do you believe women are just being paranoid?
I don't think this demonstrates that. Relationship success for women is about quality of partner instead of whether they can marry. Or even exclude "for women" if you find that controversial. Lower your standards enough and practicially anyone can marry.
To you and @rococobasilica - yeah, there's some general dislike (potentially justified!) of higher body counts, especially for wives. But - how strong is that? It doesn't seem to be anywhere near what the OP implies. Anecdotally, while my right-leaning friends care a lot (imo too much) about body count, my apolitical or liberal friends either don't care about, or care a bit but not much about, for instance 8 past partners, for a wife - and it's somewhat hard to tell but their actions don't seem to contradict it. They'd, ofc, find 50 past partners unappealing, but few women have that so it's not a general issue. My experiences aren't universal obviously, social clustering is weird, but my guess is it's common enough, and the amount of caring about 8 past partners among non-conservatives small enough, that OP's worry about 'promiscuous women not finding partners because men aren't interested' isn't a big issue for feminism.
No, it does a bit, just not that much. People lie about all sorts of things. Men lie about their height, everyone lies about attractiveness, even though everyone can already see them.
It's important to realize that it may affect the men at a deeper level even if they get into relationships with these women. There are a lot of biological mechanisms at play to prevent men from wasting their energy on strategies that don't lead to survival, so these men may not give these women as much attention, focus on committing adultery etc.
"How many men you claim to have slept with in the past" seems like a difficult target for a 'biological mechanism'. Do you have any evidence/arguments for this, aside from 'its evolutionarily plausible'? There are a lot of much more likely evolutionary mechanisms that didn't happen, because evolution is complicated and random.
Everything in human life is complex, so evolutionary targets and gene-environment interactions are always complicated, but that doesn't mean they don't exist.
And no evolution isn't just "random", I study it mathematically, it's meant to ensure survival and reproduction, and to assume it hasn't affected sexual jealousy, common in many animals, is just batshit crazy.
I can tell you what disgusts me about promiscuity and it's not necessarily body count, but imagining my woman giving herself to other men makes me want to vomit, so having a woman who hasn't had one-night stands is more important than absolute body count to me. I'd love to steal other men's loyal women though.
By 'random' I meant 'has randomness as a significant input'. I'm confident that "your women, at the moment or in the future, fucking another guy" is unpleasant for natural selection reasons. But the strength of the extension of that to 'your woman fucked another guy in the past' is probably mostly cultural - even if there is a natural basis to it, it's weak enough to be overridden (as opposed to the first example, which would be much harder to override)
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Just off the cuff and if we're talking about a woman in her late 20s/early 30s: <3 is preferred but might raise suspicions about prudishness, 4-6 is expected, 7-10 is a slight argument against, >20 is close to an exclusion criterion.
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