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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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