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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   3200 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for July 16, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

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Is anyone of the opinion that even honest, non-coercive casual sex is immoral, for secular reasons? I think I share a common preference among men that I’d rarely pass up on a hookup with an attractive woman but would probably not date a woman long-term who has slept around too much (“too much” is probably decided on a case-by-case basis and there are other factors involved). I can see how that’s hypocritical in one sense. And according to my own value system, I’m denigrating the value of women I have no long-term intentions with but other men with my shared preferences might. But a certain libertarian perspective also says “whatever is honest, legal, and uncoerced is ethical” and men (including me, probably) will just have to learn to settle later in life for women with a higher body count than they deem acceptable.

I'd fuck just about anyone attractive and female without an STD, and so would most men.

Personally, when it comes to relationships, I'm not that fussed about bodycount, but then again I evaluate myself by Indian standards, where having had more than a handful of steady boyfriends before marriage time is a cause for opprobrium.

Isn't this an extremely common religious view? It's exactly what many a Catholic priest or Orthodox rabbi would say to you.

Hypocrisy is something to be aware of. It's a fact of life and one of the necessary copes, I'd say, but it does not generally endear you to your peers and it is therefore, on some level, antisocial behavior.

I don't think the average modern secular man is capable of judging a woman's bodycount well, at least provided he lives in a city, is dating someone over 21 and can't do a full background check with childhood friends, classmates, college friends etc. A lot of the women I know who've slept around a lot had like one three or six month phase of sleeping with a large number of men in a single summer or study abroad or college semester or gap year or something when they were 19, even people who knew them quite well might not know the full extent unless they're very close female friends, who probably aren't going to spill to her new boyfriend.

So to me, the logic for many men would be something like :

"Unless I become a very trad Mormon (or equivalent) and commit to dating and trying to marry a 19 year old of good provenance (which, by the way, is very hard as a Mormon/Orthodox Jew/Tradcath etc if you're over 22/23 and didn't grow up in those traditions), I will probably have very little way of knowing what my wife's real bodycount is, and (if she's somewhat intelligent and it's high) she'll probably only tell me what I want to hear".

It's kind of like the "have you ever fucked a hooker?" question for men asked by their girlfriend/wife. Unless he thinks she's trying to set up a threesome with an escort, there is literally no reason for him to answer this question with a 'yes', whatever the truth. Women are mostly smart enough to know what men want to hear on the bodycount question and will lie where necessary accordingly. Maybe it's better, then, to convince yourself it's less important? I don't know.

While I can't quite bring myself to call casual sex immoral, I can definitely stand on terming it anti-social and/or degenerative to society.

First, two major starting assumptions:

(1) The reasons people commit murder in all non-nomadic societies across epochs can be roughly grouped into three broad areas: Money / resources, social standing or prestige, and sexual partner access or exclusivity.

(2) The Judeo-Christian theory of marriage, which has strongly influenced secular marriage laws in western societies, is concerned with regulating sexual activity to ensure more couples are starting more families instead of a very, very few percentage of men impregnating everyone, leaving much of their progeny to fend for themselves and, if the local community is small enough, getting to really thorny issues around incest and inbreeding in just a few generations. Long term monogamous pair bonding that produces above replacement level births is the best way in humans have come up with for building long lasting societies that persist over multiple centuries if not longer.

Any personal sexual strategy that ignores the first assumption (why murder?) and is directly in opposition to the second (marriage is good and we should be marriage-like even if we aren't doing the vows/ring/contract thing) is degenerative at the societal level even if it is well managed at the individual level. I think a really useful analogy is hard drugs like heroin or even cocaine. Why isn't there a sincere decriminalization / legalization movement for those drugs the way there is/was one for marijuana? Is it so hard to imagine people "responsibly" using cocaine / heroin in the privacy of their own homes? Sure, if they use it and then go out and engage in other behavior that's illegal or antisocial, we arrest them for that secondary behavior. But what's so wrong with just the use itself?

Well, the standard argument (that I agree with) goes "it's just far too high of a risk that even infrequent use of cocaine and heroin will result in extremely damaging behaviors." This doesn't even touch on the much stronger risk of addiction and the secondary degenerative behaviors that go towards supporting an addiction.

Sex is extremely powerful and therefore poses some real risk - again - at the aggregate societal level. There are certainly people out there who can find casual sex partners who understand that they are casual sex partners and both parties (or more than two if you're into that ;-) ) can leave the experience feeling fine. But, in my estimation, the vast majority of society cannot, especially over repeated trials. This brings up one important additional point related to body count.

Hyping female virginity is odd in a society with technology that allows us to determine paternal identity. No one who recommends low body county for women says this (in the West) because "how do we figure out who the kid's dad is?!?" No, the argument - often poorly formed - is that there is something suspicious about a woman who sleeps around with multiple guys even if both she and those guys are up front about the casual nature of the relationship. She is seen as somehow less valuable because of these repeated liaisons. Let's throw in a trope (because culture wars are fun) that our hypothetical female in this scenario also has some trendy tattoos, several piercings, and rotates through hair-dying phases. Why is this woman both often so compelling yet so reviled? Risk. She is signaling her high risk tolerance - preference even. Well, why is that bad? People are allowed to make their own risk assessments of their partners. True, but an overall higher risk tolerant society, especially at the point of family creation, will start to see higher base levels of instability. This doesn't guarantee fast and radical demise of the society as a whole, but it can absolutely raise the base levels of violent interpersonal conflict.

(A quick aside: Substitute in a Andrew Tate kind of fellow bedding random models at will for the female in our above scenario if you like - I don't think the responsibility in casual sex is anything other than equal across sexes).

So, what to do about casual sex in a society that now absolutely condones and even actively supports it? The first and obvious answer is to simply reject it. I'm not saying "virgin until marriage" but I am saying serial monogamy (with relationships lasting in several months) or celibacy / masturbation. In terms of finding a good partner, explicitly ask them about things like body count, perspectives on casual sex etc. If they adhere to the default line of "people shouldn't be judged on their sexual history!" well ... you have your answer, don't you?

From a policy level, I'd love to see massive bonuses for earlier family formation and marriage (i.e. you get huge tax incentives to get married and procreate before 30) ... however, I feel like this is legally really hard to do and would get into a whole strong of Supreme Court cases. There are more intelligent legal minds on The Motte who can comment. A general trend to support more sexual modesty would help, but that's not going to happen. Structured dating is something I'm sort of optimistic on. There's a tacit acknowledgement that the big dating apps create a tyranny of choices for women, and a desert/starvation feedback loop for most men. I've (anecdotally) seen a trend back towards social-group expansion dating where women won't go out with someone who has been "endorsed" by a friend. This also carries with it the added friction of not wanting to be that girl/guy in the friend group who just bounces around from bed to bed. (A fun question to ask related to this is "Sure, people shouldn't be judged on their sexual histories ... how many friends do you have who are avowed sluts / cocksmen?")

Wrapping up where I started, because casual sex can be consensual in a way that murder/rape/theft cannot be, I don't think I can quite file it under "IMMORAL.That's a paddlin" but I think it's fair to say that regular casual-sex-havers are probably not who we want to model all of society on and should be viewed as a sort of 1970s swingers kind of eccentric or outcast.

I think I share a common preference among men that I’d rarely pass up on a hookup with an attractive woman but would probably not date a woman long-term who has slept around too much

I'd pass on even a hookup with an attractive woman who has had too many partners. Some character traits or behaviours lower a woman's attractiveness so much that she just drops below a critical level for me. For instance, if I see a woman being cruel to a child, she could look like Emily Ratajkowski, and I still wouldn't want to fuck her (or maybe at that point it wraps back around to hate-fucking, I'm not sure)

But yes, I think that casual sex unethical, because "casual sex" is for men what "friendzoned orbiters" is for women. In both cases only one party gets most of what they want: sex for men, emotional intimacy for women. In most real cases of friendzoned guys and girls having casual sex, no one is making it clear that the relationship has no chance of going further, both these situations are fundamentally consequences of power imbalances.

I'd pass on even a hookup with an attractive woman who has had too many partners.

It's usually not that easy to tell. There are indicators of particularly extreme promiscuity but I've often been surprised.

In both cases only one party gets most of what they want: sex for men, emotional intimacy for women. In most real cases of friendzoned guys and girls having casual sex, no one is making it clear that the relationship has no chance of going further

This particular argument doesn't convince me at all. If you go home with a man after a first date that wasn't particularly romantic you should be aware there's a risk there won't be a second. If it's happened to you a few times, learn to say no or lower your standards to find a man more likely to commit. The friendzone example is even less convincing, are women supposed to suss out which of their male friends are romantically interested in them and preemptively reject them?

Is anyone of the opinion that even honest, non-coercive casual sex is immoral, for secular reasons?

I'm not a secular person, but yes. I value meaningful forms of joy, the more meaningful the better. Strong drugs are generally immoral because the opportunity cost (the chance you could be working or calling a friend or something) far outweighs the benefits (meaningless physical pleasure). Similarly a casual relationship is less meaningful than a committed one and so is immoral to the extent that it keeps you from pursuing a long-term partner. I also think making sex an intimate thing is meaningful, so casual sex somewhat decreases the intimacy of any eventual long-term relationship, meaning that casual sex is immoral even when it is definitely not replacing/delaying a potential long-term relationship.

There's no need for a "moral" justification when it comes to preferring chaste women for long-term relationships. Potentially wifing up a hoe gives most men a sense of male ick, just as short, low status, sexually unsuccessful, physically and/or mentally weak men give women the ick.

It's not like women feel compelled to "morally" justify their preferences. At most when they get cornered, it gets rolled into Merited Impossibility/Celebration Parallax: "No, women aren't shallow and don't care about things like height, but if we do it's only because all you stupid manlets deserve it." Men should internalise that, like those of women, their preferences are legitimate in and of themselves.

Interesting. It's long been the case that short guys have to be remarkable if they want decent partners. This being said. I've observed two clusters of promiscuous women. The first isn't satisfied with herself or her life, and seeks casual encounters to numb an inner pain. The second is an adrenaline junkie and generally plans things well. The second type frequently does pretty well in life: loving, put together husbands, kids if they want them...The first type doesn't do as well.

These aren't moral questions, they are aesthetic questions. There's nothing wrong with preferring one type of woman for one type of relationship and a different type of woman for a different type of relationship.

Of course, women get to have dual preferences too, much to the despair of the red pill community.

I'm not sure I buy it, but I've heard the argument that sex before marriage is bad for lifetime satisfaction. Kind of like delayed gratification.

So, a secular red tribe view- fornication is part of dating but women definitely shouldn’t be too promiscuous and how much is too much depends on how badly you want to date her, also casual sex is morally suspect but what can you expect from men offered the opportunity? Not an uncommon view among the red tribe.

But most hookups don’t start with the man being propositioned, it’s usually a result of them consciously pursuing a woman.

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