Good article! I think there's one other factor worth mentioning. Women are shamed for having too much sex, and men are often looked down on for not having enough, so in addition to other women who perpetuate slut-shaming, (or by men who are seen as viable mates by more "virginal" women), low-status men end up projecting their own resentment onto more sexuality active women, not because they value traditional norms, but because they feel deprived of being the recipient of the women's promiscuity. "Sour grapes"!
100% agree. The anger that women aren't saving themselves for monogamous marriage which would result in more equally distributed sexual access is a source of resentment which can be used against women who express sexual agency.
First, children are cruel and in this case very cruel. I also think childhood sex education is pretty dumb scare tactics that reduces human dignity. You generally agree on the substantive points. A few practical considerations:
- when I was a single guy I was looking for meaningful relationships and I had a rule "easy in, easy out". I get one real signal on how easy it is to get with a woman, and if it's too easy she's likely on to the next man. I had/have good friends who were easy and I respect them, but I never dated them as I didn't want to be part of their man merry-go-round.
- A minority of men have extensive sexual opportunity with women. Most men work hard for any opportunity. If a woman just wants sex, sleep with the player. If a woman wants a relationship, then it's practically useful to be sexually conservative to filter players. Effort a guy is willing to put in proxies how much he values potentially being with you.
-Teenagers are idiots, but better have them have practice relationships then reading romance novel are watching porn. I don't think society has agreed on a healthy and socially acceptable rule set for the extend adolescents (13-23 or something like that) where adult committed relationships aren't socially/economically viable despite sexual maturity.
Socially we care most about how we communicate norms especially to children. Sexual conservatism and long-term stable relationships is a more fulfilling norm. Comparing men and women outside that norm to used socks is stupid, so I agree with you on slut shaming. In contrast idolizing player and slut culture is not socially healthy either.
Thanks for the comment Paul! I agree with everything here, and I'm certainly against encouraging both player and slut culture - while I didn't dwell on it in the post I think these ways of sexually relating to others are generally degrading for everyone involved. Appreciate the added nuance and perspective.
" She once participated in a school play after which she and a few other cast members came out and performed the Soulja Boy “crank that” dance. The boys, always eager to participate in school events, excitedly joined in to shout “Supersoak that hoe!” at her every time the line came up. "
How is it that a school is allowing such lyrics to be openly played and sung on school property, much less in a school play? That to a Catholic school?
Slut shaming is probably non-existent in sex segregated schools. Girls and boys in girls schools and boys schools tend to sexually experiment with each other and I doubt they are "slut shaming" each other.
So many purity culture victims are on Youtube now saying how disappointing sex was after they got married because their churches made it out that if you just save yourself for marriage you will get to experience this amazingly beautiful, blissful, profound union on your wedding night that will be unlike anything you ever imagined. And... it's not. Their first experiences are awkward at best, uncomfortable at mediorcre and downright painful and awful at worst. For some of them getting to a decent sex life with their spouse took years.
Ha, I have no idea why they were allowed to play that, perhaps it was the radio edit version but either way... all I can say is that the "Catholic" in the Catholic school I went to was taken quite lightly outside of our actual religion classes and mass attendances.
But agree with your assumption on sex segregated schools. I do think older women "slut shame" their younger relatives or mentees but I think that's done more out of real concern for the younger woman's safety (both emotional and physical) as well as the potential cost to her reputation (assuming slut shaming is the norm in the broader context)
Your perspective is interesting, but it completely misses the biological realities that are the reason there is a double standard for the sexual behavior of men and women. Men have an innate drive and desire to have offspring (as do women). Men's desire to support their offspring is powerful, but also generally limited to children they believe to be their own. Men (generally) do not want to support other men's offspring. And lastly, when a child is born there is never any question about who is the mother. But, prior to DNA testing, the identity of the father is entirely based on the supposition of who the mother had slept with. In an ethnically homogenous society you can't identify the child's biological father just by looking it it.
The result of these biological realities is that men desire sex and tend to have relatively low standards concerning with whom. But as soon as a child enters the picture the man will have doubts about the fidelity of the woman, questioning whether the child is his own.
Marriage was originally a relationship that balanced the needs of the man and the woman with a contractual relationship. The man commits to love, protect, and provide for a woman and her children for life, in exchange for exclusive sexual access to the woman. A particularly productive man in a society that allowed polygyny might take an additional wife. The marriage contract never included sexual exclusivity by the man until this idea was introduced by the Greeks and Romans in Late Antiquity and was made Canon Law by the Roman Catholic Church.
Due to the uncertainty around the fidelity of a woman, the reputation of the woman for chastity and fidelity becomes extremely valuable to men who desire children of their own. Prior to DNA testing, a woman's reputation was the only reasonable indicator of her likelihood to be true to her husband.
Even in strict patriarchal cultures there has always been a supply of prostitutes for whom sex is transactional. The Law of Moses imposed no penalty for prostitution, except for a woman who played the harlot in her father's house, which is to say, when she was not economically compelled to do so. Sex is always transactional, the only questions are the price and duration of the transaction. A prostitute offers sex for twenty minutes or an hour for money, while a wife offers exclusive sex for a lifetime for a much greater amount of money (nowadays, all of his money and his future earnings too). For men sex is available but there is an enormous difference in the quality of the available women. Marriage is the most expensive sex available while prostitutes are the most efficient and lowest cost sex available. If all a man wants is sex, then prostitution is a much better solution than marriage because he can get a lot more sex with pretty young women for a lot less money that he would spend on a wife. But if he desires children that are biologically his offspring then marriage is the most reliable, if expensive, solution.
This comes back to slut shaming. Women compete with each other far more than men do. This is because men are physically stronger and have always been more economically productive than women. Historically, prior to the mid-twentieth century interference of the socialist police-state, women were locked in a competition with other women for the attentions and financial commitment of men.
For a married woman, a prostitute is a threat to her lifelong economic claim to her husband's resources. The prostitute undercuts her on the price of sex, and the prostitute siphons off resources from the married woman's household. Women are also very deeply wired as herd animals in a way that men are not. Slut shaming is the natural device used by the herd of married women to minimize economic competition for their husband's resources by prostitutes.
In a world that recognizes these biological realities a virgin becomes the most valuable candidate for a wife. This economic reality was reflected in the Bible where the bride price for a virgin was nearly double the price for seven years labor by a man as a servant or slave. It is also reflected in modern divorce statistics. 80% of the women who were virgins on their wedding day are still married to the same husband 20 years later, while only 10% of the women who have had more than ten sexual partners prior to marriage remain married to the same husband 20 years later. Women have been given the power of no-fault divorce and in 66% of the divorces, the women is the one who filed. So divorce has given feminists the ability to enter a marriage contract, take the money and run. But that is a rabbit trail for another discussion.
The sexual revolution was the revolt of the prostitutes. Feminism demands the right for every woman to be able to act like a prostitute without being slut shamed. Prostitutes demand abortion because men pay for sex with a nubile young women, but men refuse to pay for babies with uncertain paternities.
Herodotus described the marriage customs in his native Lydia as being very similar to today's sexually liberated West. Young women would prostitute themselves to the highest bidder and save their money until they had a dowry high enough to find a husband. In that culture men would wife up a woman only if she already came with the money to support herself in the form of a dowry. That was quite similar to today's sugar babies who sell their bodies to wealthy men to pay their tuition for higher education. The graduate degrees are perceived as conferring economic security to the women, even though in reality they don't.
Also, in the culture of sexual revolution we see virgin shaming replace slut shaming. Women are still hard wired with that herd mentality. Virgins are economic competitors to prostitutes because they offer a man the one thing a prostitute does not have and can never recover - a sexually pure woman with a high reputation who can provide him with exclusive sexual access to bear his biological children.
So as long as women are women, slut shaming and virgin shaming will be competing behaviors by the two teams of women - the wives and the prostitutes. This reality is inescapable. Women do this to other women because they are driven to do so, and I don't think it is a bad thing. Slut shaming pressures women to act in a way that raises the value of women across society. Virgin shaming has the opposite effect.
"Marriage was originally a relationship that balanced the needs of the man and the woman with a contractual relationship. The man commits to love, protect, and provide for a woman and her children for life, in exchange for exclusive sexual access to the woman. "
The pair exchanges sexual access to each other. He is exchanging his exclusive sexual access for her's, and she is exchanging her exclusive sexual access for his. That is called monogamy.
Except that females gain nothing tangible from exclusive sexual access to a male. In many societies of people as well as wild animals a group of females prefers to share an alpha male rather than have exclusive access to a weak beta male.
In human societies marriage was originally a trade of sexual exclusivity by the woman in exchange for lifelong economic support from the man.
"Except that females gain nothing tangible from exclusive sexual access to a male."
-- Human females gain a lot from it. Freedom from STDs (some are lethal, some render humans infertile), exclusive access to his resources, focus on her children through his exclusive parenting. And more!
"In many societies of people as well as wild animals a group of females prefers to share an alpha male rather than have exclusive access to a weak beta male."
-- You'd have to define "alpha" and "beta" for me. The Manosphere has used and abused these terms to the point they hold zero meaning. Maybe they never had any meaning in the human context to beginwith. But if by "beta" you mean the "Average Joe" - he is by no means "weak". It's average work-a-day people that keep civilization running.
There are polygynous societies still existing and if you have travelled to the regions of the world and gotten close to the wives who are "sharing" a man (and he's rarely "alpha") you would gain a different perspective. And talking to the children of these marriages is a whole other ballgame.
Nevertheless, monogamy seems to have been a norm for much longer than people these days realize. The assumption that ancient civilizations were comprised of primarily polygynous marriages with everyone else being single and childless is just wrong. Yes there were and still are polygynous marriages, but the MAJORITY of marriages have always been 1 wife, 1 husband. Including the Vikings. Even in countries that today allow polygyny, the majority of marriages are monogamous.
"In human societies marriage was originally a trade of sexual exclusivity by the woman in exchange for lifelong economic support from the man."
-- In human socieites today and as far back as we have records for, the majority of men, women and children all worked to bring income and resources into the home. The only women and children who did not have to work were royalty, nobility and other wealthy members of the elite class. Otherwise, for everyone else, women and children were also economically supporting the household.
"There are polygynous societies still existing and if you have travelled to the regions of the world and gotten close to the wives who are "sharing" a man (and he's rarely "alpha") you would gain a different perspective. And talking to the children of these marriages is a whole other ballgame."
I'll have to call your bluff on that one. I spent five years in East Africa. My point was not to promote polygamy or polygany. My point was that the primary exchange in marriage is resources from the man for exclusive sex from the woman, not vice versa.
OK so how many "wives of polygyny" did you get close to in East Africa? If they were Muslim you would be non-mehram so I'm thinking - none. In India, Muslim women demanded the government outlaw polygyny for Indian Muslims. There is no uniform civil code in India (yet, anyway) so Muslims have a different "family law" than other Indian citizens. These Indian Muslim "wives of polygyny" were the ones to demand a change in the law.
I still stand by "exclusive sexual access is exchanged between the pair" since nobody who enters into a monogamous agreement expects it to be a one-way street.
I know more than I am at liberty to say on this subject concerning Muslim women in polygamous families in East Africa. I also met several Christian polygamous families in Kenya and S. Sudan. The Lua tribe in particular practices polygamy though they are by no means unique in that regard. As I said, my point was not to advocate polygyny. My point was that marriage is about children. The fidelity of the woman is essential to the contract, but monogamy by the man is not. Marriage is an exchange of sexual exclusivity by the woman for lifelong economic support by the man. Anything else is late Medieval romanticism.
I don't think your points here are mutually exclusive from the main post. One could easily argue that with the advent of the pill, DNA tests, and yes, the economic choice now to forego marriage and / or kids, we are at very different equilibrium points than we were historically.
Given this new baseline, what would you expect the new norms to be like? I bet that no matter how you re-arrange the morals to this new baseline, a less dogmatic view of women's promiscuity will be part of it, since the "costs" have significantly reduced. And this is good for women overall. This I take to be Regans main point.
With that said, I don't think the long term ramifications of this new equilibrium point have fully born out yet. My hunch is that we will continue to see a more sugar babies and drop in marriages and children going forward ("you have sex for free? why not get something out of it gf"). This is not necessarily a bad thing. Maybe some other smaller subset of the population will continue down the marriage and procreation path (virgins, traditional marriage, religious types etc) and woman will be able to make the choice early on which path they prefer.
Regarding equilibrium, traditionally in monogamy the exchange was as follows;
The pair exchanges sexual access to each other. He is exchanging his exclusive sexual access for her's, and she is exchanging her exclusive sexual access for his. That is called monogamy.
Those boys are cruel and should be disciplined obviously.
But also maybe boys just aren't very attracted to promiscuous women and it doesn't fit their model of the ideal woman they'd want to marry. I don't think your essay addresses raw, pre-rational preferences of men. Changing the culture around slut shaming might not do anything to this more important problem.
I don't know how true this is, but anecdotally, even the men I know who are themselves promiscuous and sex positive don't end up dating promiscuous women long term. This seems especially the case in marriage. But my social circle might not be like yours.
I don't really know many women who would classify as "super promiscuous" anyways since most women, as Phetasy exemplifies, don't actually want to be. But I can certainly believe that, at least after a certain point, promiscuity is unattractive to many men. This is true for women as well even if it's to a lesser degree. Still, I don't support shaming women in response. If men don't value these women then women will see that expressed in dating and marriage preferences. I also think it's fine to *advise* women that this could be a potential cost but the women who actually want to be highly promiscuous are probably going to be quite atypical in other ways and will want to date weird guys who probably don't care about this at all (as Aella talks about, the men she's interested in dating do not value her less due to her being a slut). I see much of the slut shaming that goes on as men expressing irritation that the overall dating market doesn't devalue sluts to the extent that they think it should - in my post on "Thirst trapping your way to the top" I talk about areas where I'm tempted to slut shame for this very reason, that I want the market values to match my personal values - but, while understandable, that's wrong!
Yes, certain things can work for Aella that can't work for other women because she's famous, lives in a male dominated area and mentally inhabits a male dominated milieu. This is definitionally not true for the average woman.
If there was a substantial innate desire of men to marry less promiscuous women, how would we find that out? Surveys may be useful but they don't tell the whole story because I suspect a lot of men seem to believe their partner's sexual history doesn't matter but act contrary to that belief when it comes to marriage.
I don't think shaming is the way to go, but at least it gets some information out there. My point is that it's dangerous when one sex simply internalizes its preferences and even expresses the opposite of the real preference in public. It's dangerous to both sexes actually because these innate preferences largely determine whether marriages can happen.
The image in this chart showing the dramatic decrease in marriage rates is troubling and I wonder if it's related to men expressing latent preferences rather than women.
>Still, I don't support shaming women in response. If men don't value these women then women will see that expressed in dating and marriage preferences.
Can you think of an example where society works like that? "Dont tell people what you think of them, the only way they feel it is through silent decisions" is not really something people do outside of very transactional contexts.
Culture can handily override pre rational preferences and frequently does so. See culture where boys have to swallow semen to become men. This kind of preference, for women with few prior partners - something which can never be determined just by looking at, talking to or having sex with a woman, if it existed, would clearly be small and therefore easily trumped by culture.
'the slut shaming was initiated and mainly perpetrated by boys.'
Are you sure about that? It sounds like the boys engaged in some unpleasant VISIBLE slut shaming, but I would imagine that the girls engaged in plenty of nasty gossiping. It's not obvious which is worse.
Yes, it was mostly the boys. They spread the rumors, invented the nick name and publicly humiliated her regularly. Girls may have gossiped as well or been careful about being associated with her, but it was in response to the boys marking her out in the first place and nowhere near as severe. And the fear of being targeted was also a reason for other girls, including me who thought their slut shaming was incredibly mean and gross, to not defend her. I do think women engage in slut shaming but the type I've seen is *mostly* in the more wholesome category of slut shaming - shaming their friends for putting themselves in dangerous situations or accepting sub par treatment from a man they're sleeping with, or relatives telling girls "not to give it away for free" as a warning about the potential costs of engaging in casual sexual relationships. But I've honestly only seen a few cases of women or girls initiating or even joining in on the type of dehumanizing slut shaming (public or private) that I described with the "Tugger" case.
Could you share some links to your sources? I'd like to look into it more. Like I said above I've more often seen women slut shame from a place of care/desire to protect their loved ones than as a way to bully. The female bullying I've experienced was very minor and I wouldn't have been the target of slut shaming anyways.
Will check it out, thanks. I've heard arguments about slut shaming as a result of female competition and in the post I quickly note the structure of such an argument (quoted below). It's just never struck a chord with me because I've never felt like I was actually competing with those women.
From the post: "But another potential source of motivation for women to slut shame other women is that sluts, by making sex easily available to men, lower its value in the marketplace which weakens the ability of other women to use the promise of sex to incentivize commitment from men."
It’s l unfortunate how many young Catholics aren’t properly catechized, even in Catholic schools. Because I’m confused the Catholic sexual morality bashing. Both sexes are called to chastity. The double standard for male promiscuity is a worldly cultural standard, not Catholic. So is Sex is viewed as a gift (as everything is) that is both unitive and procreative.
This article, like many of the counter-counter-sexual revolution types, leaves out the actual research on the topic:
1. The more sexual partners you have, the higher your chance of divorce and the more likely you are unhappy in your marriage.
2. There is a well known phenomena in the literature called the paradox of declining female happiness. Women today are less happy than their predecessors in less liberated times.
If the sexual revolution was so awesome, wouldn't these be precisely the opposite results?
I am a successful single man in my 40’s who longs for the deeper connection of a committed relationship, but who hasn’t found that partner yet.
—
I despise how the tropes about manhood are proliferated throughout our culture. Not all men are commitment avoidant, not all men want to have sex with random strangers all the time, not all men are walking phalluses (phallusi ?).
These tropes are harmful to men such as myself by making us feel like outsiders/weirdos and pushing us to change who we are to fit in.
Can we move towards a recognition that there are many thoughtful, dedicated, committed men rather than perpetuating these harmful tropes?
—
While this article is more measured in its approach, I do feel like these tropes are present here as well.
I stopped reading after a few paragraphs. The boys need to be disciplined (do Catholics whip people?) and perhaps expelled. What does this have anything to do with that girl or women or feminism at all is lost on me.
It was an illustrative anecdotal example of the negative outcomes that are downstream of a culture that highly prizes feminine purity and enforces that value using slut shaming. If you’d like to know more you can read the post.
This is something my boyfriend and I were discussing last night - to what extent is sexual chemistry correlated with general romantic chemistry? My intuition is that they're very correlated and I'd expect the quality of the sexual connection to largely mirror the emotional connection/how well you get along and "vibe" (although I can think of counter examples with friends of mine). But, that's maybe more true for women than for men? Either way though, I agree that even if you can be reasonably confident that there will be sexual chemistry because you have a lot of emotional chemistry and find the other person attractive, it's still worth confirming that! Plus, most people just like having sex!
Yes and no, but people can also have sexual dysfunctions that they haven’t addressed or worked through, which you’d probably rather know about sooner than later (thinking of Charlotte on SATC finding out on her wedding night that her new husband has poorly treated ED)
That's true. Good reference lol. And even if they're correlated they're not 100% correlated so seems worth making sure you do in fact have sexual chemistry at a reasonably early stage. But my reluctance to fully support this reasoning comes from the observation that sexual compatibility is not a constant anyways - through the course of a multi-decade relationship there will surely be ups and downs. So I wonder how predictive early sexual compatibility is for later sexual compatibility, probably somewhat predictive but is it like 90% predictive or more like 30%? I'm not sure.
I never understood that argument. It takes time to discover someone sexually, learn with them, grow with them. What one does sexually, or desires sexually also can change over time. Either way, there's a learning curve and growth and this often happens over years. Either way it has to happen, whether you start to have sex on 4th date, 40th, or after the wedding.
This is more how I view it as well if I'm reading you correctly, that compatibility is not constant or necessarily predicted well from the initial sexual experiences you have with someone. That said, I could believe that there are some ways in which people can be sexually mismatched that you can tell early on... like if both people really like to be dominant that might be a real problem? I'm not sure.
I also don't understand "dominant" in relation to lovemaking. It's a flow. A give and take. A synergystic dance. Where is the question of "dominance" in it?
Good article! I think there's one other factor worth mentioning. Women are shamed for having too much sex, and men are often looked down on for not having enough, so in addition to other women who perpetuate slut-shaming, (or by men who are seen as viable mates by more "virginal" women), low-status men end up projecting their own resentment onto more sexuality active women, not because they value traditional norms, but because they feel deprived of being the recipient of the women's promiscuity. "Sour grapes"!
100% agree. The anger that women aren't saving themselves for monogamous marriage which would result in more equally distributed sexual access is a source of resentment which can be used against women who express sexual agency.
First, children are cruel and in this case very cruel. I also think childhood sex education is pretty dumb scare tactics that reduces human dignity. You generally agree on the substantive points. A few practical considerations:
- when I was a single guy I was looking for meaningful relationships and I had a rule "easy in, easy out". I get one real signal on how easy it is to get with a woman, and if it's too easy she's likely on to the next man. I had/have good friends who were easy and I respect them, but I never dated them as I didn't want to be part of their man merry-go-round.
- A minority of men have extensive sexual opportunity with women. Most men work hard for any opportunity. If a woman just wants sex, sleep with the player. If a woman wants a relationship, then it's practically useful to be sexually conservative to filter players. Effort a guy is willing to put in proxies how much he values potentially being with you.
-Teenagers are idiots, but better have them have practice relationships then reading romance novel are watching porn. I don't think society has agreed on a healthy and socially acceptable rule set for the extend adolescents (13-23 or something like that) where adult committed relationships aren't socially/economically viable despite sexual maturity.
Socially we care most about how we communicate norms especially to children. Sexual conservatism and long-term stable relationships is a more fulfilling norm. Comparing men and women outside that norm to used socks is stupid, so I agree with you on slut shaming. In contrast idolizing player and slut culture is not socially healthy either.
Thanks for the comment Paul! I agree with everything here, and I'm certainly against encouraging both player and slut culture - while I didn't dwell on it in the post I think these ways of sexually relating to others are generally degrading for everyone involved. Appreciate the added nuance and perspective.
" She once participated in a school play after which she and a few other cast members came out and performed the Soulja Boy “crank that” dance. The boys, always eager to participate in school events, excitedly joined in to shout “Supersoak that hoe!” at her every time the line came up. "
How is it that a school is allowing such lyrics to be openly played and sung on school property, much less in a school play? That to a Catholic school?
Slut shaming is probably non-existent in sex segregated schools. Girls and boys in girls schools and boys schools tend to sexually experiment with each other and I doubt they are "slut shaming" each other.
So many purity culture victims are on Youtube now saying how disappointing sex was after they got married because their churches made it out that if you just save yourself for marriage you will get to experience this amazingly beautiful, blissful, profound union on your wedding night that will be unlike anything you ever imagined. And... it's not. Their first experiences are awkward at best, uncomfortable at mediorcre and downright painful and awful at worst. For some of them getting to a decent sex life with their spouse took years.
Ha, I have no idea why they were allowed to play that, perhaps it was the radio edit version but either way... all I can say is that the "Catholic" in the Catholic school I went to was taken quite lightly outside of our actual religion classes and mass attendances.
But agree with your assumption on sex segregated schools. I do think older women "slut shame" their younger relatives or mentees but I think that's done more out of real concern for the younger woman's safety (both emotional and physical) as well as the potential cost to her reputation (assuming slut shaming is the norm in the broader context)
Such a good nuanced post. This one, along with the abortion post, has made this a must-read substack!
Thank you so much for reading! And glad you enjoyed the abortion post as well :)
Your perspective is interesting, but it completely misses the biological realities that are the reason there is a double standard for the sexual behavior of men and women. Men have an innate drive and desire to have offspring (as do women). Men's desire to support their offspring is powerful, but also generally limited to children they believe to be their own. Men (generally) do not want to support other men's offspring. And lastly, when a child is born there is never any question about who is the mother. But, prior to DNA testing, the identity of the father is entirely based on the supposition of who the mother had slept with. In an ethnically homogenous society you can't identify the child's biological father just by looking it it.
The result of these biological realities is that men desire sex and tend to have relatively low standards concerning with whom. But as soon as a child enters the picture the man will have doubts about the fidelity of the woman, questioning whether the child is his own.
Marriage was originally a relationship that balanced the needs of the man and the woman with a contractual relationship. The man commits to love, protect, and provide for a woman and her children for life, in exchange for exclusive sexual access to the woman. A particularly productive man in a society that allowed polygyny might take an additional wife. The marriage contract never included sexual exclusivity by the man until this idea was introduced by the Greeks and Romans in Late Antiquity and was made Canon Law by the Roman Catholic Church.
Due to the uncertainty around the fidelity of a woman, the reputation of the woman for chastity and fidelity becomes extremely valuable to men who desire children of their own. Prior to DNA testing, a woman's reputation was the only reasonable indicator of her likelihood to be true to her husband.
Even in strict patriarchal cultures there has always been a supply of prostitutes for whom sex is transactional. The Law of Moses imposed no penalty for prostitution, except for a woman who played the harlot in her father's house, which is to say, when she was not economically compelled to do so. Sex is always transactional, the only questions are the price and duration of the transaction. A prostitute offers sex for twenty minutes or an hour for money, while a wife offers exclusive sex for a lifetime for a much greater amount of money (nowadays, all of his money and his future earnings too). For men sex is available but there is an enormous difference in the quality of the available women. Marriage is the most expensive sex available while prostitutes are the most efficient and lowest cost sex available. If all a man wants is sex, then prostitution is a much better solution than marriage because he can get a lot more sex with pretty young women for a lot less money that he would spend on a wife. But if he desires children that are biologically his offspring then marriage is the most reliable, if expensive, solution.
This comes back to slut shaming. Women compete with each other far more than men do. This is because men are physically stronger and have always been more economically productive than women. Historically, prior to the mid-twentieth century interference of the socialist police-state, women were locked in a competition with other women for the attentions and financial commitment of men.
For a married woman, a prostitute is a threat to her lifelong economic claim to her husband's resources. The prostitute undercuts her on the price of sex, and the prostitute siphons off resources from the married woman's household. Women are also very deeply wired as herd animals in a way that men are not. Slut shaming is the natural device used by the herd of married women to minimize economic competition for their husband's resources by prostitutes.
In a world that recognizes these biological realities a virgin becomes the most valuable candidate for a wife. This economic reality was reflected in the Bible where the bride price for a virgin was nearly double the price for seven years labor by a man as a servant or slave. It is also reflected in modern divorce statistics. 80% of the women who were virgins on their wedding day are still married to the same husband 20 years later, while only 10% of the women who have had more than ten sexual partners prior to marriage remain married to the same husband 20 years later. Women have been given the power of no-fault divorce and in 66% of the divorces, the women is the one who filed. So divorce has given feminists the ability to enter a marriage contract, take the money and run. But that is a rabbit trail for another discussion.
The sexual revolution was the revolt of the prostitutes. Feminism demands the right for every woman to be able to act like a prostitute without being slut shamed. Prostitutes demand abortion because men pay for sex with a nubile young women, but men refuse to pay for babies with uncertain paternities.
Herodotus described the marriage customs in his native Lydia as being very similar to today's sexually liberated West. Young women would prostitute themselves to the highest bidder and save their money until they had a dowry high enough to find a husband. In that culture men would wife up a woman only if she already came with the money to support herself in the form of a dowry. That was quite similar to today's sugar babies who sell their bodies to wealthy men to pay their tuition for higher education. The graduate degrees are perceived as conferring economic security to the women, even though in reality they don't.
Also, in the culture of sexual revolution we see virgin shaming replace slut shaming. Women are still hard wired with that herd mentality. Virgins are economic competitors to prostitutes because they offer a man the one thing a prostitute does not have and can never recover - a sexually pure woman with a high reputation who can provide him with exclusive sexual access to bear his biological children.
So as long as women are women, slut shaming and virgin shaming will be competing behaviors by the two teams of women - the wives and the prostitutes. This reality is inescapable. Women do this to other women because they are driven to do so, and I don't think it is a bad thing. Slut shaming pressures women to act in a way that raises the value of women across society. Virgin shaming has the opposite effect.
"Marriage was originally a relationship that balanced the needs of the man and the woman with a contractual relationship. The man commits to love, protect, and provide for a woman and her children for life, in exchange for exclusive sexual access to the woman. "
The pair exchanges sexual access to each other. He is exchanging his exclusive sexual access for her's, and she is exchanging her exclusive sexual access for his. That is called monogamy.
Except that females gain nothing tangible from exclusive sexual access to a male. In many societies of people as well as wild animals a group of females prefers to share an alpha male rather than have exclusive access to a weak beta male.
In human societies marriage was originally a trade of sexual exclusivity by the woman in exchange for lifelong economic support from the man.
"Except that females gain nothing tangible from exclusive sexual access to a male."
-- Human females gain a lot from it. Freedom from STDs (some are lethal, some render humans infertile), exclusive access to his resources, focus on her children through his exclusive parenting. And more!
"In many societies of people as well as wild animals a group of females prefers to share an alpha male rather than have exclusive access to a weak beta male."
-- You'd have to define "alpha" and "beta" for me. The Manosphere has used and abused these terms to the point they hold zero meaning. Maybe they never had any meaning in the human context to beginwith. But if by "beta" you mean the "Average Joe" - he is by no means "weak". It's average work-a-day people that keep civilization running.
There are polygynous societies still existing and if you have travelled to the regions of the world and gotten close to the wives who are "sharing" a man (and he's rarely "alpha") you would gain a different perspective. And talking to the children of these marriages is a whole other ballgame.
Nevertheless, monogamy seems to have been a norm for much longer than people these days realize. The assumption that ancient civilizations were comprised of primarily polygynous marriages with everyone else being single and childless is just wrong. Yes there were and still are polygynous marriages, but the MAJORITY of marriages have always been 1 wife, 1 husband. Including the Vikings. Even in countries that today allow polygyny, the majority of marriages are monogamous.
"In human societies marriage was originally a trade of sexual exclusivity by the woman in exchange for lifelong economic support from the man."
-- In human socieites today and as far back as we have records for, the majority of men, women and children all worked to bring income and resources into the home. The only women and children who did not have to work were royalty, nobility and other wealthy members of the elite class. Otherwise, for everyone else, women and children were also economically supporting the household.
"There are polygynous societies still existing and if you have travelled to the regions of the world and gotten close to the wives who are "sharing" a man (and he's rarely "alpha") you would gain a different perspective. And talking to the children of these marriages is a whole other ballgame."
I'll have to call your bluff on that one. I spent five years in East Africa. My point was not to promote polygamy or polygany. My point was that the primary exchange in marriage is resources from the man for exclusive sex from the woman, not vice versa.
OK so how many "wives of polygyny" did you get close to in East Africa? If they were Muslim you would be non-mehram so I'm thinking - none. In India, Muslim women demanded the government outlaw polygyny for Indian Muslims. There is no uniform civil code in India (yet, anyway) so Muslims have a different "family law" than other Indian citizens. These Indian Muslim "wives of polygyny" were the ones to demand a change in the law.
I still stand by "exclusive sexual access is exchanged between the pair" since nobody who enters into a monogamous agreement expects it to be a one-way street.
I know more than I am at liberty to say on this subject concerning Muslim women in polygamous families in East Africa. I also met several Christian polygamous families in Kenya and S. Sudan. The Lua tribe in particular practices polygamy though they are by no means unique in that regard. As I said, my point was not to advocate polygyny. My point was that marriage is about children. The fidelity of the woman is essential to the contract, but monogamy by the man is not. Marriage is an exchange of sexual exclusivity by the woman for lifelong economic support by the man. Anything else is late Medieval romanticism.
I don't think your points here are mutually exclusive from the main post. One could easily argue that with the advent of the pill, DNA tests, and yes, the economic choice now to forego marriage and / or kids, we are at very different equilibrium points than we were historically.
Given this new baseline, what would you expect the new norms to be like? I bet that no matter how you re-arrange the morals to this new baseline, a less dogmatic view of women's promiscuity will be part of it, since the "costs" have significantly reduced. And this is good for women overall. This I take to be Regans main point.
With that said, I don't think the long term ramifications of this new equilibrium point have fully born out yet. My hunch is that we will continue to see a more sugar babies and drop in marriages and children going forward ("you have sex for free? why not get something out of it gf"). This is not necessarily a bad thing. Maybe some other smaller subset of the population will continue down the marriage and procreation path (virgins, traditional marriage, religious types etc) and woman will be able to make the choice early on which path they prefer.
Regarding equilibrium, traditionally in monogamy the exchange was as follows;
The pair exchanges sexual access to each other. He is exchanging his exclusive sexual access for her's, and she is exchanging her exclusive sexual access for his. That is called monogamy.
Those boys are cruel and should be disciplined obviously.
But also maybe boys just aren't very attracted to promiscuous women and it doesn't fit their model of the ideal woman they'd want to marry. I don't think your essay addresses raw, pre-rational preferences of men. Changing the culture around slut shaming might not do anything to this more important problem.
I don't know how true this is, but anecdotally, even the men I know who are themselves promiscuous and sex positive don't end up dating promiscuous women long term. This seems especially the case in marriage. But my social circle might not be like yours.
I don't really know many women who would classify as "super promiscuous" anyways since most women, as Phetasy exemplifies, don't actually want to be. But I can certainly believe that, at least after a certain point, promiscuity is unattractive to many men. This is true for women as well even if it's to a lesser degree. Still, I don't support shaming women in response. If men don't value these women then women will see that expressed in dating and marriage preferences. I also think it's fine to *advise* women that this could be a potential cost but the women who actually want to be highly promiscuous are probably going to be quite atypical in other ways and will want to date weird guys who probably don't care about this at all (as Aella talks about, the men she's interested in dating do not value her less due to her being a slut). I see much of the slut shaming that goes on as men expressing irritation that the overall dating market doesn't devalue sluts to the extent that they think it should - in my post on "Thirst trapping your way to the top" I talk about areas where I'm tempted to slut shame for this very reason, that I want the market values to match my personal values - but, while understandable, that's wrong!
Yes, certain things can work for Aella that can't work for other women because she's famous, lives in a male dominated area and mentally inhabits a male dominated milieu. This is definitionally not true for the average woman.
If there was a substantial innate desire of men to marry less promiscuous women, how would we find that out? Surveys may be useful but they don't tell the whole story because I suspect a lot of men seem to believe their partner's sexual history doesn't matter but act contrary to that belief when it comes to marriage.
I don't think shaming is the way to go, but at least it gets some information out there. My point is that it's dangerous when one sex simply internalizes its preferences and even expresses the opposite of the real preference in public. It's dangerous to both sexes actually because these innate preferences largely determine whether marriages can happen.
The image in this chart showing the dramatic decrease in marriage rates is troubling and I wonder if it's related to men expressing latent preferences rather than women.
https://x.com/chamath/status/1737238320235831546?s=20
>Still, I don't support shaming women in response. If men don't value these women then women will see that expressed in dating and marriage preferences.
Can you think of an example where society works like that? "Dont tell people what you think of them, the only way they feel it is through silent decisions" is not really something people do outside of very transactional contexts.
Culture can handily override pre rational preferences and frequently does so. See culture where boys have to swallow semen to become men. This kind of preference, for women with few prior partners - something which can never be determined just by looking at, talking to or having sex with a woman, if it existed, would clearly be small and therefore easily trumped by culture.
'the slut shaming was initiated and mainly perpetrated by boys.'
Are you sure about that? It sounds like the boys engaged in some unpleasant VISIBLE slut shaming, but I would imagine that the girls engaged in plenty of nasty gossiping. It's not obvious which is worse.
Yes, it was mostly the boys. They spread the rumors, invented the nick name and publicly humiliated her regularly. Girls may have gossiped as well or been careful about being associated with her, but it was in response to the boys marking her out in the first place and nowhere near as severe. And the fear of being targeted was also a reason for other girls, including me who thought their slut shaming was incredibly mean and gross, to not defend her. I do think women engage in slut shaming but the type I've seen is *mostly* in the more wholesome category of slut shaming - shaming their friends for putting themselves in dangerous situations or accepting sub par treatment from a man they're sleeping with, or relatives telling girls "not to give it away for free" as a warning about the potential costs of engaging in casual sexual relationships. But I've honestly only seen a few cases of women or girls initiating or even joining in on the type of dehumanizing slut shaming (public or private) that I described with the "Tugger" case.
Could you share some links to your sources? I'd like to look into it more. Like I said above I've more often seen women slut shame from a place of care/desire to protect their loved ones than as a way to bully. The female bullying I've experienced was very minor and I wouldn't have been the target of slut shaming anyways.
Even non-sexual bullying goes from boys to girls. I remember clearly from school as well.
Will check it out, thanks. I've heard arguments about slut shaming as a result of female competition and in the post I quickly note the structure of such an argument (quoted below). It's just never struck a chord with me because I've never felt like I was actually competing with those women.
From the post: "But another potential source of motivation for women to slut shame other women is that sluts, by making sex easily available to men, lower its value in the marketplace which weakens the ability of other women to use the promise of sex to incentivize commitment from men."
It’s l unfortunate how many young Catholics aren’t properly catechized, even in Catholic schools. Because I’m confused the Catholic sexual morality bashing. Both sexes are called to chastity. The double standard for male promiscuity is a worldly cultural standard, not Catholic. So is Sex is viewed as a gift (as everything is) that is both unitive and procreative.
This article, like many of the counter-counter-sexual revolution types, leaves out the actual research on the topic:
1. The more sexual partners you have, the higher your chance of divorce and the more likely you are unhappy in your marriage.
2. There is a well known phenomena in the literature called the paradox of declining female happiness. Women today are less happy than their predecessors in less liberated times.
If the sexual revolution was so awesome, wouldn't these be precisely the opposite results?
I am a successful single man in my 40’s who longs for the deeper connection of a committed relationship, but who hasn’t found that partner yet.
—
I despise how the tropes about manhood are proliferated throughout our culture. Not all men are commitment avoidant, not all men want to have sex with random strangers all the time, not all men are walking phalluses (phallusi ?).
These tropes are harmful to men such as myself by making us feel like outsiders/weirdos and pushing us to change who we are to fit in.
Can we move towards a recognition that there are many thoughtful, dedicated, committed men rather than perpetuating these harmful tropes?
—
While this article is more measured in its approach, I do feel like these tropes are present here as well.
I stopped reading after a few paragraphs. The boys need to be disciplined (do Catholics whip people?) and perhaps expelled. What does this have anything to do with that girl or women or feminism at all is lost on me.
It was an illustrative anecdotal example of the negative outcomes that are downstream of a culture that highly prizes feminine purity and enforces that value using slut shaming. If you’d like to know more you can read the post.
“But Bridget having all that sex she regrets didn’t actually devalue her.”
This sentence could be made easier to parse, I think: “but having all that sex she regrets didn’t devalue Bridget.”
Well aware of the fertility trends and have written several posts related to the subject.
Can women really have it all?
https://open.substack.com/pub/reganarntzgray/p/can-women-really-have-it-all?r=ipqw&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true
Young mom old mom
https://open.substack.com/pub/reganarntzgray/p/young-mom-old-mom?r=ipqw&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true
How much for a marginal baby
https://open.substack.com/pub/reganarntzgray/p/how-much-for-a-marginal-baby?r=ipqw&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true
For the love of humanity
https://open.substack.com/pub/reganarntzgray/p/for-the-love-of-humanity?r=ipqw&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true
Egg freezing utilization rates
https://open.substack.com/pub/reganarntzgray/p/egg-freezing-utilization-rates?r=ipqw&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true
This is something my boyfriend and I were discussing last night - to what extent is sexual chemistry correlated with general romantic chemistry? My intuition is that they're very correlated and I'd expect the quality of the sexual connection to largely mirror the emotional connection/how well you get along and "vibe" (although I can think of counter examples with friends of mine). But, that's maybe more true for women than for men? Either way though, I agree that even if you can be reasonably confident that there will be sexual chemistry because you have a lot of emotional chemistry and find the other person attractive, it's still worth confirming that! Plus, most people just like having sex!
Yes and no, but people can also have sexual dysfunctions that they haven’t addressed or worked through, which you’d probably rather know about sooner than later (thinking of Charlotte on SATC finding out on her wedding night that her new husband has poorly treated ED)
That's true. Good reference lol. And even if they're correlated they're not 100% correlated so seems worth making sure you do in fact have sexual chemistry at a reasonably early stage. But my reluctance to fully support this reasoning comes from the observation that sexual compatibility is not a constant anyways - through the course of a multi-decade relationship there will surely be ups and downs. So I wonder how predictive early sexual compatibility is for later sexual compatibility, probably somewhat predictive but is it like 90% predictive or more like 30%? I'm not sure.
I think it’s more about ruling out someone who you’re definitely *not* sexually compatible with
lol seems like there's a lot of men on this platform who'd prefer the only women they interact with to be their mom and their virginal wife.
I never understood that argument. It takes time to discover someone sexually, learn with them, grow with them. What one does sexually, or desires sexually also can change over time. Either way, there's a learning curve and growth and this often happens over years. Either way it has to happen, whether you start to have sex on 4th date, 40th, or after the wedding.
This is more how I view it as well if I'm reading you correctly, that compatibility is not constant or necessarily predicted well from the initial sexual experiences you have with someone. That said, I could believe that there are some ways in which people can be sexually mismatched that you can tell early on... like if both people really like to be dominant that might be a real problem? I'm not sure.
I also don't understand "dominant" in relation to lovemaking. It's a flow. A give and take. A synergystic dance. Where is the question of "dominance" in it?