Posted on 02/08/2010 10:07:18 PM PST by libh8er
You often hear women, especially feminists and sluts, complaining about how it’s such an unfair double standard that men are called studs when they sleep around, yet women are called sluts. It’s really not a double standard though, because both scenarios are pretty different in terms of circumstances and consequences. I can think of at least three crucial differences.
First, sleeping around is easier for women. Regardless of how you feel about promiscuity, we can all agree that a guy who manages to rack up a lot of sexual partners has to have some skills. It’s challenging for men to rack up partners, even for men with low standards. It requires a certain amount of social intelligence, interpersonal skills, persistence, thick skin, and plain old dumb luck. For women to rack up a lot of partners, however, it pretty much only requires a vagina and a pulse. So a man whoring it up and a woman whoring it up are hardly the same thing because for a woman to get a lot of partners is absolutely no challenge, hence no one respects it. It’s just viewed as a lack of self-discipline when women indulge in lots of sex partners because they can get new ones whenever they want. When men get lots of sex partners, it’s respected more because getting lots of sex partners, for men, is a challenge. This is just human nature: people gain respect for those who accomplish challenging feats while they consider those who overindulge in easily obtained vices as weak or flawed.
Second, women do more harm by sleeping around than men do. Say a man sleeps around with a bunch of different women. He is definitely doing harm to these women if he pretends to be monogamous while sleeping around with these multiple partners. He may cause them emotional pain by his promiscuity. He may cause unwanted pregnancy. He may spread venereal diseases. When women sleep around, however, they can cause not only these same ill effects but one additional crucial ill effect: the risk of unknown parentage. If one guy sleeps around with five women, each of whom is monogamous to him, and they all get pregnant, it’s a safe bet as to who the father is. If one woman sleeps around with five men and gets pregnant, it could be anybody’s baby. And if a man is tricked into raising a baby that isn’t his, he is basically investing his time, money, estate and property to provide for a child that is not carrying on his DNA into the next generations, which is a costly mistake from an evolutionary standpoint. Our two basic primal drives are to survive and to reproduce, and promiscuous women traditionally make it hard for a man to know for sure whether he is truly reproducing or simply raising another man’s child. Men stand a lot more to lose from promiscuous women than the other way around. And it’s no picnic for the child to not know who his real father is either. And it’s a mess for the women carrying on the deception as well. Or just look at any random episode of the Maury show if you don’t believe me. Considering that the DNA test and the birth control pill had not existed for most of human history, meaning that there were no reliable ways to prevent pregnancy or prove parentage, society for many centuries had a vested interest in preventing promiscuity among women and society accomplished this by creating the slut stigma. And even though the creation of birth control and DNA tests have made this less of a risk than the past, longstanding traditions and customs are not easy for society to break.
Third, men have evolutionary reasons to be programmed to sleep around. A lot of women roll their eyes when they hear that men are “hard-wired” to sleep around. But from an evolutionary standpoint, it makes total sense. If the two primal drives of humans are to survive and to reproduce, nothing leads to maximum reproduction like one man sleeping with multiple women. If one women slept with many men, in a nine month period, she would still only get pregnant just once. Nine months of rampant promiscuity would give the same result as nine months of highly sexed monogamy: one pregnancy. Now if one man sleeps with many women, you can get many pregnancies. The more women he sleeps with, the more pregnancies. So from an evolutionary standpoint, there are concrete advantages to men sleeping around with multiple partners rather than women.
These three reasons are probably why the longstanding tradition came about of men being rewarded for multiple partners while women get socially punished for similar promiscuity. Of course all this is gradually changing, but we’re up against centuries of tradition here, so don’t expect any dramatic reversals or anything.
Now a lot of people are going to read all this and dismissively think Oh this guy is just being a typical man and trying to justify every man’s dream: cheating and polygamy. But believe it or not, I don’t really think male polygamy is all it’s cracked up to be. Despite what most people assume, polygamy actually may benefit women more than men. Most dudes think a society of widespread polygamy (specifically polygyny, where one man can have several women) would just be a utopia of every guy sleeping with every woman under the sun. Some economists think otherwise though. The basic argument is that in a world where po
lygamy was acceptable, most of the women would be hoarded by the most successful men. As explained in this Psychology Today article:
The history of western civilization aside, humans are naturally polygamous. Polyandry (a marriage of one woman to many men) is very rare, but polygyny (the marriage of one man to many women) is widely practiced in human societies, even though Judeo-Christian traditions hold that monogamy is the only natural form of marriage…..Relative to monogamy, polygyny creates greater fitness variance (the distance between the “winners” and the “losers” in the reproductive game) among males than among females because it allows a few males to monopolize all the females in the group. The greater fitness variance among males creates greater pressure for men to compete with each other for mates. Only big and tall males can win mating opportunities. Among pair-bonding species like humans, in which males and females stay together to raise their children, females also prefer to mate with big and tall males because they can provide better physical protection against predators and other males.
In societies where rich men are much richer than poor men, women (and their children) are better off sharing the few wealthy men; one-half, one-quarter, or even one-tenth of a wealthy man is still better than an entire poor man. As George Bernard Shaw puts it, “The maternal instinct leads a woman to prefer a tenth share in a first-rate man to the exclusive possession of a third-rate one.” Despite the fact that humans are naturally polygynous, most industrial societies are monogamous because men tend to be more or less equal in their resources compared with their ancestors in medieval times. (Inequality tends to increase as society advances in complexity from hunter-gatherer to advanced agrarian societies. Industrialization tends to decrease the level of inequality.)
When there is resource inequality among men?the case in every human society?most women benefit from polygyny: women can share a wealthy man. Under monogamy, they are stuck with marrying a poorer man.
The only exceptions are extremely desirable women. Under monogamy, they can monopolize the wealthiest men; under polygyny, they must share the men with other, less desirable women. However, the situation is exactly opposite for men. Monogamy guarantees that every man can find a wife. True, less desirable men can marry only less desirable women, but that’s much better than not marrying anyone at all.
Men in monogamous societies imagine they would be better off under polygyny. What they don’t realize is that, for most men who are not extremely desirable, polygyny means no wife at all, or, if they are lucky, a wife who is much less desirable than one they could get under monogamy.
So basically, women complain about how men are allowed to sleep around and they aren’t. Meanwhile men wish polygamy had widespread acceptance. And the truth may actually be that male polygamy benefits the average women more than the average man. Who’da thunk?
Dumbest statement on FR ever.
You forgot the barf alert
I thought they’re called man-ho’s?
Huh ? You mean you disagree ? :)
I once paternity tested a woman when I was a prosecutor who had previously been tested 7 times and did not know who the father of her child was. So we tested her, the rugrat and prospective baby daddy #8 and ... he was not the daddy. She told my paralegal that there were a lot of guys at that party that night [the night she said her son was conceived] and she still wasn’t sure who the father was. I kid you not, it was like a Maury show come to life.
So yeah there is definite harm in a woman giving it to whoever comes at them. That kid is going to grow up not knowing who is father is and if he does find out there’s going to be one hell of stigma attached.
You are in de NILE!
Words fail.
Wish I had your (or his) problems.
Wilt, is that you?
Yeah guys.. It’s time to “slut ourselves out” to all those ladies clawing at the door to get at us. Damn, that estrogen makes them so aggressive (oh, my apologies.. So “assertive”).. They just WON’T leave us alone!!!
Disagree is too mild a word.
Polygamy is not the panacea people think it would be. Look at David and Solomon in the bible. Not really shangra-la.
Anyways, one wife that always is unhappy about something and lets you know about it, is enough for any one man. God is merciful in marriage being between a man and just one woman.
And if someone said a woman was "easy"...well, why bother going further. Too many ways to shoot this thing down.
the sad thing is the value systems I see in the students in Elementary, jr high & sr. high today.
Various sex activities are openly practiced as part of social discourse and just not considered taboo. There are some young people that have been able to fight the tide & stay half way unaffected but they seem to be truly in the minority.
The idea of “it’s no big thing” is seemingly the battle cry.
If you doubt this ask teachers, check out Facebook, read the My space & other blogs.
Nope. Never did. And the State was paying for her housing, health care, food, etc, etc. I told one of the local cops about it and she laughed and said she was on patrol one night and drove by this ladies place and her blinds or curtains (not sure which) were open. Well the cop could see her having sex in her home with some dude from the street. She had to stop and beat on her door to tell her to close her curtains or she was going to be cited for indecent exposure.
I also had her oldest son on my juvenile docket. The kid was 9 when I started getting police reports on him and I finally charged him at 10. He was too young to place in juvie but it was just the beginning. The school district was putting a lot of pressure on the school liaison officer to get the kid out of school but the judge wouldn’t do it.
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