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?
Call it fascism if you like, but sometimes I think are extreme circumstances where individuals AND their offspring should be sterilized...
Really???? You have no choice in whether you conceive a child or not??
Yes there is an epidemic of fatherless children and it is disgusting that women are more often than not, blamed for the pregnancy, yet no one is forcing the male to deposit the sperm. I get so tired of hearing that males are the victims of an unplanned pregnancy. LISTEN UP JERKS, CHILDREN ARE THE VICTIMS.
And some people don’t see how the fiscal and moral health of our country are related.
Um, woman's “right” to choose (kill what you HELPED create or get child support without legal say from the man who HELPED create said child) ring a bell to what the poster was referring to.
There is no male equivalent to the "hot dog down a hallway." Women who sleep around become like roadkill after a few years: easy to catch and eat, but do you really want to? Doesn't quite hold true for guys.
This issue of paying child support is a separate issue from whether a male has the power to prevent an unwanted pregnancy. With the rare expect ion of a fertile male being raped by a fertile women,men have the power to not conceive a child.
Regarding the man not having any say in whether he pays child support, aside from the fact that he is not forced to conceive a child, you think it is ok to make that child that didn't ask to be born pay for the decisions TWO fertile adults made? I don't think a child should suffer any consequences for actions that they had absolutely no control over. OBTW, the "legal say" is decided by the court. The court would have no say if a child is not conceived. Does the phrase personal responsibly enter the discussion?
Actually, it’s a pretty intriguing statement. I’d instead argue that your response is one of the more inadequately thought-out statements on FR. He’s not saying that men do zero harm by sleeping around, in fact he mentions quite a few really bad things that happen when men sleep around. He just adds to the list one very damaging thing that women cause when they sleep around, hence the “more” damage.
Look at the original premise of the posters example and current reality/laws, not your own POV since they are not law.
BOTH have invited the sperm/egg to unite (Through a consensual act), now who has the “power” to “choose” after that, duh, hence the double standard.
Man wants child, to love the child and provide for the child/woman wants to kill the child = woman gets to kill the child
Man wants an abortion or no involvement at all/woman wants baby and $$$ = woman gets the baby and $$$
Under current law this is a double standard if I ever saw one. I cringe that I had to hold your hand and write that out for you.
Too many people have too much relativety in their moral standards. I remember one girl’s statement that “three in one night is not so bad.” I wonder how many fellas one needed to service to be out and out naughty in her eyes.
I get upset myself when I’m reminded that God does not grade on a curve.
lol...man...you two gave me some good keyboard chuckles for a snowy TN evening and morning...that is a great sense of humour..
yep...it is one of life’s unfairness things which is why girls need to practice some discretion
just logically...without even considering religious mores
for the record...I am not in favor of a man cheating on his wife and kids if she is faithful
but before marriage I think a man needs to know what he needs
There’s nothing wrong with being a slut . . . especially of the Geriatric Order.
So men can screw around all they want to before marriage but women must have limits.
So how exactly does that work?
At one time I did examine Solomon and reached the conclusion that wisdom and intelligence are two different things.
He had 300 wives . . . 700 concubines . . .
One Thousand women under one roof . . .
Didn't anyone explain to this cat about PMS?
That is not what I said precisely but nice twist.
I’m only 52 and been around a bit so what do I know but I’ll give it a shot.
I think men and women are wired quite differently about sex....men more easily stray and should be sure they are ready for fidelity.
Women for biological and shelf-life reasons should be more discreet.
Not to say women can’t go all Caligula too but history has always shown more deference to a woman’s sexual value than to a man’s...and not just because of sexism...again...I hate that sort of word....reproduction being the definer.
I could never have been faithful to the first woman I slept with but I think more women than man can or at least more so.
I call the men sluts too. Both sexes are whores when they shun monogamy and adhere to an abhorrent sexual lifestyle.
Then, we get into homosexuality which in MHO is downright deviant and a true health threat.
Ummmmm, to find out if she was a slut or not?
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