Women and Promiscuity
Women often complain that they want marriage but can’t find Mr. Right. In today’s dating environment, attractive, intelligent, successful women are seeing their biological clocks expire before they can find a husband. Even among those who do get married, divorce is rampant. How did committed husbands become so rare? Why is it that women are the ones pursuing commitment now? Women who desire marriage don’t realize that it is today’s promiscuous culture that has turned the odds against them.
Promiscuity vs. Marriage
Today’s promiscuous culture has allowed women to enjoy greater sexual freedom than ever before. Women can freely pursue their instinctual desires for love and lust in a way that was impossible under the monogamous system. However, there is a tradeoff. The more freely women pursue sex, the more difficult it becomes to find marriage.
There are several reasons why marriage is becoming less common in today’s culture. The most obvious is that when premarital sex is readily available, men lose one of the major motivations for marriage. (There is No Longer Someone For Everyone has a discussion of men’s greater sex drive.) The monogamous system restricted male sexual desire so that women, by controlling access to sex, held a great deal of power to demand resources and commitment. Under the promiscuous system, that power is very much reduced.
Another consequence of the promiscuous system is that many women concentrate their attentions on a small number of very attractive men. Biology dictates that men can cycle through sex partners more frequently and for a longer part of their lifetimes than women can. (See There is No Longer Someone for Everyone) This creates an imblance where a large number of women are sexually and emotionally connected to a small number of men. In this case, simple math dictates that few of those women can get married to the man with whom they’re having sex.
Another factor making things difficult for marriage-minded women are the kind of men they are instinctively programmed to pursue. Under today’s promiscuous system, women “follow their hearts” and seek out the kinds of sexually attractive men who pique their emotions. Women think that intense physical attraction is necessary for the beginning of a lifelong relationship. In reality, the opposite is true. The forces of evolution have made women physically and emotionally attracted to the very kinds of “jerks” and “players” that are the least likely to get married, and most likely to cheat if they do get married. (See The Rise of Players and the Decline of Providers.)
The Slippery Slope of Promiscuity
Once premarital sex and adultery are tolerated, women must become increasingly promiscuous in order to attract men. When a man chooses between two women, if all else is equal, he will take the woman who is more sexually available. Because of this, women competing for attractive men are caught in a downward spiral where they must compete amongst each other with increasing promiscuity. Since the invention of the pill and the advent of the sexual revolution, women have had to become consistently more sexual in their clothing and behavior. Women who attempt to dress modestly and practice restraint have difficulty attracting men from their more sexually available competition.
Another change in the current dating system is that women can no longer delay sex to obtain commitment. In the past, women seeking marriage delayed sex in order to determine whether their suitors wanted more than just a short-term sexual conquest. Men unwilling to wait would be rejected. In the promiscuous system, delaying sex is not possible because attractive men have so many other sexual options. A woman who tries to delay for long will soon find her man contested by other more willing women.
In the monogamous system, social stigma and fear of pregnancy prevented women from using sex to compete for male attention. In that system, it was men who competed for marriage on the terms dictated by women. Women wanted men who could prove commitment through chivalry and courtship. Because all women demanded the same treatment, and because there were no other sexual options, men were forced to comply.
Seeking Marriage Later
Because the pill now allows women to put off pregnancy and marriage, many women wait until their late 20’s to begin seriously searching for a marriage partner. Unfortunately, while these women feel pressure to settle down and marry, they still find themselves competing for male attention with younger, more promiscuous women. Younger women aren’t facing the pressures of the biological clock, and don’t demand commitment from men. This competition works against the women seeking marriage. Formerly promiscuous women who want to settle down as they get older must also contend with men’s aversion to their sexual experience. In the end, the same promiscuity and sexuality that a woman must use to attract desirable men for short-term relationships reduces her attractiveness as a potential marriage partner.
Men prefer women with less sexual experience because of the biology of maternal certainty and paternal uncertainty. When a woman has a child, she can be 100 percent sure the child is hers. Her husband has no such assurances. In fact, out of 280,000 blood tests done in 1999, 28 percent of the time, the man tested was not the father (New York Times). From an evolutionary standpoint, a man who spends a lifetime of his resources raising another man’s child is a genetic catastrophe, and men who are insensitive to the possibility of cuckoldry cannot survive long in the gene pool. The only way a man can be sure that a child is really his own is to make sure that his wife has not had sex with other men. This is the underlying reason why men prefer sexual inexperience in the women they marry. Men, particularly “provider” men who tend to have had fewer partners themselves, are less likely to consider a sexually experienced woman serious marriage material. (See David Buss, The Dangerous Passion: Why Jealousy Is As Necessary As Love and Sex.)
Marriage and Sexual Morality
Under the monogamous system, there were many layers of laws, religious rules, parental pressures and social norms that forced women to seek out men who would be good long-term providers. Women who had sex without commitment made marriage more difficult for other women, and their promiscuity was stigmatized. Nowadays, the old system of morals and rules is largely gone, and women can freely pursue their sexual instincts. Unfortunately, those same instincts are driving women onto a never-ending treadmill of relationships without commitment.
Many of today’s women bought into the idea that they should freely exercise their sexual liberties. Many of those women also bought into the idea that they would be able to get married at the time and age of their choosing. As those women get older, they are finding that the rules of evolution and biology make promiscuity and marriage incompatible.