The Slut Double Standard Revisited
A lot of people are going to read all my previous post on the male/female slut double standard and dismissively think Oh this guy is just being a typical man and trying to justify every man’s dream: cheating and polygamy.Actually though , 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 experts think otherwise though. The basic argument is that in a world where polygamy 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.
Also at play is a phenomenon described by Matt Ridley in his book The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature
So basically, women complain about how men are allowed to sleep around and they aren’t. Meanwhile men wish male polygamy was the cultural norm because they imagine they’d be swimming in women. And the truth may actually be that both sides are wrong and male polygamy benefits the average woman more than the average man. Who’da thunk?
Recommended Reading:
This book is mind-blowing and will totally change the way you look at female promiscuity. Highly recommended.
your arguments are horrible and fallacious
1st of all “it’s easier for women and does more harm” are not reasons to call women sluts.
2nd
it is true that men are programmed to be licentious but that doesn’t mean that “program” is optimal. All programs have faults and flaws and that is why nature created a weapon against human promiscuity and it is called the prefrontal cortex. The prefrontal cortex is one of evolutions mot recent gifts to the human brain. Although it is true that the pc gets smaller during arousal, even the smallest human pc is proportionately larger than animals. It’s the pc that tells us right from wrong. It’s the pc that tells us “if you go through this your child will have to share a father with a sibling he did not know.”
We are no longer Neanderthals or eat raw flesh. Look at the change that has come to the world. Women can now have careers. Slavery, another natural human inclination, is almost eradicated. What you do is promoting injustice and bias with ill conceived fallacies. You think that people are greedy and earthly but you’re wrong. Our minds are developed to be rational and make the BEST CHOICES FOR EVERYONE AND NOT FOR OURSELVES. THIS IS AN AGE OF SOPHISTICATION WHERE THE BASIC UNIT OF SOCIETY IS NOT AN INDIVIDUAL BUT A HAPPY FAMILY.
It is true that not all problems are eradicated completely but the world has progressed and humans started to stop being cannibals, enslavers and ignorant.
Vince, you’re confusing descriptive arguments with prescriptive arguments. I never said that the current double standards are morally right or even preferable. I’m just explaining why they exist. Yes we have a prefrontal cortex but it often gets hijacked by our primal urges and old evolutionary strategies that were once useful but now are not only not useful but in many ways counterproductive.
I’m not saying that the double standard is right or wrong, just that people tend to oversimplify the dynamic of what drives it. If women really want to fight it and eradicate it, they need to get a deeper understanding of what drives it.
Thnk you for this post and the previous one, nicely written. And your last comment “I’m not saying that the double standard is right or wrong, just that people tend to oversimplify the dynamic of what drives it. If women really want to fight it and eradicate it, they need to get a deeper understanding of what drives it.” is just golden.
I have seen so much useless fighting on internet forums about this “double standard” being right or wrong and why it should exist or not. But the standard is just a manifestation of much deeper and complex mechanics of people and society that we probably don’t want to change.
Well, here’s a miracle for women to find out. Behind men’s backs and behind closed doors, men do get bad reputations with women for their promiscuous behaviour. But, this sort of information gets kept behind closed doors and isn’t shared with the world. I know that men get bad reputations with women for their promiscuous behaviour because I’ve seen and known heaps of women who backstab males for being sleazebags and for sleeping around. I hope this miracle I have shared brings relief to all women.