In memoirs and TV/magazine interviews galore, numerous stars of Hollywood, the recording industry, and the sports world have boasted of bedding thousands of women over their careers. These claims are so widespread, and buttressed by so many independent first-person accounts over so many decades, as to be widely accepted truths. Translation: These guys have more notches on their beds than Edward Scissorhands. Even if a NBA star is inflating his booty count of 20,000 women by 50%, the adjusted figure is still astronomically high, so how are these guys hiding all their love children – and what is keeping the children from demanding child support?
I understand the role of “fixers” in the sports and entertainment worlds, but if your client has amassed 250 love children during his storied career, how does his attorney and CPA keep them from exploding across next week’s National Enquirer – or does today’s Enquirer yawn at this stuff? One has to assume a sizeable number of these men are not practically safe sex and their female fans are not using reliable birth control.
I wouldn’t necessarily assume that. Especially if you’re a celebrity. But sure, I’d assume sometimes they don’t or forget or it fails. But we’re not talking Johann der Kindermacher here. It’s extremely unlikely anyone in recent history would have had 250 kids with the easy availability of both birth control and especially abortion (until recently). Clint Eastwood had at least eight, Herschel Walker had at least four. Which ain’t nothing but isn’t remotely 250, which I suspect would be entirely impossible to conceal given the National Enquirer and its various competitor’s penchant for paying for salacious celebrity stories.
I mean, I had a co-worker who would bring in NE issues from his mom’s house for the amusement value. One of them had a story about some dipshit that claimed to have taken his then much younger celebrity girlfriend’s virginity (I almost wrote her name, but yeah, no reason for that). Very obviously he got paid for that lack of class. Someone is gonna reach for the dollars, especially if there are 250 someones each wanting a piece of the celebrity money pie.
Think about it this way - if I’m reading Table 2 on p4 of this pdf correctly men who have been married seldom have more than about 5 children. Despite having access to a sexual partner.
So the difference with a highly sexually active male athlete is that (a) they may have ready access to far more different sex partners during their sexually active years, and (b) they are probably never trying to have a child with their casual partners.
(a) may well lead to more sex due to the attraction of variety but also possibly less due to the vagaries of training and travel etc compared to someone who is at home with their partner all the time. And (b) means they may be at least trying to use contraception all the time, unlike someone with a partner who is trying to have children.
Consequently I don’t think the problem has the scale you think it does.
Don’t forget also that there is potentially a price to be paid for a woman to admit that her child was fathered in a celebrity fling or one night stand. Yes that may result in some child-support that may also result in the destruction of her primary relationship, if she has one.
This is obviously a reference to Wilt Chamberlain’s well-known claim. Interestingly, despite that number (insanely high even if it’s off by 50% or more), there is, as far as I can tell, only one significant claim of him fathering a child – and that claim was only made in 2015, by a man who had been born in 1964.
Is there also a possibility that even the scandal media need a bit more variety in what they report? An endless series of celebrity love-children on every other page might just turn the customers off.
I’ve read confessionals by many, many athletes and rock stars who talk about having one-night stands nightly, and sometimes multiple women each day. I do not find that hard to believe at all. Some young women throw themselves at celebrities, who welcome them with open arms.
Princhester, one factor to consider: Women looking for a rich sugar daddy or baby daddy who will lavish them with baubles and monthly support checks know exactly whom to target: young athletes and celebrities. Consequently, their birth control might be nil, but will not admit so. True, many of these men are aware of that “honey pot” scenario, but I can easily imagine not a few of them surrendering to the heat of the moment. Okay, crapping out 250 times? Surely not. But some men are slow learners in classrooms headed by exceedingly sexy women, especially when the man’s behavior is compulsive.
I am not specifically referring to Wilt Chamberlain. If you imagine a young athlete having sex with “just” two women each day, every day, that’s about 700 women a year. Over 20 years, it’s nearly 15,000 women. For a young, athletic, narcissistic guy surrounded by curvy women, having sex with two women each day strikes me as rather monastic. I recently skimmed the memoir of one of the 007 James Bonds, who confessed that, in the 60s and 70s, he typically had sex with multiple women each day, in his trailer, between shoots, as it were. Boasting or true? Having met more than a few horndogs in my life, I believe it’s true. I think a book written by one of those “fixers” would be fascinating.
Most young athlete 20 years into their careers are called no-longer-young ex-athletes . The average career of professional athletes in the Big 3 (football, baseball, basketball) is startlingly short. The Dirk Nowitzki’s, Nolan Ryan’s and Tom Brady’s are quite rare. And what did they all have in common? They all had long-term relationships.
Which is very, very common. The hypersexual athletes/celebrities living a non-stop life of debauchery are very much the exception and even for many of those it is at most a brief period in their life. Most folks want to settle down soon enough and even if some of them continue to cheat from time to time, it’s probably not with two different women/night.
People (especially celebrities with very healthy egos) brag/lie about their sexual adventures constantly and most people aren’t playboys. I think you are vastly overestimating the likely crop of illegitimate children out there. There are many, but probably generally not a ton of them per father.
ISTM that most athletic high-achievers are having way less sex than that. This survey of Olympic athletes, for example, puts the average at once every two to three days.
Add to these details the fact that a random instance of totally unprotected PIV sex between reproductively fertile people has only about a 1 in 20 chance of resulting in pregnancy, and that contraceptive use (even imperfectly and inconsistently practiced) among stranger hookups probably cuts down those odds by more than half. You end up with even Caribbean_cruiser’s (unrealistically liberal IMHO) estimate of 700 sexual encounters per year resulting in fewer than 15 pregnancies, even if every one of those encounters involved PIV sex (which I doubt they would).
Then consider that most such unplanned and unwanted pregnancies are terminated, and I think it’s very unlikely that even over a 20-year span (which as Tamerlane notes is a pretty long time for any pro athlete to retain ubiquitous-hordes-of-crazed-groupies levels of stardom) any athlete would end up fathering even as many as a hundred children.
We can do another reality check on Caribbean_cruiser’s speculations by considering the historical case of Genghis Khan, for example. Now, there’s a guy who really did have unlimited sexual access to women at all times, being officially married to hundreds of women (in the days before effective birth-control methods or marital-rape prohibitions), with many others as concubines, and constantly acquiring young female captives to rape/seduce/make love to extramaritally. And AFAICT even he is estimated to have produced “only” a few dozen up to a few hundred children.
Agree with all that ref Khan, but we’d also need to include a factor going the other way that getting from fertilized egg to pregnant to birth to age 2 was a bit more uncertain in Ghenghis’ time compared to our own.
If horny old Ghengis produced, e.g., 100 offspring who lived to reproduce, he probably produced more like 200 infants and 300 fertilizations. And that’s assuming various court intrigues didn’t result in widespread killing of his offspring at various ages by somebody.
Kimstu, I accept your figures, but if the female’s objective is to get pregnant, then her odds of success increase significantly, especially if she uses an ovulation predictor kit. We might object to the idea of anyone setting up a celebrity in this manner, but if the plotter believes a payday awaits on the other side, who knows?
Of course, my prior arguments ignore the fact that some women may want to hook up with celebrities simply for bragging rights.
IIRC at one time there was a website whose url was some variation on http://www.iwannafuckpetecarroll.com
Pete was then the coach of the Seattle Seahawks football team and very popular with the internet groupie set despite the fact he’s married and is apparently a genuine family man, not a playah. Bragging rights indeed.
So, I’m going to tell a story about my dearly departed mother.
Once, many years ago, she was in Vegas with her family and stopped to play a slot machine. Who walks up? Wilt Chamberlain.
He starts talking to her, but she quickly confesses “I’m not even supposed to be here! I’m only 17.” (Making this about 1968). He then walks away.
A few minutes later somebody comes up to her and tells her to follow him. She’s mad: “he told on me!”
But, she’s led into a room and is sat down on a chair next to Wilt at a table with other people. She said she got flirty with him, trying to hold his hand, but he pulled it away. Eventually, she got up to leave and he patted her on the butt - as I recall, she said his hand went from her waist to her knee.
But nothing else came of it (and I’m only 6 feet tall).
I have no doubt that Wilt scored a lot on and off the basketball court, but I’ve always wondered just how exaggerated his counting was.
I know it’s not mundane and pointless anymore, but I’ll just say that in the movie Bad Teacher, Cameron Diaz’s character decides to get knocked up by an athlete for the free ride, but later laments that ‘these guys use a condom and take it with them when they go.’ not sure if that’s any kind of truth in television or not.
OK, it is late and I can’t find what I wanted to actually quote but this is sort of close enough.
As to why there are not a zillion famous bastards out there [not meaning anything negative, just referring to kids out of wedlock]
Not just using birth control [something about using condoms and taking them away afterwards] but the sheer fact that a large number of pregnancies self abort before they even get started. Someone else pointed out that the parentage is hidden to not screw up the primary relationship, or the woman really doesn’t care who fathered her kid, or the woman used abortion as birth control and didn’t care to monetize the potential kid.
I don’t know, honestly? Yes I might find The Rock or Jason Momoa handsome, or Wilt Chamberlain [had to look for a pic, while I know the name, I can’t say that I ever saw him play] but I am not really into the whole casual sex thing. I can’t really see the thing for going after someone famous for a one night stand, I prefer to be in a relationship.
. The