“Had his way”? “Used women”? All of your descriptions angle toward objectifying women. Do you think that women should be “grossed out” by the idea of sex with you because another woman has already “had her way with you”?
At this point, I would say that there are three possibilities as to why you have this need for virginal women.[ol][li]You have a virgin fetish, and are psychologically unable to “get it up” for someone who is not a virgin. However, this seems unlikely, since you can “get it up” for non-virgins who have had sexual experiences only with you.[/li]
[li]You are extremely insecure, and don’t wish for a woman to be capable of comparing your performance (or size) to that of any of her past lovers.[/li]
[li]You have a significant enough level of homophobia that you refuse to go anywhere that someone else’s penis has previously been. This seems to be the most likely candidate, based on your “it grosses me out” comment. If this is the case, then you also probably would not kiss a woman who has ever performed fellatio, but would probably have no difficulty engaging in intercourse with a bisexual woman who has only had sexual experiences with other women before.[/ol][/li]
My money’s on 3, with a slight misogynistic attitude thrown in.
Not exactly. There is no instinctive dictate for how you get food. Only what to do when you find it. If you laid out fresh bison steaks in front of a Neanderthal’s dwelling, he’d eat those, rather than go hunting for food that morning.
On the other hand, there is definite evolutionary pressure for animals (including humans) being selective about their mates. Having a way to determine if a prospective mate is healthy and carries good genes is critical to the survival of a species.
It appears that numerous women – though a statistically insignificant percentage thereof – exhibit this abnormality.
Evolutionary heuristics are developed across millions of years, billions of individuals and hundreds of generations. If a million women end up having superelastic hymens – a minute fraction of a percent of a percent – numerous as they are, they won’t impact the effectiveness of the heuristic very much.
After a quick look, I didn’t come across any hard numbers as to how common this abnormality is. If you have numbers, feel free to post.
Men who sleep with women who sleep around not only run much lower probabilities of impregnating them – seeing as how the woman is likely already pregnant – but run higher risks of
Contracting STDs
Getting beaten up or killed by the woman’s other, vengeful, jealous partners
Exiled by their clans / societies
and dying a quick death.
So, no, it’s not an evolutionary advantage to sleep with women who sleep around. The expected value of sleeping with a virgin is much higher than the expected value of sleeping with a nonvirgin. The coefficients of the equation used to calculate these expected values have been changing – it is now more difficult to find a virgin than it used to be, the probability of getting beaten up or killed by a jealous partner is slightly lower, but the risk of contracting STD’s is much higher. Overall, the end result favors choosing virgins over nonvirgins.
This is of course assuming that a man’s objective in life is to sire the maximal number of children who themselves go on to sire the maximal number of children, which is no longer a metric that is all that relevant for the majority of us. But our evolutionary heritage being what it is, it colors our sexual preferences to their very core.
People actually think this way? I mean, like outside of a laboratory?
“Hmm, she’s nice and likes the same movies I do and that little laugh of hers is quite amusing, but damnit, those hips just aren’t wide enough for proper child bearing.”
I’ll guarantee that if a comely young lass was naked in front of me and little Jack was up to the task, the survival of the species would be the last thing on my mind.
This is wrong. A woman can only become pregnant for a few days each month, and even during that time, pregnancy is not assured. A quick look at the high number of couples who need to try for several months or even years to conceive bears this out. Since the number of nonvirginal women is always going to be FAR larger than the number of virgins, simple mathematics dictates that the nonpicky men will pass on their genes more often.
Cite? Throughout human prehistory, it is likely that females mated shortly after reaching sexual maturity, so that virgins would have been far less available than now.
Apart from the fetish/preference distinction that Broomstick so beautifully outlined on page 1 of this thread, I believe that the issue becomes one of politeness.
After hitting my late teens, I just automatically assumed that anybody I became intimate with was NOT a virgin. It was not something that was discussed or enquired into, because their sexual-status was NONE OF MY BUSINESS, nor was mine any of theirs.
In fact, if anybody had dared to ask me whether I was a virgin, and had judged my worth on such a basis, they would have gotten a swift kick in the arse. I would have considered it the height of discourtesy, and indicative of a social and psychological immaturity or even pathology.
Except for statistically insignificant percentages of women who rupture their hymens while riding a bike (yeah, right) or women with superhuman superelastic superduper hymens, the two groups are virtually equal. Am I missing something?
It isn’t a concious decision. It’s instinctive. Admittedly, it’s less of a driving force in modern times, since social pressures have largely overwhelmed instictive choices, but early in the evolution of humans, it was a very important factor.
I guess that’s what I was smart-assedly getting at … it was an issue.
I really don’t think it is one anymore, outside of theoretical arguments. I mean it’s fun to argue about, but I really don’t see it occurring in practice.
“Most women by the age of 18, however, won’t have an intact hymen. If you’ve been using tampons, for example, you won’t have an intact hymen” This is referring to women who are virgins.
“They hymen, this thin membrane of skin may stretch or break when you ride a bike, climb a tree, ride a horse, do gymnastics or do any physical activity.”
And how about women who are widows? Have been divorced? Maybe they only slept with their husbands and no one else. This doesn’t mean they “slept around.”
Your skepticism regarding a women whose hymen is broken but hasn’t been sexually active says more about you than about female anatomy.
As does your unwillingness to give cites for your assertions.
As does your insistance that nonvirgins by definition sleep around.
It still is, to a point. Men do tend to prefer women with broader hips and larger breasts, overall, since these are as good indicators of the womans ability to bear and raise healthy children as any. Oddly, I’m in the minority on the breast thing.
Pregnancy is never assured. However, its probability increases every time a woman sleeps with a new man. Also note that women become hornier during their fertile phase.
I was actually being courteous on this one, lowering one coefficient while raising the other so the value works out to approximately what it has always been.
If we go with your assumption – which I’m willing to do, for the sake of argument – sleeping with a virgin these days has a higher expected value than it has ever had throughout all of human history. So our OP is even more justified in his preference than he would have been at any previous time.
Psst… I do not think Colinmarshall is still around anymore.
A pity, if he would not come back in this tread. He asked a genuine question. And I would like to see his answers to some of the hypothetical situations outlined by posters.
You have to realize that I’m making an argument in defense of how a preference for virgins has come to be a useful heuristic for men throughout the history of evolution – not a defense of my own tastes, which I haven’t even stated. Tampons haven’t existed until very recently. Nor has birth control, pregnancy tests, and a host of other things that seem to contradict with the basis for a man’s taste for virgins.
You can no more fault a man for being aroused by virgins and being turned off by nonvirgins, than you can fault him for being aroused by large, perky breasts and being turned off by wrinkly, sagging breasts. Both behaviors are evolutionary heuristics designed to home in on women most likely to successfully give birth to healthy babies.
If successful pregnancy is the key, as you’ve said, then how one chooses a mate isn’t important except for the first case of intercourse.
It’s simple. The chances of impregnating a virgin on the first shot are high. The chances of impregnating any particular woman at any particular time can be lower, e.g. in the case that she’s already pregnant.
But once the woman is not pregnant, it ceases to matter if she is a virgin or not - she can be impregnated, just the same as if she were a virgin.
This particularly damages your evolutionary theory because, evolutionarily speaking, it would be incredibly dangerous for our species to copulate once and only once; the population would be in a state of decline.
I am purposely neglecting your risks. This is because the perception of these risks are on a different level than this preference; one is cognitive and the other instinctual.
That is, the sex drive wants what it wants. That the woman a man is lusting for is married or may be pregnant or may have a disease is on a level different from the sex drive, and when a man stops himself from seducing his neighbor’s wife, it’s probably because he consciously - that’s the key word here - decides it wouldn’t be wise to do so.
This doesn’t mean that the idea of sleeping with virgins is wrong, but it suggests that an evolutionary tendency to do so is an invalid claim.