The last line says it all. Infidelity is not abandonment. More generally, polygyny does not lessen the likelihood that a woman will pass on her genes. Polyandry does lessen the likelihood that a man will pass on his.
[Even the relatively small impact of infidelity leading to abandonment is mostly the result of the modern monogamous society and is thus insignificant in evolutionary terms.]
I’ve made my case here.
I’ll try to do justice to the belief, so here goes: Sex is biological. We have a desire to do ridiculous things like insert organ A into slot B so that one hundred years from now there will be more humans. Further, we all, both men and women, want OUR genes to be those future humans, not that idiot’s genes next door.
So how do we accomplish that? If I am a man, I accomplish that by sleeping with as many women as possible. Quantity, not quality. If I impregnate 100 women per year and only 5 survive to adulthood, it is a net win. I don’t need to stay around to raise the kids, but if I find a woman who cleans out the cave and makes me feel comfortable after killing a wooly mammoth, I might stay around.
If I am a woman, I can only have one child every nine months at most. I can sleep with a thousand men per year, but only have one child. Therefore, I should be selective. I should only sleep with someone that will give me the greatest potential to raise this one child per year and give him/her the best genes. So I am not having sex on the first cave date. I want an interview process so that my one child this year has the best possible father. And after I have selected the candidate, I want to keep him around. Because of my stature, I cannot kill wooly mammoths, but I would like a man who can to bring back wooly mammoth for me and my child. I will clean the cave and make him comfortable when he returns.
Now, does all of the above apply to modern society? Yes, and no. We still have the hard wired biological desires, but because women can support themselves now, there is not the need to clean caves and throw away wooly mammoth bones. However, by and large, men are still the breadwinners, and society has trained women, for lack of a better word, to want to make their man feel clean and comfortable.
That’s the belief. If you disagree, I am open to criticism.
Don’t worry. You’re not alone in this regard.
When you claim “there remain gender differences regardless of the ceaseless mission of the left to obliterate them” after talking about pernicious stereotypes, I strangely don’t feel like you really want to get rid of those stereotypes. Wacky of me, I’m sure.
I agree with the biological/evolutionary reasons for the differences betwwen male and female attitudes towards casual sex and infidelity. I would also add that a husband’s infidelity has little evolutionary impact on the couple’s future gene passing, but a wife’s infidelity can cause the husband to expend much of his resources unknowingly raising another man’s child, which is a disaster for his own selfish genes. This happens far more often than most would think.
It does get murky which makes me wonder; What do you think are some ways the move can be made poorly or not made at the right time? How can the rebuff be performed the wrong way?
Polygyny is not infidelity, either. Infidelity in monogamous cultures often leads to abandonment.
It’s mostly a hang up over sex at all. I think most people would see each relationship as unique, each first date as unique. To apply a rule about it would seem to prejudge the people / circumstances involved. Kind of shallow if you think about it.
Some of those stereotypes should be destroyed, burned down, and the earth salted so nothing more can grow there.
Others are valid, non-discriminatory, legitimate reasons for a distinction. In the 1970s we saw the former being brushed away. In the 2010s, we are going all coocoo ridiculous about it.
Do you agree that there are gender differences that might be appropriate to be regulated, if not in law, but in social customs?
I disagree, for purposes of this discussion.
If men are inherently predisposed to desire a mate whose children are definitely theirs (which they will be, since men who possess this trait are more likely to pass on their genes) then this would lead to them finding women who are more promiscuous less desirable, for the same reason they would be opposed to polyandrous relationships.
Women will be less predisposed to find promiscuous men undesirable, as well as less predisposed to object to polygynous relationships, since such a trait will not significantly impact the likelihood of them passing on their genes (at least to nearly the same extent as it would for men).
For purposes of this concept, these are the same. Quibbling over whether it’s called “infidelity” is missing the point. Call it the “someone who I’m confident will only sleep with me” characteristic if you like - it’s inherently a bigger deal for men than for women, for reasons given, whatever form it takes.
Again: it’s still not as big of a factor as cuckolding, and monogamous cultures have not been the norm for all that long, historically speaking.
No, all men are not always up for it. This stupid stereotype is as bad as the reverse that women never want sex, and only give it to men as a reward of some sort.
However, I do think there is some truth that there are biological differences for sexual desire between the genders. I vaguely recall a study that showed that gay men had roughly twice as much sex as lesbian couples during the first two years of their relationships. I’m not googling for that study at work though, so take it with grain of salt.
One thing I haven’t seen mentioned is the truth to the fact that men are physically larger on average than women are. In a situation where two people are alone and naked, it seems reasonable that the woman on average would have larger concerns over her boundaries being honored then a man would. If the woman declines and the man doesn’t accept it, it’s pretty good evidence that he is bad with boundaries and not a good potential partner.
I thought it was a fairly accepted idea that the sex that carries the greater burden during reproduction/child rearing was usually the choosier/more cautious mating partner. So homosexuality aside, it follows that female humans are more hesitant to jump into bed.
As I’ve said, it’s not an issue (at least in this thread) of choosiness. It’s certainly understandable that a person, male or female, might not be ready to have sex with another person.
What I’m curious about is something different. It’s when a person has decided they’re interested in another person as a sexual partner but decides to postpone the actual sex. Especially when the person is acknowledging that it’s their interest in the other partner that is prompting the postponement.
I can see somebody saying “I don’t like you enough to have sex with you right now.” But I don’t understand somebody saying “I like you too much to have sex with you right now.”
That’s the point however. Given that lesbians are not at risk of pregnancy, if the greater burden during reproduction was the only factor, you would expect lesbians to be having more sex than straight women. Instead, it appears that they have sex less frequently.
BTW, the study I cited was from “American Couples: Money, Work, Sex,” by Philip Blumstein and Pepper Schwartz. It’s also older than I thought (1983) so it’s quite possible that new information has come forth since, but a quick google didn’t show anything major.
Have you ever head the expression, “Why buy the cow if the milk is free?” This can easily translate to “Why date a girl if you can fuck her with no-strings attached?”
This is slowly changing, but that attitude still exists. If a woman only half likes a guy, she might still sleep with him because women are people who get horny too. However, if she really likes a guy, she probably wants more than just to sleep with him. She wants a relationship, and all of the things that go with that. Since she wants more than a sexual relationship, the best way for her to get what she wants is to delay adding sex to the relationship, and give all those other things a chance to develop.
Also, having sex with someone you’re kinda meh about, then finding out they feel the same way is no big deal. Having sex with someone you’re crazy about, then finding out that they were just horny is pretty heartbreaking. If the other person is really into you, they’ll wait for you to be ready.
Disclaimer - I’m a guy, and this is all observation and guesswork.
When I was in high school, we had a guest speaker, a sociology professor named Ray Short, who had written a book entitled “Love, Sex, or Infatuation.” He talked to us (a bunch of hyper-hormonal and confused boys at an all-male Catholic school) about how to navigate relationships and how to understand one’s feelings.
One point that he stressed, and which stuck with me: if a relationship is meant to last (that is, if it’s actually love, rather than infatuation), it’ll almost always become clear by the six-month point – that is, unless the couple is having sex. If they’re having sex, it can extend the lifespan of an infatuation-based relationship to a year or more (and, by that point, a significant number of couples may have already headed down the path towards marriage).
Given your apparent defense of “it’s okay if a man has sex on the first date, but not if a woman does it,” why don’t you fill me in on the valid, non-discriminatory, legitimate reasons for that distinction?
This is a bit OT, but the point this guy made is similar to a general argument some say against living together before marriage (or against incremental steps towards marriage generally).
The argument goes that people are willing to lower their standards in a potential mate if they’re making a smaller commitment but would raise them if they’re making a bigger commitment. So people are willing to take a bigger chance on a potentially undesirable or unfit mate if it doesn’t involve a major commitment like marriage than they would if it does. But the problem is that once you smaller step, then you’re half-way there already. While you’ve not made as big of an investment as a marriage would have been, you have made some serious investment, and it takes a greater level of unsuitability for you to drop things at that point, and can end up marrying that relatively unsuitable person just out of inertia and unwillingness to lose the sunk costs. By contrast a relatively detached person contemplating going all-in can afford to be more choosy.
Obviously that’s not the only factor involved. But it does seem to be one factor.
I previously did. If a woman has sex on the first date knowing that society has this double standard, it says something about her that might be good or bad. It’s worth exploring further.
And cultural differences can sometimes be found without necessarily moving across any lines on a map: having spent my teen years spending a lot of time in three separate towns, I was always amused when “the way things are done” turned out to be different in all three. It was a damn pain in the ass to navigate, mind you, specially when I encountered someone who wouldn’t believe that things were done differently in other places.
Some of the questions I had to deal with when I was dating in the US involved “how does he and his surroundings look at sex?” I met guys who were keener on preserving my purity than I was, and others who pouted if I didn’t want to have sex on the first date (actually, I didn’t want to have sex with them, period), and one who went from refusing to even touch to sticking his tongue in my ear and breathily proclaiming that he couldn’t wait to test out my bed. In theory, they were all from the same culture… in reality, and as with anything else involving people, the actual individuals have their own actual expectations which may or may not be anywhere in the vicinity of the official ones.
If I’m crazy about a dude, I’m ready to unwrap him. I’m sure other people’s mileages vary.