Slut-onomics: How the scarcity of sluts tears the social fabric apart

Promiscuous women have always been in great demand. Slutshaming was a way for men to handle their limited supply.

Il Sodoma, Life of St Benedict, Scene 19: Benedict Sends away the Harlots, 1505-1508, Wikimedia Commons 

A while ago I read a book¹ by Japanese-Swedish physician Peter Ueda, who is said to be one of the world's foremost experts on sexual inactivity. 

Peter Ueda takes his foremost study objects, the incels, seriously. When they claim that 20 percent of all men get 80 percent of all female partners, Peter Ueda doesn't just claim it is impossible like so many others. Instead, he cited estimates of a plausible number: A given year, in the age range of 18 to 29, 20 percent of all men have 66 percent of all female sexual partners. Meanwhile, 20 percent of all women have 57 percent of all sexual partners.

Peter Ueda also cited another study that said that among people 18-34, only 20 percent of men and 10 percent of women had more than three sexual partners during the same year.

The numbers made me think. Apparently, the most promiscuous 20 percent of men average more than three sexual partners per year. But those sexual partners seem to disproportionately belong to one category: Unusually promiscuous women. Although the numbers indicate that sexual partners are more evenly shared among women than among men, there is definitely no complete “equality” on the female side either. Especially, there should be less than ten percent of women with unusually many sexual partners who are pulling the female average upwards. 

It somehow seems less impressive that a small subset of men take most of the market, when that market mostly consists of a somewhat similar small subset of women. A minority of men and a minority of women are having fun (?) with each other while most people of both sexes are either living in traditional couples or standing beside the whole spectacle without even participating. 

Picking up the willing

That way, the deeds of pick-up artists and their disciples seem less impressive than otherwise. The men who are skilled at picking up women do not pick up every random woman they happen to fancy. Instead, they most likely succeed with a minority of women, the same minority which their colleagues have already picked up. The successful men are actually not making the market much bigger. Instead, they are competing between themselves for the minority of women who are willing to be impressed by men trying to impress them. Let the best men win.

Peter Ueda also reported about another thing that I'm normally not thinking very much about: Intra-male jealousy. Among the incels Peter Ueda wrote about, more than one had a very strong sense of not tolerating the thought of others having sex. Theoretically, I knew those feelings existed. I have even made up a theory why sexuality is a taboo in all human societies: Among males of many different species, getting provoked by others having sex is adaptive. For example, among chimpanzees, the alpha male tends to be very jealous and does not tolerate that other males copulate with fertile females. Presumably he just detests the sight, and even the thought, of other people having sex. It is likely that we have inherited the tendency to feel disgusted by other individuals having sex from our pre-human ancestors. 

Peter Ueda made it clear to me how common this feeling of provocation is to this day. A minority of young men and women participate in a game that many more men than women would like to enter. It is like a minority of the population is on show, making the most of the liberal ideals, while the others are lingering in the shadows.

Perpetually unequal

There is every reason to believe that the availability of unpaid casual sex has always been very unequal among men. Even in modern society, where casual sex is encouraged as liberating for women, only a minority heeds the calls for promiscuity. Imagine then how few women there were on the casual sex market when no one told young women that having casual sex was a good choice. 

And still, anecdotally, such a market did exist. When I have been reading one hundred year old books, they tell about quick sexual encounters between teenage girls and boys. For a certain minority of women, taking the casual track has always seemed appealing, for shorter or longer times. Very strong male demand causes ample opportunities. A few women will take those opportunities, for reasons better or worse. But only a few. 

That willing minority of women is very, very contested among men. So many want them, so few can get them. Today, the inequality is glaring. Many men, maybe a majority of young men, would like to have a share in that willing minority of women. Only a minority of those men get that privilege. Those men are considered successful while those who can't get any access to the willing minority of women are considered losers, by themselves and others. 

Sour grapes

This problem can't be new. Casual sex has never been even close to equally shared between men. Why is this bitterness bubbling up with such force now?

One obvious reason is the decline in non-casual sex. Marriage rates are declining and more people are living as celibate singles. Singles who would have preferred to engage in casual sex. But I think there is another reason too: For the first time in the history of civilization, the willing minority of women is being widely described as unambiguously desirable.

It hasn't been that way for long. Only a generation ago, there was a phenomenon called slutshaming. It implied that the minority of women who engaged in casual sex were morally depraved. And since these women were morally depraved it also implied that they were not that desirable after all. They were not called Stacies or 10/10s but sluts or simply loose women. Men still chased them, of course, but being a man who chased loose women was not a very honorable thing to be.

Looking back from now to then, it appears this was a well-functioning formula for glossing over the inequality in sexual access. Something according to the following scheme:

Many men desire women open for casual sex >> only a few men get access to those women >> the rejected majority declare the cheap women rather undesirable anyway >> the successful men do not contradict them, and thereby downplay their own prowess. 

That way, slutshaming made some kind of peace between the minority of men considered desirable by the promiscuous minority of women and the majority of men rejected by the same women. The successful men didn't really say: "Hey look, I can get something you can’t". Instead they admitted: "I amuse myself with sluts, but just like you I most of all want a proper woman.”

Slutshaming simply was a way to talk badly about that desirable female minority that causes so much strife among men. It was a way for the rejected men to say that the grapes were sour and a way for the preferred men to downplay their own success: After all, the women they seduced were "cheap". Not that much of an achievement after all. 

That way, no one had to seriously lose face. The rejected men could pretend, or actually think, that they didn't want to spend time with dishonorable women. The successful men could help them by understating their own conquests. Access to casual sex was as unequal as ever. But by talking down the value of the women offering casual sex, strife among men could be reduced. 

A good solution? 

The above is certainly not the only reason why slutshaming existed and continues to exist. A strong male wish to monopolize their partners is also at play. And Women themselves have a strong incentive to punish women who sell themselves too cheaply, in order not to deflate the value of the sexual services they provide. 

There is an established hypothesis that men evolved to prefer chastity in women because unchaste women offer less paternity certainty. Two studies from 1981 and 1983 suggest that the number of premarital partners does predict the risk of infidelity². It is a difficult subject, not least because both premarital sex and infidelity are very much affected by culture. I see one reason to assume that the number of premarital sexual partners is not a very good proxy for a woman's outlooks to become a faithful wife: Psychologist David Buss argues that women who have affairs tend to do so for strategic rather than emotional reasons. According to Buss, men who have affairs tend to be driven by a wish for sexual variety: they report no lower levels of marital satisfaction than men who do not have affairs. Women, on the other hand, tend to pursue affairs as a way to more or less deliberately scout for better relationship opportunities.³

From that information, it makes more sense for women than for men to slutshame when they are considering a marriage partner: A man with a strong taste for sexual variety is more likely to initiate affairs, while a woman with a taste in the same direction is likely to remain faithful until she is feeling unhappy enough to switch partners. 

For that reason, I think that rejecting a partner based on her sexual history is a risky strategy. An individual man who does so risks missing out on a good opportunity. The merits of slutshaming probably lie as much on the collective level as on the individual level: For women as a collective to defend their price. For men as a collective to keep peace between each other. 

It's getting personal

I don't say slutshaming was good - I say that when it comes to intra-male relationships, the current situation might be even worse. During the times of slutshaming, there were two kinds of women: Good ones and bad ones. Post-slutshaming there is only one kind of woman, graded on a scale from one to ten in physical and social attractiveness. Competition for the tens is bitter.

Post-slutshaming, all single women are supposed to be sluts by default. That not only worsens relationships between men, but also between men and women. As long as there were sluts and proper women, “I'm not that kind of girl” was a perfectly normal excuse to reject someone's sexual advances. Now that there is only one kind of girl, the rejection is ominously personal. 

When feminism abolished the distinction between good girls and bad girls, the idea was exactly that: Things should be personal. Women were not to be seen as soulless providers of sexual and reproductive services, but as unique individuals, all with their own qualities.

Individualization was supposed to happen in a positive sense: People were supposed to start wanting and liking each other for personal reasons. Instead, it seems to most of all happen in a negative sense. People still want each other for the usual old instinct-based reasons. Women still market themselves to men as a rather undifferentiated mass of providers of sexual and reproductive services, and are graded from one to ten for their efforts. But every time they do not want each other, it is suspected to be for naked, personal reasons. Saying “it's not you” is much easier when there is a system for who-should-reject-whom-at-what-occasion. And those systems have been abolished.

The rules have been taken away in the name of individualism. But people's goals have not become truly individualistic. We are right now in a middle ground, when it is not very personal when people like each other, but personal when they do not.

1. Peter Ueda, Man går sin egen väg, 2023

2. David Buss, Evolution of Desire, 2016, 22 percent of e-book, quotation tweeted by Rob Henderson

3. David Buss, When Men Behave Badly, 2021, 24 percent of e-book