Tag: sex

The Science of Test Driving a Potential Spouse

On By Christopher LansdownIn Philosophy, Science, UncategorizedLeave a comment

I recently saw someone try to support the idea of “test driving” a potential marriage partner prior to getting married in order to ensure that they are “sexually compatible”, and then in the ensuing discussion I was told to look up the research on “the wide variability in female sexual responsiveness due to both psychological and anatomical reasons”. My understanding is that what research in this “field” exists doesn’t support the importance of “test driving” a potential marriage partner, but that’s irrelevant because there simply can’t be any good science on this subject. We can tell that by the simple expedient of asking what kinds of experiments could get us the data we want, and discovering that it’s not possible to do them.

So, what kind of experiment would show us that “there’s a wide variability in female sexual responsiveness due to both psychological and anatomical reasons”? Clearly, we’ll need to have a large number of females copulate with a wide variety of partners and measure their responsiveness during each copulation, then compare the things to which each female maximally responded to in order to see how big the range is. You can’t leave off any of these things; if you only study a few women, you won’t have the statistical power to conclude anything. If you leave off the wide variety of partners, then you can’t differentiate between there being a wide variety in what women respond to versus there simply being a wide variety in the degree to which women respond at all. If you leave off measuring, instead relying on surveys, you can’t differentiate between there being a wide variety in what women respond to and there being a wide variety in how women describe their response.

This experiment is both impractical and impossible; let’s discuss the impracticality of it first. One obvious problem is recruitment: there are very few people willing to copulate with a large number of strangers in a laboratory, covered in probes to measure responsiveness, and observed by experts, on command. Also, since you will have to pay the participants and this amounts to prostitution, there are relatively few places you can legally conduct this experiment, especially since bringing in the variety of women you want may well count as sex trafficking, doubly so because of the use of blindfolds to eliminate attractiveness as a confounding factor when measuring the effect of physical variations of anatomy. Moreover, getting this approved by an IRB (ethics committee) is pretty dicey. Never say never, of course.

But supposing one were to manage to work all of these practicalities out and conduct the experiment, it would not produce any data relevant to real life because people’s enjoyment and satisfaction in copulation is largely determined by their relationship to the person with whom they are copulating. Married people frequently report greater enjoyment of sex after five or ten years of marriage than right at the beginning, and it is impossible to have your experimental subjects form real relationships for years to each of the many subjects with whom they will be paired. If nothing else human beings don’t live that long, but repeated pair bonding is also well known to weaken subsequent bonds, especially without time between them. Plus people don’t form real bonds on command.

It is thus impossible, even in theory, to scientifically study the kinds of things which might support the idiotic idea of “test driving” a potential spouse. And bad science is worse than no science.

I should probably mention that the idea of test driving a spouse, in addition to being immoral, is also idiotic because it’s predicated on two premises, both of which are false:

  1. people can’t learn
  2. people don’t change

Young people are told to not pay too much attention to the looks of a potential husband or wife because looks are only skin deep and virtue, character, and personality matter far more. This is all quite true, but it’s also the case that selecting a husband or wife based on their looks is futile anyway because their looks will change as they age. You can find this with any celebrity who is in their sixties—just look at pictures of them from the various decades and while they are recognizable, they will be quite different. And celebrities tend to be selected for being people who change the least as they age.

In the same way, people’s tastes and preferences change. Women’s bodies change after pregnancy and childbirth. Quite apart from the immorality of the thing, the idea that finding who people who happen to match each other in their sexual enjoyments will be conducive to lasting happiness is simply unrelated to reality. Everyone must learn and adapt. There are no exceptions to that in this world.

When Libertines Advocate Self Control

On By Christopher LansdownIn Philosophy, UncategorizedLeave a comment

Several years ago, a British feminist by the name of Louise Perry wrote a book called The Case Against the Sexual Revolution. I haven’t read the book, but I’ve read a bunch of things Ms. Perry has written, including her own description of the book. She is careful to explain that she does not want to return to the sexual morality of before the sexual revolution, just to avoid the excesses of the sexual revolution. And I recently read an essay (originally published in 2022) which discusses the book, by libertine writer Bridget Phetasy, titled I Regret Being a Slut. She, too, does not want to return to traditional sexual morality, she just doesn’t like the results of the sexual revolution either. And neither of these women is at all unique.

In both cases, their writing is a bit like a man who talks about how it’s exhilarating to jump off a building, but not to hit the ground, so it’s best to continually fall past the seventh floor. That might be the point in one’s fall which is the most fun, but that doesn’t mean it’s sustainable.

The problem with this kind of thinking—it applies to all libertines who want the benefits of self-control without the downsides of self-control—is that it is, at its core, utilitarianism. There are many problems with utilitarianism (see Why Consequentialism Doesn’t Work), but the relevant problem is that it has no power to motivate people. Forgoing certain short-term benefit for the sake of uncertain long-term gain is very tricky to justify. And even if you can, a justification which is best done in a complicated Excel spreadsheet will, at best, be lifeless and dull, even if it does manage to convince someone in the abstract. And that’s ignoring the problem that, since we can’t know the probabilities with any certainty, you can always doubt the conclusion by quibbling with some of the numbers.

To put it more concretely, forgoing certain short-term benefit for uncertain long-term benefit only makes sense under one of two conditions:

  1. Extreme optimism
  2. A principle which says that you should even if it doesn’t benefit you

Very few people are extremely optimistic, for the simple reason that, in a secular sense, it’s stupid to be that optimistic. Lots of people are unlucky. And there’s a further problem: if you’re this optimistic, you might just as easily be optimistic that you can have both the short-term and long-term benefits.

That only leaves option #2: principle. But principles are exactly the thing that the libertines don’t want.

To take it back to the example from which this started: the libertine feminist advocating for sexual restraint is in the awkward position of saying that people should be free to have as much sex as they want before marriage, if they even want to get married, but they shouldn’t want sex before marriage and should want to get married because that works out better in the long run. The problem is that, if something actually does work out better in the long run, it means that you’re wise to do it and foolish to not do it. And it’s bad to be foolish.

That’s the thing which always sabotages this kind of quasi-libertine in the end: they want people to make good decisions about everything except for who to associate with. Because the only people who willingly associate with fools are other fools1. Deciding who we depend on is very nearly the most important decision we can make; asking people to exercise good judgement except for in their associations is nonsensical. Doubly so when it’s a particular kind of association that you want them to exercise good judgement on.

If a person has been sexually promiscuous, and it is accepted that sexual promiscuity is bad judgement, it means that the person has bad judgement. This is, by the way, as true of men as of women. If you read old literature instead of modern pornography set in older times, you will find that a male being sexually continent was praiseworthy and expected, while being sexually promiscuous was something he was quite desirous of hiding. The only difference was that a male was, typically, not dependent on forming a marriage to pay for his upkeep because there was a great deal of difficult work to be done in the world (soldiering, sailing, and the like) and so even as an outcast from polite society he could at least feed himself on his own. Also, people just didn’t care as much what happened to males. (You can find stories where a male who does need to make a good marriage will go to great lengths to hide his promiscuity, such as the King of Bohemia in the Sherlock Holmes story, A Scandal in Bohemia.)

Anyway, the point is that you can’t have a society in which it is accepted that only fools with poor self control are sexually promiscuous and it’s also considered just fine to be sexually promiscuous if a person wants to be. You can see this exact problem with alcohol. No one wants to associate with a drunkard (except for other drunkards2) and anyone considering marriage with a drunkard will be warned off of it by all of their friends and family. The same is true of gambling addictions, or narcotic addictions. In fact, you will be very hard pressed to find any behavior that is generally regarded as extremely foolish where only low-self-control people engage in it that people would not try to dissuade someone from marrying into.

Which is why a libertine cannot make an effective case for self-control. If they manage to make it, the world will cease to be one in which people can freely do whatever the libertine is trying to discourage.

I don’t have much patience for people who discuss sex and marriage without relation to children and child-rearing, but there is something especially tiresome about people trying to do so in order to promote things which are much better argued in reference to children and child-rearing. Perhaps this is done in order to soothe the reader; to lull her into a false sense of security so she’ll actually hear the authoress out. I have my doubts that any such deception will work, and I gravely doubt that it will work in the long-term, because it will damage the trust placed in the authoress.

Though perhaps, for the intended audience, this is one of those “white lies” like the stereotypical answer to the stereotypical woman asking her stereotypical husband whether a stereotypical hideous dress she is going to wear anyway looks good. Perhaps no one believes it, so no one will be deceived, but the willingness to tell the superficial lie signifies that the person is on the other’s side. “I’m only telling you to exercise a bit of self control. I’m not telling you that you have to believe in God or listen to your grandma or do anything for anyone else.”

Well, there are a lot of very weak and timid people in the world.

1. And saints who are trying to help them. But there aren’t many saints to go around, and they don’t associate in the same way anyway. A saint may well take on the company of a young fool and advise them, but the saint doesn’t marry the young fool or depend on them in any other way.

2. See 1.