The morals and ethics of promiscuity

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They'd need to have the great fortune of having almost nothing for depth. Many people claim the part just to look more like alpha extroverts but with the BS aside, in their 40's, 50's, for almost anyone the shadows of mortality and legacy start creeping in if you have enough resolvable 'what ifs' still out there and unanswerable. I just think its scary the notion that you can easily tread down one path but, once you've committed to the damage - its too late, you really can't reclaim it (actually I think my example with ecstacy has an inherent fallacy - its probably easier to recover from being a veteran pill popper than it is to get a global emotional adjustment back - mainly because its environment and the effects of a roll are more arbitrary and don't keep reasserting themselves after a person comes down).

If everything that Dr. Freda and The Coming Plague claims is true, shouldn't we recognize and encourage gay marriage? Wouldn't it be better for society if the 3-4% of the population that is gay has an easier time settling into relationships that are more stable and monogamous??

I don't think it equates. Gays will and should do what's in their best interest, as should the straight - the government doesn't need to direct that. On the other hand though, I think of the gay marriage issue as being very similar to the equal pay for equal work (top down correction of pay for women) idea - civil rights have been one and at this point its really just shooting for more of a trophy; at a far greater cost to everyone else than anything they gain by it. This 'plague' if that's the right word for it is brought on by ambiguous social norms on sexual habits. That said the trick is finding ways to roll our culture back toward modesty and of course find a way to insure that it will have a branding or means of communication that will make it new or forward thinking - if the image looks like its rolling backward, kids will reject it of course.

Everything in moderation

Simplest virtue we have.

I think promiscuity is different for men and women.

Males are programmed to have sex whenever they can with anyone they find attractive. Females are biologically programmed to accept it only from "leader"/sufficiently strong/the most powerful males available.

Human society began setting limits on this as soon as it understood that sex produced babies, and put even more limits on it once society sedentarised and property to be inherited became more than a few weapons and tools.

Early rules were based on the purposefulness of reproducing, in a tidy and controllable way, but when people whose reproductive prospects were poor became too numerous, and too likely to cause disturbance, a new framework of meaning, that of 'true love", developed, based on traditional spiritual narratives of perfect love.

I think that belief in "true love" is a bit like belief in god, it helps create meaning in what can seem/is otherwise pretty chaotic.

And promiscuity in women is I think often the result of a loss of meaning around sexual activity, ( particularly as increasing numbers of women work and do not want children, or "not yet") . I can't speak for men, but wonder if it is significant that the largest numbers of practitioners of promiscuous sex in recent times have been homosexual, that is non-reproductive, and who had grown up in a culture ( until the 70s at least) in which the idea of "true love" between men was considered obscene.

Oddly enough the most promiscuous women I have known were lesbian, but that is anecdotal.

I think promiscuity is a sign of loss of purpose to/meaning in sex, apart from pleasure anyway which in males has tended to be more simply associated with sex anyway.

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Speak for yourself.

Sexual styles vary greatly from one person to the next. Obviously sex was designed by nature(amongst humans) to create new people and see to it that they matured into competent individuals but the basic mechanisms can be used in all sorts of creative ways to serve individual tastes. No doubt orgasm is great fun because that's the way the mechanics works but some people do quite well achieving that alone, some masturbate with each other and some people delight in various variations with various partners at various frequencies. Society tries to get the system to work within the particular cultural system but there are many cultural systems and not all individuals fit well within their individual culture. I doubt if there is a universal law about all this. People cope as well as they can with their desires and restrictions and sometimes it works out. And sometimes it doesn't.

I've known several gay and lesbian couples who were, by any measure but the legal one, married. Monogamous and faithful for years or decades. Allowing them to legally marry is partly about providing social recognition for what is already there, and partly about giving them inheritance rights, hospital visitation rights, taxation rights, health-care benefits, etc.

I can't argue that I have a higher libido than the average man, because I clearly don't. However, the second half of your argument sounds a little like the 'women enjoy rape' argument that women just want to be dominated. I have few relationships because there are few men that I trust enough to be intimate with, not because there are few strong, dominant men. Sex is dangerous for women, and I think that has a larger impact on our habits than seeking a good sperm donor.



In the women I've known personally, it seemed more a result of a teenage immortality complex and/or a deathwish.



All of the (out) lesbian women I've known have been monogamous, but women are less dangerous to have sex with than men.

I disagree, I think much of it is due to poor impulse control. But I also think that promiscuity in both sexes has a strong element of narcissism and self-indulgence to it.

A woman I knew told me that she had a friend, another woman, that she was a prostitute, and the reason was because she was a sex addict, honestly I don't know if the story was true, but it can happen.

Last edited by greenblue on 17 Sep 2008, 7:31 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Reproduction, is the basic reason, yes, to preserve the species, love is something that is not concrete, but it comes from that basic reason of nature, although there is an example of nature giving something in which its function is pleasure and not reproduction, the clitoris.

Anyway, what sex is about is something any individual make their mind about in a personal level, there is no absolute answer to that, rather than personal.

Yes! although some like threesomes.

I'd scarcely settle for anything less!

twoshots...nice introduction of levity!

I am in full agreement with MP.