Life on the Carousel

In an effort to discourage what they see as unfair competition, people like Dr. Laura will tell unmarried women something like:

 "The more sexual partners a woman has before she marries, the less she'll enjoy marital sex."

How exactly is that determined?

We can't compare people to themselves. No one person has had both experiences - having many sexual partners before marrying and having few or none before marrying. So how can anyone know?

This is how it is determined. Usually among other questions, they ask women who are or were married:

• How satisfied they are/were with their marital sex life
• How many partners they had before they married

Then, they notice that there appears to be some correlation.

Let's be clear about a few things though.

1) This is based on self reporting. People who have had few or no sex partners before their marriage have nothing for comparison. It's like giving a starving person plain rice. How happy is that person going to be with rice? Very! As far as sex, it's basically saying "I like sex" or "I'm happy with our sex life" even if they're having sex four times per year.

2) Who has few or no sex partners before marrying? Very religious people. Many of them consider it a sin or even a "negative confession" to say that they are anything less than thrilled with their marital sex life. Also, some unattractive women don't attract many sex partners. Of those who do marry, they're probably going to be happy.

3) There are many women who saved sex for marriage and then had a terrible sex life.

4) There are women who had "many" sex partners before marriage and have a great marital sex life. They tend to be women who like sex a lot and have a high drive.

5) What people who use this tactic are advocating is that you make vows and sign a state contract with someone before finding out if you're sexually compatible. It is VERY different to have no sex at all before marrying and to get very sexual with one person before marrying them. The latter often get lumped together with the former, even though with the latter, if they realize they're not sexually compatible, they are far less likely to marry in the first place.

6) It means something that the people who use this tactic don't apply to anything else. If a woman never goes to a nice restaurant before she marries, won't that make the experience of going to one with her husband that much more special? So an unmarried woman should decline offers to go to a nice restaurant, right?

There are many women who get bored of sex. If those women have had many sex partners before they married, then they might hit that wall of boredom earlier in their marriage. Incels and some others (like Dr. Laura, "purity" purveyors) say a woman's ability to bond, and thus enjoy sex more, gets damaged more the more sex partners she has (like a piece of tape that gets reused and reused loses effectiveness). But for any individual woman, there's no assurance that she'll enjoy sex a lot if she's waits and she won't enjoy it much if she doesn't.

Again, these studies never separate out women who have decided not to marry at all, are enthusiastic about sex, and don't have moral qualms about unmarried sex. Some of them enjoy sex very much. I know my first serious girlfriend enjoyed sex a lot even after having many partners. Or at least she was very effective at pretending to.

Is It Really Sacred?

Since I listen to every (new) minute of the Dr. Laura Program, I heard her give this monologue recently. It has been posted on her website as a blog post. I still don't see an ongoing blog tab anywhere on the site, but this was tweeted out (by her staff, since she doesn't touch Twitter). It is titled "Respect Your Marriage Vows by Not Shacking Up First".

As regular readers of this blog know, I think shacking up is a generally bad idea; it's almost as bad as legally marrying.

But Dr. Laura promotes marriage and is against shacking up. Dr. Laura maintains that her program is a secular, non-religious program. But if you pay attention, she invokes religious concepts sometimes.

If someone isn't planning to marry, shacking up can't possibly disrespect their marriage vows. And now, many, perhaps most people, who do want to marry will refuse to do so without first living with the person they are considering as a possible spouse. The secular world has made it clear that they see shacking up as a normal part of relationship cycles. Without invoking religion, it is extremely difficult to explain how this would disrespect their future marriage vows. Dr. Laura has tried to teach that it is objectively detrimental to shack up, which I address here. In this blog posting of hers, she tries to explain why shacking up is bad a different way.

If you call anything a ‘piece of artwork’ or if you call something sacred, don't you immediately look at it differently from everyday objects or experiences? It doesn't matter if you're religious or not, I think when we say something is sacred, everybody lowers their voice and shows more respect. It's not accidental.

So, playing a mind game with oneself? Then someone could call shacking up "sacred" and this is all over.