What happens when female sexual desire is liberated is not an increase in the total amount of sex available to men, but a redistribution of the existing supply. Society becomes polygamous. A situation emerges in which most men are desperate for wives, but many women are just as desperately throwing themselves at a very few exceptionally attractive men. These men, who have always found it easy to get a mate, now get multiple mates. A characteristic feature of decadent societies is the recrudescence of primitive, precivilized cultural forms. That is what is happening to us. Sexual liberation really means the Darwinian mating pattern of the baboon pack reappears among humans. Once monogamy is abolished, no restriction is placed on a woman’s choices. Hence, all women choose the same few men.
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of course, women’s attitude about this situation is not especially rational. They expect their alpha man to “commit.” Woman’s complaining about men’s failure to commit, one suspects, means merely that they are unable to get a highly attractive man to commit to them; rather as if an ordinary man were to propose to Helen of Troy and complain of her refusal by saying “women don’t want to get married.” Furthermore, many women are sexually attracted to promiscuous men because, not in spite, of their promiscuity. This can be explained with reference to the primate pack. The “alpha male” can be identifi ed by his mating with many females. This is probably where the sluts-and-studs double standard argument came from—not from any social approval of male promiscuity, but from female fascination with it. Male “immorality” (in traditional language) can be attractive to females. Thus, once polygamous mating begins, it tends to be self-reinforcing. Students of animal behavior have learned that the presence of a female decoy or two near a male makes real females more likely to mate with that particular male. Among human females also, nothing succeeds like success.
