Men who want, women who succeed, and milk for free.

Non-sex blogger Matthew Yglasias, in his personal blog has an interesting observation about conservative mantra against promiscuous women:

The basic new school anti-feminist line goes something like this: Women want to get married; men want to have sex; if unmarried women are willing to have sex and society isn't willing to massively stigmatize them then men won't want to get married because "why but the cow when you can get the milk for free?" Said contentions have been the subjects of a few posts around here recently. Elsewhere, Phoebe Maltz and Amy Lamboley confirm that women are not, in fact, cows so the whole free milk analysis is somewhat lacking. Let me just add to their remarks a quasi-mathematical observation.

Grant for the sake of argument that men are more interested than women in promiscuous sex, since this seems to me to be the case. It follows from this that women will have an easier time procuring promiscuous sex. Therefore, though there ought to be individual variation in the level of interest in "buying a cow" there shouldn't be any systematic, gender-linked disagreement on this subject. The reality of contemporary life doesn't live up to the lurid imagination of conservative intellectuals. People who both want lots of promiscuous sex and succeed in having it won't be very interested in relationships. There are, say, more men in the "want" category but more women in the "succeed" category. The gender balance in the both/and category should be about even. The only reason for this not to work out is if women don't like sex at all. If they are, in other words, literally cows.

Then there's the question of double-standards. Actually existing traditional marriage wasn't really a fantasyland of monogamy. Rather, it was a world in which wives who cheated were severely punished, but men who cheated really weren't as long as they kept paying the bills. See Anna Karenina for more. Also the fact that nowadays most divorces are initiated by women.

I would particularly like to point out the two non-sex bloggers Matthew mentions, Phoebie Malts of What would Phoebe do? and Amy Lamboley of Crescat Sententia. Both do more than dismantle the women = cows argument. Lamboley: "The issue is not, as Kass et. al. claim, that women really want rings and babies, but don't know how to get them, it's that women want more than simply rings and babies, and can now demand them." And Malts: "Would there be no sex until marriage, so as to make sure the inevitable children are born into wedlock? At what age would this marriage occur? Waiting until one's mid-20s to first have sex might, ahem, bother some people. Which leads to this, related problem: sure, women could just refuse men sex in order to not give away the milk for free and so forth, but this suggests, again, that women do not themselves enjoy sex. This is why the milk-for-free argument is such nonsense--the "milk" goes, if you will, both ways, so witholding sex punishes both partners, assuming they like each other "in that way" and are reasonably coordinated...."

Wow. Unlike perhaps too many other middle-aged men I have no advice for these young women except "Thanks, I've learned a lot this evening. Keep writing."