Like most women, I grew up with the myriad benefits and importance of monogamy being drummed into my head. Don’t take multiple sexual partners; that makes you a slut. Don’t “play the field;” find one guy who is just right, and stick with him despite his lack of personal hygiene, inability to dress himself properly, the inhuman smells he leaves behind in the bathroom, or any number of other obvious failings, like I’m the protagonist in some Tammy Wynette lyric.
Hell, for a long while now, there has even been a scientific argument for monogamy (on the part of women, anyway) rooted in the notion that monogamous women experience more reproductive success (if not more orgasms) than do promiscuous ones.
Naturally, I paid very little attention to any such arguments while I was in college, where I fucked essentially anything that moved, and at least a few things that didn’t – like Joe Malstead, who thought his only responsibility during coitus was to lay there looking at the ceiling as I bounced around on his dick doing all the work, while he kept his eyes closed and alternated between invoking the name of Jesus and cursing a blue streak, with the occasional praise for the tightness of my vagina thrown in for good measure.
Of course, my goal back then was not exactly “reproductive success,” as evidenced by the fact that I took the pill, insisted on my partners using condoms and used the rhythm method, just in case. Honestly, I was just out looking for a good time, generally unsuccessfully, because – let’s face it – most college boys don’t have the first clue how to please a woman, and seem to think the only thing their tongue is good for is telling dreadfully uninteresting stories about themselves.
When I had to defend my slutty ways back then, and answer the question “Why do you sleep with so many guys?” my rebuttal generally boiled down to “Because fuck you, that’s why.” While I didn’t much care about being judged or derided by my peers, it did irk me that I didn’t have a better comeback, some witty observation or pertinent bit of information, like this one, based on hard science involving monkey sex.
As it turns out, “females in many primate species, humans included, engage in a diversity of sexual strategies to enhance their overall reproductive success.” That’s one way of putting it, I suppose – and it sure sounds a lot brainier and more erudite than “I shop for penises like shoes; it takes a while to find one that fits just right.”
Now all we need is a study showing that there’s some advantage to fucking a bevy of fellas even if you have no intention of experiencing reproductive success, and young women like the one I was in college will have a ready-made justification for their slutting around that they can conjure up on their smartphones as needed to fend off prudish critics, and we’ll be all set.
For example, I would love to hear word from UCLA that giving guys blowjobs during movies increases one’s IQ. Among other things, such data would go a long way in explaining why I struggled with Freshman Comp, but absolutely aced my 500-level literary analysis course just a few years later….
