Your discussion of "men who have very bad luck in that department." is too cursory. Polygamous societies create large numbers of unmarried and unmarriageable men. This creates all sorts of structure issues for a society. See my book, Darwinian Politics, Rutgers Press, 2002, which deals with many issues you discuss.
Yes, you have honed in on the most important observation in this essay: "Men may desire more sex partners, but the average has to turn out to be equal". In other words, if one 'cad' has ten women on the go, nine men will have none. This obvious fact gets skidded over in most journalism on sexual mating...a kind of unholy alliance between feminist journos who mostly want to bitch about 'Men' in general and male journos who want to be sure to come across as being in the 'stud' camp. And most of the commentary here does likewise.
I am a happily married 70+ so all this is now academic to me. But "when the men are ready to give up the Cad lifestyle." should really be "when the 10% of men are ready to give up the Cad lifestyle". The other 90% generally never even get the chance. https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/
"The net result is that college-educated people are able to form the traditional Dad/Trusty marriage, but not until age 30 or later, when the men are ready to give up the Cad lifestyle."
The women too. Sex in the City is a female fantasy. In my experience most women in their 20s aren't ready for marriage either. They would marry George Clooney if they could, but they aren't ready to marry a man they could realistically catch.
I think the college educated dating pattern is mostly about the female getting old enough she is willing to settle and not think about divorce because she is too old to start over.
In addition, because women are willing to date much older men, it's very hard for even promising young men to compete with men that have had a decade or two to built status. it takes until 30 to prove themselves.
That isn't too abnormal, but I think mid-20s is a lot more natural historically than 30s. It takes too long for many men to find their footing because they start out so late (no being an officer in the royal navy as a teenager).
"And people without a college education are stuck in the pattern of transitory Cad/Lusty pairings."
There are a lot of reasons for this, and I wouldn't underestimate the breakdown of lots of different moral standards (substance abuse, propriety, etc).
I have two friends that have four kids on not much income (he installs solar panels, she used to be a nurse but now stays at home). They make it work through thrift and religion (weekly church goers, good morals and self control). Maybe this isn't fair because they are high IQ (both graduated college, even if he hated office work), but such a lifestyle (the success sequence) does work.
But I'm quite afraid that there is probably only one answer that nobody wants to hear. Being a poor single mother has to be a miserable life, financially and socially, if you want to change behavior patterns. The misery is the point, there is no other way.
My wife and daughters were able to marry young despite their fiances not being established or having proved themselves. The fiances gave confidence they could be trusted by their religious and academic commitment. Religion definitely was a factor in building confidence for both partners, I know it mattered to me that my wife to be valued my faith
Men who cannot give confidence they will earn "good money" are disadvantaged. Men lacking money and lacking other proof of stability, such as religion, will struggle to find a women who sees the relationship as a long term commitment. And men, knowing this, may also approach marriage as a trial relationship, rather than a lifelong endeavor.
And, of course, money is no guarantee of a long marriage. Steady income helps the spouses have stability but money by itself will never be enough to keep both spouses satisfied.
You are right that there has to be a difference in finances between "good" and "bad" behavior if society wants more good and less bad.
"Being a poor single mother has to be a miserable life, financially and socially,"
-- ain't gonna happen, and I oppose it, too. "Not rich" should be enough, especially with the social emphasis on choice. I propose in my (too long) comment that gov't give more support to the married folk with kids who go to schools with too many kids of unmarried parents.
There are fewer Trustys these days for the average man who wants to be a Dad. The Dad & Trusty couple is now a luxury item for the well-heeled thanks to the sexual revolution, feminism, impact of technology on previous courtship norms, and a radical change in cultural mores.
Feminism has turned colleges into factories for turning all girls into sluts, er, Lusty & promiscuous. It's not unfair to claim this was one of the aims -- the college Cads, slut-jerk slut-cad promiscuously successful womanizers are big "winners" of Free Sex feminism. More older and now wiser early feminists are starting to see this.
Where on earth did you get that idea? Even a cursory examination of dating web sites, or meeting people in their 20s, will show that young-ish women who want to marry in the near future dramatically outnumber young-ish men who do.
I mostly like this essay, but a lot of both men and women do have strategies and you've only scratched the surface of them.
For one thing, the dynamic of options changing at age 30 is both an oversimplification and works very differently between men and women. The Pill has made a lot of women think they can be Lustys until they're 35 or 40 and still successfully marry and reproduce. In reality, a woman who doesn't try until she's 30 is only about 20% likely to successfully bear any children at all. More importantly, as early as age 25 it may already be too late for her to get a man to marry her whom she will accept. Women discovering this fact "out of the blue" have become so common they have become a stereotype; the discovery is now known as "hitting the wall."
Second, the laws have come to be so one-sided in favor of women that many of them won't hesitate to marry a relatively well-off man for a year or two, get their hands on his money, and then leave him, with or without a child in tow, with the law forcing him to give up most of his fortune and keep paying her just as though she had entered into the marriage with honest intentions. Or the child support laws are used by Lustys to do the same thing to Cads without even a marriage, since the man is not allowed to hold her responsible for false promises she was using birth control. Naturally this discourages many men from seeking either marriage or sex at all.
Both these behavior patterns are very common, and both have the result of reducing rich countries' fertility rates to the point that the Great (demographic) Replacement of us by third world migrants now appears unavoidable.
"Men and women have different possibilities to worry about. A woman knows that a child is hers, but she has to worry about whether a man will provide resources to help sustain her and the child. A man is less physically vulnerable, but from a reproduction standpoint he has to worry about wasting resources by contributing them to a support a child that is not his."
I feel like this is just less true than ever today. The availability of paternity tests means men who worry about supporting children that are not theirs can rest easy. Women have greatly closed the gap in their ability to generate resources, child support laws mean they are less likely to need to take on the entire burden of raising abandoned children, birth control reduces the possibility of it happening in the first place, and modern concealable weapons have leveled the playing field on physical vulnerability.
"If some men succeed at having many sex partners, then other men must have very bad luck in that department."
It's not as if the most promiscuous men are out there herding their partners into harems to enforce fidelity, so I don't really see how other men are required to have a bad time. For this to be an issue, we'd need to be talking about reproduction rather than sex and you'd need to have a world where men with the most resources are just out there producing as many children as possible and financially supporting dozens or hundreds of pregnant women, but for the most part, male billionaires just don't act like that at all.
We've pretty much broken the link between sex and reproduction, so the trusty/lusty/dad/cad model derived from premodern reproductive concerns is pretty much irrelevant if you try to apply it to today's sexual behavior.
Actually, men can be - and routinely are - required to make "child support" payments for children who are not theirs, and whom they did not adopt. In some states, mere cohabitation and establishing a relationship with the child is sufficient. In all states (I believe), being married to the child's mother - regardless of paternity - is sufficient. And if the mother claims you were the father and you do not counter this promptly in court (which may be because you didn't know she claimed it) you may find your window for rebuttal has closed.
Family law is obscenely one-sided, and almost no-one realizes it - because who listens to the "bitter" men who have found out the hard way? (I'm not one, fortunately for me. But I know them.)
Prostitution — perhaps mainly in cities, the locus of anonymity — is another wrinkle.
Before the pill, female prostitutes could supply:
(a) Premarital sex to young men. This kind of two-sided promiscuity enabled young men to delay marriage until ready and able to settle down and support offspring. Trusty women tacitly accepted the stages of male sexuality and the sex-market safety valve for young men in pre-pill cultures.
(b) Extramarital sex to men. Although trusty women didn't even tacitly accept spousal promiscuity, prostitution provided a pre-pill outlet for cads — a safety valve that enabled male promiscuity without creating children outside of wedlock (and without attendant major diversion of resources outside the family to support external offspring).
(c) Sex to men who failed to make a match in the marriage market. This, too, was a kind of social safety valve. For example, at some margin, it would reduce demand by unmarried men for affairs with married women.
Before the pill, in-person prostitution probably was part of the equilibrium, at least in cities.
A few decades after the pill, digital pornography will be another technology shock, disrupting the battle of sexes at some margins.
Prostitution is harder to get away with now, but is still a good solution, needed all the more since the kind of guys who used to harass, now have no other recourse.
The current scandal with trafficking is an obstacle, since the federal laws written to fight enslavement actually lump voluntary adult sex work into the legal definition of trafficking, even though it isn't really.
"I should emphasize that I do not think that people follow conscious strategies."
A couple days ago you blogged about preferences not being mental illness. I'm wondering how you see preferences in light of thinking people don't follow conscious strategies for reproduction.
Such an honest and relevant post! "college-educated people are able to form the traditional Dad/Trusty marriage, but not until age 30 or later, when the men are ready to give up the Cad lifestyle." (fits me, too well)
The unPC (unWoke?) word for Lusty is slut - and I've long been claiming we need more slut-shaming. But we also need such a negative word for irresponsibly promiscuous men, maybe slut-jerk or slut-cad. "Cad" isn't negative enough - but also is unlikely to be so. Too many horny male teens lust after cute girls, and their raging hormones make sex more important than just about anything else.
The college grad elites and wannabes, will be OK with low divorce after marriage after age 30 - with one or two or no kids; more none than 3+. Most of the college Lusty - pre-Trusty girls successfully avoid having kids: more & better usage of the Pill or other contraceptives, plus backstop abortion "if needed". (Despite it killing an innocent human fetus).
The real problem is that too many avg & low IQ folk, non-college grads, are having promiscuous sex which interferes with genuine relationship commitment, so they're having kids without marriage. Optimal child raising is with happy (=faithful) married parents, and teen & twenty sexual adventures make commitment less likely, less easy, less trustworthy. Black kids are at about 75% w/o married parents, white at about 30% (maybe more white kids of single mothers than black kids).
It's unrealistic to expect more social "pain" on the single mothers - so our society needs to offer more gov't cash to married folks with kids - especially those married couples whose kids go to schools with a high rate of single parent households.
Wonkish: All US gov't high schools have students with either married parents or not-married. Order them based on married %, so the worst might have 10%; or 5%; or maybe only 1% of the kids with married parents. The gov't should give the parents some $1000/yr for being married "as an example".
The married folk need to live better lives/ have more status, than the non-married folk. Such a direct marriage benefit to parents should phase out starting at the 40th percentile and end at the 60th.
Today most gov't programs reward socially negative behavior with bad results for the innocent children. We need more social rewards to those with positive behavior, to get / incentivize the good behavior. Morality has long been an attempt to define socially optimal behavior.
Your coinage of the terms trusty/lusty and dad/cad is very good, I didn't have to think about what you meant so your essay was easy to read.
From what I see most young women are trying to look hot and young men more dadish. Doesn't make sense does it. Maybe I am wrong to judge by appearance.
Unless it's that thing where a few men are getting all the women.
Oh dear... You've confused evolved desires with desire-satisfying strategies. People desire sex; only some of them desire children. For a very long time nature didn't care which it was, because a desire for sex was sufficient to produce children.
Now it's not.
As children have turned into a social good but staggering private cost, the birthrate has plummeted. Society is not going to put the genie of birth control back in the bottle. Demonizing male sexual desires isn't going to work. Family law may encourage women to have more children, but it reduces men's interest in marriage and fatherhood (hard as it is to believe, there was a time when fear of commitment was not normal for men). If society wants children, it's going to have to pay for them.
Desires and incentives matter. The rest is commentary - and much of it is bizarrely out of touch with those four words.
By the way, it's worth pausing to consider that Lustys' strategy was not an evolutionary failure, and to ask why not, rather than simply moralize about them. Presumably it's because a Lusty had more genetically varied offspring and although she received less support from any of her lovers (possibly even from all of them together) than a Trusty, she was at lower risk of being left with no support at all. (In the extreme case, a prostitute has little concern if one of her customers dies.) She also had a decent chance of being able to escape an abusive lover by running to one (or more) of the others. The idea that Lusty women are morally corrupt or corrupting is very questionable.
Similarly for the cads. Few women who mate with a cad don't know what's happening - and they do it anyway, and we have to assume they have their reasons, reasons that may be strategic (especially today, if he has money or skills) or that may be anchored in evolutionary desires. There's a standard character in women-oriented fiction: the Dead Lover. This is a man who loves the heroine, gives her a child, and then - most conveniently - dies, leaving her with her child, her memories and her autonomy. This is just a morally acceptable way to describe... a cad. Then, too, in evolution world, cads with children tend not to disappear completely: partly because people lived in small communities; partly because people don't just want sex, they want to feel close to others, and who better than people you've had sex with, and whose children remind you of yourself (and even garner praise for you from the tribe)? Being a cad requires, too, accepting that your partners are Lustys and you are almost certainly partly supporting the children of other men - and that's got social value too.
There's far too much yearning for the mythology of the 1950s by people who ought to know better. And far too many just-so "evolutionary psychology" theories - including what I just wrote.
Is Genghis Khan really a good example of someone following the Cad strategy? My impression is that the dad-cad distinction is based not on the number of sexual partners, but on whether or not someone provides long-term support to spouse(s) and offspring. If GK (or King Solomon, or Brigham Young) is providing such support, even to multiple wives/concubines, I'd think that they were following a Dad strategy. A better example of a Cad would be someone like Dean Moriarty of "On the Road", who enjoys short-term sexual relationships with women but fails to provide support for them or their offspring.
Wow. A great example of how illuminating a good toy model can be.
One extension: on most college campuses, women are a majority, often a sizable one. Simply as a matter of supply and demand, this creates an incentive for women to be Lusties (otherwise they lose out on access to men) and for men to be Cads (because they can).
I don't think there's one unitary feminism but ... I think a lot of people who call themselves feminists feel (and I mean feel, not think consciously), "Men oppress women; therefor what men have must be better than what women have. Men can have and enjoy consequence-free sex; therefor women should have and enjoy consequence-free sex."
I've long thought the feminist idea was more equality based: "women should be equally promiscuous", but the feelings you note might also be a factor.
Most conscious feminists today, if pushed to answer clearly, will admit that men enjoy the Zipless Fuck promiscuity more than women, on average. (Fear of Flying - Erica Jong, 2nd stage feminism.)
They might even feel such an enjoyment difference, inequality, IS oppression of women.
"More men than women reported having no sexual partner (16.4% vs 12.0%; P = .04) and 3 or more partners (14.5% vs 7.1%; P < .001), whereas fewer men reported weekly or more sexual activity (46.7% vs 53.3%; P = .02) and 1 sexual partner (57.5% vs 74.2%; P < .001)."
More men have NO partners AND more men have >3 partners in the last year. My skimming didn't quite show whether they separated out gays; other readings have gay men having some avg of 75 sex partners over life, way way above most straight guys.
While it's a mathematical average truism that "the average number of heterosexual sex partners will be the same for men and women", the number of men who are incels can be, and is, much higher than for women. Involuntary celibacy is also "undesirable sex mate - as not chosen by women".
My guess is that over 90% of the gays had 3 or more sexual partners. Was interested in, and didn't see, how many Cads or Lustys reported that level of promiscuity. I also think some higher number like 5 or 6 (# of partners) would give more insight into the very promiscuous. It's written as if it wants the facts to be difficult to talk about.
Your discussion of "men who have very bad luck in that department." is too cursory. Polygamous societies create large numbers of unmarried and unmarriageable men. This creates all sorts of structure issues for a society. See my book, Darwinian Politics, Rutgers Press, 2002, which deals with many issues you discuss.
Yes, you have honed in on the most important observation in this essay: "Men may desire more sex partners, but the average has to turn out to be equal". In other words, if one 'cad' has ten women on the go, nine men will have none. This obvious fact gets skidded over in most journalism on sexual mating...a kind of unholy alliance between feminist journos who mostly want to bitch about 'Men' in general and male journos who want to be sure to come across as being in the 'stud' camp. And most of the commentary here does likewise.
I am a happily married 70+ so all this is now academic to me. But "when the men are ready to give up the Cad lifestyle." should really be "when the 10% of men are ready to give up the Cad lifestyle". The other 90% generally never even get the chance. https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/
+1
I like the whole essay.
"The net result is that college-educated people are able to form the traditional Dad/Trusty marriage, but not until age 30 or later, when the men are ready to give up the Cad lifestyle."
The women too. Sex in the City is a female fantasy. In my experience most women in their 20s aren't ready for marriage either. They would marry George Clooney if they could, but they aren't ready to marry a man they could realistically catch.
I think the college educated dating pattern is mostly about the female getting old enough she is willing to settle and not think about divorce because she is too old to start over.
In addition, because women are willing to date much older men, it's very hard for even promising young men to compete with men that have had a decade or two to built status. it takes until 30 to prove themselves.
That isn't too abnormal, but I think mid-20s is a lot more natural historically than 30s. It takes too long for many men to find their footing because they start out so late (no being an officer in the royal navy as a teenager).
"And people without a college education are stuck in the pattern of transitory Cad/Lusty pairings."
There are a lot of reasons for this, and I wouldn't underestimate the breakdown of lots of different moral standards (substance abuse, propriety, etc).
I have two friends that have four kids on not much income (he installs solar panels, she used to be a nurse but now stays at home). They make it work through thrift and religion (weekly church goers, good morals and self control). Maybe this isn't fair because they are high IQ (both graduated college, even if he hated office work), but such a lifestyle (the success sequence) does work.
But I'm quite afraid that there is probably only one answer that nobody wants to hear. Being a poor single mother has to be a miserable life, financially and socially, if you want to change behavior patterns. The misery is the point, there is no other way.
My wife and daughters were able to marry young despite their fiances not being established or having proved themselves. The fiances gave confidence they could be trusted by their religious and academic commitment. Religion definitely was a factor in building confidence for both partners, I know it mattered to me that my wife to be valued my faith
Men who cannot give confidence they will earn "good money" are disadvantaged. Men lacking money and lacking other proof of stability, such as religion, will struggle to find a women who sees the relationship as a long term commitment. And men, knowing this, may also approach marriage as a trial relationship, rather than a lifelong endeavor.
And, of course, money is no guarantee of a long marriage. Steady income helps the spouses have stability but money by itself will never be enough to keep both spouses satisfied.
You are right that there has to be a difference in finances between "good" and "bad" behavior if society wants more good and less bad.
"Being a poor single mother has to be a miserable life, financially and socially,"
-- ain't gonna happen, and I oppose it, too. "Not rich" should be enough, especially with the social emphasis on choice. I propose in my (too long) comment that gov't give more support to the married folk with kids who go to schools with too many kids of unmarried parents.
Short and powerful essay!
There are fewer Trustys these days for the average man who wants to be a Dad. The Dad & Trusty couple is now a luxury item for the well-heeled thanks to the sexual revolution, feminism, impact of technology on previous courtship norms, and a radical change in cultural mores.
Feminism has turned colleges into factories for turning all girls into sluts, er, Lusty & promiscuous. It's not unfair to claim this was one of the aims -- the college Cads, slut-jerk slut-cad promiscuously successful womanizers are big "winners" of Free Sex feminism. More older and now wiser early feminists are starting to see this.
Later age of marriage is overwhelmingly driven by women, not by men.
Where on earth did you get that idea? Even a cursory examination of dating web sites, or meeting people in their 20s, will show that young-ish women who want to marry in the near future dramatically outnumber young-ish men who do.
I mostly like this essay, but a lot of both men and women do have strategies and you've only scratched the surface of them.
For one thing, the dynamic of options changing at age 30 is both an oversimplification and works very differently between men and women. The Pill has made a lot of women think they can be Lustys until they're 35 or 40 and still successfully marry and reproduce. In reality, a woman who doesn't try until she's 30 is only about 20% likely to successfully bear any children at all. More importantly, as early as age 25 it may already be too late for her to get a man to marry her whom she will accept. Women discovering this fact "out of the blue" have become so common they have become a stereotype; the discovery is now known as "hitting the wall."
Second, the laws have come to be so one-sided in favor of women that many of them won't hesitate to marry a relatively well-off man for a year or two, get their hands on his money, and then leave him, with or without a child in tow, with the law forcing him to give up most of his fortune and keep paying her just as though she had entered into the marriage with honest intentions. Or the child support laws are used by Lustys to do the same thing to Cads without even a marriage, since the man is not allowed to hold her responsible for false promises she was using birth control. Naturally this discourages many men from seeking either marriage or sex at all.
Both these behavior patterns are very common, and both have the result of reducing rich countries' fertility rates to the point that the Great (demographic) Replacement of us by third world migrants now appears unavoidable.
"Naturally this discourages many men from seeking either marriage or sex at all."
The willful refusal to consider this fact is going to keep western birth rates low for another while yet.
"Men and women have different possibilities to worry about. A woman knows that a child is hers, but she has to worry about whether a man will provide resources to help sustain her and the child. A man is less physically vulnerable, but from a reproduction standpoint he has to worry about wasting resources by contributing them to a support a child that is not his."
I feel like this is just less true than ever today. The availability of paternity tests means men who worry about supporting children that are not theirs can rest easy. Women have greatly closed the gap in their ability to generate resources, child support laws mean they are less likely to need to take on the entire burden of raising abandoned children, birth control reduces the possibility of it happening in the first place, and modern concealable weapons have leveled the playing field on physical vulnerability.
"If some men succeed at having many sex partners, then other men must have very bad luck in that department."
It's not as if the most promiscuous men are out there herding their partners into harems to enforce fidelity, so I don't really see how other men are required to have a bad time. For this to be an issue, we'd need to be talking about reproduction rather than sex and you'd need to have a world where men with the most resources are just out there producing as many children as possible and financially supporting dozens or hundreds of pregnant women, but for the most part, male billionaires just don't act like that at all.
We've pretty much broken the link between sex and reproduction, so the trusty/lusty/dad/cad model derived from premodern reproductive concerns is pretty much irrelevant if you try to apply it to today's sexual behavior.
Actually, men can be - and routinely are - required to make "child support" payments for children who are not theirs, and whom they did not adopt. In some states, mere cohabitation and establishing a relationship with the child is sufficient. In all states (I believe), being married to the child's mother - regardless of paternity - is sufficient. And if the mother claims you were the father and you do not counter this promptly in court (which may be because you didn't know she claimed it) you may find your window for rebuttal has closed.
Family law is obscenely one-sided, and almost no-one realizes it - because who listens to the "bitter" men who have found out the hard way? (I'm not one, fortunately for me. But I know them.)
Prostitution — perhaps mainly in cities, the locus of anonymity — is another wrinkle.
Before the pill, female prostitutes could supply:
(a) Premarital sex to young men. This kind of two-sided promiscuity enabled young men to delay marriage until ready and able to settle down and support offspring. Trusty women tacitly accepted the stages of male sexuality and the sex-market safety valve for young men in pre-pill cultures.
(b) Extramarital sex to men. Although trusty women didn't even tacitly accept spousal promiscuity, prostitution provided a pre-pill outlet for cads — a safety valve that enabled male promiscuity without creating children outside of wedlock (and without attendant major diversion of resources outside the family to support external offspring).
(c) Sex to men who failed to make a match in the marriage market. This, too, was a kind of social safety valve. For example, at some margin, it would reduce demand by unmarried men for affairs with married women.
Before the pill, in-person prostitution probably was part of the equilibrium, at least in cities.
A few decades after the pill, digital pornography will be another technology shock, disrupting the battle of sexes at some margins.
Prostitution is harder to get away with now, but is still a good solution, needed all the more since the kind of guys who used to harass, now have no other recourse.
The current scandal with trafficking is an obstacle, since the federal laws written to fight enslavement actually lump voluntary adult sex work into the legal definition of trafficking, even though it isn't really.
Good comment John.
Another great example of Arnold "calling it as he sees it."
Arnold
Well . . . scientific reductionism (everything explained by physics) isn’t plausible.
Alfred North Whitehead talked about ‘emergent properties’.
Human love, atoms never do. Whence love?
Thanks
Clay
"I should emphasize that I do not think that people follow conscious strategies."
A couple days ago you blogged about preferences not being mental illness. I'm wondering how you see preferences in light of thinking people don't follow conscious strategies for reproduction.
Such an honest and relevant post! "college-educated people are able to form the traditional Dad/Trusty marriage, but not until age 30 or later, when the men are ready to give up the Cad lifestyle." (fits me, too well)
The unPC (unWoke?) word for Lusty is slut - and I've long been claiming we need more slut-shaming. But we also need such a negative word for irresponsibly promiscuous men, maybe slut-jerk or slut-cad. "Cad" isn't negative enough - but also is unlikely to be so. Too many horny male teens lust after cute girls, and their raging hormones make sex more important than just about anything else.
The college grad elites and wannabes, will be OK with low divorce after marriage after age 30 - with one or two or no kids; more none than 3+. Most of the college Lusty - pre-Trusty girls successfully avoid having kids: more & better usage of the Pill or other contraceptives, plus backstop abortion "if needed". (Despite it killing an innocent human fetus).
The real problem is that too many avg & low IQ folk, non-college grads, are having promiscuous sex which interferes with genuine relationship commitment, so they're having kids without marriage. Optimal child raising is with happy (=faithful) married parents, and teen & twenty sexual adventures make commitment less likely, less easy, less trustworthy. Black kids are at about 75% w/o married parents, white at about 30% (maybe more white kids of single mothers than black kids).
It's unrealistic to expect more social "pain" on the single mothers - so our society needs to offer more gov't cash to married folks with kids - especially those married couples whose kids go to schools with a high rate of single parent households.
Wonkish: All US gov't high schools have students with either married parents or not-married. Order them based on married %, so the worst might have 10%; or 5%; or maybe only 1% of the kids with married parents. The gov't should give the parents some $1000/yr for being married "as an example".
The married folk need to live better lives/ have more status, than the non-married folk. Such a direct marriage benefit to parents should phase out starting at the 40th percentile and end at the 60th.
Today most gov't programs reward socially negative behavior with bad results for the innocent children. We need more social rewards to those with positive behavior, to get / incentivize the good behavior. Morality has long been an attempt to define socially optimal behavior.
Your coinage of the terms trusty/lusty and dad/cad is very good, I didn't have to think about what you meant so your essay was easy to read.
From what I see most young women are trying to look hot and young men more dadish. Doesn't make sense does it. Maybe I am wrong to judge by appearance.
Unless it's that thing where a few men are getting all the women.
They are, though. That Tinder poll seems to tell the tale.
Oh dear... You've confused evolved desires with desire-satisfying strategies. People desire sex; only some of them desire children. For a very long time nature didn't care which it was, because a desire for sex was sufficient to produce children.
Now it's not.
As children have turned into a social good but staggering private cost, the birthrate has plummeted. Society is not going to put the genie of birth control back in the bottle. Demonizing male sexual desires isn't going to work. Family law may encourage women to have more children, but it reduces men's interest in marriage and fatherhood (hard as it is to believe, there was a time when fear of commitment was not normal for men). If society wants children, it's going to have to pay for them.
Desires and incentives matter. The rest is commentary - and much of it is bizarrely out of touch with those four words.
By the way, it's worth pausing to consider that Lustys' strategy was not an evolutionary failure, and to ask why not, rather than simply moralize about them. Presumably it's because a Lusty had more genetically varied offspring and although she received less support from any of her lovers (possibly even from all of them together) than a Trusty, she was at lower risk of being left with no support at all. (In the extreme case, a prostitute has little concern if one of her customers dies.) She also had a decent chance of being able to escape an abusive lover by running to one (or more) of the others. The idea that Lusty women are morally corrupt or corrupting is very questionable.
Similarly for the cads. Few women who mate with a cad don't know what's happening - and they do it anyway, and we have to assume they have their reasons, reasons that may be strategic (especially today, if he has money or skills) or that may be anchored in evolutionary desires. There's a standard character in women-oriented fiction: the Dead Lover. This is a man who loves the heroine, gives her a child, and then - most conveniently - dies, leaving her with her child, her memories and her autonomy. This is just a morally acceptable way to describe... a cad. Then, too, in evolution world, cads with children tend not to disappear completely: partly because people lived in small communities; partly because people don't just want sex, they want to feel close to others, and who better than people you've had sex with, and whose children remind you of yourself (and even garner praise for you from the tribe)? Being a cad requires, too, accepting that your partners are Lustys and you are almost certainly partly supporting the children of other men - and that's got social value too.
There's far too much yearning for the mythology of the 1950s by people who ought to know better. And far too many just-so "evolutionary psychology" theories - including what I just wrote.
Is Genghis Khan really a good example of someone following the Cad strategy? My impression is that the dad-cad distinction is based not on the number of sexual partners, but on whether or not someone provides long-term support to spouse(s) and offspring. If GK (or King Solomon, or Brigham Young) is providing such support, even to multiple wives/concubines, I'd think that they were following a Dad strategy. A better example of a Cad would be someone like Dean Moriarty of "On the Road", who enjoys short-term sexual relationships with women but fails to provide support for them or their offspring.
Wow. A great example of how illuminating a good toy model can be.
One extension: on most college campuses, women are a majority, often a sizable one. Simply as a matter of supply and demand, this creates an incentive for women to be Lusties (otherwise they lose out on access to men) and for men to be Cads (because they can).
This is a goal of "feminism" - turn most college girls into Lusty sluts.
I don't think there's one unitary feminism but ... I think a lot of people who call themselves feminists feel (and I mean feel, not think consciously), "Men oppress women; therefor what men have must be better than what women have. Men can have and enjoy consequence-free sex; therefor women should have and enjoy consequence-free sex."
I've long thought the feminist idea was more equality based: "women should be equally promiscuous", but the feelings you note might also be a factor.
Most conscious feminists today, if pushed to answer clearly, will admit that men enjoy the Zipless Fuck promiscuity more than women, on average. (Fear of Flying - Erica Jong, 2nd stage feminism.)
They might even feel such an enjoyment difference, inequality, IS oppression of women.
"More men than women reported having no sexual partner (16.4% vs 12.0%; P = .04) and 3 or more partners (14.5% vs 7.1%; P < .001), whereas fewer men reported weekly or more sexual activity (46.7% vs 53.3%; P = .02) and 1 sexual partner (57.5% vs 74.2%; P < .001)."
More men have NO partners AND more men have >3 partners in the last year. My skimming didn't quite show whether they separated out gays; other readings have gay men having some avg of 75 sex partners over life, way way above most straight guys.
While it's a mathematical average truism that "the average number of heterosexual sex partners will be the same for men and women", the number of men who are incels can be, and is, much higher than for women. Involuntary celibacy is also "undesirable sex mate - as not chosen by women".
My guess is that over 90% of the gays had 3 or more sexual partners. Was interested in, and didn't see, how many Cads or Lustys reported that level of promiscuity. I also think some higher number like 5 or 6 (# of partners) would give more insight into the very promiscuous. It's written as if it wants the facts to be difficult to talk about.