Often, perhaps too much, the sexual history of women is discussed on this subreddit. Women's sexual history is brought up as a relevance for predicting marital/relationship success, future behavior because their sexual history is seen as a kind of measurement about your partners attitudes and beliefs. Red Pill users often hold that this is "wrong" or even going as far as to say, "it is never okay to lie about this". I will take the view that women ought to lie, down-play, misrepresent, omit or even use ornate language to paint a better picture of their sexual pasts.

1. Maintaining a romantic or sexual relationship

The case I am building here is going to be from a practical standpoint, that standpoint being that the woman wants to maintain a romantic or sexual relationship with a male. The moral status of whether someone ought to lie in these situations might appear to be tacit in my post, but I am not trying to make a moral argument for or against why women should do this. The argument can be phrased in If women want to maintain a relationship, they ought to be dishonest about their sexual past. I do have a moral argument on why I do think that in most cases it is morally permissible to tell these lies in a relationship, but this is not what the argument of my post is.

2. Why should women be dishonest about their sexual past

The general idea on why men would argue women should reveal their sexual history when asked about it, is because it provides the man with crucial information about her attitudes, behaviors and values, and this in turn will help them decide whether or not she is worth it for a relationship of some kind. I am going to be generous and grant that this does make perfect. The issue I am going to take with this is the kind of evaluation of a woman’s sexual past could easily be misconstrued, there is good reason to be dishonest about it if you are justified in thinking that it is irrelevant and that some of the information really is irrelevant.

2.1 The Evaluation

A good reason to be dishonest about sexual past is that the man’s evaluation of it could be completely inaccurate or hyperbolic. If you ever watched a horror film where the monster, ghost or alien is mysterious and obscure, then it reveals itself to you eventually and it kind of takes away a part of the mystery, thus making it not as terrifying you have had this experience before. This is because your imagination can generally make things a lot different than they really are if you are not really looking at them. Thoughts of nostalgia can also evoke similar effects. I think thoughts of a woman’s sexual past could also be similar. A woman could tell her partners about a sexual situation, and in his head his evaluation of it could be inaccurate as they would imagine it worse than the actual event that occurred.

2.2 Obfuscation

If for someone reason a woman wants to tell her partner about her sexual history, she is better off doctoring it or leaving out certain details. This will help ease the man with the wild imagination. If it seems like the sexual situation could be easily misconstrued by his evaluation. This will also appear a lot better than just outright denial or refusing to talk about it, and even if later for some reason he finds out about the women’s sexual history from a third party, this could allow for higher levels of plausible deniability because the woman could always play it off as them technically telling the truth.

2.3 Irrelevant details

Some of the details of a woman’s sexual history would be irrelevant, but the man could easily falsely hold these as relevant. A lot of a woman’s sexual past in her teenage years could be irrelevant to how she is when she is 25. I would think the same thing about crimes people commit as teenagers or other such deviances. Another one two is that behavior outside of a relationship does not necessarily translate into behavior within a relationship. You can see, for instance, how some people have different behaviors at work and outside of work, or with family versus with friends.

3. Another reason why this might be good

I would think men would want women to do this as well in a lot of cases, even if they if they are insistent on wanting it. If the man for some reason gets off on hearing the sexual past of his partner, a good thing to do in this situation would be to just play to that fantasy and avoid anything further. It might also strengthen the relationship to talk about it, and if the women does think the risks of it harming the relationship are mitigated, then it seems like in this case telling the truth about it might be a good thing to do, but it is still proper to acknowledge that the potential upsides to this for the relationship seemed outweighed by the potential downsides.

4. STDs/STIs

If someone is worried about this, they can always just get their sexual health tested, I do see this brought up sometimes as a reason why women should be truthful about it.

5. Conclusion

I am not actually too sure these situations come up too much in real life, because I have never been in one or heard of one really happening where it is some inquisition. Anyway, I am looking for comments that challenge my view or comments that point out crucial things that I have missed here. If you have personal attacks, red herrings or whataboutisms to share, please just use the AutoModerator.