Before I get into this, I'd like to state two things. One: I'm not approaching this from a moral perspective and I'd like to try to keep away from that as much as feasible. Not simply because morality has plenty of gray areas or that what constitutes a moral action can vary somewhat based on perspective, but because morality is a prescription of "ought"s, of how things should be, not necessarily how they are. If the question is asked "is promiscuity bad and why," we should for this discussion attempt to keep moralistic "ought"s at arm's reach from our reasoning and justifications. We do this in the attempt to figure out how something operates, its reality, its results, why it is a certain way. Two: I'm bringing up this topic as a discussion borne by a question, it's not a monologue for commentary.

Great, now that my lawyers are satisfied...

Males and females in our species can both exhibit promiscuity. Conventional wisdom states that promiscuity has negative psychological effects on the promiscuous, but moreover that such effects are considerably worse for females than for males. Assuming the aforementioned, allow me to inquire:

  • Is it true that promiscuity has negative psychological consequences for both men and women relative to those who do not engage in promiscuous behavior?

  • If so, are these negative effects the same or different for women, and are they the same in magnitude or are they better/worse?

  • If they are worse for women, why?

These questions result from a thought I had several days back. I'll take a few shortcuts in my line of thinking in the attempt to keep this brief (these are not declarations of reality, simply my train of thought): women's promiscuity causes negative long term effects for them. It makes them less and less likely to be able to "pair bond" or maintain a long term committed relationship with one person. This implies that women have a powerful pair-bonding ability when coupling with men while virgins or only one, two maximum, previous sexual partners. Why does this pair bonding exist? To psychologically bind the woman to the man as to more greatly increase the likelihood of both parents remaining together which is more genetically advantageous for the child to survive and grow to maturity in order to pass on its genes. As this pair bonding can be deduced as a flooding of chemicals in the brain resulting from certain triggers, the more sexual partners a woman has, the greater her tolerance to this pair bonding cocktail becomes (this is pure speculation on my part and I could be absolutely wrong from a biochemical standpoint, I don't know). In any case, the point is that a woman being promiscuous damages her ability to form long lasting meaningful relationships with one man, which would in turn be disadvantageous for any children she has.

However, promiscuity doesn't affect men as badly. I think most people would say that it does affect men, but I also think most men would claim that sleeping around wouldn't damage them in the same ways or with the same severity as women. Conventional thinking dictates that, basically, men can divorce themselves from emotional attachment and "pair bonding" when having sex, as it's purely physical to them; women cannot do the same. This raises the question: why? Why is this the case? If the pair bonding of a female is an evolutionary mechanism planted in them for the purposes of increasing the likelihood of success of a relationship as it's advantageous for the children, why doesn't this also apply to men? Men are the protectors and providers; using the same line of evolutionary reasoning used for women, it would make sense that chemicals also cause men to pair bond with a woman to increase the likelihood of that man sticking around and thereby increase the likelihood of the child(ren) growing to maturity. From a purely off-the-cuff standpoint I'd say that getting a man to pair bond to a woman would be even more important than the reverse when it comes to survival and genetic success. Obviously men's sexual strategy is to spread seed as far and wide as possible and this would conflict with the bonding process unless it was such that a man could psychologically bond to multiple females, but the question still remains: why does promiscuity for women damage their ability to form emotional attachments with men but the same activity by men is far less or borderline nonexistent? Why does the rationale for the existence of women's pair bonding not apply to men as well?

Hopefully these thoughts are clear enough that you understand the complex question being asked here. If we're able to crowdsource a solid answer, it would assist us in explaining why male and female promiscuity aren't equivalent in social and evolutionary terms. We'd be able to further shed light on how treating men and women the same in the context of sexual dynamics is a false equivalence and it would provide a solid explanation when the "but men do it too" objection of promiscuity is raised.