Chateau Heartiste

There are virgins among us, but they cannot be identified by their ecstatic moans, so they slip unnoticed by the sexually active masses like frigid totems to a bygone era.

A reader links to a study on American virginity rates:

Women who are college graduates are more likely to be virgins. So, it’s not just Ivy Leaguers who are more sexually restrained, but all college graduates.

I still agree with you to the extent that I think there are pockets of promiscuity among educated women, especially among those with graduate/professional degrees, and also probably among those in certain urban areas. Furthermore, I would think that educated women who are promiscuous are probably much more deliberate about it than lower class women who often disapprove of promiscuity in the abstract (I use the term loosely) but are unable to control themselves in the heat of the moment.

Before you players start to wonder if you’re just passing around the same irrepressible slut’s party hole amongst yourselves, note that overall virginity rates are still quite low for the general population, including both men and women.

1.1 million Americans between the ages of 25 and 40 are still virgins.

The CDC also reports that by age 19, 80% of men and 75% of women have lost their virginity.

And, furthermore, keeping in tune with this blog’s unnerving habit of drawing back the curtain on humanity’s clanking machinery, men, being the expendable sex, are more likely than women, the perishable sex, to remain virgins past the age of 25.

[T]he odds a man aged 25-44 has had no female partners are 1 in 35.71.

More women than men are likely to postpone losing their virginity, but during the teens and early 20s their odds follow the identical trajectory. However, by the time a woman enters the age range of 25-44, the odds she has had no male sexual partners are 1 in 58.82—so somewhere along the line women start outpacing men in shedding their virginity.

It is simply easier for the average woman to get sex than it is for the average man, and the later in life virginity rates reflect that reality. (Although the ease with which women can get sex partners may be experiencing a bump upward in difficulty owing to the increasing fattitude of Americans — obese women are 30% less likely than normal-weight women to have had a sexual partner in the last year. Obese men do not have the same problem.)

Compared to men, the relatively low effort required of women to obtain sex is why it’s silly for them to take pride in their sluttiness; getting sex from men is no accomplishment. Now getting commitment from men… there’s the challenge. But of course, if you are a feminist with a grating personality and all you have to offer men is a zip line to your jungly vagina, then you might be tempted to dismiss the shame you feel from giving it away so freely.

After a certain ripe age, a virginal woman might say to herself, “Why am I holding out for an alpha male? The odds of landing one diminish with each passing month, so, fuck it, I’ll take the next cocka that comes alonga.” She then finds that the goal of spreading her legs for a horny bastard is remarkably easy to achieve, which is why the act often leaves her feeling confused and depressed afterwards.

The typical virginal man, in contrast, discovers that it becomes increasingly difficult to lose his virginity with each passing year. For him, virginity isn’t a choice; it’s a sentence. Or it may have started as a free choice, but quickly transmogrified into a punishment. The 40-year-old male virgin who manages to finally bust a nut inside a woman doesn’t feel confusion; he feels elation.

The more interesting angle to the virginity numbers is the discrepancy in rates between uneducated and educated women:

For well-educated ladies looking to join the ranks of the sexually active, unfortunately you’ve got your work cut out for you. Female college graduates are 5.4 times more likely to be virgins than those who never received that diploma—adding a sad irony to the term “bachelor’s degree.”

I suspect this ties into impulsiveness; if you have the time to spare, there are studies floating around demonstrating a link between lower IQ and higher impulsiveness. It could simply be the case that female college grads are better at controlling their impulses, rather than some high-falutin’ notion that educated women are more apt than dumber women to save themselves for marriage deriving from some quaint personal ethos.

But why would women want to, or feel an inner urge to, restrain their sexual impulses? Well, in the ancestral environment, the one that has shaped the contours of our hindbrains to this day, the women who were bad at controlling their sexual impulses were often the ones stuck with babies from men who weren’t willing to stick around and help raise them. More circumspect women were better at screening for men willing to dependably commit to them, a male trait that is exhibited when a man wines and dines a woman while waiting patiently for her to give it up. Evolution favored the propagation of the latter’s genes (with exceptions), and so this female restraint instinct survives into the modern world, in an age of contraceptives and big daddy government, and its existence spurs all sorts of rationalizations from women seeking to make sense of their antediluvian feelings.

Nevertheless, the CDC data showing that educated women are more likely than uneducated women to be virgins seems counterintuitive to me. I swim amongst the educated set and, accounting for a few memorable exceptions, I have rarely befriended or befouled a virgin. On the whole, smart chicks are novelty seeking; they love meeting new men and flirting like femme fatales. Case in point: Smart, educated girls may be more likely to be virginal, but they are also more likely to cheat.

And my experience is not unique; I know few men, alpha or beta, who can claim to plunder virgin puss regularly. The existence of legal age virgins in the megalopolises is so rare that meeting and bedding one would be immediate cause for a triumphal parade around the city square.

As I have said on occasion, you will find that if you keep your eyes open and observe the world around you without self-assuaging delusion, that science eventually comes around to confirming 9/10s of your common sense. Yet once in a blue moon, the scientific data throws a curveball. This is one of those times.

Herewith I offer some explanations for the discrepancy between most men’s real life experiences with a paucity of educated virgins and the self-reported virginity data:

– Women lie worse than men on self-reporting surveys. This is scientifically validated. Now, participant lying doesn’t necessarily indicate that the sexual activity trend lines are wrong; for that, you’d have to somehow show that women are lying more now than they did on past surveys, or that educated women lie more than uneducated women. (In fact, the latter is a distinct possibility, as it has been shown that smarter people are generally better at the deceptive arts, and have a better grasp of what kind of information about themselves is potentially incriminating.) However, the very fact that women do lie about sexual matters more than men should give one pause about taking their virginity claims at face value.

– Player selection bias. This is a favorite assertion of the anti-gamer, feminist and omegavirgindork crowd (losers of a feather flock together): “Oh, you’re just nailing the sluts who like to screw around, so you never get a chance to meet the angelic hordes of chaste, virginal girls.” On its face, this seems plausible, but it breaks down badly upon closer inspection. One, many seducers meet women randomly, outside of the clubs where sluts tend to congregate. For instance, I have met women from extraordinarily varied occupational and educational backgrounds, in stores, at events, on the street, in buses, while driving, at the beach, in class, at work, at weddings, at picnics, and even at a funeral. It would be a remarkable coincidence if all those women were raging sluts. Two, and most disturbingly for the anti-gamer, their assertion denies the possibility that players *are* meeting chaste women, but that these women, accustomed to the limp company of their beta orbiters, are so overwhelmed by the player’s sexy vibe that they become a bit less chaste for the night (or many nights).

Given the above refutation of the player selection bias theory, I suspect that it is true to some minimal extent that men who actively bed a lot of women tend to miss the virgins, who are, after all, not very likely to be out anywhere in mixed company. And the reason for this may be that the ranks of female virgins include a lot of grossly ugly or obese girls who are ashamed to be seen in public. Girls who major in math or other male-oriented tracks are probably overrepresented in this group.

Luckily, by the early 20s, most girls have abandoned the charade of virginity, so player selection bias ceases to be of much relevance for men who don’t routinely try to pick up teenagers.

– Confusing education for introversion. Education, conscientiousness and introversion tend to correlate. If educated women have a higher virginity rate than uneducated women, that may just be a reflection of the fact that educated women are more introverted, and thus less likely to be energized by large mixed groups of men and women where hooking up is more likely to occur. Thus, players who plunder the big cities may be missing out on the virgins because those women are less comfortable mingling in social settings. This particular explanation is speculative, so take it for what it is.

– Obesity is just another word for celibacy. As noted above, there have been studies which found that fat women have less sex than thin women. Not very surprising, as men really don’t want to sleep with fat women if they can avail themselves of the sexier alternative. (A contrarian might argue that fat women, given their lower sexual market value, would more readily put out for men in hopes of gaining their commitment and love. If true, that would work against higher virginity rates for fat women.)

Anyhow, assuming the premise is true — that fat chicks are more likely to live a sexless purgatory — then the obesity epidemic may explain decreasing rates of sluttiness among American women. However, it would not tell us much about the supposed higher virginity rates of educated girls, as it is a safe assumption most truly grotesque fat chicks shamble among the lower classes. Or it could be the case that educated fat chicks, as the more introspective subspecies, are more likely than uneducated fat chicks to sequester themselves away from human contact and sunlight, thus shifting on one elephantine foot higher virginity rates toward the college crowd.

– The “technical” virgin. How do girls rationalize their lying about their sex lives? By inventing false truths. Anal and oral sex among young women are way up, but hey, it’s not the vagina, so STILL A VIRGIN. The hamster is happy. Perhaps this explains better why educated women have higher “virginity” rates — they are using a very loose definition of virginity. And wouldn’t it be just like a smartie to wordplay her way out of an uncomfortable self-assessment? I suspect the Audacious One would be interested in GSSing his way through this byline to the sexual behavior annals. Annals. Heh.

– Bifurcation Nation. I have previously offered as an explanation for the supposed decreasing overall rate of sluttiness among American women the hypothesis that the nation is bifurcating along sexual behavior lines:

[P]erhaps American society is bifurcating into two female camps, with the urban blue state camp waving the banner of Team Slut and the religious red state camp hoisting the flag of Team Prude. Since there are more red state godly girls than there are blue state heretic hos, I figured that would account for the overall trend toward less sluttiness.

Again, purely speculative, but worth investigating. (Paging Charles Murray.) I admit I don’t have reams of experience with evangelicals or Hasidim, so for all I know there is a mass of middle America religious women out there who are refusing sex until a ring is on it. Maybe a lot of these red staters who have the smarts go to college and as a consequence swing the co-ed virginity rate higher. Since religious girls tend to socialize in venues (like church) where players are rarely found (imagine a demon stepping foot on holy ground and immediately bursting into flames), it’s reasonable to conclude that male perception of college girl sluttiness is skewed by the religious de facto shut-ins.

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Bottom line: Human sexual behavior is exceedingly difficult to pin down, as the nature of the enterprise requires survey respondents possess a bracing comfort with exposing the underbellies of their egos, and nothing is quite as critical to the healthy functioning of the ego as faith in one’s SMV. Don’t trust self-reported sex survey data. Chicks lie. Educated chicks are probably not much more virginal than uneducated chicks, but there is room to disagree on this point based on potential skew in men’s perceptions of the active, college educated dating market. Nonetheless, overall virginity rates are quite low after the late teens, so men need not worry that a shrinking pool of sexually enthusiastic women is about to cramp their styles.

This post grew beyond its preplanned bounds, much like a virgin’s hymen stretches to its breaking point when confronted by the concentrated force of my life-giving battering ram.