Why you should stop shaming people who have many sexual partners
Seriously, enough of shaming people who enjoy their sexual freedom and like to express it with having many sexual partners.
Despite living in an era where sex isn’t just for married people, where as long as you’re careful about consent and contraception, you should be able to enjoy sex as much as you want to. Surprisingly, in our modern age, people are still shaming those with multiple sexual partners.
According to a recent research, from Superdrug Online Doctor, suggests that we are predisposed to slut-shaming and judge people based on how many people they’ve had sex with.
The research showed over 1000 people from Europe and US pictures of models, alongside information about how many people they bedded and then measured how their perception changed of these models. With just that information, respondents were able to discern how trustworthy, honest, intelligent, kind, and attractive they believed a person to be.
Interestingly, the models’ sexual inhibitions had a great bearing on how respondents viewed them. Models who had slept with just one person were regarded as honest, kind and trustworthy by 32% of men and 34% of women. However, when the number of sexual partners went up to 18, only 6% of men said that the model seemed trustworthy, compared to 15% of women. So men are less stigmatised by having lots of sex. Shocker.
We can easily say that respondents are pretty judgemental since all they had to go with was what the models looked like and how many sexual partners they had and yet they were quick to judge. How many people one sleeps with is not an indicator of whether one is nice or nasty, reliable or trustworthy or anything else for that matter. It ‘s just an indication of how sexually attracted they are to others and how often they choose to have sex.
Let us remind you that we’re in 2018 – an age of sex parties and polyamory; Dan Savage and Ann Summers.
This June will mark the 20 years since Sex in the City came out, shocking audiences with its depiction of women who enjoyed sex, made an effort to go get it and used men for their sexual satisfaction:
It’s then surprising that in this day and age, we’re still perceiving women who bed more than a half a dozen men as less trustworthy and honest than those who sleep with one person, if we go by this research findings.
Sex is the only area where we feel the need to tell people they are doing something wrong. You do not, for example, tell a Foodie, that they eat at too many restaurants. Or tell music lovers that they should limit where they go. Yet, we feel entitled to tell others how many people they owe to sleep with. Odd, isn’t it? When it comes to sex, you can enjoy it but only a little bit.
When it comes to sex generally people are more reticence. Enjoy sex but not too much, be good at it but don’t practice it too often; be confident with sex and empowered by sex but not with too many people.
Why do we have this attitude with sex?
Looking back at human history there’s evidence supporting these skewed views of sex. Three factors of the modern world have contributed to this. Capitalism – if your offspring is to inherit your lands ensure that they actually are yours. Patriarchy – made sex only about procreation, men must orgasm while women just need to acquiesce. And religious indoctrination convinced everyone that something so natural is sinful which shamed us into compliance. As a result of these, we’re locked into a damaging cycle of judgement and shame when it comes to sex, develop double standards and possible attitudes that end relationships.
We are different in what we like in sex and how much sex we like to have, for some anonymous sex is fulfilling, others monogamous relationships is their thing and others open their relationship up to new sexual adventures.
One thing is for sure, the more we unfairly judge by imposing archaic social and moral norms on people, the fewer people there are going to be out there with confidence, self-knowledge to make good sexual partners. This is not going to help when trying to have long healthy sexual relationships.
So, yes we should admire swingers, singles and those willing to subvert regressive ideals by being open and honest about their enjoyment of sex and the number of people they’ve had it with should be admired, not shamed.
Swingers, singles and people in open relationships, who are more open about their sex lives are less likely to judge others by their number of sexual partners and because they are less wrapped around archaic sexual views, they are confident and knowledgeable to choose better sexual and romantic partners.
Having more sexual partners does not make you untrustworthy, quite the contrary, you are more confident in what you like and who you like sexually. It’s societal norms, especially in women’s cases, force people not to speak the truth about their number of sexual partners.
