The Promiscuous Woman, The Good Woman, and The Judgements In Between

10 May 2012

“A promiscuous person is a person who is getting more sex than you are.” ~ Victor Lownes.

Promiscuous women are a controversial topic and although my original article was posted nearly a year ago it still receives numerous comments. Recently, I received a delayed notification in April that the founder of The Good Woman Project had opposed many tenets of that article in a post on her site. Unable to let sleeping dogs lie, I decided to revisit the topic. Lauren’s misquotes and assumptions were too delicious to ignore. Please join me in setting the record straight.

Lauren,

I apologize for my delayed response to your post but technology chose the timing as I just received notification of your link a couple weeks ago. I am pleased that you read my article and that it encouraged you to participate in this important and controversial dialogue. Your post brought up several fascinating points and a few erroneous statements that I look forward to addressing.

First off, I do think you may be slightly confused; not about who you are or your commitment to your beliefs, but rather the context of my article. The topic was sexual equality and was never meant to serve as a how-to guide for female validation. The title should have alerted you to that. Much of your post assumes that I promote promiscuity in women as a way of evening the gender playing field; that is neither my position on equality nor the topic of my article. You are a Christian woman and I highly respect you choosing to live your life in a manner that upholds your chosen beliefs. I applaud you for knowing who you are, what you’re comfortable with and living life undeterred. Where I do take issue is your judgmental assumptions about me and those who choose to follow a different path. Not very Christ-like. My sexuality stemmed from my confidence, which as you point out is perfectly acceptable {Thanks!}. Let me explain something to you ‘woman to woman’; there are many ladies who do not feel the need to confine their natural desire for sex within a committed relationship. I am not broken or bent…I am human. My decision to have casual sex was the healthiest choice at the time and my honesty about not wanting a steady relationship was the kindest thing I could do for the men I was seeing. You’re young and slightly inexperienced { I can make assumptions, too}, so let me explain. Post divorce I took stock of my life and sought to rediscover “me” outside of a “we” {cited as self-destructive in your post}. In reality, the absolute worst thing I, or any woman, can do when first recovering from divorce is to submerge oneself in another relationship. Think about it dear, how fair would that have been to my new partner? How can I profess future commitment to a new person when I haven’t fully disconnected from my past? A little self-destructive, don’t you think? Again, promiscuity was a healthy lifestyle choice that was appropriate for me during that stage of my life. Later in your article you made the wrong assumption that: I chose to sleep with men outside a relationship because I was afraid Mr. Right wouldn’t wait for me. Uh, wrong. I didn’t want a man {in the context of a relationship} and I didn’t want to wait to be in another relationship to satisfy my physical desires.

This is an important key point to my article that you completely ignored in your post…according to the AskMen survey, men felt it was perfectly acceptable for a man to have more than 5 sexual partners but not for a woman. Nowhere in the survey did it say under what context this wanton woman’s sexual encounters occurred. For sake of argument, let’s assume that a 40 year old woman had 5 sexual encounters in her life, all within the parameters of a committed relationship. Now, let’s take a 40 year old man who has had over twice as many sexual encounters, both in and out of relationships,as the woman. My angst is that other men do not see him as promiscuous while the woman is! Does this really seem fair? Many in society believe this double standard is completely fair. The other issue I take with the survey is the correlation of a the number of sexual partners has to promiscuity , rather than to the intent. Promiscuity means to have many TRANSIENT and INDESCRMINATE sexual encounters. I openly confess, with no regret, that I have been promiscuous by definition; however, the woman in the example above is not, yet she is still considered promiscuous by many of the men surveyed. I want to make perfectly clear that there is a huge difference between sex while in a relationship and sex outside of one and it is a difference that I respect. You don’t seem to comprehend that my promiscuous behavior never tainted my ability to have and enjoy a committed relationship or have sex with meaning. Finally, you expose your judgmental views and validate the judgments of many men in the survey, when you wrote “her self-admitted out of control yet perfectly acceptable sex life”. Ummm, I’m pretty sure I never admitted to being ‘out of control.’ In fact I was in complete control of my actions. I knew exactly what I was doing, why I was doing it, and who I was doing it with. Your assumption, and those of the men surveyed, is that a woman must be psychologically damaged or ‘out of control’ to engage in sexual behavior similar to a man! Wrong, again.

My choice to engage in casual sexual encounters was never a reflection of low self-esteem or lack of confidence. I argue that it took supreme confidence to acknowledge that I was not ready to jump into another relationship for the sake of physical gratification. I had enough courage, knowledge and self-respect to create a new life for myself outside of ‘we.’

I wanted to address your post and opinions in order to make clear the issues surrounding female sexuality and the negative assumptions that our society, and you, choose to cling so tightly to are fundamentally unfair and wrong. My post was to expose the hypocrisy of the men who take issue with women having sex with a certain number of partners and consider it unacceptable, while these same men believe it perfectly acceptable for them to have two or three times as many encounters. My article on female promiscuity is not directed towards those who hold themselves to a certain standard and choose to partner with someone who does the same…that’s called compatibility and it’s completely just. I also do not harbor anger, resentment, or negative assumptions but I’ll be damned if I will tolerate being held to a standard that someone can’t even hold themselves to…that’s called a double standard and is completely unfair. For the record, I do not “live my life by polls” however; I do not ignore their existence and choose to learn from some of them. Polls give general averages that help us understand the constructs of the world we live in, so if you think about it, although I don’t determine my identity and live my life based on polls {as you claim in your article}, the polls do show how society identifies all of us based on the lives we live. I could continue this post to a nauseating length by addressing all of the inaccuracies in your article {i.e., my anger towards men, that I haven’t found a good man, that I think a woman must be promiscuous to be sexually confident, etc.} but they are so ridiculous and far from fact they’re unworthy of elaboration. In conclusion I would like to leave you a little food for thought. You decided to spew rhetoric about confidence and independence to my insecure and troubled soul, yet in closing you say to me:

Don’t stop believing that there is a man out there who will protect your identity before he participates in your sexuality.

Wait, aren’t you confident? Aren’t you independent? Then why do you or any confident woman need a man to protect our identity? Shouldn’t a confident, independent woman be able to do this for herself or is that something only a ‘good woman’ requires of a ‘good man’?