Why the “cock carousel” is bullshit, according to SCIENCE

By David Futrelle

If you’ve spent any time at all observing misogynists online, you are no doubt familiar with the concept of the “cock carousel” — a vaguely poetic way of referring to the allegedly vast number of men that the average woman is said to have sex with in her “prime,” from the moment she first starts having sex in her teens up until she “hits the wall” somewhere between age 25 and 30, immediately rendering her too old and ugly to be appealing to most men. (Allegedly.)

Since the myth of the cock carousel is such a key component of the ideology of the so-called manosphere, I thought I’d devote a post to tearing it down completely.

Let’s start by looking at the central tenets of this absurd yet strangely pervasive myth. An elder member of the Men Going Their Own Way collective on Reddit once explained the concept to a newbie:

The cock carousel is what the majority of females spend their prime fertility years riding. This is age 14-25, as soon as she becomes sexually active (usually at 14 sometimes earlier) she will essentially not go longer than a week or two without getting dick. The number of partners can range from 2-500+.

Another MGTOW Redditor defined the term a little more succinctly:

The cock carousel? Preeeeetty sure it just means they’re jumping from one chads cock to the next.

In the vivid imaginations of many of today’s young misogynists, young women  are having sex almost constantly with a bewildering array of men. But not just any men: According to the current misogynist dogma, while virtually all young women, regardless how conventionally attractive they are, have no trouble finding sex in their “prime” years, these women are so spoiled and picky that they won’t even consider sex with any but the studliest of men. So for most women, their twenties are a sexual feast; for men that age, a famine. Or so the “cock carousel” mythology has it.

Estimates of the number of cocks these women ride during this busy decade or so vary, but many of today’s young misogynists assume the typical total is well above one hundred. According to the MGTOW Redditor known as ovendice,

the average U.S. female starts having sex around 12 and by the time she is 25 she has prob had sex with as many as 150 different men.

Someone called LowendLenovo, posting in the same thread, agreed:

I knew a girl who fucked over 100 guys by the time she was 24. Remember all a girl has to do is leave the house to get laid. All of you thinking the average is 10-20 need to get a grip and realise there are 52 weeks in a year and if she goes out on all of those weekends then numbers add up real quickly.

Another MGTOW tried to do the math:

Imagine a girl gets 40 messages a day from guys(It’s a hella lot more). That’s 280 messages a week. That means she can possibly hook up with 280 different guys a week. Women go for the top 10% of men so there are 28 guys that she is willing to fuck each week. How many guys a woman will fuck depends on her. If she is willing to ride the cock carousel hard she will fuck 10 guys a week. 

After adjusting his numbers a bit to include women who don’t ride the carousel quite so hard, he estimates that the typical total ranges from around 70 to something closer to 400. A year.

While the allegedly woman-avoiding MGTOWs and their “involuntarily celibate” cousins the incels tend to complain the most bitterly about the large number of men other than them that women their age are allegedly sleeping with, whining about the “cock carousel” is common amongst all of the different kinds of misogynists who make up the contemporary “manosphere,” from Men’s Rights Activists to pickup artists.

There are a lot of things wrong with the notion of the cock carousel, but perhaps the most obvious one is that it bears no relationship to reality.

None of the central claims of the “cock carousel” myth are even remotely close to true — from the assumption that most girls start having sex at the age of 13 or thereabouts to the notion that women in their twenties are hooking up with dozens if not hundreds of men a year.

Indeed, the consensus of most of those who’ve seriously studied contemporary sexuality is that young people today are having much less sex than most people imagine — and less than their Gen X and Baby Boomer counterparts had when they were the same age. And this goes for both men and women.

Let’s start with teenagers, who are starting to have sex at a later age than teens of previous generations. As journalist Kate Julian notes in The Atlantic,

teens are launching their sex lives later. From 1991 to 2017, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Youth Risk Behavior Survey finds, the percentage of high-school students who’d had intercourse dropped from 54 to 40 percent. In other words, in the space of a generation, sex has gone from something most high-school students have experienced to something most haven’t. (And no, they aren’t having oral sex instead—that rate hasn’t changed much.)

What about all those girls who are allegedly starting to have sex at the age of 12? They are figments of the misogynist imagination. According to the most recent figures I found from the CDC, the average (mean) age at first intercourse for girls/women aged 15-44 was 17.3, slightly higher than the average for boys/men (17.0). According to the CDC’s 2017  Youth Risk Behavior Survey, only 3.4% of 9th-12th grade students started having sex when they were younger than 13, a huge drop from the 10.2% who reported the same in 1991.

So, no, fellas. Girls aren’t hopping on the “cock carousel” in their early teens or younger. They typically start having sex in their late teens, pretty much exactly when their male counterparts do.

How many partners do women typically have once they do start having sex? Well, let’s just say it’s a lot fewer than ten guys a week. Indeed, most women aged 25-44 years have had less than half this number of total partners OVER THE COURSE OF THEIR WHOLE ADULT LIVES. 4.2 partners, to be exact, a bit fewer than the number of female partners (6.1) that men in the same age range report, according to the CDC.

The percentage of girls and women aged  15-44 who have had more than five partners in the past 12 months is all of 1.7 percent, compared to 4.0% for their male counterparts.

Generally speaking, as Julian points out, American adults are having less sex than their counterparts were having twenty years ago. Citing the research of San Diego State University psychologist Jean M. Twenge, Julian notes that “the average adult went from having sex 62 times a year [in the late 1990s] to 54 times [as of 2014].”

Indeed, as she goes on to report,

none of the many experts I interviewed for this piece seriously challenged the idea that the average young adult circa 2018 is having less sex than his or her counterparts of decades past. Nor did anyone doubt that this reality is out of step with public perception—most of us still think that other people are having a lot more sex than they actually are.

And this goes ten times for manosphere misogynists.

So what difference does it make if a bunch of women-hating dudes on the internet have weird and exaggerated notions of how often young women have sex? Because these fantasies serve only to deepen their misogyny.

As the misogynists see it, when women have sex with multiple men — even if their “notch counts” don’t number in the hundreds  — they basically destroy the chance that they’ll ever be able to settle down and truly love one man, rendering them unfit for long-term relationships and making them “completely incapable of properly pairbonding in a marriage.” 

What makes it worse, as the misogynists see it, is that these women have squandered their “best years” — that is, their primo sex-having years, the years when they were at their hottest — on a succession of unsuitable and unworthy “bad boys,” so by the time they are willing to give the decent but sex-deprived beta males sitting on the sidelines a chance, they are already worn down husks of womanhood with “thousand cock stares.”

In other words, the misogynists think that too much sex with too many men ruins women — for men like them. And these guys also think that women have way more sex with way more men than they really do — exaggerating the amount of sex women are having by orders of magnitude. These two shared delusions are a recipe for bitterness and hate. The mythology of the cock carousel is one of the main things making the manosphere such an incredibly toxic place.

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