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

Well, ok, THIS cock (and horse and zebra) carousel is a real thing

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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otrame
otrame
6 years ago

I find myself a little curious about why the amount of sex in younger generations has gone down.

As for the “cock carousel”, how many men a woman has had sex with is absolutely not your business, you idiots.

Rabid Rabbit
Rabid Rabbit
6 years ago

Pretty sure that’s a tiger in the photo, not a zebra.

Aside from that, there’s really not much to add. I’m always impressed by how much of the manosphere’s mindset can be explained by them 1) still being pissed off that Julie wouldn’t show them her breasts in seventh grade and 2) having stewed throughout high school convinced that everyone else was having sex when they weren’t, and never getting over it.

Redsilkphoenix: Jetpack Vixen, Intergalactic Meanie
Redsilkphoenix: Jetpack Vixen, Intergalactic Meanie
6 years ago

Uhm, Boss, I thiiink that white stripey animal in the left background there is actually a white tiger, not a zebra.

ETA: ninja’d by Rabid Rabbit.

tim gueguen
6 years ago

The irony is that some of these guys will end up being the “bad boys” they think women are generally attracted to. Their relations with the women they get romantically involved with will end up being emotionally toxic at best, and fatal at worst.

Surplus to Requirements, Observer of the Vast Blight-Wing Enstupidation
Surplus to Requirements, Observer of the Vast Blight-Wing Enstupidation
6 years ago

@otrame:

I find myself a little curious about why the amount of sex in younger generations has gone down.

With everyone not old enough to have been grandfathered-in to having decent full-time full-benefits work having to juggle three McJobs just to keep the rent/mortgage debt and student loan debt from sucking them under, who on Earth has the time these days?

weirwoodtreehugger: chief manatee

I don’t have research to back me up, I’m just guessing. But I think part of it is that people are more educated about pregnancy and STIs. Part of it, I think, is that there’s very little privacy. Between the surveillance state, cell phones, and social media, everyone can be tracked all the time and everybody knows everybody else’s business. Makes it harder to do things that might be considered taboo.

Bina
Bina
6 years ago

@otrame:

I strongly suspect that difficulty obtaining abortions and/or birth control might play a role. As does all the misinformation sowed by abstinence-only curricula. With so much difficulty obtaining accurate information and effective pregnancy/STD protection, I’d guess that a lot of teens are simply not doing it because that’s the safest option.

Either that, or there are slews of repugnant dudes out there gleaning so much misinformation about women and girls off the internet, that all the girls are just naturally put off.

Genjones
Genjones
6 years ago

Let’s set something straight, fellas. There was never any chance of a woman finding happiness with you. Also, you seem to have based your concept of human mating behavior on James Cameron’s Avatar.

Most consider their prime years for having children to be after they’re educated, financially stable and sure they have a compatible partner. It’s a role that requires auditions, and you are the ones that get weeded out Simon Cowell style. Sorry darling, but you haven’t got the range.

Alex
Alex
6 years ago

I didn’t lose my virginity until I was 20 in 2002, because I was scared shitless by HIV. I suspect older millennials had similar fears — STIs, HIV, and the general worries about unplanned pregnancies, etc. I also notice that there’s a lot more serial monogamy in my age cohort, something that baffles my parents. They still don’t get why I didn’t date several people at the same time like they did in the 60s and 70s. So I suspect that for Boomers especially, who came of age sexually before HIV and before the norm of serial monogamy (which I think might be also due to HIV indirectly, since that awareness changed social norms, especially amongst queer folks), higher numbers of casual sex, especially hetero casual sex, were more normal. But I do sociology as a sub-field and thinking about influencing factors of social trends is just normal. I’m honestly hypothesising from experience and anecdotes, I don’t have data to back it up.

But I don’t think these garden-gnome misogynists think about this stuff. They’re more obsessed with how to shame women for not banging them, only them, when they say so, and being chaste but sexy virgins until then. Which, sorry guys, that’s never been a norm for women in almost all of history, save for some high-ranking women whose chastity was a matter of privilege, bloodlines, and power. The myth of “women were good and chaste and had marriages arranged for them and were virgins until the wedding night at all costs” is just that — a myth. The sexual revolution just made that reality easier and more visible thanks to the Pill. But history isn’t their strong suit, either, seems like.

Knitting Cat Lady
Knitting Cat Lady
6 years ago

Saw a bumper sticker a few days ago: ‘My other toy has tits!’

That would be a blow up doll, then?

Anyways, there are plenty of people out there who never have sex. At all. Because they’re asexual.

And I’m pretty sure that the repugnant personalities of MGTOWs and their ilk are enough to turn someone who really loves having sex celibate.

Guys, it’s you. It’s your own fault nobody wants you.

YV
YV
6 years ago

About why young people are having less sex nowadays… I think it’s very likely because of better sex education. I don’t have the numbers to back me up now, but I do remember reading someone that in countries with comprehensive sex education people start having sex later, on average. It might be because they’re more aware of STIs and pregnancy, but, as a young person who started having sex a bit later than average, I was never really worried about those things (I knew how to protect myself, that my boyfriend was as virginal and unlikely to have an STI as I was, and knew that even if I did get pregnant, I would be able to obtain an abortion). I personally think that the openness about sex has made it so that teenager no longer need to satisfy their curiosity by actually doing the deed. So when they do become sexually active, it’s because they are actually emotionally ready. They can learn about it beforehand in safe, non-judgmental environments, and I think that many of them probably prefer that above cluelessly fumbling around in the dark.

Moggie
Moggie
6 years ago

So, a bunch of guys who get their ideas of sexuality largely from porn end up with a lot of inaccurate beliefs? Surprising!

Sbel
Sbel
6 years ago

@otrame:

I think there are a number of different things contributing to it. Fear of HIV and pregnancy, sure. HIV is still scary, but it was terrifying when it was a death sentence. And an unplanned pregnancy can really derail your whole life.

Lack of privacy and freedom, sure. As an older millennial, I’m still kind of shocked each time I’m reminded that a lot of Boomers and GenX were basically allowed to just roam around town with absolutely no adult supervision. No wonder they were a bunch of hooligans.

Another thought is consent culture. In the 60s and 70s part of the whole sexual revolution thing was telling people that they could have sex for fun! Without getting married! But since the 90s we’ve been more focused on saying “But you don’t have to, if you don’t want to!” So maybe now people are more willing to say “no” if they’re not really interested/ready? Resulting in waiting until later to start having sex + less sex overall?

Society has also started to get a lot harsher towards adults who have sex with teens…

The trend also matches some other trends… violent crime rate has been going down since the 90s, teen pregnancy rates have gone down since the 90s. Teen alcohol use is down. Not just teen use either. I was just reading that some companies are getting concerned, seems Millennials don’t drink enough alcohol. It’s part of a broader cultural shift, not just sex.

One theory is lead poisoning. Small children who are exposed to lead grow up to have lower IQs, poor impulse control, etc, and prone to violent crime. Some people think that the switch to unleaded fuel helps explain the decrease in violent crime. It could also help explain the decrease in anything that might come from poor impulse control. Like, say, sex. In that theory Millennials and GenZ aren’t anything new, we’re just reverting back to how people used to be before we pumped tons of lead into our environment and gave our kids lead poisoning. (Incidentally, one thing I like about this theory is it helps me explain why so many older people support Trump. Lead poisoning. )

Another theory. Legal abortion and accessible birth control leads to smaller families and fewer unwanted children. Leads to more time and attention from parents leads to kids being raised better on average, leads to less crime and less trouble in general, and kids making better decisions.

Anyway, I don’t really have any answers, just a jumble of thoughts. Sorry! 😉

Sheila Crosby
6 years ago

I suspect the heyday of casual sex was between the invention of the pill and the realisation that PiV intercourse could spread AIDS.
Of course antibiotics dealt with STDs before AIDS. So that’s only about a 20 year window, about 40 years ago, where consequence-free sex was a possibility, and it still seems to form the basis of the manuresphere world view.

IMHO one reason why teen girls are having less sex is that they have more self esteem. I’m sure they still want a boyfriend, but I really hope they don’t see having one as the entire measure of their self worth, the way my generation did. This means they can say “No” as well as “Yes” – their decision. I’m sure MRAs see this as a bad thing.

Samantha Ravensdaughter
Samantha Ravensdaughter
6 years ago

I am reminded of the justifications for torturing and killing mostly women during the Inquisition. You know, that little religious hiccup that started in the mid 1300’s and sorta ended in the mid 1800’s. As I recall, bonfires were very popular right around that time.

Anyway, in the Malleus Malificarum (sp?), that lovely guide book to the world of evil people, especially women, we of the non-penised variety were declared carnally insatiable…one of the signs that we, being the weaker sex and morally degenerate to boot, were screwing everything we could wrap our legs around.. Oh, and we were also blamed for the terribly embarrassing “nocturnal emissions.”

It seems that this obsessing over who and how many get to “know ” us, in the biblical sense, goes back at least to the beginning of writing. One would think that the penised ones would get sick and tired of wasting their time worrying about how much fun we might be having and get on with improving and enjoying their own lives.

Apparently, one would be wrong.

Catalpa
Catalpa
6 years ago

Unfortunately, none of this article will convince any manospherians that the cock carousel is a myth, since it all relies on people self-reporting their sexual activity. They’re just going to reply that women are degenerate liars.

Admittedly, you’d think that if these women actually had an average of 100+ partners instead of 4, that those numbers would be reflected in the supposedly truthful reporting of men’s sexual activity. Perhaps if cis women are nearly exclusively sleeping with trans women, then the cis women can get to ride tons of cock and the statistics are entirely concealed by women being lying [insert slur of choice here].

Or perhaps Pussy Georg, who lives in a cave and has sex with 10,000 women a year, was an outlier and was not counted.

I find myself a little curious about why the amount of sex in younger generations has gone down.

I feel like sex ed and porn are a lot more available and a lot less mystified than previous generations, so kids can often satisfy their curiosity about sex without having to engage in it with someone else. But that’s just my guess.

Kat, ambassador of the feminist government in exile
Kat, ambassador of the feminist government in exile
6 years ago

@Samantha Ravensdaughter

One would think that the penised ones would get sick and tired of wasting their time worrying about how much fun we might be having and get on with improving and enjoying their own lives.

No effin’ way.

Manospherians — MGTOWs, incels, and PUAs — are perfect as they are. Improvement? Not possible. You cannot improve on perfection.

Enjoyment? Also not possible. It’s the fault of women that manospherians are miserable. In fact, manospherians are completely helpless in the face of powerful women who decide to have sex with men who are not them, thus causing misery for the manospherians. Helpless. Completely.

Rob
Rob
6 years ago

So apparently I’ve been doing carousels wrong my whole life. I didn’t realise you’re meant to leap from one horse to another, riding as many as possible before the ride stops.

Wetherby
Wetherby
6 years ago

I didn’t lose my virginity until I was 20 in 2002, because I was scared shitless by HIV. I suspect older millennials had similar fears — STIs, HIV, and the general worries about unplanned pregnancies, etc.

Same here. My late teens coincided perfectly with the British government’s full-on safe sex campaigns in the mid-1980s, and while I didn’t abstain from sex altogether, I was a lot more circumspect than I suspect I’d have been five or ten years earlier. I also didn’t have sex without a condom until I was 25, the first time that I was absolutely certain that my girlfriend of the time had taken every imaginable anti-pregnancy precaution, as that was just as big a concern for me as HIV transmission.

(Many years earlier, my mother told me point blank that if I got a woman pregnant and shirked my responsibilities, she’d disown me – and I have no doubt that she meant every word.)

And while I wasn’t privy to the sexual activities of my female friends at the time, I also got the very strong impression that they weren’t notching up triple-figure numbers of partners per year. Three per year (if that) was most likely closer to the truth, and I can think of plenty of cases where it was just one or none.

IMHO one reason why teen girls are having less sex is that they have more self esteem. I’m sure they still want a boyfriend, but I really hope they don’t see having one as the entire measure of their self worth, the way my generation did. This means they can say “No” as well as “Yes” – their decision. I’m sure MRAs see this as a bad thing.

I completely agree. My 13-year-old daughter seems to be extremely level-headed on the subject, and her mother in particular is a fervent advocate of thoroughly comprehensive sex education (she thoroughly approves of these rather magnificent – if understandably NSFW – Norwegian sex education videos). And I suspect it’s the fact that we’ve made sure that she’s never lacking for intelligent, thoroughly contextualised information about sex that’s made her so level-headed.

WhoAmINowIAmWho
WhoAmINowIAmWho
6 years ago

porn are a lot more available and a lot less mystified than previous generations, so kids can often satisfy their curiosity about sex without having to engage in it with someone else. But that’s just my guess.

“That’s a Bingo!”

Violet the Vile, Moonbat Screech Junky
Violet the Vile, Moonbat Screech Junky
6 years ago

With a full time job, part time study, keeping up with my friends and family and 5+ hours a week karate training – not to mention basic hygiene – I can barely find the time to apply lip gloss, let alone the time to have sex with 10+ guys a week. How long do they think sex takes?? I have to do laundry!

As discussed in the Angela Merkel thread a while ago, the only way to actually achieve this goal would be to combine all the Chads and have a weekly bukkake party

I understand it’s very good for the skin, but would still involve a fair amount of annoying admin and scheduling. Perhaps all the Chads are friends and sync their google calendars, it would make sense for them if they’re sharing girls and it’s not like they need to compete with each other.

dust bunny
dust bunny
6 years ago

I believe it’s because of increasing social isolation and alienation. People are a lot lonelier overall than they used to be just a couple of decades ago. Sex is something you do with another person (for the purposes of this conversation, anyway) so it makes sense there’d be fewer opportunities for that.

As for what’s causing the alienation and isolation, well, you’ll blame your favourite evil. For some people it’s breakdown of community, religion and tradition that is caused by some sort of moral decay (possibly of the kind where we’re no longer hateful enough toward certain groups of people). Some would say it’s because of technology. Some would say capitalism.

edit. And yeah, probably the newly discovered women’s right to say no, too.

Wetherby
Wetherby
6 years ago

As for what’s causing the alienation and isolation, well, you’ll blame your favourite evil. For some people it’s breakdown of community, religion and tradition that is caused by some sort of moral decay (possibly of the kind where we’re no longer hateful enough toward certain groups of people). Some would say it’s because of technology. Some would say capitalism.

I certainly think that technology has facilitated the ability to convince ourselves that certain things must be true even though every available fact and statistic strongly suggests otherwise.

In the past, people who sincerely believed that they were the only ones not benefiting from sexual liberation would have had nowhere to turn to except possibly a couple of like-minded friends, but now they have entire communities, and the most toxic ideas are usually the ones that gain the most traction, not least because they’re the most eye-catchingly shiny. And also because they’re the theories that are most inclined to completely ignore mundane reality, which is that instead of 20% of men having 100% of sex, it’s more likely that 90% of men at the barest minimum are getting laid reasonably regularly, if not necessarily in situations involving 14-year-old virgin supermodels.

And because these ideas ignore reality, the temptation to spend as much time as possible in this online fantasy world becomes overwhelming.

Vaiyt
Vaiyt
6 years ago

The cock carousel is an essential element of the incel mythos, because their base theory – that most women are having sex with the same few men – would make the dudes the promiscuous ones.

Buttercup Q. Skullpants
Buttercup Q. Skullpants
6 years ago

Another contributor is a lack of free time. There are a lot more distractions now compared to when I was a young’un. Netflix, Hulu, Facebook, Instagram, texting, chat rooms, online gaming – all of these use up free time. Much of teenagers’ social life takes place online.

On top of that, Gen Z is focused on career development and getting into college in a world that’s gotten more competitive and scheduled in the past few decades. Sports and extracurriculars demand a high level of commitment. Many have to work jobs in order to pay for secondary education or help out the family. The pace of life has quickened. Down time is much rarer. It’s part of a larger trend of putting off engaging in adult behaviors like alcohol, driving, marriage, etc.

Re: the cock carousel, it’s an interesting metaphor in that a carousel goes nowhere, just round and round, implying that women don’t learn anything from all those partners and sex is nothing but a repetitious series of dreary, empty conquests. Seems like another case of projection.

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