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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@ Sheila Crosby:
That’s at very least a generation of men, and barely a generation has passed since the beginning of the time period. Factor in misinformation passed from older to younger men for the duration of that 20 years,, well, to me it’s not surprising at all.
Factor in the idea that manospheroids are inherently conservative, while also being readily receptive of any social convention that favors them over women, and you have an explanation of why it’s STILL that way in reddit-burg.
I still haven’t lost my virginity and I’m turning 28 in a few days. It doesn’t bug me though. I’ll lose it when I do.
”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. ”
That equation is extraordinary. The only true element of it is ‘imagine’.
It is true that as a child of 12 to young womanhood I could have had sex with men every day. I was approached constantly by men. If I had wanted to fuck men 2, 3 or 4 times my age I could have. Strangely enough, sleazy strangers did not have any appeal! Instead, it was unpleasant at best, frightening at worst to be given that ‘opportunity’.
If, for some reason, the Manosphere decided that the CC is a load of bollocks (thinking logically is a start) they would find another reason to hate women. I am pretty sure that many of them spend quite a considerable amount of time finding ways to hate women and to blame women for every single thing that is wrong with their lives.
Taking responsibility for their own happiness, life choices and mistakes is something a Manospherian simply cannot do.
So, the typical 10 %er dude has sex with 700 to 4 000 different women a year?
And apparently, every man on average is sending hookup messages to 14 000 different women a year?
The numbers, they do add up.
The tendency is global or at least exists in many countries, so I don´t think it has to do with difficulties obtaining abortion or contraceptives.
The explanation almost certainly has to do with digital culture, young people spend more time in front of screens and less time getting drunk together, also social media and cameras mean they watch themselves more. The fact young people also move out from home later might also influence.
Apparently the convenience of online dating is not enough to offset the factors above.
My 28-year-old son’s high school friends who have married got married older than my high school friends, many of whom married right out of high school. Maybe better sex education and a generation of parents who were less reluctant to talk about topics like sex and drugs helped.
Personally, I lost my virginity at 16 and I was definitely not emotionally ready for such a thing. Much though I joke about riding the cock carousel, I really never did. The guy I lost my virginity to was this gangly fellow about six foot six and he looked a lot more like Bob Denver than Brad Pitt.
I was totally in love with him, was planning the wedding in my head and all, and he broke my heart. That colliding with a bunch of other fucked up stuff in my life earned me a trip to the mental hospital over the weekend with superficial cuts on my arms. I was treated like shit in that place which led to my pact with myself that I have kept for the past 37 years: I would die before I ever allow myself to be institutionalized again, even for a second.
What I didn’t know at that point and what I wouldn’t learn until I was 38 years old was that I had type 2 bipolar disorder, which is trickier to spot than type 1, and I had borderline personality disorder.
Far from wanting to ride the cock carousel, I had a very romantic mind and a very low self-esteem, which led to my being taken advantage of by a number of less-than-honorable guys. After a horrific and extremely psychologically abusive relationship with a misogynist who would force me to watch really awful porn–we are talking bestiality and scat here–and who would force me to do things like kiss his feet under the threat that he would take his “love” from me, I ended up at his place one night with blood dripping from both wrists because, surprise surprise, after the initial thrill wore off he replaced my position as his “best girl” with someone who hadn’t yet “hit the wall.” She was in her early 20’s. I was 34 at the time.
I wasn’t done with ill-advised relationships yet, but even dense as I was I realized that I could not allow myself under the thrall of a creature like this ever again, if not for my sake than for my son’s.
Admissibly, my situation was a bit extreme because of my undiagnosed mental illness. But make no mistake, guys like this prey on vulnerable women. They even say things like “the crazy ones are great in bed,” and the line from Orange Is the New Black where Sophia tells her son about the philosophy of practicing on an insecure girl isn’t a lie. These assholes don’t think of women as people, they think of them as things to be used.
Maybe women of my son’s generation are savvier about these creeps than women of my generation were. Women of my generation expected a certain level of misogyny. The younger generation may be less willing to put up with it. I certainly hope so.
Just to shout out the previous posters, I think it’s a combination of all of those: education, self-confidence, privacy erosion, health and pregnancy concerns. Time management too… The Star ran a story today that high schoolers feel more stressed out than ever before. We keep heaping pressure on young people, no wonder they’re not going to find the time to play kissyface.
But more on the education aspect… if there’s one side-effect of this information-centric culture that we’re cultivating online, it’s that it demystifies a lot of things. Go back even 20 years and sex is “that thing that you might have seen on grainy scrambled late-night cable or heard about from a friend of a friend of Darryl who totally hooked up with Stacy at Warren’s keg party.” Now it’s that thing we’ve at least all seen on Game of Thrones, if not watched airbrushed performers with the flexibility of professional gymnasts engage in hour-long gangbangs on PornHub. In comparison to that, “plain old basic sex,” to quote Commander Riker, seems a tad ordinary.
One can see this in the tortured fantasies of the average Manospherian. They really do believe that every woman that resembles Sasha Grey is doing the stuff that Sasha Grey did on camera when not even Sasha Grey did that on a regular basis even when she was active in the adult industry! It’s the triumph of the fantasy over reality, but at the same time, this weird fusion of modern hook-up culture anxiety and puritanical “you’ve been soiled” shame-mongering. All of it essentially in the service of protecting their own egos while policing women’s sex lives.
I find honesty and mutual respect for people requires a lot less world-building.
Of course, these guys make no distinction between consensual sex and rape (including statutory), and do not take into consideration the prevalence of sexual violence. Their age estimates skew low because of their admiration of pedophiles who prey on young girls, who are then guilty of being on the cock carousel.
Young women aren’t trying to ride the cock carousel; they’re running risk analyses. Replace those animal statues with the live versions, and that’s a closer simulation for dating men as a young woman, or even just trying to live her own life without dating but with wild animals on the prowl. Some are horses, some roosters, and the occasional human-eating tiger.
Okay, so, every woman goes out and has sex every weekend… but they only pick the top 10% of men, so… those must be very busy men!
“I’m sorry Stacey, tonight isn’t good for me… maybe I can slot you in on sunday between Becky and Other Becky? Is 4pm okay?”
Now we know why Chad looks a bit pale on Mondays. He’s not getting any sleep on the weekend.
Samantha Ravensdaughter
Fun fact, the guy who wrote the Malleus was actually kicked out of the inquisition and discredited precisely because he was waaaay too interested in the sex lives of the the accused.
In my experience, I think the rise of online dating has actually had a negative effect. I suspect for a minority of people (albeit probably a sizable one) who can present well online, it works really well. For the rest of us, it’s a grinding slog. A writer I follow ran some numbers on his experience, and found that he had about a 5% success rate. And he was doing *well*. I’m not surprised that folks just don’t bother with it after a while-I’ve given up on it and taken a break twice now, and it looks like a third time coming up after the most recent rash of disappointments.
Haha, I sometimes refer to myself as an ex-slut (not in any judgmental way). I married Husband at 24 after a year’s engagement. Before him I had sex with, like, 20 persons or something like that? I used to think that was more than average but I was sorely mistaken! Actually, young me was pretty much a nun!
Also, math is hard, apparently. I was in a discussion a while ago with a self-identified MRA, who can actually (I know, hard to believe, right) often be convinced after a bit of argument that it can be hard to be a woman in today’s society with today’s gender roles and not just hard to be a man. But it was absolutely impossible for me to explain to him that every girl cannot pick and choose between multiple suitors who all wants to date her.
Me: “There’s pretty much the same number straight men and straight women. The math doesn’t add up!”
He: “There are actually more men than women!” *refers to Wikipedia and stats showing that men outnumber women with an absolutely inconsequential amount*
Me: “A whole bunch of male suitors for every woman is still impossible.”
He: “But there are guys who sort-of-pursues more than one woman at a time, ready to start dating any which one of these first responds positively to his efforts!”
Me: “Sure, but does pretty much every single man do this? Because otherwise the numbers still don’t add up!”
He: *Willfully refuses to listen to argument because he knows that he’s right.*
A related idea – which I think David should write about next – is that a woman will imprint on her first sex partner and can only properly love that one man. If the man who takes her virginity dumps her, she’ll spend the rest of her sexually-active years chasing the initial high of losing her virginity with other people, but she’ll be doomed to dissatisfaction because none of those other people can ever live up to the memory of Her First. That’s why manospherians want virgin partners so badly – they want their wife or girlfriend to have bonded with them and nobody else.
When you consider how many women remember their first sexual encounter with a man with amused embarrassment at best and traumatized horror at worst AND that people who aren’t cishet do exist AND how those who marry young are more likely to divorce than people who marry at an older age, this theory quickly breaks down. But as I said, I’d like to see David address this.
Out of morbid curiosity, I looked through the NoFap Reddit. One thing I noticed – some men asserting that they believed that immersing themselves in online video porn on the daily was bad for them.
While I have my own issues with the NoFap approach, this seems like a relatively healthy position. Given my own disconnect from the lived experience of young heterosexual men in today’s modern world of the future, it’s easy for me to dismiss such concerns. But watching video porn and masturbating to it every day does appear to have a potential downside.
The incel brigade would do well to learn from this, but that would mean abandoning the internalized mythology that makes them the tragic antiheros of their own stories.
As a corollary, it’s interesting that the “losing your virginity at all costs” movie genre has all but disappeared. In the ’80s, practically every coming-of-age teen movie revolved around the (usually male) protagonist’s quest to Get Some. Even if the movie was a comedy, the quest itself was never mocked or called into question. It was always presented as a noble endeavor, the moral heart of the movie. Women who thwarted the quest were treated as hideous beasts and comedy fodder, while pretty heroines who enabled the quest and helped the hero attain manhood were portrayed sympathetically. The message was pretty clear: which side are you on?
I’m sure B movies with that same basic plot are still being churned out, straight-to-discount-bin, but the idea of losing your V-card as a mandatory rite of high school passage seems to have gone the way of L.A. Gear and Members Only jackets. Maybe Gen Z women have better bullshit detectors and a better set of tools for analyzing and thinking critically about this stuff. I hope so.
OT: So Fox News is supporting CNN’s lawsuit against the White House for banning Acosta. And a bunch of Federalist Society supporting lawyers are suggesting that the Trump administration may be overdoing things and undermining the bases of democracy: https://www.thestar.com/news/world/2018/11/14/conservative-lawyers-say-trump-has-undermined-the-rule-of-law.html
I take it the American right is a bit more spooked by the midterms than they’d like to admit.
Buttercup: I haven’t seen it, but there was this teen comedy Cockblockers that came out last year about a bunch of girls who tried to get laid while their parents tried to stop them. From what I’ve read though, the movie was much better than it seemed from the premise, and ended up with some message about doing what you really want rather than doing what other people want you to, whether it’s having sex or abstaining.
@MrsObedMarsh
I’d be a lot more sympathetic to their wishes if incels didn’t have a shark-finning approach to virgins: catch, suck out the dewy youthful essence, and discard, as many as possible and as quickly as possible. That’s an awful lot of broken souls to leave in their wake.
@Dvarghundspossen – Cool! I like the idea of girls being the romantic protagonists, for a change. So many films treat women’s inner life as unimportant. It sounds like a much more well-thought out message than the typical teen movie takeaway of thirty years ago, which was “get laid, get into Harvard, and make a pile of money on Wall Street”. Lordy, the ’80s sucked.
Ah I love the cock carousel its so whimsical to ride a giant chicken around
Oh they mean peens
Seriously though I wonder how they get the numbers for their estimations on how many cocks a woman has had. I suspect they pull the numbers put of their collective ass rather than the sharp pointy thorn covered stick that’s making them grouchy. Also a quick fact though the state I live in still has a high teen pregnancy and sti and std rate but the reasoning is because of an enforced abstinece only based curriculum (that also shames rape victims nonetheless)
These guy’s ideologies would fit nicely in with the curriculum here eesh
(Hope You enjoy my moniker)
I, like Dvarghundspossen, though I’d be sort of the exception that proved the rule (of actual average sex partners) but according to these precious fellows, my count of 50-60 is *still* pretty middling. In the late 70s and early 80s, I thought I was working pretty hard at getting laid, but I guess I was actually slacking, lol. But seriously, I really didn’t have any other hobbies because it took up a lot of time. Not as much time as it would have in civilian life (I don’t think) but still.
As far as the shedding the dreaded virginity, I swallowed that hook, line, and sinker as a young woman in the 70s! I was obsessed with getting rid of mine before basic training.
@Dvärghundspossen
The marysue reviewed it a while back and apparently its surprisingly sex positive.
It’s not just the 80s. American Pie was one of the worst offenders when it comes to teen movies and consent.
There were a few spin offs from the original series with new characters, too. I’m not sure when the last one was. I’m sure they’re all terrible too.
I’m curious: what do manospherians do when presented with actual data of this sort? how do they explain the incongruity between their beliefs and reality? do they have conspiracy theories? do they believe the Feminist Shadow Matriarchy is trying to cover up The Truth About The Cock Carousel™?
The obsession with girls having sex at 12 is because these guys are basically paedophiles and they want to justify their attraction and lust for underage girls. Thinking about 12 year olds getting banged by Chad turns them on, then they have the cheek to call everyone else a cuck. :/
BTW, the cock carousel sounds horrendous, as an asexual, I’ve ridden a total of nil cocks, and I’m none the worse off for it. Each to their own I guess.
This story (content warning: rape, victim-blaming) is currently making headlines here in Ireland, which makes my patience with MRA “cock carousel” narratives even shorter than usual. Sure, any woman can go out of a weekend and get laid! Just wear a thong! Raging right now…
@ brian
They ignore it. Or only address it by coming up with literally any reason to nitpick, argue and be skeptical, related/justified or not, doesn’t matter.
People are really good at not changing their minds in the face of overwhelming evidence.