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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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Moon_custafer
Moon_custafer
6 years ago

(I’d expect, too, that if the majority are telling the truth you’d get a spectrum of different experiences, because people have different lives/interests.)

Katamount
Katamount
6 years ago

In other news, Ontario Tories are all terrible!

https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2018/11/15/vic-fedeli-doug-ford-patrick-brown-yellow-ties_a_23590705/?utm_hp_ref=ca-politics

Goddamn it, that anybody cast a ballot for these dipshits just galls me!

Moon_custafer
Moon_custafer
6 years ago

Argh. On the one hand, you definitely need to investigate such allegations: if Fedeli did it he should be held responsible and if he didn’t he should have a chance to clear his name; and I’m creeped out by mass declarations of solidarity with a person accused of sexual misconduct.

On the other hand, I reserve the right to be cagier about third-party accusations than I am when a victim comes forward in person (even anonymously); and Patrick Brown strikes me as being about as reliable a source as the Daily Mail. If Horvath is willing to take the political risk of calling for an inquiry, though, I suppose it’s always possible she has other information backing up Brown’s claim.

Gaebolga
Gaebolga
6 years ago

Joaquin wrote:

Do you think a woman will be honest about the number of guys she had sex with?

In an anonymous study with no possible social consequences for her? Why not?

Unless you subscribe to the “bitches always lie” school of dumbshittery, of course….

Rabid Rabbit
Rabid Rabbit
6 years ago

@Katamount:

Thoroughly unsurprising. That being said, I admit I was grudgingly impressed with DoFo when he immediately fired the last two, even if I assume it’s about optics rather than actually caring.

Also terrible is their budget, of course. I particularly liked the combination of “Everyone’s going to have to make sacrifices, people!” and “So we’re going to get rid of that extra tax on rich people.”

heebee
heebee
6 years ago

Very narrow minded article. Even if it did exist, a person can sleep around in her/his early twenties and still be a good loyal partner in their late twenties/thirties

And this is coming from an undateable guy too. Criticising people for sleeping around is dumb. Just really dumb

Pie
Pie
6 years ago

@Gaebolga

Unless you subscribe to the “bitches always lie” school of dumbshittery, of course….

Heavens, no! Everyone knows they are only lying when they disagree with men. Some brave feeeeemales dare to break ranks, eg. https://www.wehuntedthemammoth.com/2016/02/21/hot-dead-chick-reveals-dark-female-secrets-to-return-of-kings-including-the-dog-stuff/.

weirwoodtreehugger: chief manatee

Joaquin,

You seem to have a little trouble with reading comprehension. The issue is, the manosphere makes an assumption that women, as a whole are having sex with hundreds of men. The data – that is large studies conducted by the government or universities – entirely contradicts this. There are people who lie on anonymous surveys. This is why large samples sizes are preferable. They can absorb these outliers. The notion that there’s a vast global gender- wide conspiracy to lie about the number of sexual partners we have is just absurd. Do you really think that’s the case?

Catalpa
Catalpa
6 years ago

@Joaquin

Do you think a woman will be honest about the number of guys she had sex with?

If the women in the surveys were lying their pants off, then you would expect the numbers reported between men and women to be vastly different, since it’s assumed that most sexual encounters will include a man and a woman. Unless the men are also lying and underreporting the amount of sex they have. And why would they do that? If a dude is having tons of sex, wouldn’t he want to brag about it?

(I suppose the other option is that women are having vast amounts of sex with each other and lying about it, if the “all women actually have sex with hundreds of different people during their 20s!” hypothesis is to be supported.)

From the numbers reported (4.2 vs 6.1 sexual partners over the lifetime), I’d expect that women have a tendency to report slightly lower numbers and men to report slightly higher numbers than may be strictly accurate, but nothing massively different.

hebeee
hebeee
6 years ago

Even if women were lying and they were getting laid often, who cares? Good for them if they enjoy it

Im an undateable virgin and I would hate to be shamed for it, so why should women be shamed for sleeping around?

heebee
heebee
6 years ago

As an undateable guy, I would hate to be virgin shamed, so why should we shame women who sleep around? (Even if women were lying and do sleep with lots of men- SO FUCKING WHATTT)

If women are happy to experiment and sleep around, fair play.

JenniferAndLightning
JenniferAndLightning
6 years ago

@heebee

No one here thinks there is anything wrong with women (or men) having lot’s of consensual sex at any age. Facts, however, are important.

False claims about a cock carousel are harmful because they sexualize young teens (and tweens even) who are still pre-sexual. Also, such claims are used to justify misogyny and to foster a sense of alienation and oppression. Google “sex recession” and you will see that the truth is that young people are simply having less sex than they did a generation ago. As a parent of 2 teens I can’t imagine when teens would have sex, because unlike in my youth, they are rarely left unsupervised. But even the college students I work with are simply less sexually active than my peers were at that age.

The evidence is not limited to self-reported studies (although those can be very accurate), but also includes steep drops in std/sti rates for those demographics along with drops in accidental pregancies and abortions. Teens and young people are engaging in less risky behavior over all. There are also fewer car accidents in those demographics.

Lastly, the only things that makes anyone “undateable” are attitude and behavior. Yes, it is easier for pretty people to date, but I, personally, know of many people (men amd women) who are not conventionally attractive and yet have successful romantic lives.

heebee
heebee
6 years ago

Hi Jenniffer:)

Agree with all your points above, was just making a point thats all.

However, I do think there is a small amount of people who just arent cut out to date (some incels too). Attitude and behaviour obviously plays a big part (especially with incels) but its slight unfair in my opinion to state that any guy/woman who hasnt ever dated has behaviour or attitude problems. And you know what? Theres no shame in that. Not everyone will be good at everything, not everyone can have everything. Its better to focus and appreciate what you DO have and CAN do rather than worry about something you cant have (dates in my case lol).

But being a whiny idiot about it and acting entitled and resentful like the incels? EVERY SHAME in that and they deserve to be mocked and ridiculed.

kupo
kupo
6 years ago

@Heebee
Stating that you are “undateable” is basically saying that women are too shallow to look past whatever flaw you think it is that has put you in the situation of not dating anyone. It’s misogynistic at its core, and it’s a key incel talking point.

You’re not “undateable.” It’s fine if you don’t date or don’t want to try or would like to but haven’t been successful. But chalking it up to, “well, I’m just undateable” is assuming there is not one woman out there who would consider you attractive and that’s misogynistic as hell.

Jesalin: Clit-o-centric Lesbian Goddess
Jesalin: Clit-o-centric Lesbian Goddess
6 years ago

Lastly, the only things that makes anyone “undateable” are attitude and behavior. Yes, it is easier for pretty people to date, but I, personally, know of many people (men amd women) who are not conventionally attractive and yet have successful romantic lives.

Seconded.

jaygee
jaygee
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.

This comment from page 1 amused me because it highlights the fact that incels don’t even know how carousels work.
I guess I count as a millennial or Gen Y having graduated high school in the early 2000s. I noticed a lot of serial monogamy among my peers. There are couples I know who were dating in high school but didn’t marry until a decade later in our late twenties.
I will also add that I didn’t first have sex until I was 19 with my first bf, who was also a virgin, and nothing like the incel’s idea of a Chad. I spent my entire twenties with this one partner. So I had 1 partner for what’s considered my prime. I’ve since “hit the wall” and had a few more partners since then. I should also add that I’ve gotten more compliments after turning 30 than before, refuting the idea that women decline after “hitting the wall.” We all know the incel idea of reality bears no resemblance to actual reality, but I feel it’s good to see how they get things so wrong.

Old Fart
Old Fart
6 years ago

As I guy who remembers the pre-AIDS era, I can only say I never saw the cock carousel in action. What I saw (in college) was move a vagina carousel of women abused in a Kavinaugh-esque series of alcohol fueled assaults.
Ultimately, it comes down to not acting like an entitled anal pore…

Catalpa
Catalpa
6 years ago

I’d consider myself undateable, but not because there is absolutely, 100% no one out there who might be willing to date me. It’s because I’m just not interested in or willing to make the compromises and sacrifices and time commitment that is required to maintain a romantic relationship. The benefits aren’t worth it for me, by my estimation. (That I’m ace and won’t be having any sex kind of helps make the decision for me. I don’t have any drive for a partner to satisfy, and the majority of my potential partners will expect that kind of intimacy, which is not something I will be providing. But even for another ace person, I don’t think I would be a good partner.)

It’s not a flaw of mine, and it’s not a flaw of any of my potential partners. It’s just the way that I am, and the choice that I’ve made. This is the way I am most happy.

Most people who describe themselves as undateable probably don’t mean “I have taken the time for deep self-reflection and determined that trying to have a romantic relationship with someone else is unfair to both them and myself”, though. I bet that they mean “I’d sure like to have a romantic relationship with the demographic of my choice, but there are literally none of them who could possibly look past my flaws, because they are all the same and have the same standards and desires.” Which, yeah, that opinion isn’t a great one.

heebee
heebee
6 years ago

@Kupo,

With all due respect I disagree. I dont really believe in shallow when it comes to dating. Its called having preferences. No hard feelings. No shame in that.

No women does find me attractive. Does make me a loser. Doesnt make the women who rejected me “bad or shallow” people. Some things in life arent meant to happen. We cant all have everything. Its human nature to think and worry about that you cant get rather than appreciate and enjoy what you do have (where incels go wrong and what makes them bitter in the first place).

So chill. I aint attractive enough to date. But that doesnt make me women-hater. Doesnt make or assume women as “shallow” (whatever that means now in our snowflake- cant handle rejection- generation). Everyones good. No-bodys fault. Life goes on. Theres more to life than dating and sex

Lumipuna (nee Arctic Ape)
Lumipuna (nee Arctic Ape)
6 years ago

heebee, what a funny coincidence!

We periodically get this particular type of new commenter who jumps in to announce they’re “undateable but OK with it”, then doubles down when someone objects to the very concept of “undateability”. I recall it started with some more outright incel sympathizer, who was slapped down after lengthy arguments. Successive versions of the type have been increasingly subtle, almost like we’re training someone in the art of quasi-feminist sockpuppeting.

Alan Robertshaw
Alan Robertshaw
6 years ago

My mate Groot thought he was undateable, but then he met a nice dendrochronologist.

heebee
heebee
6 years ago

No one in the right mind would sympathise with an incel.

I sympathise with people with REAL problems (e.g, mental health problems, bad upbringing, ill relatives ect).

Not being able to get your penis wet isnt really a big deal. Incels need to grow up, stop watching porn, delete the dating apps and actually do something that makes them happy.

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

@Alan,

Had to look that one up, but *sporfle* ! XD

Jenora Feuer
Jenora Feuer
6 years ago

@Alan:

Ow.

(Is it sad that I mostly know what dendrochronology is from creationism rebuttals? Though my mother had several of the old Life Science Library books from the 1960s, and I vaguely recall one of them having a description of tree-ring matching.)

Alan Robertshaw
Alan Robertshaw
6 years ago

My favourite dating method is the ‘Boudiccan Destruction Horizon’; just for the name. Now that’s a legacy.

It is a bit limited; but I have an interest in Roman Britain so it’s handy there.