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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Never mind the facts, logic alone should make anybody doubt that theory. If almost ALL women have A LOT of sex with just a relatively small subset of men, then those later man would have to spend almost allt their waking time fucking, at least if we include the time necesary to ge to know and set up meeting with women. For example for every woman to have sex with a new man from the smaller group every week, those men would need to have sex with a new woman every day more or less. That´s not a level most men would find practical to keep up or even desire.
@Neon:
Uh, have you forgotten that gay men exist? And yea, some of the straight men might be exaggerating their numbers, but there’s also the fact that one guy can sleep with multiple women while each of those women is only sleeping with that one guy.
The fact that polyamory is becoming more popular might also be a factor.
This blog post cherry picks. It’s not so much that women ride the cock carousel, it’s that they have the possibility to do so. Some women still end up “hitting the wall” because of debt or simply investing all their energy in studying and a career in their prime years – despite not going after the bad boys, which is just one way of hitting the wall. Facts are not misogynistic. You don’t need to be a rocket scientist to know it’s easier for a woman to find a guy who wants to have sex with her than the other way around. Also strange that this post would dispute the fact that Zoomers have less sex – they have less sexual partners at any rate, the number is undisputedly lower than that of gen X and Boomers – there’s research to back this up and even popular culture acknowledges this. It would be nice if we could learn more about the men vs women ratio too. Furthermore, this particular figure the author cites comes from a single thread on a forum and is hardly representative for what the entire manosphere believes. Of course women haven’t had 2500 sexual partners by the time they’re 30 regardless of what a few idiots believe. And also: all men care about “notch count”, not just the men you don’t like. It’s an instant turn off for all of us to know our date has a had +10 sexual partners, even if some men would still settle for that. And for good reason, it’s only logical. Men having their own desires, standards or expectations is not misogynistic however. Women have them too and they’re “surprisingly” traditionalist as well.
Some women still end up “hitting the wall” because of debt or simply investing all their energy in studying and a career in their prime years
According to the manosphere, women will hit the wall at a certain point (30? 25? 15? — it’s entirely up to the individual manospherian), so it’s not going to matter what a woman’s been doing in her “prime years”– she’s old and undesirable.
And yeah, that’s a big mistake she’s making by studying and pursuing a career instead of attaching herself to a manospherian — who, as the manosphere tells it, remains desirable up until the moment of death.
Hey, you’ve interviewed all men in depth. Good work.
Oops, that first paragraph of mine should be a quote.
It’s a fact that everyone ages. Not just women. All genders. I know tst according to the manosphere, men are eternally youthful studs, but in reality, they age and get less conventionally hot too. It’s not a fact that women, but not men hit some sort of wall. This is where the misogyny comes in.
And there are statistics covering how many sex partners men and women have had. Surveys do ask gender. Look them up. I expect that you don’t see them in manosphere spaces because they reveal that the 80/20 myth is just that. A myth. That’s why it’s best to look at the source of the statistics, not someone’s interpretation of them when you form your opinions.
It’s also not true that all men prefer less experienced partners.
Pepe Shadilay criticising this post:
This post:
Pepe Shadilay criticising the research:
The research:
???
@Pepe Shadilay
That facts are not misogynistic is exactly why you have to keep on making up ‘facts’ that are.
I really love when these Assholes act like men don’t age as well. I used to have a dating profile and I put on there that I would like some in a age range of 3 years for me. Meaning you could be at most 3 years older then me for me to consider you a partner. I got so many 40+ older men sending me messages. I was 18 and I was like sir did you lose your reading glasses and miss the part where I said your far to old for me. You hit the wall for teenager girls, walk away. Also if anything Attractive, outgoing, romantically inclined people have a easy time finding dates or causally sex partner. That’s a small set of people, not an entire gender.
Are the facts misandristic, then?
Manospherian theory about the cock carousel seems to boil down to the idea that young women are too stupid to manage their own sex lives, that they waste their youth in a way that depreciates their own lifelong romantic and sexual prospects – and collaterally, those of men too.
In absence of good evidence, I tend to assume this isn’t true, that women wouldn’t actually be significantly happier when told how to run their lives. Women’s sexual decisions may be bad for men, but probably not for the women who make them.
How’d you know if your girlfriend has 10+ former partners? She probably won’t tell you, if there’s any reason to anticipate that you wouldn’t like the answer.
Without any personal dating experience, I imagine you could likely figure out if she’s had some partners vs. no partners at all, but not if she’s had 3 partners vs. 30 partners. Besides, my male instinct tells me this virgin vs. not virgin distinction is what my fellow men care about, if anything. The talk about high notch count sluts (with suspiciously porn-style sexual habits) is just a strawwoman to dogwhistle the substantial insecurity that some men have about dating non-virgin women.
@Pepe Shaliday:
Ahem. :cough cough: https://fetlife.com/home
Just browse around a bit & I’m sure you’ll find more than a few people that want experienced partners, that want to fuck a porn star, etc., etc., etc.
It seems you have “facts” confused with the fecal matter you’re storing in your rectum.
@Pepe Shaliday
I know why you’re pretending all men are like you. And you won’t like that I know.
You’re alone. No one is like you. No one is the same as you. You’re alone. And I have a certain amount of pity for that.
And that’s why you generalise and pretend men are all the same as you.
You sound like a terrible lover. I don’t care what those men think. I wouldn’t settle for a man who runs the second I start showing my kinky side.
The avalibility of men for women is of no question. Over 95 percent of women will give birth to children while less than 65% of men will be fathers. This means the same smaller number of men are having children with most women. The avilability of ample sex is therefore a thing women participate in far more than men in general. Why do we have incels, men who will almost never have sex with a woman other than for money. since women are the gate keepers and men are ready to go almost any time with nearly any willing female it’s clear women will find sex far more easy to attain than men. The cock carousel is a reality that women have created and bennefit from as the dating process most often cost the male and not the female. Since as many as 1 in 20 children are being raised by men who are not aware the child is not theirs, we see a clear pattern of women subugating their [artners with the offspring of their affairs. Women are less likely to chaet by a small amount but when they do they cheat in a large way with affairs the last for years. While men tend to tarry some often once and are quickly caught in their transgression. All this simply illustrates how avalibility of a easy partner is evidence that women will try the supply of cock with more frequency than most men. yes the cock coursel is real and possibly this is why there is so much porn aimed toward the male needs.
Most single single today are riding it, except for the ones that are gay.
Well that’s not fair! WON’T SOMEBODY THINK OF THE GAY SINGLES?!
@Anonymous
[citation needed]
You did miss Tommi’s necro pearl!
Citation needed etc…
Sorry for necroing myself
Your article would have much more validity without the name calling. By partaking, you fall into the trap of sounding just like the redditors you quote.
@ Roger
Whilst I would agree with you that ad hominem attacks and name calling are unpersuasive and puerile; I can’t actually find any examples of that in the article. So I’m not sure your criticism is valid.
@Roger
To sound just like the Redditors wouldn’t we have to be much less coherent and much more misogynistic?
Anyone who does not believe that a small proper subset of men has significantly more sex than the other larger proper subset is in denial. OkCupid Research published statistics taken from a large sample demonstrating that women find only 20% of the male population to be of at least average attractiveness whereas men found 80% of women to be of at least average attractiveness. Anyone who has studied statistics knows that both figures are statistical anomalies. I am fortunate to be a member of the 20% of men that other men complain about. I had many times the number of sex partners that most men have over a lifetime before I married because I was a college educated, taller than average gym rat and lead guitarist in a weekend gigging band (trust me, gym rats and guys who are musicians tend to have significantly more options than most non-gym rats and non-musicians). What I could not believe is that that number exploded after I separated from my now ex-wife in my fifties.
I joined the dating sites during the mandatory twelve-month separation requirement that existed in my state when I obtained my divorce decree. I even listed my marital status as “separated” on the dating sites that I used. Let’s say that being separated on the dating sites for most men is akin to having the relationship equivalent of having leprosy. Yet, I had zero problem obtaining dates. In fact, I stripped down to bare flesh with over fifty women during my period of separation. That is at least one new woman a week. Most men would kill for that kind of success with women. Yet, I was still legally married to another woman during that period of time. Why was I successful? Because anyone who has studied human mating behaviors knows that women have comfort and arousal needs, which often cannot be met by one man. As my current girlfriend mentioned to me, I am the kind of guy with whom women want to have sex.
When asked to enumerate what they seek in a man, most women will list comfort attributes such being kind and funny (humor makes women more comfortable). Almost no woman enumerates her arousal needs because arousal is controlled the by the reptilian brain; therefore, it is an instinctive response that is based primarily on primal cues of good reproductive fitness. That is why women cannot will themselves to be attracted to a man, regardless of how perfect he is on paper. This reality hits men who have worked hard to better themselves, but lack arousal attributes squarely face (I suspect that a lot of these men find MGTOW comforting). The reality is that finding a willing sex partner is much easier for a small percentage of the male population than it is for the other much larger percentage of the population.
Another female quality that the blogger has either conveniently ignored or is unaware of is that women will have NSA sex quickly with high arousal men who they do not see as long-term relationship (LTR) material while making men who are LTR material wait, often with the explanation that they are protecting their hearts. Most men see this behavior as backwards because men tend to place a high value on being sexually attractive to their mates.
Finally, anyone who believes that the cads (a.k.a. Chads) versus dads argument is bull needs to read publications by the anthropologist Patricia Draper as well as the work that has been based on her research by other anthropologists. This male dichotomy has been with us since we lived in caves.
@Older Chad, if that is what one wants to call me
The 80/20 rule is only a statistical phenomenon that is applied in economics (although it has been found use in other applications such as computer science) and has nothing to do with human relations, the latter were conjectures from the manosphere that appeared when removing context an OkCupid study, so far attempts to include it have failed.
https://contexts.org/blog/who-has-how-many-sexual-partners/
And it is that the subject of human relationships is very complex and so far there is no principle that can predict them (and seeing how complex the human brain is, we are still far from that) so we want to apply the rule of 80 / 20 in human relationships is a nonsense.
By the way, wanting to rely on sites is not much use since they focus more on 1-night adventures or short relationships, they do not serve to verify long-term relationships.