The manosphere talks against promiscuous sex. This is vague slut shaming. But taking the common use of the term ‘promiscuous,’ they are mistaken in making no place or distinction for truthful consensual sex among consenting adults, sex that simply extends beyond the pale of their dominant ideology; I mean sex that excludes violence, coercion, recklessness, and deceit.

We can rightly blame someone for carelessly spreading an STI, but that is not the fault of sex, including highly promiscuous sex! Carelessness is an error of judgment; it’s a fault of not just situational reasoning but also value judgments. It’s absurd to blame sexual freedom for errors of judgment.

I have some reservations about certain extremes of consensual kink, but again, that is a matter of personal judgment, not a reflection on sex or sexual freedom. It’s trivial to claim, “if we did not engage in promiscuous sex, problems like STIs and unwanted pregnancy would not exist.” We could just as easily argue that if we did not eat chicken, we would eliminate the spread of salmonella. That statement is naive, the issue lies in mishandling the food, not its consumption. Moreover, you will never convince someone who has safely engaged in non traditional sexuality for years that it cannot be done.

If we imagine three men sitting at a table eating baby carrots, and one is passionately interested in pursuing the truth even if it turns out to be something he won’t like. The next man is pragmatic; he likes the truth when it is useful, but if a lie benefits him, he will use it. The next man is totally delusional, to his own terrible misfortune. You cannot tell by what they are doing (eating baby carrots) the relationship they have with the truth. Now, simply replace eating baby carrots with having sex.

There is almost no abuse that one can inflict upon multiple partners that is not visited upon married spouses, including objectifying them entirely into a means for years and decades. I oppose all of that normalized abuse and say that the people who love more should love more people. Those people may be rare, but the rarer those people are, the more precious they are. And if you mistake them for people who don’t care because they are kinky or have more than one partner, then you will miss them and I feel sad for you. We need to be precise when discussing what we think is possible or impossible, but I think the manosphere, be it Ben Shapiro, Jordan Peterson, or their extreme conclusion, Andrew Tate (and his wannabes,) they have a blind spot with sex beyond the horizon of their expectations.

The freedom to be truthful about your body is the first freedom, and without that freedom, there is no responsibility; people are in an unwinnable internal conflict. Unnecessary restraints, ignorance, and prohibitions on the body have not led to good results; typically, we get unspoken rules, such as the hypocrisy of ‘what happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas.’ On the extreme, we get why the Catholic Church and the Boy Scouts, etc., have paid billions in settlements.

What is lost in being two-faced about sexuality is something that I have noted for decades: when someone gets to honestly have the adult consensual sex, at least the freedom to say yes to the opportunities life offers them, the magical thinking around sex is exposed. When you are sexually free, it is much harder to maintain a delusion around what life would be like ‘if’ you were sexually free! What then becomes clearer is the ongoing adaptation to the ever-changing and unpredictable circumstances of life on life’s terms. The lesson of disappointed expectations is the reality of what exists beyond the horizon of expectations, and that is where we really live. We either adapt to those facts or suffer the consequences. But if you can adapt, then life becomes a daring adventure of discovery.

The ruling ideology pushes marriage and monogamy, and all the unspoken hypocrisy that goes with it. After all, it is religious authority or the magistrates that officiate marriage. To accept tradition with its often delusional insistence of a lifelong partner, then includes the consideration of what makes a good lifelong partner, and the criterion often has nothing to do with affection. (A point often entirely overlooked in the manosphere when ‘evaluating’ partners.) The minute we measure or use a calculator, we are comparing someone to another, something else, or even worse, an idea. We are using a system of exchange, or use value as a measure. That has nothing to do with love. That is pure commodification. Ask yourself: What chains you to the governing ideology? My answer is “absolutely nothing.”

The sacrifice of real experience about ourselves and others, when blindly following the path laid out by tradition, is a terrible loss.

There are lessons that nontraditional sex can teach us, that therapy, anti-depressants, and sexual stimulants like Viagra cannot teach us. Take one single example. For a time, I had an ongoing relationship with two women, and we delighted in threesome sex. When I began seeing a fourth woman, one of my lovers, (who was herself in an open marriage,) became jealous. In her conflict, she did not want to be a hypocrite, but had not faced this with other lovers. In the midst of this, we still liked sex. The discovery for me was, I couldn’t maintain an erection with the jealous lover and could with the other. This happened repeatedly as I went from one woman into the other. This had never happened before. Clearly I was capable of functioning sexually with one women, but my body was not responding to the woman who was filled with anxiety. If this had happened to us when we were alone, I might’ve thought I was physically unable, but that was not true. This is a clarification about my sensitivity, and totally worthwhile. Here we have what many would claim to be a promiscuous circumstance, exposing something true about sensitivity that would otherwise probably be hidden by prevailing commercial prejudices about male sex functions.

By Todd Vickers