- Joined
- Nov 2, 2020
Having casual flings with friends and acquaintances is an oxymoron. No matter how liberal you are about sexual relationships, sex is stigmatized for a reason. It's why any sensible person recognizes that, before turning 18 (I realize there are different ages of consent, I'm only using 18 as an example), people under that age shouldn't engage in sex with those older than 18. It's because sex represents much more than just a natural activity after a certain state of conscience.A promiscuous lifestyle can definitely be damaging if a person is vulnerable or emotionally unstable, and I'll concede that it's not for everyone. However, provided that everyone involved is mature and grounded about it, takes precautions to avoid sexually transmitted diseases, and respects each other's boundaries: having casual flings with friends and acquaintances can be a very fun and revelatory experience; I'd even say that it can be profoundly liberating.
Don't get me wrong, there is definitely a lot of utility in monogamy, and I'm a big advocate of it when it comes to the issue of building meaningful relationships, creating families, and raising children, but the idea that our sexual behavior should be limited by this concept is something I don't find any real empirical support for, and in my view, tethering the two things together seems to pave the way for not only much diminished sex lives, but also poorer relationships as well.
Throughout most of human history, great men would lead sexually promiscuous lives, even if they reserved their love and devotion for one woman. This seems like the healthiest dynamic to me, and as the repressive legacy of Abrahamic sexual mores continues to recede into history, I believe it is the one we will naturally return to.
If you want to have sex with your wife's friends, that's your prerogative, but by and large being in a non-monogamous marriage is not conducive to an emotionally and even truly sexually fulfilling life. You're taking a physical boundary of marriage and only leaving the abstract in your marital relationship. You can say that "marriage is more than sex" which is true, but it's also one of the only physical aspects that represents your dedication to one another. Being sexually liberated enough to fuck your wife's book club and she be cool with it isn't objectively a positive and only really serves to fulfill temporary urges. It cheapens sex and brings it from not only being a natural process, but a much higher expression of love to simply an itch you need to scratch.
Also, most great men through out history didn't hold themselves to the same standards of human decency people in the developed world do. I don't think cherry-picking attributes of great men irrelevant to the formula for their success is a good way at all to reinforce your point. The same way you say "some great men of history were promiscuous", a pedophile could say "Greece was a great empire that enabled pederasty, therefore pedophilia should be normalized to improve countries". It's not an efficient way to lay out your argument.
Last edited: