Why Don't All Beautiful Girls Sleep Around?

Commenting on my article on picking up girls with a jealousy plotline, a reader asks:

Hey Chase,

I've gotten together with a girl I met in a cafe.

That marks my first lay ever from day game!

It was not super straightforward to get her in bed but I managed.

She's beautiful, very smart, great personality, pretty good body- amazing girl.

The thing which shocks me is this:

After sleeping together, I casually asked her how many partners she's had before. I always do this and never come across as judgemental, so chicks always give me the full list, including guys who don't "really count"

So I know she's been honest with and freely opened up. She told me she had one serious boyfriend and that's it. One partner only.

I asked "What about any casual wild adventures? Some naughty action at parties or something?" She laughed and said she's not really a party kinda of person. She can drink socially but never got drunk and passed out and she despises clubs.

I guess what really confuses me is: if she's telling the truth, why on earth would a sexy girl like her not hook up? Guys check her out all the time, I'm sure they must have hit on her. It's so easy for her to have sex, yet she claims she only had one serious boyfriend.

It does not make sense to me because beautiful women can get sex on demand, so why on earth would she not use that opportunity?

It's interesting the range of expectations you see among men for what beautiful women's sex lives must look like.

There are men who expect the most beautiful women to be almost virginal. There are others who expect them to be total nymphomaniacs.

The actual truth of course is beautiful women are just like normal women.

They have the same kind of range in sexual inclinations and experience you find in the general population of girls: some with many lovers, some with few, most somewhere in the middle... with the added twist that as women get more beautiful, they trend toward fewer overall lifetime sex partners.

But... why?

Why wouldn't these girls, given the opportunity to hook up with so many hot guys, indulge?

Or, on the flip side, given the ability to not have to hook up, why wouldn't they stay virgins till marriage?

 

Variations in Human Sex Drives

Among humans there is a wide variation in sex drive.

People with a very high sex drive may need sex multiple times a day. If you ask them, "What's the most times you've had sex in a single day?" you will get double-digit numbers... both Hector and our female director for One Date reported their high watermark for single-day sex sessions to be 17.

People with a very low sex drive may not need sex at all. They will occasionally have sex to please a partner... though once they reach the point where they feel like that partner is not going to leave, the sex can dry completely up, and you get what's called a 'dead bedroom'.

Most people are somewhere in the middle; not extreme sex hounds, but they couldn't live without at least some sex, some of the time.

See my article on sex drive variations and compatibilities for a deeper dive on these.

READ MORE: Sex Drive Compatibility, Drive Collapses, & Relationship Sex Issues

Now, people being the way we are, often we are most familiar with the closest example to us, which happens to be ourselves.

So, high sex drive people will assume most other people are high sex drive, and if they aren't having lots of sex it must be because they lack the opportunity to, or have suppressed themselves somehow, or so on.

Low sex drive people will assume most other people are low sex drive, and must not really be having all this sex, and all the sex in popular culture is exaggerated for unknown reasons, and when a partner says s/he wants sex, the partner doesn't really need it, it's more just a passing emotion.

But what you will find is few people are truly, deeply 'suppressed' on their sex drives, and few people who mention sex 'don't really mean it'. Instead you get people who mostly bring up sex when they want it, and mostly go for it when they desire it.

 

Sociosexuality as the Mediator

There's another dimension that impacts sexual behavior.

Its impact is actually even stronger than sex drive, and it is the actual causal factor behind someone's number of sex partners.

That dimension is what's known as sociosexuality.

Wikipedia defines sociosexuality thus:

Sociosexuality, sometimes called sociosexual orientation, is the individual difference in the willingness to engage in sexual activity outside of a committed relationship. Individuals who are more restricted sociosexually are less willing to engage in casual sex; they prefer greater love, commitment and emotional closeness before having sex with romantic partners. Individuals who are more unrestricted sociosexually are more willing to have casual sex and are more comfortable engaging in sex without love, commitment or closeness.

When scientists look at sex drive, sociosexuality, and lifetime sex partner count, they find some interesting things:

1. There's a strong positive relationship between sex drive and sociosexuality. The higher the sex drive, the more likely someone is to be open to sex outside a relationship. The lower the sex drive, the less likely someone is to be open to it.

2. There's a strong positive relationship between BOTH sex drive and sociosexuality AND lifetime sex partners. The higher your sex drive, the higher your partner count; the more open you are to sex outside a relationship, too, the higher your partner count.

3. However, when you control for sociosexual orientation, the link between sex drive and partner count goes away. i.e., if a woman has a high sex drive, she will usually also be very open sociosexually, and thus have many partners; however, should you find a high sex drive woman who is not sociosexually open, she will have a low partner count, just like a low sex drive woman who is not open sociosexually.

Get that?

The causal factor there is sociosexuality.

The more open someone is to sex outside a relationship, the more lifetime sex partners he has.

This openness governs partner count independent of sex drive.

While most high sex drive people will also tend to be (or become) sexually open-minded, if one of them isn't, she will not sleep around, despite her high sex drive.

She will, however, probably fall in love and have a lot of sex with her guy; studies show that while men are more prone to falling in love than women are, women with higher sex drives fall in love far more.

 

What People Use Sex For

So that's drive and sociosexuality.

We'll tie this in to the bigger picture of beautiful women's sexual behaviors in a moment.

But first we need to talk about WHY people have sex in the first place.

The original and primary purpose of sex is reproduction.

It's why we evolved separate sexes and why we put so much energy into the costly, time-consuming, and often frustrating process of seeking out, seducing, and maintaining sexual partnerships. We put all this energy into it because it is life's primary purpose: to continue, in this case via propagation of the species.

Of course, the brain has evolved to work in the simplest way possible, and the simplest way to motivate a large, shambling animal to any particular behavior is not with some big abstract idea like "we must find a compatible mate of sufficient quality to mix genes with, in order to produce young and continue the species."

Instead, the brain uses far simpler motivators to do the trick. Motivators like:

• "Sex organ stimulation feels good. Stimulate sex organ for pleasure."
• "Sex organ stimulation with member of opposite sex feels better. Seek member of opposite sex."
• "Sex organ stimulation with highly attractive member of opposite sex feels best. Seek this out."

Then you have various sub-motivators in there, such as:

• "Ejaculating semen into / having semen ejaculated into vagina most stimulating, especially with highly attractive member of opposite sex. Seek out highly attractive member of opposite sex, then engage in sex without condom and move semen into vagina."

The result is you get babies, that thing many people say they aren't sure they really want but end up having anyway, because "ejaculating semen into vagina" just feels so darn good.

Thus, the species continues.

Now, you can get various diversions from the path evolution's laid out. That's things like:

• A man sexually abuses a boy, rewiring the boy's brain to treat sex with the same sex as 'most stimulating', so the boy grows up to seek out members of the same sex, rather than the opposite sex (46% of homosexual men report having been molested homosexually as children; only 7% of heterosexual men report this)

• A young man spends too long in a long sexual drought and turns to farm animals or his own same sex as a sexual outlet instead, rewiring his brain to seek out this kind of sexual stimulation (I talked about the phenomenon of heterosexual incels having sex change surgery out of sexual desperation in this article)

• People develop contraceptives and, having an intrinsic desire for sex organ stimulation but not one for reproduction per se, engage in a lifetime of sterile sex acts that feel good but fail to achieve their evolutionary purpose

• Men come to view the sex act as a way of enforcing one's will or dominion on others, and use it in violent situations on inappropriate sex partners, such as the phenomenon of home invaders raping elderly women, invading male soldiers raping captured male civilians, or male prison inmates 'turning out' weaker heterosexual male inmates too afraid to fight back to make them become homosexual 'bottoms'

• People in general start to enjoy using their sex organs in a variety of ways aside from contraceptive sex, such as oral sex, anal sex, etc. Many may come to prefer one or more of these over the primary act of penis-in-vagina sex, as with guys who're happy to get nothing but a blow job or women satisfied with simple cunnilingus

So, the brain's approach of "use the simplest motivators you can to ensure species continuity" is not without bugs in the code and unintended side effects.

However, for the most part, the system works; obviously. We are still here! Over a billion years of evolution, and the system works well enough most of the time with enough individuals that species propagation continues.

We might also think of the sex act as a trait that evolved for one specific purpose (reproduction) but has been co-opted by evolution to serve others.

People use sexual intercourse for:

• Boosting their egos
• Maintaining relationship bonds
• Enforcing dominance in a relationship
• Releasing stress / pressure

(many people would say they "use sex for pleasure" but the pleasure is just the superficial motivator -- the brain makes it pleasurable and drives you toward that pleasure to accomplish some other thing, be that reproduction, an ego boost, relationship maintenance, dominance enforcement, or stress release)

However, there is one other thing people use sex for as well, that is not directly tied to immediate reproduction, and often in people's minds is totally divorced from it, yet is most often a part of the road to get there:

A process known as satisficting.

And for reasons we'll go into in a moment, most beautiful girls do not need to spend nearly as much time in the 'evaluation period' of satisficing as women not nearly so good-looking do.

 

How Satisficing Affects Sexual Behavior

It's easy to forget that sex is ultimately 'all about the children'... especially when you are living in a society with rampant media propaganda about how great it is to not reproduce -- think of all the hedonistic delights and financial benefits lifelong sterility confers... not to mention that it's not just liberating, it's also morally responsible, because there are other people who want those resources your children would consume, which makes reproduction an act of rapacious greed!

However, despite the media bombardment, most people (at least as of 2013) either have or desire children -- a steady 90% of people, across time:

That holds true for young people:

Even among people 45+ who remain childless, 56% of those wish they had children:

So, the reproductive drive is alive and strong.

Propaganda, it seems, has only a limited ability to affect things here.

The people who don't want children don't want them, no matter how much their friends, family members, and colleagues push them to have a kid.

Meanwhile the people who do want children want them, no matter how much the media tells them life is so much better without children and they're killing the Earth by reproducing.

Regardless, when you think about sexual behavior, you are ultimately thinking about reproductive behavior.

This is important to understand for really grasping why people do what they do with sex.

So why do people date... have non-reproductive casual sex... engage in sterile long-term relationships that bear no young?

For the most part it's for practice and evaluation.

READ MORE: Satisficing and Seduction; or, Why You Probably Won't be a Bachelor Forever

Satisficing is the process of figuring out what your best option is from a wide assortment of options without having to sample every single one.

If you walk into the tomato sauce aisle and there are 130 different kinds of tomato sauces, how do you decide which one you like best?

Well, you sample some of them -- the ones that look most appealing -- then after a certain amount of sampling, you settle on a preferred option.

Here's the ringer: the more options there are, the more sampling you will tend to do.

There are so many choices you need to sample broadly to be sure you've got the best one.

When people live in small towns with only a few eligible sex/marriage partners, they don't do a lot of sampling.

In fact, they may well marry the first person they date. After all, it's either her or one of the other two girls... and neither of them looks particularly good to your eye.

Move to a bigger town and they date around more before settling.

Move to a metropolis and people often date TONS before picking a partner!

The average age at first marriage in New York City is 17.2% higher for men and 18.5% higher for women than the national average (New Yorkers of either sex marry on average 5 years later in life). Why do people in big cities marry so much later? Because they have so many more options to choose from, thus spend a longer time 'sampling the goods' before they feel confident enough to make a selection.

Many people during the satisficing curve feel like they'll 'never settle down' or think they 'might, but it's a long way off'. They stay in that state until they pass a point where the brain says, "Okay! Enough sampling. Pick one and mate!" at which point they suddenly go through a cascade of life priority changes and switch into 'settle down mode' (where they look for a partner who's about on-par with their best-ever prior partner).

Yet for beautiful women it works a bit differently.

 

Beautiful Women's Satisficing Behavior

We know from multiple studies (as well as just direct personal experience) that as a woman's beauty increases, on average, her number of lifetime sex partners declines.

She gets cagier. She's less apt to jump in bed with any old guy.

Beautiful girls, simply put, don't sleep around as much as less comely women do.

READ MORE: Hotter Women are Subtler (and Hook Up Less)

Why not?

Do they have... fewer options?

In fact... they do!

Think of a girl who's a bit above average in terms of looks.

I'll set aside my dislike of the 1-to-10 rating scale for a moment for the ease of painting the picture here.

Let's say she's a 6. She's not super cute, but she's passable. Who are her romantic options?

Well, men being men, almost any guy will sleep with her, given the occasion. Not all guys may be equally motivated to, but she can probably get most guys to put it in if she makes it easy enough for them.

So her dating options are pretty much bounded by how low she's willing to go... and how high.

Let's say she's willing to date guys who are 1 point below her, and she is young enough she'll date guys as hot as she can get. So she'll date any guy who's a:

• 5
• 6
• 7
• 8
• 9
• 10

Keep in mind we're not just talking looks here. We're talking the whole package: the guy's personality, his confidence, his economic prospects, social status, etc. All this impacts his desirability rating for a woman.

So we'll say about 50% of men out there qualify as 'potential mates' for her. The other 50% are too undesirable for her and are out of the running from the start, at least until they get their fundamentals in better shape.

By the time she's 26 or 27, she's probably quit hooking up with guys who are 9s and 10s for the most part. She views these guys as callous playboys who only want to pump and dump... because that's all they do with her. A male 9 who's serious about finding a committed girlfriend is not going to be looking for that with a female 6.

She also probably discards male 5s as not being desirable enough for her on various qualities. A '5' here including a guy who's kind of good-looking but has a low-paying job, for instance, or is not bad-looking and has some money but is a complete fuckboy, meanwhile our 6 girl here is not super cute but she does hold down a stable job and is looking for someone who is in that range.

Eventually, over the course of years, she whittles her options down to male 6s and 7s, and just a small slice of male 6s and 7s who have shared life experiences and similar educational and economic backgrounds to hers.

Then, the selection pressure mounting as guys she likes get snapped up by other women running up against their biological clocks, she at last makes a choice from this group before it's too late and the other girls have gobbled up all those guys. She then marries and begins producing offspring.

Now how about a hot girl?

Say a female 9?

She's been beautiful all her life and she knows what she's worth.

She's perhaps not the hottest in the world (she's a 9, after all, not a 10), but girls of her caliber are rare and she knows it.

Let's say her dating range is any guy who's a(n):

• 8
• 9
• 10

Again, this not just being about looks; we're talking confidence, career, personality, background, etc.

Maybe once while very young she lets some pushy 7 ask her out her but she quickly decides those guys do not make the cut with her and she's not going out with a guy like that again.

By the time she's in college she's realized she can pretty reliably get both male 9s and 10s and that these guys will treat her well. So there's no need for her to date down to male 8s. Those guys are out of the running too.

But now, a problem: female 9s and 10s are in short supply, but male 9s and 10s are in even shorter supply.

There are a lot fewer guys at the absolute top of the desirability pyramid, and a lot more girls who've managed to claw their way up there. Remember, a woman's rating is not just about her raw looks... a lot of guys will rate as '10s' girls who are quite plain without makeup or pouty facial expressions, but they've learned to use what they've got to entrance men.

Our female 9, despite perhaps living in a big city, finds herself in the same conundrum the small town girl does:

There are really only a handful of eligible guys for her to date!

Most guys don't make the cut!

Because the range of acceptable dating options is so much smaller for her, she:

• Spends less time dating different people to satisfice
• Requires smaller dating sample sizes to evaluate
• Wants to lock a rare high caliber male down quickly when she can

I can't find any numbers on it, but I'd bet you if you cross-examined women's attractiveness with their age at first marriage, you would find better looking women on average marry younger.

Why? Because they have less sampling to do before they're confident of the choice they're making... because there are fewer qualified men for them to sample from.

One thing we know for sure is beautiful women have more offspring. We also know that number of offspring is related to age at first marriage and age at first birth; the older a woman is at either of these points, the fewer children she has.

It would then stand to reason that, as beautiful women are having more children, they are most likely also having children at a younger age, as well as marrying at a younger age, than their less attractive peers -- thus supporting our hypothesis here.

Beauty goes up, age at first marriage goes down, number of children goes up -- because beautiful girls are choosing men faster and marrying sooner, because they don't need to sample as much, and indeed don't have as many men who pass their criteria to choose from in the first place.

 

What About the Unrestricted Hot Girls?

Let's not forget the exception who proves the rule!

There are beautiful girls who are sociosexually unrestricted.

These girls, despite being beautiful, will tend to have high partner counts and have a much broader range of men they have sex with.

Their standards for long-term mates remain high, and they still will usually only settle down with men of high desirability. However, while single (and perhaps still once attached), they will sample broadly of men and enjoy to their pleasure-seeking hearts' content.

In this case, their sociosexual liberation lowers the 'acceptable dating' range for them, making less desirable men still okay, because those guys may yet provide a good piping.

Often guys who are newer to dating and aren't coming in as super attractive mate choices themselves who stumble onto a really hot girlfriend will tend to be dating an unrestricted girl. She wouldn't have gone for them in the first place were she pickier... but she's not as picky, and just a lot hornier, so she was okay dating them.

It's a trend you will see over and over with beginner daters -- they finally get a hot friend-with-benefits or girlfriend, but it turns out she's far more sexually experienced than they are! How did that happen!

It's because they aren't at a point yet where they will be consistently attractive to the beautiful girls who aren't sociosexually unrestricted, and/or they aren't able to consistently close the deal with such girls.

However, they've gotten good enough now that they can land the hot girl with lower standards.

A little more time, and a bit more refining, and they can land the hot girl with higher standards, too.

 

Beautiful Girls Don't Hook Up Lots Because They Don't Need To

Aside from those unrestricted sensation seeker type hotties, most beautiful girls aren't hooking up a lot because they don't need to hook up a lot.

Sex is easy for a woman (even an ugly woman) to get.

All a woman has to do is whisper in a guy's ear or flash a little skin at him and she can get almost any guy chasing her for a quick shag, right up to many male '10s'.

However, sex with a man a woman wants to have sex with, in a way she wants to have it (i.e., he manages the seduction and she doesn't have to chase him like a dog), who will make her feel what she longs to feel, and not run off after if she hopes he'll stick around, is the challenge.

Thus, for most women, the number of sex partners the girl has directly relates to how many of the guys around her she'd be willing to have a long-term relationship with, were they also willing.

Your average girl will take any guy from average on up. So she has a lot of sampling to do before she figures out what she can get.

But a beautiful girl wants only the best.

There aren't a lot of those 'best' guys around, which means she only has a handful to choose from.

She will tend to date less, hook up less, and have more committed relationships with those she does.

On the other hand, she will have SOME sex and relationships!

Women don't stay virgins till marriage because, again, there's no reason to.

It is not what we evolved to do.

Even if she's conservative about her dating, once she finds a guy she likes a lot, she is going to want to go to bed with him. Mating with a beloved partner is natural. It's far more natural than waiting for a far-off ceremony that marks a union 'official' and only after that point does mating commence.

The only places in the world women remain virgins until marriage are those societies with enormous pressure to preserve virginity, like parts of the Middle East.

However, even in those places, women are having sex -- they're just doing it anally instead of vaginally (to preserve their hymens).

All women engage in this satisficing process, just as all men do.

At the upper levels of beauty, that satisficing process is shorter and simpler... because there just aren't as many men a woman has to run through to figure out where she stands, and what she can get.

For most women, sex isn't only about the dopamine rush of flesh-hitting-flesh.

It's about the connection with the man as well.

If a woman can have a lasting connection with a man of sufficient quality, she won't have a strong desire to run through a variety of different men.

(she may still have fantasies about it... just like average guys may fantasize about shagging all the different girls they work with. But there's a big gap between fantasy and reality for most women... again, those high drive, unrestricted girls excepted!)

What if your goal is to pick up and bed lots of beautiful women?

Still not a problem!

There are more of them than there are of you (assuming you are or are making yourself into a highly desirable man).

Further, there are enough high drive / unrestricted beautiful women that you will meet these girls not uncommonly, and if you're good with girls can bed them.

The lower drive / more restricted girls are still available too. You will sometimes get them for the odd one-night stand or FWB here during their experimental period -- you might be the one guy they try something a little wild with, before returning to their normal dating habits.

Or you might take such a girl once you're entrenched in your own wife-hunt, seeking a girl who's everything you want and meets the qualifications you're after for a long-term settled gal.

These girls can be got, and they do have fantasies, and do like men, and do want to get with a sexy guy like you, just like less beautiful girls do.

By the same coin, one must always keep in mind what sex and mating is really all about, if one wants to understand why people do the things they do around it.

What it's ultimately about is propagation of the species -- so most people, in their mating, will tend to make choices that drive them toward the best possible reproductive outcomes for them.

Chase