Does Sex Damage Women's Long-Term Potential?

Do you make a woman worse as a future girlfriend, wife, or mother when you go to bed with her? Many people think you do.

On my article about player guilt, Ben asked:

Could  you address the final issue that you bring- that sleeping with women  damages their ability to have long term relationships?

You made a fairly convincing case that emotionally, assuming you are  going to flirt and go out and attract women, not sleeping with them  isn't doing them any favors.

Maybe we really shouldn't be going out and flirting with most girls  (excluding the ones who need an emotional escape or similar i guess)  from an emotional standpoint?

More importantly though, how do you justify flirting with girls then  sleeping with them, knowing it damages their ability to have long term  relationships? This bothers me more than the emotional aspect.

-ben

The issue he's talking about was where I paraphrased some 'web wisdom' thrown about about women. Some of it says sex is liberating to women. Some says sex is violent, oppressive, and patriarchal. Some say sex is empowering. Some say it ruins women for the long-term. Those aren't my opinions; they are however common tropes you will run into on the Internet.

Ben's question, though, is one worth exploring... particularly as it ties into the concept of player guilt (which that article Ben commented on was about). If you sleep with a woman, are you damaging her future potential as a girlfriend, wife, and mother?

A growing movement online seems to have arrived at the conclusion "yes, sex damages women's futures."

The men who arrive at this conclusion though follow a chain of logic that proceeds thus:

1. Women with higher numbers of sex partners are, on average, worse partners and mothers

2. Therefore, when men have sex with women, they degrade women's abilities to be competent partners and mothers

While we do have plenty of evidence that women are less faithful the more partners they have, and we've all heard anecdotes of irresponsible man-crazy single mothers ditching their kids to chase the homme du jour, there's a big causal jump between those two points. This casual leap of faith is where guys trip themselves up.

That is to say, women with high partner counts are (on average) worse as mothers and partners. This is true.

Yet their partner counts are a symptom of what makes them worse in these roles -- partner count is not the cause.

And when you take a woman to bed, you are also not 'the cause'.