The Pump and Dump
Don’t you think it’s a little strange that when a person has sex with a new partner and is immediately ghosted, they think:
“S/he only wanted me for sex!”
and rarely, if ever:
“Am I really that awful in bed?”
Seriously, if someone only wants you for sex, you’re a good lover AND there isn’t some other factor making the relationship unpalatable or impossible, why wouldn’t they come back for more?
The kind of people who do this prefer novelty and lack of attachment? Not that mysterious.
I don’t think the kind of men who try to sleep with as many different women as possible are looking for someone with the height of sexual “skill”.
Surely, the novelty doesn’t decline so much from the frisson of a first encounter that a Round 2 with a good lay is too boring to make a call on a sure thing, no?
So OK, maybe you get some kind of edgy dramatic movie sex addict who has has anonymous sex in a church bathroom one minute and then goes back to his surprisingly large apartment to performatively swig from a bottle and then chuck it at a wall the next. He won’t call you back, no matter how good you are, because he hates himself. But it’s not common.
It’s not novelty, it’s validation. On round 2 there isn’t any further support to your ego supplied to your from “yeah I can get that chick to sleep with me… again!”
But yes, it’s valuable to point out “if what shallow men (and others) what is merely the physical experience of sex, there are a hundred ways to get it that don’t look like how shallow men actually behave.”
Not to belabor this, but how many bedpost-notchers are so focused on validation by numbers that they won’t give a good lay a second go-round do you think are actually in circulation? I get that they punch above their weight in terms of numbers of partners, but it just strikes me that they’re more in the realm of statistical aberration.
(OTOH, the gendered sexlessness gap could technically result from 10% of women exclusively having sex with a small cadre of pathological bedpost-notchers and then nobody else, but that seems unlikely.)
This seems like a phenomenon that’s easy to explain through basic social dynamics.
If you go through the seduce-someone-and-have-a-one-night-stand song and dance, you’re on the prowl for casual sex and you’ve successfully bagged a target. It’s an easy, legible story that you can tell yourself (and others!) about your motivations and methods. It basically has a script. If the other party deviates from the script in a major way – for example, by visibly “catching feelings” – you can lay the blame elsewhere, secure in the knowledge that you held up your end of the social bargain.
If you seduce someone, have casual sex, and then call back for an encore…
…well, now you’re off-script and into the weeds of actual human interaction, right? Whatever else you’ve done, you’ve unavoidably said “I want to spend time with you,” in a way that isn’t totally mediated by a well-understood ritual. The other party isn’t just “someone you banged,” s/he is a person with actual desires and emotions that you can’t predict with a trivial model. Now ghosting would be rude and cruel. Now “catching feelings” is a lot more understandable. If you’re pretty sure that you just want casual sex, it would have to be really good sex to risk all that.
This does suggest that some populations might find value in creating a ritual for, essentially, booty-calling someone whom you know only through one or more previous hookups. But this doesn’t seem likely to work super well. As soon as the relationship becomes less transient, it…gains all the features of being non-transient, no matter how much you might wish it didn’t.
I get that, but is this something that a lot of people actually do? I’ve met a few extremely attractive and personable men, and none of them have that sort of serial killer ritual attitude about casual sex. The men most likely to have that sort of pathology don’t get many chances to live out the ritual.
This is speculation on my part, to be clear. I also know men who are very attractive and personable, and they don’t go in for this kind of thing at all; they are sensible and decent human beings, and therefore they find sexual and romantic partners within their actual social circles, as God intended.
But obviously there are people who do the chatting-up-strangers-for-one-night-stands thing (and people who hang around in places, online or in meatspace, where they expect to be chatted up for one-night stands). I could not tell you how many of them there are. I suspect their culture is grossly over-represented in media etc. That said, I suspect that you don’t actually have to have a “serial killer ritual attitude” or a “pathology” in order to be part of that culture, you just have to…be really into the idea of scoring casual sex, and not into the idea of socializing with your sexual partners. Which actually does make sense, if your sexual partners are mostly strangers who are totally un-selected for personal compatibility, especially if you have basically-homosocial interaction norms to start with.