Well, ok, THIS cock (and horse and zebra) carousel is a real thing
By David Futrelle
If you’ve spent any time at all observing misogynists online, you are no doubt familiar with the concept of the “cock carousel” — a vaguely poetic way of referring to the allegedly vast number of men that the average woman is said to have sex with in her “prime,” from the moment she first starts having sex in her teens up until she “hits the wall” somewhere between age 25 and 30, immediately rendering her too old and ugly to be appealing to most men. (Allegedly.)
Since the myth of the cock carousel is such a key component of the ideology of the so-called manosphere, I thought I’d devote a post to tearing it down completely.
Let’s start by looking at the central tenets of this absurd yet strangely pervasive myth. An elder member of the Men Going Their Own Way collective on Reddit once explained the concept to a newbie:
The cock carousel is what the majority of females spend their prime fertility years riding. This is age 14-25, as soon as she becomes sexually active (usually at 14 sometimes earlier) she will essentially not go longer than a week or two without getting dick. The number of partners can range from 2-500+.
Another MGTOW Redditor defined the term a little more succinctly:
The cock carousel? Preeeeetty sure it just means they’re jumping from one chads cock to the next.
In the vivid imaginations of many of today’s young misogynists, young women are having sex almost constantly with a bewildering array of men. But not just any men: According to the current misogynist dogma, while virtually all young women, regardless how conventionally attractive they are, have no trouble finding sex in their “prime” years, these women are so spoiled and picky that they won’t even consider sex with any but the studliest of men. So for most women, their twenties are a sexual feast; for men that age, a famine. Or so the “cock carousel” mythology has it.
Estimates of the number of cocks these women ride during this busy decade or so vary, but many of today’s young misogynists assume the typical total is well above one hundred. According to the MGTOW Redditor known as ovendice,
the average U.S. female starts having sex around 12 and by the time she is 25 she has prob had sex with as many as 150 different men.
Someone called LowendLenovo, posting in the same thread, agreed:
I knew a girl who fucked over 100 guys by the time she was 24. Remember all a girl has to do is leave the house to get laid. All of you thinking the average is 10-20 need to get a grip and realise there are 52 weeks in a year and if she goes out on all of those weekends then numbers add up real quickly.
Another MGTOW tried to do the math:
Imagine a girl gets 40 messages a day from guys(It’s a hella lot more). That’s 280 messages a week. That means she can possibly hook up with 280 different guys a week. Women go for the top 10% of men so there are 28 guys that she is willing to fuck each week. How many guys a woman will fuck depends on her. If she is willing to ride the cock carousel hard she will fuck 10 guys a week.
After adjusting his numbers a bit to include women who don’t ride the carousel quite so hard, he estimates that the typical total ranges from around 70 to something closer to 400. A year.
While the allegedly woman-avoiding MGTOWs and their “involuntarily celibate” cousins the incels tend to complain the most bitterly about the large number of men other than them that women their age are allegedly sleeping with, whining about the “cock carousel” is common amongst all of the different kinds of misogynists who make up the contemporary “manosphere,” from Men’s Rights Activists to pickup artists.
There are a lot of things wrong with the notion of the cock carousel, but perhaps the most obvious one is that it bears no relationship to reality.
None of the central claims of the “cock carousel” myth are even remotely close to true — from the assumption that most girls start having sex at the age of 13 or thereabouts to the notion that women in their twenties are hooking up with dozens if not hundreds of men a year.
Indeed, the consensus of most of those who’ve seriously studied contemporary sexuality is that young people today are having much less sex than most people imagine — and less than their Gen X and Baby Boomer counterparts had when they were the same age. And this goes for both men and women.
Let’s start with teenagers, who are starting to have sex at a later age than teens of previous generations. As journalist Kate Julian notes in The Atlantic,
teens are launching their sex lives later. From 1991 to 2017, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Youth Risk Behavior Survey finds, the percentage of high-school students who’d had intercourse dropped from 54 to 40 percent. In other words, in the space of a generation, sex has gone from something most high-school students have experienced to something most haven’t. (And no, they aren’t having oral sex instead—that rate hasn’t changed much.)
What about all those girls who are allegedly starting to have sex at the age of 12? They are figments of the misogynist imagination. According to the most recent figures I found from the CDC, the average (mean) age at first intercourse for girls/women aged 15-44 was 17.3, slightly higher than the average for boys/men (17.0). According to the CDC’s 2017 Youth Risk Behavior Survey, only 3.4% of 9th-12th grade students started having sex when they were younger than 13, a huge drop from the 10.2% who reported the same in 1991.
So, no, fellas. Girls aren’t hopping on the “cock carousel” in their early teens or younger. They typically start having sex in their late teens, pretty much exactly when their male counterparts do.
How many partners do women typically have once they do start having sex? Well, let’s just say it’s a lot fewer than ten guys a week. Indeed, most women aged 25-44 years have had less than half this number of total partners OVER THE COURSE OF THEIR WHOLE ADULT LIVES. 4.2 partners, to be exact, a bit fewer than the number of female partners (6.1) that men in the same age range report, according to the CDC.
The percentage of girls and women aged 15-44 who have had more than five partners in the past 12 months is all of 1.7 percent, compared to 4.0% for their male counterparts.
Generally speaking, as Julian points out, American adults are having less sex than their counterparts were having twenty years ago. Citing the research of San Diego State University psychologist Jean M. Twenge, Julian notes that “the average adult went from having sex 62 times a year [in the late 1990s] to 54 times [as of 2014].”
Indeed, as she goes on to report,
none of the many experts I interviewed for this piece seriously challenged the idea that the average young adult circa 2018 is having less sex than his or her counterparts of decades past. Nor did anyone doubt that this reality is out of step with public perception—most of us still think that other people are having a lot more sex than they actually are.
And this goes ten times for manosphere misogynists.
So what difference does it make if a bunch of women-hating dudes on the internet have weird and exaggerated notions of how often young women have sex? Because these fantasies serve only to deepen their misogyny.
As the misogynists see it, when women have sex with multiple men — even if their “notch counts” don’t number in the hundreds — they basically destroy the chance that they’ll ever be able to settle down and truly love one man, rendering them unfit for long-term relationships and making them “completely incapable of properly pairbonding in a marriage.”
What makes it worse, as the misogynists see it, is that these women have squandered their “best years” — that is, their primo sex-having years, the years when they were at their hottest — on a succession of unsuitable and unworthy “bad boys,” so by the time they are willing to give the decent but sex-deprived beta males sitting on the sidelines a chance, they are already worn down husks of womanhood with “thousand cock stares.”
In other words, the misogynists think that too much sex with too many men ruins women — for men like them. And these guys also think that women have way more sex with way more men than they really do — exaggerating the amount of sex women are having by orders of magnitude. These two shared delusions are a recipe for bitterness and hate. The mythology of the cock carousel is one of the main things making the manosphere such an incredibly toxic place.
We Hunted the Mammoth relies entirely on readers like you for its survival. If you appreciate our work, please send a few bucks our way! Thanks!
Lumipuna,
Yeah, I don’t want to jump down someone’s throat right away just because they sound like previous commenters. But…
*insert Catelyn Stark side eye here*
I used to think of myself as “undatable,” because when you go more than a decade without a date, there has to be some explanation, right?
Now, here I am, in my late forties, still never had a lover. Never even been kissed. And the older I get, the more people I meet who are in the same boat. That “coming of age, everyone experiences, first romance” thing just doesn’t happen for a surprisingly large number of people. I remember reading about J.K. Rowling describing Harry Potter’s sixth year romance as “we all experience that” and thought, “What am I, then? Inhuman?”
For a while, I thought there was some horrible flaw in me that made me repellent to the opposite sex. But, I had friends of the opposite sex, and the same sex, who always smiled when they saw me, and welcomed me, and told me lots of times that I was (insert long string of positive characteristics here). Then, I thought, “Well, I’m just too fat to date.” After all, I’ve heard people of my preferred gender actually talking about me, saying “Delurking is great! If only Delurking were thin, I’d date them.” No. First of all, I’m not as fat as a lot of fat people of my gender who have plenty of dates, lovers, and marriages with people of my preferred gender, so no. Secondly, chubby chasers are a real thing, and even if I don’t want to be anyone’s fetish, there’s still a huge population of fetishists who want someone who looks just like me.
I have finally come to the conclusion that I’m not more flawed than the rest of the world, and certainly not heinously flawed and repulsive like the incels. I am, however, among the many for whom it simply does not work out. We are friendly, with lots of friends, but for some reason, romance just doesn’t happen for us.
Several times in my life, people who love me (and even complete strangers who only met me, and liked me, in the moment), blamed the entire opposite sex. “What is WRONG with all of them, that they don’t see you?” I have literally had members of the older generation tell me that they want me for their children. “I want you to be my in-law! You have got to meet my child!” Even wanting me to marry their grandchildren. Heck, I’m quite popular marriage material for everyone except for the ones doing the actual marrying. And when they say, “What’s wrong with them?” it just hurts my heart so much, because I know that *I* am the common factor here, not them. So, it must be me, right? And they must all be wrong. Besides, I don’t think an entire gender is really that blind/stupid/clueless/insert derogatory “explanation” here. I really don’t. I’ve seen too many happy couples involving someone just like me.
It is very hard not to be bitter about it. It’s easy to be sad about it, though, because loneliness hurts. It really does hurt. I am not asexual nor aromantic. I want love and romance and sex, just as much as any “normie.” Nonetheless, I continue to be popular and make people happy when they see me, because I’m generally cheerful and positive. I’m also still single, after nearly half a century.
Am I “undatable?” I don’t know. But I am “undated.” Going on twenty years since my last blind date. BLIND date. Even longer since a “real” one. And I don’t think it’s sexist to say that, for some unknown reason, unidentifiable by me or any of my many, many friends of multiple genders, who say I’m charming and sweet, my preferred gender doesn’t seem to want to date me. I’m not blaming them for it. I’m just trying to make sense of it.
But then, I remember those times when someone of my preferred gender did want to date me. The stranger in the parking lot. The stranger in the copy room, who asked me on a date, without even asking me my name. ?! The person who gave me a flashback to abuse, leaving me screaming in public, because I cannot bear to be grabbed, and don’t you dare try to kiss me without my permission, you person with whom I have not even had dinner! The person with the overwhelming creep vibes who grabbed me, while I was walking out of the room, just trying to get to the restroom, and pulled me back in, insisting on a dance. No. I needed to pee. And then took it personally when I left to pee, but proceeded to grab me again when I came back.
SOME people want me. It’s just that those people are so creeptastic that I didn’t want them. For some reason, I’ve never met the happy medium. For some reason, all my friends of my preferred gender, who say wonderful things about me, and “what’s wrong with all of them, that they don’t date you?” are never in the “available to date” me category. You know, married, in a committed relationship, too young, too old, or simply “just friends.”
So, I could date, if I were willing to put myself into a creepy/abusive relationship. Darn me, seeing those red flags and avoiding them. Darn me for listening to my instincts. Darn me, for saying “I have been grabbed and beaten by someone who claimed to love and desire me, and never again, so if you grab me and try to force me, you are RIGHT OUT!” I could date, but for some reason, I seem to only attract people who want to use and abuse me, and I don’t let it get past that initial grab and grope. So, it’s all my fault, right?
I guess I just have to come to accept that for some of us humans, we are just not meant to date. It’s not in the cosmic cards. Why? I don’t know. It’s not because an entire gender is too shallow. Nor is an entire gender made up of users and abusers. It’s just that for some reason, we just aren’t meant to date, and fate does not allow it to happen.
And instead of raising a fuss about it, and blaming everyone but me, and instead of piling on my own insecurities, and saying “It’s this flaw and that one, that makes me utterly unlovable, despite the obvious evidence that I am loved by a whole lot of people and other people with this same flaw get love and romance,” I have just decided to accept it as a mystery of the universe, and knowing that I’m not the only one both helps and hurts. It helps me believe that I’m not a horrible, repulsive person, because I know other non-horrible, non-repulsive people in the same boat. And it hurts because there are so many wonderful people in the world that I think are great and deserving of love, but just don’t have it. I wish, so much, that everyone in the world could get just the love the need and want. But it doesn’t happen, and that makes me very sad, indeed. In my case, misery does not love company.
So, please don’t pile on heebee. Heebee has enough pain, already, and is being the mature person by *not* blaming other people. The fact that you know lots of flawed people who date a lot does not negate the existence of those of us who, despite lots of people thinking we are great, still just can’t get a date (with a non-abuser), and can’t figure out why.
Please don’t erase us.
@Delurking for this
Heebee is arguing in favor of a major tenant of incel philosophy (that he will never be able to get a date because of his physical appearance) on a post about incels. I believe that is the major reason for all the pushback.
Unfortunately I can’t write a longer response right now—got to go to work.
I read everything heebee said on this thread, and he didn’t say anything about *why* he was undatable until 1:38 pm, when several people had already called him a misogynist and said it was because of appearance. Finally, at 1:38, he said, “I ain’t attractive enough to date.” Attractive still doesn’t address *only* appearance. He never actually said anything about his actual appearance.
Some readers are putting words and misogyny into his mouth, declaring that he’s declaring that women are too shallow to see past his appearance, when he didn’t even mention it, until you piled onto him and he defended himself.
Also, before you accuse me of misogyny for my own post about not getting dates with the opposite sex. I’m a cishet female. And I do see beauty in myself. And other people see beauty in me, and say so. But I still don’t get dates. So go figure.
Heebee’s acceptance, and determination to live a life regardless of the sex our society pushes and sometimes demands is, in my opinion, admirable.
I’ve seen enough trolls here to know that heebee is not one. At least, not on this thread. Maybe he said stuff elsewhere that I didn’t read, but I’m going to give him the benefit of the doubt, and I do think it behooves you to do so, as well.
By all means, pile onto the people who come out and say awful stuff. I just don’t think heebee is one of them.
Going back to lurking status, now.
@Delurking
Well, since you’re not going to respond to anything else I say, I’ll just address the following for now:
I wasn’t involved in that. Please don’t say things about me that aren’t true.
Nobody called Heebee a misogynist, just that calling a subset of men undateable and saying the problem with incels as just that they react poorly to their undateability has misogynistic implications. Not the same thing.
Also, as Lumipuna pointed out, there is a commenter who makes multiple socks to come into incel posts and say the exact same things Heebee said. Sad boner trolls are common on feminist sites. They don’t say overtly hateful things, but they do derail conversations by making a discussion of misogyny all about themselves and their sad feels.
Whether Heebee is that same person, I don’t know. But there’s a reason that type of comment is greeted with suspicion.
@Delurking
His words are extremely similar to others that have come here. And they have been addressed before. You need to lurk more.
It’s suspicious when someone says that they are undateable, because it assumes that literally everyone in their demographic of choice has the exact same standards (at least minimum standards, which the undateable person apparently doesn’t meet), and implies that those people in the demographic are some kind of monolithic group, and not individuals with a variety of experiences and tastes. Which is the same kind of concept that features in misogyny and other bigotries. If it’s not an indicator of that mindset, then it’s at least a cousin to it.
(I would say that most traits would not make people 100% undateable, whether appearance or otherwise. For a little while I considered “all right, maybe if you’re some kind of eldritch abomination that drives humans insane when they face upon your gibbering visage”, but I’ve been on Tumblr long enough to have come across some very enthusiastic monsterfuckers, so, yeah.)
Thanks @Delurking
Not gonna derail this conversation anymore, Ive had my say, people are free to think what they want. Theres more important stuff going on than be being undateable.
The major incel philosophy is “fuck women FEEEMALEEES “insert disgusting comment here”.
Theres nothing wrong with saying “Look, Im not physically attractive enough to date, no hard feelings, no self pity, no bitterness- lets move on”.
The way incels DEAL with not being able to experience romance is an ISSUE. Not being able to experience romance is fine
@ heebee
May I suggest a further reason you’re setting off alarm bells with some people here?
Gavin DeBecker gives a list of tactics predatory men use to manipulate women into situations they’re not comfortable with. One of those is called ‘stereotyping’.
That’s when a woman says ‘no’, so the man suggests the reason for that is something negative.
And that doesn’t have to be hostile (although it often is, “Sorry, didn’t know you were one of those feminazis who thinks all men are rapists”); self depreciating and gentle stereotyping can be even more effective.
So for example, if a woman declines an invitation to walk her home, the man may say something like “That’s ok; I don’t blame you for not wanting to be seen in public with someone who looks like me”.
Now no-one likes to be thought of as being shallow or prejudiced; especially in a public setting. So the woman may be pressured to go against her instincts, just to disprove the negative stereotype.
And I think perhaps people are feeling some of that undercurrent in how you’re generalising about all women; even though you’re framing it in a pseudo non blaming way.
Thing is alan I have couple of disagreements,
1- Who am I exactly trying to manipulate? I gave up on dating two years ago, deleted my dating apps, stopped watching porn, promised myself never to approach a woman again. Moved on with my life. I aint trying to manipulate anybody. Like what would I be trying to get a group of people on an internet forum do anyway?
In the past years when I used to approach girls at bars and clubs when a woman said “no” that was the end. Simple. No explanation needed (Im an ugly fuck haha), no need for a root cause analysis or a dissertation about it, a simple no meant bye bye enjoy the rest of your night.
2- In a dating context at least, the word “shallow” is over-used. Its called having preferences. Thats it. No hard feelings. No prejiduce, no entitlement. Chill
One thing I would say is that women get SHAMED a lot for having preferences (some women are shamed and called shallow for liking tall dark guys ect). We need to EMPOWER those women to feel CONFIDENT in expressing their preferences without being called shallow .
@Delurking for this
I read back through your first post several times. Your situation sounds like it can be so frustrating and disheartening, and I’m sorry. 🙁
Due to how common it is to use the word ‘attractive’ to refer solely to physical appearance, I…kinda forgot it can refer to more. Sorry to both you and heebee for that unwarranted assumption.
Since I didn’t accuse heebee of misogyny, I’m not sure why you thought I’d accuse you.
I should note I do agree with almost all the criticisms of heebee in this thread. The reason is his statements are subtler versions of more overtly problematic ones made in past threads. Additionally, his posts are remarkably similar to those of at least two previous posters. Still, it’s possible I’m wrong and am jumping to conclusions ahead of all the necessary facts.
@heebee
This is definitely true for me.
But it is. It’s viewing people not as individuals with their own agency, goals, desires, and preferences and instead viewing them as a monolithic gender. That’s an issue. That’s the seed that, when nurtured, grows to incel proportions.
To put it another way, you and heebee have not attempted dating [preferred gender] and failed. You have attempted dating some number of individual people and not found any of them compatible with you. Having a track record like that, regardless of how long, doesn’t indicate that one is undateable or flawed or anything of the kind, nor does it say anything about how any other individuals might feel about one.
@heebee
To get sympathy or attention? Because it’s not like the internet isn’t chalk full of guys trying to get attention from women by manipulating their feels?
But I’ll give you some attention. 😛
IMO incels don’t need their misogyny to make them creepy, they ID themselves as dysfunctional the moment they create their identity not from what they are, but from what they cannot get from women. IMO while you didn’t do that, you kinda sounded pretty damn close. But that’s probably just the internet for you. 😛
I’m sorry that you’ve been unlucky with romance and that it’s beaten you down to the point that you see yourself as unattractive.
Red, R Lion- sympathy for what? Ive not ever been manipulated, abused, raped, cheated on (like I suspect many women on this forum and around the globe). Im quiet fortunate that Im a man and I don’t suffer from a women-hating/shaming society.
Kupo- The seed to incels hatred is entitlement. Which is caused by the false promise we give to young boys and men. “Someone for everyone”- is the main cause of male entitlement. “Someone for everyone” implies that romantic success (whether that be sex, dates, marriage ect) is a FIXED point on ones timescale. Then when it doesn’t happen (or no signs it happening), men will feel like they haven’t been given something that society promised them (romantic success)
Im a statistician and statistics are key in my job. If a guy has attempted to date 20000 women and gets rejected 100% of the times, he is undateable. Doesn’t mean its womens fault, doesn’t mean he is hard done by, and it doesn’t mean life is unfair. He just aint good enough to date. No hard luck story, no self pity, no resentment. Life goes on
If a guy attempts to publish a book 20000 times and none of them make it, he is a crap author. He needs to stop writing books and focus on whatever he is good at instead, nurture his strengths more and use it to his advantage
Again, you’re erasing the agency and individuality when you say an entire gender has certain dating preferences. To compare to authors, some people won’t succeed with publishers because publishers have very specific standards for what they think the market will respond to; however, there will always be someone interested in reading it if you post it somewhere. I read multiple self-published authors because major publishing houses don’t always put out the kind of stuff I like to read.
So you’re right, if you keep only looking within a small pool of people who have a very narrowly defined criteria for who they will date, you won’t be successful. But you’ve described not that, but being completely undateable, which assumes those criteria of the people you’ve attempted to date so far are shared by an entire group of people. You’ve based this assumption about this group of people on nothing other than being the same gender as the people you’ve attempted to date. That is sexist.
So in your opinion a person who has never dated in their lives and been rejected 100% of the time cant say that they are undateable? Even if they are a 50 year old virgin?
I don’t think anyone cares if a man wants to think of himself as undateable. I don’t care all that much anyway. The issue is the appropriateness of bringing that up in a discussion about violently misogynistic groups.
At best it comes off as attention and/or cookie seeking and derails the conversation, making it about men and their feelings, despite the fact that it’s women who are being subjected to violence and hate here.
At worst, it implies (whether one means it to or not) that women are responsible for misogyny because we didn’t date/love/fuck misogyny prone men.
Well, we can all agree that male entitlement brings about misogyny. So what causes the male entitlement? Men obviously aren’t born entitled, but they develop the feeling of being owed dates/sex as they grow through their teens
@heebee
We’re not really here to educate you in this. There are plenty of studies into this. There’s an entire field of interdisciplinary study for this.
And male entitlement and misogyny can exist separately from one another. For example, women can be misogynistic.
@heebee
You mention you are a statistician – I think it’s important to remember there is a difference between cumulative and non-cumulative events.
For example, when you talk about asking people out, essentially that’s a coin toss. The coin could land either way, heads or tails. Yes or no. BUT the outcome of a coin toss does not affect the outcome of any other coin toss. You ask out Bridget, she says no. You ask out Anne, she says no. Those two events are not related, so you need to stop treating them as if they are. As I’m sure you know, a coin could theoretically show tails a thousand times in a row, and the 50/50 chance of heads will be exactly the same on the next toss.
There is a tendency for human beings to relate unrelated events when it’s not the case. Rejection is thought of as cumulative – 20 people have said no to me, therefore the next one will say no. Not the case. You’ve been unlucky with your coin tosses, that’s all.
Or, as a friend of mine once said to me when I was prone to similar rants 15 years ago: “What makes you so special that no other human on earth could ever find you attractive?” It’s a kind of arrogance, to be honest. People who are ugly find partners. People who have horrific scarring over 50pc of their body find partners. Sadly, people who have horrible personalities sometimes find partners. The only reason you can’t get a date is because you are telling yourself a story about how that’s not possible for you and my guess is that internal story’s affecting how you come across to people you’re interested in.
You should work on this, but the others are correct – we’re not here to help you with that. You need to do that work yourself, either alone or with a therapist.
Thanks guys, I don’t need a therapist as Im lucky enough to be content with my life and not suffer from any mental health problems
Wont comment any more on myself, not fair if I derail this thread. Ive gave up on romance and Ill leave it as that. Cheers, and lets move on:)
400 dudes a year?
Like, I’ve got errands.
That just seems exhausting.
Explain me that “mathematics”. Men have allegedly 2 times more sexual partners than women in broad population is impossible for very simple reason – if it’s true with who these men had sex? With each other? It has to be the same number, and it is – these “surveys” are polls and like in polls people lie and women underestimate number of their partners and men overestimate so true is both sexes have same number of partners.
(https://youtu.be/H2vN2QXZGnc?t=264)
Never mind the facts, logic alone should make anybody doubt that theory. If almost ALL women have A LOT of sex with just a relatively small subset of men, then those later man would have to spend almost allt their waking time fucking, at least if we include the time necesary to ge to know and set up meeting with women. For example for every woman to have sex with a new man from the smaller group every week, those men would need to have sex with a new woman every day more or less. That´s not a level most men would find practical to keep up or even desire.
@Neon:
Uh, have you forgotten that gay men exist? And yea, some of the straight men might be exaggerating their numbers, but there’s also the fact that one guy can sleep with multiple women while each of those women is only sleeping with that one guy.
The fact that polyamory is becoming more popular might also be a factor.