do childless catladies have worse sex?
Are Liberals Crazy? part VIII: birth rates, sex, and marriage.
Besides performance on cognitive tests, educational achievement, political success, wealth, and level of obesity, one of the best ways to measure whether or not someone is mentally health is by their behavioral sexual health. Putting aside the issue of STDs (which pertains to physical health), behavioral sexual health has two components: reproduction and intercourse. Both have an important impact. First, we will look at reproduction, and its affect on women.
Young women (ages 20-39) with children have a lower level of anxiety than women without children, and this decreases linearly with the number of children. Extremely conservative women are more likely to have children. Extremely liberal women are less likely to have children.1 This either because children suppress anxiety, or because anxiety reduces fertility.
It is also possible that extremely conservative women anticipate having children, and as a result, they make choices which protect them from anxiety. For example, extremely conservative women might date for marriage, which helps them to be more selective in forming long-term partnerships. By contrast, extremely liberal women who date on the basis of political partisanship might experience cognitive dissonance between their sexual preferences and political preferences.
conservatives more sexually satisfied:
Analysis by Mark Regnerus of the New Family Structures Study found that liberal women were more sexually unsatisfied. However, after adding “religious service attendance to the regression model… political liberalism finally went silent as a predictor.” This implies one of three things:
Religious men are more sexually competent than liberal men.
Perhaps religious men have higher testosterone levels. But this doesn’t match with the data: high testosterone men avoid religious services.
Perhaps religious men watch less porn. However, frequency and length of porn use was found to not impact sexual function. Rather, it was the degree to which the behavior was compulsive that determined sexual dysfunction. In this sense, those with a moral opposition to porn might feel their use is more “compelled” than those with no moral opposition.
Religious women feel a sense of guilt, shame, or sinfulness about critiquing their partner’s sexual performance. “Everyone is good enough in the eyes of God. I am loyal to my husband, and dissatisfaction is an expression of disloyalty.” They are ashamed to admit the desire for greater amounts of sex, because they associate this desire with lust and sin. Liberal women are less ashamed to admit this desire.
Conservatives have a heightened sense of sanctity/degradation than liberals, and this increases the pleasure of the sexual experience. For some liberals, sex is a blasé, mechanical, morally neutral act. For conservatives, sex is a matter of life and death, heaven and hell, making the experience more psychologically exciting and satisfying.
Woke Liberals have Healthier Marriages
Another hypothesis is that liberal have worse sex lives because they have less happy emotional connections with their partners. However, according to the Institute for Family Studies, a conservative organization, extremely liberal married adults were the most likely to be in a happy marriage. When considering all adults in general, those who were extremely liberal were just as likely to be happily married as those who were slightly conservative.
However, liberals are less likely to be married in general, and marriage does generally correlate with psychological stability. It is not clear, however, that forcing liberals into marriages would make them happier. The correlation between marriage and mental stability could be due to selective effectives: those who are more stable are more likely to seek out marriage.
One argument in favor of forcing liberals to get married is that it might eliminate the sex gap between liberals and conservatives:
“Wolfinger … found that marital status explained the differences in sexual frequency, as Republicans are more likely to be married, and married individuals report higher sexual frequency.”2
Sadism and Sexuality.
The higher level of visceral and physical sadism among conservatives might explain why conservatives report higher sexual satisfaction. This is because most people enjoy sadistic sexual practices:
About 80% of those with a current sexual or romantic partner engaged in rough sex with them and most who engaged [in] it liked it. Bisexual women reported greater rough sex frequency and enjoyment (54.1% indicated enjoying it “very much”).
Is it possible that liberals have lower sexual satisfaction because liberal men are less physically sadistic toward their partners?
A study from 20223 asked the following: “People have different ideas about what they think rough sex means. What does it mean to you?” Participants were asked to select from a list. Students willing to be more inclusive or expansive in their definitions of rough sex might indicate a greater openness toward these practices.
Across 12 different types of sexually forceful behavior, extreme liberals were more likely to define an activity as “rough sex” than conservatives. The notable exception to this trend was in choking, where conservatives were more likely to define choking as “rough sex” when compared to liberals.
The partisan gap between extreme liberals and conservatives was the smallest for choking, forced sex, and hair pulling.
When conservatives and liberals define “rough sex,” it may be that liberals are more inclusive in their definition because they are more comfortable with those practices. If true, then liberals may avoid defining “choking” or “forced sex” as “rough sex” because they are uncomfortable with these practices.
conclusions.
Leftism almost certainly has a negative impact on birth rates, which increases anxiety levels in women. Suppression of birth rates may be linked to feelings of loneliness, although studies on parental loneliness link childbirth with greater feelings of loneliness.
Despite liberals being less satisfied with their sex lives, this isn’t due to lack of trying: liberals tend to be more open minded toward “rough sex.” Conservative satisfaction seems to have less to do with better performance, and more to do with shame over “lustful thoughts,” which suppresses self-reported dissatisfaction.
Specifically, when we control for church attendance, the correlation between leftism and sexual dissatisfaction disappears. This may be because church attending couples have more frequent or higher quality sex, or it may be because church attending couples are self-deceiving about their sexual dissatisfaction for moralistic reasons, such as believing that the desire for more or kinkier sex is sinful.
There is no evidence that wokeness (extreme leftism) reduces relationship satisfaction. In fact, the most extreme leftists were in the happiest relationships. This may be because leftists feel less social pressure to enter into unhappy marriages, whereas conservatives feel a greater moral obligation to marry a sexual partner, despite feeling little emotional connection to them.
The sex gap between liberals and conservatives can be explained by lower rates of marriage.
In the next installment, Part VII, we will begin to break down leftism by race, ethnicity, and religion.
Having children lowers testosterone for both men and women. This is unexpected, since low testosterone increases anxiety and depression.
2014, Marriage and motherhood are associated with lower testosterone concentrations in women: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3540120/
2021, Political Party Identification and Romantic Relationship Quality: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8266382/
2022, Meanings of Rough Sex across Gender, Sexual Identity, and Political Ideology: A Conditional Covariance Approach. https://doi.org/10.1080/0092623X.2022.2029781
I think I'll use this opportunity to make a comment that my trad identity prevents me from making elsewhere. I really find that fact that large numbers of women like to punched, choked and spat on during sex absolutely disgusting. I used to be mildly freaked out that 1 in 4 women I would pass in the street had had an abortion, but that was really ideological whereas this is visceral. I never enjoyed the company of women as a rule, but now I have a hard time even looking at them as human beings. My wife says it's all fake and they are just polling whores, but the data seems pretty robust. I genuinely can't comprehend how someone could think a woman who likes having her head stuck down the toilet [!] has any kind of human dignity whatsoever. This is a shame because my misogyny was trending downwards until this started appearing in my substack feed.
>Conservative satisfaction seems to have less to do with better performance, and more to do with shame over “lustful thoughts,” which suppresses self-reported dissatisfaction....Specifically, when we control for church attendance, the correlation between leftism and sexual dissatisfaction disappears. This may be because church attending couples have more frequent or higher quality sex, or it may be because church attending couples are self-deceiving about their sexual dissatisfaction for moralistic reasons, such as believing that the desire for more or kinkier sex is sinful.
i gotta say this seems pretty motivated, do you have any evidence for this? my social experience is that liberal women have much more of their identity tied up in being a "sex enjoyer" than conservative women do, & often feel great shame when they admit to any sexual dysfunction or dissatisfaction.
my guess would be that the neutral fact is that liberals are people who want change for whatever reason, so of course someone is more likely to want change if they have some kind of problem, so i would expect whether "conservatism is correct" or "liberalism is correct" that people who are having a worse time on any dimension would be more likely to be liberal