Your Preferences on Casual Sex & Abortion May Have More to Do With Sexual Strategy Than Politics

When Sexual Strategies go to war

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Rachelle has been involved with her boyfriend for the past year and a half.

Though she keeps quiet about it most times, she's secretly planning their wedding and long-term relationship. She thinks about how it will unfold; she wonders what their wedding day will be like; she thinks about having children and wonders if he'd be amicable to the idea. In short, she can't wait to have the picture-perfect family she's always dreamed of since she was a young girl.

Her beliefs were influenced by romantic comedies and fun, carefree television shows from the late 1990s and early 2000s. Much of her life has been shaped by this vision of finally settling down, raising a family, and pouring all of her love and resources into that family.

This is one way to go about passing on, among other things, our genes to the next generation and assuring they can thrive. 

This is called Attachment Fertility Theory, which suggests that since human infants are so utterly dependent upon their parents in the first many years of life, humans relied on fewer sexual strategies that favored enduring relationships rather than a variety of sexual strategies while assuring the best chances of their children's survival and flourishing.

But, observation shows us that this isn't the only strategy people employ regarding sex. Plenty of people like to sleep around; still, others employ a mixed strategy, forming long-term relationships with some partners while getting a little sex on the side with other partners.

If Attachment Fertility Theory were enough to explain that vast expanse of human sexual behavior, we wouldn’t have to explain away things like infidelity, open relationships, or people ditching their partners for an upgraded model after several years of relationships.

I've covered Sexual Strategies Theory recently, and these two theories constantly conflict (though Sexual Strategies theory offers people the ability to choose long-term strategies with fewer partners or short-term strategies with more partners). 

A brief review: Sexual Strategies Theory proposes that different people employ either short or long-term sexual strategies depending on what's best for them. If they can date and have sex with a variety of people, they'll do so, but when they feel their best bet is to find a great partner and go all in with that one person, they'll do so.

The problem is, when it comes to incentives, the two strategies are constantly at odds with one another.

Stop and think about what a world of free sex and love must feel like to someone like Rachelle, who wants to raise her children peacefully. It might seem like a world where sex is tolerated and out in the open would threaten the family. A sexually "loose" society provides ample opportunity and rationale for infidelity. 

It's a story we've seen play out repeatedly throughout history.

Family & Faith Vs. Fornication

When you ask people what they believe regarding abortion rights, they'll give you political or religious reasons. They'll rarely say what they fear—that if society drifts too much in the direction opposite their sexual strategy, it'll hinder and threaten the strategy they've doubled down on.

I mean, why else would people who call themselves pro-life simultaneously be so consistently against abortion and birth control? If you aim to prevent abortions, wouldn't you find yourself naturally allied with LGBTQ people and birth control movements that guarantee fewer people have abortions?

And wouldn't you support expanding social safety nets for people less fortunate than you? Think about it. Once those babies are born and become children, many will need assistance—it's not like only rich people terminate pregnancies. Quite the opposite, poor people usually need those services, by and large. 

If pro-life people truly cared about babies, surely they'd at least be begrudgingly willing to shell out a bit of cash to make sure those newborn babies are taken care of.

But that's not the case.

Pro-life people are often in favor of the death penalty, which presents a dilemma of Rubix Cube proportions to untangle. Conversation with pro-life people often leads to a confusing labyrinth of complicated reasoning that dances around the idea that they aren't pro-life—they're anti-sex.

How often are pro-life people also anti-LBGTQ marriage? How often are pro-life people like Rachelle, who believe that the primary goal in life should be to create a family and reduce any threats to that family, perceived or actual?

No group of people is guaranteed to have fewer abortions than gay men. It only makes sense when we see that some groups, particularly family-oriented groups, consider gay men "threats" to the nuclear family.

"Bad people," like criminals, are also threats to the nuclear family, and thus being pro-death-penalty and pro-life aren't exactly at odds when we stop and realize that pro-life means pro-family (which means anti-sex).

I spend more time digging through pro-life propaganda than I care to confess—it comes with the job—and lurking in the shadows of almost all of it is this fear that society will become overtly sexual.

It shares this fear with hardcore religious propaganda we've seen throughout the ages.

What they aren’t saying is what most of them are thinking.

“If society is allowed to be overtly sexual, I believe it threatens my way of life as someone who’s chosen a traditionalist path to my sexual strategy.”