Women did not use to sleep around so much or be so promiscuous. Except, well, the men of the past had this very complaint about the women of THEIR days!
There is this meme that’s been going around for about 8,000 years now that women in the past didn’t use to have as much sex with guys as they do today, that previous generations were purer, and that only recently have women become a lot more promiscuous and started sleeping around with men more.
You can read about it in the complaints of ancient Greeks, Romans, and Arabs from 1,500 to 2,500 years ago.
The ancient Chinese 2,000 years ago were so upset about women acting sluttier than they had in the past that they wrote an entire moral guide for women on how to not act slutty and be a good wife entitled Biographies of Exemplary Women and used it in the moral instruction of girls and women for two millennium.
Jesus’s apostles marched all around the Mediterranean 2,000 years ago, inveighing against the promiscuity they found everywhere (too many verses to list), and the Hebrew Bible from hundreds or thousands of years earlier found promiscuity such a problem it had to add specific instructions telling the daughters of priests not to go whoring (Leviticus 21:9) and women to stop cheating on their husbands (Hebrews 13:4).
We don’t have records dealing with increasing promiscuity in the women from ancient Sumer 8,000 years ago (so far as I’m aware) but based on this complaint occurring in every other epoch it was almost certainly a complaint of the civilized men then too.
Jean-Jacques Rosseau, writing in France in the 18th Century, called female promiscuity a “threat to social order” and recommended that women be taught to focus on domesticity rather than intellectual pursuits, lest they run around sleeping with men everywhere and upend society.
Men are still complaining about this phenomenon today: the apparent continuously rising tide of sluttiness in the women of every passing generation.
Men have complained of this phenomenon so long in so many places that by now you’d expect there to be some kind of SLUT APOCALYPSE, with women going to bed with hundreds of men before they even leave their teens.
But instead, the median number of lifetime sex partners for an American woman in the 21st Century is not hundreds nor thousands, but 3.
Yet why does it seem always, at all times and places, that women were purer in the past?