I've recently found myself in the position of trying to explain to several women why certain men act the way they do, and it's gotten me thinking. The question posed to me was, "why do some men go around hitting on every girl they see? It's just creepy."
The reason some men act like this is because it's a viable strategy to get laid. A lot of women seem doubtful of that. They tell me that for them and many women they know, an overly aggressive strategy is just a turn-off. They don't understand how such a flawed strategy could ever work.
Of course, the aggressive strategy isn't aimed at those women. When a guy uses an aggressive mating strategy in which he propositions many women, he expects to fail most of the time. The key thing is that he invests little time in each individual woman, but approaches many women. When a guy talks to a dozen women in the course of a night, his overall success chance can be reasonable even if his success chance with any particular woman is low. Even if the aggressive strategy is guaranteed to fail with 90% of women, 10% is still plenty to work with.
The key comparison should be with the more "standard" courtship strategy, in which a man attempts to win over a particular woman over a longer period of time. Certainly, the odds of success are better with that particular woman than they are with the aggressive strategy. But it is less clear if the overall chance of success is better with that strategy.
Many women, at least in my experience, seem to prefer it when guys pursue the individual focus strategy. They often don't like it when guys hit on them aggressively, and they prefer it when guys talk to them and attempt to win them over with an entertaining evening. Additionally, when guys pursue the aggressive strategy, they are signaling that they don't particularly care who they go home with, as long as it's someone. That is a level of objectification with which many women are uncomfortable.
What makes the aggressive strategy work is that some women, perhaps a minority, are interested in casual hook-ups. A man cannot typically tell easily which women are potential casual mates and which aren't. So the point of hitting on many women is that he is trying to find the women who are interested in that sort of thing. Of course, in the process of that, he creeps out many women who aren't into that. From his perspective, however, that's not a major drawback. He is simply trying to efficiently locate potential hook-ups.
To me, this dynamic explains certain aspects of "slut-shaming" behavior. A recent study from Cornell University that's been getting a lot of press coverage shows that women tend to not want to be friends with sexually permissive or "slutty" women. If we assume that many women don't like aggressive male mating strategies (anecdotally true, though not really proven), then it makes sense for women to put pressure on other women to respond negatively to aggressive male strategies. Similarly, many men choose to not pursue aggressive mating strategies, either because they don't know how, or because they explicitly choose not to. These men would tend to disapprove of permissive women as well, because it rewards men who pursue a strategy that they don't use or like.
This certainly doesn't explain everything about the social isolation of sexually permissive women (even other permissive women don't want to be friends with permissive women). It does, however, show why it makes sense for certain groups of people to put pressure on permissive women.
I firmly view pressure on permissive women as wrong. I think a core element of gender equality is that women who choose to sleep with many partners should not be stigmatized for their choice. However, the social logic behind slut-shaming and stigmatization is more complicated than a simple social more that sluttiness is bad and chastity is good. Solving the problem might have to involve reconsidering other parts of gender relations as well.
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