Science Is Finally Catching on That Female Promiscuity Is Natural

New anthropological research on human behavior has found that when it comes to sexual selection, females aren’t merely passive objects of male competition, but actively seek out multiple partners as an “evolutionary strategy.” According to science, we’re all sluts. Who wants to heave the first “told ya so”?

More than 30 years after Sarah Blaffer Hrdy’s The Langurs of Abu sparked controversy with her theories of female sexual strategies (that being sexually coy is not a gendered thing, as Darwin had suggested), a bunch of subsequent research has confirmed her findings. The most recent is an article published in Evolutionary Anthropology by human behavioral ecologist Brooke Scelza titled “Choosy but not Chaste: Multiple Mating in Human Females.”

Scelza finds that not only do women seek out multiple sexual partners as an evolutionary strategy, but that they change up their strategies depending on the context. In short: we fuck who we want and we have our reasons.

Over at Slate, Eric Michael Johnson makes a good point about why this news is so beneficial:

In many societies today, including our own, women who are overtly sexual and pursue multiple male partners often experience moral outrage and “slut shaming” of a kind that is entirely unheard of in other parts of the world. While these cultural attitudes used to look toward science for justification, that position is becoming increasingly difficult to reconcile with the biological evidence.