Despite appearances, I'm actually 50/50 on this issue and would like to see some serious arguments from the other side on this. I specifically want to ask y'all because I know most of this board disagrees. This isn't a judgment of people's lifestyles btw, do not apply this to the real world or to other TUSCL members at all. The only arguments you should be making are on a philosophical basis.
So hedonism is a fairly simple philosophy. Pursue pleasure, avoid pain.
In high school, I used to think the more people someone fucked, the more hedonistic they were. This is the message we're generally given. Charlie Sheen is your archetype of a hedonist, not the married Christian man who only has sex with his wife. Going through college dramatically changed my opinion on that though. From what I've seen, someone being promiscuous is no more hedonistic than anyone else. In-fact, at this point, I do not see how its even possible for a promiscuous person to live as hedonistically as a married person can.
In terms of pursuing pleasure, we can measure pleasure in terms of how often someone has sex and how good the sex was. In terms of frequency, a married man can easily have significantly more sex than a promiscuous man can. Even if the promiscuous man is a class A seducer. The married man has his wife living at home with him, he can have sex with her pretty much whenever he wants. While the promiscuous man has to worry about how busy she is, how busy he is, whether they are going to have visitors tonight, or whether or not he can pickup a random girl from a bar, the only thing stopping a married couple from having sex is somebody choosing not to. Even if you work all day and have friends over for dinner, you still share a bed which means you can theoretically have sex at the end of the night.
This means a married couple can easily have sex every day. A young married couple who has no children and youthful bodies can have significantly more though. A young married couple is capable of having sex two, three, or even four times a day. They are living with you so the only thing stopping you is someone choosing not to. Promiscuous people have an extremely difficult time reaching these numbers. Even once a day is a stretch. Most promiscuous people I meet think once a week is a lot of sex. Even if somebody has a FWB or a fuck buddy. Many promiscuous people who have FWBs or fuck buddies do not see them every day, and consider seeing them more than twice a week to be too much time together. Which means in order to have sex every day as a promiscuous man, you need to have at least four fuck buddies at all times.
But let's go further. Let's assume the promiscuous man is either an extremely seductive person or extremely wealthy and can hire prostitutes every day. It still doesn't work out. The reason being that sex significantly improves upon learning someone's likes and dislikes. You get better at having sex with a person the better you know them. So a promiscuous man who is extremely seductive still suffers from the fact that he isn't experiencing the higher quality sex that the married man is receiving.
If you measure hedonism, then surely the married man feels a much higher degree of pleasure on a much more frequent basis than the promiscuous man does. So this means that monogamy probably increases the amount of pleasure in your life. Its more than just that though. Promiscuity adds a lot of unnecessary pain to your life too. And part of hedonism's ethics is avoiding pain. So let's completely disregard the social consequences of promiscuity and only focus on the physical aspects. How does promiscuity add pain to your life?
Mainly because it involves an enormous amount of work for a promiscuous person to achieve the same amount of pleasure as the married man receives. You have to go out to bars all the time, you have to spend countless hours flirting with girls you don't know. If you are not a master seducer, you will have to spend incredible amounts of money on prostitutes. You have to deal with the flakiness of fuck buddies. Overall, even if a promiscuous person found a way to have sex every day the way the married man does. It would involve so much work that most promiscuous people don't bother trying. The reason married people tend to have more sex is because high volumes of sex come effortlessly for the married couple.
The main argument for why promiscuity increases your hedonic value so to speak is that it provides variety and a higher number of sexual partners. Okay fair enough. But it seems like a lot of sacrifices to make in order to get variety. We talk about promiscuous people as though their brains are more primed for hedonistic behaviors. But if I was trying to maximize the hedonic value of my life. I'd much rather have a monogamous mindset that is happy fucking the same girl over and over again. It seems then that the monogamous person is actually primed more for a hedonistic lifestyle. And as for a higher number of sexual partners. How exactly does a higher number of sexual partners provide a higher amount of pleasure? Sex does not feel better just because you did it with a different person. The only logical reason I can see, from a hedonistic perspective, for switching partners is because the other girl is more beautiful than the girl you are with. But assuming you have a girlfriend who's a 9/10 or 10/10, what reason is there for ever choosing a different girl? You would almost certainly be choosing a less attractive girl.
Given the philosophy of hedonism, how is it possible for a promiscuous person to reach the potential levels of pleasure that a married man is capable of reaching? And how is it possible for them to do so without enduring the pain that it requires to reach those levels?
wow. very interesting subject. oh I have to say is that I was married 35 years. separated at 32 years. so One and only for 32 of those 35 years. After separating had a three-year relationship with a local lady. a lot of days we are averaging sex four times a day. but she moved on. so most definitely the only sex I get now are strippers I encounter.