mating & taboos about promiscuity

in trying to understand how male female social roles are influenced i want to think about the strategies of reproduction. males and females both try to optimize gene flow but there are different solutions for each gender because the advantages are skewed. the male has one great advantage -less energy expenditure per generation of offspring- while the female has to give half her energy to child-bearing and her pregnancy is preclusive of other offspring generation.

child-bearing becomes a great un-equalizer and unfortunately this is a static gender difference. however child-bearing gives females one advantage out of a handful of disadvantages: information assymetry, a woman has a much clearer idea of who the father is than the man. this leads to the existence of a culture of gender discrepancies in the perception of promiscuity.

men have nothing bad to say about promiscuous men. it is the best strategy we can have hands down, no pun intended. what women have to say about promiscuous women i don't know. the "men are pigs / assholes" derision that women have for male promiscuity probably derives from the loss of resources from a promiscuous mate -she will have a harder time child-rearing if he has to stretch resources to care for his other offspring.

but there is a tolerance for it because a woman has advantages a man doesn't: information assymetry and the fact that she can still get pregnant so that *her* gene flow is successful even if her mate is spreading his seed elsewhere; her offspring is also likely to have greater natural fitness or sexual selectivity if the ability of her mate to be promiscuous, chosen by many women, is an indicator of such things.

the corollary to this explains men's absolute horror of female promiscuity. a promiscuous female is basically playing the ultimate advantage of child-bearing and the consequences are worse for males in the context that they cannot get pregnant and ensure gene flow. for a man, because a promiscuous mate can entail zero gene continuity there is much less tolerance for it.

all these interacting perceptions result in the state of taboos that exist today around promiscuity. if my logic makes sense such taboos are thus not necessarily derived from the paternalistic sexism that existed but are actually game theoretic consequences of the mating fiasco.