Feeling Dirrrty, Coming Clean

There's an article in Slate, under the feminist Double X imprint, about "the new backlash against casual sex"; its about a supposed trend of modern women, who are supposed to feel sexually liberated, being overcome by shame and guilt after hooking up.  Writer Jessica Grose has a theory that there's some sort of sine-curve "shame cycle", with care-free promiscuity climaxing in the "early aughts" (with Sex and The City and Xtina Aguilera's video for Dirrrty), then depressing into a present-day trough of guilt and remorse (brought on by "conservative cultural messages about the importance of marriage").

The fluffer for this video shoot was Pink.

Here's a counter-theory:  despite what you may have seen on Sex and The City, maybe women have always felt guilty after casual sex, and maybe they were evolved to do so.  During our evolutionary past, it would have been maladaptive for a woman to sleep around; if she got pregnant by some lunk-head who'd turn around and skip town, she and the baby would starve to death.  Nowadays we have birth-control and child-support, but the vestigial feeling of shame persists; its not logical for a woman to feel guilty, but it is natural. 

Some other examples of irrational, vestigial, evolutionary emotions might be:

• a fear of heights, even when you know you can't fall.
• a fear of the dark, even though you know there aren't predators.
• a fear of snakes, even though you know they aren't cocks.

One way to overcome these vestigial emotions is exposure therapy, in which you subject yourself to progressively stronger versions of the stimuli, eventually habituating yourself and eliminating the reaction.  I'm willing to offer myself up for the sake of womankind.

Girl, a "loose woman" is one who's been freed from the shackles of evolutionary history.