[uubpwgfn] Paradox of promiscuity

Having sex, aiming for enjoyable sex, is inherently a risky activity: you have to put yourself in a physically or emotionally vulnerable state to maximize enjoyment.  However, things could go wrong in such a state: you could get hurt.  To handle and recover from things going wrong requires a positive attitude, mental fortitude: high self-qi.

Therefore, one would expect a correlation between people who have sex with many partners and high self-qi.  Therefore, we would expect that people believed to have had sex with many partners would be prized for courtship: prefer partners who signal (as in game theory imperfect information) high self-qi.

This seems not to be occurring: In women, promiscuity is very frequently looked down upon ("slut"), and in men, although it carries value ("stud"), the meaning of that value does not seem to be because it directly signals high self-qi.

Possible explanations resolving this paradox:

This model of self-qi is entirely wrong.

The reason some people have had many sexual partners is because they can't retain them, losing them because of their own low self-qi or some other flaw like lack of commitment or loyalty.

Self-qi is a currency that can be used to advance yourself in many ways.  Those who choose to spend it on having sex are doing so because of lack of other opportunities, signaling low social status.  Future post: on the history social dancing.

People are not being rational in how much sex they have.  This seems incorrect: people make less mistakes the more chances they have to try and learn from their mistakes, so a promiscuous person for whom promiscuity is rationally bad decision will learn not to have sex so often.  Similarly, those for whom promiscuity is rationally a good decision will shift towards it, though this is contingent on other people wanting to have sex with you.

Something involving sexual economics.