Call Her Happily Married After Premarital Sex Just Like Countless Other Women

Conservatives have been slamming Call Her Daddy podcast host Alex Cooper for getting married and embracing motherhood after creating a podcast that failed to shame women for having premarital sex. Their criticisms ring ridiculously out of touch. Many center on the supposed unlikelihood of a woman being able to snag a husband after hooking up with others in her 20s, while some simply seem angry at an openly promiscuous woman not being punished for it.

Cooper “has some atoning to do,” writes Ashley McGuire at the Institute for Family Studies, citing the podcast host’s “destructive ideas” about casual sex. McGuire links to a piece about Cooper saying it’s OK to kiss or even have sex on a first date and cites Cooper telling women “you do not need to be denying yourself pleasure to prove some arbitrary point.”

The gist of the criticism—from McGuire and others—is that, for women, premarital sex leads to bad outcomes, so it’s somehow hypocritical or irresponsible for Cooper to pretend like her path from playing the field to happily married is typical or attainable.

Enjoying casual hookups in your 20s generally leads to spinsterdom because “most men don’t want to marry a thot,” suggests Isabella Redjai of the Manhattan Institute. Trading in casual encounters for marriage and motherhood is something that “only works for exceptionally successful, gorgeous women with influence,”  writes author Gina Botempo, author of Fat and Unhappy: How “Body Positivity” Is Killing Us (and How to Save Yourself). Premarital sex leads to divorce, suggests University of Virginia professor and Get Married author Brad Wilcox.

I’m sorry, but what century are these folks living in? Because in the real world, Cooper—who married at the ripe old age of 29, mind you, and is now pregnant with her first child at 31—is far from an outlier or some spectacular fairy tale case.

These days, the vast majority of young and middle-aged adults—including the vast majority of married women—have had premarital sex. According to the most recent data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, from 2017–19, the share of ever-married 15- to 49-year-olds who’ve had premarital sex stands at 89 percent for women and 93 percent for men.

In the 2000s, 14 percent of married women had 10 or more premarital sex partners and 30 percent had between four and nine partners, noted University of Utah professor Nicholas H. Wolfinger at the Institute for Family Studies in 2016. In the early 2010s, 18 percent of married women had 10 or more partners, and 32 percent had between four and nine, with just 5 percent having still been virgins when they got married.

It seems plenty of people—including plenty of women—spend some time getting down before settling down.

The data back up what I—and I’m guessing many of you, too—have observed personally: that it’s not at all unusual for a woman to spend her 20s going on dates or entering into romantic relationships that don’t work out and, despite being unchaste in some of these encounters, eventually settling into monogamous marriage and motherhood.

(Hi, it’s me! Happily married with two kids and living the most wholesome, picket-fence-perfect life despite failing to remain celibate throughout my 20s and not even marrying until age 36.)

“Alex Cooper is no exception,” notes the Substack writer Cartoons Hate Her. “Many women who date casually, or who sleep around, still get married—some on a relatively typical timeline—not to ‘beta chumps’ who don’t know any better, but to men who have lived similar lives, who had similar timelines in mind.”

Every hot slut I knew in my 20s is now happy and settled in their 30s. That’s just the normal progression of life lol.

— Josie Marcellino (@JosieMarcellino) May 18, 2026

OK—but what about Wilcox’s contention that premarital sex is a “robust predictor of divorce?”

Wilcox cites a 2023 study from Wolfinger and Jesse Smith that found the odds of divorce were higher for people with more premarital sexual partners. “Those with the highest number of premarital sexual partners…(nine or more) have about triple the odds of divorce compared to those with none,” the study authors write. “Those with one to eight partners are also at greater risk of divorce” than those with zero premarital partners, and “a significantly lower divorce risk than those with nine or more partners, indicating three distinct groups. Taken together, these results suggest…three tiers of divorce risk, with the lowest risk for those with no premarital, nonspousal partners, a modest increase for those with some, and a sharp increase for those with many.”

First, it’s important to stress that many people who had a few or even over nine sexual partners did not get divorced.

Second, let’s note that previous research from Wolfinger came to some somewhat different conclusions. Looking at premarital sex rates and marriages from the 1970s through the early 2010s, he found that women with two sexual partners before marriage had higher divorce rates than women with three to nine sexual partners.

“In short, if you’re going to have comparisons to your [future] husband, it’s best to have more than one,” Wolfinger said in 2016.

But the key thing to keep in mind here is that you can’t look at a link between premarital sex and higher divorce rates and know that the former causes the latter. And there’s good reason to suspect that that’s not what’s going on here. Because people who have premarital sex and people who don’t are likely different in all sorts of ways, and people who have one or two premarital sex partners and people who have 10 or 20 are likely different in all sorts of ways as well.

The kinds of people who entirely refrain from premarital sex may be more religious or conservative, traits that may also make them more likely to view divorce as verboten. The more recent Wolfinger study said it controlled for religion and socioeconomic factors, but there are still a lot of factors that weren’t and can’t be controlled. People who have no premarital sex may be more shy, have lower self-esteem, be less physically attractive, or possess other attributes that make divorce less likely.

Conversely, people with more sexual partners before marriage may have certain attributes that also make divorce more likely. Having premarital sex at all may indicate an openness to new experiences, or a more liberal attitude generally, and both traits could also be linked to a higher likelihood of divorce. Certainly, having lots of premarital sex may indicate a person isn’t cut out for monogamy—a trait that would also make that person less likely to stay married. And having lots of sexual partners could, in some cases, signal an underlying tendency toward chaotic or risky choices, or perhaps even mental illness—again, all attributes that could make divorce more likely.

The authors of the study Wilcox cites even note this, writing that “having more partners may indicate distinctive characteristics which are not conducive to marital stability.”

I have no trouble believing that there’s some link between higher premarriage “body counts” and divorce risk. But a correlation here does not mean that having premarital sex causes future divorces or makes one less likely to be satisfied in a future marriage. Likewise, we can’t assume that simply abstaining from premarital sex would make everyone happier in their future marriages.

(This reminds me of Wilcox’s and others’ insistence that getting married makes people happier, since surveys show married people measure higher in happiness and life satisfaction than their unmarried counterparts. But maybe people with a generally positive outlook or happy demeanor are just more likely to find a spouse. Or maybe there are traits and circumstances that lead to both happiness and a higher tendency to get married.)

The bottom line here is that some amount of premarital sex before marriage is normal. Another study conducted by the Institute for Family Studies found that in ranking relationship milestones, the second most popular “first stage” was having sex (before marriage or cohabitation).

The idea that only the lucky few, or the exceptionally beautiful and successful, can pull off marriage after a decade of dating just doesn’t match reality. As Cartoons Hate Her put it: “It’s not a luxury belief to enjoy casual sex and then get married. It’s just what lots of people do.”

Cartoons Hate Her suggests that some people criticizing Cooper and others like her are not genuinely concerned that it will result in misery for most young women. Rather, they’re concerned that it won’t: “They want Cooper (and women like her) to suffer the consequences of playing the field and failing to settle down as young as possible.”

There’s certainly an undercurrent of that in some of the commentary around Cooper—a seeming seething over the idea that women could “blow off” marriage during their “peak years” and “enjoy a libertine and licentious lifestyle” while still winding up with a conservative-coded happily ever after.

But more commonly, the criticism has coalesced around the idea that there’s something vaguely hypocritical in saying women can have sex for fun when they’re young and then, personally, taking a more traditional route.

This critique goes back further than Cooper—Wilcox was taking a similar tack in his 2023 book Get Married: Why Americans Must Defy the Elites, Forge Strong Families, and Save Civilization (which I reviewed along with several other family-formation books here). Get Married suggests there’s something hypocritical about wealthy, college-educated people choosing marriage for themselves and waiting until after marriage to have children while not insisting that this is the one true way or shaming people who take another path.

This seems to be coalescing as conventional wisdom on the right: that it’s broadly hypocritical—a “luxury belief”—to preach tolerance, sex positivity, and lifestyle pluralism while personally engaging in “conservative” actions like getting married and having kids. But that’s only hypocritical if you also believe there’s only one path to life fulfillment and everyone must follow it.

Personally, I think there’s no one-size-fits-all way to be happy. And there’s nothing hypocritical about suggesting that some or perhaps even most people would be better off in one set of circumstances while not everyone will find those circumstances optimal.

In fact, what someone finds optimal for themselves may depend on the stage of life they’re in—as we’ve seen Cooper illustrate so nicely. Call her a perfectly normal 21st century woman on a common and mundane relationship trajectory.

A case with major implications for FOSTA enforcement won’t go to the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court won’t take up a case involving X and an allegation of sex trafficking. The “rejected appeal concerned two teenage boys who thought they were interacting on Snapchat with a girl at their school,” notes USA Today:

In reality, they say, they were being tricked by sex traffickers who blackmailed them into recording sexually graphic videos of themselves.

Three years later, the videos began circulating on Twitter, now X. The company rejected requests by the minors to remove the posts, doing so only after the Department for Homeland Security got involved, according to filings.

I’ve written about this case at length before. The plaintiffs here have majorly twisted the definition of sex trafficking in an attempt to get around Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which protects websites from liability for content that they did not create.

But the 2018 law known as FOSTA carved out an exception to Section 230 for crimes involving sex trafficking. So here we’ve got plaintiffs arguing that soliciting an explicit video from minors on Snapchat counts as sex trafficking and that unwittingly hosting a link to that video makes X/Twitter part of a “sex trafficking venture.”

Lower courts rejected this argument, thankfully. Their rulings represent a narrow reading of FOSTA’s Section 230 carveout and a narrow interpretation of the law against participation in a sex trafficking venture. To have ruled otherwise could have left tech companies on the hook for human trafficking any time a user posts an illegal sex video, even if no one was actually sold for sex and even if the company ultimately takes down the video or any links to it.

Legal liability in cases like this should lie with the adults who solicited sex videos from minors and with anyone who knowingly posted an underage sex video. It should not lie with web platforms that inadvertently and temporarily hosted evidence of these criminal acts.

New @ReasonFdn Backgrounders! The GUARD Act and CHATBOT Act both suffer from the same flawed approach – “safety” through age-gating and full or partial bans on minors using AI chatbots 🧵1/9 pic.twitter.com/mtUmMNN0Pa

— Max Gulker (@maxg_econ) May 19, 2026

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