The Equestrian Demi-Monde · 5:22am Jul 10th, 2015
The time has come, due to a comment about "sex workers," to visit the Equestrian prostitutes.
Prostitution is legal in Equestria, which makes the lives of the prostitutes a heck of a lot easier because they can run their activities as normal service-oriented businesses, possessing the same protection from criminals as would any other service-oriented businesses. I've also decided that there are exotic dancers in Equestria, because believe it or not I've already referred to it in one of my stories, and a completed story at that, An Extended Performance. Remember when Trixie says she won't do hootchy-kootch dances? That's what she's talking about.
This fits my idea that Equestria is an essentially libertarian autocracy, in that most things which are not directly harmful to other Ponies are legal. This is because Celestria grasps the concept of black markets, and doesn't want to welcome organized crime into her Realm, thank you very much. Slavery, however, is highly-illegal, as is sex with anypony under the Age of Consent (10-14 depending on province, and this is one of the reasons the Age of Consent was invented both in our world and in Equestria, in the first place!)
Prostitution is legal, but not really respectable. It essentially involves Ponies willing to do things for money which most Ponies would only do for love, for other Ponies who are desperate enough to pay many for such a service. Sex isn't inherently dirty in Equestria, but loveless sex is seen by most Equestrians as rather pitiable. And most Equestrians would find being a prostitute personally disgusting, for the same reasons as would most Americans.
Consequently, as in our world, most prostitutes are emotionally-damaged, rather lazy, and on the average not terribly intelligent Ponies who are reasonably good looking and amoral enough to make money by lifting their tail for others. They have a high chance of having other bad habits, such as alcoholism or addiction to other drugs or self-destructive behaviors. They are mostly not very good businessmares. Thus, as in our world, the few who are intelligent and self-controlled tend to set up brothels, in which the less-competent ones work.
Since prostitution is legal, there are few actual streetwalkers, though there are semi-professional floozies who hang around in bars looking for somepony to pick them up and pay them for their trouble. The dividing line between Ponies like this and Ponies who are simply sleazy is, as in our world, sometimes rather fuzzy.
Also, because of the similar reproductive biology and thus sociobiology, just as in our world the majority of Pony prostitutes are females who service males, and the next biggest group are males who service males. Lesbian prostitution and straight male prostitution is a bit more common than in our world, but still less so than the first two groups.
Because there are few victimless crimes, organized crime is rare, and usually takes the form of violent banditry rather than urban gangsterism. Absent the heavy cash-flow from dealing in popular illegal substances and services, organized criminals do not really have enough money to bribe the authorities, and hence must be very careful how they operate in settled areas. This in turn means that most Equestrian prostitution is not controlled by criminals (though since prostitution is not considered respectable, a disproportionate percentage of investors in brothels are fairly seedy types of Ponies).
Brothels can range from rotten, sleazy little hot-sheet places to outwardly respectable houses of ill-repute to luxurious resorts which offer every sort of comfort to their well-shod guests. Some Changeling Hives open places like this after the Reconciliation. Some were being (secretly) run by Changelings even before the Reconciliation.
Most Equestrian brothels are quite safe -- since their operations are legal and hence their proceeds secure, there is little incentive to try to roll the guests. Only the cheapest, nastiest such places would knowingly employ prostitutes with venereal diseases -- indeed, doing so is one of the things which could get them legally shut down, or even sued by their angry and infected guests!
The most elite of Equestrian prostitutes are courtesans and professional mistresses. Courtesans are prostitutes who are very choosy about their clientele, forming what amount to long-term paid sexual relationships with multiple wealthy Ponies, and always reserving the right to reject any Pony who treats them disrespectfully. Courtesans are very likely to have wealthy and influential friends, so treating them disrespectfully is generally a very bad career move.
Professional mistresses are even choosier, often becoming sexually-involved with only one (or a few) wealthy Pony at a time: often, the resultant relationships are highly-romantic and emotional on both sides, even though the ultimate purpose is for the mistress to be very highly paid by her single or few lovers for her favors. There is a very fuzzy boundary between professional mistresses and rather mercenary members of the Fast Set, as described in "City Courtship."
Courtesans and mistresses will generally endeavor to outwardly act classy rather than sleazy, since the whole point of their sub-profession is to provide a very good simulation of love, which means that they are trying to not seem like prostitutes! The more that they manage to simply seem charming toward and attracted to their clients, the more successful they are likely to be at fascinating rich Ponies and interesting them enough that they will want to stick around.
In conclusion, Ponies Aren't Perfect -- and the oldest Human profession is alive and well amongst the Ponies.
*thumbs down*
Thank you for adding just a tiny bit more stress to my life, and adding one tiny little extra grain of black sand to my life . Thanks!
You bring up prostitution, and of course I associate it, due to the link existing in our own world, with psychotropic compounds. Your Equestria is quite libertarian, but even as a borderline libertarian myself I say that drug pushers ought to be killed on sight. Not just "put to death", but actively not allowed to live, as with the Biblical commandments against witches. Which, I'll mention, was in the Septuagint pharmakea, referring to how the "witches" of the period would brew up hallucinogenic potions to manufacture a "mystical" experience; eerily similar to the exploitative practices of drug pushers today.
OH, joy. You've just unleashed something horrific on your followers: reality.
Is there any hint in the tv show, comics or books that suggest prostitution being a thing in Equestria? If Fleur de Lis was shown coming out from some brothel looking building then that would at least be something
3225213
Where'd you get the idea that Fleur de Lis is a prostitute? I've actually assumed she's Fancy Pants' wife; if she was a demi-mondaine she'd obviously be in the "professional mistress" category.
3224886
I never claimed that all drugs are legal in my Equestria. However, the ones which are illegal, one would be ill-advised to sample, as these tend to be ones that fairly reliably produce madness and death. For the same reason, those drugs are not popular enough save among actual poisoners to support any but a tiny and poorly-organized black market in them.
By "libertarian autocracy" I dsecribe something very specific, more commonly termed "enlightened despotism." Celestia has theoretically-unlimited authority, but in practice limits it herself so as to protect the natural rights of her subjects. Her presence blocks truly-oppressive demagogues from coming to power.
3224884
I know how you feel about it, but ... can you really believe that it never occurs to the more amoral and lazy Equestrians to sell their own sexuality? It's an easy bargain to make, assuming any buyers. And I find it even less believable that there are no lonely Ponies with more money than charm, who might be willing to purchase love's counterfeit.
I'm not saying it's a really big part of Equestrian culture. Merely that it's there. And much less vicious than the culture surrounding prostitution in our world -- did you notice that I wrote the whole article without once using the word "pimp?" Though there are madams.
3224884
I mentioned violent brigands in the same article -- are you okay with that, given that it's semi-canon with Longhorn?
They should have you writing another version of the MLP comic which runs along the lines of having the same universe but with a more 'realistic', if it can be called that, tone to it. I'm serious, it'd be quite cool to read!
Somehow, I'm wouldn't be surprised.
I'm not sure prostitutes that serve mares would be as rare as you're suggesting. Part of the reason we don't have prostitutes that serve women is not biology but fear -- fear that hiring a prostitute marks you as a sexual, "dirty" woman who is not appropriate for love, fear that the demimonde of illegal sex work will contain so-called prostitutes who are actually out to kidnap you and turn you out for prostitution yourself, fear of being raped because being alone with a man who you know is a criminal by our laws, who you can't admit to having been with without marking yourself as a criminal too, is seen by women as incredibly dangerous. While the "too sleazy for love" stigma might apply in your universe, it would only apply to the degree that it would apply to the males, and the other fears simply wouldn't exist.
In a world where females have estrual cycles, and mistakes can be made with titrating your birth control potions, I would imagine that female prostitutes who serve mares, and male prostitutes who have been surgically sterilized (vasectomy, basically) would be very useful to the mare who miscalculated and ended up in estrus and is thus both incredibly horny and too fertile to risk having sex with someone who she hasn't vetted as a life partner yet, unless that someone can't knock her up. I would also think that, as in the real world, sometimes females have higher sex drives than their partners (this doesn't fit our cultural scripts, so we rarely think about it, but in real life it's a large proportion of the mismatched sex drive problem -- not a majority, but not tiny either), and the idea of going to a prostitute to get sexual satisfaction so that you don't bring disharmony into your relationship with your husband by demanding sex he doesn't want to give or resenting him for not satisfying you, would be a lot more plausible in Equestria than on Earth. I would imagine that a society as fixated on friendship, family and harmony as Equestria would have a stern stigma against divorce for solely sexual incompatibility, if there are children; you're probably expected to try to maintain family harmony through anything short of you actually hate each other.
So I'd imagine that actually, there are far, far more male prostitutes that serve female ponies than the ones that serve males, simply because Equestria doesn't have a significantly higher proportion of gay males than we do, but has a lot more reasons why females would want to patronize prostitutes. I agree with you that the number of female prostitutes who serve males is higher than the other way around, but I would think that both forms of heterosexual prostitution would dwarf the homosexual prostitution... particularly because homosexuality is not stigmatized, so there are very few gays or lesbians who have reason to be married to a member of the opposite sex and only be able to get the sex they actually desire via prostitutes. On Earth there's a lot more gay men seeking prostitutes than there needs to be, because they have a reason that straight men don't -- stigma forces them to hide their gayness, maybe even marry a woman. Most gay stallions have the same opportunities to find love and marriage in Equestria that het stallions do, and the proportion of gays is gonna be somewhere around 10% -- even if it was as high as 20%, that's a lot fewer than the proportion of mares of all sexual orientations. So the males who serve mares would be a lot more common than the males who serve stallions, just because of the gender proportions of ponies who want sex with a male and there being no greater stigma for females who patronize prostitutes than males who do.
It's also possible, if you think about it, that prostitution is more common in Equestria than on Earth, for one simple reason: ponies don't have fingers. Unicorns can use telekinesis, but pegasi and earth ponies are going to have difficulty masturbating. (Either prostitution, or amazing magical sex toys that perform a wider range of services than Earth sex toys do.) They're not as perpetually horny as humans are, since mares can probably do without sex just fine when they're not in heat and the birth control you established spares the stallions the constant smell of mares, but I would imagine that back in the day when stallions were considered to be inferior because they were always being triggered by some mare in estrus or another, stallions either visited prostitutes a lot or invested a lot of magic in building useful sex toys, because as flexible as pony hooves are, they can't perform the motion most human males require to get off manually.
3274606
You make a good point, especially in that the mares would not be particularly afraid of being kidnapped and enslaved into prostitution. Sexual enslavement for the purpose of prostitution would be a very difficult crime to carry out in Equestria, because -- while prostitution isn't thought of as a respectable career, it's not seen as putting the prostitute into a sub-equine category the same way too many people in all Human cultures see prostitutes as being sub-human.
It's that dehumanization which makes sex slavery possible in societies which otherwise make slavery illegal: the authorities assume that once the person has been put into the "prostitute" category, sex slavery isn't a ridiculous number of counts of unlawful detention, assault and battery and rape. This is why they have to make up special criminal categories for it -- and punish it far more lightly than if it were prosecuted as its logical component crimes with consecutive sentencing (essentially, anyone involved in such a crime should logically be sentenced to many centuries, even millennia in prison, but they aren't).
The illegality of prostitution in our world also helps. This is why the enslaved prostitute usually can't appeal to the john to go to the police, and why people in a profitable business would consider becoming sexual slavers with all the risk attendant upon moving into violent crime. Prostitution winds up being fairly violent as a way of life anyway, again because no one involved has any legal recourses relating to their business.
I really think that the "too sleazy for love" stigma would apply in most plausible societies, though even historically it doesn't apply between all possible couples. There are many, many cases in real life of prostitutes leaving the life and finding true love with men who are quite aware of their former careers. This is even rather a romantic concept, since it implies that the love involved is very deep and sincere.
Now that is an extremely good point, and it's interesting in that regard that my first-ever mention of the existence of Equestrian (and other Pony) prostitutes has come in Dancing Alone -- and the character who thinks about the possibility of taking advantage of their existence is a lonely, horny female, Moon Dancer (her loneliness made worse by the fact that she doesn't even have any friends to provide her with affection). Moon Dancer doesn't take advantage of this option: she's both a virgin, and prouder of her honor than she consciously admits to herself (it contradicts her intellectual Equalism), but she is aware of the possibility (*).
In fact, my concept of Lone-Madness would make this sort of prostitution even more appealing. Lone-Madness is caused by social rather than sexual deprivation, but one of the ways it can manifest itself is nymphomania/satyromania, as the lonely Pony seeks out any and all forms of closeness to assuage her social isolation. My idea of Lone-Madness came about internally because of the xenofictional concept of the Ponies as a race more gregarious than Humans and hence prone to extreme reactions due to protracted social isolation. It was externally inspired by the tendency of some fanfic writers to become so overwhelmed by their ability to write abut sex in a world where the existence of sexual relations isn't even explicitly mentioned due to its being a show marketed to children that they go overboard and essentially depict their main characters as having insanely strong sex drives and absolutely no morals.
That's a good point as well. Equestrians wouldn't talk about this save in private to trusted friends, because it would still be thought of as embarrassing and shameful (aside from the infidelity aspect, there's also the implicit criticism of the husband in that situation -- and the wife might love her husband well enough, even if she were sexually-frustrated). But it wouldn't be illegal, and the motive of preserving the integrity of the marriage (especially if it had children) would be seen as admirable.
In my Moon Dancer's backstory, a lot of her emotional problems come from her reaction to learning of her father's infidelity to her mother. She sees her mother as being an exceptionally attractive and socially-adept Pony (both true) so this shocked her even more: the lesson she took away from this was "I can't trust any stallion," because if her father, the focus of her masculine ideal, could treat her mother (obviously beautiful and charming) like this, then how would somepony as ugly and awkward as herself be treated? She also suspects her mother of returning the infidelity, which also bothers her (though it doesn't shock her as much because she knows the marriage is already broken).
They avoided divorce for respectability and for the children. The sad thing is that they've caused extreme emotional damage to Moon Dancer, mostly because she was a very perceptive child, and because neither of them really understand her all that well. She might have handled an actual, open divorce better than the lie which her parents' marriage has become.
A sexual incompatibility of the sort you describe is one reason why the romantic relationship between my Rainbow Dash and my Fluttershy failed in 1503. Rainbow Dash has only a very limited sex drive -- mostly, sex is something she would do to express love for somepony she deeply loved, and mostly to make the other pony happy. Fluttershy, on the other hand, has a very strong sex drive -- she suppressed it for years because of her unfortunate experience at sixteen, she's very shy, and she does have morals, but once she decides that it's okay to have sex with a Pony, she wants a lot of sex. That's not the biggest reason they broke up, but it's one of the reasons they didn't get back together in any decisive way.
This is also one of the reasons why Piercing Gaze, though he and Trixie deeply love one another and their marriage lasts his remaining lifetime -- many decades -- is unfaithful to Trixie. Piercing Gaze has a stronger sex drive than she does. She's not the asexual she is in the Lunaverse (she's a demisexual whose extremely narrow "type" includes Piercing), but she's not all that interested in sex save when in an extremely lusty mood by her standards (though she'll often try to make Piercing happy).
Extremely good point!
Most Equestrian bisexuals prefer the opposite sex (bisexuality is more common in Equestria than in America because of the greater frequency of polygyny and the lack of stigma towards it, but 75% of the population are heterosexual and the majority of the around 15-20% bisexuals are more attracted to the opposite than the same sex), and 5-10% homosexuality is still a very minority orientation (which limits the choice of partners). And things are far worse if you're gender-dysphoric like Glittershell (0.1% of the population has dysphoria and the only truly compatible mate for her in her current condition would be somepony male-bodied, attracted to female personalities and bisexual enough to not care that Snailsquirm Carrot is male)..
Part of the reason for male-to-male prostitution being much more common than female-to-female prostitution in our world, though, is the fundamental asymmetry in heterosexuality (and remember, male and female homosexuals still have the sexual instincts in terms of strategy which evolved for heterosexuality). For males, extreme promiscuity is a viable reproductive option; it is not for females, so males are more likely to want lots and lots of casual sex, while females think more in terms of either fidelity or limited infidelity (husband with lover on the side). When this carries over to homosexual relationships, this is why male homosexual subcultures tend to be more promiscuous than female homosexual ones -- there is no need to adapt one's behavior to the different instincts of the other sex. Which means that male homosexuals would be more satisfied with visiting prostitutes than would female homosexuals.
So what you'd probably see given your points would be (in order of frequency) (1) female prostitute / male client, (2) male prostitute / female client, (3) male prostitute / male client, and finally (4) female prostitute / female client, with homosexual prostitution in general being less common than in our world because homosexual love and marriage would be seen as respectable, and hence gays would be less lonely. Though they'd still be lonelier than heterosexuals, because less of the population is gay and hence they would have fewer mating choices.
There still might be a greater stigma, because the rationale for female superiority (deriving from the nature of estrus) is better self-restraint, and the more self-restrained alternative is chastity. Prostitution and visiting prostitutes is not criminal, but it's not all that respectable, either. The stallion who visits a prostitute is more likely to be excused with ("he's only a stallion, what can you expect, really?") while the mare is sacrificing more of her reputation (because she starts with a presumed higher reputation). This is also because even though she can't get pregnant from the prostitute, the instinct to judge her on the assumption that she's risking pregnancy still applies (this is also the case in our world, where contraception hasn't changed morals as much as people thought it would half a century ago).
But not as great a stigma as in our world, yes.
This is also a good point. I personally think that the Ponies from the very beginning of their tool usage crafted sex toys. This must make the job of an archaeologist more amusing in some respects than in our world. (And I am now grinning broadly, thinking up improbable titles for Daring Do books).
One thing you should consider is that, because of their anatomy, it's much easier for a Pony to bend completely over to the point of enabling his or her (longer than Human) tongue to reach his or her private parts than would be the case for a Human (very few Humans can do what I've just described, but then we have hands).
Hmm, I've already stated in my world that Rarity and Trixie, in particular, have exceptionally-dextrous telekinesis ...
Anyway, extremely good points.
===
(*) You've probably noticed from her attitude toward books that my Moon Dancer has a strong and very frustrated sex drive. Some of the things with which she is becoming involved are much more dangerous to her in many respects than would be visiting prostitutes. Not that visiting prostitutes would be good for Moon Dancer -- what she really needs is Friendship, and eventually Love. But violent radicalism and warlockry are both worse.
3276363
While I generally agree with you that males are biologically somewhat more likely to be promiscuous than females, this actually isn't nearly as extreme a difference as the current state of popular evopsych tries to pretend. Evopsych overlooks the fact that a female employing the strategy of depending on a male for assistance with her children will fail, and any children fathered on her will die or do poorly, if the male does not assist her, whereas the female who does not depend on male assistance can afford to be a lot more promiscuous, as varying the genetic contribution to her children with multiple male partners ensures that her children have a wider genetic spread and therefore are evolutionarily more viable.
What I'm saying is this. If a dude-ho shacks up with 27 women who all need his help to raise the kids, and he doesn't help any of them, the kids all do badly and he might just as well have been jerking it, or sleeping with men. If he shacks up with 27 women who don't need his help, then the kids will do fine, but women who don't need his help have no reason to limit their sexual activities to him; have a kid with a different father each time to make your own genetic spread more adaptable. If a woman needs a guy to help her with her kids, then that guy has to be pretty dedicated to the kids, and her, or the family won't make it. So there are two pairing patterns that work: he-sluts and she-sluts pairing off together like cats, one and done and on to the next, or two mutually committed individuals, because unless he's really wealthy one man can rarely support more than one family. This means there is selection pressure on men to be willing to commit, given the existence of women who can't successfully reproduce without that commitment, and selection pressure on women to be promiscuous and to not rely on male partners, given the existence of men who want to sleep around.
By highly stigmatizing women who sleep around and not men, our society has created a kind of lopsided equation where what we actually see are men who sleep around, men who are faithful or relatively faithful, women who are faithful or relatively faithful, and women who are demonized and treated as subhuman. This creates the impression that promiscuity in women basically doesn't exist on a biological level, because generally women who are promiscuous are socially or psychologically damaged or are forced into it. But that's entirely because of the subhuman stigma. In human subcultures where there is social pressure to prevent marriage -- people depending on welfare, for instance, where getting married or even having obvious signs of a man in the house cuts off the only form of income -- women are much likely to have multiple fathers for their children, not because they're immoral people but because if you cannot depend on a faithful (or relatively faithful) male partner, you must rely on your kin, and therefore you have no motivation to be faithful. A given woman can't get any more pregnant than she already is once she is, but having multiple children with multiple fathers is biologically advantageous, and if men know the score going in and don't expect faithfulness, it's likely that ties to multiple men, each of whom may provide the occasional gift or a social lever now and again, makes the woman and her children more successful than if she had just one man who was splitting his attention to multiple families.
Unlike my draconequui, this is not a "natural" human pattern, I think, as societies rarely fall into it on their own, and I think this is due to the strength of the maternal instinct in men. (I say maternal rather than paternal to emphasize that it's actually the exact same instinct as exists within women, extended to males in male humans and many male birds and... hardly any other species. Most mammals don't have fathers, they have baby-daddies.) Human children do better when the parental contribution is maximized, so there has been selection pressure on male humans to want a relationship with their kids. Judging from the interest various pony stallions have shown in their children, we can guess that ponies have this same pattern. So I don't think ponies are biologically very promiscuous (nor are humans; men who are excessively promiscuous often show signs of psychological damage as well.) But the existence of promiscuous males puts selection pressure on females to develop promiscuity, so while I do think that overall there is more pressure on males to be promiscuous than on females, it's not nearly as much pressure as the popular models indicate. Modern evopsych fails, and fails hard, by failing to recognize the importance of culture in humans, and assuming that patterns we see today are strictly biological.
3276610
But see, a promiscuous male can do one thing a promiscuous female can't. He can have more than one baby on the way at the same time. And this is true for both Humans and Ponies,which means that males are going to have a greater inclination to extreme promiscuity than females.
This advantage to male hyper-promiscuity is somewhat countered by the tendency for hyper-promiscuous males to have short lifespans and hence shorter reproductive periods, because in Humans hyper-promiscuity is generally linked to poor impulse control and resujltant violence. Serious violence is far less common among the Ponies, though the equivalent might be unpopularity (save for the ones with whom he was actually being promiscuous) which might make it a good idea to wander on ("Folks call him the Wanderer / and here's the reason why / Whenever he arrives somewhere / He soon must say goodbye"). I'm guessing that a lot of the semi-nomadic male Ponies we sometimes see are promiscuous -- they may have "a mare in each town," for all we know. They may avoid wearing out their welcome in any one town by not staying there too long. Which might lead to certain suspicions regarding a wandering Pony in canon ...
i.ytimg.com/vi/xC7MF5iKTOY/maxresdefault.jpg
... he has absolutely no idea what I mean. Also, he hopes Pinkie doesn't read this comment!
3278581
True, but it would fail miserably as a reproductive pattern if women who are capable of raising a child all by themselves with no input from the father didn't exist, and women who are capable of raising a child all by themselves with no input from the father have a lot less pressure to be monogamous.
Promiscuity increases at the edges of the social bell curve. The poor have so little to give, it makes sense for a woman *not* to expect to depend on a man's resources, because he might not have any, and it makes sense for both sexes to spread their seed as widely as they can (which in a woman's case is obviously less wide, but increasing the genetic variability of your children increases the odds that at least some of them will make it to adulthood, which is an advantage for both men and women. For men, there's also the advantage of multiple buns in various ovens.) The rich have so much to give, a man can afford to support multiple families, and if he's supporting multiple families, more money doesn't translate to more time -- so he spends less time with each one, leaving the women he's fathered children on the freedom to take lovers. In the middle, promiscuity is usually a bad strategy -- the two parents will almost always do better for their kids together than apart, so much so that the advantage of genetic variation pretty much disappears. Although, there's more incentive for the male of the couple to take advantage of the existence of women using the promiscuous strategy to have brief sexual encounters where they won't expect to participate in child rearing or care, while maintaining their primary pairbond with the mother of the children they do take care of.
There's higher incentive for males for extreme promiscuity -- a woman with a harem of 2000 young men to service her isn't going to end up with any more children than a woman with one lusty husband -- but there are definitely advantages to women in being promiscuous, and advantages to men in being monogamous, that are often overlooked in the simplistic "men are promiscuous, women are monogamous" theory most often presented in evopsych circles. The entire reason we see monogamous men and promiscuous women is that there are reproductive advantages to those strategies. I also have a suspicion that monogamous men are more likely to have strong maternal instincts -- so more likely to want to care for children, and more likely to have the traits of compassion, patience and self-control that you need to care for children -- than promiscuous men, thus why human civilization tends to be built around a higher tendency toward monogamous pairings. And that fits in with the promiscuous wanderer that you posit.
Interestingly, your concept of Lone Madness applies surprisingly well to my version of Discord. Draconequui, in my headcanon, were biologically more on the promiscuous side -- but they had families. Males might not tightly pairbond with the female friends they slept with, but they did prefer to sleep with friends, not total strangers, and stay in friendly contact with the females whose children might possibly be theirs; and they satisfied their social instincts though profound connections to kin, particularly female kin. A draconequus male's family was his sisters and their children; his circle of friends included the females he'd slept with and their children. My Discord lost all draconequus kin, but was granted two "sisters" through being fostered, one of whom he actually did pairbond with because she was too old to feel like an actual sister when her father took Discord in, the other one of whom he still thinks of as a sister. And then he lost them, and sometime not long after that took up extreme promiscuity even beyond draconequus norms and an emphasis on loveless sex, and was also literally pretty crazy.
3278633
(*nods*) Both for the very good reasons you gave, and for another one which especially applies in a socially-mobile culture (such as America or Equestria). The poor and (any but first-generation) rich are often less competent at impulse control. The poor, because poor impulse control is likely to result in poverty; the rich, because those who are raised rich have it easier and may wind up not learning sufficient impulse control.
I'm actually not arguing simply "men are promiscuous, women monogamous." I'm arguing that the type of infidelity which exists as an alternative to fidelity is different. Men are more likely to be extremely promiscuous if they defect, women likely to pick an economic partner and then in addition one or a few reproductive partners. That's because the (selfish-genetic) "aim" is different -- the man is trying to father as many children as possible; the woman is trying to have a few children with the best genes possible and ensure that the children have adequate economic support. The asymmetry is due to the fact that the woman must carry and usually care for the children.
It's quite true what you pointed out -- that the (unfaithful) woman is also more likely to marry the man who makes the better behavioral father and reproduce with the man (or men) who make the better genetic father -- for the obvious reasons. The difference here with the (unfaithful) man is that he need not bother so much with his offspring by (additional) women because they are likely to survive even if he pays them no mind, though of course in fact a really wealthy unfaithful man often also provides economically for his bastards (since mixed strategies are also possible).
The biggest failing of games-theory sociobiology is not sexism, but rather that the easiest way to do the math involves extreme cases, and actual players often choose mixed strategies. A failure in the application of the theory is often that tendencies are mistaken for rules -- by which I mean that, when I say that there is a tendency for males to be extremely promiscuous and females mildly promiscuous when they defect from monogamy, this is not the same thing as saying "all unfaithful men each have more lovers than all unfaithful women."
Case in point: Night Dancer and Honey Moon, who are Moon Dancer's parents and who have both defected from their marriage, while remaining formally-married for reasons of social status. Night Dancer has one mistress, to whom he is devoted; Honey Moon has several lovers, whom she likes but in a vague friendly sort of way. This is because Night Dancer is simply a more serious-minded, loyal sort of Pony than is Honey Moon; he thinks in terms of the object of his romantic affection rather than multiple ones. By contrast, Honey Moon is an amiable hedonist who thinks in terms of her own pleasures first and all other considerations second; she's not particularly loyal to anyone and the only reason she's not more promiscuous is that she doesn't find sex with anypony who isn't a really good friend pleasant.
There's an irony in there, in that Moon Dancer is emotionally a lot more like her father than her mother in her attitude toward others (she takes her relationships, friendly or otherwise, very seriously), and it's because of this that (1) when she was small she was more devoted to her father than her mother and thus (2) when she realized that her father was having an affair it upset her more (because she was so devoted to him). What's more, it's because her father is more naturally faithful that Moon Dancer knows for sure that he's unfaithful to her mother but is less certain that her mother is unfaithful to her father (she can see the signs of Night Dancer's love for his single mistress, but is not sure with which of Honey Moon's circle of close male friends she is having an affair -- she'd be seriously shocked to know that the answer was "most of them.")
So, yeah. I do more than stereotyped characterization.
3278633
I hope, incidentally, that I'm making it clear that Lone Madness is not the same thing as promiscuity. Lone Madness is an emotional instability resulting from social isolation that leads a Pony to behave dysfunctionally toward other Ponies, but the nature of that dysfunction can vary depending on the Pony. While it's true that in my terms a lot of the nymphomaniac Ponies beloved of certain fanfic writers are Lone-Mad, it's also true that both my Trixie and my Moon-Dancer veer toward Lone-Madness at points in their adventures -- and both of them are unusually leery of romantic or sexual involvement with others. Some other ways for Lone-Madness to manifest are as unusual submissiveness ("You want to be my friend? I'll do anything for you!") or violence ("Bah! I don't need Ponies. I want to kick other Ponies.") or insanely dominant behavior ("The Night shall last for ever!").
Basically, when a member of an extremely gregarious species is deprived of company, the effects on the balance of her personality is rarely pretty.
3279146
They've found that it's actually the other way around. I mean yes, poor impulse control does result in poverty, but most people in poverty are born there, and it turns out we have only a limited capacity for making tough decisions. The harder your life is to navigate, the more hard choices you need to make for survival, the worse your overall impulse control is going to be, because we can only make so many tough choices before our ability to do so peters out. (This is talking about choices that are not supported strongly by culture. The choice to, say, give your baby up for adoption, becomes a lot easier when you're under huge amounts of cultural pressure to do so; as soon as not giving up your baby becomes a valid choice that you and your baby can survive, women stop doing it for the most part, because it's too hard on them emotionally.)
There's also the "If I'm in hell anyway, might as well enjoy the heat" phenomenon: if "good behavior" cannot get you out of poverty, why not indulge yourself? I dated a very smart guy for years, who nonetheless was incapable of saving money because he had been taught by his childhood in poverty to spend money when he had it, because one way or another he wasn't going to have it long. And some choices that might strike us as a result of poor impulse control, such as getting pregnant early, are actually adaptive in poverty. If getting saddled with a baby when you're 16 will ruin your chances of a lucrative career in biotechnology, you're likely to try hard to avoid it. But if the best you can imagine ever doing with your life is manager of a McDonald's, and even that seems unlikely, you might as well reproduce early when your own mother is still young and healthy enough to help you and your own health will recover from pregnancy more rapidly.
Finally, poverty tends to result in higher exposure to environmental toxins (such as lead paint, in our world) and lower nutrition (in our world, kids get to eat when they're poor in America, but what they eat isn't nearly as good for them as what the middle class and the wealthy eat, so they have nutritional deficiencies even if they have plenty of calories), resulting in mild brain damage that makes impulse control hard.
Most people who escape poverty have some luck, some advantage over others -- intelligence so high that getting good grades requires no work, allowing them to get a scholarship without too much effort; athletic talent great enough to be scouted for college athletics; a chance meeting with some mentor who can help them escape. Unusually high levels of self-control might qualify as such. But most people in poverty lack impulse control because their circumstances actually destroy that capacity within them; and as you pointed out, once you don't have impulse control, if you're in poverty you can't escape it.
3279260
I think it's both ways round. Poor impulse control leads to falling into poverty. And being in poverty can lead to poor impulse control. It's a vicious circle, but not necessarily an unbreakable one (at least in a fairly mobile society such as most modern Western nations).
Both upward and downward social mobility, after all, exist. There are plenty of examples of people who, by dint of deliberate hard work, climb out of poverty. And there are plenty of examples of people who start rich or middle class and who, by dint of waste and folly, fall into poverty.
This is also true of Equestria, which we see in canon is a fairly upwardly mobile society (and is probably downwardly mobile as well, but that would be too depressing for the show's tone).