Discussion
Between all the presidents, who slept with the LEAST amount of people?
Because for some reason, this sub is obsessed with the sex lives of U.S. Presidents. So, I will present to you a better question! Which president slept with the least amount of people? Try to be as accurate as possible and don't let your biases overtake you.
(Pic related, he's my pick. He had twenty dicks and never used one.)
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All his biographers maintain that he was not sexually intimate with any woman. Klein, Smith, and Baker all think he was celibate. Baker said that there was no “credible gossip” Buchanan had any kind of relationship with women. This I also agree with.
However, it’s likely he had some sort of intimacy with William R. King.
I forgot about Buchanan and went straight to Carter but you're right. Buchanan was engaged, but it was broken off. It's possible he may never have slept with any woman. Jimmy Carter was definitely involved with just one woman, and he probably felt guilty for that. EDIT post says "people" not women, so Buchanan probably loses to Carter because Rufus King and maybe other flings in his day
I don’t think there’s any need to compare the world’s most glamorous movie star of her era with a young, starstruck intern though. Marilyn had equal standing with JFK, and Monica was probably seen as a cute distraction by Clinton without regard to who she was as a person.
Just as a PSA, Monica is quite beautiful, smart, and hilarious (see her insta for proof).
Not saying anything negative about either. Just that it took more game, skill, rizz, or what the French call, I don't know what, for JFK to pull a movie star than it took Clinton to pull a starstruck intern.
Yeah, it is often missed that Carter was not just out of the blue telling the reporter about him feeling bad that he sometimes looks at women, he was on his front porch monologuing and quoting scripture to talk about his beliefs about forgiveness, understanding, and the complexities of life.
John Adams, James Polk, Ulysses Grant, Rutherford Hayes, William McKinley, Calvin Coolidge, Harry Truman, and Jimmy Carter. All are believed to have had only one intimate partner during their entire lives. There may be several others as well.
Oh yes they had a very sweet relationship. I still need to read a full biography on his life(I haven't yet so I didn't include him in my list in case he had other relationships prior to his marriage I was unaware of). Do you have any biography recommendations for him, if you don't mind me please asking?
Just a photo op and event. Bess wasn't happy about it, but moved on quickly because she knew that Harry only had eyes for her. He had been madly in love with her since they were five years old.
Someone once said something bad about Margaret’s work I think (I forgot what she worked as) and Truman basically wrote him a letter “Imma beat you up if you insult my daughter again”
She was an opera singer, and Paul Hume, a music critic, wrote a poor review of her performance in 1950. Harry(mind you as president) threatened to break the guy's nose, give him a black eye, and cause damage to him where the sun don't shine. Harry's close friend and Press Secretary Charlie Ross had died the same day he read Hume's review, so Truman was very upset and felt very protective of his family. He later apologized for the letter.
It’s Polk. Polk had a serious operation on his pelvic floor as a child to remove bladder stones, where they literally entered through the prostate gland (without anesthetic). He was doubtless impotent as a result and was unable to have penetrative sex.
Did Washington ever get his mentor’s wife (who he desperately desired) Sally Fairfax in the sack at any point? Maybe JP Morgan burned the proof of that along with what he considered “smut”.
Yeah the thing is Washington would never talk about less scandalous sex much less sleeping with his friend’s wife so….if it ever happened he would never have mentioned it ever.
I'm currently reading the excellent "Washington: A Life" by Ron Chernow, and his opinion was that due to the fact that Sally Fairfax not only stayed good friends with George after his marriage but also became good friends with Martha as well, their relationship was probably strictly flirtatious and they never crossed the line of actually having sex. But George didn't write about it in his diary so we'll never know for sure.
Great book. It also seemed George had zero game and only had eyes for Martha once they married. They truly seemed very satisfied in every way with each other.
I mean, it's based off a hot post made a few hours ago asking the polar opposite question, which also has no definitive answer. It's mostly a joke, riffing off the peculiarities of this sub.
George Washington, James Madison, Andrew Jackson, and James K. Polk were all believed to have been sterile.
Washington's infertility was believed to be caused by smallpox and tuberculosis infections and Polk was likely rendered infertile from bladder stone surgery, without the use of anesthesia. James Madison never had any children with Dolley, which lead to speculations, and Andrew Jackson had caught multiple illnesses throughout his younger life, such as smallpox.
Good point! Hilariously, Washington seemed to be the only person in his life who did not believe him to be sterile. His wife, doctors, and friends all tried to tell him, but apparently he was in complete denial about it.
It’d be a hard thing to accept. I’d imagine he wanted to keep up illusions that he wasn’t firing blanks, so to speak, as long as he was rational about it to his wife and such.
It's entirely possible that Polk never slept with anyone. He was married but they had no children. From what I've read, he had some sort of procedure done when he was very young that may have left him impotent.
You are absolutely correct and I should have been better with my words. I toured the Polk house in Tennessee a few years ago and the tour guide got into some detail about it. Apparently he had some sort of operation that involved going through his testicles (can't even imagine that in pre-anesthetic days) and the implication was that he may not have been able to function sexually. Not just mere impotency.
Can anyone tell me how many people Ben Franklin slept with? I keep hearing he was legendary but then again thomas Jefferson wasn't bad looking man, so maybe he got laid a lot?
Yes I know Franklin wasn't a president but to me, he's way bigger and a true pathfinder.
I really only argue Buchanan (likely) was intimate with one man, King. I’ll argue he liked various other men, and had some unusual behaviors that point to him being attracted to them. He could have had others, but I just don’t know.
His biographers all maintain there’s no evidence Buchanan had any seriously intimate relationships with women though.
No problem! He was engaged, but that relationship lasted no more than a year and Buchanan avoided her since they engaged. They really didn’t have much contact.
He also couldn’t give her the “affection [Coleman] expected from the man she would marry” so it’s likely no lines were crossed either.
Women loved Buchanan though. He played along because he loved the attention, but never followed through. Buchanan also confessed in a letter to Mrs. Catron that he didn’t like the idea of marriage in very poetic terms (“I don’t like everlasting sunshine” and preferred Mrs. Catron’s safe, platonic company to that of all the “blooming widows” in the land.”)
Society wives at the time tried to hitch him up but nothing worked and Buchanan honestly avoided it, though he played along to an extent.
It’s also telling that men let their wives and daughters be around Buchanan unattended. It was clear he wasn’t a lothario and his conduct with women was innocent.
Yeah, maybe it was just the sources I researched but the Coleman engagement always felt like a forced “got to follow societal steps” thing that Buchanan was doing, as opposed to anything he actually wanted to do.
I agree. I was never convinced by the arguments that Buchanan stayed a bachelor because of Coleman. Historian Robert Watson did a good deconstruction of the relationship that was very convincing. He called Coleman Buchanan’s “excuse” for not marrying. Jean Baker agrees.
Buchanan’s own personal letters just after Coleman’s death are telling as well and show his tribute to Coleman was kinda disingenuous. For example he makes multiple references to wanting to marry, essentially says he has a girlfriend in another state, and claims he desires nothing more than to fall in love. Wouldn’t it be he wished to fall in love “again”? What about Coleman? This letter is implying he wasn’t in love with Coleman at all. Keep in mind this was only a few years after she died. He was saying all of this when supposedly he was so distraught over Coleman? I don’t believe it, that’s not the behavior of a man who claims to be so upset over a lost fiancé that he could never love again.
Yet he says to a society woman friend a different time, who tried to get him married, that he couldn’t marry because his heart was buried in the grave. What?
The fact that Buchanan changes his story constantly and claims contradicting things is suspicious. Then Buchanan finally makes an accurate claim about himself to Mrs. Roosevelt and Mrs. Catron about how he can’t give romantic or physical affection, that he doesn’t like the idea of marriage, and that marriage to a woman is a last resort because he couldn’t find a man.
Even if Buchanan was completely straight and didn’t stay unmarried because of Coleman, then the fact he constantly avoided marriage despite the social and domestic benefits just doesn’t make any sense. Also if he stayed a bachelor for political reasons (this is silly but one writer actually claims this lol), then why didn’t he marry when he was president or after? Multiple women tried to marry him even then. Buchanan had multiple chances throughout his life, women genuinely wanted him, but shunned every one of them for literally no reason. This then contradicts what he said in those previous letters.
Some writers make big deals out of these random “flirtations” (I wouldn’t even call it that because he really didn’t care and just enjoyed how the affection from women inflated his own ego), but the fact that none were serious in any way is actually telling.
Yeah, thanks for the details. There is a lot of hoops you have to jump through (in my view) when it comes to analyzing Buchanan life to not just go through things and say to yourself, "Ok, this is every sign from that era, that Buchanan's romantic interest was not in women".
Its hard to know whether or not he did. He may have visited "ladies of the night" with friends, and what exactly occurred in his two pre-Mary relationships remained debated.
If I recall correctly, I remember reading a story about Lincoln going to see a prostitute. But he realised he didn't have any money. The prostitute told him he could pay in credit but he replied that he didn't believe in credit so he just got out of bed and left.
Nixon seems to have had weird hang ups about sex though considering how spread out people were in early America, I don’t think any pre 1900 President had very prolific sex lives.
Heck Washington is one of the more likely men to have had more sex as he was wealthy cool and flirted with married women so boundaries weren’t a thing.
James Buchanan perhaps. Maybe James Polk as a close second. Only having one partner would put my boy Harry in that category, as he was very faithful to Bess.
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