Dr. NerdLove rages against the claim that women are only worth the sex they aren’t giving away.
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Sometimes the universe decides I don’t have enough rage in my life.
OK, perhaps I should explain. No is too much. Let me sum up.
One of the dating misconceptions that I tilt at regularly is the myth that women are the sexual gatekeepers and that sex is a transactional procedure where a woman only “gives it up” when a man meets her price; this is generally known as the commodity model of sex. The commodity model of sex insists that women are only worth the sex they don’t have; after all, if she “gives it away” too readily, then she is actively driving down her own value. Because apparently sex is a limited, non-rewnewable resource and once you’ve tapped that particular well, it’s dry forever.
This is an idea repeated over and over again, from toxic Pick-Up Artists like Roosh “Once you’ve had sex with a girl 3 times, there is nothing interesting or useful she will give you for the remainder of the relationship.” V to the Austin Institute for the Study of Family and Culture. In fact, it’s the Austin Institute’s video “The Economics of Sex” that prompted today’s column with its supposedly “novel” variation on the commodity model of sex by insisting that women being too slutty devalues sex and thus deprives them of any chance of being married. After being directed to a glowing paean to the idea in the New York Post and then reading Lindy West’s excellent takedown, I had to see this wonder for myself. Because apparently I don’t get nearly angry enough in my day to day life.
So I watched this 10 minute wonder and…
well…
All we have is the usual “if you give the milk away, nobody will buy the cow” argument, trying to use economics as a fig-leaf to give it the sheen of respectability. Too bad it’s complete and utter horse shit.
Let’s take this sucker apart, shall we? Pack a lunch, this is going to be a long one.
The (Bullshit) Economics of Banging
“The Economics of Sex”1 is a self-consciously hip whiteboard-style talk in the style of Minute Physics, because nothing makes slut-shaming go down easier than cutesy rip-offs of popular YouTube channels.
The basic premise of the video is simple: marriage is on the decline in America and that’s terrible. People’s first marriages are happening later and later in life – with a median age of 27 for women and 29 for men – and this is also terrible. Why? Who knows; if the Austin Institute does, they’re not saying. However, the cause is abundantly clear: women are giving it up to easily. You see, sex – according to this video – is a commodity, which means that there’s a market price. Since men want sex more than women do, women are thus the gatekeepers of sex, controlling the sexual market with an iron vagina. Men, on the other hand, are the gatekeepers of commitment, which women desire more than men do. And so the presumed exchange is sex for commitment.
To quote straight from the video:
The “price” varies widely. But if women are the gatekeepers, why don’t very many women “charge more” so to speak? Because pricing is not entirely up to women. The “market value” of sex is part of a social system of exchange, an “economy” if you will, wherein men and women learn from each other—and from others—what they ought to expect from each other sexually. So sex is not entirely a private matter between two consenting adults. Think of it as basic supply and demand. When supplies are high, prices drop, since people won’t pay more for something that’s easy to find. But if it’s hard to find, people will pay a premium.
So apparently under ideal circumstances, the invisible free hand of the market would be quietly stroking everyone’s nethers and keeping the price of sex high. But because women aren’t standing in lockstep solidarity and universally setting the market value for sex at “marriage”, the result is that the “market price” for sex is low.
ACTUAL QUOTE TIME:
Sex is her resource. Sex in consensual relationships will happen when women want it to. So how do women decide to begin a sexual relationship? Pricing. Women have something of value that men want…badly, something men are actually willing to sacrifice for. So how much does sex cost for men? It might cost him nothing but a few drinks and compliments, or a month of dates and respectful attention, or all the way up to a lifetime promise to share all of his affections, wealth, and earnings with her exclusively.
And since everyone knows that men won’t get married unless bribed into it by being granted access to a woman’s hoo-haa, men are reaping the benefits of the low-cost sex available to them. This is, of course, unfair to women because men can get boners forever, whereas women lose their fertility at 40 and thus become completely and utterly undesirable in any context and are thus without any sexual capital.
Oh and also, part of the reason for this market disruption was the ability to have sex without consequence. So the pill has disrupted the sexual marketplace. Also: it literally compares the birth control pill to bees and compares the Sexual Revolution to the effects of DDT. And why is this bad for the “cost” of sex? Again: an actual quote from the video.
Before contraception, sex before marriage took place during the search for a mate—someone to marry. Sex didn’t necessarily mean marriage, but serious commitment was commonly a requirement for sex. Sex was oriented towards marriage. Don’t believe people who say your great-grandparents were secretly as casual about sex as your friends are. They weren’t, because to mess around with sex eventually meant, well, becoming parents.
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Of course, this is bad for everyone because having low-commitment sex means men simply won’t grow up because why should they. So this is bad for society all around and thus women need to band together to perform a Lysistrata-esque pork-out and thus artificially dry up the supply, allowing the “natural” market price of sex to rise. And if it does, then we’ll see more “improved wooing”, fewer premarital partners and shorter co-habitations and – most importantly – “more marrying going on.”
Facts? Who Needs Facts?
So let’s start with the most obvious: the idea that women are “the gatekeepers of sex” because they don’t want sex as much as men do. The Austin Institute is quick to insist that women are less sexual than men because “men initiate sex more than women, they’re more sexually permissive than women, and they connect sex to romance less often than women.” This, we are supposed to believe, is just biology; “blame it on testosterone,” suggests the video.
Bullshit.
Women actually have a greater capacity for sexual desire than men do… society has just trained them out of acknowledging it. The idea that women are less sexual than men is not only cultural, but recent; before the Age of Enlightenment, western society from the Hebrews to the Greeks to Renaissance Europe tended to view women as almost overpoweringly lustful and needing to be reined in by marriage, lest it drain men of their life’s essences.
It wasn’t until the 19th Century, when (ironically enough) the early Feminist movement and the rise of evangelical Christianity coincided with redefining gender attitudes towards sex, labeling men as bestial and lustful and women as the sacred and angelic guardians of virtue and purity. Up until that point, men were considered to be the pure ones, who had to resist the temptations of women and control their sexual natures for them.
Of course, it doesn’t help that most studies into human sexuality, especially with regard to libido and sexual desire, take it for granted that women don’t like sex as much as men, letting confirmation bias color over bad methodology and shoddy research. For example: while the video itself doesn’t cite any sources (natch), a downloadable companion piece from the Austin Institute’s website references the infamous Clark – Hattfield study that erroneously concluded that women were just flat-out less interested in sex than men. The methodology of the Clark-Hattfield – reproduced later by Hald and Høgh-Olenson – involved literally just walking up to strangers and saying “hey, want to fuck me?” an approach that nobody actually uses to get laid. In fact, a later series of studies by Terri Conely found that women were very interested in casual sex… provided they thought the sex would be worth it. The approach in the Clark-Hattfield study betrayed a significant lack of social skills and set off alarm bells for women’s concern for their personal safety as well as an indication that the sex with person askingprobably wouldn’t be worth the attendant risk.
(It certainly doesn’t help that one of the senior fellows is Mark Regnerus, someone synonymous with shoddy research, bad methodology and biased conclusions unsupported by the data. But hey, why let facts get in the way of an agenda?)
But then, our culture tends to vigorously (and sometimes violently) resist, even repress, any research that goes against the accepted wisdom. Alfred Kinsey, after all, had his lifedestroyed because Sexual Behavior in the Human Female diverged so greatly from the cultural narrative. The exact size and anatomy of the human clitoris had to be discovered twice– once in 1998 and then again in 2009 because the medical community couldn’t be bothered to care the first time; until recently, many anatomical texts would leave the clitoris out entirely.
Of course, this is if you want to be strictly heteronormative about this. The video’s insistence that women are the gatekeepers of sex and men only give commitment in exchange for sexual access rather neatly ignores the existence of gay men and lesbians. Presumably gay men – men, after all, preferring low-cost, no commitment sex – would never get married while lesbians would almost never have sex, ever. And then you have the issue of just where trans men and women fall into this spectrum of “sex” and “commitment”…
But just as the video gets the science wrong – with an air of “just trust us on this, m’kay?”, it gets history wrong too. One of the most egregious examples, from the video:
Here’s the thing: In the past, it really wasn’t the patriarchy that policed women’s relational interests. It was women. But this agreement, this unspoken pact to set a high market value for sex has all but vanished.
Ok… when exactly was this magical time when women were in charge of sexual roles and behaviors? Any time within, say… the last 60 years? 100 years? 1000 years? Trick question: women have never been the gender police. The closest you can come to anything resembling a woman-dominated sexual marketplace (to use their metaphor) requires going back to pre-agricultural society; the only contemporary examples are stone-age tribal units that have been cut off from the world. Men have long established and regulated what is considered “acceptable” sexual behavior in men and women and continue to do so today. The ones empowered to set social and sexual standards were men; men were the heads of the religions that dictated morality. Men were the heads of government that enforced laws regarding sex and sexuality. Women having positions of actual authority outside of the running of a household is a recent development… and even now, pretending that they have somehow taken over, even covertly, is laughable. When a woman in 2014 can’t cut her hair without men lamenting on how it makes her less sexually appealing, it’s hard to swallow the idea that women were traditionally regulating sexual relations and somehow charging a “higher market price”. That “unspoken pact” was unspoken because it didn’t exist in the first place.
Then again, this willful ignorance of actual history is par for the course. In insisting that sex was was traditionally and predominantly aimed at commitment, the Austin Institute ignores vast swaths of history, focusing instead on misty fantasies . In colonial America, pre-marital sex was ostensibly a no-no, and yet it happened anyway; the concern was less about who was sleeping with who and much more about whether the young lady would get pregnant. In the 1920s – the time when the video insists our great-grandparents were really all about marriage – casual sex and cohabitation reached all-time highs.
In Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, Kinsey found that half the women who weren’t virgins before marriage had slept with more people than their eventual spouses. From the 1950s onward, the social stigma against casual, pre-marital sex was already on the downward swing before the advent of hormonal birth control.
And while the pill helped, it certainly was never the only form of contraception out there. Historians have evidence of condom use as far back as ancient Greece (usually animal bladders or intestines). The first commercial condom factory opened in 1897, and by the 1920s (when your great-grandparents were equating sex with pregnancy, remember), latex condoms came on the market. When people wanted to have some child-free fucking, there were plentyof options for them.
The sexual revolution wasn’t just about the ready availability of condoms; it was also about women’s greater economic opportunities and the de-stigmatization of divorce. Now that marriage wasn’t intrinsically bound up with financial security and sex didn’t mean pregnancy, women were free to actually enjoy their own sexuality… suggesting that the “market price” that the Austin Institute waxes rhapsodic about was artificially inflated under the best of circumstances.
But What About Marriage?
“The Economics of Sex” is very concerned with the fact that the rate that couples marry is on the decline and – worse – the median age of people getting married for the first time is increasing. Why is this bad? They don’t say. We’re just supposed to accept that it’s a bad thing because reasons. Similarly, we’re supposed to just accept that the cause is that women are “giving it away” too cheaply and thus losing potential capital that they could trade for commitment and marriage. An exact quote:
“While there are certainly factors that contribute [to the lower number of Americans 25 – 34 years old getting married and higher average age of first marriages], the gender imbalance in a split mating market is a big one”
Is it? They provide no evidence and in fact, completely elided over all those other causes. This is known as “begging the question”; basically, “this is true because we say it is, and we say it because it’s true”. But let’s look at a few of those pesky “other factors”, shall we?
It’s hardly a surprise that the median age of first marriages is rising; in fact, according to the US Census bureau, it’s been doing so since the 1950′s when the median age was 24 for men and 20 for women. One reason for this change: the social stigma against pre-marital sex had lessened and social and legal protections for unmarried parents and their children increased. As a result, men and women who might have gotten married chose instead to cohabitate – splitting their economic burden without necessitating a legal contract beforehand. In fact, the percentage of couples living together and the decline of marriages were almost exactly the same.
Another reason for the change is that, starting in the late 60′s and early ’70s, the barriers preventing women from having greater economic opportunities finally came down. For the first time ever, women were able to fully participate in the workforce, choosing jobs outside of the traditional “women’s fields” of nursing, teaching and social work. They were looking forward not just to jobs but careers, ones that mandated college degrees. The number of women attending college, masters and PhD programs has skyrocketed since the 80s, and having a college education pushes back the marriage timeline by a number of years for both men andwomen.
Of course, the pill helped as well. Not only did the number of “shotgun marriages” (marriages prompted by getting pregnant) occur, but it freed women up to pursue their dreams without having to worry that they would have to sacrifice their careers on the altar of motherhood. Women who have kids take a severe career penalty, both in earning power and in upward mobility; widely available, effective birth control allows women to ensure that they’re able to have children on their terms, at a point when they’re much more established in their careers. In fact, a large part of the “hook-up culture” that causes the Austin Institute and writers like Naomi Schaefer Riley to gasp and clutch their pearls is due in no small part to the fact that women like sex, but don’t want a commitment because it would get in their way of their career ambitions. Women who marry later in life earn more money and report higher satisfaction with their lives in general. And considering that the average college student graduates with $25,000 in college loans to pay off… well, small wonder that men and women both would want to maximize their earning potential before tying the knot.
But What About The Men?
Of course, after spending all that time slut-shaming women, one would think that men would get off clean. Not so; in fact, men get insulted in equal measure. Men, you see, only care about one thing: bangin’. In fact, the only reason why men aren’t getting married is because they’re too busy enjoying all this low-cost sex that women are just tossing around. After all, men are incapable of emotional connections and relationships. Men just don’t fall in love… not when there’s all that cheap poontang to sample.
ACTUAL QUOTE TIME:
The blunt reality is an economic one. Women vastly outnumber men in the marriage market, which means men can be picky and insist on extensive sexual experience before committing. Men are in a position to maximize their rewards while investing fewer resources. Why do they do this? Because they can.
Yup. You caught us. There’s no chance that sex with one’s romantic partner is a component of one’s emotional connection; we’re just insisting that women put out because otherwise we’ll never spring for a ring. Busted.
(Who, exactly are they insisting on this extensive sexual experience from? Either they’re having “extensive” sex from their partner – which is part of what the rest of us call “a relationship” – or they’re demanding to be allowed to play the field before settling down. Except… they’re already “overpopulated” in the short-term market where women supposedly control things. So somehow men are getting low-cost sex in a market that women supposedly dominate because otherwise they won’t marry them. How exactly does one resolve this intellectual conundrum? Naturally, the authors don’t explain.)
Of course, since men will never commit except if they’re coerced into it… what is the appeal here? I mean, we’ve established that men don’t care about silly things like love or emotional intimacy or companionship… so what, exactly, is the upside to being coerced into an otherwise loveless marriage? Getting laid?
Evidently the ideal world that the Austin Institute pictures is an awful lot like “Paradise By the Dashboard Light”. To whit:
I couldn’t take it any longer, Lord I was crazed
And when the feeling came upon me like a tidal wave
I started swearing to my God and on my mother’s grave
That I would love you to the end of time.I swore I would love you to the end of time
So now I’m waiting for the end of time
To hurry up and arrive
Because if I have to spend another moment with you I don’t know how I’ll ever survive.
And why, exactly, wouldn’t guys just leave? After all, according to the video, women’s desirability goes out the window when they hit 40 and their fertile years are gone, while men have the capacity for “fun”2 well into their twilight years. What’s keeping the men around around once her fertility’s run out? The sunk-cost fallacy? Well shit, sign my happy ass up. That sounds amazing.
But you see, men need women… because otherwise we’re just never going to grow up. You see, according to the video, young men are somehow “failing to adapt to contemporary life” – a familiar old complaint. By what standards are they measuring men’s ability to adapt? Once again: they don’t say. We’re just supposed to take it at face value. But this is because women are being too permissive with us. By giving up the ass, they’re enabling us to live a life of pizza, beer and trashy women. No, seriously. They blame women for this. Again, an actual quote:
In reality, men tend to behave as well or as poorly as the women in their lives permit.
So just for those of you keeping score: women have to quit offering sex and be surrogate mothers because guys are incapable of maturing on their own.
Keynesian Concern Trolling
The internal logic of “The Economics of Sex” is dubious. The video spends a great deal of time simultaneously slut-shaming women and insisting that they’re somehow less sexual at the same time – Schrödinger’s Sluts if you will.
Hell, as the blog Lady Economist points out, it’s not even good economics! I mean, shit, even if we were to concede the idea of sex as a commodity, there’s more that influences the market value than just simple “supply and demand”. Even if the supply of a particular item is high, there will be other factors that influence price ranging from desirability to perceived quality. Bespoke fucks3 are going to be going at a premium regardless of how much sex is floating around.
But in the end, the cold, hard fact is that outside of sex-work, sex isn’t a commodity and equating a woman’s willingness to have sex with her “market value” just hides the implication that one believes that this is all a woman has to offer. All this is is an attempt to give the authors’ Madonna/Whore complex a gloss of legitimacy by pretending that it’s about the numbers, not the authors’ attempts to impose their world-view on others. Like other attempts to rationalize slut-shaming women, this is just concern trolling. The false note of solicitude, the tone of “hey we don’t like it, but this is just the way it is” and the crocodile tears shed for women standing in solidarity just makes it more insulting.
Buy Harris’ book, Simplified Dating: The Ultimate Guide to Mastering Dating
Originally appeared at Paging Dr. NerdLove
Lead Photo: Flickr/vivek jena
Thanks for pointing out the BS. Sometimes stereotypes can create social patterns. When women’s sexuality is repressed through things like slut-shaming, that actually can repress their interest in sex. And that isn’t good for men or women. I read somewhere that over 40% of women have experienced sexual dysfunction. Pretty sad for everyone.
And then the stereotypes about men being gatekeepers because they care less about commitment. And yet men rarely leave a woman until he’s got someone else lined up, and men are quicker to remarry after divorce or being widowed. Married men are also happier and healthier.
@BroadBlogs, “And yet men rarely leave a woman until he’s got someone else lined up, and men are quicker to remarry after divorce or being widowed. Married men are also happier and healthier.” TOTALLY FALSE!!!! Women terminate nearly 70% of marriages and relationships in America. As for married men being happier, I scoff at the notion. The studies are mixed at best. Whether a married man is happier and lives longer than a single man is dependent upon: the amount and quality of sex, relationship with wife, and his relationships with friends and family. The general consensus is that marriage… Read more »
It’s possible to use economic models to describe how people choose partners, but there are some that work well as models and others that don’t. (And by “work well,” I just mean that they have some prediction value and describe some general trends, not that they’re natural laws.) The economic model you describe, an overly simple PUA-type “women are hypergamous gatekeepers” is just one, and as you point out a deeply flawed one based on all sorts of false assumptions. Just because one economic model is bogus doesn’t mean economic theories have no place in analyzing dating patterns. “Sex as… Read more »
@ No Man in Particular,
“It’s possible to use economic models to describe how people choose partners, but there are some that work well as models and others that don’t.”
Correct. I studied Econ in grad school. The field is rather fascinating. The university of Chicago (Chicago School) pioneered this approach to human behavior. Economist Paul Romer has been a leader in this field. Some critics have attacked this approach as economism.
http://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~promer/biography.shtml
First of all, thanks for the article. Very eye-opening. I found myself getting angrier and angrier by the minute, which, now that I think about it is extremely ironic, considering how much we men (including me) blindly follow this flawed logic. Women want sex. It is as simple as that. Well, not quite. Of course, there will be variety in how much they want, etc. but my basic point remains. When I first started dating the woman who will be my fiancé, I complained that she “wanted to have sex all of the time.” That’s a new one. Lol. Joking… Read more »
Richard,
No offense, but as someone who was once pretty much in the same situation (but not daring to joke about it) I would really love to get your feedback on this after she has actually been your fiancée for a year or two.
Meaning what? You think she’s going to lose interest? Or you think she was just using sex to catch her man, and now she’s going to go back to her preferred sexless state? Your question, FlyingKal, just reinforces Dr. NerdLove’s point that people make assumptions regarding female sexuality, and attempt to explain away anything that disagrees with those assumptions. I’m a woman, and I’ve been with the same man for 9 years, 5 of those years married to him, and I can say without a shadow of a doubt that my husband could complain “She wants sex ALL THE TIME!”.… Read more »
@Eudaimonya, You say, ” Your question, FlyingKal, just reinforces Dr. NerdLove’s point that people make assumptions regarding female sexuality, and attempt to explain away anything that disagrees with those assumptions.” Well, I think NL is wrong. There is a wealth of research that clearly demonstrate that female sexuality is far more complicated than male sexuality. Yes, I do believe there are many women with high libidos. My girlfriend is a high libido woman. It’s great!!! Have you read, “Mating in Captivity” by Esther Perel? Or Lisa Diamond, “Sexual Fluidity”? You really should do so if you have not. There are… Read more »
Eudaimonya,
Meaning precisely what I asked, that instead of making assumptions I would be interested to know how it turned out, because you can rarely predict the future by extrapolating current behaviour.
OK. I’m gonna admit outright on this one that I’m a little lost on the overall message, except I got that the “Economics of Sex” video/NY Post article is bad. The quotes, followed by sarcasm threw me off, so I kept thinking “wait, so you agree with that?” I felt like Sheldon on The Big Bang Theory, and given my Aspergery tendencies, I suppose that’s appropriate. Nevertheless, I like the topic, even though it vexes me. I find that people have too much of a tendency to define the whole sexual interplay between men and women too much according to… Read more »
Paul writes: “In this article, for example, the author says “Women actually have a greater capacity for sexual desire than men do… society has just trained them out of acknowledging it.” Flat out, I have a difficult time believing this.” I’m with Paul on that one. If it’s true, then that means I and every man I know (as far as I know) has just been terribly unlucky. Or maybe we’re just not that attractive, which is also possible. Call me sexist, but I tend to think that women who say women want sex more than men are women who… Read more »
as opposed to you knowing very well what goes on in the minds of women. two comment by men and BOTH claim to know more about a woman then women themselves. god complex? And I’m sure none of these men have ever used the word slut or have friends that have a called a woman a slut. Did you ever think that what goes into your mind is a need to prove yourself? or a need to feel better than your friends? The prove your manhood? Please tell me about all the social systems we have in place to blame… Read more »
@ Lynn,
Yes, you are correct. There IS a double standard and it is not right.
Women are punished for being very sexual in our society, while men are not.
My personal belief is this: A woman can do as she damn well pleases in the sexual arena. However, I reserve the right to reject a woman based on an excessive number of sexual partners. As you stated above, we all have preferences. Having loads of sexual partners carries with it many risks. This goes for men and women.
There is another side to the commodity argument: that men are judged primarily by what they can provide for others, especially women. We have been told to “man up” and be good husbands and
providers even though we can lose half our incomes, houses and even children. Men are shunning marriage not because they are irresponsible, but for simple self preservation. For all the arguments about women being valued only for sex, men are valued as appliances, ATMs or sperm donors. What happens when sex becomes more trouble than the hoops you have to jump through to get it?
Thank you , thank you, thank you, thank you.
i am so sad, my comment disappeared, don’t know why, maybe i took too long…so, briefly, i’m 57, originally as i read your article i got mad because this conversation is still needed and it’s a conversation i’ve been having and living since 1974…then i realized, oh, the author is a man which could not have happened in 1974…so, once again i come face-to-face with how slow society is to change it’s dynamics, but it does change, none-the-less, and to see this article written by a man does this middle-aged woman’s heart a world of good…love the ‘good men project’…
thank you so much for your comment, kathy!
sorry it disappeared before. 🙁
Lol – interesting to read that, as I wasn’t paying full attention to the details of who, what, where, and was just reading the link posted on a friends facebook feed. I had assumed that the writer was female until about 3/4ths of the way through. I actually had to do a little mental double-take when I got tripped up at “Yup. You caught ‘us'” (men) and realized my mistake. There was a real sense of solidarity and understanding and a feeling of sisterhood there that really threw me for a loop! It was also partly because the tone of… Read more »
Thank you for pointing out what is perhaps the most corrosive lie of our culture – and one that bleeds into and poisons far more than inter-gender relations.
Tina, I have alwys been curious about men choosing women with low sex drives. Because we are spoonfed from an early age the message that any woman probably has a “greater capacity for sexual desire than men do…”, she just needs a caring, nurturing, stable, safe, non-judgemental, whatever, environment to release it. And what better way to create such an environment than in a marriage/committed relationship. And also that there still seems to be quite a lot of people actually waiting to have sex until they are married, so then I guess they just don’t know. Then again it might… Read more »
@ Tina, “Basically, I think the female with the lower libido than a woman with a high sex drive is considered more moral.” First, I would say we need to make a distinction between lower libido and number of sex partners. Just because she has few sex partners does NOT mean she has a low sex drive. Perhaps she made to decision to exercise restraint. Second, I must agree with you that sexual compatibility is paramount. I was in a sexless marriage for over a decade. In my case, things were the opposite: I had very few partners (due to… Read more »
Jules you seem to apply your theories based only on your experience. Just coz your wife was who she was dont mean its applicable to everyone, same goes for the men haters to!
@NK,
Not so! I also use a lot of new research.
I think you need to be open to things and views that are ‘out of the box’ but supported by evidence.
What do you consider generous? So a woman has a high numbers of sex partners. and yet what if those partners only got to have sex with her ONCE. that doesn’t seem very generous according to you. So is it about the number of partners or the amount of sex she has? Because you seem to be confusing the two as one in the same things which they clearly are not. So your whole statement that “What about the men who married women with high numbers of sex partners but do not treat their husbands as generously as their previous… Read more »
@Lynn,
Usually most women don’t count the men they had sex with only once.
My logic is sound. I think you have simply misinterpreted what I said Lynn.
As for your reasoning that lots of parts does not equate to lots of sex, that is simply not true. In reality this is not the way it works. However, since I am not into lots of partners or womanizing (being a cad), I could really care less.
“Most women don’t count the men they had sex with only once?” In what universe? There are men I’ve had sex with only once and I absolutely count them as former sex partners–because we had SEX. Every woman I know well enough to know something about her sexual history also includes one-time sexual enounters. Because why wouldn’t she, unless she was feeling slut-shamed… I do agree with you that number of partners (or even frequency of sexual activity) does not positively correlate with libido. There are various reasons people have sex, and it’s not always because they are “in the… Read more »
Here’s the reality. Marriage is dead, and sex has no value. It’s just something people do for fun. Next questions.
Fun is reason enough for me!
THANK YOU!!! I have been thinking about this for some time and you eloquently deconstruct all this “numbers” nonsense. (“Numbers” meaning a person’s value goes down according to the number of sexual partners they have had. High numbers = whore,, low numbers = moral person.) I can’t tell you how much I love this article and you hit on so many good points. I have alwys been curious about men choosing women with low sex drives. Basically, I think the female with the lower libido than a woman with a high sex drive is considered more moral. There is often… Read more »
Tina, I totally agree on that twisted logic on womans credibility in regards to her sex drive! Though it always awes me how men don’t question their own credibility as a partner on the same terms. I mean, why would any woman trust he won’t sleep with other women (if they partner-up) if he has a high sex drive (as he slept with them for years before he met her)? Unless she gives him enough sex in the relationship, right? Oh wait…
Exactly, Laura. Although, I find it interesting that you say “how men don’t question their own credibility” instead of saying “how women don’t question men’s credibility.” It seems as if you’re drawn to put that burden on men. As a man with a less than average sex drive, I’ve often wondered why women weren’t drawn to the fact that I wasn’t gawking at them or hounding them. They might have guessed that my sex drive was lower, and therefore I was better trusted to be faithful to them. I guess they just liked the attention they got from the “amped-up”… Read more »
That’s because what’s she’s speaking of has to do with integrity and hypocrisy. Saying how women don’t question is saying that men and women do the same thing in judging. this isn’t the problem. We all have our prefrences. What she’s talking about is the HYPOCRISY of people who judge others for doing the SAME THING that they do themselves. Do as I say, not as a do is Hypocrisy. This is what she seems to be talking about. People who will Judge others for doing things that they would never judge themselves for doing. If you don’t want to… Read more »
@Lynn,
“If you don’t want to be with a person who has many partners, odds are, the person you find is going to want the same thing, so maybe you should think about NOT sleeping around if that’s what you want in return.”
That’s a fair deal. I have always lived by this principle.
I really think that people need to realize how matching sex drives is just as important as cultivating a intimate friendship just because I’m sexually driven doesn’t mean I should be labeled a slut I just hive high expectations in my sex life.
@Leigh Ann,
There is certainly nothing wrong with having high expectation for your sex life. I too have very high expectations.
Yes, matching sex drives is paramount. I learned that the hard way.