The Point of the Thought Experiment
Most posts on this blog get several comments right after I post them, but occasionally there will be a post that continues to get comments for months and months after I originally post it. One of these posts is an early one titled “Why Women Are Called Sluts When They Sleep Around, But Men Aren’t.”
It amazes me how this one post continues to strike a nerve with readers so long after I posted it. It’s my first actual substantive post on this whole blog, not including my introduction post. A lot of women vehemently took issue with that post and continue to do so, and it surprises me because I don’t think I really said anything all that controversial (although I have changed my view on on aspect of the original article, but that’s a story for another post). Most of it seemed common sense, especially the part where I said getting lots of sex (quality is a different issue of course) is easy for women and not a challenge, but for men it is a big challenge, hence the different treatments for both genders when they score a lot, but even that premise angers quite a few commenters.
So last week I thought, why not do a thought experiment with a different gender double standard that touches on a few of the same issues involved in the “male/female slut double standard” but without saying so and see what answers pop up. I wanted to see what directions the discussion would go in and see if I got any answers that changed my original conclusions and also see if women would be willing to admit my original conclusions had merit when I don’t set off the “slut shaming” alarm.
Thus, last week’s thought experiment. A decent idea in theory, but there was one problem: my readers are too smart. I expected the comments to go all over the place before someone touched on the same issues I touched on in my male/female slut double standard post.
Instead Liz pops in and hits the bullseye in the very first comment!
Because it is widely assumed, and in most cases true, that a woman CAN get sex whenever she wants, just by lowering her standards a bit. That being said, a woman using a sex toy is seen as a voluntary action. She’s doing it because she wants to. A man using them is seen as doing it because he HAS to. He can’t find ayone willing to have sex with him. True or not, that, I think, is the crux of the discrepancy.
And if that wasn’t enough, Maake swooped in a few comments later and even got the tie-in I was going for:
Liz is right and that is the reason whu woman with many sexual relationships is a whore but man a hero.
It did confirm something I suspect though, and that is that sometimes no matter how much people agree with your reasoning and premises deep down, if it leads to a conclusion they find personally discomforting they’ll still fight you tooth and nail the whole way.
(2 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)
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When a man writes a blog about gender issues especially the aforementioned, some women take it as you championing a male cause! Some of them take it as you saying its ok for a man to have multiple partners and not a women!
Justin, exactly. People mistake description for prescription.
Your last point – about agreeing and still fighting – is what’s led to my last 2 girlfriends leaving me. On the one hand, I should probably work on my delivery. On the other, they both have contacted me and thanked me for the advice and insight I’d given them on various situations, which only pisses me off more. Never read this blog before, but… good stuff. Thanks for posting.
I think we fight tooth and nail with what we know. Madonna/Whore, Slut/Hero, naturalistic fallacy, or whatever it is. However, we constantly fail to recognize our ignorance. There’s just so much more to something than what we know. It is disheartening to see the same arguments made over and over, back and forth, leaving nothing but hurt feelings or exasperation in their wake. Learning more about something can only teach us how little we really know in the first place. Someday this is going to look not unlike arguing about how many angels you can fit on a pinhead. So plan for it.
I suspect you have already familiarized yourself with most of these concepts, but a summary of what is known about women’s “options” can be found in an evolutionary psych paper by some UCLA researchers called “Women’s sexual strategies: The evolution of long-term bonds and extrapair sex.” The PDF is here: http://pillse.bol.ucla.edu/Pub.....n_ARSR.pdf. It’s not a bad read if you’ve heard of some of the terms before.
One other idea, one that may offer a glimpse of the complexity of the topic, is one that they didn’t address in the above paper. It is the theorized female strategy for addressing the problem of infanticide by an unrelated male.
Here’s the deal. People have a long history of battle with fellow humans. Intertribal warfare frequently results in the death of children and their dads. It does not take much imagination to figure out what atrocity mothers of childbearing age experience when the killer of the father and children then turns to her. How can she possibly avoid this entire horrific situation? This will sound bad, but if a woman has snuck around a bit and occasionally slept with someone from an enemy tribe, she is prepared. When the enemy tribe inevitably comes to attack, the attacking party cannot rule out the possibility that the child is theirs. The father-in-name-only may still be killed, but maybe not, considering he is the cuckhold and thus, quite useful. Furthermore, the child lives, and Mom may avoid sexual assault.
Women have a wide variety of reasons to sleep around. As I described, in certain circumstances, it may be just as basic and reasonable as wanting to avoid being raped and avoid having your child murdered in your arms. From her perspective, it is just reeeeeaaallly important that no one finds out. The carefully constructed house of cards for survival just falls apart.
Empathy due for men. Empathy due for women. Prescription – learn how to treat each other better than we did yesterday, whatever that means.
“sometimes no matter how much people agree with your reasoning and premises deep down, if it leads to a conclusion they find personally discomforting they’ll still fight you tooth and nail the whole way.”
Ain’t that the truth? Even more insightful then the main topic.
People give themselves far too much credit for being logical and reasonable. In my experience, most people don’t trust the conclusions they reach when they apply logic and reason, the few who do are those whose jobs require such thinking. Most people get by on conventional beliefs and following the crowd. This makes perfect sense, those methods have withstood the test of time, whereas logic and reason are new-fangled and often wrong.
51% right over a thousand generations is as good as we need.
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