How are women not the gatekeepers of sex? Men are the primary initiators of any type of sexual relations, and the man's offer is either accepcted or rejected by the woman.

[deleted] · 2014-07-08T14:44:15+00:00

Relevant to this, a speed dating study in 2009 controlled the social norm of who initiates. When men rotated and women sat they showed the expected sex dynamics (men pursue, women choose; men desire more htan women). Only when exclusively women rotated did the sex differences completely disappear; the authors think this is an effect of increased self-confidence on the part of the pursuer (but somehow it only affects men).

As women are thought to be the sex with higher parental investment, perhaps it is very surprising that anything like parity can be achieved here just by changing the social norms. And I doubt we could just ban all men from approaching women in RL. But perhaps human men should count themselves lucky.

OfSpock · 2014-07-05T21:59:01+00:00

It takes two to Tango. Both people should be willing. For women to be the gatekeepers of sex, men must have no standards. Similarly, for men to be the gatekeepers of commitment, women would have to be willing to marry anyone who asked them.

Someone has a taken a general trend and gone with hyperbole.

The-Pax-Bisonica · 2014-07-06T17:26:29+00:00

I have had women interested in having sex with me and have declined their advances, so aren't I the gate keeper in that situation? This isn't a question of sex or gender, merely who wants the other more. The one that desires the other less is always the gate keeper. Whomever loves least holds all the power, fact of life.

SpaceWhiskey · 2014-07-06T01:34:31+00:00

Women get rejected too yanno. And I mean, women are the gatekeepers of their own bodies, yes. They get to decide who has sex with them. But then so do men...

cxj · 2014-07-05T20:01:40+00:00

Men are the primary initiators of any type of sexual relations

In movies perhaps but this has not been my experience in real life at all.

mustryhardr · 2014-07-05T21:06:41+00:00

You're begging the question, based on assumptions that are decades out of date.

When STDs were a life sentence, when childbirth was very likely to kill, when birth control was not available and paternity could not be proved, then yeah, women were generally a bit more careful about who they jumped into bed with.

Nowadays, they mostly just have to learn to avoid the kind of man who thinks they shouldn't be doing the asking. ;)

nope_nic_tesla · 2014-07-06T16:08:57+00:00

Your premise is wrong. "Women" aren't some singular unified group that get together and make decisions about who they're going to limit their sex to. "Women" are billions of individuals around the world with vastly differing personalities, traits and experiences.

So in some cases, a woman might be the "gatekeeper" for sex. In other cases, a woman might not be.

inhale_exhale_repeat · 2014-07-06T17:19:26+00:00

I'm a woman, I've been rejected. I've also dated men with lower libidos.

ThorLives · 2014-07-07T22:17:06+00:00

I'm finding most of the comments in this post to be pretty disappointing. Honestly, it makes me think that the PurplePill subreddit has become too heavily visited by BluePillers.

Here's what I would have hoped that someone would've written. First, there's a number of things said in the RedPill that are exaggerations, but they have a degree of truth to them. If someone is kind of pissed off about something, they tend to overstate their argument. (I see this all the time with feminists, as well. I hope that people who are complaining about RedPill exaggerations are equally as critical about feminist exaggerations.)

The thing is that men tend to be more sexually motivated than women are. I'm sure we can all come up with explanations for why this is the case. Maybe women are socialized not to sleep around because it will lower her value. Maybe women simply have lower sex drives for biological reasons (and I do believe this is part of the answer). Maybe women have a hard time reaching orgasm or have body-image issues, so they tend to find sex less pleasurable. Maybe some women were sexually abused and they have all kinds of issues around having sex. Whatever those reasons are, the end result is that women are less sexually motivated than men are. I could talk about this quite a bit or offer lots of evidence that there is an imbalance in male-female sex drives. Evidence supporting this argument include:

most of the prostitution industry caters to male clients,
most strippers and pornography caters to men,
when comparing gay male couples, heterosexual couples and lesbian couples, gay males have the most sex and the highest number of sexual partners, lesbians have the least sex and the lowest number of sexual partners, and heterosexual couples fall in the middle but closer to lesbians

As I said, I could go on about this, but I don't want to belabor the point. I will also admit that not everybody is the same. I have one male friend who only wants sex about once a month (which doesn't make his girlfriend very happy), so I know that variations exist. I also know women with high sex drives (one male friend of mine complained about a girl who wanted sex eight times a day). Though, to be fair, both of those situations are within a relationship framework.

Still, we can talk about the buyer-seller market dynamic with sex the same way we talk about the buyer-seller market dynamic with the home market. If there are more people trying to buy homes than sell them, that has an effect on the entire market (i.e. it becomes a "seller's market"). Talking about how "some home owners want to sell their home", as if that invalidates the fact that it's a seller's market is missing the point.

In the realm of sex, women have most of the power because whoever wants it less (whether it's sex or the housing market) has more power. This isn't to say that this happens in every situation. I'm a man and I've turned down sex from women, but it's still obvious to me that, in general, women have more power than men on this issue. In general, most of the women who have initiated or tried to initiate sex with me have generally been less attractive. (Individual attractiveness also influences the buyer-seller dynamic. One could think of those situations this way: the woman has power as a result of being the female and the general market conditions put women at an advantage over men, but she's not so attractive, so she's at a disadvantage relative to me.) I'm sometimes astounded at how well some of my female friends do at bars - if they want to pickup a guy at a bar for sex, she's at a big advantage over me trying to pickup girls for sex, even if she's less attractive than me. I know some average-looking girls that clean-up like crazy at bars. Sometimes I've been left speechless at how easy they have it. If one of my average-looking female friends offered me a bet: to have a race to sleep with 10 new people and whoever gets there first wins, I'd never take that bet because women have it far easier than men do.

This imbalance where women have most of the power is being turned into "women are the gatekeepers of sex". That's somewhat true, though, as I said, I've turned down sex with girls (mostly because I simply wasn't that attracted to them, and I don't really care about sleeping with someone I'm not attracted to). To further reinforce this fact, we could compare the number of sexual partners that gay men have versus heterosexual males. It's really damn easy for gay men to get laid. There's often very little work that needs to go into it (see Grindr). There have been studies of gay men in San Francisco before the AIDS epidemic hit, and the number of sex partners that the average man had was astounding. (Have you ever heard of a heterosexual bath house? No? Well, I have gay friends and there are gay bathhouses.) This is the amount of sex that straight men would be having except that women are generally not willing to jump into bed anywhere nearly as quickly as most men are. Does that make women the "gatekeepers"? I suppose it depends on how strict you are about your definition of gatekeeper. I don't think it's literally true, but more often than not, that's the way things play-out.

MISANDRYLADY · 2014-07-05T21:24:50+00:00

You're thinking far too simply about this. It will never be as easy as "women are this and men are that". Never. However, disregarding the root of why certain genders behave in certain ways - I want to avoid that debate as much as possible to be honest, because it's messy - the recipient of advances is the "gatekeeper" to sex and the initiator is either accepted or rejected by the recipient. That's is definitely the way the social interaction generally goes. Gender has nothing to do with it.

219387219387 · 2014-07-05T18:12:12+00:00

Because some men are more reserved and because some women are going to initiate things. Neither is in the majority, but there are men who will turn down sex for whatever reason and women that will initiate sex for whatever reason. Basically, you have to look at it by the individual, not by the entire gender.

Keeper_Artemus · 2014-07-06T02:35:54+00:00

This is how you're looking at it:

Men constantly seek entrance to Sexland. Women guard the gates and can let anyone in that they want.

This is how it is:

Sexland is on the other side of a wall that it takes two people to get over. Men generally want to get in more than women do, so generally it's men who initiate. Both people are granting each other entrance; the man might have a harder time finding a partner, but the woman is equally incapable of entering on her own.

There is no gatekeeper. It's just that generally women have less trouble getting in when they want to.

masterrod · 2014-07-08T17:54:53+00:00

That's why good negotiates have power.

AshleyYakeley · 2014-07-05T18:26:47+00:00

I don't think this is a rule within an existing relationship.

bunker_man · 2014-07-06T08:51:33+00:00

Does that mean I'm a hyper-alpha, since I didn't have to initiate anything, and I was the one who got to accept or reject the offer?

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