re: Not Having Sex on the First Date
I echo my blog posts on the Straight Dope Message Board, an internet discussion board I've been a part of for two decades. It's a general-topic board where people post thought-provoking posts on a wide range of interesting subjects. For those of you with no familiarity with it, I recommend it: The Straight Dope Message Board
Anyway, there is a current thread titled Not having sex on the first date, which in turn was prompted by author Anna Akana's YouTube video titled Should I stop f*cking on the first date. The ensuing questions concern women and whether or not they refrain from having sex on the first date (or "too soon" by some other definition) specifically in order to fend off being discarded or otherwise perceived in a negative manner by the men that they date.
The Straight Dopers' posted opinions can be conveniently (at least for me and my thought processes) divided into three rough clumps:
• posts that come from a viewpoint that regards the double standard and any relevant beliefs about built-in differences between the sexes as deplorably sexist and either express bewilderment about any modern males who would hold such sentiments or else attribute such attitudes to knuckle-dragging misogyny and express bewilderment about why women would think losing out on the prospect of such guys is any real loss;
• posts that come from a stated belief that there are indeed built-in differences between the sexes, and that the double standard exists as a very predictable outgrowth of those differences;
• posts that do NOT embrace a belief that these differences are inherently built in to male and female nature but which instead emphasize the entirely real existence of the social attitudes and accompanying expectations, and contemplate the behaviors against the backdrop of those social realities and how those behaviors are likely to be interpreted by the other party (who is also embedded in that social environment) in these liaisons.
Within the first clump, one person finds the behavior of misogynists confusing and inconsistent: they want sex, and they'd be unhappy if they were deprived of sex, and yet they're contemptuous of the women who make sex easily attainable. (I made similar points in my blogpost titled What Do Men Want? last March, so I quite understand that bewilderment). Farther down, someone opines that men with this kind of mindset think sex degrades the party who is penetrated, so they have contempt for anyone who would let themselves be so degraded.
Other folks' answers and conjectures come from a more essentialist perspective: that men and women simply want different things (men want sex, women want ongoing relationships) -- sometimes this is stated explicitly, while other people's posts seem to tacitly assume that while surmising that what a person wants on his first date is often different from what he wants over the long haul (without explaining how or why this would differ by gender to create the described situation).
Then, in the third cluster, people ponder the strategic thinking of the participants against the backdrop of these cultural-social expectations: if there are roles and rules and expectations, some people can be viewed as testing their potential partners to see how appropriate and normative their responses are. Another person picks up from there and conjectures about the thoughts in the minds of one person when the other person's behavior does NOT follow those roles and rules, the wonderings and ponderings that person would have about WHY the other person would violate those social norms in such a situation.
Nobody has, as of yet, brought up gender in the sense of being cisgender as opposed to being transgender or genderqueer and how that variable would affect these participants. I, of course, am about to do so.
I am currently combing through Part One of my book, because the publishing editor finds that section (which covers junior high and high school days) to have redundancies and would like me to trim them out. (And I agree with that assessment, by the way). So as I've gone through it paragraph by paragraph, one of the recurrent themes from that part of my life was the powerful aversion I had towards being perceived as "only after one thing".
Insofar as I had always seen myself as akin to the girls and wanted them to see me that way as well, I had also internalized a lot of the same things they did about how we wish to be perceived. And across a very wide spectrum of differences, one of the things I observed about nearly every girl I'd ever known was that NONE OF THEM WANTED TO FEEL AS IF THEY WERE PUSHING SEX ONTO SOMEONE WHO DIDN'T APPRECIATE IT. Some girls wanted to feel as if sex with them were so special and personal that it would only be a possibility under very select circumstances. Other girls were cheerfully enthusiastic about sex with any adequately cute person who was similarly enthusiastic about having sex with them. And many had an attitude all along a continuum in between. But almost no girl had any interest in trying to make sex happen with someone who found the prospect unappealing.
Firstly, because you can't feel very attractive and desirable if you're trying to impose sex on someone and they're acting as if you're insulting them or asking for a huge huge favor. Secondly, because it's humiliating to have to mount a campaign to get someone to do anything with you that should be of mutual benefit, whether it be eating together during lunch or playing jumprope together on the playground or being friends in general or whatever. Thirdly, because it's not nice to make someone do something so personal if they don't want to, and although some girls didn't have any compunction against that sort of thing, many did -- it didn't mesh well with how they like to think of themselves, they weren't mean girls who took delight in making someone creeped out and uncomfortable.
if you think of the behavior from the vantage point of the person doing it, it looks like begging for it, trying to get someone to condescend to do something with you that ought to be a mutually delightful thing if both parties want it. If you think of it from the vantage point of the person you'd be doing it to, on the other hand, it manifests itself as a nasty invasive pushy offensive kind of behavior, and if you aren't comfortable with that notion of yourself (or of being perceived by others in that way), that's not so enticing either.
I have said before that I myself am agnostic about whether or not there are intrinsic built-in differences between the sexes in matters like this. I certainly agree with the people in the third clump, as I described and defined it above, that there is definitely a social reality regardless of whether or not there is a biological reality, and the social reality means that everybody functions not in a vaccuum but against the backdrop of socially shared expectations and roles and rules, and they are definitely gendered and they definitely delegate the horny sex-seeking sexually aggressive behavior of making sex happen to the male people.
The single most recurrent question I get from skeptical and provisionally noninclusive people when I say I am genderqueer and identity as a male girl is "what do you mean when you say you're a girl if you do not wish to have a female body or to be perceived as female?" It's a long complicated convoluted answer, which is why I wrote a book about it, but this issue, the "only after one thing" issue (if we may call it that), that was critical for me. it's the keystone issue. I'm not doing all this in order to win the right to wear skirts when I feel like it. It's this.
So here are some takeaway points:
• If you want to understand why girls in general, and boys in general, behave according to these patterns, it is useful to consider the situation they would find themselves in were they to depart from them.
• If you wish to understand why genderqueer people find it important and necessary to come out and explain their gender identity to the world surrounding them, ask yourself how else would a person proceed if conforming their own sexual (and flirting and dating and related etc) behaviors to those expected patterns is so foreign and feels so wrong to them that they can't go there; and then consider what alternatives may exist and how one would seek out potential partners who do not have those expectations.
• Riffing on the line of thought of one of the Straight Dopers I dumped into the third clump category, YES, consider the thought processes of someone when they do encounter someone who does NOT behave according to the expected conventions. It is reasonable and rational, I think, to assume that the typical person would find it perplexing and worrisome -- not so much that these nonconforming behaviors are WRONG but that they're indicative of someone not caring, in a proper self-preservative manner, for what folks they encounter might think of them. But now let's consider an ATYPICAL person in the same situation and perceiving the same nonconforming behavior. An atypical person whose reaction is an affirmative one. "Aha! I found one!"
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--------
Index of all Blog Posts
Anyway, there is a current thread titled Not having sex on the first date, which in turn was prompted by author Anna Akana's YouTube video titled Should I stop f*cking on the first date. The ensuing questions concern women and whether or not they refrain from having sex on the first date (or "too soon" by some other definition) specifically in order to fend off being discarded or otherwise perceived in a negative manner by the men that they date.
The Straight Dopers' posted opinions can be conveniently (at least for me and my thought processes) divided into three rough clumps:
• posts that come from a viewpoint that regards the double standard and any relevant beliefs about built-in differences between the sexes as deplorably sexist and either express bewilderment about any modern males who would hold such sentiments or else attribute such attitudes to knuckle-dragging misogyny and express bewilderment about why women would think losing out on the prospect of such guys is any real loss;
• posts that come from a stated belief that there are indeed built-in differences between the sexes, and that the double standard exists as a very predictable outgrowth of those differences;
• posts that do NOT embrace a belief that these differences are inherently built in to male and female nature but which instead emphasize the entirely real existence of the social attitudes and accompanying expectations, and contemplate the behaviors against the backdrop of those social realities and how those behaviors are likely to be interpreted by the other party (who is also embedded in that social environment) in these liaisons.
Within the first clump, one person finds the behavior of misogynists confusing and inconsistent: they want sex, and they'd be unhappy if they were deprived of sex, and yet they're contemptuous of the women who make sex easily attainable. (I made similar points in my blogpost titled What Do Men Want? last March, so I quite understand that bewilderment). Farther down, someone opines that men with this kind of mindset think sex degrades the party who is penetrated, so they have contempt for anyone who would let themselves be so degraded.
Other folks' answers and conjectures come from a more essentialist perspective: that men and women simply want different things (men want sex, women want ongoing relationships) -- sometimes this is stated explicitly, while other people's posts seem to tacitly assume that while surmising that what a person wants on his first date is often different from what he wants over the long haul (without explaining how or why this would differ by gender to create the described situation).
Then, in the third cluster, people ponder the strategic thinking of the participants against the backdrop of these cultural-social expectations: if there are roles and rules and expectations, some people can be viewed as testing their potential partners to see how appropriate and normative their responses are. Another person picks up from there and conjectures about the thoughts in the minds of one person when the other person's behavior does NOT follow those roles and rules, the wonderings and ponderings that person would have about WHY the other person would violate those social norms in such a situation.
Nobody has, as of yet, brought up gender in the sense of being cisgender as opposed to being transgender or genderqueer and how that variable would affect these participants. I, of course, am about to do so.
I am currently combing through Part One of my book, because the publishing editor finds that section (which covers junior high and high school days) to have redundancies and would like me to trim them out. (And I agree with that assessment, by the way). So as I've gone through it paragraph by paragraph, one of the recurrent themes from that part of my life was the powerful aversion I had towards being perceived as "only after one thing".
Insofar as I had always seen myself as akin to the girls and wanted them to see me that way as well, I had also internalized a lot of the same things they did about how we wish to be perceived. And across a very wide spectrum of differences, one of the things I observed about nearly every girl I'd ever known was that NONE OF THEM WANTED TO FEEL AS IF THEY WERE PUSHING SEX ONTO SOMEONE WHO DIDN'T APPRECIATE IT. Some girls wanted to feel as if sex with them were so special and personal that it would only be a possibility under very select circumstances. Other girls were cheerfully enthusiastic about sex with any adequately cute person who was similarly enthusiastic about having sex with them. And many had an attitude all along a continuum in between. But almost no girl had any interest in trying to make sex happen with someone who found the prospect unappealing.
Firstly, because you can't feel very attractive and desirable if you're trying to impose sex on someone and they're acting as if you're insulting them or asking for a huge huge favor. Secondly, because it's humiliating to have to mount a campaign to get someone to do anything with you that should be of mutual benefit, whether it be eating together during lunch or playing jumprope together on the playground or being friends in general or whatever. Thirdly, because it's not nice to make someone do something so personal if they don't want to, and although some girls didn't have any compunction against that sort of thing, many did -- it didn't mesh well with how they like to think of themselves, they weren't mean girls who took delight in making someone creeped out and uncomfortable.
if you think of the behavior from the vantage point of the person doing it, it looks like begging for it, trying to get someone to condescend to do something with you that ought to be a mutually delightful thing if both parties want it. If you think of it from the vantage point of the person you'd be doing it to, on the other hand, it manifests itself as a nasty invasive pushy offensive kind of behavior, and if you aren't comfortable with that notion of yourself (or of being perceived by others in that way), that's not so enticing either.
I have said before that I myself am agnostic about whether or not there are intrinsic built-in differences between the sexes in matters like this. I certainly agree with the people in the third clump, as I described and defined it above, that there is definitely a social reality regardless of whether or not there is a biological reality, and the social reality means that everybody functions not in a vaccuum but against the backdrop of socially shared expectations and roles and rules, and they are definitely gendered and they definitely delegate the horny sex-seeking sexually aggressive behavior of making sex happen to the male people.
The single most recurrent question I get from skeptical and provisionally noninclusive people when I say I am genderqueer and identity as a male girl is "what do you mean when you say you're a girl if you do not wish to have a female body or to be perceived as female?" It's a long complicated convoluted answer, which is why I wrote a book about it, but this issue, the "only after one thing" issue (if we may call it that), that was critical for me. it's the keystone issue. I'm not doing all this in order to win the right to wear skirts when I feel like it. It's this.
So here are some takeaway points:
• If you want to understand why girls in general, and boys in general, behave according to these patterns, it is useful to consider the situation they would find themselves in were they to depart from them.
• If you wish to understand why genderqueer people find it important and necessary to come out and explain their gender identity to the world surrounding them, ask yourself how else would a person proceed if conforming their own sexual (and flirting and dating and related etc) behaviors to those expected patterns is so foreign and feels so wrong to them that they can't go there; and then consider what alternatives may exist and how one would seek out potential partners who do not have those expectations.
• Riffing on the line of thought of one of the Straight Dopers I dumped into the third clump category, YES, consider the thought processes of someone when they do encounter someone who does NOT behave according to the expected conventions. It is reasonable and rational, I think, to assume that the typical person would find it perplexing and worrisome -- not so much that these nonconforming behaviors are WRONG but that they're indicative of someone not caring, in a proper self-preservative manner, for what folks they encounter might think of them. But now let's consider an ATYPICAL person in the same situation and perceiving the same nonconforming behavior. An atypical person whose reaction is an affirmative one. "Aha! I found one!"
--------
I am now echoed on DreamWidth, like many other LJ folks. My DW acct is here. Please friend/link me on DW if you are a DreamWidth user.
--------
Index of all Blog Posts