re: Not Having Sex on the First Date

[ahunter3]

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 BoardAnyway, there is a

Comments

[ahunter3]

On the Straight Dope, someone replied to the above blogpost to say that it was all cogent and clearly written, but that it seemed to be a long introduction to a concluding point that I never actually made.

Here's my reply on that:

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As for it being an unfinished protothought more than a thought, hmm, well, I do sometimes tend to think that what is apparent to me (which is often because I've been dwelling on the topic) ought to be self-evident to others when that's not necessarily so. Let's see if I can flesh this out a bit more...

• We have a described situation on the referenced original page where each individual woman or girl, and each individual man or boy, behaves in these on-a-date situations against the backdrop of social expectations.

• Those social expectations are, as summarized above in the long & verbose OP, that the male-bodied one is going to be seeking sex: putting the moves on and trying to make sex happen; and that she (so goes the general expectation) is going to anticipate that he will do so, and that he (so goes the general expectation) is going to expect her to be less than enthusiastic about sex on the first date and that, if she isn't, will wonder why the heck she's risking the (very predictable, once again because of the socially shared awarenesses of socially shared attitudes) probability of being regarded as a slut or a pushover or a gal of low self-esteem or whatever.

• In response to the alleged biological and/or evolutionary explanations, I have said (in the original thread and elsewhere and referenced it in passing in the OP here) that bio or evolutionary forces may have created an in-general tendency but that there is a lot of overlap between the male population and the female population even if the difference is inherent, and that there are outliers, of which I am one, a person who, in this way along with other ways, is more like the girls, my behavior skewing more in that direction, and that there are many of us outliers.

• BUT, I went on to imply, but perhaps didn't say clearly enough: the socially shared expectations do not incorporate much of a sense of those exceptions. It's pretty much constructed around the behavioral mode for each sex, as if what is true of men in general is always going to be true of each male in particular and likewise for the generalizations and specific individuals on the female side.

• BUT, I went on further to also imply, but once again didn't say clearly enough, the activism of genderqueer (and etc) people coming out and explaining what it is like for US, the outliers, the exceptions to the general rule, have the potential for changing that set of socially shared expectations.

The more that society in general, and therefore the pool of individuals who date, have in their heads the possibility that a given individual may be one of those outliers, the easier it is for people whose preference is FOR an outlier individual to know how to read the behavioral signal, and to interpret in a meaningful way. And that, in turn, makes it far easier for the outlier people to find (or be found by) the folks who would connect with them in a satisfying way instead of experiencing them simply as weird wrong people.