Because Solitude Gives You Time to Think: A Modest Proposal About Sex

By "solitude" I mean hour-long bus rides (although reading this gal's blog probably contributes to the content of those thoughts) and by "Modest Proposal" I mean an idea that ought to be just that, and not that my last name is "Swift" nor that I’m being ironic. And this isn't about eating Irish babies...

Instead this is about gender relations and this is about sex, something which ought to interest anyone who has a gender and likes sex, and maybe other people too. My specific question is "who ought to initiate sex, men or women?" I've decided to treat the question, as is increasingly my habit, like an economics problem. I'm starting from a premise that's common in that discipline, namely that our goals should include maximizing happiness (what economist call "utility"). Oddly this doesn't seem a common metric for evaluating cultural norms of any stripe (try to think of the last time you heard an argument about gay marriage or abortion and someone said--"but people will be happier this way!"), but I can’t honestly think of a better one.


For starters let’s suppose that every man and woman has a certain percentage chance that, upon being propositioned for sex by someone of the opposite sex, he or she will say yes (I’m leaving out being propositioned by members of the same sex because, things seem to work out a little differently on the other side of the fence). We can comfortably assume that for every person there’s going to be some given value between 0 and 100 that will vary based on all sorts of factors we’re not going to get into, but which could include their mood, how their day went, the physical attractiveness of the other person, how they feel about said person, what relationship they have with that person etc. The list goes on.

However one of the primary determinants to the answer to this question is going to be the gender of the person in question. I don’t think I need to gender stereotype too much to say that generally that number will be higher for men than for women. Some men reading this will undoubtedly say “hell yeah 100%, I never turn down sex!” and some of you will say, “that’s not true at all, I’m very discerning”. But I think it’s fair to say that on average (a crucial caveat) that number will be higher (and less than 100) for men than women. Women are, on the whole, just a bit pickier than we are.

I think we can also reasonably suppose that being turned down diminishes people's happiness pretty dramatically. It really stinks to get turned down (for anything really) and people do their best to avoid rejection where possible.

If you accept these premises, which I find fairly modest, then let’s look at the ramifications. Remember we said earlier that our goal was to make people happy. Suppose that only one gender can be the one to do the propositioning whether in the case of casual sex or sex in the context of a relationship or marriage. Which gender would we want this to be?

It should be pretty clear that if we want to maximize people’s happiness we would want this to be women or, if you don’t hold with my first assumption, whichever gender it is that is most likely to turn down sex. Let’s play this out and make some numbers up to illustrate this better. Let’s say that women have an average 25% chance of accepting a proposition of sex to any given man, and that men on the other hand have a 75% acceptance rate. This means that on an average proposition the man will be turned down 75% of the time, making him (and probably her as well) unhappy and making everybody pretty awkward and arguably worse off than if he hadn’t brought it up to begin with. If on the other hand these 25% acceptance rate women are doing the asking they will only be turned down 25% of the time and thus there’s less awkwardness and more happiness for everybody.

Something similar happens in many partner dance scenes. The old default of men asking women to dance has changed to a more pragmatic approach where the gender who is in the majority (in terms of numbers) does the asking. This makes sense if you think about it—if you’re a man and in the minority (as is often the case) the notion that you should go up to a group of women and pick one of them, making everyone else feel crappy because they have to sit out isn’t really worth it. You may not even have particularly cared which one you danced with but you had to pick somebody. If on the other hand the group in the majority does the asking then it becomes a matter of which of them can find an available partner fastest or who feels like dancing to this song (if you’re tired you can just sit out and leave the available men for someone who’s up for dancing this song).

Reality is of course not nearly this simple, people don't literally just ask people to have sex with them, and things like desire and consent can be slippery things. But actually when we complicate the situation it only makes the case stronger. For instance, let’s see what happens when we introduce rape into the equation. Suppose the cost for being turned down, in terms of happiness, self-esteem, etc. is quite large due to social pressures on men for having sex, the male ego and similar forces. Now suppose you can avoid this penalty by persistence and not taking “no” for an answer effectively increasing the costs of refusal for everybody. Suppose further that within our previously assumed 25% acceptance rate there is a “true” acceptance rate of only 10% that is to say that we can divide that acquiescence in the face of a proposition into some percent of the time she wants the sex on its own merits and some other percent fo the time when she strictly prefers saying “yes” over saying “no” as a result of taking into account those costs (which are shared, but now imposed more disproportionately by the other's attempt to avoid rejection) of refusal that we mentioned earlier.

As I said, this actually makes for an even stronger case for female initiation of sex, for if you accept the inevitability of the above assumptions (which I contend are not strong but actually fairly modest) you then have to accept that there will be a certain amount of rape occurring in the traditional arrangement, in addition to a whole lot mediocre sex (if she wouldn’t have picked it without coercion than it’s unlikely to be good sex). Even if you suppose that men suffer none of the consequences of women being raped by men (I have a sister and am thus unconvinced of this) the mere enormity of the costs, physical, social and psychological, of a rape should balance the scales firmly against this arrangement for even any marginal amount of rape produced by this arrangement.

You could argue that if the tables were turned and women were consistently the ones initiating sex we would see a reversal of that outcome and see more men being raped by women. But even if we would see a marginal increase in women raping men, it’s important to keep in mind that I’m not writing about what will happen every time (surely men initiating sex has resulted in plenty of good, consensual sex). I’m talking about that if we want things better, on average, we should encourage cultural norms that support that superior average outcome, or else what the hell good is culture?