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?

The Question of Authenticity

I think that there is an issue that not only I, but many others who study abroad struggle with living in a foreign country and that is the search for an "authentic" experience. This can get a bit absurd at times and difficult to define, but the basic idea is that we don't want to travel halfway around the world, just to spend our time eating at Burger Kings and watching Hollywood movies. We want to avoid going to venues and stores and sites that cater to tourists and where everyone speaks English to you and go to places where "real Argentines" hang out.

There are a couple of problems with this pursuit. For one, it is hard to define what is authentic as sometimes those things that are the most traditionally culturally important are also of the most interest to foreigners for the same reason. For instance I was warned by a friend who had studied abroad in Buenos Aires, not to bother taking tango classes, because they are "for tourists". The vast majority of young argentines are more likely to be found dancing to electronic music at a disco than to tango at a milonga.

For me the comparison with the American swing scene is an obvious one--while swing is certainly classic American music, swing dancing is definitely not mainstream, and I understand that I am not in the majority in this respect. Nonetheless, this doesn't make me any less of a real American because I do it. Similarly I don't think that I necessarily need to avoid tango to experience Argentina, I just have to recognize the place it holds in Argentine society, which is necessarily different from the place it would hold in other countries, but is still certainly not pop music.

On the other hand, I don't think that having an authentic experience has to mean sacrificing cultural imports from the rest of the world. It wouldn't be any more authentic to shut oneself off from the music of the rest of the world, because in a cosmopolitan city like Buenos Aires that isn't what the locals do either. By contrast you hear American Top 40 everywhere in Buenos Aires. This sort of phenomenon complicates the issue immensely. I don't listen to American Top 40 in the U.S. so I'm certainly not going to listen to it here. But interestingly this will make me interested in different music than someone here might be interested in. Ironically if I am interested in foreign music, people like me who share an interest in music from foreign lands would be interested in "my" music while I am interested in "theirs".

At the same time as we look for authentic experiences I think it's important to not be restricted by this either. Just because Jazz wasn't born in Argentina, doesn't mean that there's something "fake" about seeing a jazz here, and there is always something different. Music is always colored by where it's created so the jazz scene in Buenos Aires is still a different scene than the scene in Cleveland or the scene in New York. For instance Jazz Clubs in Buenos Aires also feature tango groups, something which cannot be said of American cities, where if tango is performed it probably falls under the purview of "world" music or classical music.

For this reason it is interesting to see how they categorize music here versus how we categorize music at home. Flipping through the paper I saw that "Jazz, Blues and Hip-Hop" was one section, tango another section, singers, folk and rock/pop. A little bit different from how we would classify them in the United States.

I think that one has to move past a sort of artificially imposed definition of authenticity as being "this is real Argentine culture and this is not". That's the sort of thing that dictators do, like Mao Zedong did in the cultural revolution. The fact is that culture is organic, and authenticity to the extent that we can say it exists, is a relative thing, and it isn't so obvious or black and white as we often assume.

In sense this whole issue shows one of the advantages of being in a place, like Cleveland, that is not at all popular to the rest of the world. You never have to worry about being in the real Cleveland--that's all you've got. I don't know that many people come to Cleveland as tourists, so there's nothing that's catered to foreigners with lots of cash.