After the recent tirade of posts from yours truly blaming the American culture’s puritanical views on sex for a host of social problems, I managed to catch up with a few posts from some of my favorite bloggers. Is it coincidence, or is it the Holiday season that has everyone talking about that, too? I saw similar-sounding (and better-written) posts over on their blogs, too. Tom Paine reacts to Chelsea Girl talking about the myth that says “most women can easily find a sex partner, while most men can’t”. Tom says in his blog post:

Given the relatively small number of real sluts (whom I define as women who like sex for its own sake and aren’t using it to find a man for something more than carnal gratification) vs. the enormous number of randy men (including men with wives and girlfriends who want additional sex partners), there’s no way the average man with average looks is going to score.

The opposite, however, is not true: an average-looking woman who’s open to NSA [no-strings-attached] sex can have a different partner every night. Hell, a different partner every hour. A good-looking woman ups the odds even more.

As my friends would be quick, and correct, to point out, I’m hardly the poster child for the typical man, but I think even they would have to agree with this appraisal of the numbers. Without bringing potential causes into the picture for a moment, look at the number of nightlife events in town—any town—that won’t let single men past the doors in an attempt to manipulate those very statistics, the oft-cited femdom demographic issue in the BDSM community that states there are simply more submissive men around than there are dominant women, even the typical ratio of (heterosexual) men to (heterosexual) women in private parties, or traditionally vanilla spaces like bars.

I think Tom’s conclusion is accurate. He thinks the difference is culture—that is to say, it’s caused at least primarily by nurture, and not by nature:

The difference seems to be in what men and women are socialized to expect from sex. Men are conditioned, perhaps driven by their biology, to fuck early and fuck often. Women seem to shun anonymous sex, whether for the reasons CG mentions (fear of rape) or social ones.

Chelsea Girl is a beautiful woman who (sadly) doesn’t have a lot of the sex she likes, she says, because maybe she had standards, and doesn’t everybody?

Here’s the thing: our culture is pretty ready to get angry at women for not having standards. Fuck a few men in a short span of time, and we get called “slut” faster than you can slide on a condom. But we also get derided when we do act on our standards. In fact, we get derided when we have the exact same standards men do. It’s more double standard crap, and it’s time to dismantle it, accepted idea by accepted idea, brick by brick, until it all comes happily tumbling down like the Berlin Wall of sex, and we can sing a song of real liberation.

Yes, indeed. Women lose either way, just like we all said. But, naturally, so do men. Is it not plainly obvious to see why the whole having sex thing isn’t actually a good deal for women? And is it similarly not plainly obvious to see why making the whole having sex thing a little less of a social stigma would be a good thing for all those randy men who complain about not having partners (including yours truly)? And this is not just a vanilla dating quagmire. It has real implications to alternative sexualities like kink, ala aforementioned femdom demographic issue.

But this is not just about the Great Drought of Females. It’s about enabling everyone, men and women and genderqueer people alike, to behave in a truly sexually uninhibited way, safely and with an awareness of their actions. Chelsea Girl lists some common myths that need busting:

Why do we continue to believe that having sex on a first date is the relationship equivalent of walking under a ladder while crossing the path of a black cat? Why in the face of mounting scientific evidence to the contrary do we continue to accept that men’s sex drives are higher than women’s? Or that men can more easily have sex without emotions? Or that some sex acts are inherently degrading to women? Or that women, especially “good” ones, don’t like porn, or if they do, it’s only the kind steeped like tea in rose-colored emotion?

Simply from my own personal experience, and apparently from Chelsea’s as well, it’s clear that the value judgments we as a society have placed on sex and then told one another are simply the natural way of things, that they are based on biology and fact, that they are embedded in our DNA in such an implacable way that we would be foolhardy to try and shape them any differently, are wrong. I am not saying that these values, morals, and judgments are all wrong (because they’re not—a woman who feels bad about putting her mouth on a penis needn’t do it, nor should a man who doesn’t like having sex on the bottom) but they are all cultural.

It’s clear that these were all the result of nurture, not nature. For the proof, just look at yourself, and then at your neighbor or, if a neighbor isn’t available, then at me.