Is it seen as a bad thing for guys to turn down sex?

I've turned down a few offers.

I've almost always regretted it afterwards, but it depends on the situation, I suppose. If she's a complete fucking nutcase or rife with disease then it'd be only sensible to turn it down.

If I were single and an unknown woman suggested sex to me, my default position would be to refuse. There has to be a reason for me to have sex with someone - you know, besides the obvious (that sex is great fun.)

The obvious is enough for me!

Your analogy isn't analogous; you're saying that the pendulum was at one point hanging tilted to one side, and claiming that means it had to be pushed. Well, of course it had to be pushed but "cause and effect exists" says nothing about what cause it was, and the thing you propose isn't a cause; you need some OTHER cause to cause it to change over the years if it would naturally be hanging at a certain angle.

Nope. People have minds that can think, which have developed all kinds of differences between the sexes with utterly no basis in biological fact. It was widely thought at one point that women were naturally suited to being homemakers. Also that they were less intelligent, and bizarrely enough that they could be good cooks but not good chefs. And this is all beside all the times people have made up a biological difference between other groups: made-up racial differences were quite common pre-Civil War, and the Nazis made up a biological difference between "Aryans" and other races that had no relationship at all to actual fact because the "Aryans" were themselves entirely made up.

It's very, very easy to make up bullshit that supports some other idea you have, is what I'm saying. "Women have lower libidos" was mainly made up to support the Victorian notion of women being inherently good and pure. (In contrast, the Greek idea of women having higher libidos was made up to support the idea of women being more animalistic than men and therefore deserving of male domination.)

Frankly I'd even challenge the idea that biology is the core of the differences between men and women. There are many societies with more than two genders out there; they generally report differences in behavior between all three (or more) genders.

@ Octo "It's completely irrelevant anyway."

That was sort of what I was getting at. From a personal level it's irrelevant.

It IS relevant to anthropologists and culture theoreticists though, I would think. AND it's quite interesting in general.

I'd say it's a matter of social conditioning rather than biology.

In the environment I live in it's assumed that no guy refuses to have sex with a woman without a specific reason, which can be just about anything ("not my type", "too drunk", "mentally unstable", "has a partner", "I have partner", "I'm gay", "I'm asexual" etc.), just not "I don't feel like it". I've never felt like not having sex with a woman. Even when I'm not horny, if a reasonable attractive women approaches me, I get to the mood quite easily. Furthermore I've never heard any man say that they turned a woman down, because they didn't feel like it. It's not a matter of bad or good; it's a matter of never encountering such a mindset.

I swing both ways and so does half of my friends. Around here it's perfectly normal to refuse a guy because you don't feel like it. You might want to fuck a guy and then again you might want to drink your beer. Both options are understandable. You'd never choose getting wasted over a hot girl.

It doesn't make sense that person's libido would magically change like that, so I'm convinced that there are social variables at play rather than the over-powering male sex drive.

I would sometimes choose so.

Yeah, I understood it; I just wanted to emphasise how your experience isn't ubiquitous.

edited 12th Mar '12 4:25:09 PM by BestOf

Didn't mean guys in general, just guys I know.

Black Humor, I must emphasize my earlier point about perceived differences not necessarily being the same as the real ones. Even for the kind of things you mentioned, that some people had incentive to claim such differences, and other people were inclined to believe them, suggests a fair bit of sexual dimorphism even beforehand, even if it reacts in different ways with different cultures.

And yes, it would make sense for biology to be at the core. The animal world is divided highly, albeit not exclusively, into males and females. Different roles in reproduction have been known to yield different behaviours. We're just not sure what these differences are in humans.

Your comparison to race ignores that there are very different claimed reasons for supposed racial differences or perceptions thereof. If it is at all comparable to the above, it would be more similar to different geographical regions' different versions of otherwise similar animals.

@Matt: I think you are, one, taking for granted a level of sexual dimporphism that simply hasn't been proven to exist, which is, two, putting much too much emphasis on male vs. female.

The major difference between an American man and an American women is the same as between an American woman and a Swedish woman: culture. Sure there is some biological difference but it is much less than you think.

Maybe so, but you will still have a hard time persuading people without hard evidence. Before anyone has got good experimental data to support this it's still just a tidy hypothesis.

edited 13th Mar '12 9:22:22 PM by IraTheSquire

For a guy to "turn down" sex, he would first have to be offered sex. Very few guys get offered sex out of the blue on a regular basis. I'm really only counting single males here. If you're already in a relationship with somebody, then it's a different dynamic entirely.

For single guys, sex is generally seen as something they have to "earn". It is something that women give to men, not the other way around. Men actively seek it out, while women rarely do, simply because they don't have to. If you're a woman, then that fact alone means that there are plenty of men out there who will have sex with you right here and now.

Thus, if a guy is "offered" sex, it's generally seen as the result of something that he's done. To actually put forth the effort to get offered sex and then turn it down is almost contradictory. It's like going to a restaurant, ordering and paying for an expensive meal, and then not eating it. Who does that?

But if a guy were lucky enough where he would have attractive women walk up to him and offer themselves to him reguarly... I can't imagine that happening unless he's a pro athlete, a rock star, a famous actor or somebody like that. But that also means that he's already put forward the effort to make himself sexually desirable.

Matt, I think you're practicing the notion of "begging the question". There is a perceived difference between the sexes, and thus you conclude, that there must exist one. That doesn't necessarily follow. We could make up a difference because, by chance, males happened to be the dominant political power in a particular society that was poised to rule the world and thus thereafter came up with all sorts of reasons as to why women cannot do certain tasks in order to cement that power. That's just an example.

I mean, as pointed out before, if we were to believe all the perceived notions to have any basis in reality without actually checking for it then we'd have to assume certain things. For instance, there has been widespread anti-black notions (such as them being lazy, criminals, steal etc). So are we to assume that there MUST be some biological cause for such a notion to have come about versus artificially invented social ones?

This said, I definitely turned down a couple of people because I did not see them and me having a full-fledged, long-term relationship and I was not interested in a fling. And I am neither especially attractive nor especially suave (pretty much the opposite, actually ), so I don't think it is as rare as you make it.

Now, granted, it was not really formulated as "Sex? Y/N", but come on — nobody, male or female, does that, it'd be silly and a little creepy...

edited 19th Mar '12 12:42:10 PM by Carciofus

It also has a lot to do with where you live, and the social environment. If a person lives somewhere where casual sex is had by a lot of people, and where just about any guy can get laid by snapping his fingers, and the beautiful promiscuous women fall from the sky and... OK enough sarcasm.

But sure, if I as a male lived somewhere or was in an environment where single people could get laid without expending much effort, then I would probably have turned it down even if I was interested. When I was single I turned down the opportunity before, mainly if I wasn't interested in her.

Again, it comes back to how easy it is. If sex is hard to get, then turning it down makes less sense than if it's easy to get.

All right, but most people are just not interested in sex with most people, regardless of their gender. I may be wrong; but it seems to me that it is less an offer/demand thing and more a problem of finding a person you are interested in who is also interested in you.

Yes, and for the most part, if a guy is not interested in a girl, he won't pursue her in the first place. If a girl isn't interested in a guy, she will turn him down, but he may not ask in the first place anyway. For a guy to not have sex, he has to do nothing at all. It's women, by and large, who do the rejecting.

edited 19th Mar '12 1:58:19 PM by Firebert

@63: See, this is something that really , and I think modern society would be far better off if we got rid of this ridiculous idea that women are "suppliers" of sex and men are the "consumers".

There's any number of single women out there who don't get asked out on a daily basis, or even a monthly one. There's any number of insecure teenage girls who are certain they'll never lose their virginity, because boys show no interest in them or outright tell them they're ugly. Don't even get me started on how physical attractiveness fits into this; if a man says "I wish a woman would ask me to sleep with her", I suspect that more often than not he actually means "I wish an attractive woman would ask me to sleep with her." (And obviously, the same goes for women.)

The idea that women are the suppliers of sex and that men have to work for it is an illusion, not reality.

edited 20th Mar '12 5:38:20 AM by DoktorvonEurotrash

You're not wrong, but sometimes perception is reality. Men often do really believe that they have to do all the work, and I know plenty of girls who will never make a pass at a man upwards of smiling or whatever. They want the guy to come over to them, buy all the drinks, initiate the conversation, etc. They want to be pursued. And I know a lot of men who love the pursuit, sometimes even more than the actual consummation. Some women are predatory also, but not many. Mostly older women, which is obviously why they're called cougars. I love those, by the way.

Problem with that worldview is that it promotes a quite ugly notion: That if women supply sex, then men just have to, well purchase sex. Oh, not in money, but by being kind, good listener... See where I am driving it? It is the kind of ideas that spawns the cohorts of so called "Nice Guys", along with shits such as PUA and the "friendzone" stereotype. A romantic, or even platonic or purely sexual relationship is not "One party supplies, the other purchases". It's two peoples reaching out toward each other. No one is entitled to someone else's friendship or sexuality. No one.

Certainly the idea that sex is a commodity is a lousy one. But in our consumerist culture, people have grown up seeing it as something that men pay for and that women supply. The idea that women may have sex because she actually likes the guy can, for some, sound like a foreign concept. Many guys grow up thinking, "So if I do X, Y, and Z, I will 'earn' the right to have sex with her." It causes males to approach it as a business transaction.

And women are no less guilty of sex commodification. If a woman sees sex as something that she "gives up" to a man in return for things, then she's basically calling herself a prostitute. And by "things" I don't mean just money. It can even be something like the prestige of having "won" a particular mate.

Why do you think girls on those stupid dating shows go to such ridiculous lengths to win? Is it because of his personal qualities? I doubt it.

Sable, I completely agree, and I wasn't making a value judgment in that statement. I was just saying that's how it often is. Friends or acquaintances of mine have used that very same ridiculous argument in defense of their paying for prostitutes. Usually, it goes something like, "You always end up paying for it. You pay for dinner, you pay for a movie, you pay for drinks, you pay for gifts..." blah blah blah.

I always counter with, "Well, if I'm taking a girl out for dinner, I probably actually enjoy her company outside of the bedroom, so I don't see it as paying for anything. And I've had plenty of one-nighters or short-term casual relationships where I didn't even buy a single drink. So no, I don't end up paying for it, ever."

Also very true, on women seeing sex as a commodity to buy things, like dinner, gifts, etc. Not a good thing at all, to my mind.

edited 20th Mar '12 12:59:14 PM by Martello