I’d like to, but Society says No.

March 21, 2006 at 3:08 pm | Posted in Personal, Rants | 39 Comments

I’ve been having a back-and-forth with dekucat in the the comment section of one of her posts about whether men are really affected by societal conditioning when it comes to women being sexually assertive or aggressive. I would rather have an in-and-out with dekucat, but this is interesting too.

So, to bring all of you lov-er-ly people into the conversation, a popular theory seems to be that many/most men will be tempted to reject women who proposition them for sex or otherwise come onto them because society has taught these men that that’s not how things are done and that it’s “wrong”.

Colour me sceptical.

Now of course what’s going to happen is that the first six comments in response to this post will be stories of individual times that one particular man has been put off by a woman asking him for a date.

Even though I’m sure that these stories will be well-written and amusing, do they really respresent more than a small majority of cases involving man-woman-BowChickaWowWow interactions?

From my admittedly limited perspective, it seems that if a man buys into the idea that men are/should be the sexual agressors, that man will continue to believe it right up to the point that a woman propositions them for casual sex. Even if they have been conditioned to believe that it is wrong for a woman to ask for sex, I doubt that that conditioning is going to stand in the way of them gettin’ it on.

I’m not going to get far into societal conditioning for women. I’ll just say that I believe that conditioning for women in terms of sex is a whole other planet than conditioning for men, not just in content, but also in which areas of life that it is meant to apply to.

For example:

Q: When does societal conditioning (sex) for men apply?

A: Sometimes.

Q: When does societal conditioning (sex) for women apply?

A: Always.

So in summary, even though dekucat is a clever little marmot, I think that she is giving too much credit to societal conditioning in this particular area. I don’t think that men are affected by their conditioning in this area in the same way or to the same extent.

Not that dekucat has said otherwise, but if a man is put off by a woman asking for sex, I would suggest that there are many many factors contributing to that situation.

This has been Point-Counterpoint. I’m your host Hugh Jass. Thank you and goodnight.

EDIT: It turns out that I was misunderstanding dekucat‘s original point, but what the hell, I got to waste 15 minutes instead of working.

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