Yeah, we humans always shop for the best deal in life. It’s nice when your mate makes you feel like you were the best choice, but it’s naive to actually believe you’re not the best compromise. The thing about compromise is it goes both ways. Hey, so does sex!
[underlining mine] I’m not sure I follow you on the underlined part.
If I understand your post correctly, you’re steering my example into a different area than I intended. I am currently single, not in a relationship at the moment. It sounds like you’re talking about something like a married man whose wife isn’t providing enough sex. I was married and the wife usually didn’t want to provide it, so I recognize the sort of “insult upon injury” that I think you’re alluding to.
Or do you mean, in the underlined part, that women (especially) will take a dim view because I seem to be saying that “Sex is nothing more than rubbing.”? I can’t speak for all men, but I bet many/most would always say it’s ALWAYS better with a woman…not your hand, not a blowup doll, but a woman. I thought that was a given.
Stated another way, going back to the “take away food” part of my post. I didn’t say, “Take away the Beef Wellington and Beluga caviar and Chateauneuf-du-Pape” and he will die. No food…not even the poorest quality food…take everything and anything away and he’s a goner. Likewise with sex, take away every and any form of stimulation—even the weakest form of relief—and I think he’ll weird.
I think there are allegedly celibate people, e.g. priests, who probably masturbate for a release. Women may think, ‘I don’t get it; Father Jones at church never has sex and he’s the nicest guy in the world! Why do other men have such a fixation with it?’
Men in my situation of course have other options…telling women pretty lies so that they will get some is a common one, but prostitution’s also out there (legal in parts of Nevada I guess). And men who end up in prison—men who were totally straight IRL—may experiment because they have no other choices.
Jackson Browne provides the musical interlude:
On second thought, I’ll have to back away a bit from the man going crazy if not allowed any stimulation whatsoever. Nature would probably step in with a wet dream for relief, if needed.
The guy wouldn’t be happy, though.
Couldn’t he just masturbate?
I mean, I know I get cranky when I don’t orgasm, but nature gave me hands and vibrating pieces of metal.
I was referring to my “Elizabethan collar” scenario.
The “men who can’t have sex with women” thing reminded me of parts of a book. I’ll put the author in spoiler for anybody who wants to guess.
*There are no women in a man’s prison. That makes the biggest difference in the world. You just can’t take away women from men. It’s devastating. Nothing buffers this. There’s a sadness inside those walls, in men’s eyes, that’s pathetic. The loneliness. The anger. It was incredible.
<snip>
The real penalty of jail, as I’ve said, is no women. With no place for the testosterone to go—and the painful memory of where it could go—the flare-ups get very violent. And the violence is very unlike life, because real life gets mitigated by touch and feelings.
<snip>
I remember a guy who put his hand on my shoulder during a conversation. He wasn’t gay, but I leaned in toward him anyway just because having somebody touch you meant a lot.*
Tim Allen, in “Don’t Stand Too Close to a Naked Man.”
Ah, well that would be torture for me as well. It reminds me of a scene in “Story of O” where the title character is chained up for the night and unable even to touch herself.
But what about men who never have sex with women due to enforced celibacy (priests, etc.) or men who just never have the opportunity and end up staying virgins until dreadfully late ages? They manage–yeah, it’s hard, but they not all of them end up humping people in the subway out of pure unadulterated lust and/or insanity.
He could, but that is certainly no substitute for a true intimate relationship with his woman. “Not tonight honey…couldn’t you just masturbate instead?” said by a woman is understood by the man as “I have no desire to be intimate with you…can you just be intimate with yourself and leave me alone?..you are not wanted.”
So to answer your question:
For physiological relief…sure. For emotional support and intimacy in the relationship…destructive. Kinda like one step forward, two steps back. Maybe three.
#1 Yes, my comment was that women may take a dim view of your comparing a mere personal rejection with it becoming physically impossible to gain any relief. This is because…
#2 In the real-world scenario of rejection, it is NOT equivalent to prison, nor to chastity restraint. Why? Because not being in prison or bondage, the rejectee can rethink what he’s looking for and come back again (149 times or however many… 
) I mean, respecfully, when I get shot down I do NOT feel like I’m in danger of never ever getting any [choose: (a)nookie/(b)loving emotional commitment/(c)both] again. I’m just not getting it here, now, and from this person, so let me evaluate whether it’s a problem with her, with me, is it beyond my control, how do I move on. Depending on circumstance I may become angry or sad or peeved but that passes.
Going way back in the thread…
I raised the issue of what kind of a ‘need’ sex was. First I talked about food: deny a man food for months and he will die. But sex isn’t really the same…you can go without for months but not die.
So when I brought up sex, putting a man in a cage, denying him any form of sexual stimulation with an Elizabethan collar, I was focusing only on the sex part. I certainly wouldn’t deny that sex is soooo much more than that. IMO coitus and other sex acts leading to a release are icing on the cake, but they’re not the cake. And cake, while nobody’s idea of health food, is better nutrition than the icing. To take it a step further, I can imagine surviving a marriage without sex; I can’t imagine surviving one without the warm, fuzzy stuff, the simple validations that occur in healthy relationships.
So yes, all the other emotional goodies that go with sex are denied as well. Taking away the relief of self-stimulation, meager and pale though it is when compared to a robust relationship, would be the final straw, IMO.
And I think it’s interesting that you mention “real world” because I know there are people in loveless marriages who gave up on sex a long time ago. They aren’t incarcerated, but they’re prisoners nonetheless. They have the option of denying themselves a critically important requirement in life, pushing for change (may have already been there and done that and failed), or breaking the marriage vow. Some don’t believe in divorce and are really in a tough place.
I think too that our discussion is bulging outside its borders or something. For instance, I’m a single guy. If I go out to a bar tonight and meet a woman, hit on her, and get rejected, that’s one thing. I can go to a different venue tomorrow, find a different woman, and give it another try if I choose. But as I said in the above paragraph, there are people who don’t have that luxury. Being rejected by a spouse/SO and being rejected by a relative stranger are completely different kettles of fish.
FWIW, Maslow’s hierarchy of needs addresses how everything ranks.
If you look at the start of the thread, the OP question IS about rejection in the context of pickup or, at best, courtship, NOT on the question of being “cut off” while already within a relationship.
It was in later responses that came the idea that there’s a “power” in being the party that controls whether to yield to sexual advances, and that it is specially a female power.
Since that can extend beyond the mere pickup/courtship phase THAT’s where, as I see it, things began to drift “outside the borders”, as you put it, of the discussion proposition. Your scenario is a specific case, in which Party A has permanently surrendered power to Party B and removed all other options, and is (alas, only figuratively) screwed.
However, in general terms, if you do NOT get yourself into that situation in the first place, then it goes back to the OP and general aspects of whether it’s tougher for males or females, in which question, again, I lean towards it being an individual, circumstantial thing that can’t be easily generalized, save in the sense of a longstanding **cultural ** convention about male seeker/female goalkeeper roles being accepted by people due to it being what they were brought up with.
OK, I think we’re on the same page and in agreement.