Malacandra, in response to everything you’ve said, I’ve said already “In general, both men and women do the choosing, but if you insist that one side might have an upper-hand, I’d say it’s the men who hold it”. I’m not saying things are skewed dramatically to be unfair to women; I’m saying the odds are at least slightly against them. Your point of “that’s what, a fraction of a percent? Hardly depriving millions of women of the chance to hook an acceptable male”, does nothing to dissolve the claim - it still represents a skew, however slight, in favor of straight males. An ugly man with no money is not genetically bound to pennilessness, so what’s your point?
I guess the ugly man with no money can always make some money, but all that happens then is he becomes acceptable to some female who wouldn’t have looked at him before - which, I guess, means that his efforts now mean she has gained a mating prospect.
And the numerical skew for which you are arguing is, I contend, offset by the perception (real or imagined) that men want pussy more than women want dick - which make it a seller’s market for those who have a lock on the vagina supply.
shrug I dunno. Maybe I should have adopted more of an attitude of “Ladies! Get your unattached straight male here while the getting’s good!” instead of being perfectly willing to date less-than-hot chicks and still going chronically short of sex. 
Why does the reason have to be society? Maybe they have a much lower sex drive, and can’t really understand why a woman would want that much sex. If they were having as much sex as someone with a higher drive, then it would be unpleasant and likely motivated by something else. Thus they think women with high sex drives are sluts.
Society tried to tell men that masturbation was wrong and shameful for hundreds of years, but stopping an average 17 year old male is gonna be damn near impossible because the biology is there.
Even still it’s all up to him. And he can always make more money to become even more attractive and get even more attractive women.
What’re you saying - men’s promiscuous appetites cancel out the raw numerical skewing in their favor?! A man’s insatiability should not factor into an objective survey of “fairness”. He may not get as much and as high quality* sex as he wants, but it still stands that a man has slightly easier time getting laid than a woman.
which I think is the crux of any dissent. Men have a hard time recognizing and then accepting the “league” they’re in
I think it’s the opposite. A woman is much more likely to go home alone if her standards aren’t met, because she doesn’t want it as bad. Get enough beer in a guy and he’ll hump a tree with lipstick on it. Playing out of one’s league is a problem on both sides, but at the end of the night men are going to settle for what they can get. This cancels the slight numeric advantage that women have.
Started a GQ thread.
A man wouldn’t settle for what he can get because a man judges his own worth based on the physically attractiveness of the people he has sex with in a way a woman doesn’t. I straight man would be unforgiven by his friends and male family members if he admits to having sex with a fat woman. Can’t you attest to that - the fact that men judge each other based on their partners’ physical attractiveness to that extent? And that women don’t?
Ahem.
To the Esteemed Gentlemen of the SDMB:*
Could we please, in the interest of the very purpose this board is dedicated to, drop the notion that all women are inherently less interested in sex than men?
Thank you.
Admiral Crunch, I hate to break this to you, but at 17 I was a rather prudish young woman who did not believe in sex outside of marriage. Unfortunately, my sex drive was such that like the 17 year old males you refer to, I tried to give up masturbation for Lent more than once, but couldn’t do so, even with the Sunday loophole. Sex does not equal sex drive. Nor does age, degree of prudishness or the way one dresses or one’s religious beliefs. Could we please lay this myth to rest before I get tempted to make suggestions about laying other things?
I actually do think that there should be identical or nearly identical ideas about how appropriate it is for men and women to want sex. In other words, if women are to remain virgins until marriage, then so should men. If men are assumed to be capable of and interested in sex without an emotional commitment, then it should not be assumed women aren’t. I dislike the notion that a man who’s looking for women to have sex with is less likely to be looked down on by society than a woman who’s looking for men to have sex with. Basically, I wonder why “slut” remains a perjorative as applied to a woman, but the nearest equivalent which can be applied to a man (“stud”, perhaps?) carries no such negative connotation.
I freely admit that women are at least as responsible for this attitude as men if not more so. On the other hand, Malacandra, you mentioned how difficult it’s been for you to find women who are as interested in sex as you are. To demonstrate the sort of attitudes women are raised with, I have to ask you and the other gentlemen in this thread how you’d feel if it were your sisters or daughters who you learned were matching men’s sexual appetites. The attitude that sexually interested and available women are a good thing seems to change when applied to one’s relatives and I don’t think it’s solely because of the incest taboo. By the way, Malacandra, having read your lament, I wish I’d met you a few years ago.
*and the rest of you guys
(size only matters in fonts)
What’s the weather like on this planet you’re from? How about the day-night cycle? Is it tidally locked? Because I for one would have gone up to age 28 getting laid maybe three or four times, tops, if it weren’t for fat unattractive women; and I can’t help noticing that in pretty much every culture on Earth there’s a reliable living to be made for women prepared to spread their legs for cash, which strongly suggests the existence of a large pool of men who aren’t getting laid either at all or often enough without coughing up for it.
Mrs M was maybe thirty pounds overweight when I met her. She’s since added at least another seventy to it. In compensation, we have sex maybe three times a month on average, and when I say sex, we haven’t had intercourse to orgasm (or at any rate not for me) since before our second son was born. He turned three and a half two days ago. What point are we making here exactly?
Siege, I don’t doubt that you personally are as horny as all get-out. It hardly invalidates the proposal that in general women aren’t as up for it as men are, does it?
Ah, but how physically attractive are you? We have pizzabrat’s word for it that I wouldn’t look at you if you weren’t a supermodel - y’know, peer pressure and all that. 
It’s not that they’re less interested, it’s that their sex drive is less, well, urgent. Discussed in this thread.
If it were the case that they just have a lower sex drive, then why would it automatically follow that those who have a higher sex drive are sluts? And why would that apply only to women who have a higher sex drive, and not men?
Something is missing in between, and that something is a societal message likely based on thousands of years of not having reliable birth control.
Women get beer goggles too. Women do stupid things when they have beer goggles, just like men do. I remain unconvinced that in any society in which women have been severely stigmatized for expressing a sexual appetite comparable to a man’s, you’ll ever get enough honest answers when you ask about their sex drive to be meaningful. There are still a lot of women who are just as horny as men, and will not say so because they don’t want to be thought of as a slut.
Mine isn’t ‘less urgent’ at all. Most people would probably think so if I had been less resistant to the message that I should not want sex, much less express that I want sex, because that makes a good girl into a dirty slut.
I want to take back the term slut. I want to rob it of its negative power. I want there to be nothing more wrong with being a slut than there is with being a stud. I applaud the one night stand. I think there’s nothing wrong with leaving right after he falls asleep. I’m not going to buy the bull because I can get the horns for free.
I bet you won’t give that message to your daughters.
How many here in this thread would tell their daughters there’s nothing wrong with liking sex, nothing wrong with seeking it out on their terms when they want it, and that it’s not their job to keep their knees pressed firmly together?
Well, the gays have managed to do that with “queer.” (Or have they?)
yeah, but speaking of double standards, women can claim they were raped when they have beer goggles, or slept with a guy they normally wouldn’t have (on that note, I think the fact that women and men become more similar in sex drive as intoxication increases/inhibition lowers means that women my unconsciously (or consciously) control their sex drive due to societal methods) but when a guy has an…unfortunate…or unintentional sexual encounter, the best he gets is his friends laughing at him.
@ The debate above over which member of a relationship wants more sex, it’s entirely up to them and either the guys who don’t think women want sex somehow want it nearly constantly or they’re unlucky. Two ex’es ago wanted to have sex more than I did, and the one before had at least that much of a sex drive but we did everything but (still a good example)…The last one was just as horny but she was raised Catholic and so she had this idea that she had to restrain herself.
I think we’re arguing in circles because we can’t agree on 3 assumptions.
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Men have a higher/more urgent sex drive than women.
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Women have an easier time getting laid than men.
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Promiscuous women are seen as sluts while promiscuous men are studs.
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Men have a higher/more urgent sex drive than women.
This is supported by the WebMD article I linked to, the thread BrainGlutton linked to, evolutionary strategy(spread the seed vs. find a mate to raise a child), and the general cliché that exists in society today. Personal anecdotes aside, until someone digs up some cites otherwise, in general this one’s true.
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Women have an easier time getting laid than men.
If #1 is true, then at any given time there are more men on the prowl than women looking to accept. The supply of women willing to engage in casual sex is smaller, so it’s a woman’s market. Prostitutes, strip clubs, and nudie booths aren’t necessarily proof, but they certainly don’t hurt the premise. This is also where societal conditioning for men and women comes in. Women being shamed into remaining chaste exacerbates the situation.
- Promiscuous women are seen as sluts while promiscuous men are studs.
It’s been said before, but given #1 and #2, women are in control. When the perceived limiting factor for the average man is how many women are willing to sleep with him, society isn’t going to blame him for being especially skilled. On the other hand, when the perceived limiting factor for women is how many men she will allow to sleep with her, the ball’s in her court. She’s seen as a slut because she lets men sleep with her more often than her peers.
Others beat me to the punch, but no one said all women are inherently less interested in sex than men. The average woman is inherently less interested in sex than the average man.
Again, average. When 17 year old men don’t masturbate, God does the work for them and nocturnal emissions happen. It isn’t unheard of for woman to make it past 20 having never had an orgasm.
As noted in #2 and #3, women are in charge. If a woman with a low sex drive lets men sleep with her often, she’s a slut. This isn’t very discernible on the outside from a woman with a higher than average sex drive. That’s why most of the stigma comes from women.
I’m sure it plays a part, and played a greater part in the past, but it’s not what makes the double standard persist.
I applaud you and am glad that you’re comfortable with it. I wish more women were. But they’re not, and they likely won’t be.
It’s possible you are a statistical outlier, my good slut. We’re talking about averages.
Cynical/Darwinian answer ( pretty much the same thing usually ) : Because for women, one of the primary functions of sex is to acquire wealth or status, and the more common sex is, the lower it’s market value becomes. It’s the same principle behind “female circumcision”, which is something that women primarily do to girls; by destroying the girl’s ability to enjoy sex, they lower the supply and raise the price. Just as when males engage in FGM, they tend to choose methods that involve sealing the girl up so she can’t have sex ( or chastity belts, or confinement if they don’t use FGM ), except when she’s handed over as a wife. It’s a pattern straight out of the animal world. Males want a woman to have sex only with him; females don’t want other women to have sex at all.
Now the odds are good that they don’t reason it out like that, but that doesn’t mean their instincts won’t drive them that way.
Sooo many possibilities…
-Age affecting sex drive (The bitching friends are 19-35, their partners and potential partners are the same age or older)
-Quality (If they like your personality enough to continue the relationship but you’re no good in bed, they may just opt to masturbate. Also, sometimes lots of screwing with little foreplay can lead to irritation, UTIs, etc.)
-Etc. Rather than inform men of every single thing going on with their vaginas, women I know tend to just refuse sex sans explanation when they have PMS, heavy periods (that’s one week/month for some), yeast infections, etc. This is more for younger women who aren’t in relationships.
Didn’t know that. Might be relevant to this thread.
Hmmm. I wonder why they’re so hung up that way? If I had a sore cock for any reason, or a UTI, or anything else that made me hesitant to have sex, I wouldn’t be shy about saying so.
No flame intended – perhaps I should’ve included a 
in that. You want to reclaim the word “slut” and cleanse it of negative connotations, I’m glad to help you along. 
Which brings up another point. In Robert Heinlein’s novel Friday, there is a scene where Friday Jones, being out of work, is looking through the want ads. One is from a gentleman advertising for a mistress/companion. One requirement is that her “amativeness quotient” be above a certain figure. Have psychologists ever devised a reliable numerical measurement of the level/intensity of an individual’s sex drive? Will they ever?