Depending on how indoctrinated you are your first reaction to this post might be “couldn’t happen.” Or even “even if you were right it couldn’t happen.” We’ll see.

So!

Everybody knows men want sex more than women. Everybody knows it’s always been that way and it always will. Everybody knows that if nothing else that purely reflexive oxygenation reflex (which actually persists in most males of all ages most of the night) known as the “morning erection” puts men on the sexual “offensive” far more than women could ever be prepared to cope with.

Oh yeah, and everybody knows that men are just such horndogs that if women tried to turn the tables by, say, sitting straddle-legged, cupping men’s asses without asking, assessing them openly and frankly, making coarse assertions like “mmm, I bet his cock is as long as my arm,” and otherwise indiscriminately bringing it on that men would just soak it up like hounds on a ham sandwich.

Maybe so, maybe no. I actually happen to believe, very strongly, men and women are both people and that, being people and all our similarities far, far outweigh our differences. In fact they outweigh them to such an extent that much of what we consider immutable gender dynamics is actually far more the dynamics of circumstance.

And yes, yes, we’re all well aware of the dynamics of gender since we’ve all been through some pretty common variation of a K-12 education… or at least by the time we’re old enough for this website to register as even remotely interesting to us we’ve been through approximately 18 years of the gender dynamics of conventional youth.

Of course… looking much further than those first 18 years… looking instead towards, say, the 18 years between 37 and 50 the picture changes considerably, often with male partners losing steam against the ongoing or even increasing libidos of their female partners. (Any of my readers had that experience? Just asking cause I could be totally mistaken.)

And even if I was mistaken what’s true about the lusty behavior of young men is so overwhelming it surely must be immutable, right? Well, not exactly.

It seems that for a sizable number of young men, the fact that they can get sex whenever they want may have created a situation where, in fact, they’re unable to have sex. According to surveys, young women are now as likely as young men to have sex and by countless reports are also as likely to initiate sex, taking away from males the age-old, erotic power of the chase.

“I know lots of girls for whom nothing is off limits,” says Helen Czapary, a junior at the University of Maryland. “The pressure on the guys is a huge deal.”

...

One can argue that a young woman speaking her mind is a sign of equality. “That’s a good thing,” says Sawyer, father of four daughters. “But for some guys, it has come at a price. It’s turned into ED [a marketing acronym for “erectile dysfunction” —fl] in men you normally wouldn’t think would have ED.

Discussion here.

And besides maybe the famous old Third Wish joke is a total fluke. (This should be particularly funny, then, to my male readers who are thinking what a foolish fellow this figleaf is being today.)

A man was sitting alone in his office one night when a genie popped up out of his ashtray and said, “And what will your third wish be?”

The man looked at the genie and said, “Huh? How can I be getting a third wish when I haven’t had a first or second wish yet?”

“You have had two wishes already,” the genie said, “but your second wish was for me to put everything back the way it was before you made your first wish. Thus, you remember nothing, because everything is the way it was before you made any wishes. You have one wish left.”

“Okay,” said the man, “I don’t believe this, but what the heck. I wish I were irresistible to women.”

“Funny,” said the genie as it granted his wish and disappeared forever. “That was your first wish, too.”

And by now I’m pretty sure pretty much everyone has come up with at least one current-paradigm reason why this won’t work — risks of pregnancy, fear of disease, men can never get enough, men would still divert towards whatever minority of women didn’t participate, men would just be violent towards women about something else, women are just too delicate to have sex one time more often per day than their partners can, laws designed traditionally to protect women’s sensibilities would protect men’s… all of which could certainly be true and I wouldn’t want to discount it. (There’d certainly be some repercussions.)

But flexing the idea, conducting the thought experiment of a contrarian Lysistrata project, raises some interesting points about our assumptions about gender dynamics.

I mean, in modern times we’ve always assumed that women have been kept economically, physically, educationally, and socially down and out in order to preserve… to ensure… men’s sexual access to them. But what if, at some time in the distant past, it was the other way around? What if the whole shebang, the whole deprecation of women, the whole holding them economic and violent hostage, of pressuring them to parcel out sex, was imposed for men’s benefits yes, and imposed out of violence and patriarchy yes, but was also imposed in order to preserve men’s self-image as sexual conquerors? Because minus all the second-classing and oppression, without the illusion that women aren’t even sexual beings in the first place, that rather than being the sex class of classical feminist theory women have to be relegated to “no-sex” class to protect men’s sensibilities…

Like I say, if you’re really invested in the current paradigms then you’re not going to want to confront the question. You might even say it’s typical male wish-fulfillment. And that’s totally, totally fine. Current paradigms have gotten humanity to the point we’re at and if it’s something you’re really invested in then it makes perfect sense to defend it… not to look too close at fundamental assumptions about ourselves or others… not rock the boat… :-)