Lynn Gazis-Sax of Noli Irritare Leones has several thoughtful posts on the weird scolding manefestos of Kass and Mansfield here and here brings up another interesting problem.

Just one more quick post on the Mansfield and Kass articles. Let’s assume (it’s not, after all, a huge leap) that men are, in fact, more willing to engage in casual, or promiscuous, or multiple partner sex than women. Let’s further assume that the reason for this isn’t entirely cultural, and that women are, in fact, by nature more inclined to sexual stability and monogamy, for whatever combination of reasons (we have lower sex drives, we know darn well that the physical consequences fall more heavily on us and after a while that sinks in, whatever). What moral conclusions ought one to draw from such a fact?

Read her whole post here.

I think that “...than men think they would be if the shoe were on the other foot” is the critical part of this premise but let’s also take a look at “...after a while that sinks in.”

For whatever reasons — an assumption about greater natural reticence is as good as social conditioning here — women almost never do proposition men. Consequently men tend only to imagine what they’d do. (I would add that when they do think about it selection bias prompts them to assume the woman propositioning them would be attractive to them.)

Several social science studies suggest that men are indeed more willing to accept a spontaneous invitation to a woman’s dorm room, however my direct experience and observations of male friends in similar circumstances suggests our reactions are based more on social expectations than genuine enthusiasm. (If you’re wondering, in college I had a lot of sexually assertive women friends.)

I’m not sure I’m composing this very well, but I think that our dominant men propose / women decide dating structure. Whatever men think they might do is probably very different from what they’d do after they’d been propositioned enough for it to sink in — for the novelty to wear off.

I might add that, were pixie dust to fly and men and women were permitted to make propositions entirely as they saw fit, one would see entirely more sympathy on both sides for the other.

This is an appropriate time of year to bring this up as I’ve most often been propositioned out of the blue at Halloween costume parties. (Presumably because when I’m wearing face paint I didn’t trigger the “you look like your brother” effect created by the fact that I do indeed look like everybody’s brother.) The first time it happened I followed blindly and I can’t say it turned out well. I thought that was a fluke. The second time didn’t turn out so well either a few years later. The third time I was far more wary but I’d been propositioned by two women, roommates, and though I was vaguely flattered I was pretty sure it wasn’t going to turn out well this time either so, in the end, I declined.

Anyway, the point is that Lynn’s thought experiment is valid but the context is limited. I’m pretty confident that if women were more inclined to proposition men (which in time they might if Kass’s “gloomy” fears are born out) we’d likely see a corresponding decrease in unrealistic propositions from men.

What do you think? Have you ever propositioned a man out of the (semi) blue? Been propositioned out of the blue by a woman? Did it go as you expected?

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Aside: Maybe twenty years ago now I ran into a woman I hadn’t seen for years. I’d admired her quite a lot, learned a great deal about gender issues from her, and had generally been pretty intimidated. She’d since developed some pretty severe personality disorders and, to top it off, she’d become a street prostitute. And not, it turns out, a very successful one. Her method evidently involved going up to men she thought were likely and bluntly saying they could have sex with her for money and she was pretty irked that they almost always declined because it contradicted the image of men she’d constructed for herself. I’m aware that the money angle made the refusals less clear cut, but I’m pretty confident she’d have had little better luck if she’d just been looking for sex. What men might imagine they’d do and what they’d actually do aren’t at all the same things.