Why Women Set the Double Standard

A man who can get free milk will not buy the cow

The most widely perceived restraint on adult female sexuality is the double standard: certain sexual behaviours, it asserts, are acceptable for men but not for women. A common explanation for this is the male control theory of female sexuality. According to this, women’s lesser sexuality arises because patriarchal culture represses female sexual desire.

Women (so the theory goes) naturally have a very high sex drive, but men suppress it - mainly through husbands suppressing their wives’ sexuality to encourage fidelity (thus securing paternity and property rights) and to prevent indiscriminate copulation causing social chaos.

Yet the majority of men are notoriously receptive to female requests for sex even when the woman is a total stranger. And the double standard of sexual morality—supposedly central to the suppression of female sexuality—is actually positively accepted by females more than by males. The evidence shows it is not men but women who suppress female sexuality.

The basic economic principles of supply and demand explain why. Women are the limiting factor in reproduction, so sex is a resource that men desire and women possess. To obtain it, men offer women other desired resources in return, especially resources and security. And since sex is the main asset women have to bargain with for these other benefits, they want the price of sex to be high.

As with any resource, scarcity increases the price. Keeping supply below demand enables monopolies and cartels to extract a high price. If sex were freely available to men, then most individual women would be in a weaker bargaining position. And the principle of least interest also contends that having less desire for a particular relationship gives a person greater power in that relationship.

Female passionlessness during the Victorian period, for example, allowed women in general to extract better treatment and resources from men. As grandmothers used wisely to warn, a man who can get free milk will not buy the cow. Widespread suppression of female sexuality also reduces the risk that each woman will lose her male lover to another woman.

This is because to the extent that a man might have sex with other women, his girlfriend or wife might fear losing him. The control that individual women can exert over their men by limiting access to sex is undermined if men can easily get sex from other women. Hence women punish other women for making sex too freely available to men, calling the promiscuous women ‘cheap’.

The term ‘cheap’ is revealing. Promiscuous women are “rate busters” who lower everyone’s price because they dispense the female resource, sex, at a lower price than the going rate. The monopoly opposes the appearance of low-priced substitutes threatening its market control. And women oppose alternative outlets for male sexual gratification.

Although women are better off as a group holding the high price, any individual woman can gain an immediate advantage by cutting the price slightly. That is why other women perceive such women as threats.  So women restrain female sexuality to benefit all women: it allows them better to negotiate the terms of exchange for beginning a sexual relationship.

When women hold the advantage, sex is rare and expensive, whereas men want sex to be cheap and easy. Since reproduction involves one man and one woman, a relative shortage of either gives that sex an advantage. During WW2, for example, some women placed newspaper advertisements for prom dates, even offering to furnish the car and pay all expenses of the date.

Accordingly, since the male control theory holds that men want to suppress female sexuality, there should be less sexual activity when men are in the minority and therefore have more leverage. On the contrary, the increased power this gives men over the courtship process means there is more sex, not less. They don’t have to offer as much to get it. Counterintuitively, teenage girls are most likely to become pregnant when there is a shortage of men.

Feminist movements are more common when men are in the minority, but this makes no sense if men are trying to suppress female sexuality to impose patriarchal power. If suppressing female sexuality were a strategy to maintain social order, it would be used more than ever when men were threatened by being in the minority. But the opposite actually happens.

When women lack political and economic power, they rely heavily on sex to control men and gain resources, so they restrict each other’s sexuality very strongly. As women gain more political and economic power, they suppress female sexuality less - hence its liberation during the sexual revolution.

But there was another aspect to this: the pill, other contraceptives and abortion made women fear pregnancy less.  Previously, mothers had overwhelmingly sought to suppress their daughters’ desires to avoid this. Mothers and female peers suppress female sexuality most. Young men mostly make pacts to have sex; young women, to refrain from it, emphasising maintaining a good reputation.

Women mostly cite external pressures of gossip and reputation as forces that push them to hold back sexually: other women tend to ostracise and shame them. Girls who menstruate early are bullied by girls but embraced by boys. And women with very high sex drives report feeling more comfortable with men than with women.

Hence not men but women support and perpetuate female genital mutilation. European women are much sought after as wives in Islamic African nations because the men find that they enjoy sex more. African men do not prefer women with surgically suppressed sexuality. Many fathers try to stop their daughters being sub-incised or infibulated, but they are overruled by the women in the family.

Veiling and foot-binding are also more supported by women. Veiling in Mesopotamia and Persia was so popular among women that it had to be forbidden by law to poor and single women, prostitutes and slaves. In China, women bound their own and their daughters’ feet. Emperors’ repeated attempts to ban it failed; women reversed them.

Women are also consistently more opposed than men are to prostitution and pornography. And they express more negative views than do men about the rise in sexual permissiveness generally.  Women conceal norm-breaking sexual activity from female friends while sharing it with the male partner. Women sometimes fake orgasms because they know men don’t want sexually suppressed partners.

By contrast, although the male control theory would make men the losers in the sexual revolution, most men have welcomed it. And it’s easy to see why. Young men no longer need an education or career prospects to qualify for sex. They don’t need to get married, forgoing other women. Sex is now so easily available that none of that is necessary.

The other main motivator for men to pursue a career seriously was having a family to provide for. But feminist ideology encourages women to prioritise career, leading them to cheapen sex further, making it even more readily available to men, creating a vicious cycle.

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