Is it Time for Men to Have a Right to Sex?
Does society owe men sex?
Can you imagine what an actual “right to sex” for men would look like? At first, most women would probably remain in hiding, while the wealthiest women would travel via an underground, female-only tunnel system that would only be built because a bunch of women had sex with men to convince them to build it. Every time a woman walked outside before she got 5 feet, it would be like that famous ending scene of Invasion of the Body Snatchers and then hordes of guys would come running over:
My guess is that eventually, it would all descend into war as men killed each other in the streets over access to women and we’d end up with something akin to an old-school tribal system where everyone would mind their manners around women mainly because the women’s male relatives would kill them/make them marry them if they did anything otherwise. After all, that’s kind of how it played out back in the “might makes right” tribal days of humanity and our species is just as cruel as ever, even if we like to display it on Twitter instead of with swords or clubs.
In any case, this is relevant because of some attention-grabbing tweets from someone named Alexandra Hunt who is running for Congress in Philadelphia:
Note that 28% figure is not for virgins, it’s for men who haven’t had sex in the last year.
Although as a general rule, I don’t bother responding to people with personal pronouns in their bios, this seemed to be a case worth making an exception. First of all, we must note that because liberals on Twitter are extraordinarily moronic, even for liberals, Hunt had to spend multiple tweets after this explaining that she really wasn’t advocating the idea that men should be able to grab women of their choice and force them to have sex, like the scenario we discussed at the beginning.
She didn’t say exactly how the “right to sex” should work, but it sounded like she was angling towards legalizing prostitution along with government-funded propaganda designed to teach everyone how healthy and wonderful it is to pay some woman to let you be the 11th guy of the day that she allows to pay her for oral sex.
Of course, getting the government involved is a bad idea in almost every situation imaginable and this one is no different. After all, at least to an extent, we already have the government involved in issues related to sex and they’re encouraging men to go in women’s bathrooms, promoting drag queens, and trying to convince every child in America that they’re either gay or trans. At this point, it’s almost a surprise that the public schools aren’t taking third graders on field trips to watch orgies and then gaslighting everyone by pretending to be puzzled that parents are accusing them of grooming afterward.
As for legalizing prostitution, it would almost certainly be a horrible idea, just like legalizing drugs. Throughout history, it’s one of those things that comes and goes in waves. It comes because men want easy access to sex, but it ends up going over the long haul because of all the things that end up going with it like crime, drugs, human trafficking, slavery, and STIs. If prostitution were suddenly legal everywhere in the United States, would it be different here? No. Like communism, it’s “this time it’s going to be different,” but it’s never really different… well, that’s not entirely true. After all, Americans have become experts these days at blurring the lines between sex work, social media, and dating. How much of a difference is there between prostitution and porn? Being a cam girl? OnlyFans? Phone sex? Seedy massage parlors? Working in a strip club? Being a sugar baby? How about this:
Some people might say, “How does that fit in?” but Kim Kardashian gets paid more than 800k for product placements on an Instagram that literally features posts of her showing her @ss to the world. Most people don’t look at it this way, but in reality, all these activities are on the same continuum.
That highlights an important point that most people aren’t considering. That being, in many respects, this is one of the most sex-drenched countries in world history. You can look at pornography on your phone when you get up, see scantily clad women in the TV commercials for the morning news, see college-age girls dressed like prostitutes at the mall, come home and peruse more porn or pay to see more women naked via a variety of methods, and then settle in to watch a little TV, which will probably feature characters having sex or talking about it before you drift off to sleep and do it again. Sex is everywhere in our culture, so how is it that so many young men in their prime aren’t actually able to have sex?
There is an answer to this question, and it has to do with the increasingly broken nature of relationships in America today. I’ve written about this in detail, but here’s the short version. Less than a hundred years ago, marriage was essentially an unspoken deal that looked something like this:
The man was expected to take care of his wife and children financially and lead the household. In return, he regularly received sex, was treated as the king of the castle, and he had a woman who was expected to do the cooking, the cleaning and take care of the children.
This arrangement worked for a long time, but the world changed in a way that made the old, unspoken deal mostly irrelevant:
A) Women entered the job market in a big way and the government steps in to pay the bills if a man isn’t around to do it.
B) Feminism pushes the idea that women don’t “need” men and certainly shouldn’t cater to men. It also encourages women to pursue a career instead of a relationship in their twenties.
C) Sex before the pill was a huge risk. Now with reliable birth control, most women feel very comfortable having sex outside of a committed relationship.
D) Now, combine all this with the rise of very visually oriented online dating as the primary way couples connect and it changes the game.
Today, the number of Americans getting married is close to an all-time low, the ones that are getting married are doing it later than ever and far too many women end up doing something that looks roughly like this:
The guys may be having trouble getting laid, but the women aren’t. It’s just that the peak of the pyramid guys on dating websites like Tinder are pumping and dumping them left and right while a big group of guys who would have once potentially been marriage material aren’t getting second looks because, in a very real sense, they’re not needed anymore. The old idea that a woman should lock down a “good man” for marriage and children when she’s young and at the height of her powers as a woman is as out of date as top hats or the Model-T Ford.
Sure, you can take those young men who are locked out of the dating market and give them a “right to sex” with a prostitute, but is that going to fill the void left in their lives that a committed marriage to a woman that produces kids would? Not at all. Their lack of sexual activity is a symptom, not the disease. The disease is a broken way of looking at marriage, relationships, and a horrible series of incentives that our society offers to people in the dating market.
There are legal changes to divorce, custody, and welfare laws that can help correct these problems around the edges. However, the real fix is going to be either changes that make that old “unspoken deal” make sense again or people will have to give up on it and create a new one. Maybe we could come up with unlikely scenarios where those things could happen, but there is no clear path to either of those options occurring in the foreseeable future.
Since those structural changes aren’t likely, that brings us back to the central question of the column, “Is it time for men to have a right to sex?” Whether you’re talking about a literal right or just legalizing prostitution everywhere, the answer should be, “no.” That doesn’t mean we need draconian penalties for prostitution or that we should be horrified when we hear that an old widower like Robert Kraft got a VERY SPECIAL massage, but it does mean that we’ll be better off as a society if we don’t encourage prostitution. That’s not just because of the crime, STIs, and the way it encourages men to view women as objects to use, it’s because we don’t need to incentivize more women to sell their bodies.
Yes, there are women who are going to do it anyway, but it’s not something most people would want to see for a woman they care about. If you’re talking about your daughter, sister, or potential wife, most people are going to view them being nurses or teachers very differently than they do them being OnlyFans girls or prostitutes. Creating some kind of “right to sex” is likely to create more problems than it solves and is just a bad idea all the way around.
Yup the old unspoken deal is far gone, and the big body blows of The Pill, women's lib, and government welfare set up to disincentivize marriage put it on the canvas. When I was in school, the jocks got most of the girls, but then college came and often the smarter young women figured out that the brainy nerds who could earn six figure incomes might make a better provider than a used car or insurance salesman. But shattering the glass ceiling and dating via Tinder erased some of that, so that pyramid of really handsome guys remains pretty pointy and is in play for years longer; it seems like lots of money goes to fertility clinics as commitment comes ever later. I'd guess living in your parent's basement and watching OnlyFans contributes greatly as well. Too bad we don't have the benefit of 20/20 hindsight at the time we make- or postpone- our major decisions. Thanks, John