A Quickie On Quickies

The patriarchy severely complicates our ability to fuck.

While I could go on all day about how society genders us leading to women being encouraged to behave as submissive and men as domineering, and most quick sex being basically a protracted exercise in dominance and submission wrapped around daddy/mommy issues instead of, you know, sex, there's a far more obvious way in which the culture of 'consequences' for 'irresponsible women' has limited the options of conscientious men.

Planned Parenthood is maligned pretty frequently as some kind of radical abortionist group by the mainstream culture, and its mission - to provide sexuality education, counseling, and services (primarily, but not exclusively) to women - is treated as encouraging 'irresponsibility'.

The Patriarchy basically considers responsibility submission to its desires. In the case of women, sex becomes a matter of fertility; women who wish to have sex but do not wish to be fertile are Irresponsible. It doesn't matter how much trouble the woman has taken to be infertile - condoms, spermicide, hormonal birth control - a woman who gets pregnant is irresponsible.

There is, of course, a ridiculous double standard at work here -- but that's not what matters, because the standard in and of itself is false. What society wants 'responsible' to mean for sexually-active women and what 'responsible' does mean for sexually-active women are two different things. In this case, the responsible thing for women with active sex lives and unstable personal lives is to avoid having children. (And by 'unstable personal lives' I just mean anyone who hasn't reached the end of her education and gotten onto some kind of career arc - pretty much anyone below the age of 25 and most women below the age of 30.)

Most of the time, the effort needed to avoid having children is limited to using the pill and condoms. (Condoms are an absolute must except for in the case of long-term monogamy.) But sometimes those fail - and then, as a last resort, abortion becomes necessary.

This is why free love is an especially strong non-starter in the US - we are luridly uptight about sexuality precisely because we want to make enjoying no-hassle sex as difficult as possible for women. After all, if they enjoy it they'll forget its purpose is to make mothers of them.

How do men lose out here? They lose coming and going: men who want quick, easy sex without having to worry about being a father have a tricky time finding it, precisely because most women who are paying attention know that if their partner is a dick about it, they can wind up carrying an accident to term. And on the flip side, thanks to the culture constantly hammering home to little girls how precious infants are without actually letting them know that raising them is a full-time job, there are plenty of women out there who (naturally) want quick, easy sex - and are perfectly willing to get pregnant as a result. So good easy sex is hard to find - and when you do find it, chances are better than you might like that it'll result in having to father and support a child too early in life.

It's a pretty minor loss - especially compared to that which women lose, which is the ability to have quick, easy sex on their own terms more or less at all. But it's yet another way in which the patriarchy robs us of the ability to exercise our manhood.

It's not one quite as infuriating as the constant assault on the concept of paternity, or the dismissal of basic social fraternity as effeminate. But it's still annoying, and it makes your life a little more difficult - unless you happen to be more interested in cheap labor than casual sex, in which case it works out great. (And if you happen to be in that position, chances are you can combine the two with a junket to Thailand anyway.)