Recently a YouTube commenter named Danny asked me not once but twice to do a video explaining
the sexual double standard. 'Why is it that if a guy sleeps around he is manly but if
a woman does it she's a slut?' Because that's just the way the world works. Just kidding.
I mean not entirely kidding but there is more to it than that.
What do we mean when we say the sexual double standard? In cliched terms we could say that
it refers to men being instructed to go sew their wild oats while women are warned that
no one's going to want to buy the cow if they give away the milk samples for free. Uhhhhh.
Specifically it refers to our permissive attitudes toward premarital sex on the basis of gender.
Contemporary evidence of how we might internalize that sexual double standard is that a lot
of times in studies of hookup behavior, women report a lot more guilt after the fact than
men do. The sexual double standard can also manifest in far more extreme and gruesome
ways such as the instances in Steubenville and Maryville wherein sexual assault victims
were slut-shamed for sex acts that they weren't even consenting to. When we look at where
the sexual double standard comes from, it first enters the academic lexicon in the late
1960s when a guy named Ira Reiss decided to study this. Even though a sexual revolution
was going on there was still big gender divide in how those permissive attitudes were applied.
Women who were getting it on during the summer of love were still cast in media reports and
portrayed on film and television and even just in neighborhood gossip as no good whores
who you want to keep your sons away from. The sexual double standard began a long time
before the late 1960s. You can hop back a couple decades to World War II where you see
public health campaigns regarding venereal diseases being framed as warnings for men
to keep their penises away from promiscuous women dirty vaginas. But to get more to the
root of the issue we have to go way, way farther back. The idea of marrying for love is a very
modern phenomenon. Back in the day, when women were really considered men's property than
their own autonomous beings you want to make sure that that property is chaste and virginal
and unsullied, that none of its milk samples have been given out for free. There's also
a broader economic incentive for reinforcing this sexual double standard because back at
this time, particularly for lower class women, if they were to get pregnant outside of marriage
which was very easy because this was long before the days of accessible birth control,
it was up to the church and state to take care of them and their fatherless children.
You know what the church and the state didn't want to do? Have to pay for a bunch of mothers
and their fatherless children. We see this rise of sexual stigma focused on women to
de-incentivize their desires for premarital sex. This idea that women should be shamed
for having sex outside of the confines of a heterosexual marriage is along standing
one. What has changed is the fact that we're now living in a time of more sexual permissiveness
than ever before with women having more premarital sex yet we are failing them, particularly
in the United States with a sex education system that prepares us only for one thing:
Don't get pregnant. But I do think that we can chip away at the sexual double standard
by taking action on an individual basis and really paying attention to the messages that
we're sending not just to women but also to little girls telling them that they need to
be ladylike a prim and proper, as they get older, you need to watch out what you're wearing
because if you're showing too much of something or something, then you're going to give off
the wrong impression. Telling girls who might be of an age when they could be having sex
that they don't want to be that kind of girl. We can go on and on about all the societal
changes that need to happen in order to dismantle this sexual double standard but first we got
to start with ourselves. And I challenge you and myself to do just that.