East Williamsburg wrote:I'm the first one in my family to go to college. I know how the world works.
Surveys demonstrate that at college, men who sleep around more are respected less for it.
By actual students, that is. Students believe in the existence of a double standard whereby promiscuous men are respected more, but almost all personally respect promiscuous men less. There are a few people who look up to promiscuous men, and those are mostly concentrated in fraternities and athletics programs.
There's also a confounding problem and a conflating problem.
First, the higher your status, as a man, the more likely women are to sleep with you. So you may notice that men who you know sleep around a lot are respected more widely; but it's them having more sex because they are respected, rather than being more respected because they have more sex. That's the confounding problem.
Second, the more women you sleep with, the more likely women are to sleep with you. It's very easy for a man to conflate sexual attention from women with respect from women, because we tend to teach boys to measure their self-worth by female attention, and sexual attention is very visible. Truth of the matter is, women are, to a large degree and particularly in college, not picking men to sleep with on the basis of who they respect. They're picking men to sleep with on the basis of how likely the experience is to be pleasurable.
Studies that try to control for whether or not women expect to receive an orgasm from the prospective sexual partner suggest similar willingness from men and women to engage in casual sex; with the real-world difference being inferred as coming from women viewing the odds of their receiving an orgasm from boning a man as low. If other women are sleeping with that man, though, he must be good at sex, right?
