Much like nobody ever sat me down and told me that the three spray tans I was having a week, aged 18, was not a good look for me, I don’t remember anyone ever actually coming out and telling me not to sleep with someone on the first date. It’s just something that, as an adult, I’ve always been aware of; it’s in our social subconscious from movies, from what people say online and even from those closest to us. People say it in films and on TV all the time “you know I don’t sleep with someone on the first date!” in order to suggest that they aren’t easy and have good moral standards. I say it a lot too, but only when I’m being ironic.
Life and relationships are confusing enough as it is. I spent my teenage years being told if I didn’t let boys touch my (non-existent) breasts I was frigid and my adult life being told that if I let a man touch me too early on in our relationship then they wouldn’t respect me. Nobody told me I wouldn’t end up respecting many men, either.
Women’s magazines aren’t much help. They go to great pains to tell us how sexually liberated we ladies should be now, whilst still being quick to remind us to “make him wait”. It’s something that continuously pisses me off when I hear it suggested as I think its stupid advice. It puts the ball solely in the man’s court with him having all the control right from the start and doesn’t take into account the fact that we women don’t have sex purely to appease men and that, shock horror, we might actually be horny and want to do it. I wonder if there’s a men’s mag equivalent that tells men “if she tries to sleep with you, say no. That way you’ll definitely remember to text her back the next day”. Sex shouldn’t equate to respect and yet it still seems to, and it boggles my brain that people will still judge someone so emphatically on such a basic, biological encounter between two consenting adults.
“Did you sleep with him?” my friend will ask, when I tell her about my latest date and I’ll shrug and say yes and she’ll wince a little bit and I’ll change the subject and then, when he inevitably goes quiet over the next week she’ll say, “Maybe you should have waited” when its quite obvious to all that really I just have horrendous taste in men.
I think both men and women are conditioned to feel that having sex with someone when you’ve only just met them is “easy”. Some men genuinely do go off women that they’ve slept with so soon after meeting but for me personally, I don’t use sex as any kind of marker for a relationship. If a man really likes you it won’t matter when you fucked, he’ll still want to see you again. Besides, sex is a really important part of being with someone. I’d be so pissed if I really liked a guy, went on a load of dates with him then finally slept with him after a month, just to discover that he could only cum from having his nipples sucked and thought that going down on a woman was something only lesbians did.
It really does seem alien to me that in the overly sexualised world we now live in, where men ask for nudes every 15 minutes, that having sex with someone the first time you meet them is still considered socially taboo. You only have to look back at that old Anthony Joshua interview that recently got dredged up, in which he says his son will be a “Jack the Lad” but that there will none of that sort of behaviour for his niece to see that even in this generation, society is still fundamentally quite traditional. I don’t see these sorts of double standards for men and women changing anytime soon, so let’s not dwell on it, although who are the men meant to be fucking if the women are suppose to stay chaste? You’re not a slut for fancying someone and wanting to have sex with them but they are a dickhead if they judge you based solely on that. Women seem to lose their “value” if they’ve had multiple sexual partners, like it actually means anything at all in the grand scheme of things and please, do not even get me started on the absolute morons who think that how many dicks a woman has taken makes a difference on the shape of her vagina.
Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate that most people like a challenge but I’m not going to go out of my way to hold sex back from a man on the basis that he might stick around if I make him wait. There’s no guarantee that you’ll end up in a relationship together just because you made withheld sex for a month or that the sex will be any better just because you went on three dates first. In some cases I’m glad I’ve had sex with some of the men I’ve met before I’ve actually got to know them, simply because some of them have been absolute utter numpties and I’d hate to think I’d have had to spent anymore time making dead “what you been up to?” conversation with them than absolutely necessary with them. Not every man is going to be your Noah, trust me. Anticipation and the build-up is the best part, but I also like to know what I’m working with. And if they aren’t getting it from you they’ll just get it elsewhere, trust me on this one.
It does make me wonder though, if Biggie called that girl back after she pulled that g-string down South (aowww).