Asking for sex

As we were talking in class about people’s “numbers” and about sexual permissiveness of males vs. females, it reminded me of these videos I had seen a little while back.  It was described as a social experiment where a woman would walk up to random strangers on the street and ask them to have sex, and they would record their responses.  Similarly, a male would walk up to 100 women and ask them if they would have sex with him, and their responses were recorded.  This really reminded me about how we have been talking about double standards between men and women.

In this first video, although shorter and less men are asked, we can see that an attractive, young female walks around town asking men if they would have sex with her.  Many don’t find her very threatening (other than the confused man at the beginning), and seem to laugh it off and just say, “Wait, are you serious?”.   Many of the men, after asking if she was serious, decide to say that they would in fact have sex with her and walk with her.  At the end, the woman ends up having a 50% success rate in getting males to say yes to her.

            Similarly, although a longer video and there is a larger subject pool, we can see an attractive, young male walking around the same town, asking women to have sex with him.  Many women give him skeptical looks, laugh and walk away.  Some women are even more offended and call him names or call him creepy, and one woman (at 1:11) even throws her drink in his face.  Throughout the whole video, many of the women have similar reactions to this male when approached by him to have sex.  At the end, the male ends up have a 0% success rate, and no females said yes to wanting to have sex with him.

            This reminded me of the Chia and Gunther reading, where it was said that “We found that male students who believed their peers to be more sexually permissive were more likely to engage in premarital and casual sex, whereas female students showed no such susceptibility.” (316).  This is because in the female’s video where she is asking men to have sex, in one scenario, we can see her talking to a young male, and his friends are yelling to him in the background, so we can assume that he feels more permissive due to peer pressure of his friends.  Similarly, at another point in the video, we see two friends standing next to each other and she asks them if they would like to have sex.  Before both of them say yes, they look to each other for approval.  On the counter, we see that the women being asked by the male to engage in sex showed less susceptibility, much like Chia and Gunther had stated; they don’t have to get any approval from friends, but rather are apt to answer much more quickly and just say no.

            Overall, these videos really just reminded me of what we have been talking about in class, how women have this unfair double standard that expects them to say no when approached by a male asking about sex, but it’s okay if they ask the male for sex.  It is almost as if it is seen as “hot” that the woman engages the conversation, but “creepy” if the male does.  This touches back on the much talked about conversation in class how a woman should be classy, but a “freak in the bed”, but also the type of woman that you can take home to mom, and domestic, etc. etc.  So, it’s humorous and then sexy if a woman will ask you for sex, but creepy if a male does, which doesn’t make much sense, because at the same time, if one of the women in the second videos were to say yes in engaging in sex, wouldn’t she be seen as some type of “slut” by her peers?