I’ve heard over and over again how “women can get laid any time they want” and therefore can’t possibly know how men suffer when some uppity bitch won’t hand over the sex he clearly deserves for sending her a shitty form letter. If you’ve been paying attention, you won’t be at all surprised to hear how much that annoys me.

First of all, not all women can just snap their fingers and have a guy show up ready to fuck them. Second, even if you are the kind of (young, skinny, conventionally attractive) woman who can get laid whenever she wants, who says the sex is going to be any good?

Saying that women can get laid any time they want can technically be sort of true depending on how you define “woman.” To quote Cliff Pervocracy’s brilliantly sarcastic post The Beta Male:

The word “woman” refers exclusively to slender, outgoing, fashionable, conventionally beautiful heterosexual white women under 30 who aren’t too slutty. Other types of woman aren’t undesirable so much as nonexistent.

If that’s the definition of woman you’re working from when you say women can get laid any time they want, then you’re not saying anything remotely interesting. Yep, young, white, thin, conventionally attractive men and women do in fact have an easier time getting laid than people who’ve had the unbelievable gall to age or not be skinny. In related news, water is still wet and the sun still rises in the east.

On the other hand, if you actually mean literally all adult female humans when you say women can get laid any time you want, you’re an ignorant and deluded asshole. Fat women exist. Women over the age of 30 exist. Women with wrinkles and stretch marks exist. Women who don’t shave exist. Women who don’t dress in a way that turns you on exist. So do women who don’t wear makeup. Trans women exist too. How many of the men who whine and cry about how desperate they are for just one woman to give them a chaaaaaance are willing to even consider possibly thinking about fucking a woman who isn’t a goddamn supermodel? Guess you’re not actually that desperate to get your dick wet now are you. It’s like men are people who have standards or something.

Along with having standards, men also have all sorts of reasons not to be interested in casual sex. Sometimes those reasons are good (for example, not being comfortable getting naked with someone you barely know, not feeling safe going home with a stranger or bringing a stranger to your home, etc), sometimes they’re not so good (being afraid that the sort of dirty slut who would have sex with someone she just met (like, you know, you’re trying to) is going to give you an STI or turn out to be “crazy” (read: have emotions that are inconvenient for the guy being a dick to her)), but not all guys are into casual sex with literally any woman who offers. Yep, TV lied to you.

Also, sometimes a guy is totally into casual sex but just not into you. Guys get to have standards as detailed above (slender, outgoing, fashionable, conventionally beautiful, etc), but the idea that women can get laid any time they want presumes that women who have standards are just bitches who enjoy rejecting men. Yes, I have standards. No, I’m not sorry that I prefer to have sex with guys who have showered in the last 12 hours, dress like they give a shit what they look like, can string a coherent sentence together, and act even vaguely like they give a shit what I think of them. Sure, if I had no standards I could get some random poorly groomed asshole to put his dick in me any night of the week but honestly I’d rather slam my hand in a door.

Guys, you too can get laid any time you want if you lower your standards far enough. If you are willing to fuck literally anyone, someone will fuck you. It just won’t be anyone you would ever actually want to fuck.

So no, women as in all adult female humans cannot get laid any time they want and you’re a fucking asshole if you think the word woman means “slender, outgoing, fashionable, conventionally beautiful heterosexual white women under 30 who aren’t too slutty.”

But for the sake of argument, let’s pretend that all women actually can access hot and cold running dick whenever they want to (yes I’m being super heteronormative but let’s be honest: nobody who whines about how women can supposedly get laid whenever they like is thinking of anyone but straight cis people). Now we have another definition problem. The men who say that women can get laid any time they want are assuming the sex that they enjoy is also good for the woman they’re pounding away at while completely ignoring her clitoris. Guys, there is a difference between “sex” and “good sex.”

For cis men, sex can be like pizza in that even if it’s bad it’s still pretty good. For cis women, sex can easily be much less fulfilling and far more hassle than staying home and binge-watching House of Cards on Netflix. It’s not that we don’t like sex, it’s that bad sex is really fucking boring and lots of men are bad at it. Plus it’s pretty fucking hard to tell someone how to get you off when a) you’ve been socialized from birth never to talk about what you want or have needs that might possibly inconvenience anyone, b) are worried about hurting the guy’s feelings if you tell him that the almighty penis alone is not going to get it done, and c) are worried about being considered some sort of dirty slut who *gasp* masturbates for knowing what kind of touch gets you off.

I’m not any sort of expert in the science of desire and sexuality (for that you should read Emily Nagoski’s entire blog), but for a really quick overview just read her post about the dual control model of sexuality. Oh, and this one about orgasm differences. To quote that post:

Virtually all heterosexual men are reliably orgasmic from penile-vaginal intercourse, while only about a quarter to a third of women are. Another third of women are sometimes orgasmic from penetration, and the remaining third of women are never or almost never orgasmic from penile-vaginal penetration. These results have been replicated over and over, in the lab and by self-report.

Also:

Latency is the amount of time it takes from the start of stimulation to orgasm. For women, it’s somewhere between 5-25 minutes on average (masturbating), and for men it’s more like 4-7 minutes (intravaginal).

Tell me, do you think random guy from the bar/craigslist/okcupid/whatever is going to patiently bring me to the edge of orgasm before he sticks it in and or patiently bring me off after he’s already gotten his and quite possibly fallen asleep? Sure, maybe he will, but are the odds of that good enough to justify the hassle of leaving the house (I’m a hermit, okay, this is a serious hurdle to overcome) and finding someone who might get me off?

Personally, I’ve had good luck with online hookups actually giving a shit whether I’ve gotten off but I was also a picky motherfucker who spent days if not weeks looking out for an ad that actually made me want to reply. Online personals, even the most casual ones, were never an “I need to get laid tonight” solution, they were an “I would like to get laid in the not so distant future” solution. If I needed an orgasm that night and didn’t already have a friend with benefits coming over, I just jerked off. Look at that stats up there: I have terrible odds of getting off with some random. Admittedly I’m one of the lucky ones in that I can reliably orgasm with the right stimulation and it’s not that much of a hassle, for women with more elusive orgasms casual hookups are an even worse bet.

It is true that women have slightly better chances of having casual sex than men do because the vastly higher risk for women means that relatively few of us are even interested in casual sex. It is simply not true that any woman can have satisfying sex with a man she finds attractive any time she wants. Guys, you too can get laid any time you want (for free, even!) if you just lower your standards far enough and are willing to have bad sex with someone you’re not attracted to. Doesn’t that sound like fun?