Genderslop thrives on the cold truths about how men and women are polar opposites in every conceivable way. Bonus points if you can imply that the Bad Gender could never possibly understand the Good Gender’s feelings and experiences. But even if you’re speaking without a clear agenda, the best takes are the ones that simplify straight men and women’s behaviors, desires and abilities into clear, oppositional buckets. Men are visual, women are emotional. Men are logical, women are emotional. Men are horny, women are emotional.
This type of content does so well in part because for a little while, it was in vogue to insist that gender differences didn’t exist, and that anything we noticed that seemed different about the genders was either a figment of our imaginations or purely socialization-based. As a result, blunt declarations that men and women are polar opposites make people feel really good, because they can feel like their “controversial” opinions are being validated by a brave truth-teller.
But the reality lies somewhere in the middle. Men and women have on-average differences, but these differences can be starker (or less stark) depending on the topic. Moreover, there is a great degree of variability within each gender, where a man can easily align more with a random woman than a random man on any given topic.
Let’s take the discourse of the week (aside from all this “election” stuff): men and women’s relative sex drives. This woman tried to show men what being nagged for sex feels like by relaying them a hypothetical scenario in which their wife or girlfriend is begging them for sex while they aren’t horny:
As you can imagine, her edit didn’t help. Men responded that this was a very appealing situation, and that there would never be a scenario in which they were “not horny at all,” especially for a woman already attractive enough for them to date or marry. One guy turned the tweet into a copypasta and asked women to imagine feeling like they didn’t want to shop while their husband begged to take them shopping (honestly, I chuckled.) The takeaway: women just don’t understand the degree to which men are absolutely ravenous for sex, anywhere, anytime. Men are so sex-obsessed that they are never “not in the mood,” and if a man claims not to be in the mood, he’s either gay, his wife is fat, or he’s cheating on her.
Look, I agree men are, on average, hornier than women. The fact that women can go on testosterone to increase their own sex drive should put the “Are men *actually *hornier than women?” question to rest. Of course they are! I agree this hypothetical “woman begs for sex” setup was a bad example, because if you polled most men (many of whom are getting less sex than they’d like) “How would you feel if your wife begged you for sex while you were, checks notes, fixing shelves?” they would be up for it, especially in a hypothetical scenario.
But “men are always horny, women aren’t” isn’t exactly true either. It’s not just that there are exceptions and outliers, but that men and women experience sex and sexual desire differently, and then within the buckets labeled “man” and “woman,” there’s quite a bit of variability in sex drive and attitudes about sex.
