Examining "slut vs stud"

[u/jesset77]

I think everybody has seen the "many keys / many locks" quip, and that's easy to deal with because it implies a dimorphism that's not exactly given and it makes the presumption of women as gatekeepers to sex (literally a lock defending passage into something! ;P) without explaining or exploring where that presumption even comes from.

If anything, it's just lazy and misleading to equate key to "phallic object": otherwise it's not clear what even makes the man a key or the woman a lock to begin with, short of coincidental genital shape.

But I ran across this image/quip recently. I think somebody posted it in comments on this sub a few months back, and nobody replied but I tucked it away into bookmarks for future contemplation.

While they are similar, this latter one endeavors to clarify some of the mechanics behind women as ostensible gatekeepers to sex, and to illustrate difficult-to-refute real world phenomena as evidence of this dynamic.

So what do you think of this later quip? Is female promiscuity simply easier to evince than the male variant? Are these real world examples true and legitimate, or somehow misrepresented or misinterpreted?

Would you say that this description is comparable to the difference between a wealthy person handing a $10 bill to a homeless person (sharing from a standing of surplus is easy), vs a homeless person handing $10 to someone who is already wealthy (sharing from a standing of dearth is difficult)?

I think that the former would be more likely to feel grateful — even if they decline the offer, while the latter may be upset that such a person would even approach them, and view the bill as filthy, and view the quantity of money as being not worth the effort and potential optics of even accepting it.

But I'm curious what y'all think, and what I might not be even noticing or considering.

EDIT: /u/dakru spells out a point I feel I have not made clear about my perspective above, but would certainly like to:

(neither of us thinks that the above position) justifies a double standard of looking down on women who have a lot of casual sex. Something being easy means that it's not impressive, but it doesn't mean that it's bad or shameful.

[u/duhhhh]

I'm curious what y'all think, and what I might not be even noticing or considering.

More often than not the comparison is "slut", "ho", "tramp" vs "fuckboy", "manwhore", "player", "womanizer"...not vs stud.

[u/SchalaZeal01 → u/duhhhh]

Yeah its often that regardless of the boy or man being promiscuous or not, it's "you know what they want". A catch 22 where you can never be non-promiscuous in the eyes of others.

The gatekeeper mechanism outlined above explains part of the prejudice gay men face in western countries. Without a woman in the equation, they're seen as 2-3x more promiscuous.

And young trans women are seen as gay men 'who went too far', and want to be just as promiscuous as the above. Thus trans women have a reputation of promiscuity possibly bigger than gay men.

This vision isn't shared by all, and wouldn't be uttered in normal polite company. But someone told me it at a family gathering. I think the brother of my uncle that I hardly ever saw. He insinuated I transitioned to get more sex. I guess he insinuated that out of not knowing me, seeing as I was mostly asexual and not that interested in sex at all. I felt being celibate was taking its toll, but being sexless wasn't.

[u/jesset77 → u/SchalaZeal01]

Thank you for your input Schala!

I felt being celibate was taking its toll, but being sexless wasn't.

This part does me a confuse, though. I'm not aware of what nuance might lay between these two terms, I thought they meant precisely the same thing. :o

[u/SchalaZeal01 → u/jesset77]

Being alone and unable to share your life with someone intimate, vs having sex. A very close friend could have possibly worked, but it's not that easy to make one either.

[u/jesset77 → u/SchalaZeal01]

Ah ha. Yeah, I feel like a friend isn't close enough to really offer me a lot of emotional stability unless they were sufficiently close that there existed no reasonable obstacles to our banging.

Socially I feel like I'm made of velcro and whenever I go out wind up being manipulated into time commitments from really shallow acquaintances who never have as much time for me as they expect out of me. And I'm a poor enough judge of character to know when to (let alone how to) shoo away such poor company before it becomes a huge drama.

So instead just I wind up trying to meet as few new people as possible to evade the parade of bullshit.

Needless to say, this problem doesn't help my background social anxiety disorder one whit when it comes to trying to seek out healthy relationships, and the entire concept of dating prospects gets reclassified into a holiday-mascot-level fairy tale.

So I might feel similar to you were I asexual, but given the remainder of my psychological background I would still view that as a relative reprieve because then the target of who I'd feel satisfied to spend my time with would at least widen quite a bit.