The gender gap

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Years ago, when I was making significantly worse life choices, I used to hang out with a dude who held, shall well say, incel lite views*. On more than one occasion, we'd get into arguments about men and women and dating. He would insist that it was just inherently easier for women to date and find sex partners, that no woman could ever understand the loneliness of a man — that she would have to be appallingly, horrifically unattractive to even have the slightest sense of what dating is like for the average man.

At the time, I came at this argument from the stance that "unfuckability," if you will, is a personal and subjective thing; that regardless of how easy or hard it might objectively be for you to get laid, the feeling of "unfuckability" is less about objective truths than about a mismatch between your desires and your options.

It is frequently noted that ur-incel Elliot Rodger** was, gasp, an attractive man; the point was never that no one in the world would have deigned to fuck him. The point was that he wanted to fuck women who didn't want to fuck him, and thus felt unfuckable. That feeling that drove Rodger? It's a common one, one that many women — sometimes even conventionally attractive women! — feel. You may have plenty of options for dates, but if none of them are the people you want to date, then it is easy to feel unattractive, unlovable, unfuckable.

For the record, I still believe that, even as it didn't really sway this dude. But later, after I had stopped hanging out with him and started exclusively pursuing women, it occurred to me that there was another, perhaps more persuasive, argument I could have made.

Because I suppose there was some underlying truth to the argument he was trying to make, to this feeling he had that I, a woman, could more easily feel desired than he, a man, could. The problem with his argument wasn't that he'd misidentified the ultimate outcome. The problem was that he had made a category error: this wasn't a question of "women" versus "men." It was a question of "people who are pursuing men" versus "people who are pursuing women."

Once you expand your lens beyond the world of hetero sex and dating, the obviousness of this becomes shockingly clear. I apologize for the stereotypes that I'm about to invoke, but it's a generally understood truism that for gay men, sex is easy to find and pretty immediately engaged in; for lesbians, sex is much harder to secure and tends to require a lengthier courtship. Many years ago, I frequented a pan-queer sex party: the running joke was that the men would always pair off quickly and start fucking away while the women would hole up in a corner and chat before slowly easing into sex.

We can debate whether this is caused by biology or socialization (we can, though my answer would be "it doesn't really matter and I don't care"), but the fact remains that on a macro level***, people who pursue men will always have an easier time securing partners than people who pursue women.

And for bisexuals, this creates an interesting phenomenon.

I suspect I am not going out on a limb here when I say that if you are a bisexual who has pursued partners multiple genders, you have found some, shall we say, disparities in your sense of your own attractiveness depending on the gender you are in pursuit of. And I suspect that for many — likely most — of you, it is probable that you have had an easier time attracting the attentions of men than women (though whether this is a positive or negative is entirely a personal preference).

I cannot speak to what this feels like as a bisexual man or non-binary person, but I can say that as a bi woman, it is jarring. When pursuing men, it was easy to feel like the hottest bitch in the room: they required so little from me, until it ultimately got to a point where sexual attention from men felt nearly worthless. As a friend used to say, "If you know a man, he will sleep with you," and while I know from personal experience that that is not exactly the case (men can have standards too, guys), it's also not notthe case, you know?

When pursuing women, on the other hand — friends, do you know how often I have felt like a pile of cold cat puke? People often talk about "the numbers game" for bi women, about how we're more likely to end up with men because there are simply more straight or bi men than queer women, and yet I don't even think that's what it is, given that queer men are also a relatively small population, and yet anecdotally I have heard bi men talk about the increased ease of pursuing sex with other men (to say nothing of the "straight" men — I think of them as heteroromantic bisexuals — who pursue other men for casual sex because it's easier than finding casual sex with women).

I think it is simply that women — because we're pickier, because we've been socially conditioned to be cautious about sex, because our bodies are just biologically wired this way, who knows, who cares — are a tougher crowd to woo, and that that is a general fact, whatever your gender may be.

Or, perhaps: you're not a "fake" bisexual. There's just a gap in the ease with which you can pursue partners of different genders. And that's not about you. That's about the laws of the universe.

* In my defense, he was extremely hot and this severely affected my judgment

** In before someone tells me incel was coined by a queer woman who is thus the real ur-incel, I know that but also you get my point here

*** On a micro level it varies, individuals are individuals