Sleeping with Him “Too Soon” and the Perils of Slutty Dating

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Fuck. He’s not calling because I showed him my boobs.

Say we have a slutty girl– the kind I wrote about when I wrote about calling myself a slut. She’s sexually confident, she likes having sex when she feels like it and she’s perhaps had more partners than most of her friends (though in the world of slut self-identification, having had many partners isn’t a necessary feature of sluttiness– read this). This particular self-identified slutty girl has decided that she’s looking for a relationship with a dude, so she starts dating. She goes out with guys, decides she likes them, and because she wants to and he wants to, they have sex the first or second time they hang out together. Afterwards, the guys avoid her and don’t text her and no longer seem interested in her. What is she doing wrong?

TRICK QUESTION GUYS. She’s not doing anything wrong.

If you do nothing else today, listen to this episode of the Savage Love podcast, specifically the 24 year-old slutty dater who calls in for advice at around the 20-minute mark. She sounds sweet and cute and utterly confident in her sexuality, she likes having sex on the first or second date, and she wants to know if she really has to “play the game” and stop herself from having sex with guys in order to successfully find someone to date her.

The idea that having sex on a first or second date disqualifies someone from being “dating material” is some fucked up shit, and Dan Savage calls it immediately for what it is: “crazy-ass double-standards”. Dan says that clearly, in this girl’s situation, “you want to find a guy who APPRECIATES that you fucked the shit out of him on the first night”. He then says that even though he really hates the idea of “men as fixer-uppers”, the only reason for this girl to wait to fuck a guy even though she doesn’t feel like waiting is if she meets someone who is perfect in every way except that she suspects that he is harboring the sexist double-standards and once they start dating for real she can bring it up and teach him why this is sexist and slut-shaming and why it’s wrong. But really, he says, she should just be who she is and find someone who likes first-date sex and won’t judge her if she does, too.

I say the “perils” of slutty dating, but what I mean aren’t the risks that maybe the slutty girls won’t find boyfriends. The real risks are that the slutty girls who are rejected by guys for having sex get first-hand knowledge of how many otherwise fun, decent guys still harbor sexist ideas of how girls “should” and “shouldn’t” use their bodies. This is risky because it’s kind of sad and kind of discouraging. It can make a happily sexual girl wonder if there is something wrong with her. It sets her up for being called “crazy” for wanting sex but also wanting to date monogamously. It sets her up for feeling like she is “bad at sex” or there is something wrong with her body and that’s why he rejected her.

There is nothing wrong with her, just like there is nothing wrong with the girl who waits three months, until she falls in love, until marriage to have sex. If a guy and a girl who are otherwise getting along really well have consensual sex on the first or second date and the guy’s attitude suddenly changes afterwards, he owes it to the girl and to himself to articulate why he’s no longer interested in her. Like I said before, there are many otherwise decent guys who have the attitude that the girl should withhold sex until an arbitrary later date even if he feels like he wants to have sex with her on the first date, because that’s how the girl can prove to him that she’s “worth” his respect.

Girls who like sex can, in fact, want and be good at relationships, too. They don’t have to want them, though. Slutty girls might sometimes want to be single, to be promiscuous, to take a break from sex, to date multiple people at the same time, to fall in love and only fuck one person for the rest of their lives because they are people and people are complicated. Listen to the podcast. Don’t make assumptions about what a particular person is looking for at a particular time. Do date people who you are actually compatible with and don’t waste time on people you feel you need to hide things from at first in order to get them to like you.

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