Comment by SamBam
20 days ago
Long before the racism thing, I remember how grossed out I was by him complaining that he only got to have sex when his girlfriend wanted it, therefore his girlfriend, and women in general, were the "gatekeepers" of sex.
Completing failing to recognize that consent is a two person affair.
Sure sounds like Adams was consenting to sex and the person gatekeeping the sex and making the consent not a two person affair was his girlfriend, which is why Adams was complaining to begin with.
You're entitled to feel grossed out by this I suppose but your feelings have nothing to do with whether Adams was correct or reasonable or not.
The weird part is, calling women gatekeepers of sex. When it is also men who gatekeeps.
The gross part is, that this reminds of older times, when men had the legal right to have sex with their wife whenever they wanted (it is a quite new thing, that there can be rape in marriage, the current chancellor of germany famously opposed this legal change). In short, patriarcharical BS that women are objects owned by men and that this is the natural order.
> "Why are we only allowed to have sex when you want it?"
> "Um, no honey, we both have to want to have sex in order for us to have sex."
> "Exactly, so men are only allowed to have sex when women want it. Access to sex is strictly controlled by the woman."
Two fundamentally different ways of looking at the same thing. Why did he feel like it ought to be any other way?
I would guess that Adams probably wanted to have sex more than his girlfriend did, which meant that he had lots of personal experiences of his girlfriend not wanting to have sex when he did; and few if any personal experiences of not wanting to have sex when his girlfriend did. From his perspective, this looks like women (his girlfriend in particular) being the gatekeeper of sex. And this is what he was complaining about.
On a society-wide level, men are systematically more interested in having sex more often and in more contexts than women are. So lots of people in heterosexual relationships have experiences similar to Adams' (sex not happening in cases where the man wants it and the woman doesn't), which is why the rhetorical trope that women are the gatekeepers of sex exists.