Comment by SamBam
1 month ago
> "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.