Physical asymmetry makes casual sex dramatically riskier for women than men

Evidence

But the difference in physical strength is also very significant, especially in relations between strangers—relations that take place on a physical level. A man has little to fear from the woman he takes home; a little vigilance is enough. It is not the same for the woman who lets a man into her house. I have been told of two young women, newly arrived in Paris and avid to “see life,” who, after doing the town, invited two seductive Montmartre pimps to a late supper: in the morning they found themselves robbed, brutalized, and threatened with blackmail. A worse case is that of a divorced woman of about forty who worked hard all day to feed her three grown children and elderly parents. Still beautiful and attractive, she had absolutely no leisure time to have a social life, to flirt, or to make any of the usual efforts necessary for seduction, which in any case would have bored her. Yet she had strong physical desires; and she felt that, like a man, she had the right to satisfy them. Some evenings she went out to roam the streets and managed to pick up a man. But one night, after an hour or two spent in a thicket in the Bois de Boulogne, her lover refused to let her leave: he wanted her name, her address, to see her again, to live with her; when she refused, he beat her violently and only left her when she was wounded and terrorized. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1925

Categorization

• SHARE: Send to someone interested in the phenomenology of gendered risk in sexual encounters.
• XREF: connects to: Casual sexual relief is structurally unavailable to women as it is to men — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1925

Broader Connections

• Casual sexual relief is structurally unavailable to women as it is to men #expands (0.80) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1925