Have you ever been at a bar or even at the grocery store and seen a nice, attractive, single girl and worked up the courage to flirt with her? Have you ever been turned down even though you’re in the same league? What you just experienced was the other side of the double standard.

I have recently heard a lot of talk about the double standard between women and men. The double standard implies that men can have sex with whomever they want without fear of persecution for it and women are not supposed to partake in this same scandalous behavior. Typically people think this makes the double standard very unfair for the fairer sex. Have you ever stopped to wonder if that’s really true? Take the previous example for instance. If you were an attractive single man, and an attractive single women started flirting with you, that would make you want to drop your pants right then and there. So why are men supposed to do the leg work and risk being rejected, and why is it that men think that women don’t share our interest of sex? The double standard is to blame.

The effect of the double standard in society begins at an early period in a young child’s life. A boy will kiss a girl or a girl will kiss a boy in preschool or kindergarten. Their child’s parents will tell the girl that she can’t just go around kissing every boy she meets, she has to make the boy work for it, and she has to let the boy come to her. However, when the little boy comes home and tells the story, his father is right there telling him he did a good job and saying things like; “my boy’s a regular romeo just like the old man”. This gives girls a sense of restraint while allowing boys to continue being wild-eyed kiss machines. This instills in a child’s head the sense of the double standard, which is further strengthened later in life when parents will give their children the sex talk. Girls will get a lecture on love and remaining as abstinent as possible, and boys (with the exception of very conservative families) will get a lecture on responsibility and wearing protection. When men and women start dating, the girls still have the idea of the boy coming to them, which means all they have to do is say yes or no when he does. This leaves the boy asking out girls and getting rejected until he finds one that will be his girlfriend. This then further endows societal roles on both sexes at an early age and boys begin to experience the dark side of the double standard. Where girls rarely have to worry of the fear of rejection, it becomes a common occurrence for males. This then strengthens the Male’s growing belief that girls must not like sex as much as boys, because in his mind, if they did, and the situation were reversed, he would be more than happy to pleasure every attractive person who asked him out.