Women are not the gatekeepers of sex. This is a bad analogy because it presumes that women as a whole want sex less than men as a whole. This is a fairly recent cultural idea that only gained steam in the 18th century; before that, marriage was seen as a good thing because it *restrained* women's sexual desire. Along these lines, men have historically determined the range of acceptable sexual behavior for both men and women and continue to do so even today. This idea that women have gained any power relative to men in this regard is frankly laughable. For God's sakes, we still live in a society where women with short hair are judged for "making themselves less sexually attractive." Sex is not a one-way transaction, nor is it a non-renewable resource; so why are women still judged on the basis of how much sex they
don't have?
A lot of women actually turn out to be very interested in casual sex. This has been demonstrated in a 2011 study -
see here for a detailed discussion; the paper does not seem to be available online, but I have found it in my university's library.
The results of the study were as follows:
it wasn’t a matter of whether women were less interested or receptive to sexual offers than men were, it was that they were less interested when those offers came from men. Even straight women were more likely to be willing to go to bed with another woman, and even gay men propositioned by an attractive gay man were less likely to accept.
As far as the celebrities in the study went,
men and women were equally likely to go to bed with the attractive celebrity and equally less likely to bed the unattractive one. Yet, when it came to opposite-sex friends, the gap re-established itself; men were more likely to go to bed with their female friend than women were with their male friend.
So we can conclude two things from the study - (1) women are more motivated by the likelihood of sexual pleasure than anything else, and (2) personal safety is a big motivator (women thought men were more likely to be dangerous and less likely to be good in bed, while men and women of all sexual orientations rated women as more likely to be safe and a better lay).
Thus, the big question for the women tends to be: risk vs. reward. Status doesn't have any effect in the choice, but familiarity does. These same women were more likely to pick sleeping with Brad Pitt than an equally attractive stranger because they felt as though they were more familiar with Brad. So it's a constant weighing of risks versus benefits, which shit-tons of feminists have been saying all along.
Women are uniquely trapped by culture; on the one hand, they have sexual drives, but on the other, they tend to be shamed for owning their own sexuality. You and others are contributing to this by perpetuating a false model of sex that treats men as the pursuers and sex from women as the commodity. This is a world in which sex is seen as having a price. If a woman gives sex away for too low of a price, it devalues her as a person. When PUAs measure themselves by how many women they sleep with, it follows that sleeping with the "easier" women gives them less glory. So in this situation, a woman is only as good as the sex she
doesn't have. When you add in all the additional risk factors associated with sex (pregnancy, the fact that women tend to contract more STDs from men than vice versa), it ends up being the case that the
risks of having casual sex aren't worth the potential fallout in medical as well as cultural terms. Of course, men have a chronic inability to admit these circumstances and jump right to the assumption that women aren't interested in casual sex as a means of preserving their control over sexual mores. The status argument is nothing but a big, fat red herring. The sad thing is that men are essentially making it harder on themselves to get laid in a culture that promotes blaming rape victims for their own assaults, increasing abortion and contraception restrictions, and slut-shaming. Of
course men have a hard time finding sex. It's the only option they're given in the current state of society (what feminists refer to as
patriarchy).