Whenever I mention that I’m dating someone in an open relationship to a certain kind of straight male friend, the first reaction I get—right after the forever eye-roll-inducing, “HoW do yOu kNoW he’S nOt juSt CheAtiNg on hiS giRlfriEnd?”—is a rant about how open relationships “aren’t fair to guys, though.” What’s so unjust about ethical non-monogamy, you ask? According to these men, it’s the fact that it’s apparently “so much easier” for women to find men to have sex with than vice versa.
The internet is rife with this male complaint, with countless Reddit threads detailing a regretful husband’s tragic tale of woe after opening up his relationship with big dreams of swimming in extramarital pussy, only to find his wife is hooking up round the clock while he can hardly get a date. Two strains of discourse generally emerge around these sob stories: one led by polyamory-phobes who point to them as evidence that non-monogamy is evil and harmful to men, and the other by those who like to gather round and mock an arrogant man’s delusional self-confidence—what did you think was going to happen, buddy?
Listen, I love to see a lady thrive while a man faces the consequences of his actions (for once) as much as the next girl. But frankly, I am so fucking sick of this bullshit narrative—from every single side of it.
First of all, this idea that open relationships are only “fair” if everyone has the same number of sex partners is…not at all how ethical non-monogamy works. Open relationships are not a race to rack up the highest body count like you’re trying to get your money’s worth at the all-you-can-eat sex buffet—and if that’s what you want from one, I would hazard that you definitely should not be in one!
This model of supposed “equality” or “fairness” in a non-monogamous relationship represents a fundamental misunderstanding of what open relationships actually are: not a competition to see who can have the most sex, but a mutual agreement between partners to give each other the gift of pursuing sexual (and possibly romantic) fulfillment outside the relationship. What that fulfillment looks like may well be different from one partner to the other and may evolve over time. And, sure, while a large number of sexual encounters outside the relationship may very well be something one or both partners has or desires at any given point, it should never (IMO, anyway) be rooted in competitive body-counting.
“There are always going to be periods where one person is dating more people than the other in a non-monogamous relationship,” says Leanne Yau, polyamory educator and expert at Taimi. “I really encourage people not to think about it as a tit-for-tat kind of situation, because the moment you start competing with your partner about the amount of action you're getting, it's a lose-lose situation. The point of polyamory or non-monogamy is not to score as many partners as possible, but to find fulfilling connections.”
But look, I get it. Not everyone is going to understand non-monogamy and not everyone has to! (I would encourage them to keep their opinions on it to themselves in that case, but that’s just me.) What I find more harmful about this narrative—to both monogamists and non-monogamists alike—is that the premise that it’s “easier” for women to find male sex partners than it is for those men to do the opposite is just a reflection of the heteropatriarchal dictate that “women are the gatekeepers of sex; men are the gatekeepers of commitment.” Used as an argument against non-monogamy, what it really comes down to is: if we remove “commitment” from the equation, we take away men’s power—i.e., their power to control women—and that’s…“not fair” (?). Boys, if you want to own a woman, just say so!
You might even argue, then—if you’re willing to throw yourself to the incel wolves of Reddit with me—that if non-monogamy is unfair to men, then monogamy is unfair to women. And wouldn’t you know it, history certainly seems to back me up. As Yau notes, men have historically had much more license than their female counterparts to engage in non-monogamy, even within supposedly “monogamous” contexts. Think kings and their concubines, Henry VIII executing his wives for rumored adultery while impregnating his mistresses, the Mad Men-coded, “look the other way” mentality with which generations of women were encouraged to approach (or, rather, not approach) a cheating husband, or the many ways in which female infidelity is still more harshly condemned in the court of public opinion than cheating men because, come on, “men have needs!” But women? Who let them have needs?
Ethical non-monogamy within heterosexual relationships challenges this script, granting women the same sexual freedom society has always slipped men under the table with a wink. And—surprise, surprise—it turns out many men don’t like “fairness” in their relationships as much as they claim to—not when it benefits the women in them, anyway!
As Elisabeth Sheff, PhD, author of The Polyamorists Next Door, notes, the kind of men you’re likely to find soapboxing on the grave injustices of open relationships are “generally not anti-non-monogamy for themselves—just ‘their’ women. They want access to all the free-range pussy they can find, but they don't like women having that same access.”
All of which both reflects and fuels the regrettably obvious truth at the core of this issue: “Straight men feel very entitled to sex,” says Cosmo’s ‘Navigating Non-Monogamy’ columnist Zachary Zane, author of Boyslut: A Memoir and Manifesto. And when they can’t get it (or as much of it as they want or think they deserve), they tend to react with anger, violence, or, in some cases, whiny, self-pitying bullshit about hypothetical situations in which they simply fear they may not be having as much sex as their hypothetical female partners in a hypothetical open relationship.
“Polyamory is a very threatening concept to toxic masculine ideals,” says Yau. Specifically, the toxic masculine ideal of men executing their sexual freedom while curbing and controlling women’s. Under this patriarchal paradigm, a man with multiple sex partners is an “alpha.” One whose female partner does the same is a “beta cuck.” Regardless of whether a man openly or knowingly subscribes to this age-old, incel-coded ideology, male anxiety about women potentially lapping men in number of sex partners really just amounts to the same old patriarchal bread and butter it always has and always will: “an attempt by men to control and subjugate women’s sexuality,” as Yau puts it. Anything that threatens that control and fuels female sexual agency and independence shakes a red-pilled brain to its quivering core.
But enough trolling the incels with my man-hating, brain-washed, feminist vitriol or whatever they’re saying these days. A less telling but potentially more load-bearing thread to pull in this tapestry of male fallacy that claims it’s easier for women to get laid than men is that it’s…not even fucking true?
Listen, I don’t have the hard data here. But one thing I can tell you as a woman who has sex with men—historically, a lot of men!—is that it’s pretty difficult to find one you actually want to bone. And look, I get the logic. Generally speaking, is it probably going to be easier for most women to find casual sex with a man—any man—than vice versa? Sure. But—once more for the folks in the back—non-monogamy (or sex, period) shouldn’t be about racking up bodies you’ve boned like Pac-Man gobbling up dots. Even if it were, I suspect many women—both single and non-monogamously partnered—who have sex with men would likely tell you that while it’s insipidly easy to find any stray dude who’s down to fuck, it’s pretty difficult to find a guy they actually want inside their bodies.
Need it be this difficult? Nope! In case you haven’t heard, the bar for straight men is disastrously low. As Zane notes, “If you’re a man who treats his partners and potential lovers with respect and honesty, you're going to get laid, even as a straight dude. I know plenty of straight men in open relationships who are having tons of sex with various women—more than their female primary partners.”
On paper, Yau adds, women may theoretically have an easier time finding sex partners, sure. But regardless of whatever high-scoring numbers game men seem to be playing against themselves when it comes to sex, for women, it’s often a matter of “quality over quantity.”
And boy, oh boy, is the quality few and far between. Take it from me, a woman who has all the sexual freedom in the world and little to no desire to exercise it at the moment: it’s devastatingly hard to want to fuck a man! You know why? Probably because men have a tendency to say dumb shit like, “But it’s so EASY for YOU to find someone to have sex with,” like they’re mad at us for…IDK, the fact that they are attracted to us? Because they feel entitled to sex with us but have already decided we won’t give it to them before even trying? Because you’re scared that in some hypothetical situation you just made up in your head, I (or whatever theoretical female partner you’re projecting upon me) could potentially be having more sex than you?
Am I proving your point? See, it is harder for men to get laid thanks to frigid feminists and/or cock-carousel-riding whores like yourself. (I can be either or both in their world). As Yau notes, men who feel this way are “missing the bigger picture,” focusing on the wrong thing. If your primary gripe here is that women can supposedly so easily have sex with men and yet it’s difficult for you to have sex with them, could it possibly be that you…are…the problem?
And no, I don’t mean because of your height or income or any of the superficial, self-imposed “shortcomings” you paradoxically flaunt in an attempt to shame women for failing to deliver the sex you’ve been told you deserve, but because of the ways in which you live and breathe—however knowingly or otherwise—the toxic, patriarchal bullshit many women are desperate to dodge. Like, for example, the way in which you conceive of sex with us or the sex we (may!) have with others as nothing more than a notch on either your belt or another man’s.
Gentlemen, I say this because I care and because I deeply want to want to fuck (some of) you again someday: You are literally out here shooting yourselves in the dicks and it is not my job to save you by sitting on them instead.
Kayla Kibbe (she/her) is the Associate Sex and Relationships Editor at Cosmopolitan US, where she covers all things sex, love, dating and relationships. She lives in Astoria, Queens and probably won’t stop talking about how great it is if you bring it up. Follow her on Twitter and Instagram.
