I don't know what to feel after reading this :
I am pretty confident that that sex is more likely to be physically harmful for girls than for boys: Obviously, only girls can get pregnant (something that isn’t strictly a physical harm, but that is often harmful when unintended, and harmful because of the physical consequences of the sex). Also, unless I’m mistaken, females are more likely to get HIV from males than vice versa; females are more likely to suffer directly from the effects of HPV, such as death, illness, or infertility caused by cervical cancer; and females are more likely to become infertile as a result of various sexually transmitted diseases than are males.
I’m less confident (hence the “I suspect”) about the emotional matter, but my sense is that at least in our society today females are still more likely to feel used and degraded as a result of a sexual relationship that has not gone as they had hoped, and in particular that involved less emotional commitment from the other person than they had hoped. Perhaps this is something that is innate; I can see why it might be, though I don’t know if there is any serious evidence of that. Still, whether this stems from nature or nurture, my sense is that this is indeed the case today in America.
I "suspect" that there is something fundamentally wrong with Eugene Volokh's views of gender and of sex and that he interprets his facts wrongly not to say ideologically; I guess the most important thing is that his views don't offend me (it's so easy nowadays to use offensiveness as an excuse to avoid debate and to shame the other into submission), but they do bother me very much because they are restrictive and lead to the conclusion that nature is queen when it can be wrong.


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