So if a man and a woman do the same thing, the man is much more likely to be labeled a homosexual. The double standard was especially pronounced among the male students, and everyone knows how freaky guys get about male homosexuality. But you could find it in the thinking of both sexes. Why does the double standard exist? I suspect it's because people consider male homosexuality so much worse than female-female love making. The greater social taboo implies that if a guy does something seriously "homo," it says more about what he must be, about impulses he can't control, than it would say about a woman doing the same thing, because it's not condemned for women. It's a pernicious attribution, to be sure, but double standards are not known for their fairness. Neither, for that matter, is homophobia.

The old “double standard” gave men a sexual liberty denied to women. Marxist feminists reduced the historical cult of woman’s virginity to her property value, her worth on the male marriage market. I would argue instead that there was and is a biological basis to the double standard. The first medical reports on the disease killing male homosexuals [i.e., AIDS] indicated men most at risk were those with a thousand partners over their lifetime. Incredulity. Who could such people be? Why, it turns out, everyone one knew. Serious, kind, literate men, not bums or thugs.

Double standards demand that feminine respectability bars women from articulating, writing, or deploying words, concepts, and ideas deemed to be taboo subjects.

Double standards in domestic roles are deeply rooted in cultural attitudes and workplace practices. Working mothers are held to higher standards than working fathers and are often criticized for being insufficiently committed, either as parents or professionals. Those who seem willing to sacrifice family needs to workplace demands appear lacking as mothers. Those who take extended leave or reduced schedules appear lacking as leaders. These mixed messages leave many women with the uncomfortable sense that whatever they are doing, they should be doing something else.

"You are holding women to a higher standard than men," he said. "Madame used to tell us that this is traditional, for men have usually been the judges, and they put women either in the gutter or on a pedestal. Men have traditionally forgiven one another, for they know and excuse their own failings, but they do not forgive women for falling off the pedestal." (p. 516)

There is a certain standard that women are placed on, much higher than men. Why is it that when it’s a woman it’s like so much more dramatic and quite frankly irritating?

A lot of performers, if they go to bed with a woman on the road, they think of her as a slut. As a person and a man, what does that make them then? Lowlife or high living, you give as good as you get, and I don't think women's sex lives have a thing to do with the kinds of human beings they are.

These concerns (that is, about differences being used to justify unequal treatment) are fair. But just because people have exaggerated sexual differences in the past does not mean they cannot exist. There is no a priori reason for assuming that men and women have identical minds and no amount of wishing it were so will make it so if it is not so. Difference is not inequality.

Women are so often segregated to their sexuality, and how they appear. In fact, there’s a lot of talk, even now, I think in most jobs this is true…people will say, when a woman rises to power, they ask, ‘who did she sleep with?’ You know, it couldn’t possibly be about her acumen, it couldn’t possibly be about her intelligence. It’s got to be about her body, because that’s how women get ahead.

I was in a school last week and I asked the girls if there are any situations where women are not treated with respect. There was an uproar, all of them shouting: "Yes, the boys in our year call us sluts and slags more than they use our real names. Yes, we're told that we have to send them pictures of our breasts and if we don't, then we're uptight and we’re prudes." This stuff isn't, like, isolated incidents. This is stuff that's coming up again and again.

Society considers the sex experiences of a man as attributes of his general development, while similar experiences in the life of a woman are looked upon as a terrible calamity, a loss of honor and of all that is good and noble in a human being. This double standard of morality has played no little part in the creation and perpetuation of prostitution. It involves the keeping of the young in absolute ignorance on sex matters, which alleged “innocence,” together with an overwrought and stifled sex nature, helps to bring about a state of affairs that our Puritans are so anxious to avoid or prevent.

Women’s Liberation is just a lot of foolishness. It’s the men who are discriminated against. They can’t bear children. And no one’s likely to do anything about that.