A Brief Reclamation of the Discourse of Sex from Awful Dating Advice

The first thing I heard about the infamous Steve Harvey dating book was the matter of the swordfish. According to the TV personality, women should aspire to be the fish a man takes home, scales, fillets, and fries. And not the swordfish that he takes a picture with, shows off to his buds, and chucks back into the ocean with all the other swordfish who have no idea of the violent fate they’ve just escaped.

The first dating book I devoured was at a far more tender age, more impressionable, more pliable to the discourse orchestrated mostly by men for a mostly female audience presumed to be indefatigable to the barrage of the unspoken regulations of intimate relationships. I was amused, but not entirely convinced. Well into my teenage years, I didn’t think that the human condition could be summarised with such simplicity.

I only read bits and pieces of Mr Harvey’s book, to be honest, which was useful in some places, god-awful in others. But my particular gripe was, naturally, with the controversial, mildly titillating chapters about sex.

The idea that women and our sexualities can be compared to fish and cars and cattle is…unsettling, to say the least. But we all know it, and we listen to these conversations with a freckle of shame and second-hand embarrassment for the speaker detailing his account of a tryst with a rainbow trout.

But Harvey goes further in delineating the terms and conditions around which women should engage in sex with a man, and his bottom line is, she should wait three months lest he doesn’t respect her in the morning.

How and when another woman decides to have sex with a man of her choosing is none of my business, and it really should not be the business of a narrative that pits a woman against her sexuality. This is nothing new. We’ve heard it many times before. And naturally, the response is that men are simply telling women how they are wired, and perhaps we would all start to fare better if men began to address one another on whether they ought to recondition the schemas of how they perceive the value of a woman in relation to what she chooses to do with her vagina.

I am of the opinion that should a man not respect you in the morning, it really is best for you to find out as soon as possible. For it is likely that he won’t respect you when you get a shinier car than his, a bigger paycheck, or when you won’t make him a sandwich while he’s playing Xbox.

Perhaps, as a collective, women should indeed start fucking on the first date as a matter of principle, just to weed out the filth.

Yet, women are not innocent of this kind of discourse. The idea of the ‘high value woman’ - the woman who doesn’t give it up too easily, who stays away from provocative clothing and a salacious demeanour; the virtuous kind, the kind he can take home to his parents - has leapt from the lips of my fellow womankind, and I wonder how many times I’ve compared myself and other women to criteria of respectability politics that we’ve all been subject to at one point, that we’ve all - to some extent - internalized and made our own.

Using ‘the cookie’ as a means of bait, to lure an inherently disrespectful man into the fingers of a committed relationship, I believe, has implications for the potential of a relationship and for the individuals involved. If a woman cannot evaluate her own boundaries and agency, she is engaging in a play in which the authority she has over her body is subverted by the mere notion of a partnership, the mere notion of the man she is inexorably placing on a pedestal for the mere notion of a Sunday dinner with his mother. And it should have implications for the men who stand by this narrative, who believe that the yoni, that the sacred space, is devalued by his own parts, by his own habits. The unasked question is, well, would I respect him if he slept with me the moment we met? Would I take his masculinity seriously, would I consider him to be boyfriend material, or partner material, or love material?

The thing is, I likely would, because women are not generally socialised into narratives that afford us to make judgements on things like character and compatibility based on sex to the same extent that men are. Quite contrarily, sex for women has historically been construed to be a thing of meaning and intimacy, and perhaps we are not wrong for this.

There has been conversation around how men have appropriated women’s sexual liberation movements and moments, accepting the sex of a sexually liberated woman whilst manipulating the constructs that define for women the interpersonal and vulnerable nature of sex. Situationships, faux-relationships, sexual relationships that are webbed with emotion, with investment, but with no commitment, support, or sustenance. Maybe it is these situations and these men that Harvey is trying to warn us women about...but what if he took that discourse elsewhere? What if he directed it to his own gender; what if he, and other men in his position, began to ask why contemporary masculinity has appeared to demonize and regulate a woman’s sexuality, from dismissing how she relates to her sex life on her own terms to defining how frequently and under what conditions she should engage with it. Vulnerability and intimacy in sex is not a curse. It is not a punchline. It is not the unfavourable hindrance to a wild, carefree, and pleasurable sex life.

Indeed, many women can and do have sex without attachment. If it's up to men how much to invest, it should be up to everyone else, too, without the fear that our agency will stop us from getting the guy, and from finding love. The narratives that we should be creating, that we should be perpetuating is one in which a woman is able to define and meet the boundaries of what she considers to be the appropriate period of time, the suitable conditions, and the right dude to get under the covers - or on the fax machine - with.

To participate in any other narrative is to undermine the struggle that women have undertaken in claiming their bodies and their sexuality as their own. Harvey doesn’t address the ideologies behind his ideas - what he does say is, simply, Don’t hate the player, hate the game. Well, I do hate the game, and I do not agree that any of us should continue playing into the discourse that is harmful to a sense of equality, equilibrium, and healthy partnership between men and women.

Harvey insists that the 90 day rule - the three months before you put out - is some kind of guarantee that the man you are with is upstanding, is good, and is honourable. So I ask, what happens when he’s not? What happens when you as a woman are dutifully abstaining, and once intercourse takes place, so does domestic violence? So does infidelity? So does the ghosting, the breadcrumbing, the straw-manning, and every other Millennial/Gen Z term for terrible, toxic dating behaviours? Harvey’s reductionist advice, it appears, is that a woman withholding sex is a measure of a man’s integrity. Because somehow, it is inconceivable that a man would want to stick around even when he’s got it in because, can you believe it, she has a personality. She is funny, she is sweet, she is charming, and smart. The 90 day rule is an insult to men as it is to women, simplifying human connection and reasoning to the plain act of intercourse, without the nuance that comes with intimacy between two individuals and the decisions that they’ve made regarding their own bodies.

I’m not dismissing the valid points that Mr Harvey makes throughout this chapter. He attributes sex to personal power, which indeed it is. But he also attributes sex to payment; more specifically, that a man is paid in dirty texts, in seeing the naked female form, as though a woman is his keeper. And no woman is any man’s keeper. So my response, in brief, is, if you want a man who regards the personal power of the decisions you make around your own body as some kind of transactional procedure, that is your right. But it is also every woman’s right to not bend to atrocious narratives that strip us from the highly personal boundaries and agency that we should instead be claiming from the male gaze, not playing into it. If you want to act like a lady and think like a man, you can. That is your prerogative. But wouldn’t we rather act like women who have achieved political and socio-economic rights, who have fought through structures of patriarchy to attain freedoms that allow us to engage in intimate relationships like adults, undefined by whatever discourse made by men who’ve yet to realise that a woman is not a swordfish, or a job at Ford, or any other analogies Mr Harvey writes in his book. Wouldn’t we rather instead reclaim a narrative that rightfully belongs to us, and pin responsibility of shitty dating behaviours on the backs of men who maybe need to grow the fuck up?