“Girls who have a lot of sex are called sluts, and guys who have a lot of sex are called studs.”

People use this saying all the time to point out the double standard in how men and women are judged differently based on their sexual activity. “Slut” is taken to be a derogatory term, while “stud” is taken to be somewhat of a compliment in this context. Is this generalization accurate? As a guy, I can’t speak on behalf of the girls. But, is it really true to say that a guy who can sleep with a lot of different girls is heralded as some sort of hero by the general male community?

Sure, in some private locker room talk, a guy may talk about the girl he managed to sleep with the night before to impress his friends. But, if it becomes public knowledge that a guy indiscriminately has sex with every girl who says yes and has trouble keeping his pants zipped up, he is judged by other guys as an irresponsible person who lacks control of his desires. And I doubt girls would have anything good to say about a guy who is known to be so promiscuous. At the end of the day, bragging to people about how much sex a guy gets is not going to get him career advancement, long-lasting friendships, or societal approval.

As much as any comparison across gender is presumptuous and unprovable, there does seem to be a general agreement that girls who are judged as promiscuous have a worse sentence than guys (on the flipside, guys who are considered "virgins" or "prudes" aren’t exactly treated well either). Slut-shaming does lead to serious repercussions for the victim, but we have taken just about the worst approach to addressing this issue: since men seem to get away with being promiscuous, we made promiscuity socially acceptable for women, too. We even created the notion of "sex-positivity" to tell people: have as much sex as you want, and no one should judge you for what type of sex you have, with whom you have sex, how often you have sex, etc.

No, sex isn’t just pizza rolls—you can have as much as you want, share with friends, and pass them around. Sex is directly related to family values. That’s why in pharmacies, condoms are sold in the "Family Planning" department, and sex ed in public schools is called education on "family life." We should teach everyone to respect sex, instead of treating it like some other materialistic commodity. When sex means something other than physical pleasure, other than some sort of token to be collected, then people won't be judged because of how much or how little sex they are having.