So how does getting sexual experience with prostitutes translate over to getting into sexual relationships with regular women through dating, any way?
I met a 20-something woman at the Venturist cryonics convention in Laughlin, Nevada, last year who talked to me more than she needed to as a social acknowledgment, which made me wonder if she felt attracted to me. I don’t know how to interpret these situations in the handful of times they have happened in my life, so I don’t know what to do, and they make me anxious.
If I had sexual learning experiences only from prostitutes, and I had nothing else to go on, should I have asked this woman how much money she wanted to come with me to my room in Laughlin’s hotel for sex?
If I had sexual learning experiences only from prostitutes, and I had nothing else to go on, should I have asked this woman how much money she wanted to come with me to my room in Laughlin’s hotel for sex
That would likely be perceived as highly inappropriate and carries with it the chance of you getting banned from that convention in the future.
should I have asked this woman how much money she wanted
That generally doesn’t work on women who don’t already sell sex for a living.
Maybe a sex surrogate could be useful for you. She would provide you with more emotional and social guidance than a regular hooker, and the learning process would advance at your own pace and on your own terms.
So how does getting sexual experience with prostitutes translate over to getting into sexual relationships with regular women through dating, any way?
It doesn’t (unless you’re subconsciously self-sabotaging because you’re scared that you will make a bad impression with your first sexual performance or something). OTOH, it doesn’t hurt either (except via opportunity costs, but then so does anything else). So how does eating at restaurants translate over to learning how to cook? It doesn’t, but that’s not what people eat at restaurants for.
So how does getting sexual experience with prostitutes translate over to getting into sexual relationships with regular women through dating, any way?
It doesn’t, in no way. The top positive effect you could get from sex workers is the relief of pressure and anxiety, but if you’re not getting even that then I guess you could stop wasting your money.
should I have asked this woman how much money she wanted
99.9% it would have had a bad outcome. Why didn’t you just simply invited her to discuss the things further in front of a drink in a more intimate space?
Why didn’t you just simply invited her to discuss the things further in front of a drink in a more intimate space?
I’d rather people actually said “Do you want to come back to my room for sex?” rather than “Do you want to come back to my room for coffee?” where coffee is a euphemism for sex, because some people will take coffee at face value, which can lead to either uncomfortable situations, including fear of assault, or lead to people missing opportunities because they are bad at reading between the lines.
Or if you do want to invite someone for a drink, go somewhere public.
Edit: I’m not saying that people should go round propositioning people for sex without getting to know them first. I’m saying that drinks in public are good, and that I, personally, prefer to think that adults should be able to say what they mean without euphemisms. I’m not saying that I get to ignore societies’ rules. And I realise that people find what I have been saying creepy, but personally, I think if I was a girl I would find it very creepy that there could be situations where I’m in a private room with no witnesses and I want to drink coffee and the guy expects sex.
Actually, it’s often not—it’s a declaration of interest and an euphemism for “let’s move this thing along for the time being and see where we’ll end up”.
Imagine the answer to your “Do you want to come back to my room for sex?” being “I don’t know yet, why don’t we have coffee while I evaluate you a bit more thoroughly?”
Actually, it’s often not—it’s a declaration of interest and an euphemism for “let’s move this thing along for the time being and see where we’ll end up”.
So, someone who wanted to take things slowly would turn them down, where they might have accepted an invitation for coffee in starbucks. If invitation to bars = drink , bedroom = sex then everyone knows where they stand.
So, someone who wanted to take things slowly would turn them down
Maybe? It’s a negotiation. For example that someone could have counter-suggested a coffee at Starbucks, that’s a “you’re going too fast” signal. Or said “Sure, but I’ll have to run in 10 minutes, I have an appointment to catch”, that’s a “yes to coffee, no to sex” signal. There is a VERY large variety of ways to signal interest, intentions, etc.
Plausible deniability, dude. It’s much easier to dispel the awkwardness of rejection if you can reasonably fall back on the claim that, hey, maybe coffee was all you wanted anyway. Successful courtship depends on making the other person feel comfortable around you; it’s a human relationship, not resource extraction, and it has to be framed in appropriate terms. (Edit: oh, sorry, I thought I was replying to advancedatheist; removed a sentence that assumed this.)
In table format. The second strategy is much more likely to lead to (2,1) than to (2,2).
I get that it’s not resource extraction, but its not espionage either, and I personally don’t see the need for ‘I can neither confirm nor deny that I want sex’.
I also get that its about making people feel comfortable. I’m more comfortable if people are fairly upfront about what they want, but I get that it’s just me who feels this way. I’m really bad at picking up on subtext, I have conversations like this:
Other person: “We’re spending a lot of time together, its almost like we’re being a couple.”
Me: “Yeah, we have been hanging out a lot.”
several months later...
Oh. I get it now. Why couldn’t he just say he wanted a relationship?
And things can get even worse if one person thinks coffee means sex and one thinks it means coffee. I know a girl who has been accidentally raped because of drunken misunderstandings.
BTW I’m impressed that you went to the fuss of making a table :)
A lot of the time people are not sure about what they want (or whether the cost-benefit is favorable). Socially acceptable delaying tactics are important.
I know a girl who has been accidentally raped because of drunken misunderstandings.
A girl saying yes to coffee isn’t an excuse to not look for consent when having sex.
Saying yes to coffee just means consent to move to a different location.
This is true, but its not that simple. When you’re in private, its a far more dangerous situation, and, for instance, some girls will be scared to say no because of the possibility of violence.
She will be even more afraid to say “no” while in private if she beforehand explicitely said “yes” to sex instead of having said “yes” to coffee.
If you ask: “Do you want to come to my room with me to have sex” and she says “Yes”, that can be interpreted as a promise to have sex if the girl comes to the room.
Asking for “coming to the room to drink coffee” doesn’t do that to the same extend.
But that presumes that the girl changes her mind about the sex when she reaches his room, which seems strange.
In the example the girl usually don’t just want sex but she wants sex while she’s turned on and that brings her pleasure. Even in the case of asking directly for sex a girl would assume that the guy will engage in foreplay that puts her then in an emotional state where she will have pleasurable sex.
When a guy asks: “Do you want to come to my room for coffee” a girl might think “That’s exciting and hopefully the night will end with great sex” but depending on how the interaction in the room goes it might or might not end up in sex.
I know a girl who has been accidentally raped because of drunken misunderstandings.
That’s such BS. Rapists know what they’re doing, even when they pretend otherwise; rape is predatory behavior. The only way you could accidentally rape someone is in the “whoops, found the wrong hole!” sense.
That depends on how one defines the word “rape”. The fact that there is currently an attempt by certain groups to massively expand the definition of that word (while keeping the connotations of the original meaning) isn’t helping.
Rapists know what they’re doing, even when they pretend otherwise
The issue in this case seems to be that the man thought that the fact that the woman said “yes” to having coffee means that she expressed consent while the woman thought it didn’t.
Why do you think that in every case both people have the same idea whether there’s consent? Or do you think that rape means something different than having sex without consent?
The data show otherwise. As it turns out, an overwhelming portion of rapes is due to a minority of repeat offenders who never get caught, due in no small part to prevailing social attitudes which all-too-readily construe rapes as nothing more than one-off “misunderstandings” which can be “forgiven”. But again, that’s just wrong. Rape is not something that just happens once—they do it again and again.
I note that people who misunderstand something once seem above-averagely likely to misunderstand similar things in future, especially (but not exclusively) if they don’t receive correction.
Maybe you’re right about the vast majority of cases. In the specific anecdote I mentioned, the victim told me that it was a misunderstanding—they were friends, she thought she was going home with him to sleep, he thought they were going to have sex, they were both very, very, drunk and he didn’t understand that she wasn’t consenting. She has forgiven it and they are still friends, although perhaps less close.
I’m not endorsing anyone’s actions here. Perhaps this guy is a threat, and she should not have forgiven him. But I think my original point stands, which is that it is safer for people to get to know each other over drinks in public and only go home if they both sure whether or not they want sex.
I’d rather people actually said “Do you want to come back to my room for sex?” rather than “Do you want to come back to my room for coffee?” where coffee is a euphemism for sex, because some people will take coffee at face value, which can lead to either uncomfortable situations, including fear of assault, or lead to people missing opportunities because they are bad at reading between the lines.
I’d rather that too, and I’ve had it go wrong in both directions. But the whole point of much of this site is that outcomes are more important than principles. Saying “do you want to come back to my room for sex?” is not going to change society, it’s just going to make you personally come off as a creep.
Saying “do you want to come back to my room for sex?” is not going to change society, it’s just going to make you personally come off as a creep.
I’m not sure its always creepy, not if you’ve already kissed them. Depends on circumstances. Inviting someone in for coffee and then trying to fuck them can be pretty creepy too.
But I agree that I can’t change society, and so I might as well conform to the rules.
It’s almost always creepy in the context of an early relationship: whether you’ve kissed or not, it’s a strong signal of contempt for or unfamiliarity with sexual norms. About the only exceptions I can think of would occur in very sex-positive cultures with very strong norms around explicit verbal negotiation. There aren’t many of those cultures, and even within them you’d usually want some strong indications of interest beforehand.
On the other hand, if you’ve invited someone up for coffee (or just said “do you want to come back to my place?”, which is pretty much the same offer), that’s not license for them to tear your clothes off as soon as the door closes either. Doing that would be creepy, unless you’ve practically been molesting each other on the way over, but normally the script goes more like this: you walk in, there’s maybe some awkward chitchat, you sit down on the bed or couch, they sit down next to you, you start kissing, and things progress naturally from there. If at any point they break script or the progression stalls out… well, then you make coffee.
About the only exceptions I can think of would occur in very sex-positive cultures with very strong norms around explicit verbal negotiation.
I can think of a few examples where I’ve seen directly propositioning someone work, but these examples were among rather promiscuous people, so I think your point stands.
On the other hand, if you’ve invited someone up for coffee (or just said “do you want to come back to my place?”, which is pretty much the same offer)
Actually, I’d interpret this very differently—inviting someone back for coffee is, on the face of it, saying that the reason you are inviting them is for coffee, not sex. Its a false pretext. But “do you want to come back to my place?” gives no pretext and its obviously for sex (assuming you’ve kissed already).
Obviously, I do know that inviting someone for coffee means sex might happen (or at least it does in some contexts). But there’s also people who invite people over to “watch a movie” or “smoke weed” and this is more of a grey area because they might actually want to watch a movie.
Actually, I’d interpret this very differently—inviting someone back for coffee is, on the face of it, saying that the reason you are inviting them is for coffee, not sex. Its a false pretext.
It’s a pretext, sure. That’s the point. The standard getting-to-know-you script does not allow for directly asking someone for sex (unless you’re already screwing them on the regular; “wanna get some ice cream and fuck?” is acceptable, if a little crass, on the tenth date) so we’ve developed the line as a semi-standardized cover story for getting a couple hours of privacy with someone. You shouldn’t read it as “I want coffee”, but rather as “I want to be alone with you, so here’s a transparent excuse”. There are more creative ways to ask the same thing, but because they’re more creative (and therefore further outside the standard cultural script), they’re more prone to misinterpretation.
Compare the Seventies-era cliche of “wanna come look at my etchings?”
I think there’s a deeper point: human interactions are multilayered and the surface layer does not necessarily carry the most important meaning. The meaning can be—and often is—masked by something else which should not be interpreted literally.
“It’s a false pretext” is not even wrong—it’s just not a correct way to think about the situation. A “pretext” is a way to express in a socially acceptable fashion a deliberately ambiguous meaning which, if said explicitly aloud, would change the dynamics of the situation completely.
Human interaction, especially of a sexual nature, just is not reducible to the straightforward exchange of “wanna fuck?” information bits.
Or if you do want to invite someone for a drink, go somewhere public.
I agree with you, and that’s indeed what is implied by my “a more intimate space”. I meant a bar where you can create a two people bubble, with more overlapping of intimate space, rather than “come back to my room”.
The error I see socially inexperienced people making over and over is presupposing that others have the same need and way of communicating that they have. It’s not so, especially when dealing with a person of the opposite sex.
A good rule of thumb in these matters is to incrementally test for more intimacy in a gradual manner:
The problem with “Do you want to come back to my room for sex?” can be that it requires the woman to commit in that moment.
A woman might very well think: “I would enjoy making out in a more private space but at the moment I don’t know whether I actually want to have sex, and I want to make that decision based on how I feel in the moment”
I find this strange, because if I’m attracted to someone, this attraction doesn’t change on a second-by-second basis, although perhaps its just me that feels like that. I think if this hypothetical woman doesn’t know whether she wants sex, maybe it would be best for her to wait until the next date, where she might have a better idea of what she wants.
I heard some advice saying that if you’re not enthusiastic about something its not worth doing, and while I’m not sure this applies in general, I would apply it to sex. No point in half-hearted sex.
I find this strange, because if I’m attracted to someone, this attraction doesn’t change on a second-by-second basis, although perhaps its just me that feels like that.
Being attracted to someone and wanting to have sex with them next minute aren’t the same thing. You usually want to also be horny to have sex. Women also want to feel comfort and trust.
A woman might feel: “I’m attracted to this guy but I’m menstruating and I don’t like it to have sex while I’m menstruating.”
where she might have a better idea of what she wants.
That assumes that a mental idea of what she wants drives her behavior. I think in most cases a woman will instead listen to her emotions that tell her what she likes in that particular moment instead of relying too much on mental concepts.
That desire might simply be: “I want to be more intimite with this guy than I’m at the moment but I don’t want to be in public when we get more intimite.”
I’d rather people actually said “Do you want to come back to my room for sex?”
There is the section of Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman with the phrase “you just ask them!”, which does endorse explicitly asking people if they’re interested in sex. I don’t think this is a replacement for understanding and displaying social cues, though.
So how does getting sexual experience with prostitutes translate over to getting into sexual relationships with regular women through dating, any way?
I met a 20-something woman at the Venturist cryonics convention in Laughlin, Nevada, last year who talked to me more than she needed to as a social acknowledgment, which made me wonder if she felt attracted to me. I don’t know how to interpret these situations in the handful of times they have happened in my life, so I don’t know what to do, and they make me anxious.
If I had sexual learning experiences only from prostitutes, and I had nothing else to go on, should I have asked this woman how much money she wanted to come with me to my room in Laughlin’s hotel for sex?
That would likely be perceived as highly inappropriate and carries with it the chance of you getting banned from that convention in the future.
That generally doesn’t work on women who don’t already sell sex for a living.
Maybe a sex surrogate could be useful for you. She would provide you with more emotional and social guidance than a regular hooker, and the learning process would advance at your own pace and on your own terms.
Epistemic status: speculation
It doesn’t (unless you’re subconsciously self-sabotaging because you’re scared that you will make a bad impression with your first sexual performance or something). OTOH, it doesn’t hurt either (except via opportunity costs, but then so does anything else). So how does eating at restaurants translate over to learning how to cook? It doesn’t, but that’s not what people eat at restaurants for.
It doesn’t, in no way. The top positive effect you could get from sex workers is the relief of pressure and anxiety, but if you’re not getting even that then I guess you could stop wasting your money.
99.9% it would have had a bad outcome. Why didn’t you just simply invited her to discuss the things further in front of a drink in a more intimate space?
I’d rather people actually said “Do you want to come back to my room for sex?” rather than “Do you want to come back to my room for coffee?” where coffee is a euphemism for sex, because some people will take coffee at face value, which can lead to either uncomfortable situations, including fear of assault, or lead to people missing opportunities because they are bad at reading between the lines.
Or if you do want to invite someone for a drink, go somewhere public.
Edit: I’m not saying that people should go round propositioning people for sex without getting to know them first. I’m saying that drinks in public are good, and that I, personally, prefer to think that adults should be able to say what they mean without euphemisms. I’m not saying that I get to ignore societies’ rules. And I realise that people find what I have been saying creepy, but personally, I think if I was a girl I would find it very creepy that there could be situations where I’m in a private room with no witnesses and I want to drink coffee and the guy expects sex.
Actually, it’s often not—it’s a declaration of interest and an euphemism for “let’s move this thing along for the time being and see where we’ll end up”.
Imagine the answer to your “Do you want to come back to my room for sex?” being “I don’t know yet, why don’t we have coffee while I evaluate you a bit more thoroughly?”
So, someone who wanted to take things slowly would turn them down, where they might have accepted an invitation for coffee in starbucks. If invitation to bars = drink , bedroom = sex then everyone knows where they stand.
Maybe? It’s a negotiation. For example that someone could have counter-suggested a coffee at Starbucks, that’s a “you’re going too fast” signal. Or said “Sure, but I’ll have to run in 10 minutes, I have an appointment to catch”, that’s a “yes to coffee, no to sex” signal. There is a VERY large variety of ways to signal interest, intentions, etc.
Plausible deniability, dude. It’s much easier to dispel the awkwardness of rejection if you can reasonably fall back on the claim that, hey, maybe coffee was all you wanted anyway. Successful courtship depends on making the other person feel comfortable around you; it’s a human relationship, not resource extraction, and it has to be framed in appropriate terms. (Edit: oh, sorry, I thought I was replying to advancedatheist; removed a sentence that assumed this.)
In table format. The second strategy is much more likely to lead to (2,1) than to (2,2).
I get that it’s not resource extraction, but its not espionage either, and I personally don’t see the need for ‘I can neither confirm nor deny that I want sex’.
I also get that its about making people feel comfortable. I’m more comfortable if people are fairly upfront about what they want, but I get that it’s just me who feels this way. I’m really bad at picking up on subtext, I have conversations like this:
Other person: “We’re spending a lot of time together, its almost like we’re being a couple.”
Me: “Yeah, we have been hanging out a lot.”
several months later...
Oh. I get it now. Why couldn’t he just say he wanted a relationship?
And things can get even worse if one person thinks coffee means sex and one thinks it means coffee. I know a girl who has been accidentally raped because of drunken misunderstandings.
BTW I’m impressed that you went to the fuss of making a table :)
The usual term is flirting.
A lot of the time people are not sure about what they want (or whether the cost-benefit is favorable). Socially acceptable delaying tactics are important.
A girl saying yes to coffee isn’t an excuse to not look for consent when having sex. Saying yes to coffee just means consent to move to a different location.
This is true, but its not that simple. When you’re in private, its a far more dangerous situation, and, for instance, some girls will be scared to say no because of the possibility of violence.
She will be even more afraid to say “no” while in private if she beforehand explicitely said “yes” to sex instead of having said “yes” to coffee.
If you ask: “Do you want to come to my room with me to have sex” and she says “Yes”, that can be interpreted as a promise to have sex if the girl comes to the room. Asking for “coming to the room to drink coffee” doesn’t do that to the same extend.
But that presumes that the girl changes her mind about the sex when she reaches his room, which seems strange.
I suppose the room could be a sex dungeon, but in that case he should have asked “Wanna come home with me for kinky sex?”
(Obviously, people have the right to withdraw consent at any time for any reason, it just seems unlikely that it would be necessary)
In the example the girl usually don’t just want sex but she wants sex while she’s turned on and that brings her pleasure. Even in the case of asking directly for sex a girl would assume that the guy will engage in foreplay that puts her then in an emotional state where she will have pleasurable sex.
When a guy asks: “Do you want to come to my room for coffee” a girl might think “That’s exciting and hopefully the night will end with great sex” but depending on how the interaction in the room goes it might or might not end up in sex.
I am assuming that the people involved have probably been out drinking and having fun and getting into an exciting emotional state beforehand.
That’s such BS. Rapists know what they’re doing, even when they pretend otherwise; rape is predatory behavior. The only way you could accidentally rape someone is in the “whoops, found the wrong hole!” sense.
That depends on how one defines the word “rape”. The fact that there is currently an attempt by certain groups to massively expand the definition of that word (while keeping the connotations of the original meaning) isn’t helping.
The issue in this case seems to be that the man thought that the fact that the woman said “yes” to having coffee means that she expressed consent while the woman thought it didn’t.
Why do you think that in every case both people have the same idea whether there’s consent? Or do you think that rape means something different than having sex without consent?
The data show otherwise. As it turns out, an overwhelming portion of rapes is due to a minority of repeat offenders who never get caught, due in no small part to prevailing social attitudes which all-too-readily construe rapes as nothing more than one-off “misunderstandings” which can be “forgiven”. But again, that’s just wrong. Rape is not something that just happens once—they do it again and again.
Someone who thinks that a woman saying “Yes” to coffee means that she expresses consent to sex is likely going to repeat the error multiple times.
Believes such as: ‘Her mouth that “no” but her eyes said “yes”’ can also repeat to repeated offending without the rapist thinking he’s a rapist.
Understanding how to determine consent is vital and not all problems are due to bad intent.
I note that people who misunderstand something once seem above-averagely likely to misunderstand similar things in future, especially (but not exclusively) if they don’t receive correction.
Maybe you’re right about the vast majority of cases. In the specific anecdote I mentioned, the victim told me that it was a misunderstanding—they were friends, she thought she was going home with him to sleep, he thought they were going to have sex, they were both very, very, drunk and he didn’t understand that she wasn’t consenting. She has forgiven it and they are still friends, although perhaps less close.
I’m not endorsing anyone’s actions here. Perhaps this guy is a threat, and she should not have forgiven him. But I think my original point stands, which is that it is safer for people to get to know each other over drinks in public and only go home if they both sure whether or not they want sex.
Would this be the same “data” that claims that 1 in 4 college women are “raped”?
I’d rather that too, and I’ve had it go wrong in both directions. But the whole point of much of this site is that outcomes are more important than principles. Saying “do you want to come back to my room for sex?” is not going to change society, it’s just going to make you personally come off as a creep.
I’m not sure its always creepy, not if you’ve already kissed them. Depends on circumstances. Inviting someone in for coffee and then trying to fuck them can be pretty creepy too.
But I agree that I can’t change society, and so I might as well conform to the rules.
It’s almost always creepy in the context of an early relationship: whether you’ve kissed or not, it’s a strong signal of contempt for or unfamiliarity with sexual norms. About the only exceptions I can think of would occur in very sex-positive cultures with very strong norms around explicit verbal negotiation. There aren’t many of those cultures, and even within them you’d usually want some strong indications of interest beforehand.
On the other hand, if you’ve invited someone up for coffee (or just said “do you want to come back to my place?”, which is pretty much the same offer), that’s not license for them to tear your clothes off as soon as the door closes either. Doing that would be creepy, unless you’ve practically been molesting each other on the way over, but normally the script goes more like this: you walk in, there’s maybe some awkward chitchat, you sit down on the bed or couch, they sit down next to you, you start kissing, and things progress naturally from there. If at any point they break script or the progression stalls out… well, then you make coffee.
I can think of a few examples where I’ve seen directly propositioning someone work, but these examples were among rather promiscuous people, so I think your point stands.
Actually, I’d interpret this very differently—inviting someone back for coffee is, on the face of it, saying that the reason you are inviting them is for coffee, not sex. Its a false pretext. But “do you want to come back to my place?” gives no pretext and its obviously for sex (assuming you’ve kissed already).
Obviously, I do know that inviting someone for coffee means sex might happen (or at least it does in some contexts). But there’s also people who invite people over to “watch a movie” or “smoke weed” and this is more of a grey area because they might actually want to watch a movie.
It’s a pretext, sure. That’s the point. The standard getting-to-know-you script does not allow for directly asking someone for sex (unless you’re already screwing them on the regular; “wanna get some ice cream and fuck?” is acceptable, if a little crass, on the tenth date) so we’ve developed the line as a semi-standardized cover story for getting a couple hours of privacy with someone. You shouldn’t read it as “I want coffee”, but rather as “I want to be alone with you, so here’s a transparent excuse”. There are more creative ways to ask the same thing, but because they’re more creative (and therefore further outside the standard cultural script), they’re more prone to misinterpretation.
Compare the Seventies-era cliche of “wanna come look at my etchings?”
I think there’s a deeper point: human interactions are multilayered and the surface layer does not necessarily carry the most important meaning. The meaning can be—and often is—masked by something else which should not be interpreted literally.
“It’s a false pretext” is not even wrong—it’s just not a correct way to think about the situation. A “pretext” is a way to express in a socially acceptable fashion a deliberately ambiguous meaning which, if said explicitly aloud, would change the dynamics of the situation completely.
Human interaction, especially of a sexual nature, just is not reducible to the straightforward exchange of “wanna fuck?” information bits.
I agree with you, and that’s indeed what is implied by my “a more intimate space”. I meant a bar where you can create a two people bubble, with more overlapping of intimate space, rather than “come back to my room”.
The error I see socially inexperienced people making over and over is presupposing that others have the same need and way of communicating that they have. It’s not so, especially when dealing with a person of the opposite sex.
A good rule of thumb in these matters is to incrementally test for more intimacy in a gradual manner:
The problem with “Do you want to come back to my room for sex?” can be that it requires the woman to commit in that moment. A woman might very well think: “I would enjoy making out in a more private space but at the moment I don’t know whether I actually want to have sex, and I want to make that decision based on how I feel in the moment”
I find this strange, because if I’m attracted to someone, this attraction doesn’t change on a second-by-second basis, although perhaps its just me that feels like that. I think if this hypothetical woman doesn’t know whether she wants sex, maybe it would be best for her to wait until the next date, where she might have a better idea of what she wants.
I heard some advice saying that if you’re not enthusiastic about something its not worth doing, and while I’m not sure this applies in general, I would apply it to sex. No point in half-hearted sex.
Being attracted to someone and wanting to have sex with them next minute aren’t the same thing. You usually want to also be horny to have sex. Women also want to feel comfort and trust.
A woman might feel: “I’m attracted to this guy but I’m menstruating and I don’t like it to have sex while I’m menstruating.”
That assumes that a mental idea of what she wants drives her behavior. I think in most cases a woman will instead listen to her emotions that tell her what she likes in that particular moment instead of relying too much on mental concepts.
That desire might simply be: “I want to be more intimite with this guy than I’m at the moment but I don’t want to be in public when we get more intimite.”
There is the section of Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman with the phrase “you just ask them!”, which does endorse explicitly asking people if they’re interested in sex. I don’t think this is a replacement for understanding and displaying social cues, though.