"I'm Not Going to Sleep with You!" Means She Probably Will

Young people have lost basic common sense

I recently posted this clip on X, along with an enthusiastic endorsement of the message.

The tweet is now at 46 million views. Some people pointed out that the woman in the video is supposed to be a comedian, and this fact even made its way into a very judgmental community note, which has thankfully been removed. Much of modern comedy involves finding humor in people’s lived experiences. I don’t know if this specific story is meant to be true, and it really doesn’t matter for our purposes. Some argue that she was actually making fun of women who do this, which itself means that the audience recognizes the phenomenon as real.

I was surprised that the tweet took off like it did, and anecdotally the reaction seemed to be polarized across generational lines. Older millennials and up were basically like “ha ha, yeah of course,” and younger people would talk about “sexual assault” and be quick to throw around other HR or legalistic terms. The implicit knowledge that previous generations had, once passed on through channels like older men talking to young boys and cultural products such as the semi-cancelled song “Baby It’s Cold Outside,” has to an extent been lost. In the interest of uncovering such lost knowledge, it seems worthwhile to explain exactly what is going on when a woman says “I’m not going to sleep with you.”