Why do you feel like a lack of sex is a punishment? Isn’t a lack of sex the baseline? If I don’t buy my friend a gift, that’s not a punishment, that is a neutral action. Unless the implied assumption was that I owe it to them to give them gifts.

Thanks again for the reply - I think I understand your point, which I think is genuinely interesting and worthy of discussion, but there is just something about the phrasing that feels off to me, and just to be clear, I’m sure it’s unintentional. I’m sure we can both agree that we would always want to make everyone feel safe, respected and valued, but sometimes we can accidentally say (or write) things in a way that come across in a way that we don’t intend.

In my opinion, talking about women ‘withholding’ sex as a ‘punishment’ implies a certain level of expectation or entitlement, like men are entitled to have sex with women and if they don’t have sex then they’re punishing men. This is something that I think a lot of us sort of struggle to recognise as harmful, because we all are human and we know that we all have a need for sex, both men and women - but historically, this kind of framing, that men are entitled to sex with women. has been used to excuse violent sexual crimes

There’s totally a valid conversation to be had about how effective this movement could be, but I think that it’s really important that men like myself need to start from a place of recognising that our behaviour can be really hurtful to women, even when we don’t intend it to be, and that we listen to them when they tell us that we can make really simple small changes to protect their humanity, make them feel safe and valued, and recognise the part that we all play - consciously and unconsciously - in the system that has mistreated women for longer than we can possibly fathom.