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The Darwin–Bateman paradigm predicts that females enhance their fitness by being choosy and mating with high‐quality males, while males should compete to mate with as many females as possible. In many species, males enhance their fitness by defending females and/or resources used by females. That is, males directly defend access to mating opportunities. However, paternity analyses have repeatedly shown that females in most species mate polyandrously, which contradicts traditional expectations that male defensive behaviours lead to monandry. Here, in an extensive meta‐analysis, encompassing 109 species and 1026 effect sizes from across the animal kingdom, we tested if the occurrence of defensive behaviours modulates sexual selection on females and males. If so, we can illuminate the extent to which males really succeed in defending access to mating and fertilisation opportunities. We used four different indices of the opportunity for sexual selection that comprise pre‐mating and/or post‐mating episodes of selection. We found, for both sexes, that the occurrence of defensive behaviours does not modulate the potential strength of sexual selection. This implies that male defensive behaviours do not predict the true intensity of sexual selection. While the most extreme levels of sexual selection on males are in species with male defensive behaviours, which indicates that males do sometimes succeed in restricting females' re‐mating ability (e.g. elephant seals, Mirounga leonina), estimates of the opportunity for sexual selection vary greatly across species, regardless of whether or not defensive behaviours occur. Indeed, widespread polyandry shows that females are usually not restricted by male defensive behaviours. In addition, our results indicate that post‐mating episodes of selection, such as cryptic female choice and sperm competition, might be important factors modulating the opportunity for sexual selection. We discuss: (i) why male defensive behaviours fail to lower the opportunity for sexual selection among females or fail to elevate it for males; (ii) how post‐mating events might influence sexual selection; and (iii) the role of females as active participants in sexual selection. We also highlight that inadequate data reporting in the literature prevented us from extracting effect sizes from many studies that had presumably collected the relevant data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]