A little while back, over at
Hooking Up Smart,
there was some debate over advice being offered to a college girl when
the 19 year old boy she was kind-of-seeing-but-not-sleeping-with got
caught out kind-of-seeing-but-possibly-sleeping-with someone else. Well, it happens. The boy was branded a 'player' (!) right
from the get-go, a ghastly predator practising his 'toxic' dark arts on this sweet
virginal child [of the same age], & some of the female commenters ( I may be exaggerating a little here) seemed
just about ready to organize a lynching there & then
. On the other side of the fence,
most of the men tended towards a groan & a sigh & a shake of the head & a
'been-there-done-that-God-doesn't-the-desire-for-pretty-women-make-us-do-some-stupid-things-sometimes'
stance. They weren't as ready to judge & demonize the boy for urges & actions they knew they could just as easily have had & carried out themselves.
The point is that it split into two camps
quite quickly, with the women growing increasingly hostile & in some
cases openly insulting of the men, who kept on trying to make their
points in different ways but weren't being heard. Now, if you've ever
been to HUS, you'll know that this is a rare occurence - the commenters
there are smart, thoughtful, original, generally open-minded &
constructive, & I've never found a group of women more empathetic
towards the problems men face in modern society anywhere. So this was a
little odd. It got kind of ugly & I've not been back since. I'm sure
I will eventually, I think I just need a break to absorb it all. But
since then I've been trying to figure out what happened & why it
happened & if there is a way to not make it happen in the future.
How do you talk
between the sexes about the differing experiences
of sex?
For
the most part, the wonderful women of HUS are highly-advanced in their
thinking about the workings of male/female relationships (the marvellous men too, of course).
Regular topics of discussion there include evolutionary psychology & Game
Theory, so the ability to step out of ones own personal narrative & emotions & attempt to observe the human situation objectively & dispassionately is present. Feminism is looked at very critically & it's largely
understood there that men & women are necessarily different in
matters relating to reproduction & therefore sex. But once this sore
point was touched on, practically all the women rounded up their wagons
& all that theoretical thinking went out the window. And in my life,
pretty much every woman I've ever spoken to has reacted in the same
way, with the exception of a few polyamorous types (but they generally
haven't cleared the feminism hurdle yet, & apply all discussion
about sexuality to both sexes interchangeably, so they're not much help
either).
It seems to me the women got hostile because to acknowledge the essentially polygamous drive of men, to recognize that it is
necessarily
different to womens, that
that is their nature, cannot help but threaten the (also necessary)
female biological need for stability, i.e. that the man, who is needed
to provide for the female while she carries her child & later nurses
it, will be there to stick around.
It's become common, the past 40 years or so, to hear women talking quite openly about their
experiences & requirements of sex,
& as a result we as a society know quite a lot about the preferences & desires of
women, which we see largely without judgement. Men's desires, on the other
hand, although so overwhelmingly strong
(men on average have between 20 to100 times more testosterone, the hormone which governs sexual desire in both sexes, than women), are still shrouded in shame.
Female fantasies (which we call 'erotica') are considered benign. Male fantasies (which we call 'pornography') are still considered harmful & wrong. This moral judgement & imbalance makes men & women's experience of sex even harder to explain to each other. As
Bill Maher said, "There are no such things as mutual fantasies:
yours bore
us, ours
offend you."
Pornography
simply doesn't interest most women, & so is off their radar - it doesn't really
exist for them. Conversely, 'romantic' tales
of rich surgeons/sheiks/oil barons/princes whisking barmaids/florists/typists up & off into the sunset on their yacht/mercedes/pony bore
almost all men silly too, so the entire 'Romantic' aisle in the bookshop is something they don't ever really think of either.
But
our sexual fantasies tell us an awful lot about how different we are
from each other. Men & women may well be as much as 99% the same, but then again, we're told that the DNA of the
human race & chimpanzees are about 99% the same, too. It's that 1% that makes all the difference. And the places the sexes differ the most are the areas closest to reproduction, & so sex.
Gay culture is a very interesting barometer of this, I find. Men are men, after all, & Gay men are very
much the same as straight men sexually, as Sai Gaddam & Ogi Ogass'
recent
A Billion Wicked Thoughts
has shown - it is simply the
direction in which male desire is pointed that differs. What we see when we look at gay culture is
men without women
- more precisely, men living outside of the societal compromises they otherwise would have struck
with women.
And what do we see when we look at gay culture? By a rather huge margin, the people self-reporting having the most sex in the world are single gay men. The
people self-reporting the lowest amount of sex in the world are lesbians
in long-term relationships. On a grossly simplified level, we have
there the male/female polarity. Promiscuity is not a
gay trait, it's a
male trait.
But it's treated with far more understanding in the gay world than in the
straight world, because there everyone
is male, so they all know how it
is to
be male, what that reality feels like, inside.
"Considering our true wishes & longings, our daily lives are pretty ridiculous"
- Dieter Duhm
It must be great to be gay, in this day & age. So simple. Can you even
imagine it? If I
could go to a bathhouse, pick up a different woman every night for the rest of my life & then perhaps never see her again, I would. Gladly. Wouldn't you? It doesn't have anything to do with falling in love -
which I also love to do but experience as a largely seperate thing - as
Lenny Bruce told us earlier, 'men
detatch - not consciously but they
do detatch.'
There's the day-to-day need to be met - food/water/sex - & then
there is romance on top of that, an additional sweet taste
on top
. That is the male reality stripped down the best I can. Women are different in this, or at
least healthy women. A woman compulsively engaging in anonymous sex would be seen by others
& herself as unhappy & damaged in some way. Yet
every male is like this, to a greater or lesser degree, healthy & happy or not. Most men would feel biologically
fulfilled by
this: they would be doing what life has told them to do. Whereas women
would be going against their own best interests in doing this, mating
with whoever crosses their path.
When you bring this subject up, some women always
have to tell you about that
one girlfriend of theirs with a sex-drive
as big as any man, who goes out every weekend picking up one-night
stands. Every girl, it seems, knows at least one girl like that. And it's true, there are girls like that out there. But she's
not telling you how
all her
male friends would like to be doing that too, if they only had the
chance (which they don't). It's likely that she doesn't even know that, because that's
something the men & boys she knows most likely don't tell her, for
fear of being shamed or judged. And if you asked that
friend of hers if she see herself doing what she's doing now at 55, 60 years old, it's
highly unlikely that she will tell you 'yes'. No
woman dreams of a future which consists of them simply fucking a
different man - or several men - every single day for the rest of their
lives until they die. No riding off into the sunset, no
marriage, no children, no settling down... Just new, different, sweaty faces,
day in & day out for the rest of your life.
To almost any woman that's a nightmarish vision of white-slavery-crackwhore hell
. But to most men, that's veritably an
all-areas pass to the Hall of the Gods.
Men are biologically driven to be with as many sexual partners as they can be:
Quantity Matters.
Women are instructed by their own bodies to find the best male they can
find & be with them at least long enough to raise a child out of
infancy.
Quality matters.
This isn't rocket science -
We all know this. Stand-up comedians
make their living from talking about the differences between the sexes
on stage every night. They can do this only because their audience
already recognizes those differences & knows them to be true. Women know that men are born different, that they "think with their
dicks", that they are "only after one thing". All their jokes & advice & wisdom
rely upon that ancient
knowledge. But there is no understanding or kindness accompanying it.
The change I see that needs to come is for the different male experience of sex to be accepted [it is], without judgement [it isn't].
19
year-old boys do not start out 'toxic players'. They start out being
the male of their species whose bodies are instructing them - in the
prime of their youth - to go spread their seed with as many females as
possible in order to enable the survival of the human race. They make
many mistakes & blunders along the way, chiefly because no-one,
least of all their mothers - who are now primarily raising them - is instructing them in the best way to
strike the balance between what their society expects of them & what
their body
demands of them. They
receive no instruction on how to be
male in the present society as
being male runs
contrary to female goals & expectations.
In the society we live now, men's needs & concerns
have for some time been overlooked & downplayed, as any truly objective observer
would have to agree. Mainstream society - if not civilization itself - is always a compromise
between male & female concerns. If we believe in equality - or at
least
fairness - then we have to make sure that one sex is not promoted at the expense of the other. We cannot apply identical expectations to both men & women, as men & women are, by definition,
different. If you have a law or a morality that is very easy for 50% of the people to live under & very hard for the other 50%, it isn't a fair law, & it isn't a healthy morality.
Instead of shaming male sexuality, we
could instruct teenage boys about some of the realities that accompany sex out there - we could tell them that
if they make a girl pregnant, they will be in legal servitude to that
girl for many years, & have to work to provide for a child they
weren't ready for.We could tell them that unprotected sex with a promiscuous partner can result in STDs. This, after all, is basically the
message we give to girls. But we could do it without judging &
shaming the boys naturally polygamous urges. We could tell them if a truly exceptional woman comes along, he may want to commit to her, to build a life together & start a family, but in the meantime not to confuse the sex he will have with love. That won't end happily for anyone.
So anyway. The fundamental point I have been trying to make in this somewhat meandering monologue is this:
Until there is a widespread recognition of male sexuality being innately different, without judgement, there can never be a truly fair, honest dialogue between the sexes.
And I guess it's in service of that that I am writing this.
_-*-_-*-_-*-_-*-_
There's more to be said on this, but it's starting to get on a little. I'll pick it up again next post.
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