I find this surprising. Lots of men I know have very mixed feelings about sex. They want it, but have fears and anxieties around it. The biggest source is usually that their desire is dangerous and will hurt women.
It’s often justified because sometimes male desire is dangerous. Some men really do lose their sense and pressure women into sex they don’t want to have our worse. But most of the time sexual desire can be welcome with the right partner and if it’s honest rather than coercive.
Further, this is a big topic and I’ve definitely not covered all of it, just one tiny corner. This post had to be a lot more personal because the alternative was writing 10k words. Sorry if it didn’t connect for you. Maybe the next one will.
(I’m aware I’m probably coming off as unproductive.)
Of course the expression “lots of” is vague. I guess “a few” can be “a lot”, or at least: too many. In any case, I don’t think the problem of deeming their desire as overly dangerous is anywhere close to the most common problem heterosexual men have with sex. I’m not sure you would even disagree with that. To be a tiny bit more direct, I think the most common problem has to do with the fact that between men and women, there is a very, very large difference in average interest in sex. It is hard to talk about this publicly, so I won’t go into details. Again, nothing about the content of your post; I personally didn’t like the implicature of the title, but that’s just N=1.
I agree that this is difficult to talk about publicly. If we assume that sexually attractive people are more sexually attractive (which sounds like a tautology), then a man complaining about his lack of sexual opportunities can be dismissed as an unattractive loser. Plus it is politically incorrect, so people are invited to express outrage. On the other hand, a man who says “guys, I have absolutely no idea what are you talking about, from my perspective it always seemed that women are just as interested at sex as men, probably even more” is expressing a politically correct opinion, and at the same time (not so) subtly advertising his attractiveness. The incentives for reporting the two kinds of experience are horribly imbalanced.
(This does not work symmetrically for both genders. If women are not sexually interested in a man, it is clearly his fault. But if men are not sexually interested in a woman, it is probably their fault, too. “The men-children these days spend more time thinking about computer games than about women.” “Most guys cannot handle a real woman.” “Men have such fragile egos; they are intimidated by smart women.” “If he is not interested in you, he is probably gay or impotent.”)
But it is also difficult to talk about for statistical reasons, as there are at least three possible effects that are difficult to distinguish:
maybe men on average are more interested in sex than women on average;
maybe people in general are often sexually frustrated because they desire people who are more attractive than them, and those people keep turning them down because they desire people who are more attractive than them;
maybe women are hypergamous, i.e. an average man would be happy to have sex with an average woman, but an average woman feels like she would lower her standards too much by having sex with an average man.
Notice that each of these three hypotheses alone would predict that the average man feels sexually frustrated. My personal opinion is that each of them explains a part of reality, but it is difficult to estimate their relative strength.
The second and third would predict that many women feel sexually frustrated, too. But that wouldn’t actually disprove the first; it would only mean that the first effect cannot be the only thing that happens.
Also, this doesn’t make the advice in the article useless. If a man’s sexual opportunities are… fewer than he would prefer to have, but more than zero… it is still important that he doesn’t screw up the few opportunities he has.
I find this surprising. Lots of men I know have very mixed feelings about sex. They want it, but have fears and anxieties around it. The biggest source is usually that their desire is dangerous and will hurt women.
It’s often justified because sometimes male desire is dangerous. Some men really do lose their sense and pressure women into sex they don’t want to have our worse. But most of the time sexual desire can be welcome with the right partner and if it’s honest rather than coercive.
Further, this is a big topic and I’ve definitely not covered all of it, just one tiny corner. This post had to be a lot more personal because the alternative was writing 10k words. Sorry if it didn’t connect for you. Maybe the next one will.
(I’m aware I’m probably coming off as unproductive.)
Of course the expression “lots of” is vague. I guess “a few” can be “a lot”, or at least: too many. In any case, I don’t think the problem of deeming their desire as overly dangerous is anywhere close to the most common problem heterosexual men have with sex. I’m not sure you would even disagree with that. To be a tiny bit more direct, I think the most common problem has to do with the fact that between men and women, there is a very, very large difference in average interest in sex. It is hard to talk about this publicly, so I won’t go into details. Again, nothing about the content of your post; I personally didn’t like the implicature of the title, but that’s just N=1.
I agree that this is difficult to talk about publicly. If we assume that sexually attractive people are more sexually attractive (which sounds like a tautology), then a man complaining about his lack of sexual opportunities can be dismissed as an unattractive loser. Plus it is politically incorrect, so people are invited to express outrage. On the other hand, a man who says “guys, I have absolutely no idea what are you talking about, from my perspective it always seemed that women are just as interested at sex as men, probably even more” is expressing a politically correct opinion, and at the same time (not so) subtly advertising his attractiveness. The incentives for reporting the two kinds of experience are horribly imbalanced.
(This does not work symmetrically for both genders. If women are not sexually interested in a man, it is clearly his fault. But if men are not sexually interested in a woman, it is probably their fault, too. “The men-children these days spend more time thinking about computer games than about women.” “Most guys cannot handle a real woman.” “Men have such fragile egos; they are intimidated by smart women.” “If he is not interested in you, he is probably gay or impotent.”)
But it is also difficult to talk about for statistical reasons, as there are at least three possible effects that are difficult to distinguish:
maybe men on average are more interested in sex than women on average;
maybe people in general are often sexually frustrated because they desire people who are more attractive than them, and those people keep turning them down because they desire people who are more attractive than them;
maybe women are hypergamous, i.e. an average man would be happy to have sex with an average woman, but an average woman feels like she would lower her standards too much by having sex with an average man.
Notice that each of these three hypotheses alone would predict that the average man feels sexually frustrated. My personal opinion is that each of them explains a part of reality, but it is difficult to estimate their relative strength.
The second and third would predict that many women feel sexually frustrated, too. But that wouldn’t actually disprove the first; it would only mean that the first effect cannot be the only thing that happens.
Also, this doesn’t make the advice in the article useless. If a man’s sexual opportunities are… fewer than he would prefer to have, but more than zero… it is still important that he doesn’t screw up the few opportunities he has.