EOTM: The Nitty Gritty of Male Sexuality

Male sexuality is really very easy to understand. Men feel a tie to the natural world and natural forces whether they realize it or not. The force that drives young men to find young women attractive and to try to mate with them is the same force that causes flowers to bloom, and crops to grow, and is responsible for every bit of life on earth: the drive to survive, the quality and essence of life itself. No amount of veneer of civilization can change the nature of life. No matter how many insane notions humans dream up about the way life"should" be, life will remain as it really is until it all is destroyed.

Almost all multi-celled life on earth is the result of sexual reproduction. For a longer discussion of this see the pages titled Biology1, and Biology 101. Our very ability to have things to eat is directly due to the natural force of life driving a member of one subset of a species, called the "male" to fertilize a member of another subset of the species, termed the "female", in order to produce offspring. This drive is manifested in human males to the same extent that it manifests in male animals and the male parts of plants. Its primary characteristic is urgency. In the natural world the male is the reproductive servant of the female. He stands ready at all times to deliver the male element of sperm as soon as the egg is fertile. When she lets him know she is ready, he must be ready. Males everywhere stand ready to rise to the task.

What is much more difficult to understand is the behavior of men in the contexts which are not in themselves sexual but which our culture has attached to sexuality in order to make its expression "acceptable". Civilization today consists of nothing but fictions about life. Men and women have been cut off from their ties to the natural world so they no longer understand the forces that move them and move within them. They have attempted to substitute fictions and illusions, and the results are the same as if they tried to eat fictional and illusionary bread.

Nowhere is this more apparent and painfully destructive than in the area of our lives related to sexuality. Female sexuality has already, for the most part, been destroyed. The natural partnership and division of labor which evolved as a result of very real biological differences between men and women has been twisted by revisionist fanatics into a fiction about history-long and world-wide conspiracy by men to "oppress" and harm women. Nothing could be further from the truth. As a result of this incredibly insane fiction, relationships between men and women, already severely strained by the cultural fictions which dominate sexuality, are breaking down almost completely. Cut off from the history and reality which created the practices, cultures have made fertility control practices into traditions and belief systems which are not only obsolete in today's world, but which have begun to destroy the very social structures they were initially developed to preserve.

Men and women tend to very naturally fall into partnerships. Within the partnership there is also a natural division of labor which evolves based on differing abilities and preferences. In pre-industrial, non-urban societies these divisions tend to be more informal, far more flexible, and based more on individual choices than on strictly enforced social roles. The inability of an urbanized and industrialized society to tolerate normal individual variations created rigid definitions of roles and enforcement of conformity to them. What before had been done by choice, people were now being forced into doing because someone like them had once done it and the expectation got transferred to them that they would (must) do the same.

The natural tendency of humans to resist being forced into anything was countered by the fact that each role had certain rewards that came only with that role and no other. Men, due to the fact that they were unhampered by periodic interruptions of "productivity" due to childbirth, were the obvious choice of the gender to force out of the home and in the factories. Women, due to the fact that their so-called "careers" or "productive output" would be stalled by childbirth, were the natural choice to provide maintenance of the homestead, staying at home to care for the children that the men were now isolated from. Each was compensated for isolation from the other's worlds by culturally sanctioned power and recognized authority in their own. Men had power in the world of work, women had power in the domestic world and the world of relationships. Over time the knowledge that they had ever been comfortable outside their cultural niche got lost. What had once been a comfortable and convenient arrangement for providing the environment necessary to raise children to maturity became a prison cell of roles and expectations based entirely on the plumbing one displayed at birth. None of this changed the basic urge to merge, it just made it infinitely more complicated, increased the severity of the consequences, and in general drove everyone crazy.

Women were backed into a corner where their sexuality was their only economic asset. This separated women from their sexuality as completely as men were separated from a sense of intrinsic value to their work by being forced to work in intolerable conditions to earn the wages to fulfill their culturally indoctrinated role as providers. Still, there was a lot of pride in fulfilling that role for men. Being able to provide for a family was the only accomplishment that most men of the industrial age are able to point to as the result of an entire life's work. For most men of the past 2 centuries, the price of an outlet for their own sexuality has been a life of indentured servitude in the factories and offices of Consumer Society.

It should be regarded as a measure of the value that men have placed on their sexuality, as well as its incredible power and persistence, that they have been willing to do so. Men are required by the structure of society to purchase an outlet for their sexuality by turning over economic assets. Women have been required by the structure of society to deny themselves an outlet for their sexuality, except in a culturally sanctioned exchange of economic assets. Thus society has turned all women into prostitutes, and all men into johns.

The extended period of childhood dependency enforced by industrial and post-industrial society, makes it nearly certain that both genders will be denied a culturally sanctioned outlet for their natural drive to mate for a period of several years after its onset. During this period, the mechanisms of the exchange of money for sex become so ingrained in the mentality of both men and women, that they continue to follow them even when they are no longer necessary. Women routinely withhold sex and intimacy as a means of gaining power and favors. Men bitterly resent this and retaliate by seeking to get sex without having to pay for it.

Both end up feeling used, taken advantage of, violated, and "oppressed" by the other. No trust or intimacy gets built. The foundation of mutual respect, trust, and regard which used to develop in most marriages never gets built today. Having had their own needs denied and fucked with by the other gender for so long, men and women begin by seeing each other as being diametrically opposed to their interests, an obstacle to be overcome. Men, suckered so many times into turning over hard earned money in response to signals of sexual receptiveness, become angry when their responses have been triggered only to be exploited. Women, so estranged from their sexuality that 50% of them are unable to respond orgasmically even when all the cultural conditions have been met, are often not even aware that is what they are doing, so the man's behavior is totally confusing and frightening.

This whole process of breaking down the pair bond which is the heart and foundation of the family structure has greatly accelerated in the past 30 years. The delicate balance of power in the worlds of work and domestic relations was completely destroyed when women began to demand the same degree of power in the workplace that they had always enjoyed in the home, and which they assumed, because they had never seen it, that men had as much power there as women did in the home. When they encountered the fact that it wasn't there to be had, they didn't go "oops, never mind" like Gilda Radner on Saturday Night Live, they blamed men. It wasn't because men did not have the power they were being demanded of to share, it was because they were "backlashing". The last reason that men had to voluntarily enter into the institution of marriage and commit their lives to supporting a wife and children was gone. The only thing left was the sex drive, and men began to pursue a strategy of gratifying it as inexpensively as possible.

This is not to say that men consciously set out to exploit women, they in fact do not. Men have a deep and sincere desire to love and be loved by women. They have made themselves totally crazy trying to live up to their part of the bargain, but always find nothing under the shell they've picked once the money has been laid down. Men distrust and fear women and the way that women have abused their sexual power over men. Men are learning how to deny their own sexuality in the same way that women do, because it is the only means they have to protect themselves from being exploited by it. More and more this is the only aspect of men that women see. This and the unrestrained and angry expression of it which takes the form of forced sex or rape.

You see, to paraphrase the NRA bumper stickers: when sex is outlawed, only outlaws will have sex. Women simply do not see any other aspect of male sexuality, because it makes men too vulnerable to women's manipulation.

Psychology of Sex
Romance
Love
Biology Basics
The Socio-Cultural Context

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