My overall theory is that many if not most of the worst truly foul excesses of human behavior are due to extreme measures of sexual repression. The mating instinct is part of life - and life is persistent enough that sexual desire is going to persist no matter what is done to try to stamp it out.
The fossil record indicates that at the dawn of Homo Sapiens, the average life span was about 8 years and about 80% of the population died before reaching reproductive maturity. This means that 20% of females had to do the job of reproducing for the entire species - which they did by spending most of their life spans after reproductive maturity either pregnant or nursing. That level of sex urge is built into our genetics and a few decades of modern medicine have done nothing to change that.
With the advent of death control - first through the stabilization of the food supply via agriculture a few thousand years ago and next through modern medicine, birth control became inevitable in order to keep humans from running into the yeast problem and being poisoned by their own excrement. (Rhetorical - the problem is both waste and shortage of food)
The first means of birth control was obviously abstinence from sexual intercourse, which also served the purpose of the ruling elites of giving them a tool to use to control average men by controlling their access to female sexuality. What was the reward offered to the 19 male hijackers on 9/11? Not just one, nor even one dozen, but 72, six dozen, virgins.
Since reproduction is the only real meaning of "life" any deal up to death in exchange for it is acceptable to our genes, and those who controlled the hijackers even found a way to get around that.
It takes a lot of effort to control access to women's sexuality via supervision and outside controls, so the next step was to make women so neurotic and #$%#@# up about sex that they would hate it. And, since the consequences of unprotected sex with a man who isn't bound in some way to stick around and support her fell disproportionately on the female, that played right into it as well.
Anthropologist Marvin Harris has an interesting theory that only religious shaming is a powerful enough force to prevent people from engaging in some kinds of hedonistic and self-gratifying behaviors - like eating pork in desert climates and unrestrained sexual activity. Thus, shaming people into neurotic craziness about their sexual desires is the original form of birth control.
I believe that overcoming sexual shaming is key to men regaining their own power. The sex drive is as natural as breathing and as much a part of life as eating. As long as a man carries around shame for his desires, he is easy prey to women who can use that shame to play the game that they have done him a huge favor by sleeping with him - as illustrated by the phrase "getting lucky."
Obnoxious women like spitfire who come in here flaunting their sexuality - whether it be by bragging about the size of her tits, or how great her sex life with her husband is - are playing the DeBeers game - keeping demand up by advertising at the same time "supply" is kept artificially low.
I don't think that men need to brag about jerking off, but neither do I believe they need to be ashamed of it and feel like they are somehow less "manly" because they do. Eating grub worms may be a poor second to eating sirloin steak, but if you are hungry enough you do what you gotta do. And, that is what sex is - a hunger.
As part of the original sexual revolution, I would not call a woman a "slut" simply because she owns her own sexuality and chooses who she is going to share it with and doesn't play $%#@$#%@ faux-virginal games with it. However, I would also have no problem at all calling a woman a "whore" who uses her sexuality purely for the purposes of extracting something from men - whether it be money or attention.
My preference is for honest relationships conducted with integrity, and beyond that I do not have many strong feelings about how people "should" behave. But, the guys who are indirectly bragging about how big their dicks are by way of bragging about how many women they have lied into bed - bore the $#$% out of me and disgust me.
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19th Century Anti-Masturbation Devices
"Masturbation or what was termed the "solitary vice" or "onanism" emerged as a veritable epidemic, especially amongst children. This forms the core around which the modern child becomes engulfed in what might termed the sexualisation of modern society. A medical and moral campaign was waged around the sexuality of children. Parents, educators, doctors were all alerted to hunt out any traces of child sexuality through a myriad of surveillance techniques and upon discovery subject to a seemingly inexhaustible array of corrective measures. One nineteenth century doctor invented a device which administered electric shocks to a sleeping boy's penis upon erection.
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The insane, pale, quivering masturbator along with the lascivious barren prostitute emerge as creatures spreading contagion and weakening the modern social body. The masturbator and the prostitute both disrupted the boundaries surrounding the emergent bourgeois family. Prostitution because it directed sexuality outside the family to non-reproductive ends and masturbation because it turned sexuality inwards to the core of the family - the child and solitary adult. Sexuality in general becomes dominated by men’s fear concerning women’s sexuality, expressed as a threat to public rational masculinity."
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Medicalized circumcision began during the 1800’s to prevent masturbation, which was believed to cause disease.
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Q: Why do you think male circumcision exists?
A: To reduce male libido, or as Rambam (the most famous Jewish Rabbi) wrote:
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"Similarly with regard to circumcision, one of the reasons for it is, in my opinion, the wish to bring about a decrease in sexual intercourse and a weakening of the organ in question, so that this activity be diminished and the organ be in as quiet a state as possible.
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It has been thought that circumcision perfects what is defective congenitally. This gave the possibility to everyone to raise an objection and to say: How can natural things be defective so that they need to be perfected from outside, all the more because we know how useful the foreskin is for that member?
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In fact this commandment has not been prescribed with a view to perfecting what is defective congenitally, but to perfecting what is defective morally.
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The bodily pain caused to that member is the real purpose of circumcision. None of the activities necessary for the preservation of the individual is harmed thereby, nor is procreation rendered impossible, but violent concupiscence and lust that goes beyond what is needed are diminished.
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The fact that circumcision weakens the faculty of sexual excitement and sometimes perhaps diminishes the pleasure is indubitable.
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For if at birth this member has been made to bleed and has had its covering taken away from it, it must indubitably be weakened. The Sages, may their memory be blessed, have explicitly stated: It is hard for a woman with whom an uncircumcised man has had sexual intercourse to separate from him. In my opinion this is the strongest of the reasons for circumcision."
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"Dr. John Gordon, a professor of English at Connecticut College, says that in the 1800s anti-male novels and anti-male tracts - thousands of them - "were part of a campaign to represent men as barbarians whose urges had to be leashed in by the forces of decency - meaning women - if civilization were to survive." -- Jack Kammer, If Men Have All The Power, How Come Women Make The Rules? p30
"Pre-Nineteenth century Western culture assumed that women, not men, were the insatiable sexual aggressors, with men as vulnerable creatures in need of protection." -- Historian Peter N. Stearns in his 1990 book Be a Man: Males in Modern Society
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Re: Women viewed as insatiable sexual aggressors:
Women and Lechery -- from The Lamentations of Matheolus, 1295
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Further Reading:
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EOTM: Sexual Psychology – Part 2 – Puberty to 40
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