Hugo Schwyzer, expanding on my post about Julie Bindel’s research into customers of prostitutes says (emphasis his)
Many women who are uncomfortable with their male partners’ porn use (or visits to strip clubs, etc.) tell themselves (and concerned friends) that they’re grateful that their guys “don’t do anything worse.” Perhaps there are some who genuinely believe what the men in the Guardian study claim to believe: that prostitution provides a necessary sexual outlet for fellas whose supposedly insatiable needs cannot be met in any other way. This is the soft bigotry of low expectations writ large, with the twist that the most painful consequences affect those who hold these assumptions — rather than those about whom the expectations are held.
It’s worth noting that the two men quoted in the Bindel piece use the second and third person to describe what “you” or “a desperate man” might do. Perhaps this is a way of claiming cover under the myth of male weakness without risking the sobriquet of a potential rapist. On the other hand, perhaps these lads don’t use the first person because in their hearts, they know it isn’t true.
And of course it isn’t true! As Hugo nicely puts it, lust is not a catalyst for rape although anger is.*
And as Hugo points out, there’s a benefit (an unfortunately patriarchal one, incidentally) to men when they exploit the social expectation that we’re uncontrollable animals who’d drink out of toilets if the water didn’t get up their noses and who’d lick their butts if they could only reach them, and who’d have sex with thing that moved. (Or, more precisely anything that can’t move fast enough!)
The social downsides for men, however, are disproportionately large.
Anyway, Hugo closes with an interesting sentence that I’d like to riff on briefly.
Until we dismantle the narrative of uncontrollable male sexual desire we cannot build a just and safe world for all.
I’m going to go all radical and say the problem isn’t the narrative of uncontrollable male sexual desire. It’s the narrative of men’s sexual desire period! Because there is no narrative of men’s sexual desire that’s anything other than “uncontrollable.” Just as there’s no narrative of women’s sexual desire as anything but a) non-existent, b) broken, damaged, “wild,” or “crazy.” Oh, or c) displaced into desire for “closeness” or “procreation.”
In other words the narrative of men’s and women’s sexuality is almost nonexistent outside the dominant paradigm of men as the obligate and reflexive “sex class” and women as the disinterested and unmotivated no-sex class.
I agree absolutely with Hugo that until we subvert that dominant paradigm we can’t begin to build a just and safe world for all.
* Assertion of privilege would be another big catalyst that I’d argue is distinct from anger.)
