While reflecting intelligently on the topic of women who pressure their male partners for sex, Rachel Hills of Musings of an Inappropriate Woman introduces a vocabulary term that I’ve been looking for several years: male sex drive discourse.”
So where do these (very common) outbreaks of insecurity come from? I blame them on what feminist psychologist Wendy Hollway calls the “male sex drive discourse” – the idea that men are always “up for it”, forever ready and able to “perform”, and can’t control their desires. In this discourse, there’s no room for being tired, for not “feeling like it”, for just wanting to cuddle, or even for refraining from assaulting a scantily clad woman. Even amongst many progressives, these assumptions are deeply seated.
...
The flipside of the male sex drive discourse is the other point Pluralist touches upon: that if men are hungry sex fiends, women are too compassionate and docile to ever do something like pressure a man into sex, let alone to assault him. And if they do – well, it couldn’t have hurt that much and he probably wanted it anyway, amirite?
I’ve always, always felt I couldn’t be the first person to figure out what I’ve been calling the“no-sex” class paradigm where in a terminology-twist on the classic feminist construction men view ourselves as obliged to be sexual (the “sex class”) and women as the “no-sex” class. And to be honest, while my construction has been gaining a little bit of traction around the blogosphere it makes me kind of nervous feeling like I’m the only one who’s noticed.
At this point I know almost nothing else about “male sex drive discourse,” well… discourse than the excerpts from Hill’s post. (Everything else I know about it at the moment comes from this Amazon.com key phrase. Which for the moment, at least, I haven’t had time to read.) It might or might not tie in directly with the no-sex class paradigm. For instance it could just be… a really helpful body of work analyzing the way assumptions about male sexuality are tightly knitted into social fabric. Which of course wouldn’t be interesting at all for me, right? :-)
So good stuff either way. And if it does support the no-sex class paradigm so much the better.
The reason you feel like
Submitted by Plymouth (not verified) on Tue, 2010-02-09 17:33.The reason you feel like you’re alone with this idea is that the idea is a spherical cow. You’ve taken a trend and decided to turn it into an absolute, with words like “inconceivable” and “rules”. Hundreds, thousands, dare I say millions of people have noticed the trend. But very few of them have decided to simplify it down to the extreme that you have. The point of the spherical cow joke is that if you simplify something too much it no longer reflects reality. And so any conclusions you draw from that simplified version are useless.
full text of joke follows because I simply cannot find a link to a page that doesn’t have 50 other jokes on it.
_________________________________________________________
The USDA once wanted to make cows produce milk faster, to improve the
dairy industry.
So, they decided to consult the foremost biologists and recombinant
DNA technicians to build them a better cow. They assembled this team
of great scientists, and gave them unlimited funding. They requested
rare chemicals, weird bacteria, tons of quarantine equipment, there
was a horrible typhus epidemic they started by accident, and, 2 years
later, they came back with the “new, improved cow.” It had a milk
production improvement of 2% over the original.
They then tried with the greatest Nobel Prize winning chemists around.
They worked for six months, and, after requisitioning tons of chemical
equipment, and poisoning half the small town in Colorado where they
were working with a toxic cloud from one of their experiments, they
got a 5% improvement in milk output.
The physicists tried for a year, and, after ten thousand cows were
subjected to radiation therapy, they got a 1% improvement in output.
Finally, in desperation, they turned to the mathematicians. The
foremost mathematician of his time offered to help them with the
problem. Upon hearing the problem, he told the delegation that they
could come back in the morning and he would have solved the problem.
In the morning, they came back, and he handed them a piece of paper
with the computations for the new, 300% improved milk cow.
The plans began:
“A Proof of the Attainability of Increased Milk Output from Bovines:
Consider a spherical cow…...”