Photo by Flickr user pichenettes. Used under a Creative Commons license.

I don’t ordinarily get so excited by a post that I gabble incoherently in comments, hashing everybody’s names and posting addenda and corrections, but I was pretty jazzed when Debbie of Body Impolitic mentioned a pretty interesting article from the UK’s Guardian about men and sexual desire that challenges a ton of stereotypes about men.

So maybe part of the story is, as Peter Bell would have it, that “men and women are more sexually similar than they think.” Maybe when married men are as readily “available” to their wives as wives have historically been to their husbands, the power dynamic shifts. Maybe it’s not so much that wives know how to ask for what they want as that husbands are in unmapped territory. Before, their penises told them whether or not they were “ready” for sex at any given time; now, it’s much more complicated.

Read the quote in context here.

The article in question, Why men are telling their wives ‘not tonight’, tries to make sense of a growing number of couples coming to relationship counsellors to deal with low-male libido imbalances.

‘Men used to come to us with impotence – now known as erectile insufficiency – but Viagra has sorted some of that problem,’ said Peter Bell, Relate’s head of practice. ‘What we have is a lot of men who say, as women did in the Fifties: “I can have sex, but I don’t want to. It’s not rewarding”.’

Bell says that around half the men he is now seeing admit to a complete lack of libido. Ten years ago, he said, such complaints were unheard of.

Source: Guardian.co.uk

It’s pretty clear from the article that the men in question aren’t particularly masturbating more, using porn, having affairs, or otherwise taking their sexual outlets elsewhere. They’re just (to borrow a familiar slur) “drying up.”

Just for the record I’m pretty sure that Viagra’s making a difference in the reporting increases: what could once be begged off as impotence must now be confronted as loss of libido.

In fact there’s one very telling line from one interviewee that I hadn’t really thought about before.

The curious thing is that I can get erections, and I don’t fancy or fantasise about other women. It’s just that, over the years, my desire to have sex with anyone at all has faded.

There’s always been this assumption going the other way that, as Debbie puts it…

In a purely physical sense, human women are effectively always “ready” for sex. For tens of thousands of years, it has been physically possible to have penetrative sex with a woman regardless of her emotional or mental state or willingness to participate.

But here’s the trick: I’m pretty sure most men have noticed, at least in their youths and every morning for almost everyone else, that erections aren’t always directly related to arousal. (If you haven’t reviewed your Masters and Johnson lately erection for men is one of the earliest, and therefore least “committed” signs of arousal, corresponding to the point of initial lubrication in women rather than clitoral erections that, according to M&J, begin much further into arousal.) And so, sort of contrary to received wisdom, I’m wondering how many men have been able to sort of hide in plain sight their lack of interest behind their mechanical erections?

So! I’ve got a ton more to say about what this might mean (much of which, incidentally, I’ve been able to say only speculatively before) but I’m going to stop here for now.

For now I just want to say how nice it feels to find a little evidence to back up my strong, strong belief that men are no more automatic, reflexive, base-line-always-ready “sex class” members than women are inevitable, prim, lie-back-and-think-of-England members of the “no-sex” class. And that’s exciting to me because while “Doctor” John Gray plus everyone else back to Aristotle can claim that men are from Mars and women from Venus, I’ve come to realize that in fact the differences we do have are grounded almost entirely in circumstance rather than biological, gender, or evolutionary imperatives. And incidentally I think that’s a big deal because, well, frankly the status quo kind of sucks.

Because who, exactly, is served by a negative-sum system that severely screws women over in order to… prevent men from reaching their full potential either? If the only thing holding it up is lies about inevitability, and those lies start falling apart then…