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…

Depending on how indoctrinated you are your first reaction to this post might be “couldn’t happen.” Or even “even if you were right it couldn’t happen.” We’ll see.

So!

Everybody knows men want sex more than women. Everybody knows it’s always been that way and it always will. Everybody knows that if nothing else that purely reflexive oxygenation reflex (which actually persists in most males of all ages most of the night) known as the “morning erection” puts men on the sexual “offensive” far more than women could ever be prepared to cope with.

Oh yeah, and everybody knows that men are just such horndogs that if women tried to turn the tables by, say, sitting straddle-legged, cupping men’s asses without asking, assessing them openly and frankly, making coarse assertions like “mmm, I bet his cock is as long as my arm,” and otherwise indiscriminately bringing it on that men would just soak it up like hounds on a ham sandwich.

Maybe so, maybe no. I actually happen to believe, very strongly, men and women are both people and that, being people and all our similarities far, far outweigh our differences. In fact they outweigh them to such an extent that much of what we consider immutable gender dynamics is actually far more the dynamics of circumstance.

And yes, yes, we’re all well aware of the dynamics of gender since we’ve all been through some pretty common variation of a K-12 education… or at least by the time we’re old enough for this website to register as even remotely interesting to us we’ve been through approximately 18 years of the gender dynamics of conventional youth.

Of course… looking much further than those first 18 years… looking instead towards, say, the 18 years between 37 and 50 the picture changes considerably, often with male partners losing steam against the ongoing or even increasing libidos of their female partners. (Any of my readers had that experience? Just asking cause I could be totally mistaken.)

And even if I was mistaken what’s true about the lusty behavior of young men is so overwhelming it surely must be immutable, right? Well, not exactly.

It seems that for a sizable number of young men, the fact that they can get sex whenever they want may have created a situation where, in fact, they’re unable to have sex. According to surveys, young women are now as likely as young men to have sex and by countless reports are also as likely to initiate sex, taking away from males the age-old, erotic power of the chase.

“I know lots of girls for whom nothing is off limits,” says Helen Czapary, a junior at the University of Maryland. “The pressure on the guys is a huge deal.”

...

One can argue that a young woman speaking her mind is a sign of equality. “That’s a good thing,” says Sawyer, father of four daughters. “But for some guys, it has come at a price. It’s turned into ED [a marketing acronym for “erectile dysfunction” —fl] in men you normally wouldn’t think would have ED.

Discussion here.

And besides maybe the famous old Third Wish joke is a total fluke. (This should be particularly funny, then, to my male readers who are thinking what a foolish fellow this figleaf is being today.)

A man was sitting alone in his office one night when a genie popped up out of his ashtray and said, “And what will your third wish be?”

The man looked at the genie and said, “Huh? How can I be getting a third wish when I haven’t had a first or second wish yet?”

“You have had two wishes already,” the genie said, “but your second wish was for me to put everything back the way it was before you made your first wish. Thus, you remember nothing, because everything is the way it was before you made any wishes. You have one wish left.”

“Okay,” said the man, “I don’t believe this, but what the heck. I wish I were irresistible to women.”

“Funny,” said the genie as it granted his wish and disappeared forever. “That was your first wish, too.”

And by now I’m pretty sure pretty much everyone has come up with at least one current-paradigm reason why this won’t work — risks of pregnancy, fear of disease, men can never get enough, men would still divert towards whatever minority of women didn’t participate, men would just be violent towards women about something else, women are just too delicate to have sex one time more often per day than their partners can, laws designed traditionally to protect women’s sensibilities would protect men’s… all of which could certainly be true and I wouldn’t want to discount it. (There’d certainly be some repercussions.)

But flexing the idea, conducting the thought experiment of a contrarian Lysistrata project, raises some interesting points about our assumptions about gender dynamics.

I mean, in modern times we’ve always assumed that women have been kept economically, physically, educationally, and socially down and out in order to preserve… to ensure… men’s sexual access to them. But what if, at some time in the distant past, it was the other way around? What if the whole shebang, the whole deprecation of women, the whole holding them economic and violent hostage, of pressuring them to parcel out sex, was imposed for men’s benefits yes, and imposed out of violence and patriarchy yes, but was also imposed in order to preserve men’s self-image as sexual conquerors? Because minus all the second-classing and oppression, without the illusion that women aren’t even sexual beings in the first place, that rather than being the sex class of classical feminist theory women have to be relegated to “no-sex” class to protect men’s sensibilities…

Like I say, if you’re really invested in the current paradigms then you’re not going to want to confront the question. You might even say it’s typical male wish-fulfillment. And that’s totally, totally fine. Current paradigms have gotten humanity to the point we’re at and if it’s something you’re really invested in then it makes perfect sense to defend it… not to look too close at fundamental assumptions about ourselves or others… not rock the boat… :-)

Side A would have it that heterosexual, strictly penis-in-vagina intercourse is one of the best arguments in favor of non-casual monogamy: it’s possible for the average woman to have an orgasm from thrusting alone but it generally takes quite a bit of practice.

Side B would have it that sex isn’t even sex if it doesn’t end in penis-in-vagina thrusting.

Side Me would have it that gee, maybe that’s one more reason we hear more men than women waxing enthusiastic about casual sex.

—-

Side C would have it that heterosexual, strictly penis-in-vaginal intercourse is one of the best arguments in favor of non-casual monogamy: it’s extremely easy to become pregnant that way and under traditional circumstances casual sex plus pregnancy equals unsupported single mother.

Side D would have it that sex isn’t even sex if it doesn’t end in penis-in-vagina thrusting.

Side Me would have it that gee, maybe that’s one more reason we hear more men than women waxing enthusiastic about casual sex

—-

Of course some people think that women, as the “no-sex” class, just aren’t ever directly interested in sex…

Men pursuing casual sex do so for casual sex as an end in itself. Now some women may have casual sex in this way, but they are in a tiny minority. In fact, the idea of indiscriminate sex disgusts most women. To most women, “casual sex” is not casual at all, but part of evaluating a potential long term mate.

Source: SoSuave.com

To be fair to Ivan Appleton, the author of the above snippet, acknowledges that long-term sexual interest is one of the ulterior motives…

Remember, she’s out to find a long-term mate, and part of what a long-term mate has is strong sexual attraction for her. When women complain about men who are “only after one thing”, the emphasis is on “only”.

... but it’s still presented as ulterior motive rather than present desire.

—-

Of course as long as Parts A, B, C, and D, above are combined with a social structure that is, in the words of Helen E. Fisher,

...a relic of our long agricultural past, when women were pawns in elaborate property exchanges at marriage…

Source: Anatomy of Love; 1992

then simply suggesting “lighten up a little, bbbbaby” probably isn’t going to cut it.

Via all kinds of sources check out this New York Times article about Berkeley math professor David Gale’s arithmetic lesson on averages. Bottom line is that multiple surveys show that the the number of partners reported by men does not add up to the number of partners reported by women. You’d expect a little margin-of-error trouble but not the roughly 75% difference that keeps showing up.

Now much ink is spilled on questions about how this could be — about whether men are misrepresenting themselves (much evidence for this exists), or whether it’s women who are prevaricating (much evidence for this exists), or whether it’s men visiting all those Canadian prostitutes that UK and US researchers overlook (um, some but not very much evidence of this exists, and, again, definitely not enough to explain that 75% gap.)

Professor Gale sidesteps all that.

Dr. Gale added that he is not just being querulous when he raises the question of logical impossibility. The problem, he said, is that when such data are published, with no asterisk next to them saying they can’t be true, they just “reinforce the stereotypes of promiscuous males and chaste females.”

In fact, he added, the survey data themselves may be part of the problem. If asked, a man, believing that he should have a lot of partners, may feel compelled to exaggerate, and a woman, believing that she should have few partners, may minimize her past.

“In this way,” Dr. Gale said, “the false conclusions people draw from these surveys may have a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy.”

Source: New York Times Week In Review: Gina Kolata, Aug. 12, 2007

And that sounds about right to me. If, based on what you hear about other people, your “number” seems higher or lower than average you’re probably going to feel at least some inclination to compare yourself. And depending on what the social stakes are (whichever way you depart from that “norm”) you’re going to be aware of the social consequences whether or not you choose to “correct” our number when asked. We don’t even have to be sexually repressed to fudge our responses (though it certainly doesn’t hurt.)

Anyway, next time the debate about sex-partner reporting disparities comes up think about whether and how (mostly how) previous measurement influences further measurement. And it will keep coming up so long as women are relegated to the “no-sex” class and as long as men relegate ourselves to the “sex class.”