Stand by Your Manhood (7 page)
Read Stand by Your Manhood Online
Authors: Peter Lloyd
Tags: #Reference, #Personal & Practical Guides, #Social Science, #Popular Culture, #Men's Studies
Meanwhile, the same women will happily use their ‘erotic capital’ – heels, make-up, push-up bras – to get what they want from men on a personal level. Why else do you think they dress in certain ways? To look and feel good, yes, but also to hypnotise. To have men fall at their feet. You see, a beauty that blinds is a power like no other. Something men can’t replicate or get from other men, which is why there’s so much fierce competition around women who want to be the source of it. Visit any northern city on a Saturday night and see for yourself. There’ll be scores of them walking around with no coats
on, even if it’s freezing, because no time must be wasted with clothes that conceal. That would hide their magic and give rivals an advantage.
Combined, this two-pronged attack targets male sexuality from both sides – on the one hand instilling guilt and shame, on the other offering release and vanity. What’s left in the middle is the increasingly narrow space where it can exist, and be expressed, freely. Then again, to keep it all going, even this orbits around a core, unspoken belief that failing to find women attractive is
the ultimate male shame.
People pretend this isn’t true, but it is. Why else do you think closeted men in Hollywood sign up for lavender marriages? Because a man who comes out socially neuters women. Rationally, of course, these women understand it doesn’t matter – but subconsciously, primitively in terms of human instinct and fantasy, which Hollywood trades on, there’s an unspoken disconnect. A rejection. These men have nothing to offer at the box office because they have nothing to offer in the bedroom.
Yes, OK, the film industry is mostly managed by men on an administrative level, but not really. It’s actually run by money. The money women spend. I personally know an A-list actor who’s gay – one who’s currently plastered over London’s buses because he’s the lead star in a major motion picture – but experts in LA still forbid him
from coming out, even though everybody in the industry knows, because it’d be professional suicide. The roles would slip away. Not as a result of horrible homophobic men, which is just one huge heterosexist prejudice, but because women have no power in that exchange. And, for them, that’s a turn-off.
This is why women don’t enjoy gay male porn
: because it means watching their obsoleteness right there on screen. It’s the same reason why straight men are conditioned to dislike gay guys. Everybody assumes it’s because they fear getting hit on – but that awkwardness, which is taught, can be between a father and a son. The fear isn’t sex. It’s the societal downgrading men get when they don’t fancy women.
‘Ah, but women love the gays!’ you’ll say. In some ways, yes, they do – because they cannot compete for a straight man’s attention. But ask her to date an openly bisexual man in the real world and I’d happily bet £100 the answer is no.
Therefore, men can wield so much more personal power if they get wise to it all and play the player. The reason gay men have more freedom to sexually express themselves than straight men is because they’re not adhering to women’s rules. The more heterosexual men understand this, the more control they can possess over their own sexuality – both politically and personally.
After all, they’re born with the same bodies, brains and biological drive for sex, yet approach it so differently. Gay men need not justify drinking in bars with go-go dancers, parkland cruising or sex saunas, whilst Grindr was downloaded a million times long before straight, single colleagues were obsessing over Tinder. Sex can be central to a gay man’s life and, religious cranks aside, he isn’t vilified for it. It’s never considered oppressive or sinister, just hedonistic. Straight men, however, have a very different experience. Yet the only variable between them, to put it crudely, is their partner’s anatomy – meaning male sexuality only becomes ‘bad’ when it involves a woman.
‘It’s all about politics,’ says Joe Kurt, expert therapist and sexologist.
I’m constantly coaching straight guys to be more direct with their partners, like gay men. So many of them feel shame – either because their wives shame them or they’ve got their own self-loathing from society – but, either way, they’ve stopped advocating for their own sexuality. They stop talking. Instead, they secretly watch porn or cheat. These men need to feel more confident about the things they have a sexual interest in, whilst women need to learn that a man’s sexual expression is equally valid.
Rather than being judged for it, men should expect
curiosity and empathy in the same way their girlfriends do. This should be a dialogue, not a monologue.
When I relay this to American female porn director Nica Noelle, she agrees. ‘The sense of shame, both private and public, attached to sex is a very complex, multi-layered syndrome that affects both men and women, but male sexuality is certainly viewed as far more negative and dangerous,’ she says. ‘What amazes me is that no one really challenges this view, including men. They’ve become so browbeaten they’re willing to accept almost anything women say about them.’
For guys at university, this approach is increasingly institutionalised. On the campuses of American colleges, for example, young men are automatically assumed to be a threat if they’re sexually active.
‘Reported rapes and sexual assaults reached a high point [on campuses] in the mid-1990s,’ the
Washington Examiner
’s Ashe Schow tells me.
At the time, women faced an uphill battle to bring their attackers to justice. They were told that if there was no blood, bruises or broken bones then they couldn’t have been raped. This led to a national movement to correct that injustice, but has since evolved into an overcorrection – where accusers are believed outright and the accused
has to figure out a way to prove them wrong. And, even if they’re exonerated, chances are their lives are still ruined.
One recent case is Peter Wu, who was expelled from New York’s Vassar College after losing his virginity to a fellow student, whose father is on the staff roll. Court documents describe the incident as ‘clearly consensual activity’ (she sent him a Facebook message the next day saying she ‘had a wondeful time’). Yet, despite being a non-native English speaker, he wasn’t allowed a legal representative to present his defence at the college hearing, which subsequently destroyed his academic career. He’s now suing them for damages.
Max Fraad-Wolf suffered a similar fate there. He was not allowed to be accompanied by parents or a lawyer when he was randomly summoned before a parallel criminal justice system made up of school officials, who later expelled him for sleeping with a girl – even though he was never formally charged with an offence.
Sadly, there are countless other examples. Too many to list here.
‘Worryingly, I don’t see this trend ending any time soon,’ Ashe adds.
If modern feminism can succeed in making colleges and universities a de facto court system, why wouldn’t they
take that victory to the population at large? I believe we will soon see a movement to change the definition of rape and sexual assault in the criminal justice system. And, if the college definitions of ‘consent’ are applied to the general public, then any man in the country could find himself accused. I’ve considered this outcome and realised that if such a broad definition is applied to the general public, then I could accuse any man I’ve ever dated of sexual assault. Of course I would never do that, but it’s a frightening possibility.
For a new generation of young boys, shades of this threat start early.
From childhood, they are painted as eternal predators whom girls should fear. Only last year a boy was suspended from school in America for kissing a girl on her hand – a gesture later deemed sexual harassment, irrespective of the fact he was six years old and too young to have sex. In a similar case, another boy was said to have committed ‘sexual misconduct’ after his peers goaded him into playfully, and momentarily, pulling his trousers down. The so-called ‘charge’ remains on his record.
Like a thousand pin pricks of disapproval, these messages, even if absorbed through osmosis, form a braille in the brain which reads: male sexuality is inherently bad. Over time, boys and young men internalise this, where
it manifests in various hushed ways that seem unique to us, but are actually felt by most men.
A friend of mine recently confessed after much-needed reassurance, that, as a boy, he worried about being a paedophile because, like him, the girl he fancied in 1988 was also eight years old. Another is so paranoid about what constitutes ‘enthusiastic consent’ that he asks women to record proof as a voice memo on his phone. Then there’s the mate who, on becoming a new dad, said he was uncomfortable changing his daughter’s nappy because he’s so over-conditioned to second-guess masculinity. It was only when his wife absolved him of this that he could relax.
Gentlemen, ENOUGH.
For centuries we’ve been wading through the shame associated with sex to try to reach a place of peace and resolve, rather than endless, exhausting, tail-chasing guilt. Please, for fuck’s sake – and I mean that literally – let’s not go back there. It offers no solution. Especially as there are already a hundred different man-shaped concerns regarding sex: Will I be good enough? Am I big enough? Will I get it up? Will I keep it up? Will I make her come – or will she fake it? And will she publicly evaluate my performance anyway? It’s a minefield.
Hence if this book came with a sound-effect button, it would elicit applause right now, because – in spite of all the above – we actually do a pretty good job. Not least
because the insidious assumptions about male sexuality are toxic. Which is why it’s important to remember that women are not on a sexual pedestal – ever.
But let’s not stop there. With the help of some world-renowned experts, here are a few more dignity-restoring facts which debunk the common myths about our sex lives:
Some myths, like cockroaches after a nuclear war, seem to live on no matter how much we try to kill them. One of these is the frequently repeated, rarely substantiated claim that men enjoy their sexual peak at eighteen, whilst women get theirs at around fifty.
This might seem innocent enough, but don’t be fooled. What it’s really saying is that guys go downhill the moment they officially become men, which is convenient, whereas women get to spend their lives forever ascending the sex scale on the carnal equivalent of a Stannah stairlift – steadily moving up without actually doing anything. Just getting up in morning means they’ve graduated from Kylie pre-Michael Hutchence to Kylie post-Michael Hutchence, like a modern-day Sandy from
Grease
. Thus, if we want to stay in the game and not be
cuckolded by a virile teen with Herculean powers, we’d better shape up. ’Cause they need a man etc.
No need to ask why perfectly healthy men who get erections at the drop of a hat are still buying Viagra online to maintain a mythical level of performance.
So what’s the truth? ‘The idea that men peak sexually at eighteen originates from the belief that hormone levels reach their apex in the teen years, but that’s not true,’ says Vanessa Marin, a California-based sexual psychotherapist.
Hormone levels don’t dip until much later in life, and excessive hormones don’t necessarily translate to amazing sex anyway.
Technique and confidence improve greatly as you age, and most people report that sex feels more enjoyable as they get older. When most men look back at the sex they were having when they were eighteen, they laugh.
Great news, guys. We fake it too.
OK, it might not be
great
news, because somebody, somewhere, is having bad sex, but it’s excellent in the sense that it’s a leveller. After years of endless put-downs
about our performance, it turns out women don’t always get it right either.
A recent online poll at AskMen.com surveyed 50,000 people on their bedroom antics and generated some surprising results: a third of men faked it every time. Similar research conducted by
Time Out
found a matching trend in New York, whilst a local University of Kansas study reached the same conclusion. Harvard University professor Dr Abraham Morgentaler even published a book about it, called
Why Men Fake It: The Totally Unexpected Truth about Men and Sex.
Unsurprisingly, the nagging question most people ask is: how on earth can men convincingly fake it – isn’t there proof? Not necessarily. If you’re wearing a condom you can quickly dispose of the evidence (or lack of), whilst without one a woman can hardly evaluate the amount of semen in her body.
Some bruised egos aside, this nifty little revelation might be a good thing, especially if it re-distributes a sexual responsibility men have single-handedly shouldered for years. Now nobody can afford to lay back and assume that dissatisfaction isn’t mutual – it is.
The sexual revolution certainly kick-started a change in how men and women fuck. Now, thanks to this latest revelation, it might just come full-circle. Or, at the very least, just come.
Wrong.
Like those Magic Eye pictures, the hidden suggestion here isn’t obvious, but it’s this: women’s bodies are complex and intricate, whilst ours are push-and-go.
The truth? Men and women can both enjoy multiple orgasms. Back in the ’70s, research couple William Hartman and Marilyn Fithian studied hundreds of willing participants for their book
Any Man Can
and found that, once they got the hang of it, men could do it just as much as women. The key, if you’re interested, is separating orgasm from ejaculation, which is controlled by separate nerve pathways. Sound too good to be true? Don’t be so sure.
‘Oh, it’s true,’ says Dr Beverly Whipple, a long-standing researcher recommended by the Kinsey Institute.
In my very own lab we documented a man who was capable of multi-orgasms and multi-ejaculations during the same erection over thirty-six minutes. Now, I teach a class that shows others how to do it too. I tell them how to contract their pelvic floor muscles at the point of ejaculatory inevitability so they can keep going as long as they want. I even show them how to evaluate their muscle strength by lifting a tissue with their erection, then
– progressively, over time – a face cloth, hand towel, then bath towel. After this, weights can be added for extra resistance. It can really change a man’s experience.
That said, this doesn’t mean you now need to invest hours trying to master it – simply having the option might be enough. As is knowing that we aren’t operating at some kind of sex handicap to women.
