I still don’t know much about men, and I certainly didn’t know much about them at 18 when I started having sex with them. I hadn’t encountered many of the species out in the wild so everything I knew came from popular culture. Men were only after one thing, and they would go to extraordinary lengths to get it. To me, all straight men were Joey Tribiani and Barney Stinson. I had been supplied with an armoury of troubling stereotypes of male sexuality which I had come to think of as the norm. Women were complex sexual beings, they were the ones with thoughts and emotions about sex. Women, and people outside of cis-gendered heterosexuality. But certainly not straight men. Never straight men.
That view was challenged by the real, actual, in the flesh man I met. He didn’t have a high libido at all. In fact, he had a lower libido than me. This threw me. I had scripted our sexual interactions in my head before we had even met. I knew how it was meant to go. This was a rewrite I hadn’t greenlit. I didn’t know how to act as the driving force and, to my shock, I found myself acting in ways I would never have stood for from a man. I didn’t respect his boundaries, I made him feel bad about his sex drive, and though I don’t like to admit it, I was probably emotionally manipulative.
You might be thinking, this sounds like a you problem. And at first, I thought so too. Every time he wasn’t in the mood, I assumed I was unattractive, not sexy enough. I worried that we weren’t meant to be together. I blamed him for being ‘broken’. Why couldn’t he be like a normal guy? But when I spoke to female friends, I found they too had been rudely informed that their male sexual partners were, in fact, three-dimensional beings and not cartoons with bulging heart eyes and wagging tongues.
There is a pervasive stereotype of male sexuality that is hardly examined, despite the fact that sexuality is now a well-established area of study. Straight men are expected to want sex all the time, be always DTF. They’re often expected to get hard immediately and stay that way. And, for the most part, they’re expected to take control and know what they’re doing. I am sure there are men that fit this model, but it seems all men are being reduced to the same experience.
A particular study looking at desire discrepancy in couples, ie when one partner has a higher sex drive than the other, found that men were no more likely to have a higher level of sexual desire than their female partner. In another study, the men interviewed described feeling pressured to demonstrate a high sex drive in order to appear more masculine and expressed worry that saying no to sex would upset their female partners.
It was around this point in my research that I started to feel pretty guilty, and considered sending flowers to my boyfriend’s office, but decided against it. What would you even write on that card?
There is a sexual binary that goes alongside the gender binary. Men have high-sex drives, women have low sex-drives. Men cum quickly and easily, some women never cum. It's obvious how harmful these stereotypes are, and if feminism has gone to great lengths to debunk one half of this myth, why not the other? This hypermasculine sexual stereotype not only prevents straight men and their partners from experiencing a more authentic and rich sexual life, but it also facilitates rape culture and the toxic idea that boys will be boys.
I decided to allow the men in my life the same space for emotional complexity as I had always allowed women. It may sound simple, but it required deconstructing ideas that, once I noticed them, seemed to be everywhere. We all remember being teased and chastised by aunts and uncles. Hands where we can see em lad. Wink wink, nudge nudge. Stereotypes are harmful, even when they are applied to the dominant, powerful group. Young men deserve our education, encouragement, and support just as much as young women. If we are to be truly sex-positive, straight men have to be included in the conversation.
Now, when my boyfriend doesn’t want to have sex, I know it isn’t about me at all, and I now understand that intimacy and desire can be shown in a variety of ways, not just vaginal sex. Examining male sexuality has enriched my own sex life, and, whilst it is hard, the results are worth it.
If you want to learn more, check out Not Always in the Mood: The New Science of Men, Sex and Relationships by Sarah Hunter Murray
Additionally, Sara Pascoe has brilliant, well-informed discussions on male sexuality (among many other topics) within her best-selling book Sex, Power, Money. Within it, she 'confront[s] her fear of the male libido', analysing porn, biology, evolution, and more.
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