The Unexamined Brutality of the Male Libido
- 7 years ago
The Unexamined Brutality of the Male Libido
In 1976, the radical feminist and pornography opponent Andrea Dworkin said
that the only sex between a man and a woman that could be undertaken without violence was sex with a flaccid penis: “I think that men will have to give up their precious erections,” she wrote.
Which is how we wind up where we are today: having a public conversation about
male sexual misbehavior, while barely touching on the nature of men and sex.
How naïve must you be not to understand that sex itself is about power every bit as much as it’s about pleasure?)
The men I know don’t actively discuss changing sexual norms.
Almost all are uninterested or unwilling to grapple with the problem at the heart of all this: the often ugly and dangerous nature of the male libido.
Sigmund Freud recognized the id, and knew it as “a chaos, a caldron full of seething excitations.”
But the point of Freud was not that boys will be boys.
Many men are quite willing to offer this recognition; it means they don’t have to talk
about who they are, which means they don’t have to think about what they are.
In the spring, I published a male take on the fluctuations of gender
and power in advanced economies; I was interviewed over 70 times by reporters from all over the world, but only three of them were men.
What any given man might say about gender politics and how he treats women are separate and unrelated phenomena.
In 1976, the radical feminist and pornography opponent Andrea Dworkin said
that the only sex between a man and a woman that could be undertaken without violence was sex with a flaccid penis: “I think that men will have to give up their precious erections,” she wrote.
Which is how we wind up where we are today: having a public conversation about
male sexual misbehavior, while barely touching on the nature of men and sex.
How naïve must you be not to understand that sex itself is about power every bit as much as it’s about pleasure?)
The men I know don’t actively discuss changing sexual norms.
Almost all are uninterested or unwilling to grapple with the problem at the heart of all this: the often ugly and dangerous nature of the male libido.
Sigmund Freud recognized the id, and knew it as “a chaos, a caldron full of seething excitations.”
But the point of Freud was not that boys will be boys.
Many men are quite willing to offer this recognition; it means they don’t have to talk
about who they are, which means they don’t have to think about what they are.
In the spring, I published a male take on the fluctuations of gender
and power in advanced economies; I was interviewed over 70 times by reporters from all over the world, but only three of them were men.
What any given man might say about gender politics and how he treats women are separate and unrelated phenomena.