The New Male Sexuality (5 page)

Being a male is like living in a suit of armor, ready for battle to prove himself. The armor may offer protection (although it’s not clear against what), but it’s horribly confining and not much fun. In fact, fun is exactly what it’s not. Maybe this is why so many men take to alcohol and other ways of deadening themselves. And it may help explain men’s fascination with sports.

In sports many of the usual prohibitions on males are lifted. A man can be as emotional and expressive about his favorite team and players as he wants. He can cheer them on with unabashed enthusiasm and what might even pass for love. He can be ecstatic and jump up and down when they win, and he can feel despair and weep when they lose. Playfulness and creativity are allowed. He can dress up in ridiculous hats and shirts, make up posters and poems and songs, and just be plain silly. There’s even a lot of physical contact: back-and butt-slapping, touching of shoulders and arms, and hugging. And cursing a bad call, a decision, or a mistake is a way of expressing anger without much risk. Sports is one of the few places where men can safely drop the facade of Mr. Uptight-and-in-Control and just play.

LEARNING ABOUT SEX

Through no fault of my own I reached adolescence. While the pressure to prove myself on the athletic field lessened, the overall situation got worse—because
now I had to prove myself with girls. Just how I was supposed to go about doing this was beyond me.… Nonetheless, duty called, and with my ninth-grade gym-class jockstrap flapping between my legs, off I went.
—Julius Lester

Between the ages of eleven and fourteen, children enter puberty. The brain signals the pituitary gland to increase its production of growth hormones and, in males, of testosterone. One of the first outward signs of puberty is a spurt of the rate of physical growth, unmatched since the first few years of life. During the next few years, in boys the penis and scrotum enlarge to adult size, facial and pubic hair appear, and sperm and semen are manufactured. By the age of thirteen or so, boys (and girls as well) are capable of sexual reproduction. And they feel different than before, trying to get accustomed to their new bodies, trying to make sense of new sensations they experience, trying to deal with the hormonal gush. Testosterone in boys and estrogen in girls make a crucial difference, causing the boys and girls to seek each other out, but also propelling them along separate paths that are already well developed.

Before they start having sex with partners or even themselves, boys know that sexual interest and prowess are crucial to being a man. The message permeates our culture. Here’s how the hero of a romance novel thinks of himself:
“He was, after all, a very physical man with a highly active sex drive. He enjoyed women, all kinds of women.” All kinds: short ones, tall ones, young ones, old ones, fat ones, thin ones, smart ones, dumb ones. He likes to get it on and presumably isn’t too particular about partners. After all, you can’t be a hero if you don’t have a whopping sex drive.

It’s interesting that in the liberated ‘90s we still have a double standard for males and females regarding sex. Boys will be boys, after all, and how can you be against a boy’s sowing his wild oats? We tend to admire males who get around. But although women are no longer expected to be virgins, God help any of them who has had sex with too many men, however many that might be.

Since sexuality is such a crucial component of masculinity, males feel pressured to act interested in sex whether or not they really are. They have to join in the jokes and banter. “Getting any, Fred?” “Oh yeah, more than I know what to do with.” And they have to face the derision of their peers if they’re still—God forbid—virgins at the advanced age of eighteen or twenty-three. This is a great setup for faking, lying, and feeling inadequate.

Perhaps no one has captured the angst of boys’ sexual learning better than Bill Cosby in an article he wrote about his first sexual nonexperience.
Believing that other boys are doing what he isn’t, Cosby asks his girlfriend if she’ll have sex with him. She agrees to do so next Saturday, at which point Cosby realizes he has a problem: He doesn’t know what sex is or what to do.

I’m trying to ask people questions about how they get some p-u-s-s-y. And I don’t want guys to know that I don’t know nothin’ about gettin’ no p-u-s-s-y. But how do you find out how to do it without blowin’ the fact that you don’t know how to do it? So I come up to a guy and I say, Say man, have you ever had any p-u-s-s-y? And the guy says, Yeah. And I say, Well, man, what’s your favorite way of gettin’ it? He says, Well, you know, just the regular way. And I say, Well, do you do it like I do it? And the cat says, How’s that? And I say, Well, hey, I heard that there was different ways of doin’ it, man. He says, Well, there’s a lotta ways of doin’ it, you know, but I think that … you know, the regular way.… I say, Yeah, good ol’ regular way of gettin’ that p-u-s-s-y.

As he continues his ruminations on the way to the girl’s house, Cosby shows how well he has learned that a man should be able to do it all on his own.

So now, I’m walkin’, and I’m trying to figure out how to do it. And when I get there, the most embarrassing thing is gonna be when I have to take my pants down. See, right away, then. I’m buck naked in front of this girl. Now, what happens then? Do you … do you just … I don’t even know what to do … I’m gonna just stand there and she’s gonna say, You don’t know how to do it. And I’m gonna say, Yes I do, but I forgot. I never thought of her showing me, because I’m a man and I don’t want her to show me—I don’t want nobody to show me, but I wish somebody would kinda slip me a note.

The sex that adolescent boys learn about is totally penis-centered. The focus is narrow-mindedly on what can be done with their frequent erections. But this penis orientation has to do with more than just immediate pleasure and release. Boys are aware, even if only vaguely, that having and using erections has something to do with masculinity. Popular literature abounds with statements linking the two, phrases about a woman grasping or feeling his “throbbing manhood” or reaching for the “essence of his masculinity.” And it goes even further: She reached for
him
, or she grasped
him
gently, the
him
in both cases referring to his penis. From a recent novel:
“Her hands left my neck and scrambled at my fly. More fumbling, eyes closed. Then she located me.” What she located, of course, was his penis. This creates an incredible confusion between personhood or identity and one’s sexual organ. No wonder men get so perturbed when their penis isn’t the “right” size or doesn’t operate according to spec. No penis, no person.

The sex that boys learn about is also largely impersonal. Although this message may serve one of nature’s goals (for men to spread their seed as widely as possible regardless of love or commitment) and therefore be programmed into men, there is no shortage of cultural messages to reinforce the idea. For example, one of the characters in Irving Wallace’s
Guest of Honor
is the secretary of state. He’s approached by the resident’s adviser for a favor requested by the First Lady. “I’d do her any favor, if she’d do one for me. I’d love to fuck her.” And then: “Not that I care for her that much. I just have a hunch she’d be fun between the sheets.”

The message is clear: For men, sex doesn’t have to be connected to anything except lust, and it doesn’t matter much toward whom it’s directed. A boy may have fantasies about girls in his classes, his friends’ mothers, neighbors, girls or women in the street, movie and TV stars, and anyone else. The female in his fantasies is simply a tool to gain release. And then to do it again, and again, and again. Next time it will probably be a different female. And he certainly doesn’t have to like the girl to want to have sex with her. This is clearly demonstrated in an old practice where teenage boys have sex with unpopular girls they despise and wouldn’t be seen with in daylight. It’s enough if she’ll give the boy sex. At this early age, we can see the start of the male split between love and sex. Sex is a thing unto itself for adolescent boys, cut off from the rest of life and centered on their desire for physical release and the need to prove themselves.

Girls go in a different direction. Perhaps because their genitals are internal, less obvious and less obtrusive than boys’, their attention isn’t constantly drawn downward. Probably of greater importance is that nature had a different task in mind for women than for men: to find a mate to help to care for and raise the children they produced. Although in recent years girls have started masturbating earlier and more frequently than in the past, the percentage of girls who do masturbate is far smaller than the percentage of boys. And the girls who do masturbate don’t do it as much as boys of the same age.

Teenage girls aren’t as focused on physical sex as boys. “Getting off” in itself isn’t nearly as important to them. Girls’ sexuality is channeled or
filtered through personal connection. They want to have sex with Prince Charming or Mr. Right in the context of a relationship. The idea of a group of girls getting together to have sex with Joe Dork just because he’s willing to put out is almost unthinkable. More so than men’s, women’s first sexual experience with a partner is likely to be with someone they love. And women are far less likely than men to seek sex for its own sake. It’s not surprising that when Lonnie Barbach and Linda Levine asked women what qualities make for a good sexual experience, relationship factors were mentioned most often: “Women talked about the security, comfort, and sharing that took place in the emotional relationship as being necessary prerequisites for good sex.”

Here we see a male-female difference that persists into adult life.
For women, sex is intertwined with personal connection. For men, sex is more a thing in itself, an act to be engaged in with or without love, with or without commitment, with or without connection. Although in surveys men agree with women that the best sex occurs in loving relationships, much more so than women they’ll take it any way they can get it.

That the sex boys learn about is performance-oriented goes without saying. What else could it be for a person who has already had over a decade of training in becoming a performance machine?

CHAPTER TWO

It’s Two feet long, Hard as Steel,
and Will Knock Your Socks Off:
The Fantasy Model of Sex

I learned so much crap about sex as a kid that it took most of the rest of my life to unlearn it and come up with something better. It’s still hard to believe how much hassle I caused myself and what a poor lover I was in my early years. I wish I could apologize to every woman I was with before I shaped up.—
Man, 49

When I started working with men with sex problems nearly thirty years ago, I was immediately struck by the absolutely fantastic beliefs they held. They seemed to believe, for example, that they needed a penis as big and hard as a telephone pole to satisfy a woman, that male and female orgasm were absolutely necessary, that intercourse was the only real sexual act, that good sex had to be spontaneous, without planning or talking, and that it was a crime against humanity if a man had any questions, doubts, or problems in sex. As I reflected on these beliefs, I was shocked to realize that I shared many of them myself, and so did most men who weren’t clients, and many women as well.

Where, I wondered, did we get these messages? They weren’t taught in most sex courses or in sex books by professionals. I was making the mistake, of course, of assuming that most knowledge about sex comes in formal ways, from courses and books. But before boys and girls get to sex courses and books, they already have had years of learning about the subject.

Whether we know it or not, whether it’s intended or not, sex education
goes on all the time, from the day we’re born until the day we die, with an especially heavy dose coming during puberty. Long before we are exposed to the realities of sex, our heads are filled with all sorts of nonsense. Every time we tell or listen to a sexual joke, watch a movie that depicts sexuality explicitly or implicitly, read a novel or see a television program that involves sex or adult relationships—at all these times and many others, either we learn something about sex or, more likely, something we already believe is reinforced and strengthened.