We need a safe space for straight male sexuality

Heterosexual men's desire is ordinary, boring and unshameful

Le Désespéré (The Desperate Man), self-portrait 1844-45, Gustave Coubert

There are few advantages to being a woman on social media. Abuse, harassment and patronizing male responses are all in constant supply. Women do, though, it appears to me, have one advantage on such platforms – it is more socially acceptable for them to express their sexual desire. A woman can share a picture of a man, often a significantly undressed man, with her exclamation of her ‘thirst’ for a ‘bae’ received as something positive, often echoed in her mentions by gay men, who enjoy similar prerogatives although, of course, only online. For these classes of people, publicly expressing desire still has something transgressive and empowering about it; this is not, and is certainly no longer, the case for straight men.

The journalist Helen Lewis puts this well:

Aside from its biological and cultural meanings, woman now often stands in for “person who talks openly about sex.” On social media, women cheerfully objectify the hot duke from Bridgerton and members of the Korean boy band BTS, while a man talking about female tennis players in similar terms would get pilloried as sexist. The Updike/Roth era is truly dead: We are primed to dismiss discussion of male desire as either locker-room vulgarity or pathetic neediness.

From ‘The Problem with Being Cool About Sex’, 03.09.2021, The Atlantic

Even if true, is this really a problem? After all, men have over the centuries dominated the field of eroticism¹ and objectification just as they have so many others, meaning a period of overcorrection, where females can have the stage to express their sexuality, is surely justified to redress the balance. This is the logic behind a lot of cultural decision making these days. But a further reason for this course correction is that male sexual desire and objectification genuinely can be humiliating, dominating and damaging to women, reducing them exclusively to sexual objects, and this mode of doing things – and selling things – has been so long baked into society that any attempt to counter it or rebalance it would, or so the argument goes, appear hopelessly disruptive.

You probably wouldn’t surprised, though, that I as a (by and large) heterosexual man do think there has to be a safe cultural space for men to express heterosexual desire. A caveat here; I would, as someone not entirely straight, still feel comfortable tweeting a photo of an attractive man, and imagine that would be allowed and even celebrated as evidencing a man ‘in touch with his sexuality’. What feels impermissible right now is to show the same public desire for a woman, unless, perhaps, she had died a very long time ago. (Saying that you fancy Veronica Lake - and frankly who doesn’t - still has something of the pop culture connoisseur about it). Isn’t this double standard fair, though, given the huge disparity in harassment women face?

In fact, allowing men to express their attraction to women even in mixed spaces might be genuinely beneficial to both sexes. I don’t mean making public the fabled ‘locker-room vulgarity’ Lewis references above – which I personally have never experienced, with my own experience of locker rooms being of them as full of men who talk exclusively about the preceding or imminent sporting contest – but a space where men can, freely and without fear, express their attraction to and appreciation of the opposite sex. It is also my contention that, if this space existed today, our current critical culture would be absolutely unable to deal with it.

We can see this in the way tributes are paid to men on various men’s days and male-centred celebrations in the listing a series of stereotypically feminine adjectives and associations (‘Real men sew. Real men eat ice cream in their pyjamas. Real men weep at Bette Midler movies’); all of which I am up for including in the remit of normal masculine behaviour but with the insistence that real men also fight, compete and chase after women. Sometimes it feels that it’s currently more socially acceptable to say that you’re into kink, whipping, bondage or being pissed on than that your real thing is boring old heteronormative male desire.

Here’s why I advocate for such spaces: The present situation around sexual expression is almost designed to make straight men go a bit nuts. At present there exists the combination of the lack of a safe, healthy space for men to express their sexuality, and a surrounding culture which is relentlessly hypersexualized. At some point in history, probably quite early on, someone made the discovery that feminine bodies look good and can be used to sell things, and so our culture is saturated with female bodies as product; it is a sort of ‘look but don’t touch’ culture, epitomized by the rise of sites like ‘Only Fans’, where you can pay for visual access - but no actual closeness, of course.

At the same time, to express the sexual desire this bombardment of images provokes in a man is risking cancellation or being stigmatized as a creep, a set-up rather precisely designed to confuse men, particularly young men who as of yet lack the tools to manage their sexual desires in a mature fashion. This is the young man who, watching the ‘Wet Ass Pussy’ video, finds that this hymn to female empowerment both appears to make him fantastically horny and also that stating this is a bit sus. One solution is, of course, cracking down on the proliferation of sexual imagery in media and in particular advertising, although this doesn’t seem to me to be a particularly progressive position to have arrived at; for, just as men should have the right to express their desire without shame, so women should have the right to move through the world as they wish without a shred of harassment.

It struck me as a younger man that while progressive culture officially wanted sympathetic and emotional men my female friends would often reward more stereotypical masculine behaviours in their private lives. They were hung up on men who were physically strong, didn’t call, and were often generally unemotional. This gap between policy and outcome was all rather confusing, and while it’s not exactly true that the worse I treated the opposite sex the more success I had with them, it is fair to say the more I disengaged and worked on myself the more opportunities with women presented themselves. There was, I regret to say, a certain froideur which seemed to inspire female interest. It’s almost as if the best thing you can give someone you would like to be with is a certain space to project onto you what they want you to be, rather than spoiling things by evidencing who you actually are.

Most young men, liking the opposite sex, will want to learn how to attract them. I do not think young men should be stigmatized about behaving in whatever way seems to maximise the chances of this– after all, much better to get it out of your system younger rather than later, before the ultimate anaphrodisiac of marriage and commitment. Yet at the same time it’s unfair to young men to provide them with alternatives to toxic masculinity – ‘be open about your feelings, cry, and prioritize empathy over strength’ – without acknowledging that that behaviour is as unlikely to get them as many sexual rewards as earning decent money and growing a beard. As a Twitter acquaintance recently observed, what women want is a bear that can cook.

Prove you reward intellect in men by buying me a Ko-Fi

I have met countless women who have spoken about their ‘natural desire’ for a baby, of being struck by it like a tidal wave, and I would never dream of telling them that was something wrong or deluded about such a wish. Yet many of these same women would be equally appalled at their male partner having declaring an interest in other women, or desiring sexual novelty, when it seems that for most straight men – and, of course, many women – those things are just as natural. We cannot treat society as subordinate to biology in some instances and absolutely superior to it in others, at least not without people ending up rather confused.

The pop evolutionary explanation of the male drive for sexual novelty is that that males naturally seek to maximise their potential mates and reproductive opportunities - though I am certain that this is too reductive to be true, not least because most men are far too lazy to keep up with the admin polyamory involves. What I can say though is that the age of 39, married and definitely out the game, I still instantly assess every woman I meet on the grounds of sexual attractiveness, and this is an absolutely automatic and unstoppable reflex. The men you love in your life do that too, even the ‘nice’ ones, and I refuse to feel bad about it now or in future. The societal understanding is that I will not act on it.

Finally, women look good. Thousands of years of patriarchal culture have hymned the eternal feminine of course due to patriarchal domination and a desire to control feminine bodies, but also because feminine bodies are relentlessly pleasurable to look at, and beauty inspires in us a desire to share it. And to show it; I refuse to believe every female artist’s model was forcibly coerced into sitting for a nude. It’s not sleazy or objectifying to say this, just an aspect of life and while we can argue with, celebrate or even lament it, I don’t think we can do away with it. Why would we? It sparks joy. Men should be able to express their joy in female beauty, relish its countless wonderful varieties, without fear of guilt or shame; the answer to the centuries of hang-ups men and women both have inflicted on the female body is not to try and make men feel similar levels of shame in their own immutable characteristics now.

Perhaps, for those unconvinced by what I am saying, I might offer you a final example of the series ‘Fleabag’ and its reception. A woman coming out and talking about her messy sex life and awful behaviour in relationships is sharing the liberating truth, and celebrated for it. Now imagine a young straight male comedian doing the same, releasing a frank series about their perverse desires and relationship screw-ups. What do you think the response would be? I can imagine the op-eds about ‘toxic masculinity’ now. For me it would inevitably involve a process of shaming the male comedian for their heteronormative, objectifying desires, no matter how incisively or artfully they were expressed. And that itself is a shame, because men have good and funny stories to tell about the endless humiliations of horniness too, and all of us miss out if men don’t get to share.

1. There is, of course, a long and fascinating tradition of erotic writing by women, ranging from Sappho to Histoire d’O. As a female friend of mine once put it to me, ‘Men like pictures, women like words.’