What Does a Sexually Empowered Straight Man Look Like?

Because, to be honest, I don’t think I’ve ever met one.

You guys have all heard this story before. When my dad gave me the dreaded sex talk, he focused a lot on the SUPER GROSS and probably even MEAN things boys wanted to do to girls, citing his own experience as a man to add legitimacy to his claims that all men are terrible fuck monsters. At the time I thought it meant there was something wrong with me, because, as far as I could tell, my own ideas about boys were coming from a distinctly manly place. At least according to my dad. Since then, I’ve felt indignant at a culture that creates this double standard where men get to have sexual fantasies, while women only get sexual fears.

What men want to do to women is gross, while what women want to do to men is tender. Meaning that wanting to fuck someone’s ass or mouth is a man thing. While wanting to make them pie and stare lovingly into their eyes is a woman thing. BORING.

Not being a man, my perspective on how this affects them is severely lacking. But this thread got posted on Reddit today, and it tied so many things together for me in a whole new way. The level of sexual repression in our society effects all of us, and while women have books and blogs, and podcasts about our sexual repression, the men I know tend not to have a place for theirs. I’ve seen it from both sides. Man friends frustrated at the fact that they feel inherently predatory, even when they just want someone to bake pies for. Women friends who want wild monkey butt-sex and get told their partners are uncomfortable with “disrespecting” them like that.

Something that came up on the thread multiple times was that men are made to feel like “giving in” to their sexual fantasies would turn them, Jekyll and Hyde style, into uncontrollable rape machines. Having never been a man, but also having had a shameful fear of my own mind, I can say from experience (but not experience, if you get me) that the unexamined psyche, sexual or otherwise is a dark alley of shame and ignorance. Leave it, and it will fester. Shine a light, and the damnedest thing happens. It’s never as bad as you thought it was.

But what do I know? I’m just your average, dirty minded lady. Maybe it’s true and my myriad of violent fantasies are really very innocent when compared to the kind of horrors that reside in the male mind. But I have to say, I doubt it. Anybody interested in comparing, comment, email, Facebook, Twitter, whatever. The reason I don’t talk about this stuff is mostly audience consideration. It’s the same reason I don’t spend every hour of every day completely naked. I don’t want to burn out someone’s retinas.

Boys grow up seeing men as violent aggressors and women as unwilling victims. They’re taught that men are strong and women are weak. That, in addition to being stewards of our honor, they are expected to tame themselves in order to protect us, frequently from the very thing we’ve been wanting all along. Not to imply that women crave domination anymore than men crave to be dominant. But that, in general, people crave sex, and in the universal, we crave love and recognition. That can’t happen if one partner is terrified of the other. And I mean to say that men are terrified of women. Of what they are to women, or what they could be.

Show of hands, how many rapists read this and stopped raping people?
Show of hands, how many rapists read this and stopped raping people?

Shitty archetypes like The Nice Guy come out of this lack of self-actualization. Sex is an apatite that we, as a culture, have a massive disorder about. Nobody stands near chips hoping some will fall into their mouth. (Nobody human, anyway.) But Nice Guys will stand near ladies hoping they’ll trip face-first on some dick, specifically theirs. In a place where only creeps ask for sex, and only whores suggest it, there’s no comfortable way to express sexual interest, especially if you don’t know anything about women from a lifetime of shit media portrayals and moralizing tales of damsels in distress.

And yeah, I doubt that those Red Pill douche bags who do things like threaten to rape feminist commentators for mentioning how poorly fat women get treated in the media would consider themselves to be terrified of woman. But they’re even more fucked then the Nice Guy, because they’re reacting so true to acculturation that they might as well be an elected official sucking heavy corporate donation dick for all the real choices they’re making about their lives.

Sexual liberation sold us a bill of goods that we have yet to see delivery on. There’s this idea that we’re all out here in hook-up culture, having the kind of fun, amazing sex our parents would have had if they weren’t so busy making the world a sex-friendly place for us to live in. But hook-up culture is a sad lie we tell them to make them think we’re not just as (un)fucked as they were and still are. Even people hooking up aren’t having the kind of fun the TV says they are. I’ve had pap smears less stressful than some of my friends legendary hook-ups.

Overall, we are a generation of awkward masturbators, afraid to reach out and fuck somebody. Afraid to be embarrassed, afraid to offend the very person or people we should revel in, and yet, we are equally afraid of ourselves. For as much as we seem to jerk it, there’s almost no masturbation culture. It’s a strictly business kind of business, especially for straight guys. Just a glance at the sex toy market shows who gets to play with their JO time. The vast majority of solo sex aids are made for and marketed to women and gay men.

Now, I’m not trying to say that women have any responsibility to help straight men with their masturbatory man pain, just because I happen to be female and writing this post means nothing. In fact, I don’t even really think I should be the one writing about this. It’s just that nobody else seems to be, and even though I can’t entirely relate doesn’t mean I don’t see what’s happening to a lot of my male friends.

Sex is fun. Or at least it should be. We have more of an opportunity now than any other generation before us to actually make it as fun as we can. So let’s get our thumbs out of our asses (or put them in, as the case may be) and make this a funner world for sex.