The hidden side of the macho macho man?
I was intrigued, sorta, by this piece in yesterday's Guardian: While women like me write openly about their sex lives, few men now feel free to do the same.
I've been mulling about this and it fits in to various other musings I've had recently and over a longer period about masculinity, men and sex, etc (trust me, I'm a historian...)
Someone on one of my reading lists posted, within the last couple of weeks, a link to a piece on the impossibility of ever achieving the masculine ideal, and that while at least there is some critique of the impossibility of the demands upon women to fulfill an ideal of femininity, the fact that Ideal Manhood is equally impossible and contradictory is seldom addressed. (Readers, I failed to save the link.)
Unless a male sex life memoir were to be all 'Lo! Regard me, what an amazing cocksman am I!', at some point I think it extremely possible that it would have to deal with issues of vulnerability and sexual ineptitude and failure and rejections, etc. While there are lots of way creepy things about 'Walter', at least in My Secret Life he did actually fess up to impotence, worries re same and less than triumphant encounters, but that's a very unusual, pretty much unique, text.
Problematic, no?
I don't think this is about 'men's worst fear is that women will laugh at them'; I think it's a male-male thing (I may be wrong).
In the course of my thesis research, back in the medievalz pretty much (i.e. taking notes by hand on index cards) I frequently came across men feeling okay about revealing their problems to Female Expert, while mentioning that either they could not bring themselves to talk to a (male) doctor, or had done so and boy, was he lacking in empathy and concern.
(Some of the correspondents in question were doctors, who were just as bewildered about Teh Sexx as anybody else.)
There's also something I've seen in some of the historical phenomena I've studied, which is men's fear, loathing, disgust, etc, around their own sexuality. E.g. men totally buying in to the Great Masturbation Panic and Spermatorrhoea Paranoia. (It's possible that some of the 'keep prostitution out of sight' dynamic may come from issues around men's perceptions about their 'natural needs' that made prostitution 'necessary' being very negative - I mean, if these are natural and okay, why does the provision for them need to be hidden away and regarded as filthy and contaminating? but I may be pushing this too far.)
I also invoke here as very likely related the fact that far more male than female writers get even nominated for the Bad Sex Award, and less than an handful of dishonorees have been women.
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