Delusional? Aspirational? or what?
I was reading this interesting piece about sex positivity and critical analysis, and encountered the following about What Men Want:
they always tell me that they want a partner who’s down for whatever and wants it all the time.
Okay, in context that is really young men who have probably not done a lot of reality-testing about their desires and fantasies.
On one level this is a shallow sexist dream which is not even about a partner who is actually 'down for whatever' and 'wants it all the time': what they actually mean is a partner who is down for whatever they want to try or have seen in porn, and wants it whenever they do.
I think if they found a partner who did want it all the time, even when they did not, and whose downness for whatever included whatevers that were way outside their own comfort zone, they might find themselves to be seriously discomfited.
(Some years ago I read a literary sort-of sffy type of novel in which someone was putting something into the water supply, or something like that, so that women were going into oestrus: and the protag's wife started being unusually periodically sexually forthcoming, but not, I thought, in a way that to me mapped to 'woman with imperative desire for her own gratification' rather than 'male fantasy of male gratifications performed'.)
I also wonder a bit about the context, and whether this is expressed in public or private, but generally, is this really at bottom about a certain and possibly aspirational model of masculinity which is about being the kind of man who needs someone who wants it all the time and will accommodate any whatever that crosses his mind. (There is a sharp comment in, if I recollect aright, The Female Eunuch, apropos of a male-gazey novel, and the extremely sexually-gymnastic female love interest, and how a woman like that is actually some kind of comment on the macho-macho qualities of Our Hero.)
I feel another woman/car analogy coming on, whereby the fast sporty car thing is also about performing a certain kind of masculinity.
I do think the writer of that piece might have interrogated the kinds of expectations and attitudes that affect men and get expressed in statements similar to the one quoted.
(Not sure how coherent this is - Friday evening, long tiring week.) This entry was originally posted at http://oursin.dreamwidth.org/2201667.html. Please comment there using OpenID. View
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