The Male Libido ... Is It Brutal?

Stephen Marche

In "The Unexamined Brutality of the Male Libido" in the New York Times, Stephen Marche has it that: "For most of history, we’ve taken for granted the implicit brutality of male sexuality. ... How are we supposed to create an equal world when male mechanisms of desire are inherently brutal?"

I think Marche is wrong. Male "mechanisms of desire" are not "inherently brutal."

Yes, the recent upwelling of powerful men being credibly accused of sexual abuse against unwilling women shows that some men are sometimes brutal in their sexual expressions. Men "from Bill Cosby to Roger Ailes to Harvey Weinstein to Louis C.K. to Al Franken and ... Charlie Rose and John Lasseter" have indeed acted brutally at times. But I'd be willing to bet those same men have most often acted gently in expressing their libidos. So have virtually all of us men.

Yet the questions Marche implicitly raises are valid ones. Why do some men's sexual and romantic lives sometimes turn brutal? Is that happening more often today than it used to? (Keep in mind that most of the allegations against Weinstein et al. go back many years, even decades.) How can we men, starting right now, arrange for it to happen less often, en route to some virtual vanishing point? If, as Marche says, sexual and social norms have been changing, what further changes would be needed to tamp down sexual predation? And is not the current discussion a fitting prelude to their much-needed arrival?

More on Misogyny

Amanda Bennett, author-journalist and former editor of The Philadelphia Inquirer, wrote the piece "Snapchat CEO’s e-mails show need to confront misogyny" for the the June 2 Washington Post op-ed page. It echoes my own beliefs about the rise of shameless misogyny in today's America.

Bennett writes of certain e-mails, recently published, that went back and forth among Kappa Sigma frat boys at Stanford back in 2009-10 and how those messages betokened a craze for misogynistic sexual behavior among many — though by no means all — young men nowadays.

Snapchat Inc. CEO
Evan Spiegel

Snapchat Inc. CEO Evan Spiegel, who has apologized for his crass undergraduate behavior, was apparently one of the frat boys who took part in the Kappa Sigma crudities.

"Let us .... thank both him and the anonymous leaker," Bennett writes, "for the x-ray vision they have given us into a world that many suspected existed but had no real way to know for sure. Then, after giving thanks, I would like to exhort all mothers, fathers, college administrators, young men, young women and, above all, employers to take a deep breath and read the e-mails in their entirety."

Then, says she, all those concerned should "consider: Are these just words? Clearly there is a lot of hormonal prancing there. Yet, given what we know about binge drinking on campus, I think we all know that the references to blackouts are real. Aren’t the references to sexual domination and contempt real, too? And if we long ago acknowledged that what we now only coyly refer to as the N-word is a real word with real powers to hurt, then why do we feel differently about allowing ourselves, our daughters, our sisters to be called bitches and whores as if it were funny?"

My attitude: Bennett is being, if anything, way too tentative here. There can be no doubt — none at all — that applying the B-word and the W-word to women in general is beyond the pale of honorable, decent, civilized behavior. It always has been, it always will be.

There was a time, long ago, when the prancing hormones of young men led them to become knights errant, sworn to uphold the dignity and honor of womankind. Women have more recently said, "We don't need to have our dignity and honor upheld by men; we can do that ourselves. And we don't want to be put on a pedestal."

Men seem to have responded by now dragging women through the sexual mire instead.

Can't there be a happy medium?

Amanda Bennett

Finding it is mainly up to the young men themselves, I'd say. Bennett writes, "Young men: I completely agree with the #notallmen hashtag. It is clearly not all men who are this vile. You who are not need to stand up against those who are."

I'd add that there needs to be a way for men to swear an oath of proper behavior towards women. Oaths are sworn before others, publicly. They are not taken privately. Wouldn't it be nice if the oaths they swear to when joining a college fraternity would contain such language?

Finding the happy medium, Bennett says, also will have to involve parents, schools, employers ... and the young women themselves. She addresses this last group by saying, "You are party to this, too. Read those e-mails. If you like what you see, keep going to those [fraternity] rages. Sex on your own terms is great, ladies. But are you sure it is on your terms? Is it sex you read in those e-mails, or power? Is that really where you want to be on the power spectrum."

Feminists point out that sex was really about power, back in women's pre-liberated past. It still is today. It's just that men have nominally lost their former positions of power ... so they've now begun trampling women beneath their prancing hormonal feet instead. The relative power relationship is the same. But now it's concealed not by the veil of centuries-old tradition but by the haze of alcoholic stupor.