by Rachel Hills
But Alpha Epsilon Eta is not your stereotypical fraternity. It is one of what sociologists have identified as a new breed of frat, born out of a more inclusive brand of masculinity that began to emerge in the early 1990s. Fraternity life has historically been criticized by feminists and other progressives for the negative attitudes it fosters toward women and gay men (and for good reason—research shows that fraternity men are three times more likely to commit sexual assault than other men on college campuses), but Alpha Epsilon Eta counts openly gay students among its members. They don’t haze in the conventional sense, instead asking new members to study the chapter’s history and recite chants from Stanley Kubrick films. As for their attitudes toward women, I was introduced to the Alpha Epsilon Eta men because a young woman I had interviewed had slept in a spare bed at the fraternity for a couple of months when she was in between houses. The manifesto on their wall urges “respect for all womankind.”
And Max—a tall, analytical twenty-year-old with glasses and a buzz cut—is not your stereotypical frat guy. Like many of the fraternity men I met in my travels, Max didn’t come to college planning to join a frat. A cross-country runner, he chose his school based on its athletics program. But when he neared the end of his freshman year and realized that most of the nonathlete guys he knew were members of the same fraternity, joining seemed like the natural thing to do.
Not all of the fraternities on Max’s campus are like Alpha Epsilon Eta. He tells me about the “douchebag fraternity,” as he and his friends describe them, “who think that they’re the best thing that has ever walked the earth.” Those guys, he says, are proud that they don’t have any gay members and only hang out with women when they’re looking to hook up.
But Max believes that the emotionally detached and macho brand of guyhood is on the decline. “I mean, you do see it,” he admits. “Those guys who are all, like, I’m the big, strong sports guy who likes to drink and party, I wear my hat backwards, et cetera. And you will continue to see guys like that as long as there are people who think that stuff looks cool. But most men aren’t like that. At least, most men I talk to aren’t,” he clarifies. Max doesn’t think that most Greek guys are like that, either. “The stereotypes usually lag behind the people,” he observes.
Masculinity scholars such as Michael Kimmel and Raewyn Connell argue that manhood has traditionally been defined by what it is not, as much as it is defined by what it is. In the conventional, orthodox view of manhood, “real men” prove their masculinity by being strong, confident, self-reliant, adept with women, and good at sports. They also assert it by distancing themselves from that which is defined as not masculine—which historically has meant anything feminine and anything that might hint at being something other than heterosexual.
These rules are starting to change, exemplified by young men like Max, who have grown up in a time in which homophobia is on a rapid decline and in which gender equality is not just a political movement but an accepted fact of life. But the conventional view of what it means to be a man hasn’t disappeared entirely, either—especially when it comes to sex.
Max and his friends may be on what he describes as the “progressive track” of masculinity, but he is aware that there is a gap between his experiences and the masculine ideal that is presented in popular culture. “There is definitely an idea that men should be trying to have sex with as many women as possible,” says Max, who has only slept with his current girlfriend. “I know guys who say they’ve slept with twenty people. It’s a little intimidating.”
In the same way that straight people’s sex lives have historically been treated as apolitical, a state so neutral and ingrained that it does not warrant serious discussion, so too are men’s experiences often left out of the ongoing public dialogue around sexuality. Female sexuality is contentious and politically fraught, bound up in questions of empowerment and oppression. But men’s sexuality is framed as something that just “is”—an uncomplicated biological urge.
In some ways, this ordinariness is a reflection of men’s continued institutional power: male sexuality does not need to be discussed because it is not considered a problem. But the absence of straight men from public conversations about sexuality also means that expectations of what men should do, be, and desire when it comes to sex too often go unchallenged. It renders the cornucopia of ways that men experience sexuality invisible and dissolves them into one single, streamlined march, making young men arguably even more vulnerable to the Sex Myth than young women. In this chapter, we will look at how the Sex Myth is shaping men’s experiences of sex and relationships, and how young men are challenging the constraints of conventional masculinity in their own lives.
“No Memory and No Conscience”: The Sexually Insatiable Man
Men, we are told, want sex in a way that women just don’t. It is the impulse that puts a twinkle in their eye when they’re sitting in class listening to a boring lecture and plagues them whenever they pass an attractive person on the street. Where women’s desires are depicted as passive and malleable, easily influenced by the vagaries of popular culture, emotion, and how much housework they’ve done that day, men’s sexuality is portrayed as fixed and unchanging, an unrelenting biological need. Men thirst for sex like dogs thirst for water, whereas women can take it or leave it. Men will fuck anyone who will let them, whether they find them attractive or not, but women seek to bond with a single partner who will stick around to provide for their babies.
These binaries are not just embedded in our culture; they are seemingly inscribed in the very physicality of our bodies. The alternately exterior and interior design of human genitalia means that men’s sexual arousal is literally more visible than women’s. If a teenage boy gets an erection at the swimming pool, everyone can see. If he has a sex dream, his semen stains the sheets. If a girl dreams about sex or fantasizes about one of her classmates as she glances at them from across the room, no one will know but her.
As most men will tell you, an erection does not always signal sexual desire—it can as easily be a response to warm air or water, a full bladder, or even the vibrations of a bus. But the erection’s seemingly spontaneous nature serves as a visual reinforcement of the idea that men’s desire is both an essential expression of their masculinity and something that occurs independently of their brains.
Josh, a thirty-year-old mobile phone app developer from Johannesburg, South Africa, recalls his embarrassment as a teenager when he was asked to come up to the front of the class to solve a math equation in the midst of an unwanted erection. “At first I said I didn’t want to, but the teacher thought I was just being shy, so pretty much forced me to do it. I had to make some sort of nifty shirt/trousers/belt rearrangement, and walk with my arm by my side in order not to be seen,” he remembers. “It can be very frustrating to realize that you don’t have full control of how your penis behaves in certain situations.”
A man’s penis is not just another part of his body, like his torso or his knees. It is treated as a force unto itself that, as the actor Robin Williams once put it, “has no memory and no conscience.” It is a view that simultaneously abases men while privileging their sexual needs over the needs of their (presumably female) partners. If men are unable to control their own desires, it falls to women to manage them instead, whether that means having sex they don’t want in order to maintain a relationship, being more sexually inventive to preserve their partners’ interest, or changing their clothes or behavior to avoid unwanted sexual advances.
But men’s desire for sex is not as uncontrollable as we think. At twenty-three, Christopher, a slightly built, charming Texan with dark hair and eyes, has had a lot of sex: with women and with men, in long-term relationships, threesomes, and one-night stands. But at no point in any of those encounters has there been a time when he “couldn’t stop and say no,” he says. “There might be a slight twitch, but even if the other person wants to stop halfway through, that’s that. The idea that guys ‘can’t help themselve
s’ is completely ridiculous.”
But if Christopher has always been physically able to slow down, he hasn’t always felt like that was something he is permitted to do—even when it has been exactly what he wanted. “In every sexual relationship I have had with a woman, I have felt pressured to do more than I am comfortable with,” Christopher says. Sometimes that pressure has come directly from the women he’s dating, other times from some internalized ideal of how guys “should” approach sex. He recalls a night he spent watching movies on the couch with his first girlfriend when he was fifteen. “I was quite happy to just kiss, but I remember feeling this pressure to initiate something more. You’re alone and she turned off the lights, so I guess that means you’re supposed to take it further.”
He felt the same pressure when he started dating the girl he lost his virginity to a few years later. He’d had a crush on her for two years, and the first time they hooked up, they gave each other oral sex. “It was really wonderful,” he says. “But I still remember feeling like I hadn’t gone far enough. Like maybe we should have had [vaginal intercourse], because that was ‘real sex.’ ”
Christopher’s comments echo qualitative research into young men’s sexual attitudes and experiences. A 2004 study funded by the Ford Foundation found that many teenage boys and young men felt they were expected to be sexually active, even before they wanted to be. One thirteen-year-old boy interviewed for the study, “RZA,” described feeling like he had to “be a man” and “get some” with a girl his friend had described as an “easy target.” The two had been left alone together with the expectation that they would have sex, and were kissing when RZA realized he didn’t want to have sex with her—or with anyone at that moment. “I don’t know what it was, I just didn’t want to, like, do anything,” he told the researchers.
Another boy who participated in the Ford study, the self-described “Nervous Guy,” described feeling pressured to kiss a girl in a game of truth-or-dare. “You gotta do something, so I did. And, like, it was terrible.” He recalled the kiss as “disgusting,” and told the researchers that he later went home and washed his mouth out. “It was kind of a rip-off, man . . . Like, ’cause it really didn’t mean anything, it was just really dumb. In a way, that’s just, like, rude to myself [to kiss a girl he wasn’t attracted to].” It was his first kiss.
A 2010 survey commissioned by the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy and Seventeen magazine found that 21 percent of fifteen-to-twenty-two-year-old guys had been pressured by a female peer to go further sexually than they wanted to, with more than three-quarters (78 percent) agreeing that there was “way too much pressure” to have sex. Fifty-six percent said they were “relieved” when a female partner wanted to wait to have sex.
Expectations that young men be sexually active don’t just apply to intercourse. A 2013 Australian study on sexting, the practice of exchanging sexually explicit photographs, videos, and text messages via cell phone, found that teenage boys sext in part because of pressure from other boys to have girls’ photos on their phones and computers. They are also more likely than girls to share explicit messages that they receive with their friends.
This isn’t to say that men aren’t interested in sex. Most of them are—at least some of the time, with some people. But the reality of male desire is more complex than is portrayed in the media, popular culture, or everyday conversation. Stereotypes about male sexuality aren’t designed to reflect actual men you might meet and know in your everyday life. They are an imagined ideal of how men should be, and it’s selling many men short.
“Find, Fuck, and Forget”: Love Is a Battlefield
You don’t need to like a stereotype to fold it into your understanding of how the world works or how you ought to behave. Like Christopher, Ben, whom we met in chapter 3, is not fond of the way that media and popular culture pigeonhole male sexuality. He finds it “demeaning” and hates that it is “just kind of an accepted fact.” But he acknowledges the ways in which those stereotypes have shaped his attitudes and experiences when it comes to sex, especially when he was a teenager.
Ben attended an all-boys private school that had a regular Monday-morning ritual: the guys would meet in the leafy schoolyard before the first bell rang and exchange stories of the girls they had met and hooked up with over the weekend. “The idea was to get as much as you could from girls,” he recalls. “One of my friends described it as the ‘three-Fs’ culture. Find, fuck, and forget.” Most of Ben’s friends didn’t make it past the first step—“finding”—but the point of the ritual wasn’t what had actually transpired. Its appeal was embedded in the bravado itself: it gave the boys an opportunity to play the role of the stud, even if the reality of their weekend escapades didn’t live up to the stories they told at school on Monday morning.
Guys aren’t the only ones who internalize these expectations of how men should behave when it comes to sex. A University of California, Santa Cruz study into young people’s first dating relationships found that young women so much expected their male partners to pressure them for sex that they were startled if their boyfriends wanted to take things more slowly. “I was really surprised, because I didn’t know that guys felt like that and stuff,” said one young woman whose boyfriend wanted to wait until he was married. “He didn’t want to force anything,” said another. “It wasn’t his goal to sleep with as many people [as possible] or anything, he was just very, very sensitive.” The young women expected coercion—whether it came in the form of begging, wandering hands, or threats to end the relationship and take up with someone else. As a third woman put it, “[Guys] think that they have to ask [for sex] in every relationship . . . just in case, like, there [is] a glimmer of hope that it [will] happen.” Trying to get your girlfriend to have sex with you, however you went about it, was just part of being a “regular guy.”
One reason young women expect their boyfriends to push for sex is because, statistically speaking, sexual pressure is the norm in adolescent relationships. Just over half the female college students interviewed for the University of California study reported some form of pressure from their partners to advance their sexual activity beyond the point that they were comfortable with. One in twelve described experiences that fit the legal definition of rape. But they may have also anticipated pressure because the dynamic of male initiator and female gatekeeper is one that each of us is taught to play out and expect, years before we ever have sex.
For boys and men, these messages are found in knowing remarks from friends and family about how “boys will be boys.” They are in all the films and TV shows in which the male hero pursues an initially unwilling female lead. And they are in the deeply embedded but dangerous notion that women need to be persuaded to have sex—because it is not something they could ever possibly want to do of their own accord.
For girls and women, the same messages are found in teen magazines, television dramas, and well-intentioned warnings from authority figures to hold on to your virginity because boys are “only after one thing.” The sealed sex-education supplements in the magazines I read as a teenager set up sex as a battlefield, on which boys would always push for more ground and girls needed to be armed with the weaponry to hold their own—not just physically, but mentally and emotionally. It wasn’t bad advice per se, but it put girls on the defensive, poised to fight off predators even when there were none, while simultaneously positioning coercion as unavoidable, one of those things that guys “just did.”
The expectations change a little as we grow older, but not as much as they should. In their 2006 study examining women’s magazine representations of male and female sexuality, New Zealand psychologists Panteá Farvid and Virginia Braun found that men were depicted as naturally more sexual than women, their desires needing to be managed by any women wishing to build and maintain a long-term heterosexual relationship. In one of the articles they cite, a male informant declares, “Most of us guys are raring to go anytime, anyplace, anywhere.
” In another article, a man confesses: “[B]eing male, I find that sometimes your groin can take over, and it’s only after the deed is actually done that you regret sleeping with a particular girl.” Men’s magazines talk about male sexuality in the same way, depicting their readers as insatiable when it comes to sex, forever on the hunt for a new partner or source of sexual novelty.
One effect is that men like Christopher feel pressured to pursue and initiate sex, even when they don’t want it. Others, meanwhile, pursue the conventionally masculine role with gusto, transforming themselves into players and pickup artists.
“The MVP of Getting Laid”: Sex as Sport
In a culture that equates manhood with sexual insatiability, it is no surprise that some men seek out sex with the fervor of a professional athlete approaching a major game. At twenty-one, Nate is a self-described “bro,” defined on the website UrbanDictionary.com as “an alpha male idiot” who is “obsessed with women, beer, and sports.”
A final-year science student at UC Berkeley, Nate is passionate about environmental issues and wants to work in renewable energy after he graduates. He is also passionate about women. Self-assured and smoothly charming, Nate has been an athlete and a partier his whole life, playing competitive basketball and cruising with college kids when he was still in high school. “It was an interesting juxtaposition,” he says. “I didn’t like the popular people, but I still hung out with them, even though I thought lots of them were douchebags.”