by Liz Plank
Sex is the language through which men have license to ask for love, tenderness, surrender, sensuality, affection and more.
—ESTHER PEREL
5 Men Don’t Need Intimacy
The penis-brain myth isn’t just untrue; it also fuels another dangerous common gender stereotype: that women crave intimacy and men just want sex. It leads to two kinds of shaming behaviors: women are shamed for wanting sex and men are shamed for asking for intimacy. Sex and intimacy are both essential parts of the human experience. To say that women love to snuggle and talk while men just want sex is simply not true.
But the idea that men are exclusively after as much sex as possible isn’t only reinforced in movies and films—perhaps the ones most responsible for perpetuating this idea are those who work in the field of evolutionary psychology. One of the most commonly believed evolutionary truths about men is the “scatter-gun” theory, which argues that men are on a quest to drop their seed in as many women as possible, while every woman is looking for a stable partner who will provide for her offspring. It’s born out of Darwin’s theory of sexual selection, which he argued made women more “coy” and choosy, while men have far fewer standards because they have less to lose. This concept is often peddled by masculinity panic warriors and is known within evolutionary psychology as the Bateman principle, named after a geneticist who proved this theory by studying … fruit flies. Although it’s still highly regarded, the theory has been called into question by numerous researchers, primarily women (go figure), who are still a very small minority in the field (go figure). One of the scatter-gun theory skeptics is Dr. Zuleyma Tang-Martinez, a professor at the University of Missouri–St. Louis. “Bateman’s conclusions and predictions have become axiomatic and, at times, have gone unquestioned even when modern empirical data do not conform to this model,” she wrote.
This stereotype goes so far that we don’t just believe that men want more sex; we also believe that all male species want more sex, even though this is a gross exaggeration and simplification of the wide range of differences across the animal kingdom. A lot of this is coming from popular culture, but it’s fueled by evolutionary science, a field still overwhelmingly dominated by white men. Biologist and author Joan Roughgarden summed up her male colleagues’ choices of research to the BBC by saying “it’s almost like they are using this locker-room logic—counting which males ‘score’ the most.” Roughgarden has been highly critical of the oversimplification of human behavior and sex differences as immutable. She remarks that sex differences are not as large as some research suggests and that in trying to preserve this narrative, the diversity of the animal kingdom is significantly flattened and underappreciated. Dr. Tang-Martinez, who dissents from many of her colleagues, warns about the often-unacknowledged phenomenon of “confirmation bias” among her colleagues in the fields of neuroscience and biology, where researchers end up commissioning and performing research that confirms what they already believe to be true, which is of course shaped by the social environment they were themselves raised into.
The men-want-all-the-sex myth isn’t just untrue; it fuels the idea that men don’t need other forms of physical or psychological intimacy. While it’s often widely assumed that men want more sex and that women want more emotional intimacy, if the data could talk it would say something a little more nuanced. The way society controls women’s bodies and female sexuality is widely documented and difficult to refute. From the Salem witch trials, to chastity belts and promise rings, to male politicians curbing access to abortion and access to birth control, it’s not shocking that women have developed a discomfort around asking for sex. But on the other side of that coin, and somewhat less widely discussed, is how men frequently feel uncomfortable asking for affection. Besides the fact that we expect men to always be up for sex (pun definitely intended), if we don’t always give men the space to ask for or experience emotional intimacy, physical contact can become the most acceptable way for them to express or receive love. In either case, men and women aren’t asking for what they want.
In other words, she suppresses her own needs because she’s taught that the needs of others are more important—he suppresses his needs because he’s taught he doesn’t have any.
Although some would argue that the male demand for sex workers powering the sex industry proves the veracity of this myth, sex workers frequently cite that the biggest part of their job has nothing to do with sex at all. Janet Mock, who has been open about her experience in the industry, said that stripping was much more emotional labor than physical work. In her book Redefining Realness, she says her job was more about “crafting open roads in conversation that would stimulate him, inflate his ego and make him feel centered and listened to.” In an interview for The New York Times, she says: “Everyone talks about the tricks that we were doing, which was great and glamorous and looked like a Nelly video. But for clients, it was more about the quiet stuff: sitting and letting someone rub your thigh, and you nodding and listening.”
If we accept the premise that many men are at least in part seeking sex workers for intimacy, it’s no surprise that a new booming market is one that took the sex out of sex work: the cuddle industry. It’s real and it’s sort of like Uber for snuggles. Someone meets up with you and will nuzzle you for a set amount of time for a set amount of money. The rules are that it must be consensual and explicitly nonsexual. Although women are known for loving to cuddle, most of the clients seeking out the service aren’t ladies; they’re straight men in their fifties. To say that women love to cuddle and men want sex is simply not true. One study from the Kinsey Institute in Bloomington observing the preferences of ten thousand heterosexual couples also found that kissing and hugging was more important to men than to women in relationships. So perhaps we are more alike than we are different: we are all seeking human touch. If women aren’t given permission to want sex and men aren’t given permission to want intimacy, then how do we know what everyone actually needs?
And the myth that men don’t need intimacy impacts the way that men approach sex. “Sex is still largely defined by men,” Michael Kimmel, my friend and world-famous masculinity professor, told me over Cobb salad one afternoon. “If you’re not sure, just look at the terms we use to define it,” he explained as he scooped a bit off his plate. “I nailed her; I hit that; we banged … They’re all violent.” Dr. Kimmel explained that sex is often pursued as a form of conquering: “I scored!” he exclaimed. Of course, implicit in the language is that if one conquers, the other is therefore defeated. What a sad way to view the most natural and intimate act human beings share.
Kimmel’s point about the violence and conquering embedded in sexual pursuits for men was echoed in the conversations I had with men, but what I found fascinating was how much and how many men confessed hating the language that they had themselves used. “I still catch myself stuck in some of the negative sometimes violent metaphors from my teenage socialization,” Wim Laven told me over Facebook when I asked men about this myth in a public thread. “The language is a pretty good example, not just the words used like ‘score’ and ‘tap’ but the words not used. I still can’t think of more than a handful of times I’ve heard a guy use the words ‘make love’ when talking with another guy. [Sex] is always a discussion of a physical and non-emotional act.” The framing of sex as an act of conquering didn’t only lessen the act of sex; it also impacted men’s own enjoyment of it. Men told me that in order to have any conversation about sex they found themselves squeezing any of the intimacy it has from it.
Men in the thread also complained that idealized masculinity had brainwashed them into focusing exclusively on quantity at the cost of the quality of their sex life. “As a younger man, I believed a lot of the extremely toxic ‘numericals’ that are a part of sexuality for most men,” Patrick Davis said. “IE, ‘how many girls did you f*** last year, etc.?’ or even how many times you had sex in a given night or weekend.” And of course, the way men talk about sex impact
s the way they have sex. Men talked about being wrapped into the ideal of the right or manly way to have sex, whether it was in the size of their erection, the intricacy or number of positions, rather than being present during the act, which honestly would probably increase enjoyment for both partners. “To be honest, you’re thinking as much about how much you’re going to brag about the sex than actually enjoying it,” Patrick said. Sadly, because of the dynamics that traditional masculinity sets up, many men approach sex as something to get from a woman rather than give to a woman. As Michael Kimmel put it to me:
For so many straight men, sexual adequacy is measured by whether or not she comes (he takes his pleasure for granted). But does that mean he is as selfless as she is? No!! So much of women’s sexuality is organized around her relationship to HIM. So much of men’s sexuality is organized around his relationship with … other men. Sex is often homosocial competition. Women are, in this model, the currency of the male conversation. So instead of him being focused on himself—which would at least be about a sense of self, however selfish, it’s more that he is outside of his own pleasure, trying mightily (and often vainly) not to feel so much that he comes, trying to prove that he is a great lay by making her come, and all the while thinking about his rising status among his bros.
This male anxiety about performance in sex is reflected in the online searches men make. Men Google information about their penis more than any other body part. “Will my penis shrink?” was the most researched age-related concern for men. While many women certainly care about girth, for every one woman who Googled something about penis size, 170 men did.
From my conversations with men it seemed that while sex was an omnipresent and required part of manhood, because traditional masculinity didn’t allow any real conversations about it, it created barriers to enjoying the act that’s supposed to be a fundamental part of being a man. Men said it prevented them from having a rich relationship to sex. “Toxic masculinity doesn’t have open discussions about what sex is, how to please your partner, how to find the right partner,” one user wrote. “Toxic masculinity keeps people from talking, keeps people from reflecting on their own sexuality and emotional needs. Toxic masculinity is the utmost devolved form of the male psyche and it doesn’t want to nurture or empower those around them. It is egoic, and it takes and it gives nothing back.” Men also said that they felt like this culture of conquering meant that they used sex for personal gain or as a form of currency to gain status with other men, which explained why so many women reported feeling used in the context of sexual intimacy. “I have had periods in life, particularly after a divorce, where many women (unfortunately) paid for my hurt and anger,” one user explained. “Those sexual interludes were void of intimacy.”
As I listened to men describe their insecurities and their inability to share them with other men and how it affected their presence in the bedroom, it explained a lot of the frustrations I heard from women. One of the most frequent complaints I received from the heterosexual women I spoke to was that their male partners felt disconnected during sex. They didn’t feel present in the act and focused on what to do to their partner rather than how to be with their partner. Women told me that the men they sleep with often treated them as unidimensional, as if all women enjoyed the same thing in the same way, when in fact what works for one woman may not work for another. The truth is having sex with a woman is a lot like driving a car: it’s important to pay close attention to sounds, bumps and signals. But repeatedly, I kept hearing from women that the men they were intimate with weren’t tapping into those signals because they were focused on their own performance. So ironically, it seemed like because straight men were so focused on having great sex, they were having a lot of bad sex, at least from her perspective.
Shame corrodes the very part of us that believes we are capable of change.
—BRENÉ BROWN
6 Male Shame: What Is It Like to Feel Like You Need to Prove Something You Never Quite Feel Like You Have?
When the expectations set by society for men are rooted in lies, it creates expectations they can’t fulfill. Through my conversations with men, it became clear that the most common consequence that all the masculinity myths share could be summed up in one word: “shame.” Men felt shame that they weren’t attaining the unrealistic tenets of masculinity, and that shame was rarely discussed among themselves because that’s precisely how shame works. In other words, shame creates lies about how men should think and act, and when men don’t reach these impossible expectations they feel additional humiliation. The best way for me to put it is that traditional masculinity creates a male shame spiral.
The experience of male shame starts early. A Perry Undem survey showed that three-quarters of boys reported feeling they have to prove that they are physically strong and play sports and that 82 percent of them reported hearing a man in their family or their peers humiliating a boy by telling him he’s acting like a girl. A third felt a pressure to hide their emotions if they felt sad. Given this intense pressure, it’s no surprise that research on 343 male college students published in the Psychology of Men & Masculinity journal showed that when men experience gender role conflict, defined as the gap between how they view themselves as men and what society expects of them as men, they experience heightened levels of shame.
The way we raise boys creates shame that leads to inevitable dysfunction into adulthood. This became clear when I asked men about how these masculine ideals impacted their adult relationships, particularly with women. “Shame. That’s what defines you when you try to deal with women,” Hilmar Bjarni Hilmarsson wrote. “Shame if you don’t provide enough, or if you feel weak or even just feel too much. Shame that you need them but shame if you don’t have one by your side either if you’re single. Shame when you think of what you’ve done, in the past, when you didn’t know what you do know. A lot of shame.” When I asked him how that showed up, Hilmar said it came from feeling like failure was not an option. “It’s shame or anger really, but the anger usually is feeding off the former. And because men aren’t allowed to admit to failure, because the matter of their failure is shameful, they keep it locked inside. That lays heavily on many of us, where we keep silent rather than talk about it because we even lack the language and concepts to articulate our pain at being perpetrators and enablers of something we understand hurts us and others but can’t seem to stop,” Hilmar said.
In other words, idealized notions of masculinity didn’t just encourage men to repress their emotions; it created shame around feeling them in the first place. “I am guilty of self-censorship when it comes to openly displaying emotion,” Brad, a commenter, said. “When my wife asks me how I feel about something, I lack even the basic vocabulary or recognition beyond superbasic stuff like ‘frustrated,’ ‘bored’ or ‘yeah—I like that.’” Another commenter, Toby Morgana, who identifies as trans, wrote that he learned a lot about the pressures of being a man when he transitioned. “During the early months of my transition, I thought being a man meant heavy drinking and speaking over everyone,” he wrote. “I was engaging in a lot of posturing and trying to seem like nothing was wrong.” Brian echoed a similar sentiment: “Guys in my family were basically expected to suppress everything else. My 77-year-old father now refers to me as the sensitive one in our family. Sometimes I think it’s a dig and other times I think he’s envious.” Men’s lives were rooted in so much covering up that I wondered if they even knew all the things they had been hiding all this time. For many men, coming to terms with the way they were brought up opened their eyes to all the repressed feelings that had been inside of them all along. As Ashton Hynes put it, “When you understand toxic masculinity, it’s like that 80’s movie where the guy gets those glasses that allow him to see monsters all around him he never noticed, you know?”
This idea that masculinity mysteriously strips away the basic human need for vulnerability, closeness, intimacy and connection is not only untrue; it also leads to an internali
zation of shame when men have those needs and an inability to properly manage them. This means that some of the aggression we associate with men may not be due to their nature; it’s due to the way we raise them. The patriarchy doesn’t just convince men that they don’t have emotional needs; it also leads men to feel embarrassed when those needs naturally occur, which leads those feelings to come out in other, less productive ways. This is clear from the research. One study on male college students found that a fear of emotion was correlated with increased likelihood of aggression and hostility. In other words, men and boys end up expressing more aggression because they lack the social permission to express their emotions in the first place. Showing violence becomes more acceptable than showing feelings. The conclusion from the researchers was that gender role socialization encouraged men not to show emotion and made them less tolerant of uncomfortable emotions and less likely to handle them.
In order to indoctrinate men into being “tough,” we teach them to deny parts of themselves. And keeping things in is glamorized so that men are obedient to the code and stay quiet. We all grow up being taught that a cool and collected man keeps emotions on the inside, so bottling up feelings and thoughts becomes a practice so common and so ingrained that it becomes second nature. I think many men can spend their entire life not even knowing what emotions they’re hiding. Shame is both the connection and the consequence between all these myths because what shames us ends up defining us. The idealized masculinity pact is a vicious cycle. It makes men feel shame and then enforces the omertà rule making that shame impossible to talk about. And this all comes back to men’s inability to ask for directions. If you spend your whole life being told you aren’t allowed to get lost, going deeper into the words becomes easier than admitting you’re going the wrong way.