Even though feminism is an unalloyed good and is one of the best things to happen to the human condition, that doesn’t mean it’s not without complications.

Something I’ve often wondered about and been distressed about myself is dealt with in the two posts I’m about to link at the bottom. Even in the most sex-positive feminist spaces, most expressions of male sexuality are seen as threatening if not downright perverse, while any female expression of same sexuality is lauded.

While I understand how and why these distortions have developed, that still doesn’t make it any easier to deal with their consequences. It’s dehumanizing and frankly insulting to be told that your sexuality and your desire is innately wrong, and any expression of it at all makes you perverse or not a feminist or feminist ally — any man existing in feminist spaces gets told this multiple times very quickly, no matter how he expresses himself.

While I don’t believe that the genders are that different, I do believe there is an innate biological basis (statistically speaking) of how men and women approach and process sexuality. Of course, this is reinforced and promoted by culture, making it all the stronger.

The first post is by Hugo Schwyzer. It deals with Lust and humanity, desire and dignity.

But to a man, they were stirred up by the topic, and most were willing to admit to immense frustration and pain with this nearly omnipresent sense that their sexuality was dangerous, potentially predatory, and, as one fellow said, only to be celebrated when tightly controlled.

The second post is this one on Saucebox, discussing a particular male’s desire.

And in this place and time, the people whose respect I crave the most are always telling me that my very inner core is dirty, shameful, evil, wrong, disrespectful, backward, brute, and unevolved. But I can’t change it. So I’m stuck in perma-shame. That conundrum has always made me envy gay men. But I crave women. I desire their bodies. I want to fuck them. They’re so gorgeous and wonderful and perfect that I want to make love to almost every one I see. But I don’t try to fulfill that, and I don’t even admit those feelings to most people, and that’s how I get by. But I still feel like I’m acting through all of life. I have to pretend that the evidence of my respect for women lies in the supposed fact that I don’t want to fuck most of them.

As a rough guess, I’d say about 90% of straight men have this same profile, particularly when an adolescent or young (20s) man. I know I did, though I don’t think that kept me from seeing women as human.

And I bet that this description fits no more than about 10% of women — hence why I was talking about biological differences above.

The strange thing is, though most men seem to be able to understand the differences of breadth and intensity of female desire, almost no women seem to be able to understand how pervasive and overpowering the internal feeling of male desire is — I’ve met no more than one or two in my lifetime so far. And that’s a pretty big disconnect, and leads to a lot of misundestanding. I doubt that gap will ever be bridged, either, because it’s much easier to understand something that happens to you sometimes (all men experience periods of low or no desire), though I’ve rarely met any women who experience the raging, fever-dream intensity that almost any 18-25-year-old man’s desire is nearly-permanently set at.

And it’s very strange to watch the vast majority of women deny that it exists, or to seriously doubt it. Because it does, and it sucks, and most men would turn it off if they could. But you can’t, so there you go.

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