Straight male Dopers: What do you think of this article?

In My Humble Opinion
61

This following blog post does a much better take-down of the article than I ever could:

I highly recommend it.

Choice quotes:

“This is the underpinning of the Nice Guy® complaint. They say that “women” overlook the “nice” guys because they’re not as attractive or whatever, but if you scratch them, you’ll find that they exclude a huge percentage of women from the category “women” for not fitting their beauty standards. Thus, the whine only makes sense if you assume that men are entitled to beauty, but women should settle for “nice”, and give up on physical attraction.”

and

“The rest of the piece is based on the iffy theory that only men really know what it’s like to feel horny. This is why liberal dudes were licking it up, since it was a purportedly anti-sexist piece, but it still had a soothing message that men still somehow are more than women, because they are more alive, you know. They have more desire. They really like sex, in a way that you women can never understand.”

and

“They want to control women sexually, not because they’re more horny, but because sexual control is just one more form of control.”

and

“stop blaming sex for misogyny. If all men wanted was women to fuck them more, the English language wouldn’t even have the word “slut” in it.”

62

IMO, the difference between objectification and recognizing beauty is how the former tends to reduce women to a single dimension: her sexual worth to men. In some other contexts, that dimension is motherhood.

Hollywood objectifies women so often that we’ve become numbed to it. If a woman is in a movie, her identity very often will be that of the Wife, Girlfriend, Hottie/Bimbo, Love Interest, or Mother. Her whole existence revolves around what the male actors do. Unless she’s in cast as Mother, her attractiveness will always be a central element to her relevance. Nothing matters as much as how well she convinces us that she’s beautiful. Her acting ability can be totally underwhelming as long as she’s able to do this.

This formula is so ingrained us that when an actress who is not a stunner (like Sarah Jessica Parker) has the audacity to be in a movie, all people can talk about is how her face looks like a foot/horse/or whatever. How dare she play someone who is in a relationship or is sought after! It’s not like this is what happens in real life, right? Never mind that plenty of male actors of comparable looks are cast in movies in which they are the lead (e.g., Craig James), and everyone accepts this just fine. A less than perfect looking specimen of a woman gets ripped to shreds.

This is what objectification does.

63

From the blog post linked by LTFT:

I’ve always rather disliked how that phrase seems intended to shut down any debate. These two threads are full of people expressing their frustrations with how they’re treated by, or told to treat, the opposite sex. And yet there’s a message that one particular type of person is expected to just shut up.

64

What I said was “men can often look at a woman and be attracted merely based on physical attributes”. The often there is key, as I didn’t want to generalize about men or women.

Fact is, attraction is much more a physical thing for men than for women.
It’s not that looks don’t matter to women but they (generally) need to like the actual guy himself; they need to at least know the guy isn’t desperate, weird, a jerk etc.

That’s a different sense of “sexuality”.
Obviously straight women are by definition sexually attracted to at least one man some of the time.

But that doesn’t mean that they appreciate all the things that turn guys on e.g. many women find popular for-men porn disgusting. And women generally don’t appreciate being ogled by lots of random dudes, which is the point I was getting at.

I don’t understand what you meant by put off (turned off?), or what your point is.

65

I’ve often wondered about this, actually. *Are *there women who enjoy looking at the kind of porn that’s often available for guys–for example, closeup shots of sexual body parts, graphic depictions at close-up angles of sex, etc.? I’ve never met one who did, but my sample size is very small (it’s not the sort of thing I ask about. :P)

I’m not a good sample because my usual reaction to any kind traditional porn is to either laugh or be uncomfortable, but close-ups of penises or of two or more people putting tab A into slot B with all the requisite noises and bodily fluids turn me seriously off.

Actually, I think I’ma go make me a poll! Stand by…

66

The first sentence there is exactly what I meant by put off. My point, and where I take exception to what you said, is that your original post seemed to imply that ogling (take note: ogling is not the same thing as feeling attraction for a woman, or noticing that women around us look good) random women is some inherent part of male sexuality and welp, there’d be no problem if women just learned to get over it. Why should they?

Time and again I’ve heard guys say they’d be just fine if random women ogled them the way guys do to women, but I have to call bullshit on that. No one likes being hit on by someone they feel no attraction toward. I sure as hell would not appreciate from a woman the kind of behavior they are just expected to tolerate from us.

67

Since you only have one of those perspectives to draw on, how can you know that’s true?

And it’s totally irrelevant if a woman is a jerk? I don’t really believe that’s true for most guys. I can only say for me that a person’s personality plays a role in if I’m attracted to them – both making someone who I initially was attracted to no longer attractive, and making someone who would be average or even below average suddenly seem very desirable after I got to know them.

Again, I’m not convinced by your generalizations about what men like. I’ve seen plenty of instances of men not handling unwanted sexual attention gracefully. And, as a guy, my own experiences with being subjected to sexual advances from people I’m not attracted to are at very least uncomfortable. Whereas a lot of straight guys seem downright squeamish about being hit on by people they’re not into, or in some cases being approached in some way they found unacceptable.

Awhile back I overheard a conversation between two straight male acquaintances about a woman who had approached one of them. Long story short, the gist of it was that the woman came on a little too aggressively and the guy no longer had any interest in her, despite her (apparently) being otherwise attractive. Once he found out what a “psycho” she was (his word, not mine) he was totally unwilling to be with her. And this was, from what she said, just because she came on a bit sexually aggressive. His friend didn’t bust his balls, either, he commiserated, so apparently that wasn’t totally anomalous behavior, at least in their circle.

And I’m sure other people here have heard of instances in which men were turned off by women who seemed too “easy”. Isn’t that the conclusion of a whole lot of popular advice to women? He won’t like her if she gives it away. Whereas the sex-crazed caricature you’re describing would be happier than anything to find a woman like that.

What you’re describing doesn’t seem all that much like the way actual men experience their sexuality. At least, it’s not true for me, and it’s not true for men I’ve observed. It sounds like a cliché from a high school sex comedy, not real life.

68

It’s weird to me that you asked if any women like what you are assuming most guys like, even though you’re apparently a counterexample. Maybe that’s not universally appealing to men either. (I don’t like close-up shots of sex personally, and I’ve heard other guys complain about that in porn so I’m not thinking I’m an outlier.)

69

When I read that article, I had a definite agreement with #4 “We’re Trained from Birth to See You as Decoration” and I can see in parts of the world, they aren’t shy about admitting to #3 “We Think You’re Conspiring With Our Boners to Ruin Us”

I admit that I like looking at hot women on TV and movies, but really, the eye-candy in movies and TV sometimes gets so distracting that I can’t concentrate on anything else. And outside of TV, it bugs me that women are judged so much according to looks, so that when the Elena Kagan nomination happened, it was really infuriating to watch all these conservative dicks step over each other to call her ugly, or cast aspersions on her sexuality simply for not being married. And the guy, or people, who went around Hillary’s campaign in 2008 with a “Iron My Shirt” sign? I wanted to punch him.

70

That may be what you inferred, but that wasn’t the intended point.

Well, certainly there’d be less of a problem if the genders’ sexualities were more similar. But I would not say the onus (I said onus) is on women, or men, or anyone, to go against what feels natural to them.
Anus.

I’m not bragging, but sure, I have been ogled / chatted up by women I don’t feel attracted to, and men, and I couldn’t care less. At the risk of prompting a rolleyes, it’s flattering.

71

Well, you’ll note that I carefully didn’t say that “most guys” like it–you’re right, I don’t know that. And maybe I’m out of touch–the last time I caught a glimpse of a hardcore-ish male porn magazine or movie was many years ago. But I just assumed that if the “close up on body parts thing” was mainstream enough that it ended up prominently featured in magazines like Hustler, it must appeal to at least a reasonable segment of the male porn-buying population.

72

This is quite a lame argument; of course you can know about something without direct experience.

In any case, are you actually disputing that male attraction is, as a generalization, more visual than women’s?

I never claimed that for all men it’s never a factor; I made it clear these things don’t apply to all. But sure, find me a hawt girl who’s, say, a spoiled brat and give me the mission of getting her laid (and it can’t be me). Absolute piece of cake.

Again, I didn’t claim all men are just like me. But again, are you saying that you think men are equally, or even more, freaked out by lecherous looks than women?

This is somewhat different. I would be unwilling to be with a woman if I thought she was so nuts she might, say, stab me in the chest while I slept.
That’s not about someone’s personality not being attractive, that’s about personal safety.

It depends what kind of relationship they’re after. But we were talking about attraction.

73

You haven’t demonstrated how you know what you claim to know, however.

I think “more visual” is too vague a description to be a real hypothesis in the first place. And I dispute the idea that even if the generalization were valid within one cultural context, that it means anything inherent or innate rather than being, at least in part, the product of culture. And your posts (and others in this thread) have all implicitly treated these generalizations that are being thrown around about men’s and women’s sexualities as being the inescapable product of human nature. Given the immense degree of variation in human sexual behavior cross-culturally, in fact, it seems like the safer assumption would be that whatever differences we may find that exist (differences more specific and testable than “more visual”) are heavily conditioned by culture.

Incidentally, I don’t find your attempt to advance your argument by being loudly astounded that I don’t automatically agree with you all that convincing.

Do you think hot guys – even ones who may not have many other things going for them – have a very difficult time getting laid? Because if not, I don’t see your point.

I have no idea. I disagree with the idea that men are always welcoming of even unwanted sexual attention. If women are even less welcoming, you hardly have to resort to differences in women’s sexual functioning. There’s an obvious difference in the risk posed by a man giving socially inappropriate sexual attention to a woman than vice versa, or for that matter to another man. And yet more than one straight man has responded to sexual attention from a gay man with threats of violence.

. . . um, and you don’t think women’s choices about what men they’re willing to be around are informed by personal safety? Not to speak for women but from what I’ve seen personal safety is an overriding concern for women who are looking for a romantic or sexual liaison. So I’m not sure what distinction you’re trying to draw.

And it’s about how a fair number of men are apparently not attracted to women who they, logically, oughta be all over. If men are so heavily motivated by sex with attractive women.

74

For my own answer to the OP:

We Were Told That Society Owed Us a Hot Girl
I don’t agree, but I think I deserve a hot girl. That has no doubt made me miss out possible relationships I might have had.

We’re Trained from Birth to See You as Decoration
I disagree. We are trained from birth to see beautiful women as desirable objects, like a nice car. We are not trained to see unattractive women at all.

We Think You’re Conspiring With Our Boners to Ruin Us
No, I think the mixed messages we get from different elements of society make us vastly confused. Pop culture glorifies hot women and aggressive men. while academia and “polite society” are all about mutual respect and egalitarianism. We don’t understand women, and if we choose any of the accepted “models” of behavior toward them, it just seem a total crapshoot whether they respond positively or not. Because it IS a total crapshoot, but we’re not really told that either.

We Feel Like Manhood Was Stolen from Us at Some Point
In my younger days, I would have to say I agreed with this, because in my younger days I more closely defined ‘manhood’ with sexual experience, and I was certain I wasn’t getting enough. I’m still certain I wasn’t getting enough, but I’m more comfortable (or less desperate) about it than I used to be.

We Feel Powerless
I agree. Because we our powerless – if we are rationale and don’t do crazy shot like rape and pillage. I’m not just talking about with women. Most of us fee powerless in society – our vote counts for nothing, our opinions count for nothing. On the job we are cogs and replaceable drones – odds are that even if we are GREAT at our jobs we can be replaced by someone of far less talent and the employer will roll on never having any idea what a valuable asset has been lost. And we men feel that women have the power in relationships because they can reject us at any time for any reason or no reason at all.

Of course, all these responses of mine are about an emotional undercurrent to my intellectual understanding of the world, which is entirely different. But I’m sure it has an influence on me.

75

From female friends, from dating experiences, from seeing / being told about other people’s dating experiences, culture, research studies etc.

Where did I say that? Again this is something you have inferred…from what exactly?

I simply wanted to be clear that you actually disputed my point. Because you initially talked around it (you asked why I thought that).

Virtually all hot guys will have trouble getting laid at least some of the time. And some, if they lack confidence or experience, may consistently have trouble.

Certainly the challenge of getting a guy laid would be much harder than the girl challenge.

I said in the clearest of terms in my last post that that was not what I was saying.

For the last time: I am making no claim about all men or all women’s sexuality. I am also making no value judgement about what anyone’s sexuality should be.

I would agree that that is a factor. On the first draft of my last post, I mentioned this myself.

Again, I’m not saying all men. But in any case, sure, find me a hot woman who’s “too easy” and we’ll see how difficult it is to get her laid.

76

What an interesting discussion on an article I found interesting. My two cents are going to be a bit different, and I’ll attempt to offer what I think may be a third perspective on this.

So - me. Male: check. In possession of functioning testicles and the consequent sex drive: check. Think that the article described me: nope, but not because I didn’t recognise what it was talking about with sexuality, but because I’m gay.

The discussion that has ensued in this thread has (as usually happens in this area) boiled down to cultural expectation/socialisation vs biology. One we can be held accountable for and have some degree of influence over, the other we really can’t. Yes all of the cultural and social expectation for what manhood is supposed to mean for straight men doesn’t work on gay men. Sure we hear the same messages, but by the time we’re clear that our sexuality is different and have to start our own journey of working out what being a gay man (or woman for lesbians, who similarly have their own social gender expectations to negotiate) means for us those lessons start to evaporate. This happens because when you try and relate to your gender peers on sexuality - when straight teens/young men are having sexual urges directed towards females who are different to them, it’s a very different dynamic to having urges towards someone who is the same as you (maybe indeed the person who is telling you about their urges to someone else).

So there isn’t any real socialisation for most gay men on what is and isn’t acceptable or “correct” ways to perceive their sexuality. It’s obviously that for gay men the totally availability of cock means that the sexual rules of supply and demand change the dynamic completely. It’s not difficult to have sex, so it quickly becomes less valuable as an individual act, and it can also seem less of a big deal over time. At the age of 32 I’ve had in the region of 300 sexual partners, and I’m not bragging because it could have been waaaaaaaaaaay higher if I had applied myself more. There are gay men who do nothing BUT have sex, camped out on grindr/gaydar as they are and trawling the sex clubs/bars and saunas that exist for that very purpose. As a result I have a very take it or leave it approach to sex that I’m not clear isn’t going to be good. Really I’m happy to stay at home with the porn and fleshlight rather than what could ultimately be just another so so experience with some random guy. Sex with a hot guy? Yes please, but still let’s keep this in perspective.

Turning to the article itself and how, then, I would interpret it in this light and for other gay men:

  1. We Were Told That Society Owed Us a Hot Girl

We’re definitely not taught that we’re owed hot men. If anything society as a whole tells us that our sexuality is disgusting and we shouldn’t be having sex at all. At best you will have people who are accepting of homosexuality who treat it broadly the same as heterosexuality in theory, but they don’t want to be confronted with it in person (I think that was demonstrated nicely by the recent thread on straight men being asked if they were squicked out by two men kissing - most men said yes even though they had no issue with it in theory). So unless you live on the gay scene there is no substantial affirmation of your sexual desires. Straight men are not going to participate in conversations about the men you find hot, or discuss your sexual exploits the way they would with other straight men.

  1. We’re trained from birth to see you as decoration

Again, definitely not. The socialisation that teaches men to see women as objects of beauty does not work the same way in the other direction. Men are not encouraged to view other men as sex objects, and again it’s really in fairly limited situations when it’s taken as a good thing that a man desires another man. The whole metrosexual revolution means that men on the whole are more appreciative of their own ability to be sexually desirable and hot for its own sake, but that doesn’t correlate exactly to men wanting other men to look at them.

So as a gay guy, you are essentially taught to keep your eyes to yourself, never look at a man who you’re not sure isn’t gay, and if you do that it’s not a nice thing to make it obvious that you like him (because if he was straight he would clearly be very uncomfortable with this - whether or not that’s true is another matter). In situations where I’ve seen a guy that I think is hot who is himself eye fucking a woman, when he notices me checking him out the reaction is generally not to look appreciative, but rather to look away or look mildly annoyed. I can’t help but think “oh so you don’t like it when it’s done to you? nice double standard”.

  1. We think you’re conspiring with our boners to ruin us

Any gay man who was overly forceful in their behaviour toward another man who didn’t want it would never get a pass from society as a whole. If it’s towards another gay man, it’s generally “ick”, if it’s towards a straight man it’s either considered rude or creepy, or at worst a justification to injure or kill that gay man.

Picture this - you’re a straight man being forced to have a shower with a load of athletic, young women. At the very least it would be expected that that man get an erection (how could he not when there’s all that stimulation near by???), he might even get a pass on not being able to prevent himself groping a woman because he was so aroused, which would be regrettable but that’s what happens when you put a man in a situation where he’s surrounded by something he desires sexually, right? Well I’ve just described what it’s like to be a gay man at the gym, and I’ve never once had an erection in the shower, and I keep my hands firmly to myself because I know that I could be physically attacked or prosecuted to the full extent of the law if I did anything different. Even making eye contact is a no no to an extreme.

So, really, I don’t buy the whole “I’m a man, I have needs” defence, because I have those needs yet my society thinks they are wrong, so I am not encouraged to act upon them. The only time you can is when you’re in an all gay setting, in which case it’s pretty much expected that that’s what you’re there for. So I know I can control myself, straight men can too.

  1. We feel like manhood was stolen from us at some point

If you’re gay then you’re pretty much told that manhood was never yours to begin with. You’re not a “real man” until you can easily get a woman’s vagina wrapped around your penis, and how many gay men are going to be doing that regularly? More to the point, the kind of man you are is so wrong that we’ll try and cure you of it.

This isn’t to bemoan the state of the gay male, rather to point out that not having a model of masculinity thrust on you that really suits you doesn’t automatically have to be a problem, nor does it have to necessitate the kind of unpleasant behaviour you see in some men who do have that sense of entitlement. Most gay men make up their own notion of what being a man means independently of societal expectation. Sometimes that means a hyper-masculinised caricature (surly, big-dicked gym bunny), sometimes it means a complete rejection of all male norms, but generally it’s somewhere in between.

Again, we just have to cope with it.

  1. We feel powerless

I think gay men have a much better reason for feeling this way than straight men do, considering that on the whole straight men run most of the planet (and in some parts of the world gay men are still being told via the method of execution that they’re not welcome). Again, this isn’t to bemoan the situation of gay men, rather to point out that that this whole existential angst that straight men are supposed to feel due to their emasculation is nothing more than the gutting of a traditional model, meaning that men on the whole have to do some more work on deciding what being a man is generally (and boo fucking hoo to that, welcome to the world of virtually every gay man).

This is without getting into the whole messy arena of not having the excuse that the object of your desire is essentially a variation of you, so you can’t even get into that whole dialectic where you blame the other gender for being unfathomable or so different that you can’t reconcile your differences. When a woman treats a man badly he can think “it’s to be expected, women are bitches/whores/frigid/crazy” if he wants, even if it’s patently ridiculous to ascribe such categorisations to half the planet. Mentally he can compartmentalise that, though, and see this as a result of woman being “other”. When a man treats a woman badly she can do the same thing, men are pigs/only after one thing/afraid of commitment etc. If a man treats a man badly? Not much point in thinking “all men are pigs” if you are one yourself.
TLDR

Gay men have the same desires as straight men but we don’t have the social conditioning to be told we should be slaves to them, nor are we given a pass when we commit the kinds of transgressions that men feel they should be allowed to as described in this article. On that basis I would say the issue is not biology, but cultural/social conditioning and our response to it.

77

I posted this in another thread.

FYI, A feminist rebuttal.

78

Firstly, some men. You don’t think all men are misogynists, right?

As for the rest of your post, I just can’t relate to this brand of feminism.
For example, I often open doors for people; both genders, all ages, people higher and lower than me in the pecking order at work etc. I shudder to think that in the case of some women they’re thinking to themselves “He’s just doing that to assert control over me!”

And relationship-wise, there is nothing more I want than to find my “soul mate”. No I don’t want someone to clean up after me. WTH?

79

Men are more likely to suffer from Narcissistic Personality Disorder, while women are more likely to suffer from Boderline Personality Disorder. The problem is that society is geared to reward NPD, and only tolerate BPD. But that’s just my pet theory.

The issue I have with the article is its assumption that men, even the young men at which it’s aimed, only want sex; and don’t care about being loved. Not “can’t admit they want to be loved,” but are indifferent to the need to receive and express love. Bullshit. This post would be pure TLDR if I went into detail, so let this suffice: Bullshit.

There is a social message that “attractive women are more deserving of love,” fueling the economy. But this hurts men because it commodifies them as well as women: “you dropped those 20 pounds at the gym: now drop another 200 by kicking that loser boyfriend to the curb!”

Yes, consumerism tells women that they are only worth their looks. But it also tells them that the average man is not good enough for them: they deserve better…by buying this cosmetic, clothing, diet, etc.

Consumerism also tells men that they are only worth their wealth. It won’t flat out claim that women will only love us for our money: that woud contradict the con its playing on them, that their virtue is relected by their beauty. However, what woman can love a man whom she does not admire? And isn’t admiration based on success? And isn’t weath a measure of success? So no, it’s not our money, but we are expected to have it as an incidental.

Consumerism sets the genders against each other by telling each of them slightly different lies about the other.

80

And the award for the most insightful observation of our society in one pithy statement goes to…

Opens envelope

Slithy Tove, for their fantastic work on the “Straight male Dopers: What do you think of this article?” thread!!!

Audience gives standing ovation