Men, You Have Permission to Finally Feel Sexy
Institutional sex-negativity is a problem. It's time men start writing their own stories.
“My problem is, I’m too nice,” he said, staring down into his beer glass.
He said it with certainty as if his audience would know what he was alluding to, cramming so many thoughts and feelings into so few words.
He’d recently lost his mother to a long battle with cancer—she fought bitterly until the very end until she could no longer walk or talk. He stayed in her hospital room playing her favorite Pandora stations, soaking up the remaining time they had.
He stayed with her right up until the end.
Then his wife told him she was ending their marriage of many years. It was a double whammy. That’s how this stranger ended up sitting next to us at the tables outside of the brewery.
Sometimes, you can sense when someone needs company.
He wasn’t your typical “nice guy” who uses niceness as a ploy, a manipulative tool to pry what he wants from people. His kindness is genuine. It’s a natural part of who he is.
He detests it.
“What makes you think that?” my girlfriend asked him.
“I’m just having such a hard time finding someone who likes me for me,” he replied to my inquiry. A moment of silence prompted a further explanation.
“I’ve been on a few dates since I’ve been single—over the past year—and the same thing always happens. First, she asks me to come over and help with one favor, then it’s another, and then another. Next thing I know, I’m a tool, not a human being.”
Being newly single in his mid-40s was a shock.
As he continued to talk, I realized he couldn’t possibly see himself as an attractive figure. He isn’t alone in this kind of thinking.
Many men derive their personal value and identity from their money and jobs. For them, affection and romance require an exchange of tangible goods—they’re transactions.
An old acquaintance had a similar problem.
He was filthy rich after inheriting a stock brokerage. He would take women out on dates in a car that cost more than most people’s houses. They’d eat $500 sushi, and a few months later, he’d be complaining to me about how all women wanted was his money.
It wasn’t until I asked him, “What signals are you sending on these kinds of dates?” that he started to get the picture.
You’re more than money.
Funny Guys
There are many men who try to buy romance in affectionate ways. There’s also an abundance of men unable to comprehend they have more to offer.
It’s no secret why.
Society effortlessly categorizes some men as deserving of love and the rest have a role to fill.
Look how men are defined by American culture.
Between Screech from Saved by the Bell, Ross from Friends, George from Seinfeld, and countless “funny guys” from our media, we’ve had the message pounded into our heads that men cannot be attractive unless they look like a Calvin Klein model.
“Average guys” don’t cut it. Pop media says average guys can’t be sexy.
They’re depicted as geeky hopefuls. It’s bullshit.
Bald men in their thirties don’t have support movements.
Unless they’re saving the world from a nefarious plot hatched by a madman like in a Jason Statham movie, they’re told they’re average and without erotic value.
How do they think this makes men feel?
Even the naked male body has the stain of consumerism.
Naked women’s bodies are objects used to sell us things.
Naked men’s bodies are jokes.
Men at Work
Trends changed as we exited the last century and entered the new millennium. The 1990s was an era dominated by sitcoms, a trend eventually supplanted by “reality” TV shows.
You might think things got a little better, but they just got worse. Men started defining themselves as their careers. I can’t help but notice how strange it is to compare men’s and women’s reality TV.
Reality TV for women focused on romance, marriage, and love, with shows like The Bachelor.
Reality TV for men focused on—work.
You’re either revering a logger on Ax Men or relishing the daring risks taken on Ice Road Truckers. There’s Deadliest Catch, Duck Dynasty, Bering Sea Gold, Shipping Wars, and Mountain Men.
What does this say about how society values men?
Shows like these teach boys what their “purpose” is and where their value needs to come from.
Sex-Negative Culture
Being charitable, shows like these give some of us a glimpse into the work lives of others. Suppose we became a doctor and always wondered what life would’ve been if we’d been an artist, we get a carefully curated view of that life for an hour.
There’s nothing wrong with being capable of doing any or all of these things.
But there’s also nothing sexy about them either.
Being able to drive a truck and catch fish aren’t exactly traits that are considered erotic. Just ask women what they think of guys on dating profiles holding up fish carcasses.
If these cultural signals of masculinity were congruous with our romantic pursuits, the guys with dead fish on Tinder would be killin’ it.
I assure you, they’re not.
The problem is the constant bombardment telling us that we must fit into prefabricated molds in order to have any sort of value. The problem is being told we can’t have inherent romantic or erotic value.
Sometimes the absence of what’s being said says it all.
The human body can’t be seen as attractive and pleasurable for its own sake. Pleasure, either of seeing or touching it, always has to have a function in our culture.
It needs to sell you underwear or coerce you into buying something to be “okay” in society’s eyes. This is institutional sex-negativity, which tells us that sexuality is only allowed in transactional domains, and the transaction cannot be sex itself.
Prostitution is only illegal if you don’t record it on video and sell it.
Then it becomes a cycle.
The Cycle
Boys grow up being told that intimacy, love, attraction, sex, and pleasure for their own sake are shameful. They’re told they can’t possibly enjoy these things. They’re told they can’t possibly give them to someone else to make them happy (unless they look like a celebrity). They’re told their worth is in their work.
As adults, we learn that you can’t buy affection, love, attraction, and intimacy. Then we’re left scratching our heads, wondering how we go about obtaining these human necessities.
The pain and confusion of not knowing how to navigate relationships overwhelm us. We never had examples of affectionate, intimate, romantic, and, yes, sexy men — we were laughed at, instead.
Eventually, many men throw their hands up and scorn sex altogether. They look at it with a mixture of spite, rage, FOMO, and envy. Eventually, they become the men their fathers were, teaching the same anti-affection lessons.
It’s time we break the cycle.
It’s time we admit to ourselves that we can have value—romantic, erotic value—of our own. We don’t need to perform some action, we don’t need to save the world, we don’t need to look like Calvin Klein models, and we don’t need to define ourselves solely by our work.
There’s nothing wrong with hard work, productivity, looking your best, and doing good things for others. When these things must come at the expense of human intimacy, bonding, love, affection, romance, and sex, serious problems arise.
Guys, it’s time we start writing our own story.
Men, you have permission to finally feel sexy.
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