7/25/2023 0 Comments Sexual moods![]() ![]() The men I interviewed were all in relationships, while the incel is all about not having a girlfriend, so that’s a different subset of men. But I am hearing a lot of men saying ‘that’s not my experience, that’s not how I want to be’. “Women have experienced a lot of harm from men, whether through power or sexuality. How does Hunter Murray see such issues as affecting the portrayal of male sexual desire? The rise of social media has also seen an exponential rise in the availability of often violent porn, as well as the disturbing advent of the ‘incel’ - men who see themselves as ‘involuntarily celibate’, who express their desire in online chatrooms to punish women for their rejection. Sexual politics has become a hot-button topic, with the advent of the #MeToo movement, and an increasing awareness of sexual harassment and violence towards women. In addition to physical pleasure, they want some emotional connection.” “But I also hear from men in my research that sex is a really intimate way for them to connect and when they initiate sex they can feel quite vulnerable. ![]() They can also feel frustrated if their male partner does have a high level of sexual desire but they feel ‘he’s just a horndog’ and it has nothing to do with attraction, that he just wants to experience the physical pleasure. “What I mostly see is that women either presume men’s desire should be high, so that if their partner has lower desire than them - which is quite common - they take it personally, that he’s not attracted to her or there’s an issue with the relationship. Hunter Murray’s book is an attempt to change the conversation around sexual desire, from a male and female perspective. It struck me that those interviews would begin with men following stereotypical descriptions of their desire - and how we rely on those first minutes and those stereotypes. I’d ask ‘is there ever a time you’d say no?’ and they’d say ‘if I was sick, or tired’, and I felt the more space men had to express their experiences the more I’d hear stories like ‘my wife and I aren’t really on the same page, we’re emotionally disconnected, I’m not always so turned on, sometimes my wife will suggest having sex before we’ve had a chance to talk and I feel pressured to say yes’. “With the in-depth interviews, we would talk for an hour, and they started opening up. While in initial interviews, the subjects would suggest they had higher sex drives than their partners, when Hunter Murray probed deeper, a different story began to emerge. it wasn’t long before they showed they wanted to discuss a more complex narrative than the one we had heard.” “I started by interviewing men without knowing what I’d find. Over the course of 10 years, Hunter Murray interviewed 237 men of all ages and backgrounds in an attempt to discover whether this was really the case. In the research, there was this implication that men’s desire was always high or they were always in the mood, and would never turn down sex,” she says. I started to notice there was a counterpoint. “As a sex researcher, I started studying women’s sexual desires, which were complex and nuanced, with so many factors impacting whether women were in the mood or not. She says that we have been culturally conditioned, through songs, films, television and advertising, to view men as having an insatiable sexual appetite. In her book Not Always in the Mood, Hunter Murray aims to debunk the myths that surround men’s sexual desire. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |