We know that it’s a mess when only heterosexual men are considered as having active and desiring sexuality. It’s a mess because the sex women have with other women gets seen as nothing, because the sex men have with other men gets seen as threatening, because so help you if you’re not fixed to those categories. It’s a mess because the people desired by those heterosexual men aren’t seen as proper people, with their own desires and agency, and because their consent doesn’t really matter.
People being reduced from their personhood, then, is the main problem here. It’s also a mess for the desires of the dominant set.
What? How are heterosexual men being messed up by the ever-present foregrounding of their desires? There’s nothing like feeling yourself desired, too: it’s powerful and validating and important. If you can’t connect with that? If you’re always the pursuer of people who you don’t understand as full people? And if you can only understand yourself as not someone special, but some guy chasing around gorgeous women to get shot down by the cold bitches but why because you do everything you’re supposed to? You’re missing out in vital ways. You’re not only missing the fullness of connecting with someone you understand as a person, but the affirmation of your sexuality and you yourself.
I keep hitting up against the unexpectedness of my desire. That I have it. That it’s significant. That I’m completely reworking my world to give it the healthy space for expression I’m just not getting here. Love is amazing. I’m so in love with *love* it’s unbelievable. I have some of the most amazing in depth love-relationships (where love isn’t always romantic) imaginable. And yet. Desire. Still there. Still confronting me and challenging me. I want to write about this a bit. But… I’m worried about the can of worms it would open about something so deeply personal too and whether I have the courage to have that discussion…. Owning my own self as a sexually expressionate person…. in some ways easier than I imagined. Other times, harder than I believe.
It is not only heterosexual men, it is heterosexual men between (say) 15 – where they are not supposed to act on their desires and perhaps 50 – maybe stretched to 60. Outside of these ranges even heterosexual men are supposedly free of any sexual urges. Sad, silly and completely untrue.
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It’s the kind of system in which nobody is happy. When it’s *always* the man’s duty to instigate and if he doesn’t he’s less of a man, and a woman is *never* allowed to instigate because, well, I don’t really understand why either part is the way it is. All I know is it’s made everybody miserable, including me. I’ve done by fair share of chasing after women in my life and I haven’t been successful even once (even though I’ve done everything right, right?), and now I’m a coward. You can’t approach women? Well, you must be a *coward*. Sort yourself out.
The thing is, there’s no shortage of women who desire me. I know that, I can see it in the way they look at me. But experience has taught me that that’s a lie – if I act on that I’ll only get rejected. And for the ones of them that *do* actually desire me, the fact that they’re not allowed to act on it has to be immensely frustrating.
It’s no good for anyone and yet that’s the way it is.
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