Do Loose Chicks Sink Dicks?

Jessica at Feministing points us to this article by Rebecca Traister taking apart that “girls who want TEH SEX shrivel penises!!!” article from the WaPo that I discussed here.

The fact that young guys are having a rough time with erectile dysfunction is well worth investigating and I was happy to see a long reported piece about it in the Post. But imagine my surprise at learning that antidepressants, alcohol and stress aren’t the real story here. (They get mentioned several paragraphs into the piece, along with explanations like anxiety, recreational drug use and overconsumption of Red Bull, so as not to rob the piece of its backlash-y punch.) No, according to the Washington Post, the factor that’s making boys go limp is … (drum roll) … women who want to have sex with them! That’s right, folks. Apparently nothing can make a dude lose a stiffie like the feeling that a girl is horny. You following? No, me neither.

Traister points out that the fact that our bench-pressing he-man, Adam, had a hard time getting a hard-on with the sophomore may actually have been a sign that something was right rather than that something was wrong:

Now, I read Adam’s story and I think: Hey, maybe Adam is just a really great guy! The kind of guy who actually wants to have sex with someone he really likes and is attracted to. Clearly he wasn’t so interested in this sophomore, and so his body didn’t respond to her. I don’t see this as a disaster so much as a positive indicator of a healthy attitude about sex. I get that men and women often enjoy sex with people they despise or are indifferent to, but wouldn’t the world be a generally more cheerful place if our bodies nudged us toward those we found physically and emotionally alluring to begin with?

An awful lot of time and energy is invested in telling women and girls that, variously, it’s okay to say yes to sex and that it’s okay to say no. Then there’s the obsessive focus from the purity-ball/virginity-pledge crowd on making sure girls say no; feminists and sex-positive types try to let women know that sex should be fun and enjoyable and on their own terms.

But where is the comparable focus on telling boys and men that they don’t have to fuck everything that moves in order to “be a man,” that it’s okay to not try to fuck a girl if you don’t really feel like it or you aren’t really all that attracted to her? That was something that really jumped out at me from the original article, that if guys couldn’t get an erection, there must be a problem, and if there wasn’t a physical cause, there had to be something external thwarting the erection that the guy was entitled to or expected to have. An illustration of this is the following bit from the original article:

He decided to drop his bad habits for a while, start taking walks outside and working out at the gym. He sat down with his best friend, Josh Rolf, and spilled his guts. Rolf told him no one is a stud every time. Almost immediately, his talents returned.

“The day after I talked to Josh, everything went back to normal,” he says. He also credits his girlfriend. They had been dating a year, and “I didn’t think she’d walk out on me. That was incredibly helpful.”

It’s like it never occurred to him that he might not be in the mood every single time his girlfriend was. And it probably didn’t, since he was probably thoroughly socially conditioned to believe that he was supposed to be horny all the time. But the fact that he had another guy tell him this — reassure him that he wasn’t a machine — let him relax and get out of what was probably a spiral of anxiety about having not gotten it up that one time leading to never being able to get it up. Well, that and giving up the pot-smoking, drinking, Adderall and lack of exercise that Stepp handwaved. But I don’t think the importance of having another guy tell him that he’s normal, that there’s nothing wrong with him, can be underestimated.

As Traister points out, this kind of education for boys would go a long way to reduce the kind of performance anxiety described in the WaPo article, but it’s just so much easier to blame feminists and leave it at that:

It shouldn’t surprise anyone that massive consumption of alcohol, cigarettes, drugs and caffeine takes a toll on a human body. And this is a generation of kids that has been pushed to achieve — through hyper-scheduled play dates and after-school activities and college-prep courses — to the point where “performance anxiety” is a whole new ballgame. And I’m perfectly willing to believe that a sexual economy where female desire is allowed to match male desire could lead to a changed playing field on which the boys were less motivated by the sense that sex is the equivalent of a touchdown, scored by pushing your way through the opposing team’s defense.

But why, when there are all these perfectly reasonable explanations — explanations that, not for nothing, could turn out to be productive if we reacted to them by educating boys about the effects of recreational substance use, or developing and prescribing pills with fewer sexual side effects, or encouraging guys to get used to a sex life in which they’re on equal footing with their partners — do we have to immediately start in on the ghoulish, desire-sapping, sexless succubus of women’s liberation?