A long, low-grade hunger

Imagine that you suffer from a condition where you are more or less always hungry. A peculiar aspect of this condition is that you don’t actually need to eat; you have all the nutrition your body actually needs.✗If you must have an concrete example, imagine that you suffer from stomach cancer or some similar problem where you live off an IV and cannot ingest food. But both the hunger and the urge to soothe it by eating remain ever present.

Meanwhile, every day you see food. Every day, people talk about food around you. Every day, people bring food into your presence. Perhaps they consume it in front of you, or perhaps they just show it off: “What do you think? Doesn’t this look tasty?” They’re aware of your condition, but they’re not mean-spirited; they just don’t realize the effect their actions have on you.

What would you think of such people, if that were your daily condition?

What would you think of such people, even if that weren’t your daily condition?

Similar analogies

Or, if you prefer, think of an alcoholic who has sworn off drinking, or a man who has recently quit smoking. His friends and family claim to respect his commitment, but do not change their behavior: they continue to drink alcohol in front of him, or continue to smoke in his presence. Perhaps they even mock him, or offer him ”just a taste” of the stuff they know he’s missing.

Again, what kinds of friends are those?

What on earth are you babbling about?

The situation I described above is analagous to what it is like to be male. To be male is to experience a long, low-grade hunger for union with a female. Just as with the hypothetical individuals above, no man needs sex to survive. A man can go without it for decades, even an entire lifetime. He will live, and it can even be a pleasant existence.

Chastity, however, would not be easy, certainly not with a constant external stimulus. It surprises me how many people talk and act as if they are unaware of this: when an attractive woman wears clothing that reveals her curves and/or her flesh, she stimulates the appetite of pretty much every man in sight. That’s just the way our bodies work.

At some level, we all know this, but we certainly don’t take it seriously. Our culture contradicts itself routinely on this matter, stimulating and even rewarding men’s worst reproductive instincts for financial gain or psychological leverage, then reacting with horror when it sometimes goes wrong.

We should be clear about this: the way men see women and talk about them changes at pubescence. It goes from “Ewwww, girls are icky!” to “Whoah! girls are cool!” — and, sorry ladies, but it’s not the conversation that attracts us. Pop music, cute dresses, and how you do your hair are simply not high on the average male’s agenda.

An example

Show an innocent pre-pubescent male two images: one of a cookie, and one of a naked, attractive young woman. Which will he find more enticing?

In my experience, it will be the cookie: he will desire one, and preferably lots of them. A Playboy magazine is more likely to make him giggle nervously and confusedly while he pages through it, vaguely certain that something here is wrong, or at least naughty, but he’s not entirely sure what. (Yes, I am speaking from unfortunate experience. Yes, the qualifier “innocent” does a lot of heavy lifting.)

Now do the same thing with an innocent, post-pubescent male. Do I really need to describe the result? To be pedantic: he will feel aroused; he will want to keep looking; he will want to see more; and he will feel an urge to act. He will ignore the cookie, and desire the woman.

Let me emphasize that this is an entirely involuntary response. He doesn’t choose to have these feelings. They just happen.

Now suppose the image is of is a partially clad woman. In some cases, the attraction goes away. But in many cases, when the clothing is enticing, revealing, or even merely flattering, the urge remains and can even increase. I still remember my astonishment when one high school friend told another that he preferred a scantily clad woman to a naked one, because that left more to the imagination — and the second friend agreed enthusiastically.

None of this is a secret: adolescence is the great thief of innocence. You can’t have the joys of human life without humans, and human life is finite, which means we have to reproduce. If fertile men did not find fertile woman sexually attractive, then our species would have vanished millions of years ago. You can’t have the joys of human life without sexual attraction.

In short, there is nothing wrong or evil about sexual attraction. The instinct itself is neither sick, twisted, nor mentally ill. Indeed, it is a positive good.

A universal experience

It’s not just me who experiences this. It’s not a minority of men who are sick, or twisted, or mentally ill. It’s pretty much all of us.

I’ve men evaluate women’s figures all my life. Makeup, hairstyle, and clothing matter, yes, but the figure matters far more. I’ve heard it expressed in both polite and vulgar terms, and it might well surprise women to know which men speak politely and which speak vulgarly. I’ve heard it from teenagers, from college students, and from old men. I’ve heard it from men both reactionary and enlightened, pro-life and extremely pro-choice.

Granted, this is merely anecdotal evidence, and I am just one man. But I’m sorry, but that’s my overwhelming experience.

Men know this, and have said so for millennia

Let’s take a quote from Plato’s Republic — surprisingly, the only one that I remember as being from The Republic:†While I certainly remember the parables of the cave and the chariot, the only other quote I remember from The Republic is the following, from Book IV: People deem as their worst enemy the one who tells them the truth. But I did not remember it as being from The Republic until I looked it up just now to check.

It’s clear what Plato refers to here, and the context makes it even plainer; the speakers simply assume that it is a universal experience among men.

But notice how they speak of it as a burden. Look at the words they use to describe the experience: “escape”, “a mad and furious master”.

The internet knows this

It is well known that the vast majority of pornography targets men. After all, the vast majority of it puts women’s bodies on display — not men’s. The explicit depiction of one of life’s most intimate acts typically focuses on the woman and her anatomy. If a pornography website has a menu that lets you search by name, the vast majority of those names will be women. With few exceptions, men are better known in the pornography industry as producers than as stars.

Women know this

Talk with women when their guards are down, and they will admit this fact themselves, albeit not quite in the same words. For all my life, I have both heard and overheard women throughout the world not only describe with disgust how men react to women’s appearance, but asking each other for advice on how to dress so as to attract a particular man’s attention.

It might even amuse us, sad as it is, how often a woman wears an attractive outfit in the hope of catching a man’s eye, then catches a different man admiring her figure, and disdain him immediately as a lecher when she knows nothing about what he was thinking.

Again, one might discount this as anecdotal, but I invite the reader so inclined to watch any number of rom-coms or to read any number of romance novels — a genre whose readership is nearly entirely female — and notice how often the woman asks herself what sort of dress will attract that man’s attention.

Science knows this

Consider how this unquestionably feminist publication describes the results of a survey reporting that:

• 84% of men believe women always or mostly wear revealing clothing to arouse men;
• 76% believe they do it to elicit sexual advances;
• 95% enjoy gazing at women who wear revealing clothing;
• 88% admit being aroused by revealing clothing.

That’s an awful lot of men, isn’t it? Being a gender studies publication, it claims that female beauty as a sexual matter is a social construct, which (unless I completely misread it, which I may) flies in the face of not only pretty much every man’s experience but even their own data — only a gender studies publication would pretend that 95% of men are responding to a “social construct”.

Take a simple glance at our fellow primates or even much of the animal world: the revelation of signs of female fertility stimulates males. For many animals, and perhaps most, this occurs through smell; for other animals, it occurs visually, as male coloring and/or behavior attracts females. (Think of the all the great Birds of Paradise videos.) But for primates, and especially humans who have more or less lost most of the animal sense of smell, the primary stimulation is visual.

In my own defense

I am absolutely not saying any of the following:

• Women should cover themselves up in layers of unattractive, uncomfortable clothing.
• Women should submissively accept male domination.
• Women should accept that their purpose is to please the male gaze, and dress accordingly.
• Women who wear revealing clothing and are raped had it coming.
• Women must always be on their guard because men are uncontrollable monsters.

…or anything else I do not state explicitly.

Quite the contrary

At roughly 13 years of age I came across the following verse from the Gospel of Matthew, and have tried ever since to live by it:

The way I read this, the obligation is on men to guard the eye — and the hand, as well, which interpretation I leave to the reader, though I think it obvious what Our Lord refers to.

I have striven all my life to live a decent life. I haven’t always succeeded; as I admit rather plainly above, I have struggled with pornography, to the point of experiencing mockery from those who thought me a fool to struggle. My past failures grieve me, and I take comfort in the fact that I never once paid for it. That may seem a bizarre distinction to make, but for me it proves that I did it only under a compulsion — the compulsion of the long, low-grade hunger, where food is often placed before me, and sometimes — sometimes — I failed to resist the urge to taste it.

For pity’s sake, have pity

To be male is to live with a long, low-grade hunger. The best of us deal with it as best we can; we see women as mothers and wives; we try to honor them accordingly, care for them in their pregnancy, and reverence their roles in the family. But even so, we are only male. It’s dismaying, discouraging, and dispiriting when women complain that we men don’t talk about our feelings — then call us disgusting or filthy when we do. For pity’s sake, ladies, have pity.

What do I mean by this? Stop talking and acting as if men aren’t men. Stop pretending it’s some sort of crime for a man to admire a woman’s form, or — heaven forbid! — to compliment her on it.

Maybe reconsider showing so much flesh. In general, I’ve worked out how to look away, or to render myself effectively blind by removing my glasses — but in an age where people think of their clothing as a form of self-expression, maybe give a moment’s thought about what your dress says to everyone, including those burdened with a long, low-grade hunger.

If you don’t, that’s your affair. But it’s rather rich then to act as if it’s alright for some men — young, attractive, socially adept — to express appreciation for a woman’s appearance, whiel scorning it from the older, unattractive, or socially awkward. You never know — that awkward, “creep” might turn be the one guy who is willing to care for you after the handsome rake who puts a bun in your oven skips town.

I’m quite serious about that. It’s entirely possible that one reason a guy seems to be a creep is because he’s rather sensitive and awkward, and women spent years making him ashamed for paying them attention while rewarding the genuine creeps. Once you stop judging superficially and get to know him, you might get to like him. Sort of how you’d like men to act with you… right?