Myths, misconceptions about men’s sexuality

Myths, religion, and popular culture influence the way in which we look at ourselves and at the other sex. The fact that a man is not responsible for controlling his own drives is a perverse misunderstanding that enjoys unprecedented authority. Women have often ended up going along with that view or even claimed that they are by definition responsible for all male urges, convinced that their role in life is to be subservient to the whims of the unruly phallus.

An Islamic student in Egypt answered my question as to why she wore a headscarf: ‘We all know that men are beasts, and that’s why we need to fully cover ourselves.’ This rather grievous misconception about the male sex has become so ingrained that lack of self-control is confused with ‘masculinity’. Women have to give in it, according to the reasoning: ‘You caused my arousal, so you have to help get me rid of it.’ 

A man’s best remedy for arousal by a female stranger was to rush home and ‘discharge the material of that excitement where it rightfully belongs so that Satan […] does not entangle him in sin’ — advice originating from the writings of Imam Muslim (Muslim ibn al-Hajjaj, 821-875). On YouTube, ultra-orthodox preachers repeat the warning to women that their prayers will not be answered if they do not immediately oblige their husbands when they come home agitated and in need of their wives. Whether a woman has something else on her mind at such a moment is of no relevance: she must let her bread burn in the oven rather than let her husband burn with desire.

This tenacious traditional reasoning is also singed into the minds of countless non-Muslim men and women who earnestly state that men cannot help being carried away by their testosterone, as Dutch literary critic and columnist Jessica Durlacher argued in 2018 in a debate at the National Theatre in Amsterdam. A professor specialising in the philosophy of law was also inclined to sympathise with the ideas of Ibn Abbas in a column about the Weinstein affair, even though he himself is a dogmatic atheist: Such a situation — alone with a woman in a room — remains a temptation for many men. Their hormones may strike up so that their will follows their desire instead of their reason. Irrevocably this will lead to unsavoury things. That is why it is better to prevent something like this from happening. Hence, women were supposed to keep their distance from foreign men — that is, any man who is not a husband or brother — and if a tête-à-tête was unavoidable, to take along a trustworthy male. It seems to me that this line of thought was certainly not entirely wrong.

In this way, he automatically puts the solution back on to the woman’s plate. Just like in the time of Ibn Abbas, it is better for women to be guided! Wouldn’t it by now be more reasonable for an adult man who is afraid his hormones might play up — for example, during a thesis meeting with an attractive student — to get himself a testosterone supervisor?

The ‘effects’ of testosterone continue to be based more on popular opinion than on scientific evidence. In Cordelia Fine’s razor-sharp Testosterone Rex (2017) she argues that the whole testosterone fable was invalidated a long time ago. Or, in the words of Amsterdam professor of sexology Ellen Laan: ‘There is not one piece of evidence proving that men who conduct non-consensual sexual behaviour have more testosterone than those who do not.’ The cynical reality is that wherever people hold on to the fabled force majeure of testosterone, there are men interpreting this view as a license to do whatever they want. As a result, potential victims are constantly in danger — not only in society but also at home. According to World Health Organisation estimates, one in three women experience some form of physical or sexual violence on the part of her own partner, and 38 per cent of the murders of women are committed by male partners. Reports of such cases are constantly in the news and yet barely scratch the surface in terms of the number of actual occurrences. Recent statistics of women’s lack of physical security confront the world with the shocking consequences of fake testosterone logic in societies where men are not brought up to practice self-control from an early age.

In an extensive interview, Professor Laan corrects a few misconceptions about sexual behaviour, based on her recent research findings: Both men and women respond to sexual stimuli. With the man they are visible on the outside, with the woman they can be measured from the inside. The libido concept from Freud’s ‘drives’ must be thrown overboard: this ‘steam boiler’ theory saw the man as a barrel full of lust that must be discharged into sex (‘he cannot but carry on’), but testosterone is no ‘macho hormone’. This substance plays a role in the sexual lust of both men and women.

Power differences between men and women are the main cause of male misconduct. Two surviving ideas play a role in this. First, it is not the perpetrator who is guilty and responsible for his own arousal, but the woman who sexually arouses him — for example, by wearing a short skirt. Secondly, the myth that a man with an erection must absolutely come because otherwise he will get ‘blue balls’. Eradicate it as nothing but empty talk that has manipulated generations of women. There is no physiological urgency whatsoever for such an ejaculation: a man who has no sex for a while will simply have a nocturnal ejaculation. Undesirable behaviour can only be prevented by (sexual) education in which equality between men and women is paramount.

That much-needed sexual education is still in its infancy. Only in 2000 — in the final document of the Women’s Convention of the United Nations in Beijing — was it recorded for the first time that emancipation policy should also be targeted at men. Writing off all responsibility for one’s own desire remains a sign of weakness — from both sides. The ‘overwhelming catastrophe’ à la Ibn Abbas customarily ignored the question of how women experience forced or obligatory sex. Throughout history, from the starting point of male arrogance or carelessness, a female ‘no’ is too frequently interpreted unilaterally as a ‘yes’.

(The author has just published Hills of Paradise: Power, Powerlessness and the Female Body with Speaking Tiger.)