It has come up a couple of times (no puns intended at all in this very serious post), but one of the reasons that I think many, especially very young, men/boys are gravitating to the “manosphere” and patriarchal misogynistic media sources (as I talk about in post 28 of 100), is that these are places that tend to give them permission to be horny weirdos that are attracted to women. And not just be horny weirdos, but really revel in that identity…as long as it conforms to very particular, very problematic, very heteronormative, ways of being horny and weird. Like seriously, the manosphere is making themselves a lot of money off of creating camaraderie around creating a shared sexual identity…based on objectifying women’s bodies as sport for straight men. Basically, when it comes to socializing young folks as men and trying to help them discover what they find attractive, what and who turns them on, and how to develop the social skills necessary to become the person that they want to be, there are currently some (underfunded) LGBTQIA2S+ resources and resource centers, primarily for folks in dense Urban environments; there is confusing and often contradictory mass media, especially “coming of age” movies, television, video games and comics; and then there is the “manosphere.”
Honestly, from my own personal experience, even tapping into these resources more than 25-30 years ago when “Trans” meant “transexual” at least in the US midwest, I am so thankful that I had as much access to as much queer theory resources as I did, because the mainstream media portrayals of straight men in relationships was awful and everyone was still terrified of gay men because of the US governments awful response to the AIDS pandemic. Bi was rarely an identity that ever got talked about seriously, and was usually just code for “gay passing as straight.” But beyond the language to talk about ones own personal sexuality and gender identity, what was even more lacking was resources to talk about sex. There was the clinical language of sex Ed classes (which have remained remarkably restricted over the last 30 years), and then there was there was the kid in class talking about “Cincinnati steamers” and “felching” that was definitely not having sex, but somehow had access to the weirdest information about it. In all fairness, I might have been one of these kids, because my mom kept a lot of erotica and pornography in places I would definitely find it, and I was probably the only one of my male-socialized high school friends who was masturbating to Penthouse Letters (written by women) and the Kama Sutra. I still had stupid ideas about sex and how men had it, until I started getting much better information from Punk and Anarchist zines about sex and sexuality, which was my first real exposure to queer theory. At that time I was still identifying very intensely as straight, but straight men were (and maybe still are) largely terrible at talking to each other about sex without turning it into a competition, or just repeating truly awful takes about it from men’s health magazines trying to sell them products straight men need to be better straight men. Even so, I know a lot of male-socialized folks were very scared to let anyone know they were turning to gay/queer sources to learn about sex, because all of that stuff had to just be about gay desires, right? I mean, no straight man can possible get any pleasure out of exploring anal play for themselves, can they? These really were the kinds of fears and thoughts that I had when I was very young, and that I have heard repeated back to me by men too old to be thinking this way.
Now I am old, and it has been a long time since I had questions about my sexual or gender identity that I didn’t know how to research on my own, so I may be pretty out of touch with how kids today are learning about themselves as sexual beings, especially folks being socialized as men. But, I do research and write about the media that people turn to learn about sex, and one trend that I have noticed is that it seems like it is much more common for there to be feminist portrayals of folks being socialized as women learning about themselves as sexual beings through masturbation then there are of folks being socialized as men doing the same, and most feminist portrayals of men learning about themselves as sexual beings does tend to focus on queer, gay and trans experiences. Meanwhile, mainstream media and PM media tends to portray “men masturbating” as pathetic or as a joke, because “masturbation isn’t real sex” and “real men want real sex.”
Maybe the one exception I can think of off the top of my head (although it still falls pretty squarely in the “joke” camp) is the movie There’s Something About Mary, in which the character being played by Ben Stiller is given the intentionally misleading advice that masturbating will calm his nerves before a date. Maybe the other, “not-terrible, but still for comedic effect” portrayals of men masturbating tend to revolve around donating sperm.
I think the “Masturbating isn’t real sex” combined with “Real men want real sex” idea, is a pretty toxic pair for teaching folks who want to be men how to be self aware sexual beings and good sexual partners for others. It is usually a very bad thing for anyone to first learn about their own body and how they get turned on directly from another person. Overwhelmingly when this is how it happens, it is because someone is not ready to be engaging in sexual activity, often through force or coercion, and these stories are rarely portrayed this way in media. Stories about fathers taking young boys to sex workers, for example, are far too common and even when they are romanticized they reek of statutory rape and violations of consent. Because even when a young person is very horny, and is thinking about sex a lot, if they are not really mature enough to understand what sex is, and to talk about it with the person they are having sex with, they are not really capable of giving consent. This is why statutory rape is a crime regardless of whether consent appears to be given, and this is not a new or radical idea. Even so, older people (usually male-identifying folks) being entranced by the budding sexual fantasies of youth are an ever-present feature of media making, and is an example of a value conflict that leads to a lot of shame, lies, and sexual violence. Now clearly, there is legitimate grey area around things like “when do age gaps matter?” States have very different laws about statutory rape, and while many of them are rooted in patriarchal and misogynistic ideas about parents marrying off their children at a young age, most people will not want to accuse a now 18 year-old person of statutory rape when their partner of the last 6 months is still 17. But “Barely legal” is absolutely a real category of pornography, American Beauty won an academy award and Lolita is a beloved work of literature that has been made into movies and been the basis of many adaptations.
Young people become horny. How do we, as a society acknowledge that and facilitate young people to learn their own life lessons about what that means for them and the adult they will grow up to be, without exploiting them—sexually, the youth are often targets of sexual assault; but also economically, socially and politically, as is really the case with most pornography and the Manosphere as a whole? This seems like a very difficult question to address from a political/national level, as many of people’s deepest held spiritual and psychological believes seem to revolve around it, but is also one that has to addressed at a community level larger than individual families and their personal believes, because the rhetoric of hiding the development of gender and sexual identities within the sphere of “Family Values” has, and continues to be one of the most effective ways of protecting sexual predators. So what do boys believe about masturbation? Who is teaching them these beliefs? And how do these beliefs empower boys to be healthy, caring and responsible sexual partners? It seems like the Manosphere is more than happy to answer these questions, and has been given enough power that it is very difficult to challenge their authority on this topic, especially for young folks trying to socialize into men.
Post 32 of 100: what do boys believe about masturbation?
It has come up a couple of times (no puns intended at all in this very serious post), but one of the reasons that I think many, especially very young, men/boys are gravitating to the “manosphere” and patriarchal misogynistic media sources (as I talk about in post 28 of 100), is that these are places that tend to give them permission to be horny weirdos that are attracted to women. And not just be horny weirdos, but really revel in that identity…as long as it conforms to very particular, very problematic, very heteronormative, ways of being horny and weird. Like seriously, the manosphere is making themselves a lot of money off of creating camaraderie around creating a shared sexual identity…based on objectifying women’s bodies as sport for straight men. Basically, when it comes to socializing young folks as men and trying to help them discover what they find attractive, what and who turns them on, and how to develop the social skills necessary to become the person that they want to be, there are currently some (underfunded) LGBTQIAA2S+ resources and resource centers, primarily for folks in dense Urban environments; there is confusing and often contradictory mass media, especially “coming of age” movies, television, video games and comics; and then there is the “manosphere.”
Honestly, from my own personal experience, even tapping into these resources more than 25-30 years ago when “Trans” meant “transexual” at least in the US midwest, I am so thankful that I had as much access to as much queer theory resources as I did, because the mainstream media portrayals of straight men in relationships was awful and everyone was still terrified of gay men because of the US governments awful response to the AIDS pandemic. Bi was rarely an identity that ever got talked about seriously, and was usually just code for “gay passing as straight.” But beyond the language to talk about ones own personal sexuality and gender identity, what was even more lacking was resources to talk about sex. There was the clinical language of sex Ed classes (which have remained remarkably restricted over the last 30 years), and then there was there was the kid in class talking about “Cincinnati steamers” and “felching” that was definitely not having sex, but somehow had access to the weirdest information about it. In all fairness, I might have been one of these kids, because my mom kept a lot of erotica and pornography in places I would definitely find, and I was probably the only one of my male-socialized high school friends who was masturbating to Penthouse Letters (written by women) and the Kama Sutra, because this was before the internet was made for porn and this was the material to which I had access. I still had a lot of stupid ideas about sex and how men had it (remind me to talk about “Unrequited Love” in a future post), until I started getting much better information from Punk and Anarchist zines about sex and sexuality, which was my first real exposure to queer theory. At that time I was still identifying very intensely as straight, but straight men were (and maybe still are) largely terrible at talking to each other about sex without turning it into a competition, or just repeating truly awful takes about it from men’s health magazines trying to sell them products straight men need to be better straight men. Even so, I know a lot of male-socialized folks were very scared to let anyone know they were turning to gay/queer sources to learn about sex, because all of that stuff had to just be about gay desires, right? I mean, no straight man can possible get any pleasure out of exploring anal play for themselves, can they? These really were the kinds of fears and thoughts that I had when I was very young, and that I have heard repeated back to me by men too old to be thinking this way.
Now I am old, and it has been a long time since I had questions about my sexual or gender identity that I didn’t know how to research on my own, so I may be pretty out of touch with how kids today are learning about themselves as sexual beings, especially folks being socialized as men. But, I do research and write about the media that people turn to learn about sex, and one trend that I have noticed is that it seems like it is much more common for there to be feminist portrayals of folks being socialized as women learning about themselves as sexual beings through masturbation then there are of folks being socialized as men doing the same, and most feminist portrayals of men learning about themselves as sexual beings does tend to focus on queer, gay and trans experiences. Meanwhile, mainstream media and PM media tends to portray “men masturbating” as pathetic or as a joke, because “masturbation isn’t real sex” and “real men want real sex.”
Maybe the one exception I can think of off the top of my head (although it still falls pretty squarely in the “joke” camp) is the movie There’s Something About Mary, in which the character being played by Ben Stiller is given the intentionally misleading advice that masturbating will calm his nerves before a date. Maybe the other, “not-terrible, but still for comedic effect” portrayals of men masturbating tend to revolve around donating sperm.
I think the “Masturbating isn’t real sex” combined with “Real men want real sex” idea, is a pretty toxic pair for teaching folks who want to be men how to be self aware sexual beings and good sexual partners for others. It is usually a very bad thing for anyone to first learn about their own body and how they get turned on directly from another person. Overwhelmingly when this is how it happens, it is because someone is not ready to be engaging in sexual activity, often through force or coercion, and these stories are rarely portrayed this way in media. Stories about fathers taking young boys to sex workers, for example, are far too common and even when they are romanticized they reek of statutory rape and violations of consent. Because even when a young person is very horny, and is thinking about sex a lot, if they are not really mature enough to understand what sex is, and to talk about it with the person they are having sex with, they are not really capable of giving consent. This is why statutory rape is a crime regardless of whether consent appears to be given, and this is not a new or radical idea. Even so, older people (usually male-identifying folks) being entranced by the budding sexual fantasies of youth are an ever-present feature of media making, and is an example of a value conflict that leads to a lot of shame, lies, and sexual violence. Now clearly, there is legitimate grey area around things like “when do age gaps matter?” States have very different laws about statutory rape, and while many of them are rooted in patriarchal and misogynistic ideas about parents marrying off their children at a young age, most people will not want to accuse a now 18 year-old person of statutory rape when their partner of the last 6 months is still 17. But “Barely legal” is absolutely a real category of pornography, American Beauty won an academy award and Lolita is a beloved work of literature that has been made into movies and been the basis of many adaptations.
Young people become horny. How do we, as a society acknowledge that and facilitate young people to learn their own life lessons about what that means for them and the adult they will grow up to be, without exploiting them—sexually, the youth are often targets of sexual assault; but also economically, socially and politically, as is really the case with most pornography and the Manosphere as a whole? This seems like a very difficult question to address from a political/national level, as many of people’s deepest held spiritual and psychological believes seem to revolve around it, but is also one that has to addressed at a community level larger than individual families and their personal believes, because the rhetoric of hiding the development of gender and sexual identities within the sphere of “Family Values” has, and continues to be one of the most effective ways of protecting sexual predators. So what do boys believe about masturbation? Who is teaching them these beliefs? And how do these beliefs empower boys to be healthy, caring and responsible sexual partners? It seems like the Manosphere is more than happy to answer these questions, and has been given enough power that it is very difficult to challenge their authority on this topic, especially for young folks trying to socialize into men.