Just because a man and woman have chemistry, writes Marcus Williams, doesn’t mean they mix sex and lust the same way.
One of the coolest things I remember from high school chemistry was learning about seed crystals. When the conditions are right, a supersaturated solution can remain completely liquid, even with a bunch of molecules just looking for an excuse to crystallize into solid form. The crystallization is inevitable if you just wait, because dropping temperature or a pressure change will finally be enough to trigger it, but the process can be sped up rather dramatically with a seed crystal. A seed crystal is just a tiny crystallized piece of whatever the solution is supersaturated with, but crystals build on other crystals, so once the first piece is formed, the rest happens much more quickly. Crystallization is not dramatically fast for every kind of crystal, but with some solutions, such as sodium acetate, you can see an entire beaker’s contents crystallize in just a few seconds after adding a seed crystal.
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I have followed and even authored some of GMP’s recent articles on Male Lust, as well as keeping tabs on the conversation that has followed (several hundred comments worth), and it has been like swimming through a supersaturated mix of desire, hurt, defensiveness, sex, insecurity, pleasure, disdain, contempt, and occasionally even fun. It has all been very interesting, but genuine understanding has been slow to crystallize. Then I saw this, in a comment by Jill.
But if he stopped feeling lust for me, I would lose a lot of the pleasure I get out of our relationship.
Jill hadn’t said anything drastically different from what she and many other women were saying all along, but saying it that way dropped a little seed crystal into my brain.
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For me, sex is an emotional seed crystal. When I’m happy with the kind and amount of sex I’m having, all sorts of positive emotions that don’t seem tied directly to sex have a way of crystallizing around it. With enough sex, I feel happier, more confident both generally and in my marriage, more patient, and more likely to feel like an all-around good guy.
Insufficient sex is also a seed crystal, but for negative things. If I’m having no sex or not enough, my happiness is limited when I can feel it at all, I get more insecure in general and in my marriage, I’m more cranky and irritable, and more likely to feel discontented and annoyed with the world.
Lust is related to sex, but is not sex. I want to be lusted after, but it won’t stop the negative feelings from crystallizing if I’m not having actual sex, no matter how much my wife or other women communicate their attraction for me. Conversely, if I’m getting plenty of sex, but my wife doesn’t make a point of expressing how sexy she thinks I am, I don’t care much because sex is confirmation that I’m sexy enough.
Without sex, I lose a lot of the pleasure I get out of a relationship.
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To the extent that women are like Jill (not that women in contemporary Brazil or 17th century Africa, for instance, can’t be completely different, but I’m just drawing on my own experience) the new insight she gave me is that maybe for women, the emotional seed crystal isn’t sex—it’s lust.
If I understood Jill and several like-minded commentators, the feeling of being lusted after is what makes them feel validated, loved, and secure. (I expect Jill et. al. To tell me in short order that I haven’t understood them at all, but I’m already committed to the metaphor for the duration of this article.) Confident in the total and preferably exclusive lust from their man, they feel valued as a person, desired as a lover, recognized as a complete person, and safe from the risk that he’ll be tempted to stray.
To get the negative crystallization going for lust, it does not take an absence of lust. All it takes is a seed crystal of doubt. Lusting after other women, whether by passing glance, porn, or strip clubs, crystallizes the feeling that she is not attractive enough, or perhaps even “ruined”. Telling a friend that some body part or parts aren’t as hot as they used to be crystallizes to the belief that he shouted her ugliness from the rooftops and no longer finds her beautiful in any way. Bemoaning the aesthetic effects of age or motherhood on breasts is equated with thinking there is no longer anything beautiful or enjoyable about them.
The standard for “enough lust” is generous as women apply it to their lust for men. I’ve seen many reassurances that women still lust after their balding, gut-expanding, saggy-scrotumed mates, which is reassuring since I don’t expect to inhabit my Adonis physique forever. Even if they joke about such traits to their friends, I’m assured, it doesn’t diminish their true love and attraction. The standard they seem to apply to being the object of lust is much less forgiving. So far in this conversation, I have yet to see a man persuade a woman that his attraction to a woman with “ruined tits” could still be genuine. Why is it so easy to lust after a man “in spite” of his physical flaws, but so hard to believe that a man can do the same?
For these women, sex appears to be of secondary importance to lust. More than one comment expressed hurt or betrayal at the idea of a man having sex with her if he thought any aspect of her appearance was unattractive. I was surprised when Aya wrote:
Am I going to give everything up because he might get drunk one night while out of town and bang a hot girl who’s all over him? I’ll be pissed off. I’ll see it as possibly opening the door for me to do the same thing. An orgasm or two without me does not invalidate or get rid of everything we’ve worked for, nor does it get rid of the love and lust we have with each other. Maybe it’ll take some therapy, maybe we’ll open up the marriage for a little bit, we’ll get STD testing done–either way, cheating doesn’t have to do with dissatisfaction , it’s just about a lust for another person. Shit talking is negative in principle, and absolutely dishonest.
It would appear that sex is just sex, but lust is personal.
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Now’s the part where I’m tempted to make even more unsubstantiated generalizations than I already have, but suffice to say that these different reactions make for a volatile mix. I don’t know enough chemistry to extend this metaphor much further, but I feel like I’m left with four beakers full of crystal that I would like to safely smoke somehow, but they have a tendency to explode when mixed together. Besides, smoking crystal usually doesn’t end well. Mad lusting scientist that I am, I’ll now don my safety goggles and hold these beakers up to the open flame of user comments. Fire away.
—Photo wwarby/Flickr
About Marcus Williams
I think you’re right–it definitely rings true for me and many people I know… I have been throwing around a similar theory lately with my friends (but without the crystals link, of course.) Thanks for putting it out there!
This rings true for me! I’ll add that if women are lusted after, it may sooth their insecurities about their looks (i.e., socially-generated insecurities over body image) and build their self esteem and feelings of self worth. Sex confirms his interest in her.
Not surprising that this an emotionally-charged issue. Everyone wants to feel desirable, and everyone gets hurt (and sometimes angry, and defensive) when their desirability is questioned or challenged.
Still, it’s gonna happen.
Lots to say. No time to say it. Love the crystalization metaphor. I think you’ve hit something very interesting here. I hope I’ll get the chance to read comments and write more tonight.
I wanted to point out that a lot of time men want to be the exclusive recipients of a womans lust. There are plenty of men out there who will cheat, have a serious porn habit, but wouldnt want the wife or girlfriend lusting after and esp having sex with another men. In my experience, men are very unforgiving when a gf/wife cheats with another man. I think the man wants to feel special and also does not want to be compared. Here’s a good example. My ex had porn habit that amounted to a part time job (4+ hours a day) I sent racy pics to a man, and he was upset. He said he felt like he wasn’t enough and basically that the attention he gave me should have been enough.
That being said there’s a huge difference btwn just a glance and going to a strip club or watching porn.
I think you’re help me make my point, Alice, that women see lust and actual sex as much closer together on the sex spectrum than men. I don’t mind my wife lusting after other men, where “lusting after” means looking and/or fantasizing, but I would greatly mind her having sex with them. I don’t even mind her thinking about another guy while we’re having sex, as long as she isn’t rude about it. Unexpressed thoughts are never rude; for expressed thoughts, it depends, because fantasies can be expressed with disrespect, or with tact and playfulness that make them fun to hear. I would consider sending racy pics without my knowledge a betrayal, because unlike porn, which does not involve selecting specific people to view it, that would entail specifically interacting with and selecting another man to express herself sexually to.
I see porn as impersonal, and masturbating to it is a one-person show, but sending pics would cross the line from fantasy into sexual interaction with another person because it’s not just lusting after some stranger or celebrity that there’s no chance of ever really meeting. Actual sex would be an even greater betrayal. (In open relationships, those thresholds would be different, but I’m talking about closed monogamy.) I think strip clubs are a grayer area, because a lap dance is more interactive than just sitting at a table looking, for example, but if it’s just looking, it still strikes me as safely down at the “lust” end of the spectrum, well before the cheating threshold is crossed. I don’t expect you to agree or be convinced, but that’s the point of my article. To use another scientific analogy, it’s like we (men and women) are measuring the same stuff with what we think are the same measuring devices, but they’re calibrated very differently.
Calibration. That’s interesting. I miiiiiiight could see your point about the porn. If I send a photo of me to a real person that i know without my husband’s knowledge or consent, yes. I’m drawing in a third party to our relationship and betraying an agreement. I’d say the same thing goes for strip clubs even if you are looking, because those women there? Are real people. You look at them. They look at you, or at least know you are there to look at them. They try you for a lap dance, you’ve interacted with them. You look at the cocktail waitresses breasts while you buy a drink, etc…
I get that the porn actresses you might look at (or a man might look at) have no idea that you personally are looking. The receiver of the racy pic does. Something still isn’t really clicking perfectly for me on this.
Well, the women in the porn are real people too, which might be why women take issue with this particular conundrum.
Then again, what if I’m chatting with some guy in a chat room. He’s anonymous, likely not seeing me as a real person. Nor am I probably seeing him as a real person (in part because of how the internet works). If I send a body pic to him without my face…or him to me, how is that different than watching porn.
Those people are also mostly anonymous to us, yeah? Not real, or we can pretend they aren’t real.
I wonder if more men get upset about women’s indiscretions because they feel more entitled to act on their many lustful thoughts? Or that they don’t believe women have those thoughts (which we do, I’ve had about four today), or that we “belong” to them more than they belong to us?
I can’t speak for every woman here, and frankly, I’m not completely opposed to partners exploring sexual imagery, open relationships etc so long as they set those expectations and agreements with each other….but what I’m still hearing is that men can see some women as love and lust and all of that, and some women are disposable images (especially so far as they are farther removed from real time). How do women know which they are? I keep seeing in the comments a lot of fear from the women-we are told that men often “cheat down” with unattractive women, but that they also apparently “lust up” after we are not as attractive. And we are often told, or were told in the past in the norms of history, “She didn’t mean anything to me.”
Confusing.
When a woman cheats and its love, is that worse for the man to hear? What if she cheated for looks only? Or money? Which hurts men more?
I will agree with you that men seem happier when they get laid consistently. I think most humans do. We need touch and pleasure (in varying amounts and probably for different reasons and ok ok I’ll even assume some of those reasons are biological as well as cultural).
So how do we all keep having better and more consistent sex with our partners without messing things up?
@Julie,
I know this sounds rude, but I think men view women as chunks of meat, and therefore their lust doesn’t mean anything. Men think their lust is so harmless and also their other sexual indiscretions. “She just a piece of ass to me, she doesn’t mean anything, it’s ok if I do what I do.”
If you consider lust an indiscretion, we’re using different definitions. I don’t believe in thought crime, so lustful thoughts hurt nobody. When those thoughts translate into action, then yes, it can cause hurt depending on the circumstances, but men are well aware of that, whether they’re in the role of the betrayer or the betrayed. Do you agree that lust can also translate into action that isn’t hurtful at all?
I think my ex was a prime example of how lust can hurt somebody.
And also like I’ve been saying everyone experiences lust but men are extremely fixated on it. That where the problem starts.
Then let’s look at how men get so fixated on it.
My money rests on how men are raised with the notion that our sexual vitality is a defining part of us therefore if we aren’t all about the sex all the time that means something is wrong with us (ie failing at being “a real man”).
I think guiding young guys on sexuality would do a whole lot more good than just letting them get sucked into the notion that to be considered a man one must be horny at all time and want to have sex with as many women as possible.
But in the end its really not the lust that’s the problem its the expression of the lust that CAN get problematic.
Lust is not an indiscretion, no. Lusting after your wife or images…sure I can see how that’s perfectly reasonable. Having fantasies about other people. That’s not necessarily anything that will hurt the partnership.
Heck, some people swing. Some people take lovers openly.
Where it hurts is when you have men on the one hand saying that porn doesn’t count, but racy pictures do. It hurts when you find out that your spouse is out spending the family’s money on strippers.
The confusion hurts I think, that men can want women in one way over here, but in a very different way over there. That I think many women would consider the porn women as real people, and maybe the men don’t.
Anyway, I’m not sure lust is the problem but the sense that a lot of men believe they have an entitlement to get theirs, while women aren’t supposed to. Not phrasing that right, and it’s just a guess as to why comments skew that way.
Actually, porn does involve specific people…There are prostitute review forums. The prostitutes have their own websites with porn and you can also chat with them. And there is also erotic cam chat. Also, some of their prostitutes are basically porn girls who provide the porn experience…And they are an email or private message away. Contacting them personally is a piece of cake.
And the porn, those girls aren’t just pictures, or just accumulations of female body parts. They are real people with feelings. Not to mention all the strange ideas men get from the porn. Is porn better because there is lust after many women instead of men sending a pic to one man? And that’s what I mean, one picture vs. the 100s that a man can see in a single porn viewing session.
I really do feel like men feel like they are more entitled to it.
O and I promise you those guys aren’t spending $300 in the champagne room just for a lapdance…
Underlying that particular dynamic though? four hours a day of being disconnected from his wife no matter what he’s doing (porn, cheating, sports, gambling) and then getting angry with her for acting in a similar matter (could be pictures could be something else). I think his anger could be read as guilt because what he was giving her was clearly not enough. Not enough time or attention.
He was spending four hours a day away from her with unreal people. She got real attention from a real person and that upset him.
That’s not about lust, but about a dysfunctional dynamic in the marriage.
@Julie
In addition, he told me he was tired of me body…And turned me down for sex…Then got mad…
But that being said, I’ve been in many relationships where the dynamic was the same. I was supposed to be wholesome and faithful, while he would go out with other women/view massive porn/generally do what he wanted to do. They always have excuses for what they do, but let me make one mistake-like sending ONE racy picture while he views 1000s and its going down. My female coworkers have this same problem with men. It seems like men think they are justified as long as they are in love with wifey/gf.
i think men either need to curb their lust and sex or they need to stop being so possessive.
You hit a key note with that last word, “Possessive”! There is an unfortunate desire of men to “own” everything, its “his” woman. This is unhealthy, and I hope you have or can find someone who does not treat you like an object to be possessed, but rather as someone to love and desire. There are enough men out there who will treat a woman with respect!
I’ve seen far too many instances where the man or the woman stopped desiring their partner. It leads to a long road of disdain and dissatisfaction, ultimately ending in heated separation. Often, that separation regenerates that desire, since now they are something you cannot have. BUT, those that go for the 2nd, 3rd, or 10th shot, usually end up at the same road.
I wont cheat on someone I’m with because when it comes to that point that you’d rather sleep with someone other than the person you’re with, you should get away and prevent them from being hurt by your cheating. Its better to have loved and lost and all that Jazz!
Over the past year I’ve had several short lived relationships. One of those women had me considerate of the idea of an open relationship. (She asked ME out by asking if I would accompany her to a swingers party, not as swingers, but for me to keep her from being drunkenly taken advantage of… though later she admitted that it would be something she’d be into doing if she were in a long term relationship with someone… to keep it “spicy”!) I never thought it possible before… deciding if I could be with someone and allow them to be with themselves. I had to question that whole possessive part of my nature. I determined that I would at least give it a shot, though I never had the chance. But its in the back of my mind for the future.
I think it is possible to be physically involved with someone, while still being emotionally attached to another. She described it using something I’ve long since said… There is sex, that you can have with most anyone, then there is ‘Making Love’, which only particular people can share. Using my own words to create the connection had a lasting effect. I still don’t know if I would ever be able to follow through with having an “open marriage” (granted I also don’t know if I can ever commit to marriage). But on the point that many people make, being that humans are monogamous by choice, not by nature, I certainly do not see it as being entirely improbable.
Gordon,
It’s more of the hypocrisy than the possessiveness that gets me. I mean, how is a guy gonna get mad at me for doing something when he’s doing it x10000. That’s what I dont understand.
If my ex had been spending all that time gambling or sports, people would say he had a gambling problem and that he should consider cutting back. But bc it was sex related, he’s a man and he’s entitled to it.
If I’m having no sex or not enough, my happiness is limited when I can feel it at all, I get more insecure in general and in my marriage, I’m more cranky and irritable, and more likely to feel discontented and annoyed with the world.”
O is that why men tell women to get laid when they are cranky? LMAO
Yes. If it’s not PMS, it must be a lack of sex. ::taking cover::
You may have exposed a hole in my theory, though, because if that’s why men (the reckless ones) say that to women, why don’t women try to make us less cranky by telling us, “Everything’s fine, honey, I still lust after you even though you’re not getting laid.”?
hahaha…. you remind me of something my ex would say towards the end, after YEARS of not having sex… She’d always say “You’re always more pleasant when I give you head! Why do you have to be so miserable when I dont!”
Keep in mind, this was several months since we had ANY pleasurable interaction, this was nearing the end, we were merely together by necessity…
I like your crystals analogy in this piece. I disagree that sex and lust are different; in my opinion I think lust often leads to sex, but not always. Because of this, when a partner of mine noticeably lusts after someone else I feel worthless because I make it a priority to look good. I really don’t want to think this way despite the fact that I’ve learned (from GMP) that men will always look elsewhere.
@jessica
When it comes down to it, a man will do what he wants to do. I just want them to stop blaming their wives and gfs for their behavior.
When it comes down to it, some people will do what they want to do, and oughtn’t blame their significant others for it. It’s not a guy thing. Some people – both men and women – will have whatever desires and preferences they have, but will take their significant others’ desires and feelings into account, and modify their own behavior in ways they wouldn’t if they didn’t care. Neither gender has a monopoly on goodness, badness, or blaming anyone but themselves for their flaws.
I wasn’t trying to imply that men/women are bad, good, or blame either..I have a problem with the lust factor in men, not the men as human beings. Or is lust inherent in men?
Also, it terrifies me that in your comment below you say that its as natural for you as breathing. In my warped idea of relationships, lusting after someone else means that they like me less.
@marcus It seems to me that men in particular do this. In all fairness, maybe its bc I dont deal with women on that level, but men really really seem not to care about how the partner feels.
@Jessica – I’m tempted to give a quick “yes” to your question about lust being inherent in men, but it depends on what lust means to you, specifically. The article is sort of about it meaning different things to men and women, but if you can narrow down what it means to you, I can give you my opinion as to whether it’s inherent in men, and probably throw in an unsolicited opinion about whether it’s inherent in women, too. I definitely can’t relate to thinking being an object of my lust makes them like me less, but I’m interested in how your thought process works.
@alice – I think it’s a combination of you only having that kind of relationship with men, and your luck of the draw with the men you’ve had relationships with. I know I care about my wife and have cared about other partners in the past, and I know I’m not the only one. Also, it’s easy to mistake not knowing how a partner feels with not caring how a partner feels. I’m sure you’ve heard the tired refrain of “We’re not mindreaders!” It’s cliché, but true. I could substitute “sex” for “feel” and say almost the same thing in reverse: I’ve often felt like women don’t really really get how important sex is to how a man feels.
@Marcus,
I’m sure there are the token nice guys who do care, but most don’t even if they know they are hurting their partner. I’ve met a handful of guys who were genuinely nice.
I see what you mean about the sex.
@marcus
I’ll say how I feel about the sex. A man with lust after/have sex with just about anyone, so why is it so important if he has sex with me? Men do what they want regardless so why put in effort regarding sex?
Also, men tend to become very lazy in the relationship when they get the sex they want. I don’t think they do this on purpose, but they do. I think maybe in a man’s men the sex=relationship so he feels like he doesn’t have to work at it anymore.
@marcus, yeah that’s the message I think women may be hearing, not from you specifically, but out there in the ether, that they are having a hard time with.
1) Lust and sex are vitally important to men.
1b) Faithfulness and wholesomeness seem very important to men too.
2) Men will do it with anyone, they’ll cheat down, but lust up. So…
2a) I’m damned if I stay in shape and I’m damned if I don’t
3) What makes me so important then and why should put forth the effort.
I’m not saying that’s how all men are. Certainly in my relationships that has NOT how it has been one bit. But there are myths and ghost stories out there.
Even this piece makes a case that men can view women as lust objects in the abstract-strippers, porn artists aren’t all that “real” and so women shouldn’t be threatened by them.
I’m still confused, I don’t suspect that will change much, but I do like the piece.
My relationship with my fiance isn’t like this one bit either. In fact, my fiance and I are rather synced. We practically debunk the myth that men and women are completely different, but maybe this is just us.
I think fiancés tend to get along differently than long-time spouses, particularly when it comes to lust and sex, but here’s hoping you’re still debunking the myths 30 years from now. If not, here’s hoping you learn to live with the differences like many happy couples before you have.
To me, the threat isn’t in whether the lust objects are real women. Of course they’re all real, even strippers and porn artists. (When women say, “Real women don’t look like that!” I think, “Well, those real women do.” I’m well aware of the idealizing effects of photoshop, but you can’t photoshop out their humanity.) What constitutes a potential emotional threat to me isn’t the type of person, but the type of interaction. So, masturbating to an image of a woman I don’t know isn’t sex with her any more than reading a book and writing in the margins is “having a conversation” with the author. There’s a continuum to actual conversation that in that example, may include lesser acts like writing a fan letter, to mutual correspondence, to phone calls, to having a face to face dialogue that is unambiguously “conversation”. I see sex as having a similar continuum, so it’s always real people involved, but down toward the one-sided end of the spectrum, it doesn’t feel like sex to me.
The same goes for porn. When I’ve been referring to “porn”, I’ve sort of lazily been using the working definition of what it is in my life, which is pictures or videos of people I don’t know or interact with. As Alice points out at 11/7 2:37pm above, there’s a wider range that some people still call porn, like sexting, live interactive webcam porn, and so on. Some of that is activity I *would* place farther up toward the “having sex” end of the continuum than “just looking”, because there is direct interaction involved.
Since the boundaries of acceptable lust or sex are sure to vary from person to person, not just gender to gender, I don’t think it’s very conducive to a healthy relationship to insist that whatever your boundaries are, those are the universal constants and anyone who disagrees is a [fill in the blame word]. It takes communication to identify the differences and figure out whether they’re manageable with love and respect, or deal breakers to the relationship. Alternatively, you can judge your partners on your unspoken expectations, and be angry and hurt every time they don’t live up to them, and defensive and mystified when you don’t live up to theirs.
“It takes communication to identify the differences and figure out whether they’re manageable with love and respect, or deal breakers to the relationship.”
Absolutely.
Does that belief hold regardless of whether you’re the one lusting, or the one being lusted after?
Perhaps the distinction is less clear because you don’t have several lustful thoughts a day about assorted men, and maybe even lust is more of a voluntary act for you. I can see how lust would feel more significant that way. For me, and I’ll risk an overgeneralization to “most men in my culture”, I have way more lust than ever leads to sex, so it’s not a “special’ feeling. It’s as normal and unremarkable to me as breathing, and nearly as reflexive. I can control my actions – the sex part – but I can no more decide to stop lusting than I can to stop breathing.
(Sorry, misfiled after a screen refresh. This was intended in reply to jessica above @ 11/7, 12:12pm.)
From my perspective I believe it holds true when I am being lusted after. For most of my life (I am 23) I have viewed lust as dirty, and immediately feel ashamed for noticing that a man finds me attractive, or when I find a man attractive; I acknowledge that this is probably due to my history of being sexually abused and that’s why I have such a hard time accepting that men’s lust can be a good thing. On the other hand, I feel that I can’t survive without men being attracted to me and I spend a lot of time on this; without it, I see no reason to get out of bed.
Jessica, that’s hard stuff. It’s something to explore on your own with writing and processing, therapy or counseling if you feel comfortable with it. I wish you peace and luck as you untangle those particular threads that look like they are choking you.
XO
I agree with Julie (again!). I sincerely feel for you, Jessica, and I say that as a sexual abuse survivor myself. It can warp your views to the point that it’s hard to believe *anything* about sex can be good or healthy. It’s possible to overcome that distorted thinking, though, and much easier with help. I hope you do, for your own happiness and peace of mind. (I’m not saying it takes distorted thinking to disagree with what I’m saying in the article, but human to human, I hope you deal with the abuse so it won’t poison your sexuality.)
I like your approach to this. This definitely calls attention to the different neurological make-up of a man’s vs. a woman’s brain. We think differently, we lust differently, we love differently. Though we’re of the same species, we’re entirely different creatures.
In your final paragraphs, you make also, to an extent, the same point that I tried making in
http://goodmenproject.com/good-feed-blog/you-are-not-beautiful-to-me-you-are-gorgeous-to-me/
We do not need to follow societal “standards” of normal. We should create and accept our own. Why is it that women can unquestioningly love men given their faults (guts, baldness, hairiness), but a man cannot discuss his wifes faults without being condemned as a terrible man and husband!?!? We can love you, even your imperfections!
Marcus….ever listen to the chorus of Franz Ferdinand’s No You Girls? This whole series on lust in a nutshell….
winks and ironic detachment intended 
“You girls never know
Oh no, you girls’ll never know
No you girls never know
How you make a boy feel….
No you boys never care
Oh no you boys’ll never care
No you boys never care
How the girl feels “
Marcus, this time I think you got it. You summed up a lot of what I was feeling, but I wasn’t sure how to express. I’m glad that my stream of consciousness led you to some great insights.
My boyfriend was complaining once that he didn’t understand women. I told him, somewhat in jest, “I’ll give you the key to understanding women. The key to female psychology is inner conflict. If you understand that, everything crazy that women do makes perfect sense!” Like I said, I was joking at the time. But maybe I was onto something. As much as we complain about the superficiality of male lust, the thought that our husband/boyfriend/lover would stop feeling that lust for us is terrifying. Someone could probably write a book about all the reasons for that (someone probably has, or maybe several books).
Anyway, good job on the article, I feel like reading your re- interpretation of the thoughts that I and others were expressing has helped me understand my own feelings a little better. Also, it has given me some food for thought about the male perspective on this.
I wonder if most men, honestly, wouldn’t mind their wives/girlfriends habitually going to porn sites and masturbating to images of other men and their body parts, especially if the bodies of the porn men looked significantly different than their husbands/boyfriends. Marcus, are you implying you wouldn’t mind if your wife had a habit of doing that?
i realize my scenario isn’t traditional “female” behavior, but women are sexual creatures as much as men are, and we are visually stimulated, too. If it was more acceptable for women to be into porn, and more porn was made specifically for women (and I don’t mean “romance” porn, either), more women might get into it.
I agree, I tried watching porn with my boyfriend and even though I picked out some films that were highly rated on several “porn for women” sites, I found I was just totally bored. I just didn’t care who the people were or why they were having sex. The graphic images were sort of interesting in a clinical sense, but it all started to look the same after awhile. Oh, there’s another guy with a giant dick. I wonder if he’ll insert it into orifice A, B, or C? Yawn. I actually started to fall asleep in the middle of one movie’s big orgy scene (which all the reviews said was the most amazing thing ever filmed)… The thing is, though, I have a really strong sex drive and I feel like I could probably get into some kind of explicit films but they just don’t seem to make what I need.
Women _are_ into porn. Recategorizing it as “romance novels” doesn’t change the fact that it is porn for women; it just makes it easier to defend Harlequin Romances while condemning “porn” as that icky stuff MEN like.
I haven’t said anything on any of the “lust” threads because the idea of lust just seems too irritating. The term is perjorative, but, to me, nothing about sexuality is. Men and women have “desire.” Frequently it manifests itself in flirtations and the like, and they’re healthy, even if the person is in a committed relationship. Desire for another may incorporate sexual thoughts, or it may simply be an amalgam of other things, with occasional sexual fantasies sometimes there. I generally haven’t fantasized about someone unless the possibility of actual sex is very present. (I have too many good memories of actual partners.)
Sometimes I wonder if this site is mainly lapsed Catholics. “Lust” indeed.
I think this pretty accurate to my feelings. Except, I would use the word “desire” instead of “lust”. But I think we mean the same thing. I want my husband to show his desire, before get going onto sex.
I recommend that everyone who’s interested in this topic read Helen Fisher http://www.helenfisher.com/books.html. You can also go to youtube and hear her talk about different biological aspects of relationships. One of the most interesting involves our biochemistry, particularly in relation to dopamine and oxytocin. Dopamine, which gives us that fizzy “in love” feeling, is more active in us for less than a year after we begin a new relationship, on average. (Please check what she says, because my memory might be faulty on the time.) After that, however, oxytocin kicks in–and this keeps us attached, gives us warm feelings of belonging, etc. One of her studies has shown that people who still have a lot of that fizzy, in-love feeling for their partners over a long time period (many years!) have the dopamine still quite active in their systems.
Also–dopamine also kicks in after you break up with someone, or vice versa! That’s why people often have so much trouble making a “clean break” (though of course there are many other reasons, emotional and financial and psychological, too).
There have been studies indicating that on average, people who have been together for 7 years have more satisfying sex lives than people who have been together only for a few years.
There have been studies showing that if people look into each other’s eyes for 2 minutes, it can increase intimacy and attraction.
There are lots of great studies out there that help us understand the biological science of attraction, which can be useful when we are thinking about the emotional, mental, and psychological aspects of attraction–and when we want to control or change our own responses.
@Alice, don’t give up on finding a man who is attentive and kind, as well as faithful. They do exist. Please take good care of yourself, and don’t lower your standards.