Tom Matlack wonders—is the instinct to run off with strippers an innate part of manhood?
I was sitting with Timmy (not his real name) at dinner the other night as he recounted how a close friend of his had “lived out every wife’s worst nightmare.” The guy made it big in the venture capital world, took a business trip to Vegas, wandered into a strip club, and never came back.
A few days later, the guy told his then-wife that he didn’t love her anymore and was marrying a dancer he met in Vegas. He’s not the only guy who’s seen his life upended in Sin City. My buddy told me that a guy who worked on the “What Happens in Vegas, Stays in Vegas” ad campaign did the same thing while shooting the commercials.
The Vegas stories made me think about trying to help a rapper friend of mine stay sober. He’d been arrested after getting so drunk that he couldn’t get his car out of a parallel parking spot, ramming a BMW repeatedly, and then getting in a fight with the car’s owner. He sincerely wanted to change his life, or so he told me.
Early on in our friendship he called me from the wedding reception of his best friend and bandmate. He was agitated because he had to break up a fistfight between the groom and his best man. The groom had decided to marry a stripper from the Foxy Lady (a strip club in Providence) after getting her pregnant. The best man, also a band member, had disrespected her after the ceremony by commenting on her occupation, at which point the fight broke out and the cops were called.
“What should I do?” my new friend asked me over the phone.
“Get the hell out of there,” I told him.
A few months later, after my rapper buddy began to get his act together, he met up with his friends again to talk business. He called with another question: “The guys want to meet at the Foxy Lady to talk shop. Nothing wrong with that, is there?”
“Tell ‘em to meet you at Starbucks,” I said.
“Wow, never thought of that,” the rapper replied. I hung up, and laughed out loud at his pure insanity.
As I told Timmy about the conversation I laughed again. After digesting each other’s stories of guys trapped inside a sexual fantasy, Timmy and I started bemoaning the state of network television. The discussion at the time was about hair pulling on The Real Housewives of New Jersey, The Bachelorette, and Celebrity Rehab.
“Maybe we should create a show called Stripper Rehab,” I suggested in jest.
Timmy laughed. “That would be perfect—just take this whole thing to its logical extreme.” We chuckled as we talked about whether we would recruit strippers for the show or strippers and the guys who end up marrying them. It would be a great way, we agreed, to poke fun at our national obsession with porn and reality television.
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I woke up this morning still thinking about that conversation. Then I received an email from one of the many guys who responds to my columns with anonymous pleas for guidance. He wrote to say that he’d been in “a car accident while having phone sex with a guy, totaled my car, got a concussion and ringing in my ear that took almost two years to resolve, and derailed my new standup comedy career.” I slipped into a funk thinking about the lives of strippers and the guys paying for nudity, phone sex, and intercourse.
Spending the last two years talking to men about goodness, I’ve often been led to the issues of sex, porn, and prostitution. I’ve struggled to get my arms around the issue: is sexual exploitation of women getting worse, or is it an innate part of manhood?
David Hirshberg, who runs the most respected treatment facility for teenaged female prostitutes, told me essentially that men suck and have always sucked, citing the way armies in the Middle Ages fought for the right to kill their enemies’ men and rape their women.
I joked with him that as the founder of The Good Men Project, I was not prepared to accept that men suck. But it did make me think, as did my conversation with Timmy.
I would like to believe that as civilized men, our base instincts to rape, pillage, and run off with strippers can be overcome through our will—and replaced with more noble aims.
There is plenty of evidence that porn consumption is accelerating, as is our collective obsession with sex. But from my perch as a guy looking closely at manhood, I’m beginning to get the sense that it’s a hollow satisfaction. Maybe that’s wishful thinking on my part, but story after story about Tiger Woods, Jesse James, and Lawrence Taylor have forced normal guys to look in the mirror. “Going to a strip club feels like going to the zoo,” Timmy admitted to me. “There is nothing appealing about petting the elephants when you have the real thing at home.”
Even as “hookup” culture has taken hold in my teenage kids’ generation, there are encouraging signs that more guys are ready to do what it takes to find love rather than a fantasy. Every day I hear from guys working hard to be good husbands.
As for my rapper friend, he’s now happily married with two kids, and nearly a decade removed from his last trip to the Foxy Lady. As is Timmy. As am I. I’d like to believe there’s hope for us guys, after all. At the very least, it’s time for us to come clean and talk about the insanity that pervades the sex trade.
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In September, 2009, Tom Matlack, together with James Houghton and Larry Bean, published an anthology of stories about defining moments in men’s lives — The Good Men Project: Real Stories from the Front Lines of Modern Manhood. It was how the The Good Men Project first began. Want to buy the book? Click here. Want to learn more? Here you go.
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About Tom Matlack
Vocalyze
We used to call strip clubs “The House of Pain”, though I have some great coming-of-age stories, like the one where the entire bar is singing to the song I started chanting or the time we were there to support a charity auction. It happily has become that place I haven’t been to in a very long time, and for good reason.
Every night that was spent there was a waste of an evening, the money, the drinking nor the company worth remembering, but only valuable as that thing I’ve overcome, a decisive step into Good-Manhood.
“An innate part of manhood”? I hope not! As I read your post, I wondered if this is an American phenomenon or not. I know this kind of thing happens in other cultures, of course, but I wonder if it is at the level you describe here? It would be interesting to hear if the trouble is at such an extent in cultures where sex isn’t so ubiquitous? As the parent of two young boys, I am appalled at the sexual imagery in cartoons that are geared to young children (have you SEEN “How to Train Your Dragon” and the way Astrid is introduced?!).
While it may be naive, I choose to believe that it is NOT an innate part of manhood, but that we as a society need to really examine our attitudes about sex and how the media exploits sexuality and mixes it up with wealth, violence and power.
Sexual immorality is a tale that is as old as mankind. Granted porn is easier to come by today with all the technology we have at our fingertips. This stuff will never go away. Hoepfully we can just help educate our sons to value women more highly.
Pet the elephant in the zoo? Therein lies the rub, me thinks.
Hi Tom
I reviewed the few remarks on this question and came up with a totally different approach to an answer.
Is it the morality issue here, porn/good-bad ? The bad-boy sneakiness of going to a strip club and living out our lives vicariously through “wanton” women gyrating before our eyes. Then it dawned on me:this really is what we want our wives to be, both in the bedroom and in front of our friends. The perky-breasted,slim wasted, LONG LEGGED SIREN, who will wear all that VICTORIA’S SECRET lingerie after bathing for hours in a tub of fragrant water and soap. It is not the stripper in most circumstances, it is the physical embodiment of lewdness and sexual agility we crave, not the physical apparition.
OF COURSE, after working all day to help pay the bills, taking care of 1.5 American kids the rest of the afternoon, cleaning the house to a reasonable level, getting kids lunch’s and homework completed, cleaning up after the dog……all you guys know the rest.
And we guys, worried to death about loosing our jobs, trying to learn to fix things around the house to save a few bucks, carting kids to Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, little league, soccer, band practice, ad. nauseum, we fall into bed a snoring, sweaty mess. Aren’t we the hot studs !!??????
SO, our fantasy and libido take over and we sneak off to the strip club to see our “real wives” the ones that will dance in garter belts and stiletto heels. After all, our regular wives, the ones with stretch marks
from carrying our children so our name will be perpetuated, and that tired frazzled face in sweat pants
will fall into bed exactly the same as we are.
And YES, I have cruised a few of the porn sites and YIKES !! Husband and wife teams laying it all “bare” on these web sites. And I have been amazed how many of these women are hotties, in full make-up and lingerie doing the most acrobatic sexual gymnastics I have ever witnessed..! And for a few wistful seconds, that is me with that woman ?! The alarm goes off and we are back in reality.
And the sooner we all realize that we may, a few times in our lives, buy for our ladies some of that kinky lingerie and she will actually take a three hour bath and wear that stuff behind closed doors.PROVIDING !!! we have showered, shaved, brushed our teeth and splashed on some Aqua Velva..So..NO!, I do not fear a good man going to strip club a couple of times in his married life. It is a cartoon.
“There is plenty of evidence that porn consumption is accelerating, as is our collective obsession with sex”
I reckon this has a lot to do with overexposure (publicity, TV, you name it) which of course leads to everyone becoming desensitised and needing more (extreme) porn to get turned on. I keep wondering how far we are from a point of saturation, and what will happen then.
Will Amish become the new Hot? “LIVE FULLY DRESSED GIRLS HERE” I sense a business opportunity here…
Fantastic post, I’m so glad someone’s looking at these things with an open mind! Rock ON, Tom.
All these issues…violence, stripping, reality TV… are simply low-level creations intended to satisfy much deeper desires.
Rape, porn, stripping = Some people’s best attempts to bring the fulfilling energy of femininity and sexuality into their lives.
Violence, competition, conquering = Some people’s best attempts to bring incredible rush of accomplishing something, and feeling self-worth.
Reality TV, voyeurism, celeb-watching = Some people’s best attempts to get themselves into the life and lifestyle they want, to daydream and escape lives that deep down would love to change.
From some people’s perspectives and life-experiences, these things are the best way they know how to get close to very strong, very deep desires. To live in their shoes and see how the came into the world may shed light on how and why it happens…
But who really wants to be in their shoes, right?
Thanks for all the great comments folks. Obviously I am being provocative here to try to insite conversation about things that I think are important, hard to talk about, but we must.
I heard a great interview yesterday on Fresh Air with Super Sad True Love Story author Gary Shteyngart: http://n.pr/sadlovestory which I found fascinating on many levels. But one thing he said that I think is absolutely true. We don’t know the impact, down the line, of having pornography being commonplace for our children as preteens. Women graduate at far higher rates than men from college and yet those same women have to deal with images of sex molded not by love but by porn.
I think we have to start with this: Sexual desire is intrinsic to our species. It won’t go away for either gender and nobody would want it to I assume except for the most retrograde of religious zealots.
After we accept that fact we can talk about how men (and women) find ways to bring that sexual desire about, in themselves and others. Here is an idea. What if, just for the sake of argument, we use an analogy of a computer. The computer communicates. That is it’s reason for being. There is an achille’s heal in that proposition and that is you have to let some information into your system for that to happen. A hacker’s purpose in life is to exploit that weakness. To find ways to put something malicious into the computer for the hacker’s own purpose. That purpose might be simple malice, it might be commercial and perversely capitalist.
Now back to the human. The human (male and female) has a vulnerability. It wants to have sex. It will pursue that desire for sex and if the triggers that build that desire are present, they can be easily persuaded to go in the direction of the trigger. That trigger might be socially motivated such as in Hugh Hefner’s stated credo of liberation, or it can be purely commercial. But either way it is present and humans follow it.
Resisting it is hard the same way dieting is hard. A human wants to eat. To not eat demands discipline in America. To not see and be tempted by triggers of sexual desire is hard as well. It can be done, but men are not bad or evil or stupid simply because of this vulnerability.
By the way, it should be stated that women have the same vulnerability. They have their triggers but those triggers are called romance and bling and attention, etc. They are not called porn, or strippers, or masturbation visual aids. However, they draw women into a fantasy and a hopeful desire just as surely as those things do for men.
My point is this. It does no good to try to deny the obvious. Humans want sexual stimulation. They always have and they always will. They will find ways to meet that need, even if it is not what might be considered ‘good’ by society. That drive is that strong.
Given that, the good man’s goal is to do that in the safest, most responsible and kindest way they can. In light of that, I actually think pornography is in many men’s minds a safer, more responsible way of meeting that need than going to a strip club, a prostitute, a mistress or getting a happy ending at a massage parlor.
are men really out of their minds, is our culture with its rapacious appetite for the absurd and desire for an illustrious present on a collision course and is there any sanity left in the new world of glam, reality shows and beckoning strippers?
http://scallywagandvagabond.com/2010/08/stripper-rehab/
We have to ask why the ‘consumption’ is increasing – ease of access thanks to the internet nothwithstanding, it is merely the delivery medium. (Of note recently is the discourse amongst many in the erotic blogosphere lamenting the increase in so-called ‘gonzo porn’ that seems endemic to the web – so perhaps the pendulum does begin to swing. Perhaps we need to find our limits before we can find the comfortable middle ground.)
A quick look at the environment may offer clues – a society with an increasingly conservative moral code (at least in public), a nation that ‘bestrode the earth like a colossus’ who sees its influence in the world, politically, econmomically and militarily, beginning to wane from its peak; and the increase in consumption of what could be termed ‘licenstious’ behaviour, from the escapades of celebrities, to pornography, et al.
Of course, the students of history here will have noticed the parallel – Victorian England, the decline of the Roman Empire. Mankind has ‘been there, done that’ before and we have somehow muddled through. Francisco made the best point – strip clubs have become, much like many other things, a part of the growth of the ‘western’ male.
A quick look in any strip club will show a particular cross section – a group or two of college age guys, a couple of groups of business types (at least some of whom will have the ‘this is ok, but a sports bar would have worked just as well for an ‘off-site management meeting’ look on their faces) and a couple of old men in farmer style baseball caps.
If you believe that a right of manhood is achieved through sexual exploitation of women, then you believe that a man can’t be a man unless he subjects women to degradement. It’s of course natural for men to find women beautiful and sexual. What isn’t so natural is how women are depicted through media and how often it’s shoved out ther making it normalized. And the sad thing is that you have more young people growing up on porn like never before. Boys who will wonder why their girlfriends don’t have cantalope breasts and girls who will wonder whats wrong with their very real and natural breasts. And while there is alot of sexual exploitation of women out there, there is must as much emotional exploitation of men will grow up not knowing how to really relate to women in an authentic and honest way becaust their only experience is with their hand and computer. But I am glad there are men out there talking about this, being honest about it and truly trying to be good men. We totally need that!