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.
You said “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.” I hope all men don’t want to do this, in a strip club, or outside of one, either. – I don’t want to be raped or pillaged anytime soon. I think men go to strip clubs the way women may go to salons. To relax, and get pampered for a while. Men don’t fancy getting their nails done for the most part. I don’t think all men… Read more »
Is going to strip clubs a common thing in the US? I went into one once in Germany: I was out drinking with a friend and on the way home he got it into his head that a strip club was where he wanted to be. He ran off, but I eventually found him close to passing out in some place with neon blue lighting and lots of chrome, the bouncers were the opposite of most places I’ve ever been: they practically drag you in off the street, especially if you’re legless. Just before he finally passed out entirely he… Read more »
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… Read more »
I gotta say, I’ve watched my fair share of porn and I’ve never assumed it represented “normality.” I don’t think many other people do either.
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… Read more »
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/
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… Read more »
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… Read more »
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… Read more »
“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…
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… Read more »
Pet the elephant in the zoo? Therein lies the rub, me thinks.
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.
“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… Read more »
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.