As a young man, Mark Sherman thought there was something wrong with him because he was obsessed by thoughts of young women – until he talked to his friends.
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I am a heterosexual 71-year-old man who has been married for nearly 44 years. I have three grown sons and four young grandsons, which is a major reason that how boys and young men are treated in our country is of great importance to me. Part of that is whether or not they and their reality is and will be understood. And one element of that reality is their sex drive.
I can’t speak directly for today’s male youth, and that includes not trying to speak for my children, who are not so youthful anymore anyhow, but I can speak for myself. And unless the way young men feel about sex today is radically different from how I felt then, what I experienced does have relevance.
Here it is: Starting from about the age of 10 or 11, if not before, I was obsessed by thoughts of young women. This started before I even knew what sexual intercourse was. All I knew is that one day it became hard for me to take my eyes off young females. I can imagine some women reading this squirming, but I am simply being honest about how it was for me in my youth.
As the years went by, and I became a teenager, I began to wonder if there was something wrong with me to be so obsessed. And it wasn’t like anything was happening. I didn’t even start “necking,” as they called it in those days until I was around 16, and that meant only kissing, sometimes for an hour at a time – and often while listening to Johnny Mathis. I so much wanted to do more, but any time my hand reached for a breast, it was blocked. While I did feel frustrated, confined to kissing I became quite good at it – or so I was told as the years went by.
There was only one source of release, and that was going solo. I did this at least once a day, and often several times in 24 hours. I did it so much that sometimes I would experience considerable soreness, but that wouldn’t stop me. I truly felt that I couldn’t stop. I would make deals with myself. “On my 14th birthday,” I’d say to myself, “then I’m stopping.” Then it became my 15th birthday, and then my 16th. Finally, I simply gave up, helped along by reading what was then the modern literature on the subject – this was the 1950s – saying it really didn’t do any harm other than causing a local irritation, and God knows, I already knew that!
What I was experiencing can best be described as an intense urge. The dictionary defines “urge” as “an involuntary, natural, or instinctive impulse,” and, in fact, the example used is “the sex urge.”
I really did think that there was something wrong with me, until I talked to some of my male friends about what I was feeling, and they said they felt the same way. What a relief! I wasn’t some kind of sexual anomaly. I was just another teenage boy.
As far as my sex drive was concerned, erections became an inconvenient truth. They could happen at the most inopportune times, including, oddly, simply by riding on a bus. I remember more than once having to put my books or jacket in front of my pants as I exited the bus.
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My sexual fantasy world consisted mainly of thinking about seeing young women naked, and touching their female parts (only with their consent, of course!). Neither practically ever happened. But I do recall one weekend afternoon when I was about 16, and at Jones Beach, as I walked to the water I just happened to walk by a girl around my age (or maybe a year younger) who was sitting on her beach blanket. I momentarily caught a glance down the top of her bathing suit, and there it was! The forbidden fruit!
At that age I was nowhere near “king of my domain,” and I could not wait to get home to fantasize to that image. In fact, it is one I used for weeks, if not months.
My fantasy life back then did not involve intercourse. Keep in mind that this was years before the Internet and there was no widely available – to a boy at least – hardcore pornography of any kind. Even Playboy, much more innocent then than it became later, did not hit the stands until late 1953, and I had no access to it as a young teenager. I did not lose my virginity until I was 20, and I lost it to a woman of 19, who was also a virgin.
Actually, since my younger brother – who was tall, extremely good-looking, and had matured early – seemed to be having a much richer sex life than I was, I think my father wondered about me, wondered if indeed I was heterosexual.
In the car one day — where I suspect many important father-son conversations have taken place, and maybe a lot of them still do — when I was close to 17, my father cleared his throat and said, “I want to ask you something.”
“Yes, what, Dad?” I said.
“Have you had intercourse yet?”
“Huh?” I replied.
“Intercourse,” he repeated. “Have you done it?”
“Well, no,” I said. “I haven’t.”
I felt like I had been bad.
“Do you want to?” he asked.
“I guess so,” I said.
“You guess so?” my father said, with more than a hint of anger coming into his voice. “You guess so?! Isn’t it something you want to do more than anything?”
“Well, I don’t know. I think about girls all the time. I like to kiss them and touch them, and see them naked–”
“But what about intercourse itself?” my father demanded. And he got anatomically specific. “Doesn’t the idea of that really excite you?”
I wanted to say “yes,” but honesty was a core value for me. Better to tell the truth and suffer the consequences than to lie. I was a pathological truth-teller, and the truth was that I was not obsessed with intercourse.
So I answered, “No, I mean it sounds nice, it does, but I just haven’t–”
“Sounds nice?!” said my father. “Nice? Is that it? Lord!”
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The only thing “wrong” with me was that I hadn’t done it yet. As soon as I had, perhaps not after the first or second time — my girlfriend and I were both virgins, so it took a little effort to figure out what to do — but definitely by the third, I understood what my father had been talking about. I had reached the sexual promised land, and soon it became hard for me to think about anything else.
I married my girlfriend, though the marriage lasted less than three years. A few years after my divorce, I married again, and this one has, happily, lasted 44 years. Being married, and but even more importantly, aging, has reduced the burden of my sex drive. To me nothing about getting older is more striking than this diminishment of what was once such a powerful force in my life. I strongly suspect, in looking back, that a main reason I did not do as well in college as I might have, and took longer to get my PhD than I could have, is because it was so hard to concentrate on my studies much of the time. Those other thoughts would often intrude.
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Looking back from my 71-year-old vantage point, it is hard to believe that I was so obsessed, but I was.
I want to stress, though, that while thoughts of women and sex were pleasurable, they could often be a burden, especially when release was not possible. And thus, when I taught a course called Relationships and Gender starting in the 1980s, and some strong feminists in the class argued that the male sex drive was largely a product of social conditioning, as was a theory at that time, it was hard for me to contain my anger.
While in my research and writing, I had done everything I could to understand the female experience, these students had not done the same about what it felt like to be a male – and I doubted this was something taught in the typical women’s studies class. And as I had already discovered in my research, there was a strong tendency by both men and women to project onto the other gender how you yourself felt. If – as almost every bit of research I’ve ever read says – the typical (of course, there are exceptions) young woman’s sex drive is not as strong, as difficult to keep down, as the typical young man’s (and there are exceptions here too), then, of course, to a young woman it would have to be social conditioning that caused men to feel different.
But all the conditioning I had experienced had been to try to keep down what I felt from an early age.
While he’s not a social scientist, I think every one of us should think about those words of Tom Petty when we’re sure we know how someone else is feeling and why: “You don’t know how it feels to be me.”
Can any woman ever know how it feels to be a man? It turns out, yes. Recently, a psychotherapist I know – a woman who describes herself as a feminist – told me of someone she had counseled some years ago who made the transition from female to male. She had the hormone shots, removal of breast tissues, and took other steps to make the change.
“He said that after transition, he was incredulous at the strength of his sex drive,” she told me. “He said, ‘I never understood male sexual energy before, but now I do. I’m amazed that guys can keep it in their pants as much as they do, that they’re not going after every woman they see.’”
I wish I’d always known that the feelings I had even as a boy, which intensified so much when I became a teenager, were totally normal. But talking to my male friends helped a lot (though the constant heterosexual references ultimately made me feel bad for the one of us who turned out to be gay); and even today, as an older guy, when I share my youthful experiences and feelings with my friends, they immediately understand. It’s so good not to feel alone, and not to feel shame over what is a natural part of growing up as a heterosexual male. For my younger readers, maybe your desires aren’t as strong, or are even stronger, than mine were. And that’s okay too!
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Photo: Flickr/Leo Hidalgo
testing as couldnt comment earlier
testing as couldnt comment earlier
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only took me two months to get around to writing this: when i around 19 i remember feeling sorry for alot of animals who just have a short breeding season a year. whereas we could breed and have the instinct year round. at 39, ive now reversed my opinion, the animals must be feeling sorry for us lol. one or two months a year breeding season for humans would be merciful for us as young men. the twenty plus year breeding season (from puberty to about 35) was hellish. and from watching other young and old men, when both young… Read more »
Wonderful article, beautifully written. Thank you for sharing your experiences. I enjoyed hearing the perspective of the effects of testosterone and other hormones from someone who has made the female to male transition. I am curious now what those who’ve gone through the male to female transition. Off to Google I go….
Thank you Mr Sherman for this beautiful article. I used to imagine too that there is some kind of a psychological problem with me obsessed as I was with thoughts of Sex in all my waking moments! After reading your piece I could see that I was perfectly normal! There is a sense of humour too especially about one of those friends to whom you talked to about your “problem” turning out to be Gay! Well. Thanks again!
Yes, testosterone is a powerful drug and dangerous in the hands (bodies) of adolescents. As a fellow senior, I enjoyed your description of the less hyper sexualized past in comparison to the sexual overload that surely must confound the hormonal burden young men and women experience. Surely there is a better, safer way to channel all this youthful energy into something more productive. You are correct in eliminating the shame and normalizing adolescent sexuality and it’s consuming power.
Very nice response to the article JohnH. I thought it was also very nice to hear about sexuality pre-internet and hypersexualization myself.
There was actually a time when men thought real women were more fun. Not so much today. Today’s men like porn over real women.
Thanks Erin, I am a big fan of you as well. Your comments about internet porn brings ambivalent feelings in me. As Mark mentioned, growing up in the 50’s there was little access to porn or even sex education. Denial and gender segregation were the main methods to handle the surge of hormones until the drug fueled 60’s and 70’s. Today, men and women are more blended in society and maybe pornography, vibrators and internet sex is a logical release valve for sexual tension? The down side, which I assume you allude to is the lack of social interaction and… Read more »
My boyfriend is 47 and recently admitted to me that he hardly ever thinks about sex anymore. I actually miss the sexual energy that I remember from boyfriends in my youth, who couldn’t keep their hands off me! Aging sucks!
Hi Julie,
I’m approaching 45, much faster than I like, or care to admit 🙂
But even if the frequency of unexpected (and mostly unwanted) erections have diminshed over the years, I think about sex and long for having it just as much as in my youth.
Maybe ot’s connected to me having had limited opportunities to live out my sexuality, but then again most research seems to point that the more you have it the more you want to have more?
Single best article ever published on this site. The fact that it’s importance will be lost on most is part of the reason it is so good.
Absolutely wonderful stuff Doc. Great writing starts with the truth. Thank you for destroying the social conditioning theory of the male sex drive. That’s just ridiculous.
And …”the burden of my sex drive”. I know it’s caused me a lot more problems then its ever been worth.
TGMP scores big with this one. Thanks, again.
I agree that a lot of women don’t think much about the male sex drive as being something you can fell a slave to. I think us women often think about it like kids with candy. Although I appreciate the experiences of a trans person, even this I don’t feel is an accurate window into the male experience. When transitioning you are being so pumped with hormones it seems to be a whole other experience: like puberty, but NOT puberty. My ex went through transition and I can attest that he-now-she was flat-out crazy while on hormone therapy…it was not… Read more »