Refusing to be a Man: Essays on Sex and Justice by John Stolenberg

Author:John Stolenberg [Stolenberg, John]
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: Education, Politics & IR, Sociology & Social Policy
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

WHAT IS “GOOD SEX” ?

I. What is the relationship between the way a man has sex and the way he acts the rest of the time?

The question assumes that there is a relationship — and that a man’s erotic life and behavior have some connection to the ethics of all his acts, all the choices of action that he makes, all the values expressed by all of his behavior. The question assumes that how a man acts in sex and how he acts in general are not separate spheres, but perhaps rather a unity, perhaps a continuum, perhaps fundamentally the same problem. The question assumes that each man has a character — a way he characteristically makes choices having ethical meaning — and the question assumes that his singular character is expressed and can be observed both in and out of explicitly sexual contexts.

Needless to say, this is not a popular way to think about the way most men have sex — or the way most men live their lives.

According to the vastly more common view, the values a man expresses in the way he has sex are in fact circumscribed by the sexual context and isolated there, such that “whatever happens there happens there.” This more common view has it that sex is sex and the rest is the rest. A great deal of sexual shame both originates in this view and is neatly obscured by this view. Think, for instance, of the shame and panic in a man who is touching another man in affection for the first time when up to that point, in the rest of his life, he had acted as if the values in that touch were loathsome. Think, simultaneously, of the insular and insolent ease with which a man can privately manhandle or humiliate or injure someone else for his sexual gratification, then just go on with his life as if the meanings of what he had done and the fact that he had done it stopped at the torture chamber door — indeed as if the meaning of whatever happens in private between two consenting adults is not only nobody else’s business; it’s not even the business of the people who did it. Great quantities of various substances get ingested in order to erect a barricade around the sexual arena secure enough to support this view, secure enough to blockade memory, secure enough to obliterate shame. It’s called releasing inhibitions. What it means is getting wrecked enough to be able to believe that what happens in sex is separate. A great deal goes on between people in sex that remains incomprehensible — sometimes suffocatingly and woundingly inaccessible to later reflection and integration — because of this notion that how a man acts in sex is unrelated to how he acts all the rest of the time (and anyway, “Who do you think you are questioning what happened between us last night? We had great sex, didn’t we?” ). Such repression of so

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