Men Aren't Assholes, They Just Need Sex

We are merely animals

Image courtesy of PickPik.com

Freedom paralysis

There are a million things going wrong between men and women.

Scott Galloway says men aren’t taking enough risks or making enough of themselves.

Dating coaches say the sexes aren’t trying hard enough to make themselves available, in public places.

Louise Perry says women have unrealistic expectations of how wonderful and fulfilling relationships ought to be.

All of these are true.

And there are a million other diagnoses, prognoses, and details of the dating/marriage landscape that are clearly going wrong for both men and women.

Which is weird, because if you were to design a society to offer maximum freedom for men and women to have exactly the relationships they want all of the time, it would look exactly like this one.

Which means maybe we don’t understand what we want or need as much as we think we do. Maybe when you give yourself too much freedom, you actually forget how to commit to something and be serious about it.

That is, in my opinion, what’s going on in our world now: we are deeply, profoundly unserious. About everything. Including relationships.

But there’s one thing in particular, maybe a footnote to all these men-versus-women conversations, that bothers me and always has bothered me. Because I think it’s worthy of being much more than a footnote.

And it’s men’s relationship with sex. Which, again, is weird. We live in a time that is more permissive of sexual openness than probably any other time in history. We teach literally everyone (even transgender kids) that they should embrace their sexuality.

And yet straight men’s sexuality is a huge source of contention, both for couples and for the public. Women seem to be overwhelmed by it and disgusted by it, perhaps here and now more than ever and anywhere. We don’t want to ask honest questions about men’s sexuality — perhaps because we have been culturally taught not to accept it, or perhaps because we’re afraid of what the answers might be.

I want to answer two questions:

1. Why do men want sex so badly, all of the time? And

2. Why is that a problem?

The House of Misrepresentatives

Let me start in the most obvious place: most men are not Andrew Tate. And most men are also not doormats. Most men are not oppressors, nor are they completely worthless. In the interest of being transparent and fair, let me also say this: inside the average man, somewhere, is the fantasy of being a powerhouse of sexual conquest and having women submit before him. That is a very real desire, somewhere inside most men. It’s biological; it’s not going anywhere. But, and this is the important part, most men do not have it in them, morally, to actually treat women like shit. So they don’t.

Most men are somewhere in the middle — somewhere in the vicinity of “guy fumbling stupidly through life, trying to be a good man, hoping that someone wants to participate in good sex with him. Hoping that some woman admires him enough to want to sleep with him regularly.”

This is where I think a lot of the confusion comes from, in terms of men and sex, or in terms of pretty much everything we ever talk about: the outliers define the conversation. Some small percentage of men are genuine abusive assholes, and the conversation revolves around them.

This is how public discourse works in the 21st century: all of the worst offenders are used as stand-in representatives of an entire group, and the conversation is about tearing all of them down — meaning the middling, regular people get torn down along with the people who are actually the problem. Because of this, the average man is not only demonized for his milquetoast desires but is now terrified of women and of sex.

That’s not a good thing.

We are a nature documentary

Let’s try to answer the first of the two questions: why do men want so much sex, all of the time? Even the average, regular guy who isn’t assertive or dominant wants sex all of the time. Why?

To put the answer into two words, it’s love and biology.

Every nature documentary you’ve ever seen details how the males of most species spend their entire lives stupidly chasing the ability to mate — even enduring humiliation, exhaustion, or death for it. That… is also how human males are.

As for the love part, imagine the happiest, most secure, most warm feeling you’ve ever had. In your whole life. That's how a woman’s body makes a man feel. Sex, to a man, is not just an output, an expression of love — sex, for a man, is love. It’s the same thing.

All right, this might be an okay answer. There’s something here. But then the second question is, why is that such a problem? What is it about men’s sexual needs that women find unacceptable, or not worth honoring or participating in? Okay great, men need sex… but why so much of it? And why is it women’s job to just endlessly take care of that?

Again a short answer might be: because, even after hearing what we’ve just said, women (or culture more broadly) still choose not to understand or accept it. Because not giving men sex is more convenient than giving them sex, and because “you need to give men sex” doesn't exactly fit with our modern cultural narrative. We have taught women that it’s okay not to honor that need, and we have taught men that they ought to be above that need. (Note how I said “ought to” — because you can’t lecture an entire species out of behavior that it is biologically programmed to engage in. If we could, the stock market wouldn't have bubbles anymore.)

But that’s not acceptable either, for anyone who wants to have a functioning society. Men are not allowed to just “not accept” that women have needs. So why should women do that?

We can’t lecture either sex out of the behavior that is natural for it. But we can work our way into better relationships. There is no such thing as having too much information about the opposite sex. It’s pure upside. So there’s still a lot of discussing to do.

Let’s start the conversation over with the most basic fact we can: human beings are animals.

We have very basic needs. We are not sophisticated. We are still driven by base impulses and dark urges and raw desires and insecurity. In fact, in that way, we’re even worse off than animals — we have to worry about base desires and insecurity. When’s the last time you saw an insecure hippopotamus?

Both men and women need very simple, predictable things. Because we are, in most ways, simple biological creatures.

And as a side note, anyone who denies biology ought to be dismissed back to the children’s table so the rest of us can work on improving the real world. You can join the adults again when you’re ready to apologize.

A sense of humor is required

Let’s illustrate what a relationship should not be.

A relationship should not be a man taking sex from his wife over and over while doing nothing for her.

And a relationship should not be a woman using a man for his resources, his strength, or his support without giving him love in return.

Now let’s start to tackle what a relationship should or could be.

A wise husband knows that he must come home from work and put some of his energy into his wife. Listen to her describe her day; sit with her a while; help her with the kids for a bit. Whatever the case may be. Not all wives or girlfriends need the same things, but whatever she does need, it’s his job to provide it. To trade his attention and energy, directly, for her happiness. For her to feel heard and loved and attended to.

Now this makes women sound like simpletons, like machines that can be controlled with a few simple inputs. And that sounds insensitive. But if you’ve been paying attention, part of the whole theme here is, yes, we’re all like that to some extent. We’re creatures with very simple drives and needs. And for some reason, when it comes to men and women together, we try to outsmart those base-level behaviors. We forget to do the basics.

What do you do when a child starts getting angsty? You know he wants his bottle, or a favorite toy, or he wants you to pick him up and play with him. You don't call him a selfish, needy piece of shit. You don't criticize him for having needs and for relying on you to fulfill those needs. And you don't shout at him “my god, all you ever want to do is get attention.”

You're his mother. You laugh it off and say, “Ahh... I know what he needs.” And you pick him up and do whatever the thing is and you enjoy the moment of bonding.

Sex can be that way too. And so can attentiveness, or listening, or having a spontaneous conversation, or doing a favor, or spending time with someone on some small irrelevant thing. These are very basic, straightforward behaviors which compound into good (or bad) relationships.

For some reason, when it comes to men and women, we think we’re above this. We think we’re above being children with basic needs. And therefore we think men should be above something as brutal as “needing sex.”

But the truth is, we’re not. The same way women are not above asking us things like “if I was a rusty paperclip, would you still love me?”

These are the kinds of things our biology pushes us to want. Our own individual sense of validation and commitment — and it usually comes through the most hilariously simple acts you can think of.

I can’t nail down the source of the quote in the following sentence. As someone said, “Life is a tragedy for those who feel, and a comedy for those who think.” As a couple, you can do one of two things. You can spend your whole relationship laughing at how predictable you both are, or you can spend your whole relationship being offended by your partner’s needs. Those are your two options.

Honoring basic needs, happily

If you’re a man and you didn’t want to spend a portion of your life looking after your wife’s most basic needs, I’d ask why in the hell you got married in the first place. And I’d ask the same of women.

So now why is it so hard to publicly say “give your husband sex”? Why is it such a shameful, controversial thing to say that men need sex, and that the women they’re married to ought to provide it?

I have seen, several times now, conversations on podcasts where men almost said this out loud. But we’re all terrified to say it. We’re all terrified to say the words “women need to give men sex” out loud.

Why? Why do we have to be so terrified to say such an obvious thing out loud? Especially when we are so willing to say out loud how many needs and desires women are allowed to have?

We’re willing to tell women they should have whatever they want in life, and that any man standing in the way of that is a problem. And yet we can’t lean towards those same women and whisper “you should probably have sex with your husband. He looks antsy.”

Maybe you’ve heard the saying, “women need to feel loved to have sex, men need to have sex to feel loved.” And even if that’s not literally true, it illustrates how relationships unfortunately work: through the confounding pain of catch-22s. All it takes for a relationship to work is for both people to contribute to the feedback loop. And all it takes for it to fall apart is for one of them to stop.

“Give your husband sex” isn’t a call to let yourself be enslaved, or to let someone unworthy have total authority over you or anything like that. If you’re not with someone worthy of you, you’ve got bigger problems.

But if you’re in a loving relationship, here’s what your husband needs: to relish and revel in getting to enjoy your body. Your squishiness and softness are his Kingdom of Heaven. For most men, there isn’t a single other, stronger thing you can do than give him access to sex. To voluntarily offer it to him, and to be happy in doing so.

That last bit is important: to be happy in doing so.

There is nothing more depressing than duty sex — the lazy, “just to shut him up” handjob. That’s the saddest and most pathetic way to try to keep a man happy. You’re not letting him relish in it — you’re making him feel pathetic, like some sort of beggar. And then, like a man who just got off to some horrible obscure kink on PornHub, he now has to sit in the shame and filth of a self-demeaning orgasm. The tragic aftermath of a sexual release that wasn’t even good for him.

This is how men lose themselves: when sex is turned into a shameful cycle instead of an act of love. If you teach a man to hate himself for needing sex, at first he’ll probably resent you… but eventually he actually will hate himself. Not only for needing sex from someone who doesn’t want to give it to him, but for letting that happen in the first place.

A man would feel better about himself if he was able to walk away from such a relationship and say “well then to hell with you, I’ve got other options. I’ve got other women who will see it as a pleasure to sleep with me.”

But most men are not so lucky. Partially because their needs have been demonized everywhere, and partially because most men have become too weak to earn other options in the first place.

So when a man loses the sex — that is, literally the love — in his marriage, he is utterly defeated as a man. He is without the thing he needs most.

The key to avoiding all this, if you do love him, is to give a man access to sex and make him feel like you’re glad to do so. Ideally, and if he’s doing his job, you actually are glad to do so.

Because, let’s remember — if you’re a woman and you want your husband to have conversation with you or do things with you, you don’t want him to throw his hands up and shout “Jesus Christ, this again? You’re still bitching about that same co-worker? When is this going to stop? Okay fine, I’ll listen. Fuck. But hurry up.”

That wouldn’t make you feel very attended to, would it? As Jennifer Aniston said to Vince Vaughn in The Break-Up, “I want you to want to do the dishes.”

Now let me also point out what should be obvious to any reasonable person: neither a husband nor a wife should be completely encumbered by their partner’s needs. If your partner wants sex 4 times a day (or serious conversation 4 times a day, or a leg rub 4 times a day), but you have other things to do, then he needs to control himself to make up the difference. And the same would be true in reverse.

In between base needs and perfectly ideal cooperation are two forces: communication, and self-control. You communicate to fine-tune where you’re at between these two places. You communicate to move the needle up and down according to each of your capabilities and needs. Sometimes a husband is too busy to fulfill his wife’s needs as much as she’d like, and sometimes a wife is too busy.

And wherever needs and capabilities are out of alignment, you make up the difference with self-control. With patience. With the ability to happily support and engage with your partner in the meantime anyway.

If a man has to go a week, or a month, or even 3 months without sex, well, toughen up. Sometimes life is like that.

You can’t always be in the Garden of Eden where both of your needs are perfectly met. But you can certainly do a lot better than “Jesus Christ, this again?”

Your husband’s attention, even if he’s not the most impressive guy in the world, means something. It’s your home. It’s what supports you. Most women like the strong, protective, decisive man — so they can live underneath that umbrella. And they like when, underneath that umbrella, he also listens and plays and attends. It’s safety. It’s love.

And your body, that's his umbrella. It is his happiness. It’s not just fun, it’s not just playtime. It’s his home. It’s where he finds his value as a man. Your body is the place where he goes to get his reward for all the effort he puts into being masculine and strong and decisive and protective. Your body is his reward. Your body is the fountain he drinks from.

So when a woman gives her man willing and happy access, it makes him feel love. Someone like Freud might even call it motherly — it’s a woman’s way of nurturing. It keeps his masculinity feedback loop going.

The happiest and wisest couples I know are able to balance the brutal truth of being creatures with the flowery theatrics of being humans. They have a nuanced human relationship and still acknowledge the hideous (but funny and adorable) weaknesses of being animals.

Good relationships are positive-sum

Anyone familiar with my work probably knows how I look at relationships: they’re like adopting someone. You don’t have to be best friends, you don’t have to do everything together, but what you do have to do is take care of each other. Take complete and utter responsibility for each other until death fucks it up.

What men in modern society have been coached (and bullied) into doing is to sterilize themselves: to make fewer of their needs known, and to be terrified of what’ll happen if they do make their needs known. To think of themselves as the villains in the story of women. Young men in particular, feel like they have two options: be timid good-for-nothings, or be overbearing, toxically-masculine assholes.¹

But neither sex needs to be put down for the other to thrive.

The goal should be for men to become better and stronger, and for women to try harder to keep up with their needs. Why do I think that?

Because I also think the opposite is true: women should be dynamic and have tons of different interests, if they want to, and have careers if they so choose... and men should try their damnedest to play the best support role for those things that they possibly can.

This isn’t a zero-sum game. Good relationships don’t work by taking from one person and delivering to the other. Which is why people who act like men asking for sex is inherently a bad thing fundamentally misunderstand relationships (and men, and life).

A great relationship meets both partners’ needs, without either partner being oppressed or taken for granted, and elevates both partners to higher levels of prosperity and health. It's positive-sum.

So if someone tells you “make sure you don’t give your man (or woman) too much,” what they’re really telling you is “don't build a great relationship.” And if you read betwixt the lines, the subtext there is often “because I want you to be just as miserable as I am,” as is often the case with people who give terrible advice.

If someone doesn’t have a great relationship, for God’s sakes just don’t listen to them. And what I can tell you is, if a man isn’t having sex, it’s profoundly unlikely he’s in a great relationship.

Is it realistic to expect a partner to greet you with sex every day as you get in the door from work? Of course not, and no reasonable man would ever demand or expect that. But that sets up a hell of a “dream scenario” to vaguely aim toward. It can get you moving in a direction that might be very useful, very loving, and a hell of a lot of fun.

And the same, obviously, in reverse: can a woman expect that a man spends every afternoon gardening with her, listening to her big presentation, or serving her various needs? No… but he should want to get somewhere close to that. Why? Because he should want her to be ridiculously happy and have a great life. What other reason could you possibly need?

Caveats

Now a list of caveats — not because I don’t trust my readers to think with nuance (I do), but because they add to the conversation.

Men have more needs than sex. Obviously.

Women have more needs than a listening ear, or protection, or playfulness. Obviously.

Neither sex is a machine that you should just be putting tokens in to get the prize. Obviously. (Although negotiations and bargains can be not only productive, but sexy and fun.)

You shouldn’t be giving your attention, or your body, to someone who isn’t worthy of them. Obviously.

One night stands exist, and sometimes sex is just for play. Obviously.

But the endless, childish lust of the Jersey Shore is not how most men approach sex. Obviously.

Relationships go through phases. Obviously. More of a thing, then less of a thing. More time to work on stuff, less time to work on stuff.

I cannot tell you what is right for your specific relationship. Obviously.

Not all men or women are the same. Obviously. Some men don’t relate to what we’re saying here, and some women might find more meaning or validation or love in sex than some men do.

Communicate with your partner about your needs. Obviously.

Be able to say “not right now” when you need to. Obviously.

Hold your partner accountable to be able to hear the word “no” without throwing a tantrum. Obviously.

Men, as an entire class of people, need to get better at taking care of the female orgasm. Obviously. Men are humiliatingly selfish in this way and need to be better men than that.

And finally, I didn’t make these rules. I wish men didn’t have to need sex. Obviously. I’m simply pointing out what I’ve noticed, and seen, and felt, about women and men.

Beyond those caveats, I think this is a lesson worth keeping in mind. People are very basic creatures with very basic needs. Let’s not pretend we’re above having needs. Let’s also not pretend we’re above wanting to feel warmth and love.

Men need to do a better job of being great men, and women need to do a better job of accepting that men need sex. It’s not something to be disgusted by. It’s something to be participated in, with all its messiness and awkwardness and foreplay. Keep playing with different ways of approaching sex until sex becomes fun. You’re only alive for 80 years. And if God made anything better than sex, he kept it for himself. So you might as well be enjoying it.

I think most of this boils down to sense of humor. I think most issues in human life boil down to sense of humor.

You ought to go through life expecting the absurd, and finding joy in the fact that humans display the same behaviors over and over and over. Like animals, but even less sophisticated.

And you should go into a relationship the same way. Because if you're paying any attention at all, it's going to be hilarious.

Drink some water and give more than you think you have to. Both of you.

JR

“You're going to pass something down no matter what you do or if you do nothing. Even if you let yourself go fallow, the weeds will grow and the brambles. Something will grow.” - John Steinbeck

1. When I was discussing this essay with Kate, she pointed out some much-needed nuance around this message that men have received over the last couple of decades. Basically, men got the wrong message. I think she’s right. Here are Kate’s notes which I will leave as she wrote them:

I would just clarify here that I understand that some men have received this message, but it is actually the direct opposite of what women ever intended to convey. What women have a problem with is:

1. Covert attempts to get sex while not making their intentions known or disguising them (i.e. pretending to just want to be her friend or hang out while actually wanting sex), and

2. Refusals to accept a “no” when it is given in the method most women will try to give it, which is a “let him down easy and keep the peace” manner.

The reason that men do the covert thing is precisely because they are afraid of rejection, so they’re trying to mask their request because it lets them pretend they were never asking in the first place if they get turned down. That’s to protect their own emotions. You are right that women would much prefer a man to be confident enough to be completely clear about his intentions from the outset, not hide them. This one is really on men and an issue of their own courage and emotional fortitude (or lack thereof).

The reason for the second issue is not because men are jerks who won’t accept a no, it’s because they are not used to the more subtle social-face-saving methods of female communication, and sometimes literally don’t understand when a no is a no. This one is on women for not being clear and stringing men along so as not to hurt their feelings and try to preserve what women view as a friendship. They should take responsibility for this one.

While you’re correct that this is a mistake, I also don’t think it was ever an overt message being given, more like a misunderstanding.

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Thanks to KryptoGal for providing editing, intelligence, and nuance. Outstanding editor and communicator.