Unfortunate (Sexual) Things About Being a Man

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Despite all the self-denial and fabricated accounts of endless machismo and sexual prowess that this article will no doubt provoke from the less insecure members of the male gender, it has to be said that being a guy is, at times, pretty tough.

The difficulty doesn’t necessarily come from trying to fulfill the accepted social definition of what it is to be a “man” (though there is that), or the difficulties of having an external sex organ (there’s that, too), but simply, and most importantly, in how our biological makeup affects us in all aspects of our pursuit of the opposite sex.

From our attempts to woo them to the actual intercourse we so desperately want to have with them, there are several things about men in relation to sex and romance that make the whole ordeal much harder for men than for women. These are some of them.        

Men are driven by sex at all times

Always. It’s not something we’re necessarily proud of, and it’s not even an impulse we necessarily want (the old adage of a man’s body not having enough blood to run a brain and a penis at the same time comes to mind), but it is there nonetheless. The male body tends to treat semen like some sort of poison – no matter what, it must be expelled. Whether by disposing of it in a Dixie cup at a sperm bank, dumping it into a condom during intercourse, or by using it to impregnate a member of the opposite sex, men are driven by a truly crippling need for sex, almost all the time.

Women and/or guilty, politically-correct males might attempt to say that women and men have nearly-identical sexual urges (thereby chalking up womankind’s lower levels of horniness to some sort of gender-wide mental strength of character), but it is simply not true. The first American Pie movie included an 18-year-old female character who had never had an orgasm of any sort. The character (played, ironically, by Tara Reid) was viewed as slightly unusual in her sexual inexperience, but the fact remains: the character was plausible.

A female could hypothetically live to the age of 18 or thereabouts without ever having felt the intense, painful sexual urges of their male counterparts, and thereby never having had an orgasm (lord knows I dated a woman like that). For any male not under the watchful eye of a guilt-cultivating religion, such inexperience is unthinkable, almost impossible. While we are not singled-minded mongoloids who think only about sex at all times (no, we don’t think about it every seven seconds), the desire is nonetheless always present in the back of our minds, for better or worse – usually worse.

When a woman has an uncontrollable desire to have sex all the time at the expense of her hygiene, safety, and personal health, we call it “nymphomania.” When a man experiences the same thing, we call it “Tuesday.”

Men can only have one orgasm

It’s odd, then, that despite the fact that men seem to have immeasurably larger sexual appetites, the actual act of fornication is much less enjoyable for us than it is for women. Men are only allowed one orgasm – thrust, squirt, done – and the whole thing is finished in 3-8 seconds.

Women, on the other hand, can have multiple orgasms with no pause in between. According to some stuff I found,

“Women are capable of sustained orgasm, called status orgasmus. These start with a 2 to 4 second "spastic contraction" and last twenty to sixty seconds. Masters and Johnson (1966) published a chart of one woman who experienced a 43-second orgasm, consisting of at least 25 successive contractions.”

Not to mention,

“Wardell B. Pomeroy recounts the case of one extraordinary woman who had near-godlike powers in the sack. His words: ‘I remember one woman who was capable of from fifteen to twenty orgasms in twenty minutes. Even the most casual contact could arouse a sexual response in her. Observing her both in masturbation and in sexual intercourse, we found that in intercourse her first orgasm occurred with two to five seconds after entry.’”

Now, there are obviously many men who can have orgasms within two seconds of commencing sexual intercourse (more on that later), and obviously this woman’s case is not typical, but still; women can potentially have one orgasm per minute (if not more), and their orgasms last, as a minimum, twice as long as the male orgasm. This may not come as much as a surprise, but men are physically incapable of enjoying sex on the same level women do. We don't even get close.

In addition to serving as another unfortunate side effect of being a man, this should prove that the male gender’s insatiable lust for sex is not a mental characteristic, but a biological imperative – we don’t have as good a time as women do whilst in the sack, so why would we consciously want to have sex so much more frequently than they do? Quite simply, we don’t – our genes do. And yet, we are blamed for it anyway.

Men can “fail” at having sex

At the risk of quoting a monologue from Clerks, female participation in sex can (but definitely shouldn’t be) reduced to simply “being there.” So long as the woman is present, has a vagina, and allows the male access to said vagina, she is having sex. The sex may be bad, or awkward, or she might not actually climax, but when a woman has a penis inserted into her vagina, she is, at least technically, having sex.

Men, on the other hand, have a myriad of problems that can result in a failed attempt at having sex. Men can experience a sudden bout of erectile dysfunction, thus making intercourse impossible in the first place. Alternatively, men can prematurely ejaculate and end the game before it begins: in addition to the massive stress and expectation to bring a woman to orgasm, men are simultaneously forced to deal with their own physical problems and – dare I say – shortcomings when it comes to a roll in the hay.

I would never pretend that bringing a woman to climax is not a difficult, lengthy, and often tedious experience for the woman, and this is what makes sex so difficult for men – men have to juggle the pleasure of the woman (assuming the man in case is a real man and doesn’t engage in sex solely for his, and nobody else’s, enjoyment) along with the real possibility that they might actually fail at having sex. Women, hypothetically, only need to (A) be present, and (B) pray that their partner has at least a hint of sexual prowess.

Women hate us

Norah Vincent is a lesbian journalist. I say this not because “lesbian” is one of the only things one might need to know about her, but to bring to mind the cliché that most lesbians, to some extent, hate or dislike men.

Vincent’s book, A Self-Made Man, chronicles the year and a half she spent disguised as a man named “Ned,” in order to find out how the lives of men are different from the lives of women. While most of her findings could have been easily figured out without all the effort involved in cross-dressing (incidentally, men are less vocal about emotions than women), one particular finding is especially interesting:

As “Ned” went to clubs to hang out with “his” male friends, Norah Vincent would occasionally talk to women while still in the guise of being a man – not necessarily to hit on them, but as a means of gauging reactions to certain conversational topics when the conversation is initiated by a man. After a few months of this, Vincent evidently began to despise women; no matter what she wanted to talk about, and no matter what her intentions were, nearly all of the women she talked to either blew her off, or were insanely rude and/or condescending to her. Without even stopping to hear what “Ned” had to say, the women in the nightclubs “Ned” visited immediately assumed he was a lecherous jerk looking only for sex, and treated him like shit as a result.

To summarize: regular women were such assholes to a lesbian when she was dressed like a man that she began to sympathize with men and actually hate women. If that isn’t proof-positive that heterosexual women tend to despise and generally act like jerks to men more than men despise and generally act like jerks to women, I don’t know what is. Sexists and assholes are obviously abound in both genders, but we're talking about immediate reactions from one member of a sex to one member of another. Men may act like jerks to women, but they usually don't tend to do it just because a woman wanted to talk to them.

Women tend to despise men because of all the aforementioned reasons, many of which are beyond our control.  Despite the fact that we have shitty orgasms and that sex for us can be a stressful experience, our genes still perpetually, forcefully, unfairly push us along in pursuit of sex.

As a result of these things, men tend to be more desperate than women when it comes to finding a girlfriend and/or mate – finding a woman without a boyfriend is usually a sign of pickiness or personal choice, as there is always at least one man a woman, no matter how ugly she is, who will be able to attract a man of some sort. Finding a guy without a girlfriend is usually a sign of a lack of options. Thanks to the human male’s biologically-imposed desperation and urges, women have far more choice in choosing men, and far less pressure in doing so (outside of the natural stomp-stomp-stomp of their biological clock, anyway).

There’s a great scene in the first season of the TV show Extras where the two main characters (Andy and Maggie) have a conversation about Maggie’s desire to date a man whose wife died in a war. The conversation goes something like this:

“Forget it. Never date a man whose wife has been murdered. You’ll never live up. Pick someone else.”

“Well who, then?”

“It’s just that easy for you, isn’t it?”

Yeah. It is.