A steadfast and sure horniness

Witt and I went away for a weekend, and in a little hippie food co-op, I picked up one of those free alternative newspapers. It had a “missed connections” type section, and I read over the messages, and all the hopelessness of strangers seeking to reach other strangers they’d briefly encountered in the world. I started to feel unnerved as I read, and scanned for why. Most of the messages were from men to women, and as I re-read them, I saw how many hewed to the same basic script:

“[I saw you/you looked at me/you smiled] when we were both at the [gas station/laundromat/dump] and had I not been so [caught off guard/tongue-tied/dazzled] I would have hit on you. Please write to me so I can hit on you now.”

In almost no cases had these people exchanged even a syllable. These men were taking standard female socialization (make eye contact, smile, don’t be a bitch when you pass by men) for an invitation, for a come on. These women were just trying to get a coffee or cat food or pick up a prescription and here are men, concocting fantasy encounters about them entirely off their physical attributes.

I am an enthusiastic student of men. In many ways, they are my favorite kind of people. I am exclusively sexually attracted to men, and so my erotic energies hum around them, when they hum. As I understand it, from my studies of men, male sexuality often means a constant thrum of energy. If not all-the-time horniness, there’s at least a baseline arousability that never really goes away. They are attuned to visual stimuli, and need not much more than the sight of a body that attracts them to launch their sexual imaginations. I remember constant horniness from my youth, but it feels distant from me now. And never did my imagination fire solely off the sight of an attractive man. It always needed more story, some context. My sense of this general difference between the sexes feels supported by reports from trans men who have medically transitioned. These men have traveled in more than one hormonal country, and when they start their testosterone regimens, frequently report spikes in how often they think about sex, and the urgency and persistence of their sex drive.

Our society has a tendency to derogate male desire. I understand why, since men commit so much sexual violence, and we then make the leap to thinking their sex drive itself is violent. But taking the parts apart, there is no reason to think this is so. Our society cultivates violence in men. Sexual, non-sexual, any old kind. This is terrible, but also shows how the violence is neither limited nor intrinsic to their libidos. I love male sex drive. I am female sexed, with a female hormonal makeup, female cyclicity. There’s a roundedness to my libido, a waxing and waning, but even at its perigee, when I swing closest to their way of being, it never has the same insistence as those of the two men I keep about. Theirs is a sex drive, urge, spontaneously arising. It’s a kind of craving, and though it can’t be reduced to only the urge to penetrate, there is, I understand, a clear directionality, erectionality, an insertional wish. They have a clearly vectored desire.

I am deeply grateful for this. My desire works so differently. Outside of adolescence, and the very early days of a new relationship, I no longer feel that kind of drive. Sometimes, I feel myself withdrawn from my skin surface and into my mind, like a monk in retreat. At those times, my mind is cleared for other things, and when my men come rapping at the monastery door with their urges for me, I find myself pacific, willing to aid them, but aloof, wrapped in gray linen robes, my head shaved.

Other times, I feel my erotic spirit move back out into my limbs, my skin. I feel myself in contact with the world again and I want to rub up against it. Still, it’s rare that I feel a full-on, hard-on wish to fuck. I can, at these times, step into the current of male desire and let it carry me along. It’s a power source I can hook into, a deep aquifer I can drop into when the ground is parched and surface water scarce. When I can let go of ideas that my cyclic, subtle, sometimes cryptic sexuality is somehow inferior to men’s, I can trust the interplay between the two and be borne along until I, too, am fully immersed in it.

What to make of my veneration of male sex drive, my sense of it as an awesome and holy force, and my unease and discomfort at the men writing into the missed connections feature with their longings and urges?

When I think about how I wish straight men understood these desires in light of women’s experiences of the world, I would want to tell them this:

“Your horniness is beautiful and powerful, but it is not necessarily dyadic, even if it seems like it is. When you see a woman, and you feel that surge inside you, and the film reel of all the things you’d like to do starts playing in your head, understand that you have this response so often and to so many people because it isn’t really about them, specifically. They may trigger it, visually, but what happens in you after that is coming from the inexhaustible spring of your beautiful sexual imagination. Understand this, and understand that this is common for men. Understand, thus, that women are constantly being looked at by men in this way, and men are then unfolding capacious fantasies all around them, everywhere. And then men are thinking these fantasies mean they should act, to hit on the woman that incited this feeling in them. And there are so. many. men.”

As Steve said, he felt generic, being subject to all the male horniness he encountered on the hookup apps. And on the level I mean, about men’s general arousability, and their responsiveness to visual stimuli, the objects of that attention are generic. It’s like the advice not to go grocery shopping when you’re hungry. If you are ravenous, all sorts of things will incite your fantasies of eating. All manner of weird foods will suddenly captivate you. You will not possess any discernment, and will come home with a bizarre and overlarge collection of things that, once you have eaten, will strike you as very strange, and possibly regrettable. But the fact is, when you are ravenous, whatever you eat at that moment, be it a Twinkie, or some pimento olives wrapped in a Kraft single, or a delicately flaked baklava, will amaze and delight your senses. It will be the most delicious thing you ever ate. Not because of the particular merits of the food, but because of how deeply you wanted food. What a pleasure those appetites and desires are, the anticipation of fulfilling them, the fantasies you can concoct of what dish you will choose when you are able to sate yourself.

I have been reading a book called “Meditations” by a one-time Catholic monk named Thomas Moore. Writing about having taken a vow of celibacy, and then of being released from it when he left the Servite order, he wrote,

We can all take the vow of chastity in the midst of a vibrant sex life. The beauty of being with one person sexually is fed by saying no to others, by not giving too much attention to sexual longing, by sublimating in imagination without repression, by finding that the world itself is a sex partner.

This week, feeling exhausted and in need of emotional rest, I went to the treehouse in the woods out back of our house. I had been sitting silently for an hour when I saw a red squirrel working his way through the trees toward me. I heard scrabbling on the tree trunk by my head, but didn’t think it could possibly be the squirrel approaching so close until I saw his head peer around the corner at me, about two feet away, at my eye level. Cocking his head back and forth, he examined me, and then, straddling a branch, jittered his furred ball sack along its surface, marking the territory before going along his way.

A few minutes later, to my utter disbelief, a gray squirrel came up the same trunk and peered around it the same way. His head was blocky and his muzzle soot-gray colored, like he’d been fossicking in a dead fire. He too sized me up and then jumped to the high branch. I could see his scrotum swaying over my head. “Great,” I thought, “I’m subject to the male gaze even among the rodents.”

Considering these strange encounters later, it made complete sense that both the squirrels were male, and it’s breeding season, and they are swelled and swirling with testosterone. It’s an outwardly directed hormone. It makes a mind seek out the world, whether to fuck, or fight, or find out. It’s a mind ready to engage. And while you may not be able to harness that energy, if you can at least learn to hold on to its mane, it can carry you to some astonishing places.