Is Casual Sex Accepted for Men

I was talking to an older relative of mine a while back, I don’t remember what about, but at some point I made a comment along the lines that casual sex was still a taboo subject. Her response was that for men it’s accepted, no-one really minds today if a guy shags about.

I thought about it for a while and, hopefully respectfully, disagreed. This is a longer argument I have built up since then explaining my position.

‘Men’ are not millions of clones. We are individuals with features that are part of us that are not true in every man. We are of different ages, we are of different races and different cultures. We are of different social classes. 

So for someone to say that no one minds if ‘a guy’ has casual sex, they are making a statement based on a very specific image of who that guy is and generalising to all men.

Picture this man who is having casual sex with no-one minding. If you, like me, are in Britain he is pretty good looking, slim, white and either a student or of around that age. In terms of social class he’s not at the bottom but he’s definitely not a posh kid.

This guy, this fiction we have created might be able to go around having casual sex with no repurcussions. If you differ from this man then you might not be so lucky.

Is it really true that a 50 year old man touring around the local nightclubs looking for a one night stand would not be met with social repercussions. Would that be seen as acceptable.I doubt it. The statement that it is fine now for men to shag around is tempered by age.

In my apparently socially progressive part of the country is it really true that no-one would bat an eyelid if a black man was known to be getting a lot of sex in a predominantly white british neighbourhood. While I would love to pretend we have reached some kind of multicultural utopia I’m not going to delude myself into thinking that. The statement that it is fine now for men to shag around is tempered by race.

This goes on for an enormous number of traits that provide exceptions to our apparent permissiveness. If that man is fat you can be sure his successes will be met with a serious questioning. If that man is seen as coming from a low social class you can be sure that his promiscuity will be held against not only him but will be added to a general feeling of distrust towards ‘rough types’ like him.

This is something I think we should discuss, it is clear to me that there is both a belief that casual sex is ok for men to engage in, and, at the same time, a belief that it isn’t ok. At best it is tolerated in some men, and then only with the expectation that they grow up eventually.

This is not the only point though. I can bet that even if this man fit the very narrow sort of man that casual sex is supposedly accepted in, he wouldn’t be accepted in her household. Even the rumour that this man was promiscuous would result in stern words if her daughter were found to be hanging out with him.

So even at best, accepted here means putting pressure on him. it is also interesting to note that this pressure is not applied directly, put placed on young women to not be seen around that guy. I’m sure someone with more understanding of social pressures on women could write a whole essay on why pressure is exerted that way. 

But the end result is that the pressure is placed on young women to control the urges of young men. In consequence the pressure against casual sex, and more generally the pressure to conform to the sort of relationships society accepts, is felt by young men as coming from young women and in particular as it it were their beliefs which are causing it.

The Political Side

This did remind me of another similar argument I have heard a few times, although I cannot recall where. About the sexual habits of our political leaders. For me, I’m in the UK so it was about Boris Johnson, the current UK prime minister. The point was that no-one really seems to mind his sexual morals, despite how dubious they are. Usually this would be accompanied by some hand wringing about our moral standards in this country.

For those not in the know, he’s currently on his third wife, his second divorce was due to his own infidelity and he’s had a few extramarital affairs. In particular the fact that he had a child with a woman named Helen MacIntyre, where an injunction banning reporting of it got overturned in court.

So how do I say that this casual attitude to sex and relationships is not accepted when it seems that it is accepted in probably the most important political position in the country.

This is my counterpoint to that. You see, I don’t think his attitude is accepted.

Choosing a political leader is always a matter of compromise. There is never going to be a candidate or group that perfectly embodies what you want for the country. Even if there was, there is no way that the person who embodies exactly what you want is going to impose that on a country full of people who think differently.

So we compromise, we pick a candidate who roughly embodies the politics and ideals that we want for our country or our area.

In the case of UK politics Boris’s campaign was based around Brexit. In particular after years of stalemate where no one deal could get the approval of a majority of parliament, Boris argued that he would be able to break that. In particular he got in contact with the Brexit party, convincing Farage and others that he would make a Brexit deal they would accept, and from that the Brexit party stood down a lot of candidates to encourage their supporters to vote for the conservative party.

And all that worked. He won, he got a large majority in parliament and pushed Brexit through. While it is never going to be over in the sense that we will always have conflict with our nearest neighbours, the deal was struck and Britain has left the EU. 

If Brexit was a cause you believed in then there was really only one way to get it in a form you would be at least reasonably happy with and that was voting Conservative. Labour might have accepted leaving the EU but very few Brexit supporters would be pleased with how they would go about it, and most of the other choices were either anti Brexit (Lib Dem, Green) or national parties (SNP, Plaid Cymru). Remember, the Brexit party stood down in a lot of seats.

On the other end there were quite a few people who weren’t that keen on Brexit, but sure as hell didn’t want Jeremy Corbyn in power, again, based on principles of how they want the country to be run.

And this is where my disagreement with the idea that Boris’s attitude to marriage is accepted.

I think a lot of Johnson’s voters aren’t accepting about how he conducts his relationships. But these major ideas on how you want the country to be run take precedence. A lot of people in what we think of as the conservative heartlands, the blue wall, held their nose on some of Johnson’s persona because that was acceptable to them in order to keep Corbyn well away from power. A lot of people held their nose on some of Johnson’s party and more conservative elements in order to break out of the red wall and say they want Brexit.

I’m not saying this to agree or disagree with these politics, but to point out the rather obvious fact that people are making decisions based on politics, based on the things that affect their lives. So it is wrong to say that the election of people with dubious sexual morals means that those morals are accepted in todays culture. It means that they are not seen as bad enough to switch to an opposing party in an election which has quite literally defined the course of British history for generations.

Carnival of Aros: In Between Spaces

Here is my entry for the January 2022 carnival of aros. Thank you to aspecofstardust for hosting this month. The theme is ‘In Between Spaces’.

Quick note, I describe some of the views I have growing up using some transphobic language. Also in one of the footnotes I mention the idea of incels comitting violence against women. If you do not want to read that I absolutely understand, this is your warning that these things are here.

Hang on, I’m a man?

The idea of talking about in between spaces is to talk about how different parts of our identity affect one another. One of the prompts asks ‘How do your romantic orientation, sexuality, and gender play off of each other?’

This brings up a realisation that I have been slowly having as I have came to accept being aromantic. That is that being a man is an identity and is one which has an effect on how I experience aromanticism.

I know this sounds incredibly stupid. But I genuinely went through a lot of my life not really thinking about being a man as an identity. Although I did not have the words for it, I was well aware of the demands on me as a boy in late primary school time, I got into a lot of fights and a lot of trouble. But as I aged out of that and stopped caring about being part of a group I went through life without being a man really mattering to me.

A man was just something I suppose I was. At the time if I even knew the idea at all I would have thought of gender identity as only for those few odd people who I saw as either silly men dressed in women’s clothing or pink haired loonies. Apologies for holding that view by the way, I was a rather ignorant young lad and held some very transphobic views.

The big thing is that I didn’t care that other people percieved me as a man because it had little impact on what I wanted to do. No one is going to push back against you wanting to study physics for being a man, and for a few years I got away with the casual attitude to dating because for some* men that is grudgingly tolerated while you are a teenager.

Then I found out something terrible. It’s far easier to notice a punch in the face when you are the person who is being punched.

I had mostly got away with not seeing man as an identity because it wasn’t affecting me too much but now I was starting to hear the pressure coming back for me to act like a man should. I should really settle down. Being single was slowly becoming more commented on by friends and family but at the time I didn’t really understand why, I just wasn’t interested in the sort of relationships people around me were forming.

The way I saw it, the pressure on a man in romance is to prove his worth. For a heterosexual relationship the man should take the lead, he should propose, both to become a couple in the first place and later to marry. He should take her on dates rather than the other way round. In doing so he should prove that he is a man worthy of her love**. He is manly, therefore he should take charge. He should be the one putting his pride on the line.

If you are a single man you can’t really brush it off as not caring about romance, you will be told that really you just fear rejection, fear finding out you are not good enough. If there is one thing you must not do as a man, it is be a coward.

So my discovery of aromanticism also coincided with me realising, or perhaps re-realising, that being a man was an identity, it was a performance and I was about to get yelled at by the producer for not acting in the right way.

On finding out about aromanticism one other thing that I have found is that not only do I now think of being a man as an identity, but it is also a rather uncommon one in aromantic spaces. Looking at the 2020 aro census you can see that of the people who it surveyed, only around 15% identified as male. It is also uncommon in single spaces as well, most writings about single living are written by and for women.

So I as I am starting to write more about my aro experiences one of the things I am looking to do more of is writing about single manhood. I have made a start on that already with both this post and a piece of writing inspired by Lucas Bradley’s wonderful work, ‘The Deliberately Single Man‘.

Hopefully I will be able to add to that in future.

Footnotes

* I will write more about this in future I hope. A quick note for now, the idea that casual sex is acceptable for men in modern, western society is something I have heard a few times but is largely bollocks. there are huge caveats based on age, race, physical attractiveness (not ‘looking like a creep’) and a whole load of other factors.

** As an aside, whenever some incel goes out on a rampage and starts killing people there are always some idiots who try to argue that if women just put up with fucking him a few times it wouldn’t have happened, or they ask why he didn’t just hire a prostitute if he was so damn desperate. Hopefully you can see that this wouldn’t work. The worth comes not from having sex, it comes from being the sort of man who women will have sex with. If its done on sufferance it doesn’t count. If you payed for it it doesn’t count.

If Friendship is so Devalued, it Doesn’t Matter if you Ditch Toxic Friendships

I was reading an article recently called ‘‘He drives me mad!’ Why don’t we dump toxic friends?‘

The gist of the article is quite simple. Two guys, Roger and Jim (not their real names). They were old friends, used to be in a band and still see each other a few times a year.

Apparently Jim is really getting annoying. Same conversations, never listens, and it’s long past the point where it would be polite to say ‘hey, you’ve been a pain in the arse these past few years’. But, they go on meeting each other. The article, after diverting into attempts at explaining why people stay in toxic friendships, finishes with Roger admitting that he also does things that drive Jim mad.

One thing I think the explanations really missed though is in the very first paragraph. The introduction to Roger and Jim’s relationship:

Roger and Jim have been friends for more than 30 years. When they were younger they were in a band together, and their friendship was forged over a shared love of music and beer. Even now, despite family commitments on both sides, they manage to catch up every couple of months. “Even though he drives me mad,” says Roger.

They manage to catch up every couple of months. This entire discussion of not ditching toxic friends is based on ‘catching up’ about half a dozen times a year.

I think I talk more to a dog belonging to a local walker who lives somewhere near my parents place.

And that assumes every couple of months being taken as every two months. For me at least I use a couple, a few, etc interchangeably even though they are different amounts. I’d be willing to bet that every couple of months can easily end up being about 3 to 5 times a year.

So maybe the answer to why we don’t dump these apparently toxic friends is less about the costs and benefits of the relationship, but becasue the friendship is so devalued that it doesn’t matter if you drop it or not.

‘Catching up’ a phrase which I would use to mean a short meetup, a few times every year. At that point you have ditched the friendship.

Everything here is far lower stakes than, say, a romantic relationship where you see each other every day. Or even a familial relationship. I make sure I talk to my parents every week and we meet up regularly, often staying with each other for many days at a time. So it becomes far less important to get rid of a friendship which you aren’t happy with because all you have to put up with is about five dinners.

Men Writing About Singleness

One thing I was reading recently was an article in psychology today by a man named Lucas Bradley. It’s called Single Manhood Is So Much More Than the Stereotypes and there is a lot in it I think is worth discussing. There is also a longer compiling of his thoughts on Medium under the name The Deliberately Single Man.

But one thing that stood out to me immediately was the point made before the article even started, in an introduction by Bella DePaulo. She says:

I’ve been studying singlehood for decades, and from the very beginning, I’ve been struck by just how many of the writings about single people have been written for, by, or about single women.

This is something that got me thinking, and I think there is a broader point here. It is not just that singlehood is dominated by women, but the whole field of writing about romance in general is seen as something by and for women.

An obvious example of this is the agony aunt. Think about it, when it comes to relationship advice, would you expect to find an agony uncle. Would you trust an agony uncle.

There is an obvious push for men to not write about their or others love lives. This flows into singleness as well.

Another example is the idea of celebrity relationship gossip being something clearly marketed towards women. Men might be targeted in a more base way, but talking about other peoples romance, that’s not a blokey thing to do.

This is in fact even broader, men are not expected to talk about emotion in general. The idea of taking suffering ‘like a man’. The idea of women as being more ‘emotional’ with all the derogatory intent in that word.

Another point is that men are not expected to define themselves in relation to their relationship status in the way women are. Think about the difference between Mr and Mrs or Ms, the distinction is there for women but not for men.

A man might be single or be a husband, but he is very unlikely to refer to himself as a husband. It’s just not the done thing.

So in writing, men are expected to not discuss this part of ourselves. But interestingly we are still expected to define our manliness by our romantic relationships. The ability to pull being a measure of a young man. Or the idea that men are expected to initiate the vast majority of romances, and make the vast majority of proposals.

Its an odd conundrum, we have a social setup where the people charged with creating and leading that form of relationship is also the one expected to be so fucking useless at it.

All in all, this sets up an interesting conundrum with those of us men wanting to write about being single. We need to break a large number of taboos just to put pen to paper.

Firstly we need to break the very common cultural norm that men should not define themselves by their singleness. That’s not to say it’s the only way I define myself, just that I am willing to write about myself as a single man.

Then we need to break the taboo of writing about emotion as a man. Again, if men aren’t supposed to even show a large number of emotions. If men are not supposed to even admit to feelings of loneliness, or of our fears, how easy do you think writing these down and putting them out for the world to see feels.

On top of all of that in order to discuss singleness we need to be able to discuss its alternatives, to ask why we wish to be single. That gives yet another social norm to break, to talk openly and honestly about these sorts of relationships and how we feel or don’t feel about them.

With all that in mind the majority of writing about single living being by and for women is not unsurprising. Hopefully I can play my small part in changing that.

2022 Bingo

A little bit of fun I had, enjoy.

2021 Aro Year in Review

I first discovered aromanticism as an option in 2020. Probably around early March that year when i first considered actually researching the term, finally coming to terms with it around mid summer. Although aside from a bit of online posting I didn’t really do much with that knowledge. I started 2021 knowing aromantic seemed to fit me as a desccription but not really understanding anything deeper than that.

This was a slightly worrying proposition as I had at the end of the year committed myself to becoming more involved with the aro community by agreeing to step in as a mod on Arocalypse, an independent aro forum. Not the best time to admit how ignorant i was.

In short, I needed to learn a bit more about my identity.

So I thought for the end of 2021 I would make a recap of what i have learnt and what I have done. A record for myself of how far I have came since the start of the year.

Getting Blogging

The first obvious thing I am glad I did was start this blog. I began at the beginning of February and have managed to write at least one thing each month.

With that I got involved in carnival of aros, an aro blogging idea where one person puts up a topic for others to write about.

This not only meant I was writing about aromanticism but also I was taking the time to read longform posts that other people had written, something I rarely did before.

What I learnt

Too much to write about.

Well, I’ll try to put a few things into words. I learnt about Limerance for the first time which is quite useful. I didn’t really think much about that sort of thing before, I guess as I didn’t experience it, but reading other peoples ideas on platonic limerance taught me a fair bit.

I also learnt a bit more about the ideas of singlism and amatonormativity. These were things I had heard vaguely about before this year, they come up often when discussing aromanticism, but I had never really dug into understanding them. To be honest I wouldn’t have been able to give a good description of a cultural norm in general last year.

I also got to explore how aromanticism connected with other areas of my life. For example I wrote a post about aromanticism’s impact on self care, which is something I would never have thought of if it hadn’t been for getting into blogging.

Arts and Crafts

The other thing I am proud of is I finally had the courage to make art about my identity This was a very freeing experience and it seems what I made was well recieved by those who saw it.

I submitted a 3d design I made to a competition on the arocalypse discord and I made a metal bookmark for aros create pride.

A Year of Moderating

This honestly was smoother than I had expected. I have an image of moderators as a sort of hated enemy, angering everyone booth for being too quick to ban but also for being to slow to ban. Needing to be both more heavy handed according to some, but being a bunch of fascists according to others.

To be honest most of what I have done has been answering a few fairly simple questions about how the site works and approving or rejecting guest posts. It does surprise me what nonsense trolls try to get on the website, but it has been a less stressful gig than I had anticipated.

Life Plans

One of the things I realised after discovering aromanticism was that I had always made life plans without considering the possibility of romance. The idea that I should think that maybe I would have a partner to think about was one that never crossed my mind. So discovering aromanticism didn’t really change my plans for life.

As for how it is going, I am heading to the end of a PhD, although Covid means it might last longer than I had hoped. Whatever I do after that I have been able to put money away so I can put a deposit on a flat or old terrace, depending on where I live. Can’t really deal with that till I get a job more stable than the next few months, but I am in as good a place as I expected.