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.

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.