I have a very sensible friend. He's not gay but he says he's just not interested in having sex with women. With my life experience, I'm of two minds about this. On the one hand, of course, I think it's weird. On the other hand, it's obviously an enormously practical attitude. It's not like much of the misery I and most of the guys I know has not come from our shared obsession with women. In fact, in our more lucid moments, as you occasionally see on comedy shows on television and elsewhere, my buddies and I have wondered together what our lives might be like if we didn't have to chase women all the time...then we laugh and admit that it's all just a pipe dream.
Nietzsche noted that to a woman a man is a path to a baby, but wondered what a woman is to a man.
For a woman, it's a very simple proposition from a biological and an intellectual level. She probably does (who knows?) feel some physical urge to pursue men. But as an intellectual being she is also able to understand that if she sees other families, other women with children, and decides she might like a baby of her own, she immediately understands that she can make one with her own body, and that even if she lives in a society (like America, ha, ha) without detailed medical knowledge of how the process works, she can apply her mind to the problem and one way or another work out that she needs a man's minor initial contribution.
For men, it's an entirely different proposition. Obviously men must have some biological drive to chase women and have sex with them1. But what kind of "mental" or "intellectual" reality do men live in vis à vis women? Nietzsche's observation may seem silly and trivial, but it really isn't.
It's a kind of miracle, since men's "willingness" to pursue women or their "dedication" to the pursuit of women is really crucial to the functioning of our society. It's something to be "harnessed" rather than reviled, suppressed, I would argue. Crypto-pseudo-feminists3 say they want to destroy this, but I don't understand what kind of dystopian future world they envisage. In our current one, half the population works slavishly for no apparent reason to earn money and acquire resources just to give it all to the other half for absolutely nothing in return2. On the face of it, this seems like a pretty goddamn good deal. Of course, as with all things, it doesn't always pan out in reality.
It's still probably a bad idea to jump in and proclaim, as is typical of crypto-pseudo-feminists, that something should be dismantled a) without understanding how it works, or b) having a clear idea of how to replace it. You could take the position, as would seem to be that of Norwegian Death Metalists, that the status quo is so dysfunctional that it has to be dismantled first, before even dialogue about something new may be begun. Given that women in general and many women in particular reap huge benefits from the status quo, at least some justification is required for reviling men for their drive to pursue women, which would seem to have absolutely no clear motivation from a social or intellectual standpoint and yet is literally the mainstay and foundation of our modern industrial society.
It is the Goose that lays the Golden Eggs.
We'd better have a very good reason to kill it, and I've yet to hear it. And the scary thing is that we don't even know how healthy this poor goose is anyway. I don't know how close we are to all men becoming like my very sensible friend or just becoming gay. Personally, I feel myself getting so fed up with faux-feminist rhetoric that I find myself thinking of a woman who says non-insane things as "a good one"5, and so forth.
What should things look like? It seems like the problem with reality, with the status quo, is that even though women like to pursue men (for obvious reasons) and men like to pursue women (which is a complete mystery), they really don't get along half the time, which is true of most people, so it's not surprising. Sex changes all this, since it makes things feel "right", but if things are really "wrong", then it only seems to last a couple of years4. After that, you have two people who are "stuck" together, and for practical economical and social reasons can't separate, or if they do, one or both of them (usually the woman, though this may well have changed) ends up permanently miserable thereafter.
Making men feel guilty, badly, whatever, because of the urge they feel to pursue women does not seem to be the answer to this. It's probably a good way to hurt men, just like ridiculing women for their menstruation or lower average height or muscle content would be a good way to hurt them, and equally cruel and pointless.
Men are fascinated with women. We don't know why. But it's probably a good thing.
1Maybe this is only obvious to Darwinians. Perhaps those to follow other ideologies hold that men are somehow pure and pristine and woman are the uniquely lascivious ones and the rôle of men is to "make them honest" and "rein them in", and men are otherwise waiting around, busy with other less "earthy" occupations. I'm not sure the evidence supports this idea, however.
2A woman's children a guaranteed to be her own, of course, but a man cannot guarantee that they are his, for one. Ostensibly a man expects sex and "housework", but this is usually "unenforceable", while his "providing" for his wife/partner is. And so on and so forth.
3a.k.a., "faux-feminists", those who say they work for women's liberation, but advocate policies that obviously would not accomplish this aim, and cover over this contradiction with bluster.
4which is long enough to have children in most cases, which effectively makes the union permanent, which tends to lock the male into the rôle of getting resources and the female into the rôle of looking after these children.
5and yes, I know what a perfectly appalling reference this is.
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