Can we talk about "male sexuality"? Trigger warning: fetishes

[Elspyth]

Inspired by recent threads on Debbie Hayton and Andrew Doyle
Hayton describes their self confessed AGP fetish as "a beachball they can't keep under water" and numerous posters on here have said that Doyle/Janice Turner/anyone using preferred pronouns are unwittingly participating in their fetish.

I've seen other male commentators (I think it was Doyle but I am not sure) say that the "beach ball) metaphor resonated with them and women don't get it because they don't understand male sexuality.

It got me wondering about fetishes:

1. are fetishes part of normal male sexuality? I have known quite a few men with them (and there will be more I know that have them, but I don't know)

2. some fetishes are visible (AGP, and exhibitionists) but many aren't (high heel fetishes for example) or are secret (men who plant cameras in womens spaces, or upskirt them) Are heel fetishists who hang around professional settings because of women in heels also nonconsensually exploiting women? What about a man who upskirts a woman? Is it less of a problem if the woman is unaware? Are some fetishes "worse" than others? (Excluding the ones where people are raped or murdered, those ones are definitely worse)

3. Can we/should we try to stop men having fetishes? How do we do that? I think there is quite a lot of comorbidity e.g. men have multiple fetishes. If we crack down on one, will it cause a different one to pop up? Should we see AGP as just one of a range of fetishes or should we treat it differently?

I'm not sure where I sit on this. Personal view is talking about fetishes as male sexuality is centring penis needs and I don't like it. But pragmatically am aware lots of icky fetishists are out their exploiting women without their knowledge so maybe its not possible to expect to avoid them, depressingly.

Yes, this is an interesting thing and I think it leaves us without important tools for dealing with inappropriate, or damaging, sexual issues.

There was a time when it was commonly taught that it was a bad idea to indulge in sexual thoughts and fantasies. Of course this did not stop people from doing it, but there was a sense that it could be disrespectful to others and impact your view of them; that it could shape your own sexual response and also character; that it is important to have self-control about our thoughts; and that your thoughts can actually have an impact on who you are and how you act.

Since the sex revolution the claim is that it is ok to think about what you want as long as it stays in your head; you fantasies can't hurt you or anyone else; the particular kinds of sexual fantasies you have are part of who you are and it's a bad idea not to indulge them, not to mention prudish; it's abnormal to try and control what you think about and anyone who ever said they did was just a liar anyway.

Anyone who has been raised with the second way of thinking, who suddenly finds the idea of wanking in a rubber suit, or choking a woman while having sex, etc, intriguing, is not going to have much reason to avoid thinking about it, or much practice not thinking about it even if he wanted to. Learning to control sexual thoughts takes practice. And a 12 or 14 year old boy is not going to have much ability to think it through himself, and is very unlikely to ask someone older and wiser for advice. By the time he gets to 20, that's six or 8 years of established sexual response to whatever the stimuli is.

Just to be perfectly clear, Andrew Doyle has had Debbie Hayton on his show recently to discuss DH's book and thoughts. Andrew Doyle does not have AGP.

So, in ICD-11 (superceded ICD 10 last year) fetishism is listed as a synonym under the heading of paraphilia (as is fetishistic transvestitism). In ICD 10 it was listed as a separate code under the main heading of disorders of sexual preference, and fetishistic transvestism as another separate code.

I always assumed upskirting was part of the voyeurism fetish. The same behaviour that drives "peeping toms" at Windows, men planting cameras in public toilets and changing rooms, and even managing to kill themselves getting stuck in tiny spaces while they do it (there was a man who got trapped in an a/c vent watching women in the loo, iirc).

To me the way we talk about it is a bit like the "family annihilator" logic. We act as if these are just "one bad apple". But the reality is it is enough men for me to think it is common male sexuality 🤮.

I thought the difference between kinks and harmful fetishes/paraphilias was the all consuming nature and harm they do. Its like having an addiction. The difference is addiction normally has negative consequences for the addict as well as the people around them. If alcohol was free and it was possible to give your hangover to the neighbours or allow your children to inherit your liver problems on your behalf etc etc then unfortunately there would probably be a lot more alcoholics. As it is there is no "rock bottom" for people with AGP to hit really - the more they lean into their interest, the more celebrated they are. Women (as a rule) have to contend with the negative consequences of sex more so there is a bit of an inbuilt check there (even with the pill and the "sexual revolution" you don't actually see women behave in the same way as men. Plus they are still weaker, more vulnerable to STDs etc). The only immediate negative consequences to men are more likely to come from social reaction or harsh penalties if its something criminal. e.g. weird guy smells someone's chair after she leaves. All the men around them go "WTF" and mock. Remove all the barriers, make it possible to see exactly what you want at any point, celebrate everything and there aren't any reasons not to go further down whatever road to somewhere harmful. In the long run I think there probably are lots of disadvantages (male loneliness, irreversible surgeries) but that's too far down the road and its too easy to blame external forces (e.g. AGP man can blame transphobia, 30 year old who never got a girlfriend/job because they spend their whole lives watching porn can blame misandry etc etc). And I think in general women are also affected by the instant gratification the internet offers. Actually its physically safer (short term) for women to ship fictional relationships/get into Fujoshi stuff than actually date and I think that leads to some pretty weird places too.

And for the record I am not saying we can/should police what happens in peoples heads. But there's a big difference between that and celebrating it/saying everything is healthy.

😁😁😂
@Fruityful

Fetish/kink/paraphilia are the same thing.

The difference is when it's classed as a 'disorder', determined by whether it causes harm.

I don't believe the ball under water bullshit.
That's an excuse to justify shit behaviour.

The lack of control starts and ends with their habits of indulging their perversions and society's willingness to keep putting men's cocks before all else.

I don't really want to spend a lot of time thinking about fetishes. And I'm not sure why I need to.
I just want people to control their sexuality in public.

I think men do experience sexuality differently in general. I think it's a more powerful drive that is less immediately linked to emotion. This means it has to well controlled, by the individual and on a societal level.

I think the beach ball analogy works well. You need to learn how to control something.

The problem is we've removed many of the controls. Everyone is told their sexuality is their identity, natural and cannot be shamed. They can find porn and groups to support any perversion. Public shame and judgement has been shamed itself. Don't be a prude.

We need strong societal codes which limit male sexuality, if they want success and respect in society, and we've thrown those codes out.

They are no longer even expected to keep the beach ball under water.
That's why we're even having to discuss fetishes extensively.

Fetishism and paraphilias are much more prevalent in males.

All of this info is readily available in the links I posted upthread to the DSM etc.

The terms have clear meanings and explanations and there's plenty of literature on prevalence, sex differences, etc.

Lots of interesting posts here:

The ‘beachball’ thing that many men live with is a feeling of frustrated sexual desire. I remember once seeing a middle age man looking at a barmaid - dew-fresh and young- beautiful, I made eye contact with him and his face was tortured - he looked almost like he wanted to cry, because he knew he could never touch her - she looked straight through him and he just looked down and shook his head in self-pity.

I think it’s probably true that, on average, men have a much higher sex drive than women. That becomes obvious if we look at the difference in sexual behaviours between lesbians and gay men.

this can be triggered by a variety of things, especially but not always things connected to sex. And usually fairly young, and not by any kind of design. So in a way it reflects an innate sexual capacity, but it's a sort of misfire.
[…]

I think women have this to some extent but it's much less closely tied. Men need to have a strong enough sexual response to actually have sexual intercourse, and in many cases initiate and maintain a goal oriented pursuit of a sexual partner. It's not, from a reproductive standpoint, as necessary for women to be so sexually motivated. So maybe just less likely to go wrong.

I wonder whether it does misfire for women, just as often as men, but as women tend to be less sexually motivated in general. They are also less likely to give in to their impulses perhaps (see male and female criminality) which migh be why it’s identified more in men. It’s more likely those men will behave in problematic ways.

It wouldn’t bother me if I found a sexual partner wanking over a shoe in private, as I would understand exactly why he was doing it and (frankly) I’d rather he was doing that than watching porn or doing something in public.

What strikes me, reading this thread, is something that’s probably quite obvious really, especially when we take into account the writings of AGP men, including Hayton.

The current problem is that society, in trying to make life better for some (mostly homosexual) men with a psychiatric problem, has inadvertently sent a message to men with an abnormal sexual drive, that it is quite acceptable to indulge their sexual urges in public. (To be clear, society/government has propagated this inadvertently, but it wasn’t accidental and has been largely driven by men who saw an opportunity, I believe).

Those men, seeing this change, lie to themselves and other men like them, that these urges are somehow not sexual. That requires significant self deception, but they are being fed the lie that it’s normal and even socially acceptable. It puts temptation fully in their pathway. If we told men it was socially acceptable to rape, I suspect many more would indulge themselves, even if they knew on some level it was wrong. Men like Hayton would probably never, in normal circumstances, have indulged themselves. This new social acceptance is why so many of these men are appearing now. We can also see from what Hayton is saying, that such men will continue to indulge themselves while they think they can get away with it.

I’m not sure how we can put that cat back into the bag, honestly. It has to come at a societal level. I do think that the laws that have brought in that normalise this behaviour will probably have to go, at the very least. I’d like to return to a time when it was not considered normal to flaunt your sexuality in public and nobody was arguing it was. Nobody used the term “kink shaming” when I was young and I’d be quite happy never to hear it again. Nobody knows about my personal kink and nobody other than my sexual partner (if I choose to tell them) needs to. That is how it should be.

What I don’t want to do is for homosexuality to be pushed back underground. Holding hands in public and openly having a gay partner is not flaunting your sexuality inappropriately. We have no idea what those people are doing in private and who you choose as a partner is nobody else’s business.

Unfortunately, there are those who would argue that these things are linked and that’s why the lumping of all the letters onto the lesbian and gay bandwagon is a very dangerous tactic for gay and lesbian people. Some of them have already spotted the danger, but the damage is done. This knot is going to take a lot of untangling.

women tend to be less sexually motivated in general

The other component in this is that women are also less likely to be rejected, thwarted and frustrated in their sexual urges than men.

Women generally are both less sexually motivated and much more fussy than men. Women can suddenly get the feeling of ‘no I’m not into the idea of this after all’, even if at one point they thought it might be a yes.

This mismatch between- to put it crudely- sexually eager, unfussy men and sexually ambivalent, fussy women, puts men into a difficult spot where they can feel resentful- wounded by all the rejection and frustration and the lack of interest from women to their advances.

There’s a whole - to coin a phrase ‘patriarchal mythology’ around this, where men can think of ‘sex’ (intercourse) as a reified ‘thing’ in itself, like food and water are ‘things’, almost like it could be put in a bucket, but clearly sexual intercourse, like other interactions, such as conversation or affection, cannot.

This mythology fosters phrases that simply don’t make any sense at all to women, which men use and which make sense to them, such as ‘women are the gatekeepers of sex’. Women are personified as this kind of goddess/witch/whore who will only ‘let the men by’ who will “solve my riddles three”.

From a woman’s perspective, she is only the gatekeeper of her own body, and she gets to decide how and with whom she connects sexually. She doesn’t see herself as a conduit through which a man gets to ‘access sex’ like sex is ‘The Mysterious Cities of Gold’ and she is rocky pass to get there.

In a sense much of Patriarchal oppressive traditions and ‘institutions’ are about circumventing this power of refusal women have over men’s advances - eg- child brides, prostitution, rape within marriage not being a crime, strip clubs, pornography.

For many men this refusal and rejection by women, depriving them from ‘accessing sex’ is just the worst thing ever, particularly since many boys are raised to think of women as being inferior to them - the insolence!

So although upthread there’s been some inconclusive discussion about ‘who is more kinky/fetish- prone - men or women?’ - a big difference between men and women isn’t only the strength and intensity of men’s drives compared to women, but also how much men use fetish as a way to defend themselves from rejection by women. If a man wanks into a stiletto, it will never say “no” to him, if a man wanks over his projected fantasy woman he sees when dressed in women’s clothes, it will never say “no” to him, and so on.

This resentment underpins a lot of cruel and contemptuous behaviour towards women by men. I see it in the way married transvestites want to rub their fetish in their wives noses, in the cruelty of pornography, in the ‘Andrew Tates’ of this world, it’s in all the non-consensual acts, the sex crimes.

I am sincerely curious - what's people's issue with AGP? I struggle to understand how a man getting off on dressing as a woman would present a threat or issue to anyone...?

Because those men don't see women as people. They see women as sex objects and they want to use them and be used as a sex object.

There are now entire porn sites of blokes in dresses jerking off in women's toilets and changing rooms often standing in front of the mirror with women in the background. They cum over the clothes you try on in the store and the cubicle you sit in.

They think of your face when they jerk off because you happened to be in the same loo as them because you saw them in their dress in the women's toilet. You are part of their fetish they need you to make it work.

Paraphilias often get worse over time in that they become more and more boundary breaking. A lot of serial killers have transvestite/agp tendencies

https://www.transwidowsvoices.org/our-voices

It's because it sees women fundamentally as submissive and constituted as a kind of sexualized costume, and it tends to be combined with a view of women as lesser, which is part of why it's arousing. A lot of the men that get into it are into being dominated.

That being said, it may be that there are men for whom that whole package isn't present even though it's somewhat of a thing, but I suspect they will keep more of a handle on the themselves and pull back at a certain point.

Those men, seeing this change, lie to themselves and other men like them, that these urges are somehow not sexual. That requires significant self deception, but they are being fed the lie that it’s normal and even socially acceptable. It puts temptation fully in their pathway.

Especially when we realize the men first encountering this stuff will be boys, young teens, and won't have the experience to put it in perspective, and also aren't cognitively as capable as a adult. They will tend to take it for granted, just like girls that age do, that what adults say about transitioning is correct, and they will interpret their feelings through that lens.

I think the main objection has arisen, @SpaghettisMum because these men are now invading women’s spaces, under the false claim that they now believe they are women.

Had they quietly kept their sex lives private and worn women’s underwear where it couldn’t be seen, or cross dressed in private or in clubs, they probably would have been allowed to get on with it on the grounds that non-harmful, consensual sexual proclivities didn’t really affect others. Their demand to cross dress publically is now closely attached to a demand to access women’s spaces and generally an expectation that other inappropriately sexualised public behaviour must be tolerated.

My understanding from the little academic literature I've read on this is that paraphilias are overwhelmingly experienced by men and this is posited to be due to men's relatively higher sex drive and the fact that their experience of sexual attraction is mainly visual. Plus their greater ability to screw and leave without forming emotional ties (can't remember what the technical term for this is).

this is why attempts have consistently been made throughout history to control male sexual behaviour through social taboos, rituals and institutions such as marriage.

In recent decades those controls have loosened and the so-called sex-positive movement has reduced some of the taboos around paraphilias so I now think men who have them feel they have been legitimised enough to talk about them and indulge in them rather than keep them secret and try to control them.

I have lived and still live in Central London for the past 18 years. I can't say that a man's desire to present female has ever in any way negatively impacted me or my experience as a woman and one would assume that in large cities, this would vome up more often than rural or suburban areas. How is this such a big topic?

Firstly, I don't believe that transwomen "falsely claim to believe they are women". I whole heartedly believe that's how they identify and I support them in that, mainly because it has zero impact on me and my life but I have compassion for those that have suffered from severe mental health issues and the syffering that may have come with feeling they were born in the wrong physical body.

Men who like to present as women for sexual gratification don't believe to be women, if my understanding is correct. Why would it bother anyone if a man walked down the road in women's clothes?

In a world in which reports about police officers abusing women occur almost monthly, sexual discrimination in the workplace is still ripe and hate speech against women is a growing problem amongst school aged boys, a transwoman or a man dressed in women's clothes using the bathroom stall next to mine really doesn't feel like an issue to me.

Its interesting that you have chosen a toilet stall for your hypothetical example, and not you being incarcerated in a prison cell, or psychiatric ward, or being strip searched, or being given an internal examination by a doctor.

Well said.