Are Men Werewolves?

A woman I follow on Twitter, Aella, recently posted some of her thoughts about men. Now, Aella isn’t exactly the girl next door. Here’s how she describes her journey on her blog:

I was homeschooled from birth to the end of “high school” by professionally evangelical fundamentalist Christians in Idaho. After leaving home, losing my faith, and failing to attend college, I turned to a series of shitty jobs involving windowless factories and waking up at 4am. I eventually escaped from that into the warm, wet embrace of porn, which I used to fund dives into far away realms, both physical and psychedelic. I did a documentary or two, spent a year somehow getting addicted to LSD, and became one of the top Onlyfans earners until my attention span ran out.

So Aella’s perspective on men is anything but universal, but I found it thought-provoking. I’ll just quote her in full, and get to my thoughts below:

Men are werewolves. As an escort, I'd have dinner with an intelligent, perceptive man - CEO or something - and I'd think, no way he's a werewolf. When we end up in bed, he'll remain himself, conscious, alert. But no; they transformed every time into an unrecognizable sex creature.

It was really startling for me. I thought I'd get some kind of continuity between the man and the wolf. I thought at least some men wouldn't have wolves at all. I've had sex with a lot of women, and they don't become wolves! But the men became different, felt different.

It was as if their soul left their body, like the perception and intelligence vanished, and they went from a competent suited Wall Street king to a sweaty, slightly pink body hungrily groping you, eyes half lidded, breathing heavy "baby you like that?" directly in your ear.

It's insane. And don't get me wrong - I did enjoy some werewolves - but all of them transform, and the transformations are more startling in men who have to present as a nonsexual to the public. The ones that act as though they've never thought of sex - those are radical shifts.

Being an escort has given me the werewolf eye - every politician, philanthropist, celebrity looking sane and in control, they're just a few short steps away from tit-induced mania. Inside all of them is a flushed man hammering away at a vagina like an autistic kid building legos.

Comedian masturbates in front of coworker? Philanthropist pursues aid? Politician cheats on wife? These aren't abnormal, they are par for the course; little, slightly-more-visible blips in the giant undercurrent of men's repressed sexuality, only newsworthy cause we're in denial.

Keep in mind, this is Twitter, not a carefully considered essay, so let’s forgive the overstatement and acknowledge that her sample pool (men who both can afford a high-end escort and choose to hire them) is extremely narrow. These are guys who have the ego and drive to pile up all that money and yet lack the social skills or basic humanity that might make women want to be intimate with them without swiping the Platinum Amex beforehand. So, don’t get defensive. Unless this describes you, she’s not talking about you.

Or is she?

Admittedly, there is something wolfish about male sexuality — even among the “good guys.” We keep it under control, but part of the allure of unbridled lust is the absence of the bridle. Hormones are not to be underestimated. We acknowledge that sadness, fragility and irrationality can be external expression of some women’s internal hormonal changes, but men (and boys) can also be intoxicated by their inner hormonal ebb and flow.

Griffin Hansbury, a Manhattan-based psychoanalyst, was born female but underwent a sex change after graduating from college. He remembers the inner disruptions wrought by testosterone. “The world just changes,” he said. “The most overwhelming feeling was the incredible increase in libido and change in the way I perceived women.” Before the hormone treatments, Hansbury said, an attractive woman in the street would provoke an internal narrative: “She’s attractive. I’d like to meet her.” But after the injections, there was no more narrative. Any attractive quality in a woman, “nice ankles or something,” was enough to “flood my mind with aggressive pornographic images, just one after another. . . . Everything I looked at, everything I touched turned to sex.” He concluded, “I felt like a monster a lot of the time. It made me understand men. It made me understand adolescent boys a lot.”

What really struck me in Aella’s description was her observation that “the transformations are more startling in men who have to present as a nonsexual to the public. The ones that act as though they've never thought of sex - those are radical shifts.”

The difference between wolves and werewolves is that wolves are what they are — no excuses or apologies. Werewolves, however, seem like one thing, then reveal themselves to be something else. The deception is what makes them monsters.

So what makes a guy go werewolf?

The tree that doesn’t bend, breaks. The pressure cooker that doesn’t have a release valve, explodes. The guy who has to pretend he’s 100% domesticated and tame will have no idea how to act when he hears the call of the wild.

The intelligent response to this is not to dial up the repression. That never works. Instead, we need to acknowledge our animality (all of us), and through acknowledgment, move toward a healthy relationship with our primal energies. We cannot begin to control that which we deny.