A woman I follow on Twitter, Aella, recently posted some of her thoughts about men. Now, Aella isn’t exactly the girl next door. She's an escort, blogger, and porn actress. So her perspective is particular, but interesting.
For me, the repression that brings about the "werewolf" isn't just sexual. It's much broader than that, so it's not just liberation of sexual or sensual expression that would allow more of us to feel more wolf and less werewolf. The more animal I get to be, the less Frankensteinian outbursts of nightmarish carnivore hunger—and not just for mindless, obsessive, even violent sex—come to the surface. At the same time, *the beast that wants to fuck* is not a nightmare at all, but a very real part of most men (and, sure, also, not just men).
The former is an exaggerated overcompensation; the latter is in our nature. My feeling is that a more whole man is less beast and also _more_ wolf—and yet of course we'd be fooling ourselves if we'd like to think that wolves are wanted around that often. We, collectively, have to figure out how to reconcile our inborn, and at-times dangerous wolf nature with a modern world that has not much place for wolves—or barely even for human animals.
This seems to me to be the core dilemma facing masculinity: how can men express ourselves more fully and yet also be less aggressive, less hungry, less toothy. We're still caught in the middle. We're just not there yet.
I wouldn’t call it Werewolf, I’d just call it bad sex.
Gay men to me seem fall into three camps - bad sex, good sex, and boring sex.
The men who “get off on getting someone off” are invariably fantastic sex.
One who looks like a steaming hot Satyr incarnate but collapses as though on a fainting couch - with erection - is boring, and the porn-god quality who are completely oblivious to the other, well that’s plain bad.
But Mr Magoo, but when they concentrate on you they’re a raging sex machine of dreams...
I spent a lot of my youth chasing sex so when I got some...I wanted it in TOTALITY. To what extreme I think depends on sex drive and the perspective of what the intimacy means.
I think this applies to both sexes. It’s fun to put on different intimacy masks depending on the mood. What is more important is being on the same wavelength.
Women become werewolves, too, in the proper context and in the right conditions. And like men they can also be brought through a sexual experience that swings them emotionally from werewolf to a crying child. This duality and need for emotional deliverance inside of a sexual experience goes far beyond our capacity to understand it with statistics, or reason, alone.
Wild abandon exists in all of us. We are novelty-seeking and ecstatic-experience seeking million-year old evolved beings. It's the inauthentic and incongruent way we live ignoring our primal nature that makes us ask these kinds of questions, and Aella's lens, while possibly seeming narrow, is in actuality, not. We are broadly a sexually repressed society, and in denial that sex, is actually church.
I kind of feel like all of our problems come from living in a world where we have way more than we need. Going without really makes you appreciate everything so much more. The best analogy I can think of with sex is food. At what point does being critical of a desired sexual partner or situation equate to being a picky child that has to have everything prepared a very particular way and won’t eat anything but one fucking type of food. It’s probably unhealthy to look at everything in extreme ways and there’s probably a balance to everything but why is sex different than anything else and why do most men suck at it.
Her study design is primed for fixed outcomes. The hunger for power and control doesn’t change in the bedroom, it is only freely expressed. Their transformation is really happening outside of the bedroom, in public. This is where they have to pretend to be what they are not, which is another form of control.
I think she may be on to something. I remember being an adolescent boy and all the feeling that came along with it, in fact, in many ways the feeling never left. Even though as Chris pointed out, the sample size is incredibly small, to counterbalance his observation I can't help but think of Chris Rock's old joke, "Men are only as faithful as their options." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ShI4DKBdyw
I'm glad Chris went the way he did with his analysis because as I was reading Aella’s tweet I was thinking to myself this is pretty spot on to me. Environment (in this case societal norms) drive behavior. I actually feel for women dating us heterosexual men. I can't imagine it being fun to experience an endless cycle of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hydes. Not to say that the whole experience is a nightmare but I'd imagine it's unsettling nonetheless. It's not the men's fault though. Societal norms result in this suppression of expression and the ensuing results.
"Women ... don't become wolves! But ... men (do)."
Man, she just >can't< be talking about ME.
"Or is she?"
Look, you can be a high-energy-walking-hormone teenager & still be a decent chap when you get into bed. If you aren't, your problems go beyond hormones.
The big-shot types who purchased her services didn't get where they were by being thoughtful, kind, considerate human beings. They got there by means of wolfish ruthlessness. They were already primed to devour her.
Finally, there's sheer anatomic reality. Males having sex are largely obliged to engage in pro-active penetrating 'aggression'. Otherwise things don't work out. So shoot us.
Yes, we — women included — all need to acknowledge our animality. And be kind to each other.
"The big-shot types who purchased her services didn't get where they were by being thoughtful, kind, considerate human beings. They got there by means of wolfish ruthlessness. They were already primed to devour her."
Exactly. I take a lot of issue with this woman's data pool. It seems these men would represent the worst of all of the qualities she mentions. In my experience there isn't as much of a disconnect between who men are in the public realm vs. the bedroom. Generally, men who are alive/embodied in their desires, act accordingly in bed, and those who aren't so embodied, well, not much changes once they take their clothes off.
Animality and desire are one thing, but "a flushed man hammering away at a vagina like an autistic kid building legos" is a whole other ballgame. Yikes.
Any man fortunate enough to have partnered up with a woman who celebrates the lupine (unlike Aella) understands perfectly how amazing it is to be able to share it. I don't think it is overstating it to compare the ego-dissolution in mind-blowing trysts with that of mind-expanding trips. It is undoubtedly easy to ridicule the external look of it, but the internal experience is anything but pedestrian.
For me, the repression that brings about the "werewolf" isn't just sexual. It's much broader than that, so it's not just liberation of sexual or sensual expression that would allow more of us to feel more wolf and less werewolf. The more animal I get to be, the less Frankensteinian outbursts of nightmarish carnivore hunger—and not just for mindless, obsessive, even violent sex—come to the surface. At the same time, *the beast that wants to fuck* is not a nightmare at all, but a very real part of most men (and, sure, also, not just men).
The former is an exaggerated overcompensation; the latter is in our nature. My feeling is that a more whole man is less beast and also _more_ wolf—and yet of course we'd be fooling ourselves if we'd like to think that wolves are wanted around that often. We, collectively, have to figure out how to reconcile our inborn, and at-times dangerous wolf nature with a modern world that has not much place for wolves—or barely even for human animals.
This seems to me to be the core dilemma facing masculinity: how can men express ourselves more fully and yet also be less aggressive, less hungry, less toothy. We're still caught in the middle. We're just not there yet.
I wouldn’t call it Werewolf, I’d just call it bad sex.
Gay men to me seem fall into three camps - bad sex, good sex, and boring sex.
The men who “get off on getting someone off” are invariably fantastic sex.
One who looks like a steaming hot Satyr incarnate but collapses as though on a fainting couch - with erection - is boring, and the porn-god quality who are completely oblivious to the other, well that’s plain bad.
But Mr Magoo, but when they concentrate on you they’re a raging sex machine of dreams...
I spent a lot of my youth chasing sex so when I got some...I wanted it in TOTALITY. To what extreme I think depends on sex drive and the perspective of what the intimacy means.
I think this applies to both sexes. It’s fun to put on different intimacy masks depending on the mood. What is more important is being on the same wavelength.
Women become werewolves, too, in the proper context and in the right conditions. And like men they can also be brought through a sexual experience that swings them emotionally from werewolf to a crying child. This duality and need for emotional deliverance inside of a sexual experience goes far beyond our capacity to understand it with statistics, or reason, alone.
Wild abandon exists in all of us. We are novelty-seeking and ecstatic-experience seeking million-year old evolved beings. It's the inauthentic and incongruent way we live ignoring our primal nature that makes us ask these kinds of questions, and Aella's lens, while possibly seeming narrow, is in actuality, not. We are broadly a sexually repressed society, and in denial that sex, is actually church.
I kind of feel like all of our problems come from living in a world where we have way more than we need. Going without really makes you appreciate everything so much more. The best analogy I can think of with sex is food. At what point does being critical of a desired sexual partner or situation equate to being a picky child that has to have everything prepared a very particular way and won’t eat anything but one fucking type of food. It’s probably unhealthy to look at everything in extreme ways and there’s probably a balance to everything but why is sex different than anything else and why do most men suck at it.
Obligatory:
https://youtu.be/IhnOpwOMHgk?si=iy3CIOUMTSrDgf7Z
If we're doing that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qae25976UgA
Her study design is primed for fixed outcomes. The hunger for power and control doesn’t change in the bedroom, it is only freely expressed. Their transformation is really happening outside of the bedroom, in public. This is where they have to pretend to be what they are not, which is another form of control.
I think she may be on to something. I remember being an adolescent boy and all the feeling that came along with it, in fact, in many ways the feeling never left. Even though as Chris pointed out, the sample size is incredibly small, to counterbalance his observation I can't help but think of Chris Rock's old joke, "Men are only as faithful as their options." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ShI4DKBdyw
I'm glad Chris went the way he did with his analysis because as I was reading Aella’s tweet I was thinking to myself this is pretty spot on to me. Environment (in this case societal norms) drive behavior. I actually feel for women dating us heterosexual men. I can't imagine it being fun to experience an endless cycle of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hydes. Not to say that the whole experience is a nightmare but I'd imagine it's unsettling nonetheless. It's not the men's fault though. Societal norms result in this suppression of expression and the ensuing results.
"Women ... don't become wolves! But ... men (do)."
Man, she just >can't< be talking about ME.
"Or is she?"
Look, you can be a high-energy-walking-hormone teenager & still be a decent chap when you get into bed. If you aren't, your problems go beyond hormones.
The big-shot types who purchased her services didn't get where they were by being thoughtful, kind, considerate human beings. They got there by means of wolfish ruthlessness. They were already primed to devour her.
Finally, there's sheer anatomic reality. Males having sex are largely obliged to engage in pro-active penetrating 'aggression'. Otherwise things don't work out. So shoot us.
Yes, we — women included — all need to acknowledge our animality. And be kind to each other.
"The big-shot types who purchased her services didn't get where they were by being thoughtful, kind, considerate human beings. They got there by means of wolfish ruthlessness. They were already primed to devour her."
Exactly. I take a lot of issue with this woman's data pool. It seems these men would represent the worst of all of the qualities she mentions. In my experience there isn't as much of a disconnect between who men are in the public realm vs. the bedroom. Generally, men who are alive/embodied in their desires, act accordingly in bed, and those who aren't so embodied, well, not much changes once they take their clothes off.
Animality and desire are one thing, but "a flushed man hammering away at a vagina like an autistic kid building legos" is a whole other ballgame. Yikes.
"flushed man hammering away at a vagina like an autistic kid building legos"
Hell of a pornhub video title.
“And be kind to each other...”.
I’ve always loved the way men turn into animals during sex. And I love being an animal myself. That’s the beauty of sex.
Any man fortunate enough to have partnered up with a woman who celebrates the lupine (unlike Aella) understands perfectly how amazing it is to be able to share it. I don't think it is overstating it to compare the ego-dissolution in mind-blowing trysts with that of mind-expanding trips. It is undoubtedly easy to ridicule the external look of it, but the internal experience is anything but pedestrian.