It isn't often that you can say that what a debate really needs is greater representation of the heterosexual, cisgendered, male perspective. So I was sort of surprised last night when I heard this on BBC Radio 4. Novelist and broadcaster Sarah Dunant gave a short talk making exactly that argument. Empirically speaking, there's something in it. A search of the Guardian's (a politically and culturally liberal newspaper, likely to have more commentary on sex than most of its competitors) Comment is Free section found 64 articles related to "sex" within the last 30 days. While a few of the returned articles were written by men, this was more due to the Guardian's poor search function than anything else: most related to gay marriage or the Julian Assange trial. Articles about sex and gender, with the exception of one piece on male circumcision, were written exclusively by women. A look at Wikipedia's list of notable sex columnists reveals a few male names, not least Dan Savage, but it's still very female-dominated. The Sex and Relationships section of Alternet: female-dominated. And in the kink blogosphere, women once again rule the roost. While male sex bloggers do exist, they tend to either come from a feminist perspective, to be hopelessly self-flagellating, or both.
On the surface, this appears strange. We ostensibly live in a culture in which male sexuality is celebrated and female sexuality shamed, the stud/slut dichotomy. But while pseudonyms are common online (Clarisse Thorn, Bitchy Jones, Belle de Jour before she went public), there are plenty of women writing about sex under their own names. And while the popularity of the #mencallmethings hashtag indicates that this isn't entirely without hazard, "shaming" doesn't seem to have stopped them. Obviously these represent a fairly narrow subset of women: educated, middle-class, etc. But while this might resolve the apparently conflict between the "shaming" theory and the fact that women do in fact write candidly about their own sex lives and sexuality in general, it doesn't answer the question of why men of similar backgrounds don't get in on the act.
In fact, the reason is fairly simple. Men and straight male sexuality are presented as predatory, as shirking responsibility, as sexually unsatisfying to the point at which women should all become lesbians, as patronisingly paternalistic, as dangerous, as a justifiable barrier to political office. Even the radio piece that inspired this article is hardly complimentary: despite the subject of how men have been excluded from the sex debates, it still reads as a laundry list of male crimes against women. The only men mentioned in the piece, in fact, are George Galloway, Ken Clarke, Todd Akin, and a naked Californian doctor, all included as either sexual abusers or apologists for sexual abuse.
It's time for something different, a viewpoint that doesn't treat men and male sexuality as pathological. That isn't to say that this blog will focus relentlessly on those issues, more that it will be part of the underlying ethos. Honestly, it'll probably be a fairly light, irregularly updated look at BDSM, sex, and anything cultural or social that I care about enough to write about. It's more about filling a gap in the market, about writing something that wouldn't make someone like me feel browbeaten. But I think that's a worthy enough goal.
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