Themes in Male Sexuality

Abstract

Undoubtedly persons hoping to learn something about male sexuality in the United States get a distorted picture from films such as 48 Hours. Nick Nolte and Eddie Murphy, portraying a policeman and a convict respectively, successfully present a “wham, bam, thank you ma’am,” inborn-sexual-impulse perspective of heterosexual male sexuality—a perspective that is insulting to many men and women in American society. Unfortunately this does not mean that many men in American do not hold sexual attitudes and exhibit sexual behaviors of the kind presented in 48 Hours. Indeed, to0 many American men do display these kinds of sexual attitudes and behaviors, despite the fact that sexuality is a much more complex issue. In addition, the position taken here is that the source of such attitudes and behaviors lies in socio-cultural conditions rather than in innate tendencies. A basic assumption underlying this chapter, then, is that male sexual behavior is largely acquired through experience and socialization (Gross, 1978). This perspective contends that male sexuality is more than the sexual act and involves more than the biological component of sexual response. Male sexuality consists of affective, cognitive, behavioral, and physiological components which interact, become defined, and are experienced by men as sexual events.KeywordsSexual PartnerMale SexualitySexual GratificationSexual AttitudeSexual ScriptThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.