Male Sexual Desire Research Articles

Desire and the Literary Machine

An incredibly prolific and successful producer of juvenile fiction, Edward Stratemeyer was responsible for many of the most popular early-twentieth-century series books for boys. Examining editions from three of these series, this article argues that the ethics of capitalist production that were central to Stratemeyer's success can be seen in the plot, characterization, and material qualities of the series books themselves. Furthermore, the thematic focus on the values of hard work and ingenuity in these texts facilitates a redirection of male sexual desire away from a romantic love interest toward the more acceptable object of capitalist production. This censorship of male desire reflects a broader relocation of the topography of masculinity into the theater of capitalist production that was characteristic of early-twentieth-century American culture.

The Erotics of Domination: Male Desire and the Mistress in Latin Love Poetry

A groundbreaking examination of power relations in Roman elegyIn recent decades, scholars in the field of classics have paid increasing attention to gender and sexual politics in Latin elegiac poetry. In The Erotics of Domination, Ellen Greene re-examines long-held scholarly attitudes concerning the representation of male sexual desire and female subjection in the Latin love poetry of Catullus, Propertius, and Ovid. Analyzing first-person poetic personae that critics have often romanticized, Greene finds that whereas the Catullan lover appears to struggle against his own -feminization, - the Roman elegiac poets--particularly Propertius and Ovid--proclaim a radically unconventional philosophy in their seemingly deliberate inversion of conventional sex roles. Through the servitude of the male lover to his mistress, the woman achieves, at least nominally, complete domination and control over him.

Mapping the Terrain of Whiteness: Richard Wright's Savage Holiday

Richard Wright's Holiday, which focuses on how the white male protagonist Erskine Fowler deals with his guilt, has been ignored by critics until recently. Yoshinobu Hakutani maintains the reason why Holiday has not received popularity among the critics is Wright's exclusive treatment of white characters and his concern with nonracial matters (15). J.F. Gounard and Beverley Roberts Gounard claim that Savage Holiday is Richard Wright's only nonracial (344), and they read the novel from Freudian perspective in relationship to the Oedipal conflict between Fowler and his mother. John Vassilowitch also focuses on the paradoxical connection between male sexual desire ... and female degradation ... [that] has its counterpart in Erskine's Oedipal fantasies about (207). John M. Reilly analyzes the novel as thriller and feels that it omits racial conflict because its narrative scope is ... restricted to the singular pattern of one man's Oedipal complex (218). What all these critics have in common is psychoanalytic exploration of Fowler's Oedipal conflict with his mother which draws him to the point of murdering Mabel. Michel Fabre is the only critic who gives an extensive study of the novel and of Fowler's profile as a psychopathic murderer (376). The plot of the novel is simple. The 43-year-old Erskine Fowler is forced into early retirement from his job as insurance agent after 30 years of long service. As he picks up his Sunday paper, he is locked out of his apartment, fully naked, when the door slams shut. In panic to avoid being seen by anyone, he decides to climb through his bathroom window just above the balcony on which his neighbor Mabel Blake's son Tony is playing. Seeing Fowler nude, Tony is shocked and falls from the balcony ten floors down to his death. Believing that Mabel may be aware he is indirectly responsible for Tony's death, Fowler becomes involved with Mabel, although she is just whore in his eyes. Failing to deal with his own fear and guilt, he tries to make Mabel, widow, feel guilty for being mother, for Tony got terribly scared whenever he saw his mother have sex with men, associating the sexual relationship with in his mind. The naked body of Fowler apparently represented the war of which he has been deadly afraid. In order to buy Mabel's silence, Fowler makes proposal to her, but Mabel is too clever for that. When she eventually discovers what Fowler had been up to, he kills her and turns himself in to the police. Before he confesses his murder to the police, he remembers his childhood memory of beating the doll's head with brick because it is bad woman--a replica of his mother, who was prostitute. We realize that Fowler's revengeful act of crushing the doll and drawing the doll with his colored pencils to represent his mother's promiscuity is the reason why Mabel replaces his mother in his mind. All along he has failed to resolve the Oedipal conflict with his mother, who has deprived him of maternal affection, twisting his drive to love at an early age. He resolves the Oedipal conflict in killing in Mabel the mother that he has repudiated. In an interview with Raymond Barthes on Holiday, Wright himself states: `Having left America and having been living for some time in France, have become concerned about the historical roots and the emotional problems of western whites which make them aggressive toward colored peoples.... was looking for explanations of the psychological reactions of whites.... In this novel, have attempted to deal with what consider as the most important problem white people have to face: their moral dilemma' (167). Later, in an interview with Georges Charbonnier, Wright delves into the depth of the problem: I picked white American businessman to attempt demonstration about universal problem ... the problem of freedom (236). Given the overview of the limited body of critical works on the novel, we need to remember Wright's intention in writing it. …

Plasma MHPG response to yohimbine treatment in women with hypoactive sexual

The use of yohimbine to treat impotence has suggested that decreased male sexual desire may relate to decreased activity of central noradrenergic neurons. Previous trials of yohimbine to treat female sexual problems are not available. Yohimbine is an cvTadrenergic antagonist that stimulates norepinephrine (NE) release. In the present study, plasma concentrations of 3-methoxy-4-hydroxyphenylglycol (MPG), the major central nervous system metabolite of NE, were measured in 9 women diagnosed with hypoactive sexual desire. Daily logs of mod and sexual activity, and trimonthly MHPG blood drawings, were obtained over an initial baseline menstrual cycle followed by two subsequent treatment cycles (yohimbine or placebo), in randomized order. Blood samples were obtained at 9:OO a.m. during (a) the early follicular phase of each cycle (24 hr after the onset of each cycle), (b) the ovulatory phase (i.e., within I day of an oral temperature rise), and (c) the midluteal phase (ie., 20–25 days into each cycle). Comparisons were made with a group of 7 healthy female controls. Women with hypoactive sexual desire had slightly lower plasma MHPG values than controls at baseline, although there was only a trend toward signijicance during the early follicular phase (p = .09). Yohimbine (5.4 mg orally, 3 times daily, beginning at menses) caused a sustained rise in plasma MHPG of similar magnitude to that reported in men. However, in terms of improved sexual desire, yohimbine had no obvious therapeutic effect. Thus, plasma MHPG and the cr2-adrenergic response to yohimbine appeared within normal ranges in women with hypoactive sexual desire, with no therapeutic response to yohimbine.

In accordance with nature: What Japanese women mean by being in control

The persisting ban on oral contraceptives in Japan more than 30 years after their approval abroad is often used as evidence that Japanese women are unliberated victims of male domination. In fact, many Japanese feminists oppose oral contraceptives, and many women worry about taking these chemicals into their bodies. This paper investigates Japanese women's apprehension regarding contraceptive pills. In 1995, the author interviewed 31 patients in obstetric‐gynaecology departments in Tokyo. Their narratives contain four ideas that are important in understanding their contraceptive preferences: ‘inside’, ‘the path of blood’, ‘natural rhythm’, and the relationship between self and body. Analyses of these themes indicate that Japanese women do not share the usual American preconceptions regarding oral contraceptives: they do not take it for granted that male sexual desire is uncontrollable, neither do they think of their bodies as the objects for control. Japanese women value men's willingness to use condoms although their failure rate is higher than oral contraceptives. The ability to control the relationship and not the female body is key.

The Lavender Brick Road: Paul Bonin-Rodriguez and the Sissy Bo(d)y

The Lavender Brick Road: Paul Bonin-Rodriguez and the Sissy Bo(d)y Bradley Boney (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Paul Bonin-Rodriguez in Talk of the Town. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 2. Paul Bonin-Rodriguez in Talk of the Town. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 3. Paul Bonin-Rodriguez in Talk of the Town. I Yes it’s sad, believe me, missy When you’re born to be a sissy. —Cowardly Lion, The Wizard of Oz When I was in high school, it amazed me that the football players knew I was gay before I did. As I passed them in the hallway, especially in groups and especially on autumn Fridays when they wore their football jerseys to school, one of them would inevitably utter “faggot” under his breath at the precise moment that I cleared their peripheral vision. I soon learned to plan my routes from class to class in order to avoid the most consistent perpetrators. I came to school early and left late, and most important, I told no one. Years later, I discovered that many of the young men who were active with me in theatre (all of whom are now openly gay or dead) were subjected to the same abuse, yet at the time our isolation was all that protected us from our shame. How did the straight-identified football players know I was gay before I’d even had sex with a man? This question tormented me throughout high school, for I resisted with all my might the obvious answer: I was a sissy. The abusive treatment of proto-queer teenagers in American high schools remains one of the great open secrets of our culture. The sissy body functions as the recognizable signifier of potential male homosexuality, and as such has been positioned as the alien—subversive, disruptive, nonconformist—whose expulsion by any means teenagers and adults alike have widely sanctioned. This is by no means a recent development. Effeminacy has been intertwined with the history of modern male homosexuality since it emerged in the late nineteenth century. In his book Talk on the Wilde Side, Ed Cohen unpacks how “aesthetic” effeminacy first became the marker for homosexuals during the trials of Oscar Wilde: [End Page 35] [Wilde] was often caricatured in contemporary journals as a languorous, long-haired lover of sunflowers or as an “utterly” aestheticized utterer of epigrams, so that the representation of his large, lounging frame became an iconic disparagement of what was deemed to be male “effeminacy.” It is important to note here that the “effeminacy” popularly attributed to the “aesthetic” or “decadent” movement had not yet produced an immediate corollary association with sexual relations between men. In fact, . . . this effeminacy was often seen to align the “aesthetic” male with the domestic realm of the female, making him a more sought after object of female desire, if only because of a perceived commonalty of interests. The supplementing of “aesthetic” effeminacy with connotations of male sexual desire for other men is, I would argue, one of the consequences of the newspaper representations of the Wilde trials. 1 Although the liberal and mostly assimilationist politics that dominated the post-Stonewall 1970s gay movement attempted to unbind homosexuality from effeminacy (in an attempt to align gay men with “normal” masculinity, and, by extension, “normal” sexuality), real or perceived effeminacy has been shown to be the most common factor in the histories of adult gay men (which I address in greater detail in section II). Despite this fact and the development of a radical queer politics in the late 1980s, an affirmative sissy-boy criticism, which would be uniquely positioned to challenge the category of the “normal,” has been largely absent from queer/gay studies. Correspondingly, the sissy, and his more mature incarnation, the effeminate man or “dandy,” served as the theatrical signifier for homosexuality in English-language plays throughout most of the twentieth century. In his study Acting Gay: Male Homosexuality in Modern Drama, John M. Clum painstakingly documents the conflation of homosexuality and effeminacy in theatrical representation from Mordaunt Shairp’s The Green Bay Tree (1933), through Mart Crowley...

Gender differences in beliefs about the causes of male and female sexual desire

AbstractLittle is known about the beliefs men and women have about the causes of sexual desire, despite the interpersonal and individual significance of those beliefs. Participants in this study received a definition of sexual desire and answered a set of free‐response questions exploring their beliefs about the causal antecedents of male and female sexual desire. The results indicated that more women than men view female (and male) sexual desire as caused by external factors. In addition, both men and women believe that male and female sexual desire have different causes: intraindividual and erotic environmental factors are believed to cause male sexual desire, but interpersonal and romantic environmental factors are believed to cause female sexual desire. Although both men and women view physical attractiveness and overall personality as sexually desirable male and female characteristics, women, but not men, view femininity as a sexually desirable female characteristic, and men, but not women, view social and financial power or status as a sexually desirable male attribute.

Possession: Erotic Love in the Law of Rape

The sexual being still implicit in the law of rape has a rich history. Depictions of the strong, possessing male, mainly of a laudatory kind, are to be found in the Romantic and philosophical literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth century. In legal writing, he can be traced back at least until the time of Hale who specifically approved of sexual relations between strong men and capitulating women. The aim of this article is to show how and why this ideal of the male sexual subject has been retained within English and Australian rape law, notwithstanding legislative efforts to establish equality between the sexes. The argument is that a traditional possessive heterosexual form of 'erotic love' still forms the basis of English law, in which rape remains a crime of a man against a woman. Perhaps more surprisingly, however, a traditional view of sexuality still pervades the law of those Australian jurisdictions which have abandoned the English model and instituted ostensibly dramatic changes to the meaning of rape. In many parts of Australia, rape or its equivalent is now a crime which can be committed by and against either sex in a wide variety of ways. And yet we find that little has changed in substance. Though the crime has been sexually democratised on the statute books, faith has been kept with a simple, reductive and orthodox view of sexual relations between the sexes. This article begins with an exposition of this conventional sexuality, drawing in particular on the writings of Nietzsche who was eloquent on the subject. It then considers how this Romantic ideal of the sexes was reflected in the English common law, especially in the law of rape. The article goes on to examine recent developments in English and Australian rape law which represent an effort to modernise heterosexual relations and explains why they have failed. Finally, there is an endeavour to conceive of ways in which the law might begin to recognise a different female sexuality, one which is not simply an extrapolation to women of male sexual desires.

Men with Hypoactive Sexual Desire Disorder: The Role of Interpersonal Dependency and Assertiveness

The purpose of this study was to examine the role of sexual assertiveness and interpersonal dependency in male sexual desire using the Hurlbert Index of Sexual Desire (HISD), the Interpersonal Dependency Inventory (IDI), and the Hurlbert Index of Sexual Assertiveness (HISA). The primary subjects for this study were 21 married men, who met the DSM-III-R diagnostic criteria for hypoactive sexual desire disorder. The findings indicated that men whose level of sexual assertiveness was higher than their female partners' reported the lowest levels of sexual desire. Also, the lowest levels of sexual desire were found in those men who reported the greatest emotional reliance on others. Implications for these findings, limitations, and treatment issues are discussed.

Treatment effectiveness for dysfunctions of sexual desire.

Archival data from the Sex Therapy Center at Stony Brook were analyzed to determine the prevalence of desire phase sexual dysfunctions and the effectiveness of treating them with behavioral sex therapy. When cases were rediagnosed with a multi-axial problem-oriented system, increases from 1974-1981 in both the prevalence of desire phase problems and of male low sexual desire were observed. Data suggested that wives display more extreme patterns of sexual avoidance than do husbands in couples seeking sex therapy. Outcome statistics on marital adjustment, overall sexual satisfaction, the frequency of intercourse and masturbation, and patterns of initiation of sexual activity reveal significant positive changes after treatment. These changes are not due to nonspecific factors and are maintained at follow-up. Sex therapy was equally successful for male-centered vs. female-centered problems, for low sexual desire vs. aversion to sex, and for global or lifelong dysfunctions vs. the more recent or situational ones. Posttreatment gains reflect a minimally adequate sexual relationship, however, rather than an optimal degree of intimacy and pleasure.

Sex education for parents.

MRS. JOHNSON, a woman in her early twenties, is having her fourth unplanned baby. Her husband works long hours but brings home little money because of his low wages. The couple's sex life has become strained because of fear of pregnancies and inadequate knowledge about birth control. The above situation is all too typical. As a public health nurse, I became acquainted with many people having difficulty dealing with their sexuality. My first exposure was with over-fertility and unwed mothers. With further experience, I found more and more women were telling me about their marital problems. I suspect that it is most logical for the woman to be the least sexually satisfied of a married couple because the male is more easily and quickly stimulated and satisfied. Also, the female's desire for sexual intercourse tends to increase until the late twenties and is maintained until about age sixty. The male's sexual desires tend to decrease slightly after reaching a peak during the teenage years. It seems reasonable that an individual would expect others to respond sexually much the same as he does. Unless a man was informed otherwise, he would be inclined to believe that a female could be easily sexually aroused and satisfied. It may be especially difficult for a male to seek marital counseling for sex information because of the cultural assumption that he should already be knowledgeable in these matters. Many people seem to have little comprehension of what marriage involves when they sign the contract. High rates of divorce, illegitimacy, illegal abortions, venereal disease, and much mental illness may be indications of difficulties dealing with sexuality.

Escaped from the Harem, Trapped in the Orient: An analysis of the multiple gazes in Nadine Labaki’s movie Where Do We Go Now?

Throughout history, the majority of artists have been men, and quite often the women in their works have been featured as passive objects of male sexual desire. This sort of one-sided dynamic is ubiquitous; it can be detected in the vast majority of Western nude paintings, and even modern advertisements tend to conform to the same pattern (Berger, 1977). As a consequence, feminist discourse of the representation of women in visual culture has focused on the concept of male gaze. However, the proliferation of images in modern times has given rise to a “broad array of gazes and implied viewers” (Sturken, 2005, p. 87). Women are no longer simply objectified, nor is the business of directing the gaze relegated to solely a male domain.