CHAPTER FOUR

THE MALE LIBIDO

I think about sex, therefore I am.

Ralph Messenger, in Thinks…, DAVID LODGE

WHEN WE THINK ABOUT SEXUAL SELECTION, SEXUAL ENTITLEMENT, and sexual choices, why are we so vulnerable to preconceptions about differences between men’s and women’s sexualities? A lot of these notions are rooted in the gender binary that has been coming under fire in recent years. Despite the “rediscovery” of female sexual pleasure in the 1960s and 1970s—truly one of the great social accomplishments of the late twentieth century—there are few areas of human activity that are more bifurcated in our thinking than sexuality. Our double vision on male-versus-female sexuality will remain in place as long as we resist a similar reassessment of male libido. Otherwise we are faced with enduring myths about men and sex, hallowed scientific certainties about maleness and masculinity, and, in the continued facile glorification of male sexuality, what amounts to a social bias that prevents serious reconsideration of masculinities.

IVY LEAGUE SEXUAL SELECTION

A good place to start looking at the overexamined but under-understood topic of men and sex is Brown University, where I teach. And, sorry, but don’t get your hopes up of salacious tales of the now-defunct annual “Sex Power God” LGBTQ-sponsored party at Brown that made headlines for its reputedly rampant nudity and sex.

There is a biology course at Brown that has featured a set of slides for a particular lecture. Over the years, students have sent me copies of these slides. Made to support a lecture on sexual selection, it has included slides of rams butting horns, peacocks strutting for peahens, and insects, reptiles, and birds all with the same pattern: the males fighting each other, with the fittest males getting first dibs on sex with females. Meanwhile, coy and fussy as always, the females selected only those males they deemed to be the fittest fathers for their future offspring. Take home message: when it came to sex, males of all species were pretty much the same.

The lesson was not so different from that of the nature shows many of the students grew up on. But then came the punchline, delivered in the form of more slides, including one of football players (male, of course, in uniform on the field) and cheerleaders (all female, of course, in uniform, on the sidelines), with text on the left side of the slide that read:

Males should be competitive

Fight for additional mates

Females should be “choosy”

Allocate their expensive resources efficiently

You see, students, we’re all remarkably similar when it comes to sexual selection and the process through which males and females of every species, including the human, hook up with one another. Males display for the females, females select males. These slides were aimed precisely at an audience working overtime to figure out their own sexualities, and the implication was that males were a horde of self-fluffers, seeking to procreate indiscriminately, and females were picky about sexual partners.

Leaving aside for now the suspect contention of evolutionary biologists that it is entirely reasonable to compare the mating habits of pipefish, beetles, rhinoceroses, and humans, what are we to make of sexual selection, the twin key concept to Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection? Sexual selection is the concept that tries to explain the significance of everything from sexual dimorphism (differences in average body size for males and females) to parental investment in offspring and female fussiness, also known as “the limiting factor.” It is easy to grow inured to thinking about humans in terms of two genders. Yet far from something static, as neuroscientist Lise Eliot insists, “gender differences are a moving target.”¹

The biological binaries are now routine: females are limited by the number of eggs they produce, whereas males produce more sperm than they can handle. Males are larger in size, which for witless wombats just as much as Mar-a-Lago plutocrats is held to correlate with males contesting over females: only the natural “weaponry” of the males differs, whether that be claws or forked tongues. In the Brown biology class lecture, photos of male and female caribou, flies, newts, sticklebacks, and frigatebirds were used to illustrate the pugnacious and the coquettish—you don’t need to take the class to guess which is male and which female. Yet by far the most startling and disheartening of the images—shown in the middle of all these other animal shots, and accompanied by the professor’s biological explanations for commonalities across the animal, marine, and insect kingdoms—were the ones highlighting football players and cheerleaders. In what amounted to a test of quasi-religious faith, the students were in a sense implored to rise up in a spiritual reckoning to accept the truth: sex distinguishes, sex unites, and sex manipulates all creatures large and small.²

You can practically hear the males of all species shouting: “Yes to sex with her. Yes with her. Yes with her. Yes with her. Well, only maybe with her. Yes with her. Yes with her. Well, OBVIOUSLY, yes with her!”

Meanwhile, the finicky females are responding: “No to sex with him. No with him. No with him. No with him. Well, maybe with him. No with him. No with him. Well, FINALLY, yes with him!”

Not surprisingly, these views of male and female sexuality mapped perfectly onto existing stereotypes in the United States about such matters. But what would be made of the belief reported in Andalusia, Spain, that women are seductresses whose sexual appetites are more insatiable and lustful than men’s, or that women in Morocco are considered more sexually rapacious than men, or that the Dani of Indonesia have historically practiced a four-to-six-year postpartum sexual abstinence for men and women?³

The science of maleness can reinforce prejudices and give way to acquiescent resignation that some things sexual are too ingrained to change. That conclusion is as bad for young men as for young women, because it lends credence to male sexual aggression, enshrines female fastidiousness, and with that reinforces patriarchal ideas about sexuality, specifically consent.

WATCHING PORN IN THE MALE BRAIN

Having a little knowledge may be a dangerous thing. But having and disseminating a lot of erroneous knowledge about men and sex can be far more dangerous. And intentions be damned: the road to hell is paved with the faulty findings of expert wisdom on men’s sexuality. This is a story about pornography, or, more precisely, men watching porn. It was sparked, improbably enough, during a job interview.

For reasons that will become clear, keep in mind that the year was 1996. After my job talk earlier in the day, I made sure to arrive early for the all-important job dinner. The chair of the search committee was already at the restaurant, sitting at the bar. I sat down next to him. The department was known for its strengths in the field of psychological anthropology, and I was now sitting with the grand poohbah himself. He was a fierce advocate for the science of cognition and behavior, including gender, sex, and sexuality. That men and women in many, if not all, matters represented polar opposites in cognition and behavior was for him a given. His favorite intellectual sparring partners were the cultural relativists, who challenged his views as crude generalizations.

Over drinks, as we waited for the others in the party to arrive, he steered the discussion toward gender. He introduced a line of reasoning about what is naturally gendered, and therefore unresponsive to cultural influence, and which gender differences are more varied across cultures, and therefore potentially responsive to cultural change. He offered what he considered to be a gold-standard example of biological differences that divided all men from all women: visual cues. Men were visual thinkers, hardwired in such a way to be visually stimulated more than women, for instance, when it came to pornography. Didn’t I agree that the overwhelming number of viewers of porn were men? In 1996, I had to admit it seemed that way. Well, then, how else could I explain this except through something built into men’s physical selves? That was my challenge, and I didn’t, and perhaps couldn’t, meet it well that day.

I did counter that I didn’t think this was true. My proof? Frankly, I was weak on the evidentiary side of the conversation. I insisted that women and men were not so different when it came to sexual stimulation and visual prompts. Where were the studies to back up what I was claiming when it came to visual stimulation? He had plenty. I didn’t have any. I had a gut feeling I was correct, though of course I could not respond with such a claim.⁴

Around this time, in the mid-1990s, the Internet was taking off and porn with it. All you needed was a credit card to sample an all-you-can-watch buffet of videos from the privacy of your home. Little did the committee chair or I realize that within a few short years, porn viewership by women as well as men would grow to a multibillion-dollar industry. It was not a good move to contradict the head of the search committee, I will grant you, and I was not an expert in the realm of cognitive studies of visual or any other cues. But as it turned out, I was right.

We need to be especially wary of studies that confirm social stereotypes about gender. As we have seen, the science of masculinity is shot through with bias, and it can seep into even the most specialized, objective-sounding pronouncements and cloud our understanding about men and maleness. The more specialized the scientific knowledge in question, the harder it becomes to question it. It’s easy to weigh in on topics like visual stimulation. Brain circuitry can seem beyond comprehension for most of us. But based on the precedents, there is good reason to not always believe everything you’re told by experts.

When we compare brains in boys and girls, we find two notable differences: boys’ brains are, on average, slightly (8–10 percent) larger than girls’ brains, and girls’ brains tend to finish growing a year or two before boys’ brains. That’s it. Yet the reality that male and female brains start off essentially the same has somehow escaped the attention of the media and broader public. It can be more appealing to emphasize differences between the sexes, and to trace differences back not just puckishly to gender planets of origin, but to material, unvarying, and unalterable features of biology, such as brain types. But talk of gendered brain types, my third example of biased examples about absolute male-female gender differences, is driven by ideology. It is not good science.⁵

The biological anthropologist Richard Bribiescas believes that boys and girls behave differently because of cultural and social influences, but that biological sex-based distinctions do exist. He writes, “It would be naive to assume that millions of years of mammalian evolution involving differential selection pressures on males and females would result in a single brain type that is not selected to deal with sex-specific challenges.”⁶

Beyond the conflation of sex and gender here, even if we grant that it makes no sense that millions of years of mammalian evolution gives us a single brain type, we do not necessarily arrive at the thesis that therefore we have two brain types and only two, and that these two coincide with two types of sex organs, and not by accident. This idea can appeal to commonsense experience about differences between men and women. But those differences have to hold for all times and all places, and they simply don’t. Historical and cultural variation make an entire mess of such neat, biological distinctions.

“We love this stuff,” writes Lise Eliot. “It’s fun to be different. It makes romance more exciting and provides endless fodder for late-night comedians. But there’s enormous danger in this exaggeration of sex differences, first and foremost in the expectations it creates among parents, teachers, and children themselves.” She goes on to alert us that when we dwell on differences perceived to be natural, differences that are not in fact rooted in brain biology, we can raise our children with reinforced if specious stereotypes about boys and girls.⁷

There are several problems with dividing brains into male and female ones. First, even defining male and female biologically has proved more difficult than this framework would allow. Chromosomes don’t always paint a clear picture. Or hormone levels—within a wide range of normal levels, androgens and estrogens are not predictive of any particular behavior in men or women. Or sex organs—more people have part-male, part-female genitals than is often acknowledged. More importantly, we can easily exaggerate the differences that do exist. Even if most people have largely similar one-or-the-other apparatuses, appearances can be deceiving, as Anne Fausto-Sterling showed in a series of biological studies on intersexed people. Fausto-Sterling listed several types of intersexuality beyond ambiguous genitalia, including Turner syndrome (where females lack a second X chromosome), Klinefelter syndrome (where males have an extra X chromosome), androgen insensitivity syndrome (a genetically inherited change in the cell’s surface receptor for testosterone), and more. Most of all, Fausto-Sterling advises against pinning sex and sexuality and everything that goes with them on the form of someone’s genitals.⁸

If that’s true of gonads, why should it be otherwise with brains?

Some of those who posit an underlying premise linking brains and genitals trace the reasons back hundreds of thousands of years to human evolution and the emergence of a standard and universal division of labor between males and females. Men went hunting game, while women raised the babies and gathered nuts and berries. Over time, the males who were more aggressive and self-sufficient were more successful hunters than the less aggressive, less self-sufficient males, and therefore these traits among men were selected for through evolutionary pressures. Tasked with raising the young, the evolutionary pressure on females over time was to select for more nurturant qualities.

If such qualities were so mutually exclusive and restricted to either men or women, this argument might even make sense. But what happened to women who lost male mates? Did they automatically have to look for other males? Or could they themselves take up hunting? The answers are so obvious it pains me to have to report that some women who lost mates found other ones, some did not, some did fine, some did not, and success did not in itself depend on finding a mate. What is more, there is ample evidence in the archaeological record that until about 15,000 years ago hunting was a far more communal, male and female activity than was true later as animals became more scarce.

Contemporary arguments about men and women positing limits for women in math, leadership, and combat—and disparaging men for their lack of ability in child-rearing and emotional expression, as well as for their propensity to be risk-takers—often assume these qualities are built in, and based in evolution. Ultimately, they are grounded in beliefs about men’s and women’s brains being significantly dissimilar because of their distinctive privates. But even if we grant that there are two major types of brains, why this bifurcation exists, and why it would reflect male-female divisions of labor, and not, say, height, weight, or 20/20 vision—all factors that could conceivably impinge on how one operates in the world—may reveal more about presuppositions than it does about scientific fact and evolution. It has to do with preconceived notions of male and female characteristics.

Neuroscientist Daphna Joel agrees, maintaining that although sex differences in brain structure are well documented, in terms of both size and composition, thinking of brains as party to human sexual dimorphism is incorrect. Instead of thinking of brains as taking only one of two forms, male or female, we would do better to think of brains as intersexed, a “heterogeneous mosaic” that “can take different forms that are not aligned on a continuum between a ‘male brain’ and a ‘female brain.’”⁹

Differences in brain types by sex begin in utero: for boys-in-the-making, there is a surge in testosterone six weeks after conception and up to the end of the second trimester of pregnancy. But we should not take this information and draw flawed assumptions from it that imply a one-directional causal connection between biology and behavior later on, and, more specifically, a binary biology that provides a template restricting all human activity. What this perspective leaves out is the possibility of behavior changing brains, of environment seriously affecting biology, and of the brain as being more malleable than recalcitrant. This point about malleability is especially relevant for understanding perhaps the most important insight of recent neuroscience: whatever differences in brain chemistry and circuitry have been found between men and women, they were found, indeed, between men and women, that is, adult humans. Among children these differences are far less apparent, meaning that decades of cultural and social interactions along the gender binary can literally remodel brains along more sex-based lines.

If we simply step back and examine just the historical record from Europe, the myopia of the present moment becomes clearer. And not just Europe, but ancient Europe. What seems timeless and universal today in an ahistorical, prelapsarian cosmology about sex, brains, men, and women has changed in remarkable ways throughout history. If we traveled back millennia to the age of Jupiter, the Roman King of the Gods, we would certainly learn what everyone then knew to be the case: like it or not, women’s libido and sexual pleasure was greater than men’s. That’s just the way it was. Time-traveling forward until we reached the early modern era, in about 1600, we would learn for a fact that despite superficial appearances, women and men had identical genitalia; the sole difference was that men’s were outies and women’s were innies. Coming forward still further, to about two hundred years ago, we could witness the invention by doctors of the science of two sexes, and the subsequent deposing of us all from a happier sexual perch of shared enjoyment to a time when, in the words of Berkeley historian Thomas Laqueur, “female orgasm… was banished to the borderlands of physiology.”¹⁰

Neuroscience provides ample evidence of the brain’s malleable capacity, of greater brain differences between men and between women than between men and women, and of the astounding sex brain differences that emerge not from conception but only after childhood. Despite parents’ beliefs about their sons and daughters being from different planets, “overall, boys’ and girls’ brains are remarkably alike,” writes Lise Eliot. But because “your brain is what you do with it,” learning and practice rewire it. Which is why she concludes that “it would be shocking if the two sexes’ brains didn’t work differently by the time they were adults.”¹¹

In one classic study, Janet Hyde found in 2015 that of 124 psychological traits, including attributes long held to be sacrosanct exemplars of gender differences—mathematics performance, verbal ability, aggressive behavior, and moral reasoning—78 percent of the differences were small or close to zero. Hyde concludes, “It is time to consider the costs of overinflated claims of gender difference.” It is our ideas about sex and gendered brains that can be truly limiting. The newer biological fields of epigenetics and gene transfer point the way to far more fundamental interactionism between genes and environment than we have previously acknowledged, as we will see in Chapter 9, but even they cannot by themselves unseat or erase prejudices about men and women and sexuality.¹²

MEN ARE ANIMAL SEX

The anthropologist Lourdes Arizpe has declared that “the spread of contraception has ruptured the previously existing physiological fatalism.” That goes for her native Mexico and every other country on earth. Until the early 1970s, Mexico had what is known in the population business as a pronatalist policy: keep those babies coming, the more the merrier, because, government authorities believed, greater population meant more labor power, and a bigger workforce meant greater economic and political clout in the hemisphere and across the globe. Demographers in Mexico had been trying to prevail on federal and state strategic planners, warning of too many youths coming of age and facing too few job prospects, but as in many impoverished countries throughout the 1960s, the unanimous mantra of Mexican officials was: POPULATION GROWTH = PROGRESS!¹³

Then a remarkable change occurred, and government policy wonks did a quick about-face between 1972 and 1974: they came to fully support efforts to promote family planning, making contraceptives as widely available as possible.

Robert McNamara, then head of the World Bank, was a strong proponent of such moves, insisting that, “to put it simply: the greatest single obstacle to the economic and social advancement of the majority of peoples in the underdeveloped world is rampant population growth.” Mexico’s demographers had finally convinced the Mexican government to change course and end its population growth policies, but it took decades for the new policies to be implemented throughout the nation. Eventually, Mexico’s birthrate fell from around six or seven children per woman to a little over two, on average. One can neatly map the spread of the birth control measures, beginning in the middle-class sectors of large cities, then expanding out through the slums of these same metropoles, into medium-sized cities, and across the countryside. By the 1990s, even the most remote hamlets of Oaxaca had visits from government public health personnel or nurses supported by Mexfam, an International Planned Parenthood Federation affiliate.¹⁴

Then a not-so-remarkable change happened. Or, rather, an adaptation on an old pattern. It was so inconspicuous and commonsensical, and unintentional, that there was no controversy. To most people the change went unnoticed and did not seem like a change at all: men were planned out of family planning. This happened less through the explicit exclusion of men and more by simply ignoring men in new family planning campaigns. It should come as no surprise that the emphasis was and had to be on women’s reproductive health and sexuality. According to every social index, women were less well served in the public health sector than men; the government and every national and international funding agency recognized this and took steps to remedy the intolerable situation.

As soon as modern, relatively safe and reliable methods of birth control became available to them, the vast majority of Mexican women who wanted to prevent pregnancy adopted birth control pills, IUDs, and later, injectables and tubal ligations. The logic of women taking responsibility for family planning was levelheaded and laudable, and no one playing a significant role in promoting birth prevention—neither government health institutions, nor Mexfam, nor the international foundations supporting the work, such as Ford and Rockefeller—questioned whether and how men should be included in these new efforts. Men do not get pregnant. Men have fewer sexual and reproductive health issues. Men simply have different sexual and reproductive biologies. And women were in the most dire need of assistance in every aspect of their health, including around reproduction. There are some problems associated with planning men out of family planning, however, and the biggest one is that you cannot hope to achieve anything approaching gender equality if you exclude men from the discussion and decision making around the use of contraception. You also create a self-fulfilling prophecy if you discount men by establishing programs based on the idea that men are not interested in limiting the number of their offspring, timing the births of their children, caring for the women with whom they have children, or being a good father in these and other ways.

Leaving aside what many could more easily see as cultural issues of women shouldering the bulk of child care and parenting, women’s particular and pressing sexual and reproductive needs were finally being recognized, appreciated, and supported by government and nongovernmental agencies. In Mexico, as in countries around the world, the spread of modern contraception coincided with feminist demands that women’s health issues, including, but not limited to, gynecological matters, receive the attention they deserved, and be financed in conjunction with new family planning promotions.

In government, foundation, and family planning agency documents of the time, men were rarely mentioned as relevant to the new population programs. Perhaps they were overlooked by accident. Perhaps this was an inadvertent consequence of women reasonably being made the highest priority. Or perhaps there were underlying assumptions about men, their biologies, and their essential interests and inclinations when it came to sex and babies that precluded making them central to campaigns around contraception, birth spacing, the optimal number of children, and sexual health.

The not-so-invisible bias in the family planning room begs the question: Are men reliable sexual partners, or are we better off leaving things to those who actually get pregnant? Weren’t Mexican men notorious machos? It was widely believed that for macho men, their manhood and sense of self was intricately tied to proving their virility through procreation in general, through demonstrating degrees of manliness through siring more offspring, and, to top it off, through having as many male babies as possible. And weren’t poor Mexican men the worst of all? How to prevent the supposed inborn reluctance by men to want to limit the number of children they had, and their corresponding instinctive inability to be loving and respectful in sexual relationships, from becoming impediments in the overall campaign to disseminate information and contraception to women? Family planning across Mexico in the 1970s and 1980s could proceed even if men were unenthusiastic about its goals and means—but if men were too close-minded about birth control, for instance, they could become real obstacles to achieving the main objectives of the program. Hence those implementing the new policies around the country made it their aim to provide contraceptives and information to women and make women their sole focus of attention.

The personnel organizing reproductive health campaigns for women at least implicitly assumed that Mexican men as a group, especially those from the lower classes, were one-dimensional creatures who routinely confounded the potency of their seed with their manly worth. There were entire books about Mexican identity built around such characterizations of poor Mexican men, urban and rural, and they continued to be read and taught throughout this period.

As in every other country on earth, in Mexico it was always possible to find examples from personal experience to prove these taken-for-granted truths about irresponsible men. Fathers, brothers, husbands, and sons who were especially brutish when it came to using protection, sleeping around, and being a negligent father, at least when the children were small, were common tropes. In the twentieth century, in Mexico as in many other countries, canonical works defined the problems people suffered by focusing on poor men for a catalog of sins that held the country back from becoming a cosmopolitan, modern society.¹⁵

There was a certain tautology in the argument. By omitting them in policy documents, men seemed irrelevant when it came to family planning. After all, women were clamoring for birth control. But where were the men? At which point everyone could circle back and decry men’s lack of participation in family planning. So men were inadvertently written out of planning altogether.

Such marginalization by population specialists was premised on the belief that men couldn’t control themselves or be relied upon to behave in sexually respectable ways. If the government wanted to lower birthrates, they would have to do so by concentrating their efforts rather exclusively on women of reproductive age. In the first two decades of the new century, these practices continued. The government health agencies went so far as to promote a program called the Oferta Sistemática (Standard Offer): whenever a woman between fifteen and forty-nine years old appeared at a government health clinic or hospital in need of assistance—recurring migraines or bronchitis or skin lesions or any other problem or symptoms—medical personnel were instructed to talk with her about birth control. Do you use something? Have you had any problems with your method? If you don’t use contraception, why not? Unless a man accompanied a woman to the medical appointment, he was not party to such a line of inquiry, much less the focus of these questions.

It was not always this way. Did men do anything to prevent pregnancies before the advent of the birth control pill and the widespread availability of modern birth control for women? In Mexico men used condoms, and they practiced rhythm methods as best they could. They also achieved high marks from their wives on the manliness scale when they proved expert at the self-control required for withdrawal to work as a method of natural birth control. But it was only years after the fact that scholars seriously inquired about men’s sexual practices in the past. It turned out that the widespread assumptions of previous years were incorrect: men in Mexico had demonstrated self-control, love, and a desire to space out children by learning when to pull out. Undoubtedly for some men this was a way of demonstrating that they had control over the situation, as though by withdrawing or not, a man could decide whether to try to avoid, risk, or try getting a woman pregnant. Withdrawal during sex was also, for some men, a way to share the burdens of planning when and how often to have children.¹⁶

All this was in the past. By the 1970s and later years, men, at best, became subjected to family planning’s benign neglect. Unexamined conventions on the part of those responsible in government and private agencies about men and their sexuality had real consequences for promoting a gendered vision of responsibility for contraception.

WHAT WE DON’T KNOW HAS HURT US

When we think about men and sex, there may be a tendency to think the topic well covered and understood. Yet if we assumed less and risked more we might be surprised. Take a specific case of men and contraception—male sterilization, and who opts for this form of birth control and why. I studied vasectomies in the southern Mexican provincial capital of Oaxaca, and while this example might seem overly particular, unique even, we can draw lessons to shed light on the changing connections between men, sex, and their relationships with women more broadly.

Male sterilization in Mexico has never caught on in large numbers. In the early 2000s, the population in the state of Oaxaca was around 3.5 million. Approximately 3,000 of these inhabitants were men who had received vasectomies. This number was low by world standards, and the question I had was why so few Oaxacans had taken this route, and whether there were any sociodemographic patterns in the kind of men seeking sterilization. The explanation of public health personnel in Oaxaca was that men weren’t interested or reliable when it came to birth control, and that men feared they would lose their potency if they received vasectomies. These conclusions helped account for why Mexican efforts to stem population growth continued to focus on the adoption of contraception for women, including tubal ligations.

The prevalence of vasectomy varies tremendously around the world, from a high in New Zealand of 19.3 percent of adult males (in 1995) to less than 2 percent in much of Africa and Latin America. China’s rate was 6.7 percent in 2004; Iran’s 2.8 percent in 2000; India’s 1 percent in 2006, and in the United States the rate in 2002 was 12.8 percent. Mexico’s rate overall was 1.9 percent in 2003, but the state of Oaxaca’s was less than 1 percent. You might think that we would be able to predict different vasectomy rates based on different “national cultures,” but you’d be wrong: the rate in the United Kingdom was around 18 percent in 1993, but then plummeted by 2016, when public funding for the procedure dried up.¹⁷

Even regions within the same country can vary widely. Take New Jersey and Idaho in 2002, for example: one of them had a vasectomy rate of 4.7 percent, and the other 19.9 percent. Guess which is which? Idaho’s rate, 19.9 percent, was the highest rate in the country that year, and was followed numerically by Washington, Vermont, Oregon, Minnesota, Montana, New Hampshire, and Michigan (coming in at 15.7 percent). Something about those cold temperatures, no doubt, makes men more planful, or at least makes them want to have sex without worrying about pregnancies. What we don’t know about men and sex.…¹⁸

In order to understand why men do or don’t elect sterilization, we need to understand men’s experiences, fears, desires, and relationships with women. I attended twenty-two vasectomies at clinics in Oaxaca City, talking with the patient up by his head as the surgeon did the snipping down below. You could say I provided emotional anesthesia for men undergoing the operation. It was usually a simple and quick procedure, but many men were nervous. I started by saying, “Well, they did this to me a few years ago,” and let the conversation develop from there. Men would ask me in vague terms about my sexual performance after vasectomy. I would answer even more vaguely, but told them not to worry about a thing. Once a doctor asked me to take photographs of the event; I asked the patient, and to my surprise he agreed on the condition that I make copies of the photos and drop them off at the gas station where he worked. He wanted to share the moment with his family and friends.

I wanted to know whether there was a pattern in the kind of man seeking sterilization. I went in with the working assumption that the men would be drawn from the more educated, wealthier strata of Oaxaca society. I was quickly disabused of this notion. The men came from a wide range of backgrounds, and recommendations from friends and family, by word of mouth, proved a more significant factor in the decision than class or other social or cultural characteristics.¹⁹

The most telling commonality between men who got vasectomies revolved around the word “suffering.” When I asked them why they had chosen to get sterilized, one man after another told me his wife had used contraception for decades, with time off birth control to get pregnant and give birth to two or three children. The women had suffered long enough; now it was their turn to share the burden. Men’s relationships with their wives or significant others, rather than schooling or employment type, lay behind more of the decisions to get a vasectomy than any other factor. These men did not fit the stereotype in which men’s sexuality stands in stark contrast to women’s. They shared a different perspective, defying all the theories of scholars about men needing to spread their seed. With the women in their lives, they were intimately involved in renegotiating the meanings of manhood and men’s sexuality as well as women’s sexual and reproductive health.

Colombian anthropologist Mara Viveros has developed a concept she calls “female contraceptive culture,” in which women are the ones responsible for preventing pregnancies. My friends in Oaxaca stand in contrast to such notions, an unconditional refutation of the idea that men cannot be trusted with so consequential a responsibility as helping to decide whether and when a child should be brought into the world.²⁰

It’s tricky, of course, and getting a vasectomy means nothing in itself. For some it is an act of love and generosity; for others it is an extension of the most banal, hypermasculine traits. Getting a vasectomy involves acting like a man, but what acting like a man exactly means can be more difficult to discern. As we develop critiques that speak to social inequalities, we invariably describe scenarios of who’s to blame. When we emphasize ideas about men being irresponsible around family planning, we can end up reinforcing relationships we want to change. When we naturalize male sexuality, we say, to all intents and purposes, that men have little choice in how they behave.

There was one gentlemen I encountered in the vasectomy clinics in Oaxaca whose story seemed at first glance perverse. Before the surgery, the nurse had a questionnaire to complete with Alejandro:

“Age?”

“40.”

“Marital status?”

“Married.”

“Children?”

“Two.”

“Reason for having a vasectomy?”

“I don’t want any more children.”

“Previous birth control?”

Alejandro paused, finally answering, “None.”

I followed up from my interview during Alejandro’s operation to speak with him and his wife, Mercedes, a few days later in their home. I asked more about his reasons for getting a vasectomy. Mercedes answered instead of Alejandro:

“We’d been talking about it for eight years. Ever since our son was born.”

Alejandro then clarified: “It was my idea. I decided to do it. I did it to satisfy her, not because I am going to sprinkle children around. Because she’s already had her tubes tied, so… well…”

I was flummoxed. “If Mercedes has already done that, then why…?”

“To please me,” Mercedes said with tenderness.

“Why was this important to you?” I pressed her.

“Better to avoid surprises.”

At which point Alejandro repeated his cheeky rejoinder: “So I don’t go around sprinkling children everywhere. That’s what she says.”²¹

“Mexican men are like that, just like that,” Mercedes said, ending the conversation.

Men’s sexualized relationships with women are often overlooked in studies of men and masculinities. Taking the case of vasectomies, the postoperative “Will it work?” is not simply a question of erections and ejaculation. Men’s anxieties about vasectomy and manhood are regularly linked in their minds to whether they will still be able to sexually satisfy a woman. With earnest sincerity, a man once commented that his favorite word to hear was “¡Así!” (Like that!). He never felt more like a man than when a woman in the heat of passion whispered to him, “Just like that!”

The meanings and consequences of men being “sexually uncontrollable” look different if we see men as “culture-bound,” or as the housing-for-hormones out of control. Either way, these stereotypes complicate life for men who choose sterilization and want to challenge the stick-figure sexuality they have been assigned, as they must buck not just amorphous social constraints but also the actual ideas of family, friends, and medical personnel in the flesh about men and sex.

A final episode from the vasectomy chronicles sheds further light on efforts by government agents to force their judgments about men and sex on unsuspecting male populations: from 1975 to 1977, the prime minister of India, Indira Gandhi, launched mass sterilizations throughout India. In the end, 6.2 million more men and 2.1 million more women were left sterile after these two years. More men were sterilized because the procedure is easier and quicker to perform on men. In only one month, September 1976, health authorities carried out over 1.7 million sterilizations by sweeping into towns, rounding up all the males over the age of fifteen, dragging them to clinics, and forcibly sterilizing them. Among the main concerns of the men who were forcibly sterilized was that their vasectomies would rob them of virility and they would never again be able to sexually fulfill their wives.²²

We can never understand the subject of men and sex unless we firmly grasp that for many heterosexual men their relationships with women deeply affect their motivations and actions. The definition of “manly” for these men is often “not womanly.” For such men, their sense of worth as men is dependent in part on what they perceive to be women’s assessment of their male attributes. Women’s influence on male children has long been chronicled and analyzed by psychologists and anthropologists. The part that adult males play in the lives of women is also well documented and scrutinized. Surprisingly lacking in scholarly and popular literatures is the part that women play in defining and shaping men and masculinity.

In India and Mexico, as everywhere else, heterosexual men often base their sense of sexual self-worth on their ability to pleasure women. The history of contraception around the world shows the exclusion of men from major efforts to reduce fertility rates and improve women’s health. The people creating and leading these family planning campaigns are without a doubt some of the most enlightened and progressive on earth in matters of sexuality, gender relations, and issues of inequality. They nonetheless have unintentionally been responsible for disseminating and highlighting some of our most parochial, pseudoscience attitudes and practices about men and sex.

A MIDWIFE’S CODA

After spending a year shadowing biomedical doctors in Oaxaca, I came to the inescapable conclusion that in their minds, men were sexually rapacious and women were sexual gatekeepers. The profligate male stood in full contrast to the persnickety female. For these doctors, the binary world of sexuality was invariably true not just in Oaxaca in the 2000s but also everywhere else in the world. That was just the nature of men’s sexualities as compared to women’s. Whenever I asked them about it, they responded that men want to have sex more than women do, and that they are more receptive to having sex with strangers than are women. “You’re a man, Mateo,” they confessed to me. “So you already know that.”

At the same time, one summer I began to seek out another group of medical specialists, the indigenous healers and midwives who live throughout the mountainous state of Oaxaca. These practitioners call the hospital and clinic people “white-coat doctors,” to tease them for their need to dress a certain way to impress their patients and set themselves sartorially apart from them. The indigenous healers and midwives weren’t armed with years of formal medical training or bookcases of textbooks on morphology, anatomy, and physiology, but that didn’t stop them from speaking knowledgably about the male afflictions of impotence, infertility, and infidelity.

Even though they practiced in villages and towns quite remote from one another, their responses when I asked about men’s and women’s sexual natures was remarkably similar. “Well, Mateo, that depends on the individual, doesn’t it?” they might say. A static, dichotomous view of sexuality did not correspond to their conceptual framework; they had not witnessed this neat division in their medical practices. I wanted to know how they treated men’s sexual problems. It was quickly apparent that not everyone in Oaxaca whose work involved thinking about men’s and women’s bodies and sexuality was as comfortable dividing the world into neat male/female categories. One midwife counseled, “It’s important to get rid of the fear.” She told me about a man she treated. “Now it turns out there were problems in his house. He saw his father do different things. My grandma used to tell me (when I was grown up, not when I was little), ‘There are children who see their parents [have sexual relations]. It traumatizes them!’ But why does it traumatize them? They want to know, ‘How could our father use a woman like that?!’”²³

These healers would no more generalize about men’s sexualities than they would try to decipher some deep significance from the length of a woman’s labor, and then compare how many hours different births took, to draw conclusions about the nature of the mothers. You could probably force a correlation, but at what cost to the poor mothers?

The harm in exaggerating the differences between men’s and women’s sexualities as inevitable, you could say, was not just that it was inaccurate, but that it led to favoring health treatments based on beliefs about men’s and women’s bodies that were not necessarily true. Biases are not valid reasons for pursuing health protocols. Nor is it appropriate to assume that certain thinking, desires, and behavior arise inevitably because someone is male or female.

Knowledge about men’s sexuality does not necessarily run parallel with prevailing modern scientific ideas and practices, and men are not universally seen as sexually insatiable, or women deemed sexually hard to please, despite whatever we may have come to believe in recent years. Many of the ideas we assume to be true about men and women are historically specific beliefs camouflaged by scientific terms and pretense that have developed over the past one hundred or so years. Renewed attention to women’s libido often describes it as “more like men’s than we realized.” That women’s sexuality is not inherently passive is a revelation. That women’s sexual pleasure was denied in scientific literature for most of the twentieth century is a real problem. That we still repeat trite notions about men’s sexual pleasure is also a problem.

There is good news, however. As Rebecca Jordan-Young reported in her 2010 book Brain Storm, “high libido, multiple partners, and more varied and frequent sexual activities are all treated as part of normal female sexuality in more recent brain organization studies, even though each of these was previously interpreted as a masculine sexual pattern.” That neuroscientists’ findings coincide with changing social attitudes and practices when it comes to women and sexuality seems more than a coincidence.²⁴

What we think about men and sex—are we normal or anomalous?—may have less to do with our own experiences and more to do with whom we listen to about our experiences. This is equally true of that other lightning-rod issue regarding men’s biological penchants: violence. The connections between men, sex, and violence are never in sharper relief than when it comes to understanding rape, that insidious violence that deploys sex to wreak its damage.