The Male Sex Drive

Joe Lampton, the protagonist and narrator of John Braine's novels Room at the Top and Life at the Top, is a young man with a robust sex drive -- nothing way out of the ordinary, but striking to me for reasons I'll explain. In the second chapter of Life at the Top, the ten years married Lampton contemplates his wife Susan:

...unlike other men's wives, she desired me physically...That had been one of the great pleasures of married life; to make love at times other than night, at other places than in bed. In the bath, in the car, on country walks, wherever in fact we had as much as a quarter of an hour alone together; we'd pretend that we weren't married, pretend to be star-crossed lovers.

I was reminded, in reading this, of another passage I had noticed recently. At the library, I was looking up the novel Worth Winning, by Dan Lewandowski, the basis of a menswear-heavy Mark Harmon movie I posted about a while back. I don't honestly think I'll read this book; it doesn't look to be worth it. But as a novel about a man pursuing three women simultaneously, it certainly does its share of exploring the theme of male sexual desire. And in flipping through its pages, I was arrested by this observation, which comes during a scene when the randy hero Taylor Worth is experiencing his first bout of impotence (with the demands of three lusty women weighing on him, it's no wonder):

...he waited in vain for the old, familiar neural connections to start firing...Taylor had always marveled at the apparent autonomy of the male member. It seemed to have a mind, if not a life, of its own and as such it was a fun, predictably wild, magnificently reliable partner -- a witty sidekick, a roguish pal without whose waggish instincts and reckless attitude his life would have been incalculably duller -- but now the playful scoundrel, the best rascal buddy a man ever had, had slipped away from the party and gone to sleep.

This caught my attention in part because I couldn't relate to it (and here's where the post starts to get quite personal, but hey, it's a personal blog). Was this, I asked myself, the relationship I was supposed to be having with my own penis all these years? No such luck, I'm afraid. My physiology has never been "magnificently reliable," and my little buddy has never displayed roguish, waggish, reckless, playful, or rascally attributes. This might explain a lot.

For Joe Lampton and Taylor Worth, sex is pretty easy. They arouse readily and perform well. As a result, they are each darned confident in the sexual arena. (Of course, both are also tall, handsome, reasonably suave with the ladies.) Very many of my fellow gay men have a similarly strong and hard-charging sex drive.

I, on the other hand, arouse very slowly and only on considerable provocation; since the physiology is far from automatic, the mind-set is everything -- and is easily disturbed. This makes encounters somewhat fretful. In my young manhood, that didn't stop me from the pursuit, especially since sex is so readily obtainable in the gay world.

But in order to maintain a good level of interest in sex, I needed variety of person and situation (again, easily available in the gay context). I am struck by Joe Lampton's sexual pleasure with his wife after ten years, because I have a hard time imagining the maintenance of sexual interest in a single partner for ten months, let alone ten years. It's just not in me. The continuance of affection for ten months or ten years, that I can definitely imagine -- but as I have discovered from experience, that's scarcely enough to sustain a relationship. I wouldn't cheat because of my need for new stimulus, I would just go dormant -- which isn't a solution. Most marriages start hot and gradually go more cuddly and domestic, but I can complete that transition in record time.

Since sex for me is not "predictably" physical as it for Taylor Worth and Joe Lampton (those "familar neural connections...firing"), and since I really don't get a connection between sex and affectionate emotion at all, what I'm left with is sex as charged mental state -- one I approach much less in my late forties than I did earlier in my life. I am considerably fascinated by what sex is for other men because it seems to be so different than what it is for me. These fictional examples, I find truly interesting. And when I look for them , I notice them everywhere -- the characters Woody Allen portrays in his own movies are obviously very driven sexually, for example, and as time goes on Woody lets them be more honest about how that plays out -- Harry in Deconstructing Harry readily admits to a continuing appetite for prostitutes.