On the Sex-Negative Obsession with Intercourse

After recent problems with men that were incredibly frustrating as well as very cliché, I found myself with a wish – to peek into the mind of men who see women mostly as a sexual conquest.

There are many theories about such males, but how do they describe their philosophy? A run of the mill “womanizer” won’t usually let you in on his secrets, especially if it’s you he’s “working” on. Such men also tend to couch their motives for sleeping around in creative excuses – from having “high sex drive,” to being “hedonists,” sex addicts, polyamorous, or aromantic - the labels are endless.

But there are still honest men out there who offer their misogyny for everyone to see, such as pickup artists and Incels (“involuntarily celibate” men). The first are a community of men who believe in the existence of a “magic” formula that can get any woman into a man’s bed. Incels, on the other hand, gather in online forums where they endlessly complain about women not jumping into their beds. Also, they occasionally turn murderous.

These groups do not have the greatest gift of introspection. However, an overarching belief system can still be picked up from their angry outbursts and descriptions of idiotic sex-quests. The downside, for a woman, is being forced to wade through buckets of woman-hating sleaze. Like I did while reading The Game - a pickup artist “Bible” written by self-described “Transformational Journalist” Neil Strauss.

“Style,” as Strauss claims he was nicknamed in the Pickup Artist (PUA) community, had been a reporter for the Rolling Stone and had ghostwritten Jenna Jameson’s biography before he embarked on a very special quest to find a “fuck formula.”

As he describes in his book, during these two years, Strauss spent immeasurable energy on “scoring” with women. Obsessively, he watched every detail of his behavior to give off the right “alpha male vibes.” Hilariously, he learned magic tricks to get women’s attention in bars, invested in flashy props and dabbled in “hypnosis.” To become a “woman whisperer,” he crammed conversation starters and pickup strategies, such as “negging.” Less idiotically, during this time Strauss worked on his voice and posture, got lasik surgery, bought nice clothes, and worked out. He also traveled the world for PUA meetings and took part in endless online discussions with other, similarly afflicted men.

Sex-negative PUA obsession

“Style,” was, of course, far from the only PUA who invested extraordinary resources into getting laid. Seeing how much Strauss and his associates ostensibly yearned for intercourse, one could reasonably expect they would enjoy the act once they performed it. “Extramask,” a protagonist in Strauss’s book, who couldn’t wait to lose his virginity, thought the same. However, his first-ever intercourse with a woman he had met that night in a bar went a little differently:

“Then I fucked her. I fucked her and fucked her and fucked her and fucked her and fucked her and fucked her. About fifteen minutes into the whole thing I was thinking: ‘This fucking sucks. This is fucking sex? I hate this. I want to leave.’ (…) ‘I busted my fucking balls for months for this?’”

Despite not enjoying himself, “Extramask” continued “fucking” the lucky woman, trying various positions as well as some hard thrusting. He summed up his experience: “So that’s it. I stuck my junk in a chick. I lost my virginity. The sex was horrible. I felt a bit used and dirty after the act.” Although intercourse sucked, he felt like a winner. “Scoring,” would, he believed, help him get laid more in the future by improving his confidence.

“I mean, I’ve had sex now. I know this. So from here on in, any girl I chat with, I’ll be even more like, ‘Who gives a fuck? I don’t need what you got.’”

“Fuck diploma”

Incels are another group that can shine the light on male obsession with intercourse. Just like PUAs, the “involuntarily celibate” do not give out sex-positive vibes. In only a tiny minority of their forum posts will you find a user describing anything close expressing passion for women’s bodies, or a desire to lose himself in the sex act.

What you do find much more often is anger, rape fantasies, loneliness, extreme woman-hating and bitterness stemming from a belief that these men have been denied their right, or, more accurately, their rite.

For, to them, sex is not sex, but a means to an end – a manhood graduation ceremony. In a post on the website Incel.is marked “must read,” a user called “BlkPillPress“ claims that “a man doesn't even ‘become a man’ in a sense within society until he has sex, in essence a lot of men have not undergone their ‘right [sic] of passage’ to become part of the ‘tribe’ that is modern human civilization.”

And if the society doesn’t allow men to receive their “fuck diploma,” it will pay:

“Society expects us not to burn the village down when it won't initiate us into the tribe, that's whats [sic] truly outrageous, not the violence of disenfranchised men, but the fact that society actually expects us to just remain docile and accept this reality that has been forced upon us.”

Dworkin’s rite

Andrea Dworkin noticed the sex-negativity of some men’s obsession with intercourse too, when she wrote in the 1970s:

“What is not real, what is fantasy, is the male claim at the heart of pornography that fucking is for them an ecstatic experience, the ultimate pleasure, an unmixed blessing, a natural and easy act in which there is no terror, no dread, no fear.”

The iconic Second-wave feminist also claimed that for men, actual ecstasy lies in the “receiving the manhood certificate” aspect of sex:

“...it is necessary to understand that what is experienced by the male as authentic pleasure is the affirmation of his own identity as a male. Each time he survives the peril of entering the female void, his masculinity is reified.”

If you feel a pang of pity for the nerdy creatures who find satisfaction not in the sensuality of sex, but its ceremonial aspect, you probably don’t need to. If Dworkin was right, this rite is much more enjoyable for men than hat-tossing:

“No pleasure on earth matches the pleasure of having proven himself real, positive and not negative, a man and not a woman, a bona fide member of a group which holds dominion over all other living things.”

Right to Sex?

Whether people, meaning men, are entitled to sex is a question that regularly pops up in public conversation. In 2018, a self-identified Incel Alek Minassian drove a truck into pedestrians in Toronto, killed ten of them and injured fourteen. As a result, libertarian economist Robert Hanson, supported by New York Times columnist Ross Douthat argued for “the redistribution of sex.”

Hanson, in particular, compared intercourse to money, claiming that:

“one might plausibly argue that those with much less access to sex suffer to a similar degree as those with low income, and might similarly hope to gain from organizing around this identity, to lobby for redistribution along this axis and to at least implicitly threaten violence if their demands are not met.”

Although Hanson has been widely criticized for his essay, the idea of the “right to sex” hasn’t died with his attempt at justification. First US Congress candidate with an OnlyFans account, Alexandra M. Hunt recently resurrected the notion in an outrage-provoking tweet:

“We should be moving toward a right to sex. People should be able to have sex when they feel they want to, and we need to develop services that meet people’s needs without attaching the baggage of shame or criminalization.”

The idea of access to intercourse as a need/right has also appeared in a beloved 2022 movie "Good Luck to You, Leo Grande" where a character plays with the idea of prostitution as public service paid by local councils.

While the creators of Good Luck to You, Leo Grande seem to think elderly women are in need of young men’s “sexual charity,” academics and rights activists have been increasingly pushing the idea of such services for disabled men. “Access to Sexual Rights,” can now be translated from academic speak as the “right to have sex with prostituted women.”

This trend is only going to get stronger. But, whenever the notion of intercourse as a basic human (male) need pops up its head - whether directly or embedded – e.g. as “part of the human right to sexuality or a public health issue - you can counter it by quoting straight from the horse’s mouth:

Misogynistic men are not desperate about the lack of sex as such – they moan because they haven’t been issued a “fuck diploma” certifying their manhood. I dare to speak for all women that we’d rather use our genitals for our pleasure, not have them used as "maleness" seals of approval.

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