MEN, SEX, AND INTIMACY
(From JOURNEYMEN magazine, Spring 1993)

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I just talked with my friend Bruce on the telephone and mentioned that the theme of this column was going to be men's sexuality, a topic near and dear to his heart and mine—as well as other parts of our anatomy. Bruce and I agreed that in fact, our hearts were the part of our anatomy that had been much neglected when it came to our sexuality. Most of our focus when it came to sex had been centered on our cocks. The rest of our bodies and our being seemed like they just came along for the ride. As for intimacy, like most other men we knew, closeness with another human being, if it happened at all, usually happened only during sex and only with a woman.

Intimacy was one of those things that men just didn't talk about, let alone admit a need for. It was something for women and wusses. Even the sound of the word brought on associations of softness and weakness.

Just like real men who don't eat quiche, real men don't do intimacy. That would require too much vulnerability, too much openness, too much letting go of control. For a "real man," really letting down his guard and letting someone else see him raw and exposed was rare. It was something reserved exclusively for those precious few moments of orgasm. That's one instance when he could let go and look, sound, and feel ridiculously out of control. To paraphrase Robin Williams, if men had any choice in the matter they would never sound like that.

Genuine intimacy was a strange trip into foreign territory, where few men had gone before and those that had gone weren't telling. For most men, intimate behaviors were typically relegated to courting and mating rituals; otherwise they were stowed away and kept out of sight from the other passengers. If these ritualized behaviors worked, the man won over the object of his attention. Often, once he had romanced her into being his steady mate or spouse, most of these intimate gestures disappeared——or came out mainly when he was horny.

Although intimacy itself may have been somewhat of a mystery, we knew that some semblance of it was often a necessary prerequisite to getting laid. Outside the bedroom (or wherever else you might happen to get lucky) you had to package up your feelings, put everything back in control, and put on the self-protective armor to go out and slay some more dragons. The world as we've known it has required us to shut down our feelings and keep others out in order to successfully compete. The very behaviors that are necessary for intimacy——openness, vulnerability, self-disclosure——would get us destroyed if regularly displayed in the business/corporate environment. Most of us were well-trained to wear our armor and ill-prepared for deeper familiarity with another human being.

No wonder most of us have gotten sex and intimacy confused. Sex was often the only time we could drop the mask, feel close, emotional, and generally let down our inhibitions. Intimacy meant sex, and sex meant intimacy. Even when someone asks the question, "Were you intimate with her?" it is heard as, "Did you have sex with her?" And though we might have learned to have sex without intimacy, most of us did not learn to have intimacy without sex.

It's also not surprising that we can have sex with or without intimacy. Sex feels good. It was designed to feel good. As Woody Allen has said, "As far as bad habits go, sex is one of the best." Yet while the physical act alone can certainly provide a discharge and release, without love, without some feelings of affection exchanged, it simply becomes another habit. Particularly in long range relationships, there is the danger of intimacy being lost, of sex becoming routinely detached and mechanical. If this becomes standard fare, it gets old pretty fast.

Especially with most of us men, there is this habitual separation of sex and intimacy. We even assumed that this was true for women. In my conversation with Bruce, he summarized it for many of us when he said, "Steven, I always thought that when a woman wanted to be close to me, she wanted sex. I didn't know how to be friends with a woman, so any relationships with women ended up as all-or-nothing propositions. Either we had sex or I kept my distance." It's been so common for us to distort the relationship between intimacy and sexuality that we think of it as normal.

This entanglement of sex and intimacy is rooted in our male biology and anatomy as well as in our social and cultural training. As to our biology, men experience sexual tension much differently than women. Most males, especially younger males, experience their sexual tension very specifically, focused in the genitals. There is a drive to penetrate and ejaculate, to more aggressively and specifically discharge and release this sexual tension. Since the primary purpose for sex is for procreation, it makes sense that the male of the species has this instinctual urge, tempered and contained by socialization. While we need not be ruled by our biological urges, they are the source of our sexual drive and need to be recognized as such.

For a female, while she does experience some sexual tension directly in her genitals, she typically feels it more diffusely, throughout her body. Rather than simply craving genital discharge, she craves whole-body caressing and touching, relishing in an internal sense of connectedness to her partner as a way of more fully responding to this sexual tension. For a male, the physical act of sex is primarily genital and goal-directed, whereas for a woman it is primarily sensual and process-oriented. Just as the male wants to penetrate the female's body, the female will feel a corresponding biological urge to receive the male, to take him into her body. For the female, a more diffuse experience of sexual tension, a more generalized physical desire, including the desire to be penetrated, fits quite naturally with the original purpose for sex. The appropriate course for following these urges is what is socialized into us.

As to anatomy, the placement of our genitals is a metaphor for how we deal with our sexuality. Unlike a woman's genitalia, a man's cock and testicles are hanging out there in the world, like any other appendage. They seem to lead the way, as in "the little head leads the big head," and for many of us men that has been the case. Even though a man's genitals are connected to his body, he typically feels more detached from them, as if his penis was something separate from his body and his self. It's as if his penis is an "it," and has a mind of its own. Any man who has gotten an erection at an inconvenient time can attest to this fact. Since our sexual organs seem more detached from our bodies, we can more readily detach ourselves from our sexuality and thus disconnect our emotions and inner experience from our sexual functioning.

A woman is much more intimately connected to her sexuality. The placement of her genitals is a metaphor for this relationship. Her genitals are much less protruding, more internal, with a greater portion actually inside her body. Because of this, a woman's sexuality cannot be separated from her body. Her sexuality is her body, and her body is home for her feminine essence.

These innate biological and anatomical distinctions obviously influence how we function, yet cultural rules about what constitutes manhood drove us further from integrating our inner emotional life and self-expressiveness into a fuller range of masculine manifestation, particularly in relationship with another human being. We have been trained since boyhood to ignore our inner experience and deny our emotions. At any point past the age of five if we indulged in any "unmanly" feelings or activities, we were severely teased, criticized, or punished. It doesn't take too long to get the message: If you want to be a "real man," then don't feel anything and for God's sake if you do, don't let anybody else know you're feeling something. And of course exuberant, passionate self-expression was forbidden, in any form.

One instance for me among many of how this self-expressiveness was at one time natural and easy was in Kindergarten. One of the activities I most enjoyed was scarf-dancing, something that came up once every couple of weeks. Each one of us would get a colorful scarf, the teacher would put on some great music, and we would get to do our own creative movement altogether. I delighted in moving around the room with the other children, being a part of all of this motion and seeing all these colors flying about. Everything was so alive! The room was full of innocent smiles and laughter. Even though I was shy, the teacher's encouraging attitude made it seem okay. I would lose all self-consciousness and move as if in a reverie until the music stopped. As you might have guessed, my love for such natural, playful dancing was socialized out of me by the time I got into first grade. Big boys (and men) don't do such things.

Our passion, spontaneity, and zest for life get tucked away deep inside along with our other emotions and we learn to do whatever we can to stay numb to these feelings. We learn to turn our attention away from our emotions and our bodies, numbing ourselves to physical sensation and disconnecting from any familiarity with our being. Our spirit, our life force, becomes bottled up, right along with our bodies. Yet it remains culturally acceptable to be detached from our emotions and instead operate from our minds or our cocks. In many instances, for a man his penis was the only part of his body where it was acceptable to have any feelings.

Since intimacy with another first requires some awareness of our inner experience and our emotions, before we can learn to communicate our feelings we must start paying attention to the middle third of our bodies, and not restrict our attention to just our thoughts nor let sensory experience be primarily focused in our penises. The next step after awareness is, of course, to communicate what is going on inside. And that's the basis for intimacy: discovering what's happening inside, and reporting those happenings. Yet because of what we have been taught, we are typically ill-prepared for this kind of intense closeness.

Also, because we have been trained to shut down all our feelings except for those sensations in our penis, many of us men have had a tendency to sexualize any and all feelings and needs. Anger, anxiety, fear, sadness, tenderness, love and affection all end up being confused with lust and sexual tension. For instance, when a man feels warm and tender toward someone, he can easily mistranslate that warmth and tenderness into sexual feelings. This may be expressed directly through a sexual act, or verbally, via innuendo and double entendre. When a man gets anxious, it can go right to his genitals, because he usually has no other reference point for experiencing these feelings. Masturbating can then become an habitual way to deal with this anxiety. Even anger can be sexualized, and, often unfortunately, can be expressed through sexual activity.

For a number of years, like Bruce, I put women in an "either-or" category. When I felt close, my lust would surface. While some of this is quite natural, I couldn't sort out genuine lust from sexualized feelings of affection and closeness, or even of nervousness. Because of this tendency, I didn't know how to express my feelings of affection for a woman without somehow sexualizing it. In my mind, if I felt close, that meant it had to be sexual. For most of my adult life I couldn't feel really warm and close to another man because I might misinterpret these feelings as being sexual. Since I wasn't gay, I didn't want to take any chances because I would have to confront all my fears that I might underneath all of this really be a closet homosexual. Yet even gay men I've talked with have noted the tendency for gays to sexualize all feelings and needs as well. It is far too common even in the gay sub-culture to sexualize relationships with other men at the expense of more diverse and encompassing ways of relating.

So whether straight or gay, this habit of dissociating from our feelings, of closing others out, and of sexualizing our feelings is common to all men.

This is one of the causes of homophobia in straight men. The tendency to fuse loving, tender feelings with sensations in our genitals is much more acceptable with a woman than it is with a man. If I let myself really feel, in my body, my affection for another man, because of this long-standing habit of sexualizing my feelings, there is that ever present danger that I might experience my love for another man as a sexual sensation. And since we also commonly believe that a feeling calls for action, it becomes entirely too threatening to have any semblance of real closeness with another man.

When you put a group of men together in close quarters, such as in the military, it adds another dimension to this ominous fear of homosexuality. In this kind of grouping, it seems therefore safer somehow to put homosexuality "out there," away from the group itself. That way there is this illusion that it won't be a threat within the group. If in such a group there is an open acknowledgment of homosexuality (not an open acting out of it), it forces the straight males to confront these deeper, usually unconscious fears of their own fragile sexuality. A deep cultural taboo is being challenged on many fronts, particularly in the military, and on a personal level it forces many of us to confront issues of our own sexuality and of being close to another man.

There you have some random thoughts about men, sex and intimacy, and in particular some of the things that get in the way of our love. And after all, that's what it's all about—love. Have you ever seen how powerful a man is when he loves something or someone? It's awesome.