Male Sexual Anxiety


We live our lives according to a `Family Romance` (Freud), an incestuous constellation of sensual personae that we carry from childhood to the grave & that determines who we love or hate.
The search for freedom through sex is doomed to failure. In sex compulsion & necessity rule. Orgasm is a domination, a surrender, or a braking through. Nature is no respecter of human identity. That is why so many men turn away or flee after sex. Sex cannot be understood because nature cannot be understood. Science is a method of logical analysis of Natures operations. To name is to know, to know is to control.
Natures cycles are women’s cycles-beginning & ending at the same point. Women’s centrality gives her stability of identity, she does not have to become, but only to be. Her centrality is a great obstacle to men, who’s quest for identity she blocks. He must transform into an independent being, that is, a being free of her. If he does not, he will simply fall back into her. Reunion with the mother is like a siren call haunting our imagination. Once there was bliss, now there is struggle. Dim memories of life before the traumatic separation of birth may be the source of archaic memories.
Mythologies identification of woman with Nature is correct. The male contribution to procreation is momentary & transient.
Male bonding & patriarchy were the recourse to which man was forced by his terrible sense of woman’s power, her imperviousness, her archetypal confederacy with chthonian nature. Woman’s body is a labyrinth in which man is lost.
The North American Indian myth of the toothed vagina (vagina dentate) is a direct transcript of female power & male fear. Metaphorically speaking every vagina has secret teeth, for the male exits with less than which he entered.
Sex is a natural rather than a social transaction, a kind of drain on male energy by female fullness. Physical & spiritual castration is a danger every male runs in intercourse with a woman. Love is a spell by which he puts his sexual fear to sleep.
For men, every act of intercourse is a return to the mother & a capitulation to her. For men, sex is a struggle for identity. In sex, the male is consumed & released again by the toothed power that bore him, the female dragon of nature.
Every man harbours an inner female territory ruled by his mother, from whom he can never entirely break free.
Male sexuality is inherently manic-depressive. Estrogen tranquillises, but androgen agitates. Men are in a constant state of sexual anxiety-living on the pins & needles of their hormones.
In sex, as in life, they are driven beyond-beyond self, beyond body. Even in the womb this rule applies. Every foetus becomes female unless saturated with male hormones from the testes. Before birth, therefore, a male is already beyond the female. But to be beyond is to be exiled from the centre of life. Men know they are sexual exiles. They wander the earth seeking satisfaction, craving & never content. Sex is metaphysical for men, as it is not for women.
The male projection of erection & ejaculation is a paradigm for all cultural projection & conceptualisation-from art & philosophy, to fantasy , hallucination & obsession. An erection is thought & an orgasm is an act of imagination. He must perform or the show does not go on.
Every male projection is transient & must be anxiously, endlessly renewed.