The totemic fetish of male sexuality

Abstract

The notion of innate female sex drives, urges, and impulses has been repeatedly challenged and explored in a sophisticated feminist literature on women's sexualities. Yet if, with Simone de Beauvoir, we settled (or began to unsettle) the matter of women's bodily destiny over 50 years ago, why is the myth of men's sexual destiny still so pervasive in popular culture and why does it remain largely unchallenged in feminist venues? For a similar corpus of work among men only queer theory and studies of samesex sex can make any claim to wide-ranging, complex, and nuanced treatments of sexualities. It is high time to queer our dull understanding of male heterosexualities, that is, to consider the woefully unmarked category of the male heterosexual that, despite and perhaps because of its hidden dominance in models of sexuality, has nonetheless too long gone overdetermined and understudied. In an age of evolutionary psychology and the medicalization of all manner of (alleged) bodily processes, the belief in men's hypersexuality has, in more than a few cultural contexts, become something of a totemic illusion which treats male sexuality as naturalized, something fixed, and as entirely distinct from female sexuality. In this essay I examine the notion of men's sexual destiny, a topic that is widely taken for granted in the popular imagination yet sadly and oddly is seldom studied by feminist and gender studies scholars.