vicemag:

MIND THOUGHTS… WITH MICHAEL IAN BLACK - LET’S NOT FUCK, SHALL WE?

Here’s the thing, ladies: I don’t want to have sex with you. I know I’m supposed to. I’m supposed to want sex the way a guy in a beer commercial wants a brew: consuming my every thought, driving my every impulse, fueling my workouts, rousing me from slumber, inspiring my creativity, and propelling me through Abercrombie & Fitch with my credit card out, saliva dribbling from the corners of my mouth, and semen leaking from the pant legs of my skinny jeans. But I don’t. And I bet a lot of other guys don’t, either.

Male libido is assumed to be a constant, quivering thrum. For some men, maybe it is. But for me, as much as I enjoy the old in-n-out, the rubba-dub-dubba, the squeak-n-bubble, I have never craved it the way our culture has led me to believe I should, not even during my fabled Horny Years from ’91 to ’95. Except for those moments when I was in the first throes of a new love, sex has never subsumed me. Yet every cultural message I receive has led me to believe it should. Consequently, my lack of nymphomaniacal tendencies has always left me feeling embarrassed and emasculated.

It’s a topic I never hear men discuss. Men assume each other to be as randy as baboons during red butt season. When we discuss sex at all, we talk about it in terms of desire, never a lack of desire. Never have I been at a backyard barbecue and heard, “Man, what I wouldn’t give to not fuck Angelina Jolie.” Or “Bro, given the choice between having sex with some random bitch or reading a good book, I’d probably choose the book.”

But that’s how I feel. I just don’t want sex that much.

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