These excerpts are from "Mantalk - Tough Talk From a Tender Woman" by Irma Kurtz, Beech Tree Books, a Quill Edition, New York, 1986.
By all means, read the entire book. It's well written, enlightening, and impossible to put down. It can be found at http://www.addall.com/.
"Like any other woman, I used to believe I could, or even should, reform a man. Isn't that what maleness from its very boyhood asks women to do? A woman wants a man to make her happy, and doesn't a man dare each new woman to make him good? -
If she considers that his being good is primarily a matter of making her happy, and that making her happy means he must never want anyone else again or anything at all except what she wants too, then the man struggles under a great burden. The celestial beauty for whom he hoped to lasso stars and planets appears only to want a slave who will obey her house rules and assume absolute responsibility for her emotional well-being. This was not the job he applied for when he entered her temple.
A man and a woman have one important thing in common at the start of a romance: they are both in love with him. Her highly strung feelings tell her this is the man, the only man, the predestined mate with whom her fulfillment will be achieved. Love makes women very superstitious. Witches used to do most of their trade in love potions. Marriage counselors and advice columnists are supposed to provide them now. Love makes women incautious and forgetful of past love; and love makes women unethical, because for them it transcends everything. (Lust does similar things to men, though, mercifully, it's much more quickly over.)
When it comes to sex, and everything else, the male's great fear is of failure, and the female's is of not being loved. For a man, sex is always to some degree an edgy performance, more ritual than romance, a sport with conscience as an indulgent referee. Plain, unadulterated fucking is maleish and quite a few men manage to pull the deed off; very few men, however, in feminine estimation are better than boring lovers.
Because possible failure haunts men and because their erections are vulnerable to the racket of consciousness as well as to the whimpers of the subconscious, they can be grimly determined in bed, and determination is not voluptuous; they are competitive too, and their moments of climax and dominance are often achieved without tact or sensuousness. By feminine standards, which happen to be the lovemaking standards of the moment, most men are lousy lovers; however, feminine standards are also those of a daydream or, worse, the standards of their favorite romantic fiction.
Naturally, women think their own loving, langourous way of sex is better, and so it is...for them. Recently, they have been trying to bully and shame men into thinking it would be better for them too, though the truth is it would be less demanding, enslaving, perplexing and strenuous for a healthy male to screw a thousand women in his lifetime than to try to please one, and the potential for failure would be less.
Most men are good fellows who would honestly rather give pleasure to their partners than not, if only out of vanity. The new sexual chivalry, however, threatens the male with the dreaded old failure to get it up, and also with failure to keep it up for the long process of his partner's excitement, as well as failure to please even when he does.
Suddenly, it's no longer altogether normal or fair for a man to fuck like a man, and he's likely to be scolded for it if he insists upon it his way, or if he knows no other way, or if there is no other way, or if he is reluctant to make love in an unmanly way because - whatever trendy folk advocate - he really does not want to be effeminate, least of all in bed.
He is being asked, and not always sweetly, by sexologists, therapists, advice columnists, and his partners, to risk failure so that women can feel well and truly loved. What does he get in return for his courage and industry? The satisfaction of pleasing her, which is in its way a kind of slavery. One fear is being traded off against another, hers against his. By requiring the male to be sensuous, even demanding it, the female is ordering him to do her a favor. Making love is her metaphor for true love, entailing commitment as well as sometimes an hour of foreplay, and she intends it should be his too. However, the moment a man agrees to make love with his fingertips instead of his cock, he is sharpening the shears for Delilah, and he knows he can't trust her not to use them.
Intercourse is an aggressive act, requiring physical strength and even a degree of hostility. Physical penetration would be a painful abasement for a heterosexual man, even if he happened to be attracted to it for reasons of his own. He doesn't offer such indignity to a friend, or put a friend in place with head down, ass up, tongue first, legs apart, all the positions the male considers at the very least undignified when he considers them coolly. Some degree of audacity is necessary to any male who wants to get it up, and the closer a female comes to equality, the more difficult it is for him to put her in the postures of his sexual fantasies. The female to some extent probably has to remain an alien of strange, even repellent appetites, so she can be turned into all-cunt. Otherwise, she may reverse the procedure to which mankind owes its continuing existence, and subject him to dehumanizing humiliation.
The more a woman is admired by a man for her achievements, the less easy it is for him to desire her physically, or to have her at all, without fantasizing about someone else. Thus, there is some justice in the accusation that the New Woman is a source of male impotence, a castrator, a cause for divorce and the end of love.
Sex is not love for a man. In his fantasies he designs a sexual accomplice, not a permanent lover. Over and over again the fiction in men's soft-porn magazines embroiders the male romantic ideal: an erotic encounter with a gorgeous wanton who goes off into the sunset alone without leaving so much as a glass slipper under the bed.
Not long afterward, our impresario decided to start the first English girlie magazine, and overnight I found myself no longer a publicist, rather one of an editorial board poring over transparencies of women with no clothes on. Our biggest problem was not finding women who would strip for the camera, it was in stopping those who shouldn't. Droves of females applied in answer to our advertisement. We saw photographs of naked housewives, naked secretaries, naked bank clerks and schoolgirls, as well as a lot of professional strippers, taut and depilated as marble. After a few weeks, I began to understand what the men preferred in stroke-princesses. While I always chose bones, strong lines, and faces that looked as if they could spit in an eye at twenty paces, my male colleagues went for the dimple, the pout, and the pink. When it came to their sexual icons they liked a tootsie who advertised her availability yet managed to persuade each voyeur it was for him alone she was arching her back and sweeping her hair up from the back of her neck. They wanted neither a threat nor a victim, only quality of cheerful acquiescence I soon learned to recognize, a face and posture that promised wholehearted, unquestioning acceptance of whatever was on offer: the sort of girl a man could love and leave, simply by turning a page. The smallest trace of embarrassment in the girl's smile or in her eyes embarrassed the men, any hint of the film star's self satisfied narcissism also put them off, and so did the sleek, costly beauty of a fashion model.
Angry feminists say pornography demeans women by presenting them as sex objects, yet hundreds of women write to advice columns complaining that their boyfriend's pornography makes them feel they aren't sex object enough. It isn't easy for any woman to understand the male's atavistic gusto or his quick, infallible celebration before the image of cunt. As long as women see sex as love they are bound to be miffed when men offer to the open air what they feel should be pledged to them.
Males turn images into action, and women turn their fantasies into motives for love. The instantaneous response to what he sees is part of a young man's sexuality, intrinsic to it, even necessary to it. To shame him for this quirk could cause us all considerable harm, because his sexuality is dependent upon his ego. It is as much due to the male's ego as to his sperm that humankind keeps on reproducing. Nevertheless, these days, both male ego and male sperm are being routinely frozen. The ability men have to lust joyfully at the sight of the female, and then to fuck without commitment, is being seen increasingly as contemptible. There are people who consider it acceptable for him to impregnate, mechanically or physically, a surrogate mother so that his barren mate can fulfill her need to raise a child, yet at the same time consider him less than an animal if he jerks off, is unfaithful, or pays a whore to fulfill his need for infallibility.
Current demands make it almost impossible for a man to do the right thing sexually without sacrificing freedom, independence, robust maleness, pleasure and hilarity, to the female's cry for fidelity, eternal love, security, and, more recently, equality from acts perpetrated by the human penis. It also confuses any thoughtful man that women advertise loudly for mates who are considerate, gentle, full of foreplay and respect, and then they fantasize and fall for men who are bold, overbearing, "firmly shaped," self-assured, wicked, and real fuckers.
My friend had been divorced by his wife of thirty years in bitterness over a frivolous love affair. His life had been a shambles and his integrity destroyed by the grinding of desire against propriety. One hundred years ago, or even the day before yesterday, he could have stayed married to the respectable mother of his children, and done rude things to "bad" girls. Now, such sexual expediency leads to divorce courts or to counselors who "cure" men of the unfashionable desire to make free from time to time with a willing female. It can be so fraught, so threatening, for a male to have the bold, invigorating, straightforward sexual union of his fantasy even inside marriage that is is surprising so many men keep on trying.
Maybe some day the female's dream of intercourse as a rapturous, exclusive, eternal expression of true love, separate from lust or procreation, will bring the sexes into glorious unity; for the moment, however, her passionate extortion is increasing the market for hard porn and divorce lawyers, as men are finding it ever more difficult to squeeze themselves and their erections into the shrinking maneuvering space between being a wimp or being a rapist.
Wedding bells summon a man back to the nursery from the playground this whole planet used to be for him, and the marriage license is seen by his bride as a permit to begin his reformation and transformation into husband.
"In-Love" is unquestionably a form of temporary insanity corresponding roughly to the in-heat frenzy of other animals. No intelligent person would set up a corner shop in such a manner, let alone a household and a new line in human beings.
Most young men fall in love where it flatters them and then marry out of other weaknesses. A man has his reasons to marry, good or bad. A woman, however, is probably marrying out of an impossible romance. She expects security and fidelity, loving sex, constant attention, flowing communication, heaps of sensitized emoting, a house, adorable babies, a decent car and, having been liberated, she expects equality too, as if it were his to give. Altogether, she requires everything unliberated womankind ever did from marriage, and a lot more. What she brings to the match, however is considerably less than women have in the past. Sometimes, she'll cook on alternate nights and wash half the dishes; often she will earn less than her husband though she'll spend as much; and for children, she'll have someday, only not yet.
After the first delirium, marriage becomes a battle between two egos. Generally, his takes a bigger beating, because he had more to begin with. The woman who made him feel a giant is making him feel a mouse who has taken the cheese.
A man's bride will one day begin to tell her husband that he hasn't any feelings and is not capable of understanding what she feels. It's not easy for him, hating scenes as he does, to get through to a woman who is in the throes of being sensitive, or to tell her truthfully that he does have feelings; he is feeling trapped, impotent, restless and scared. Her swift, angry reactions censor anything he says that she cannot bear to hear. From this point on, he will probably begin to withdraw, possibly shouting those classic words of Mantalk to a frenzied woman: "You're Crazy!," which actually means she's driving him mad.
There is a general pattern to most marriages: long honeymoon, followed by short turbulence, another long honeymoon, more turbulence, shorter honeymoons, longer turbulence, babies, upheaval, disappointment, possible infidelities, turbulence, and then at last if it is ever to arrive, the calm of two chastened wills, not ecstatically happy perhaps, certainly happier than they could ever be apart. It seems a shame that marriage can't be saved as a retirement plan for sensible grown-ups after the children have left home."