3 Steps for Re-Balancing Masculine Sexuality
Masculine sexuality is out of balance in our culture. Woven into our families, workplaces, and social fabric is a pattern of men wielding their sexuality like a weapon to belittle and wound women.
This imbalance is not new and is probably not a revelation to you, but let’s get specific about what the problem is exactly and how we men can shift this dynamic.
The Nature of the Problem
A fascinating account of the imbalance between the masculine and the feminine comes from the book Arousal by Michael Bader. To paraphrase Bader: We begin life completely dependent on our mothers, both emotionally and physically. Growing up, we undergo the process of individuation from our mothers. For boys, this means differentiating our identity and also differentiating our gender and sexuality. In order to do this, boys put up boundaries against their mothers and the feminine to shore up our identities. Encouraged by our culture, boys tend to differentiate by devaluing the other, ie: we solidify our masculinity through the act of denigrating the feminine.
The unconscious driver of imbalanced masculinity derives from either fear of or resentment toward feminine sexuality. I love this theory because instead of blaming anyone, it’s attempting to explain the core psychological motivations at play in our culture.
My observation through teaching conscious sexuality workshops is that we have two general categories of wounded men walking around today:
- Alpha men are the guys whose sexuality is a means to promote their masculine identity through belittling the feminine. For these guys, it’s a fear of being consumed by the feminine or a compensation for a feeling of weakness that’s driving the behavior.
- Nice guys are horrified by the Alpha guys’ behavior and respond by shutting down their sexuality. For these guys, it’s resentment towards dominant men, resentment towards the power of feminine sexuality, and a deep fear of their own sexual desires that’s driving the shut-down.
These are categories of wounded men - guys whose sexual behavior comes from a place of fear or pain and who propagate the wound. It’s worth mentioning here that there are plenty of men out there with healthy sexual expressions, that these categories exist on a continuum - they are not absolutes, and that these categories really only apply to straight cis-men. The queer and trans communities have different dynamics at play.
Here’s why I list Nice Guys as part of the problem:
The Nice Guys are generally sensitive and tuned-in enough to see the problems and feel the impact. But their response is passivity and collapse. We need nice guys to step up, own their power, and lend their voices toward shifting these dynamics.
Additionally, the fear we have towards our desires isn’t doing us or women any favors. Repressed feelings just find other ways to get expressed through our shadow. And trying to hide our desires creates a sense of not being trustable that women can definitely feel.
Moving into Healthy Masculine Sexuality
Step 1: Connect Cock to Heart
The fundamental journey for men today is to connect our cocks to our hearts. We need to open to emotions while also owning our sexual desire.
The Alpha Men have the desires online and need to open into feeling. The key here is to create safe and accepting spaces for men to learn how to be emotionally vulnerable. Both men and women in our culture deem male emotion to be weakness. For most men, weakness is to be avoided at all costs. We need to learn that having feelings is not the same as being weak.
On my path, it’s been incredibly healing to allow myself to feel weak, explore that state, and to allow my therapist and my partner to witness me in it. I discovered that my fear of weakness was wayyyy worse than actually allowing myself to feel weak. Being in the place of weakness itself turned out to not actually be too big of a deal.
By developing our capacity to feel emotions, we also awaken to our innate capacity to feel other humans: compassion. Compassion shifts us out of objectification and into I:Thou relationship. When we are fully feeling the impact of our actions, violence becomes impossible.
The Nice Guys, on the other hand, have sensitivity online and need to connect with their primal sexual animal. My favorite tool here is what I call the sexual sandbox. It’s creating a safe space to play with a partner and explore what desires might look like and how they might express. We fear that by opening to our desires, we will lose ourselves completely in a psycho-sexual rage. We have to be willing to take some risks and experiment with our desires. Taking things slowly with plenty of feedback helps us trust ourselves enough to let our lust come out and play.
Step 2: Power in Service to Devotion
Part of the privilege of being a man is that we carry both cultural and physical power over women. Whether you’re moving from the cock up to the heart or from the heart down to the cock, it’s all about putting our sexual power in service to our devotion. Cultivating our devotion to the feminine means opening up to the sense of awe and beauty of the feminine. Admiring her and celebrating her highest good. Men, we want to cultivate that sense of totally worshiping the divine abundance of the feminine. When the feminine is witnessed by our loving presence, she absolutely blossoms. And when our power becomes an expression of our devotion, then we can trust it.
Step 3: Dropping the Agenda
From the place of devotion, we can express our sexual attraction and desire in a way that isn’t being driven by some end goal. We’re just delighting in worshiping the feminine, pure and simple. Desires are actually really fun to have and play with just in and of themselves! When we express a desire with an agenda to get somewhere, it puts pressure on the situation and brings up the question of safety. The practice of owning our desires and expressing them without an agenda removes the pressure, respects the autonomy of the woman, and gives her space to respond authentically.
A Vision of Balanced Masculine Sexuality
When we’re able to connect our hearts and our cocks, when we cultivate that sense of devotion to the feminine, and when we put down our agendas, then the masculine sexuality becomes an incredibly healing force in the world. Embodying these principles brings a sense of wholeness for men and dignity into our interactions with women.
By coming back into balance, we’re creating a new positive feedback cycle between the masculine and the feminine. Now the masculine is no longer taking from the feminine - which creates untold trauma and evokes feminine rage. Instead, when women feel our integrity around sex and when they feel honored in their feminine sexuality, then the feminine gushes forth in the most beautiful and abundant explosion of fertility. The feminine is then able to bless and adore the masculine with all of her richness and grace. This new cycle of masculine and feminine uplifting each other has no end, and represents the new sexual paradigm that we’re working towards in our culture today.
I hope you enjoyed today’s article. Men’s work is a big passion of mine and I truly believe that now is the time for these power dynamics to shift. I’d love to hear your comments as well!
Much love,
Matt
