Desperate Men, This One’s For You

Photo by Okaar

Among today’s crop of fresh, sexually awakened young men, the ability to score poon is a form of validation prized above almost all others and regarded as an essential element of being a heterosexual man. Perhaps it’s due to generations of social conditioning, or maybe it’s fueled by T.V, or possibly a combination of both. Everything that you have ever seen, heard or touched contributes to it, and as many dumb, American comedies have made painfully clear, any man who is unable to add a new notch to the bedpost every other night is considered a freakish weirdo who, undeserving of even the narrowest scrap of respect, is fundamentally flawed in every major way and should probably be burned at the stake or at the very least exiled to somewhere desolate and wind-swept.

Despite this social expectation being completely unreasonable (it’s called ‘getting lucky’ not ‘getting unremarkably ordinary’), it is adhered to unswervingly, which leaves countless young men utterly terrified of being unable to take someone home. As I’m sure you yourself have noticed, this fear can turn some young men into absolute, raging cock-heads, who are so desperate to fuck something they’d give their left kidney for a hand-job. The behavior they display is pathetic, disgusting and most of all, counterproductive. Which is why it needs to stop, right fucking now.

Anyone who’s ever spent even one dirty night in a space where horny, young things go to meet each other and dry-hump, will have witnessed and been repulsed by the shameless and self-abasing efforts of desperate young men. They’re those boys who will become a woman’s devoted butler the moment she shows them the slightest bit of interest. They’ll buy her drinks, hold her purse, tirelessly help her friends back up when their stilettos give out, and try so damn hard to make any kind of positive impression. Spouting clunky jokes half memorised from bad T.V and compliments that don’t make sense, they continue to blurt at her during a break in the genuine and interesting conversation she’s having with whomever else is dominating her attention.

This might sound like an extreme example, but you do see it live and in technicoulur often enough that a mate and I have made a casual game of trying to guess how long it’s been since the given person got laid, judging by how much of their self-respect they are willing to discard at even the slightest chance to sniff some knickers. It very quickly becomes soul-crushingly depressing.

Sure, sex can be fun and is generally a fairly enjoyable way to pass an hour or two, but when your efforts to get it reduce you to an undeterably loyal puppy, panting after anything in a skirt and pleading with every fiber of your being to be rewarded with some scrap of affection, an important line has been unmistakably crossed. Whether you realise it or not, your self-worth has been rent asunder.

Integrity and self-control are two character traits vital in the cultivation of a personality worth anything more than a jar of spit, and if you are willing to discard both the moment something pretty bats her lashes, you have crippled whatever chance you had of anyone treating you with even a shred of positive regard. And if people find you so lacking in strength of character that they look straight through you, it’s hugely unlikely that they’ll have any interest in getting naked with you any time soon.

If what I’m describing is beginning to sound like a home-truth description of the embarrassing way you comported yourself the last time you were around a girl you fancied, you need to start throwing a Samsonite amount of effort into cutting that bullshit out of your life as fast as you can. Otherwise, you run the very real risk of feeling so chronically untouched that your crushing, frustrated loneliness will (as it’s known in forensic psychiatry) ‘mature’ and begin to manifest as a resolute persistence that’s born fromthe refusal to accept that a gentle ‘no’ doesn’t really mean no. This is so abhorrently rapey it’s essentially casual sexual harassment.

An occasion on which I had the misfortune of observing this nauseating eagerness in its natural habitat was one time in a nightclub where I spent a solid twenty minutes watching in sick fascination as a young pair made out on a couch while the male half of the pair clumsily tried to force his hand up his potential conquest’s top and she frantically tried to stop him by straining to keep his palm pinned to her thigh. It honest to god stretches my mind when I try to imagine what the fuck was running through the mind of this over-zealous young prick. Did he expect that the moment his hand closed over some boob, waves of pleasure would surge through her body and she would become his supplicant playting? Did he somehow misconstrue what was an unmistakably clear ‘do not do that’ into a reverse-psychology type gesture of encouragement?

The only circumstances under which blind subservience or abject persistence will ever bear fruit is if the object of your affections is herself, also volcanically desperate, suffers from crippling self-esteem issues, or has a hyper-sensitive conscience. And so, filled with oppressive guilt, she finds herself unable to refuse the inevitable, shyly mumbled proposition, or finally relents because tossing out a pity-fuck has become less taxing than maintaining a wing-chun level barricade against the grabby, grabby hands, and goes home with her new amourer for the simple reason he is trying so hard and she has neither the heart nor social nouse to turn him down.

Whatever the reason for her begrudging acquiescence, the result is almost without fail going to be a dispassionate and unfulfilling hump that leaves both parties consumed by such self loathing and disgust that a few moments after the thin, gluey jizz dribbles sadly from the end of his wang, they will both crawl to opposite sides of the bed and quietly cry themselves to sleep begging the voices in their heads to stop screaming ‘is this what my life has become?!’ When this kind of hollow, banal sex becomes the only dish on your menu, you are missing the point so widely that you’d be far better off not having it at all.

Sex is so revered because when done right and with the right person, it has the transcendental power of turning what is at brass tacks a genetic compulsion, into a moment of life-affirming connectedness in which you and your partner express a shared admiration for each other end enjoy the intoxicating pleasure of exploring another person’s being. It is an experience that is capable of filling you with the same dizzying sense of wonder that inspired Ted Hughes to write “so this is America. Beautiful, beautiful America” after the first night he spent entwined in Sylvia Plath’s lithe little body. This sanctuary of harmonious ecstasy will never be achieved by any fuck entered into with anything less than gleeful, gay abandon by both (or all, I’m certainly not one to judge) involved, and when compared to the breath-taking awe of such encounters, anything less is a monotonous waste of time.

Absolutely no pride can be taken in a shag that turns miserable moments after you’ve come and no amount of embellishment or repeated retelling will ever bury the knowledge that the only way you can pick up is by emotionally blackmailing someone vulnerable into helping you blow your pathetic load while they pretend you’re someone else and pray to every unnamed God that it’ll be over soon. Unless you accept this and start behaving with a little decency, eventually you’re going to have to confront the fact that the best sex you are capable of having is so drenched in mutual disgust and so devoid of intimacy, passion or even mutual excitement, that it is essentially a glorified, assisted wank.

Contrary to everything our culture of glorified promiscuity has ever told you, there is absolutely nothing wrong with going home alone, or even not getting laid for months at a time. It does not make you less of a man and it does not invalidate you as a socially adjusted human. On the other hand, manipulating social pressures to erode somebody’s resolve until they relent and fall into bed with you will make you into a worthless, despicable cunt whose every action, word and breath is another nail in the coffin of your shameful and failed life.