If There's One Thing You Can Say About Mankind, There's Nothing Kind About Man

I saved this post from the Bookslut blog from yesterday, because I wanted to respond to it, but I was afraid I'd do the same thing I think Jessa Crispin is doing in that post: viscerally, and vehemently, reacting to something instead of thinking about it.

It's a day later, so maybe I can untangle it now.

Crispin is responding primarily to this Nerve article about a new novel, The Average American Male by Chad Kultgen. (Please note: this is a novel. Its main character has no name, but that does not mean that he is Kultgen, or that the novel is a record of real activities or anyone's actual thoughts. Fiction is not fact.) Her post really is a drive-by, so I feel guilty writing this long post in reaction to her, but I think hers will be a common reaction, particularly among educated, feminist women, so maybe I'm not really hunting a grape with an elephant gun.

I don't think Crispin has read The Average American Male. I'll admit I haven't, and I don't know if I particularly want to -- oh, sure, I do sometimes like books with a lot of sex in them, but Average sounds dull, tawdry, and repetitious, which aren't things I generally look for in a novel. So my reactions will be, as I assume Crispin's were, based on the review and what Kultgen says about it in the Nerve article. In other words, I'm no expert on Average...but neither was Crispin.
On the other hand, I am an American male, which Crispin isn't. And I think she's both conflating Kultgen with his character, and taking Kultgen's statements about men as evidence of his own personal feelings and desires. To put it more bluntly, she's forgetting that Average is a novel and assuming that Kultgen is untypical.

According to that article, and to Amazon, Average is a first-person "lad lit" novel about an unnamed young man in LA who likes to have a lot of sex but doesn't really understand women -- and, apparently, doesn't want to understand women. The plot seems pretty straightforward: a dude bounces between two girls, and eventually ends up with the "better" one (so this is a gender-swapped version of Bridget Jones's Diary, and of about a million romances). Oh, and this guy thinks about sex all the time, and dreams up pornographic scenarios involving just about every woman he sees. (Apparently -- and this would be the fictional part -- he also has sex with a lot of these random women.)

There seem to be two issues that some people...OK, mostly women.. have with this book: 1) that this guy thinks about sex all of the time, which is unrealistic, and 2) that his relationships with women are shallow.

To deal with #2 first: now, I haven't read the book, but it seems like that is the premise of the novel. Perhaps I'm missing something, but that's more of an observation than a criticism, like "Gosh, that Sun sure does give off a lot of light" or "Gee, this water certainly is wet."

On to #1. Crispin writes, about Kultgen (not the main character in his novel):

He's not all testosteroned out, beating his chest about his need for anal sex and blow jobs from multiple women a day. He's just scribbled on the wall and realized when mommy (or Oprah) gets home, she'll be disappointed in him. We should start a collection for his therapy bills now, get a head start.

Again, she seems to have entirely conflated the nameless protagonist and the author. (I'll admit that Kultgen doesn't help: he's in puppyish-new-writer mode in the Nerve article, ready to talk about the book as if it were the pure expression of his real life. He'll get burned by the press soon enough, and learn to emphasize that he's writing novels, not sociology.)

Crispin doesn't engage with Kultgen's thesis: that men think about sex all the time, and that has nothing to do with specific women, or their own childhoods, or anything external. It's how men are. Crispin assumes that this can't possibly be true without even pausing to consider it. But she's wrong; that is what men -- particularly young men -- are like.

Now, I can't speak for all men at all times, and I'm sure there are some men (old, dead, gay, or just sadly deficient) who don't think about women in sexual ways far too often, but...yeah, the snippets on Amazon and in the article seem reasonable to me.

The main character of Average may be a little extreme, perhaps somewhat exaggerated for effect, and he's clearly still in his 20s (men gain some ability to think about other things for whole minutes at a time somewhere between 30 and 35), but I have had streams of consciousness not unlike that, many times.

For example: while walking to work this morning, I saw an attractive woman yawning widely, and thought about blowjobs. (That's the highly sanitized version of my thought process, and I won't explain any further.) Men are nodding right now. Women perhaps are confused.

I suspect part of the problem is that a novel has to be written in words, and real stream of consciousness is largely non-verbal (at least mine is). A man doesn't think "I'd really like to fuck her. Wonder what she tastes like?" and so on; he imagines that he's already doing it, or fantasizes about how something would feel, or works through a sequence of events in his head. Putting that into words perhaps makes it seem worse than it actually is...or maybe women just think that it would be horrible, since they don't realize the other half of the population really does think like that a lot of the time.

So women, the answer is yes: men do think about sex, about having sex with random people (specifically "women they find attractive" in the case of most heterosexual men) all of the time. Men who find you attractive think about having sex with you. You'd probably be appalled if you knew some of the things they'd thought.

But then, wouldn't we all be appalled if we really knew what was in other people's heads?

(Side note: this is why some straight men are uneasy around gay men -- those guys think they know what the gay men are thinking, and they don't like it at all. Those kind of men are also usually the ones who think they're far more attractive then they actually are.)

Now that I've written all this crap, it feels horribly obvious. Don't women already know this? How can you live around men and not realize the way we think?