Men get to feel hornier because they’re socially supported in this. The whole of society is geared toward titillating men and discouraging female sexual desire. It’s inherent to the Nice Guy® complaint, where men are entitled to feel physical attraction, but a woman who wants more than “nice” is shallow. It’s evident in the way men and women dress, with women always mindful to wear stuff that makes them sexually attractive, whereas men have the opposite problem, and have to avoid being too sexualized lest they seem feminine. Naked women are draped over every inch of public space, and the internet is full of visually interesting porn for men, but our society barely can imagine what it would be like to try to attract a female eye. Men seem hornier in no small part because their sexuality is celebrated and codified. It’s easy for men to know right away how to be sexual, whereas women are still largely expected to figure it out for themselves—-and even that’s a recent invention, because pre-feminism, women were mostly just expected to do what men wanted.
But even with the small amount of freedom we have, it’s worth noting that a 30-year-old woman who admitted obliquely to having had non-procreative sex in Congress created a month long, nationwide scandal. Until that kind of pressure disappears completely, we can’t even begin to measure what the “natural”, unadulterated female sexuality would look like, and how it would compare to the celebrated and constantly titillated male sexuality.
Either way, stop blaming sex for misogyny. If all men wanted was women to fuck them more, the English language wouldn’t even have the word “slut” in it.
”- Amanda Marcotte, Misogyny isn’t caused by male horniness, on David Wong’s article 5 Ways Modern Men Are Trained to Hate Women (via cuntgarden)