What do men want?
A friend read my entry on going to the strip club and asked if I had read Norah Vincent’s book about going undercover as a man. Here is one synopsis of the part where she speaks about men and strip clubs:
Vincent said strip joints are about pure sex drive — completely empty of any meaningful interaction, even when a woman is gyrating on your lap.
Even though Vincent is attracted to women, she said she was never aroused during her visits to the clubs. “I really ran smack up against the difference between male and female sexuality. It’s that female sexuality is mental. … For a man, it’s an urge,” she said.
“At its core, it’s a bodily function. It’s a necessity. It’s such a powerful drive and I think because we [women] don’t have testosterone in our systems, we don’t understand how hard it is,” she said.
Vincent even dabbled in the art of picking up women and agreed to wear a hidden camera for “20/20” during her exploits.
She was quickly reminded that in this arena, it’s women who have the power, she said.
“In fact, we sit there and we just with one word, ‘no,’ will crush someone,” she said. “We don’t have to do the part where you cross the room and you go up to a stranger that you’ve never met in the middle of a room full of people and say the first words. And those first words are so hard to say without sounding like a cheeseball or sounding like a jerk.”
Vincent encountered some pretty cold shoulders in her attempts at the bar, but she did manage to go on about 30 dates with women as “Ned,” mostly arranging them on the Internet.
Vincent said the dates were rarely fun and that the pressure of “Ned” having to prove himself was grueling. She was surprised that many women had no interest in a soft, vulnerable man.
“My prejudice was that the ideal man is a woman in a man’s body. And I learned, no, that’s really not. There are a lot of women out there who really want a manly man, and they want his stoicism,” she said.
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Amen. Of course, women want manly men, we like the difference of men, and while I empathize with the difficulty of the man’s position to be the initiator, it just is what it is and it goes hand in hand with the other manly qualities – stoicism, testosterone sex drive, and in the type of men I’m attacted to, taciturn, stillness, laconic, a certain shyness – all of these qualities make men very desirable.
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The question is what do men want?