Sex, Sexuality and Men

By Kevin Murphy M.Sc.,
Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist,
Dublin, Ireland.

An otherwise healthy heterosexual man who finds himself unable to speak to women in social situations is more than likely going to consider himself deficient in some way. Equally, but perhaps even more so, an otherwise healthy heterosexual man who cannot perform sexually with a woman he finds attractive is going to consider himself deficient to the point of being abnormal.
Often these types of inability are allowed to knit themselves into the fabric of someone's life before they decide to do anything about it. And by the time they do decide to get help they can often be so panicked by it, and so exhausted from years of covering it up and trying to ‘think out’ a solution, that they approach therapy in an emergency state of mind. They want it fixed immediately and their eyes are so firmly fixed on the solution that they can’t concentrate on the cure.
But the cure, if it can be called such, is as much in the approach as it is in the method. It is easier to explain this notion if we first consider how men themselves conceptualise and verbalise the problem they believe they are trying to fix.
When a man presents in therapy with a proven inability to speak to women socially, he usually imagines it is simply a communication problem. Given the right lines, the right moves, the right tips from someone like Will Smith in the 2005 movie Hitch, he can perform as good as the next man. Unfortunately, the imaginary ‘next man’ always seems to perform better than he does and the more attractive the woman the less able he is to interact at any meaningful level.
These men also usually believe that they allowed themselves get out of the habit of speaking socially to women and so the skill was simply lost. They were too busy building a career, they lived in a quiet part of the world, they had a small circle of friends, or they simply never noticed it until recently. Whatever the reason, it now represents an unavoidable obstacle to their enjoyment of life and they want it removed.
By the same token, but in a qualitatively different way, the inability to perform sexually with a woman is also a burden and an obstacle. In this case, however, it is impossible for the man to claim, whatever about his partner, that it was something he failed to notice.
Men who suffer from this will generally have fewer excuses to tell themselves while having a greater number of excuses for their partners. Some men employ a strategy of dating a succession of different women so that failure to perform can continually be presented as being a ‘first time’ occurrence. Those with steady partners can often obfuscate around physical tiredness, stress, or direct their sexual activity to non-penetrative sex. Plus, men also have the option now of the medical route with prescription drugs to help them overcome the problem.
It might seem as if they are two vastly differently conditions, being unable to speak and being unable to perform sexually. And indeed in one sense they are. Often men who are unable to perform sexually are well capable of introducing themselves and speaking to women they have never met before. And, alternatively, men who are unable to speak to women socially are often quite capable of performing sexually. They are not necessarily inter-related to the extent that one follows the other.
But they are related in one sense: they are the manifestation of a man’s inability to represent himself as a man before a woman, in one case verbally and in the other sexually.
From a psychoanalytic perspective, the key question is ‘why is it before a woman that the man ‘fails’ ? Particularly when you consider that men who present with these problems are usually incredibly accomplished in many other areas of their lives.
As mentioned earlier, where there is no evidence of physical or intellectual disability, the popular understanding of an inability to speak is shyness, or lack of practise, or lack of confidence. Around an inability to perform sexually, you will hear the same reasons being trotted out.
But psychoanalytically the roots of these conditions are found in the very nature of the relationship between the man as a sexual being (in this case heterosexual) and the woman whom he encounters as an anxiety-inducing object (in the broadest sense of that latter term).
While we may have shifted the ground somewhat away from notions that most people will be familiar with, we are also shifting it away from notions that tend to stigmatise these conditions, namely that they are due to some inherently ‘unmanly’ features; far from it. We are are now in the realm of an inability to permit pleasure.
The relationship between the adult man and woman, in the pre-sexual or social phase and in the sexual phase itself, is for men a repetition of their earliest experiences of male-female encounters. For practically all of us, the first female figure in our lives is our mother and the first model of a relationship is between our parents or primary care givers.
After that we are usually playing out our own version, positively or negatively, of what we have learned as measured against the template of those experiences. This is not the same as saying men seek their mothers. That is far too simplistic. Psychoanalytic theory says two broad things: firstly that each individual has a particular set of experiences in this regard and so emerges unique and different to everyone else. There are no generalities in terms of outcome that apply.
Secondly, men in particular can often find themselves unable to perform verbally or sexually because they loved their mothers too much (or were loved too much by them), because their father figures were too ineffective often in spite of appearing strong and because conflicting questions arose at an early age around the issue of sexuality for them.
Their subsequent experiences of relationships from the earliest times were characterised by guilt, anxiousness, uncertainty, dependence and incomplete emotional satisfaction. And as you can see, in this position there is no possibility of pleasure.
But our earliest sense of interpersonal pleasure comes from the experience of loving and being loved. We love in order to ensure that we are loved in return. The experience of being loved in return can unwittingly turn into an overwhelming experience. In the same way that loving a primary carer too much or inappropriately can give rise to unconscious guilt, being loved too much in return can overwhelm and cause anxiety.
Both guilt and anxiety are the things that close us down as adults when we attempt to reach across the sexual divide either verbally or physically.
Finding our particular place in this complicated tapestry is the business of psychoanalysis. It is not a quick cure but it is one that offers rich rewards for those who approach it with patience and commitment. Like the newest theories around the concept of ‘mindfulness', it is best suited for those who focus on each step of the journey rather than remain fixed on the ultimate destination.