You might find it hot

Masc Off is our week dedicated to expressions of masculinity as a quality. Has there ever been a better time to ask the big questions? Like: What, exactly, is a man? What was masculinity, and what could it become? In this series, our contributors pull apart the tenuously constructed structure of masculinity to unearth what lies beneath the masc. 

A 17th-century merchant, drinking with new friends in an unfamiliar city, would have been asked perhaps if he was married, certainly what his religion was, and what country he was born in. These days the question of who you sleep with, how often, and how you met them seems far more salient when getting to know a new acquaintance at a bar. Where once being a Dutch Protestant was an unchangeable and essential fact about who someone was, now the fact that someone is bisexual and prefers brunettes seems more integral to their character.

Both orientations are, of course, probably the result of chance and likely transitory. We live in a time in which the way we self-define has become increasingly centered around our identity and sexual preferences, which twist and change over the course of our lives and love affairs. What might seem defining at one point in our lives might one day be outgrown or transformed.

We have fallen collectively under the delusion that sexuality is innate and unmodifiable. It is a technology that drives us, and yet it is closed to us—a hermetically sealed machine from an earlier time (our Freudian childhoods) without dials or buttons, that hums away and cannot be opened up or interfered with. When our tastes do change, this is attributed to an act of God that places us somehow in bed with a person with whom we could never have previously imagined intimacy. This moment of deus ex vino is usually recounted with a gleeful shaking of the head at the great mystery that is ourselves. Apart from these eruptions of alcoholic revelation which can set us on a new path, we continue in the same maze of funhouse mirrors, chasing infinite variations of the same essential forms.

When I was a child, my parents told me that you got an erection when you were looking at the woman you were meant to marry. For years after, I thought my pants contained a kind of magic compass leading me through the world to the perfect mate. I would stare out of the car window on the way home from school, attentive, thinking, “Not her, not her, not her.” I thought my sexuality was a secret inside me, like a Kinder egg toy, that I would only get to open when I came across the magically, exactly-right face. My obsession with King Arthur and stories of knights falling in love with the voice of an unseen lady locked in a tower only added to my reverent sense that eroticism lay in searching for and finding your partner rather than anything that might happen afterward. This focus on the pursuit of the perfect lover, and thinking of it as a pursuit, means that the same basic ideas about what we are attracted to remain unquestioned. 

It is only when we look back and try to construct the narrative of our sexual experiences that we begin to find apparent patterns and from these decide who we are. I had a ten-year run of only dating women with fringes that I tried to explain in many different ways. I like high foreheads, I like shy women, I like girls who watched too much Zooey Deschanel. All those explanations rang true until someone, crushingly, pointed out that the woman who ran my after-nursery club had been a beautiful 20 year old with a fringe. That broke the spell. The understandings, when they fit, seem so unromantic that they cease to have the same alluring power. The mystery is as flattering as it is erotic. The rote explanation is not. To be explained feels embarrassingly close to being caught and no one wants to be summed up pithily by their friends and enemies. 

If you know you like posh girls and you only like posh girls then the pursuit of an ideal can be disappointing when it meets reality. I have an ongoing argument with a friend who is always breaking things off with people he sees before he sleeps with them. “But how can you know?” I always ask, “You’re not giving them the chance to surprise you.” Somehow the vision of the perfect woman never survives encountering the real-life woman he’s talking to in a bar. Most people prefer talking about sex to having it and, without new data, their understanding of who and what they like becomes ever smaller as time goes by. They let what they think they find erotic define what they do find erotic and what they think is erotic is only based on what they have found erotic in the past. It’s like someone who has grown up in rural Sweden being certain that they are exclusively attracted to 6-foot-5 blond farmers’ sons and bemoaning their enforced celibacy now that they live in Naples. 

When I lived in England I seemed only to date vituperative and very funny chain-smokers with longer legs than me. When I moved south I found I was dating tiny, Venus-shaped girls who could bellow their emotions out in the street like fruit sellers. Accordingly, what I watched online and the paintings and writing I was drawn to changed. In England I loved novels about doomed, almost immobile states of stifled attraction, like In the Mood for Love, The Sun Also Rises, and especially the cruel and hopeless books like Hangover Square. In the south, I read the diaries of Anaïs Nin; I loved the Gustave Moreau painting of a minute, voluptuous sphinx raking Oedipus’s chest with her clawed paws. English affections of gloomy near-impotence got short shrift under the August sun. I found that amour courtois (courtly love) was an insult that French women use to goad English men who aren’t being forward enough. A long walk in which no one touches but repressed sexual tension bubbles beneath the surface was just seen as a waste of everybody’s time. 

So we can remake our world, and do, over and over again. We shouldn’t “take the world as we find it” but push forward out of the maze of mirrors to find new erotics and new seductions. Go to new bars, watch different kinds of porn, and change your preferences on all your dating apps. There are so many different kinds of erotics out there beyond what we are told is normal, or “for us,” or desirable. I always think of that bloodthirsty medieval Inquisitor who said, “Kill them all, God will know his own.” You should sleep with everyone and anyone you feel chemistry with, and identity should be constructed out of experience rather than assumption. Our imaginations always have limits that reality refuses to obey.