When I Look At You My Heart Goes Pittypat

Colleges everywhere are wrestling with the etiquette of dating so that the partners, if they wish, may move onto sexual intercourse totally consensually.  Advice columns still have women writing in to say that their male colleagues make suggestive sexually charged observations on their physical appearance loudly and impertinently.  On a more serious level I have listened to presentations two years in a row now of women who run an agency to protect young female children at risk from enforced prostitution on the streets and in the massage parlors of Sarasota.  Through it all I marvel at the intensity of male sexual desire, not that I don't know it myself, from once having been a young virile fellow, but somehow when you gather these facts together from everywhere the thought becomes what is normal what is not.  In my own experience males almost universally are aroused by photos of sexually attractive women--many men need images in order to masturbate with maximum pleasure--and I think less from my experience and more from hearsay that the same would be said of images of sexual intercourse, and that goes for internet video representations.  I know that thirty years ago the owner of a dvd store in my upper class seriously academic neighborhood told me that the most profitable rentals were for porn to men, night after night after night, and I began to notice the heavy traffic of single men along about eight o'clock in the evening. They say internet porn is the most heavily trafficked area of the web. Women complain that males hit on them as they are out walking, males complain that women wear blouses without brassieres and low decolletage, women retort "it's my body, it's my right."  Women cannot sense the extraordinary surge in desire that accompanies a sudden glimpse of breast, inner thigh whatever, or in the case of the gay male, the sudden revelation of a thick well formed penis in the next urinal or the beautiful thighs peeking out of tennis shorts of the guy sitting nearby waiting for the court.  That's just part of being male.  Gay males are so used to repressing the feelings, knowing that they will be beaten or imprisoned--well, used to be true--if they act on that sudden surge of desire that they are at an advantage to the straight male who nowadays must see what he thinks are invitations everywhere one turns.  Ironically enough as I was listening to the presentations about the horrific conditions and threats that young girls face in the Sarasota area from predator males from would be pimps to active johns, I kept thinking that maybe the Muslim male apologists for the imposition of the veil were right: women need to be protected from male gazes.  And yet the challenge in our society is to remain open and free, and at the same to acknowledge that male sexual desire is a given in most every encounter, but manage to get males comfortable with repressing it, for decency's sake--their own among other things-- and for a woman's sense of security.   The first thing needs to be a more open acknowledgement that sexual desire is what fuels males most of their waking time.