Sexuell makt förbises trots att det är en essentiell del i jämställdhet och feminism.

Additionally, the authors talk about male desire as “a solitary affair.” That is, the single-minded pursuit of sexual arousal can exist totally independent of a relationship. “Getting off” as such has precious little to do with emotional intimacy. A man can sit alone, half-mesmerized before his computer screen, as he intently clicks on images and videos in his hunt for what will immediately ignite his libido.

Unlike his female counterpart, he gives little or no thought to actually sharing his erotic predilections or experiences with friends. And searching for stimuli that will engender or enhance sexual excitement (and ultimately create a most pleasurable dopamine release) is quite apart from any tender feelings, or craving for a genuinely intimate human attachment. Literally—and symbolically—it’s masturbatory: sex for one. When in the next post I take up female sexual desire, I’ll show how women are far less turned on by erotic images than by particular kinds of relationships (as they’re typically dramatized, or exaggerated, in romance novels). Such fictive relationships can inflame their imagination with a strange sort of romanticism—however outrageous or hazardous their fantasies might be (at its extreme, think blood-sucking, yet love-stricken, vampires).

To the authors, Fudd is “solitary, quick to arouse, goal-targeted, driven to hunt . . . and a little foolish” (p. 61). In other words, two-dimensional: the very emblem of a man whose “trigger-happy” brain forever resides between his legs.

And the way the male sexual brain is constituted (as long, that is, as testosterone levels remain sufficiently high, or one’s personal, non-sexual ideals are suspended), the pursuit of sexual stimulation remains undiscouraged and unfaltering. One might almost say, indomitable.