Recent discussions on Substack have prominently featured the bogeyman of feminine shame directed at male sexuality. While women quite evidently do comment negatively on some expressions of male sexuality, and in some cases overstep, I notice a theme of assuming that the natural state of man is unafraid of his own desire, but that everywhere, female moralizing puts him in (unsexy, pitiable) chains. This doesn’t map to my experience, or at least it doesn’t explain the totality of what I observe in men with respect to their feelings on their own sexuality.

Today’s post is speculation, based in that observation: men feel a self-directed, masculine-specific sexual disgust that plausibly has a biological component, rather than being purely sociologically driven.