Free Stand by Your Manhood by Peter Lloyd Page B

sex saunas, whilst Grindr was downloaded a million times long before straight, single colleagues were obsessing over Tinder. Sex can be central to a gay man’s life and, religious cranks aside, he isn’t vilified for it. It’s never considered oppressive or sinister, just hedonistic. Straight men, however, have a very different experience. Yet the only variable between them, to put it crudely, is their partner’s anatomy – meaning male sexuality only becomes ‘bad’ when it involves a woman.
    ‘It’s all about politics,’ says Joe Kurt, expert therapist and sexologist.
    I’m constantly coaching straight guys to be more direct with their partners, like gay men. So many of them feel shame – either because their wives shame them or they’ve got their own self-loathing from society – but, either way, they’ve stopped advocating for their own sexuality. They stop talking. Instead, they secretly watch porn or cheat. These men need to feel more confident about the things they have a sexual interest in, whilst women need to learn that a man’s sexual expression is equally valid.
    Rather than being judged for it, men should expectcuriosity and empathy in the same way their girlfriends do. This should be a dialogue, not a monologue.
    When I relay this to American female porn director Nica Noelle, she agrees. ‘The sense of shame, both private and public, attached to sex is a very complex, multi-layered syndrome that affects both men and women, but male sexuality is certainly viewed as far more negative and dangerous,’ she says. ‘What amazes me is that no one really challenges this view, including men. They’ve become so browbeaten they’re willing to accept almost anything women say about them.’
    For guys at university, this approach is increasingly institutionalised. On the campuses of American colleges, for example, young men are automatically assumed to be a threat if they’re sexually active.
    ‘Reported rapes and sexual assaults reached a high point [on campuses] in the mid-1990s,’ the
Washington Examiner
’s Ashe Schow tells me.
    At the time, women faced an uphill battle to bring their attackers to justice. They were told that if there was no blood, bruises or broken bones then they couldn’t have been raped. This led to a national movement to correct that injustice, but has since evolved into an overcorrection – where accusers are believed outright and the accusedhas to figure out a way to prove them wrong. And, even if they’re exonerated, chances are their lives are still ruined.
    One recent case is Peter Wu, who was expelled from New York’s Vassar College after losing his virginity to a fellow student, whose father is on the staff roll. Court documents describe the incident as ‘clearly consensual activity’ (she sent him a Facebook message the next day saying she ‘had a wondeful time’). Yet, despite being a non-native English speaker, he wasn’t allowed a legal representative to present his defence at the college hearing, which subsequently destroyed his academic career. He’s now suing them for damages.
    Max Fraad-Wolf suffered a similar fate there. He was not allowed to be accompanied by parents or a lawyer when he was randomly summoned before a parallel criminal justice system made up of school officials, who later expelled him for sleeping with a girl – even though he was never formally charged with an offence.
    Sadly, there are countless other examples. Too many to list here.
    ‘Worryingly, I don’t see this trend ending any time soon,’ Ashe adds.
    If modern feminism can succeed in making colleges and universities a de facto court system, why wouldn’t theytake that victory to the population at large? I believe we will soon see a movement to change the definition of rape and sexual assault in the criminal justice system. And, if the college definitions of ‘consent’ are applied to the general public, then any man in the country could find himself accused. I’ve