From a very early age, certainly long before reaching puberty or understanding the mechanics of human reproduction, I had ample opportunities for observing women’s desire to be attractive to men. It was hard to miss, even for a child. Department stores featured long counters packed with ladies’ cosmetics and perfumes. Women paid good money to have their hair styled in complicated and constantly changing ways. They sought out manicures, earrings, necklaces, bracelets, and countless other forms of adornment. They devoted hours to shopping for clothing, intently asking themselves which dresses would make them look the prettiest. Magazines and books were packed with advice on making themselves appealing to men. If all else failed, you could overhear women discussing the subject with each other. If there was any fault to find in all of this, it was probably that they ought occasionally to turn their minds elsewhere.
Because I was so young when first observing these matters, I did not pay them a lot of attention. I understood they were part of the grown-up world, and found baseball more interesting. But even then I would have thought the fact of women’s desire to be attractive to men roughly as indisputable as “it gets dark at night” or “heavy things tend to fall.” Captain Obvious, call your office.
As I grew older, however, I gradually became aware of a certain need to qualify those first impressions. One reason was an encounter I had in my twenties. I liked and sought out the company of a certain young lady, as normal men often do. We saw each other several times. At pains to make a favorable impression, I kept my hands to myself. Indeed, I was such a gentleman that I was eventually forced to start wondering exactly on what terms I stood with her. Was she considering me as a possible boyfriend or not? There was no decisive evidence in her behavior, and I was starting to get the feeling the situation might continue indefinitely if I failed to put it to some sort of test.
I decided to let her know I found her attractive in the most delicate manner of which I was capable. One day I asked her something like: “Do you know what it was that first made me want to meet you?” I probably expected her to start blushing. Instead, to my surprise, she responded to this gambit by abruptly changing the subject. I thought there must have been some misunderstanding. Still assuming the female desire to be attractive to men was as universal and incontrovertible as the blueness of the sky, I imagined that some alien thought must have flashed through her mind at the instant I spoke, preventing her from catching my drift. So I waited a bit and then made a second attempt. This time an expression of weariness came over her features. She clearly disliked it that I was not going to let her simply avoid such an unpleasant subject altogether. In a very serious tone of voice such as I had not heard from her before, she said to me: “Look, we both know you liked my body.”
I cannot remember what she or I said after that, but any interest I had felt in her dissipated like air from a punctured tire and I never saw her after that day. I felt as if I had stumbled upon a prodigy of nature: a woman who found it objectionable that a man was attracted to her. She spoke as if my natural male inclinations were one of life’s distasteful realities, akin to cleaning out earwax; something that must unfortunately be dealt with, but doesn’t bear thinking about too closely. In short, she was not exactly about to burst out in a chorus of “Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing.”
Why did I react to her words in this way? If my interest had really been in her body, there would have been no reason to discontinue the courtship, because her body did not change. But something made me feel like saying to her, in effect, “Honey, you are welcome to keep that body of yours.” I knew instantly that it was time for Roger to start casting about for a different “woman’s body” to take an interest in.
In reality, when initially charmed by her appearance, my very first concern had been to try to get to know her. If I had just wanted a warm body to rub against my own, I knew there were other women available to me for that specific purpose—dedicated professionals, in fact. So there must have been something else I was hoping to find in her. When she said “you liked my body,” I realized it was not there (whatever it was), and that was the end of that.

You can buy F. Roger Devlin’s Sexual Utopia in Power here.
The philosopher Alexandre Kojève once wrote that the difference between animal sexuality and human eroticism is that whereas the animal merely desires the body of the other animal, the human desires not only the body but also the desire of the other person. This second order desire, or desire-for-desire, is specific to our species. In ordinary language, it means we want to be loved back by those we love. This explains why for many men, rape is not a temptation—even apart from any moral scruples or fear of punishment, sex with an unwilling woman would lack an essential human aspect. It is not even interesting as a fantasy.
Indeed, there may even be such a thing as third order desire. I liked the look of that young woman when I first encountered her and, as Kojève would have put it, I also desired her desire: that is, I hoped she might like me back. But I also desired her to desire my desire. In ordinary language: I expected her to take pleasure in being found attractive. And here, based on all my observations of female behavior since childhood, I did not have too many worries: if there was one thing a man could rely on, I believed, it was that women enjoy being admired. But I found out otherwise.
Decades later, I no longer view that woman as quite the prodigy I first imagined. The late Irish singer Sinéad O’Connor famously began shaving her head at a young age. When interviewers asked her why, she stated frankly that she did not wish to be perceived as pretty. Students of radicalism in late Imperial Russia know how young female socialists were at pains to play down or conceal any beauty nature may have given them to avoid distracting their male comrades from the task of fomenting revolution. And, of course, nun’s habits are designed to help everyone keep their thoughts focused on the world to come.
So there are certainly precedents for women not wanting to attract male admiration. But most such women do not so much try to conceal or destroy their own beauty as berate men for responding to it in the natural and normal way. My young woman dressed stylishly, but when I was attracted to her partly as a result of this, she disliked it. And we have all heard women lamenting over men who “think of them as sex objects.” Some readers may even have previously come across the charmingly feminine sentiment that forms the title of this essay. Yet women tend to be extremely vague about what they might prefer to see draw men to them in place of sexual attraction. The only specific suggestion I ever recall hearing is that men are supposed to take an interest in their “minds.”
Now, I happen to have had a good deal of experience with young women’s minds, and I can state unequivocally that for men’s attention to shift in that direction would not be to women’s advantage. In the best case, those who have been raised well by conscientious parents have had a few good principles inculcated into them. But most girls’ minds simply reflect whatever ideas they believe will make them popular with their peer group, and that is generally whatever happen to be the idées reçus of the society in which they happen to live. Girls are impressionable conformists with a powerful need for social approval, not skeptical mavericks whose bold thinking brings you up short and make you stop to reflect. Interesting ideas are mostly produced by men, often older men who are really not much to look at.
Sufficient time and effort can improve a woman’s mind, but the results are usually not very impressive until long after her physical bloom—if not her childbearing capacity altogether—has vanished. Most young women are far better off relying on their natural charm, provided to them for the specific purpose of deluding some young man into marrying them. It is in their own best interests to accept the world and men as they are and not attempt to try to rely on their minds, magical fairy dust, or whatever else they think ought to motivate men to seek them out apart from what God and nature determined.
None of this means that I am completely unable to sympathize with women’s reservations about the sex instinct. Eroticism combines the lowest and the highest in us, and humans may experience their own animal nature as an embarrassment. Something in us rebels against the observation that we procreate in recognizably the same manner as dogs and cats. The ascetic rejection of human sexuality is in part motivated by this. Early Christian writers enjoyed pointing out the close anatomical proximity of our organs of generation to those of elimination. Augustine agonized over the failure of sexual desire to remain entirely within the control of the will, and speculated that in the absence of original sin humans might have reproduce as mechanically and dispassionately as a potter forming pots on his wheel (which in his view would have represented an improvement). To this day the church speaks of the “immaculate conception,” with an obviously unfavorable reflection upon the way the rest of us were conceived.
Indeed, there have been societies that deliberately inculcated a negative attitude toward sexual intimacy in young women, as if fearful it might not arise spontaneously. Sex would go rigorously unmentioned until shortly before the wedding, and a young bride would lack any clear idea what the marriage relation was. Then, at almost the last possible moment, some older woman would take her aside for a talk that might go something like this: “When you get home from the wedding, there is going to be something your husband will demand from you and you are going to hate it. All women do. But men are different, and it is your religious duty as a wife to submit, however revolting the experience may be to your natural feminine feelings of modesty and decorum,” etc.
This strikes me as next door to insanity, but it is also not entirely unmotivated. Sexual desire is, after all, a powerful force of nature with considerable destructive potential. The motive for prudery is fear. As the critic Irving Babbitt once remarked: “Nowhere is the opposition between pleasure and happiness more visible than in matters of sex.” People who build their lives around the attempt to maximize sexual pleasure usually generate a great deal of unhappiness, much of which accrues to themselves, but much of which also falls to the lot of those unfortunate enough to cross paths with them. These include bastardy, incurable diseases, abandonment, jealous rages, and much else besides.
Those who try to preempt a woman’s natural sexual awakening by associate sex with unpleasant thoughts are attempting in the only way they may know how to keep sex under tight control. The prudes were calling upon the same means as their more radical cousins, the ancient ascetics who rejected human eroticism and procreation altogether. Attempting to convince a young bride that marital intimacy is a duty akin to swallowing bitter medicine rather than an occasion for joy and pleasure might not do the couple’s sex life much good, but it is also likely to make adultery, e.g., slightly less likely. At some unconscious level, the prudes were probably thinking: “What does the personal satisfaction of this couple matter in comparison with the imperative to avert sexual disaster for both them and the wider society?” They were trying, in effect, to turn every human female into a version of that young woman I met in my twenties. One hopes the effort did not always succeed.
We might, then, simply conclude that there is nothing new under the sun, and the phenomenon of women objecting to male attraction is merely a current expression of an extremely ancient and even timeless attitude. But what does appear new is the asymmetry of modern prudery. The ancient ascetics, Christian and otherwise, do not seem to have viewed female lust more favorably than male lust. Today’s women, however, do not reject their own sexuality at all. The same feminist milieus in which women can be heard complaining of the male gaze or being thought of as sex objects also chatter away about “celebrating” female sexuality, usually with the implication that far too much has been made historically of its male counterpart. The gushing fascination with female genitalia expressed in The Vagina Monologues supposedly represents a revolutionary and “empowering” challenge to the patriarchy. Feminists seem no less obsessed with sex than everyone else is today: it is only male sexual desire they find objectionable.
It is easy enough to see where the rejection of male sexual desire combined with the “celebration” of the female version inexorably leads: to lesbianism and sterility. One of the attractions of homosexuality to its votaries is dealing with people whose sexual inclinations are like one’s own. If a man is really out to get the maximum possible amount of hot, dripping sex, where better to go for it than to another man? If a woman feels a distaste for men who “just want her body,” where is she more certain to avoid that issue than in the company of another woman? It is far more difficult for men and women to understand one another, and the voice of nature must be strong to keep homosexuality as (relatively) infrequent as it is.
Most young women who complain about men viewing them “sex objects” are not lesbians, of course. That would require thinking through the logical implications of what they are saying and then learn to behaving consistently with them. It’s easier just to complain.
Besides women who do not wish to be attractive or who blame men for being attracted to them, there is hardly a woman in the world who has not wished at one time or another that men thought less about sex. How many husbands have come home from a hard day at work hopeful for a little love only to be met with a remark like: “Is that all you ever think about?”
Someone once brought to my attention a woman’s personal ad in which she stated outright that she was looking for a man who would not pester her for sex. She didn’t see why there shouldn’t be some affluent chap out there interested in marrying her, taking care of her, and paying all her bills—but who had no libido. Why didn’t she hire herself out as a housekeeper instead? Had she never stopped to consider that any man perusing the ladies’ personal adds is probably interested in finding love? Apparently not.
It is not particularly difficult to explain why men think about sex more than women. The most fundamental reason, of course, is the difference in gamete production which defines male and female in biological terms, i.e., that men are oversupplied with something for which women feel a limited need. But there are other ways of bringing the matter home to the reader. Consider it this way, for example:
Women experience many pleasures during the overall process of procreation. First, they enjoy courtship and weddings. Then they experience the pleasures of intercourse no less than the man (there are those who claim women actually get greater pleasure from the act of coitus, but I will not press this point). Then they enjoy being pregnant, which causes the release of endorphins in the female body, natural painkillers that produce a state of generalized well-being. Most men do not even suspect this, though it should not be surprising, since it is merely a specific instance of the general law that nature makes adaptive behavior reinforcing. Childbirth itself is often painful, but is normally followed by great happiness and a prolonged period of satisfaction nursing the newborn child. Being the father of an infant, while hardly unpleasant, does not provide men with the same sensual, physical sense of intimacy with the child which nursing gives a young mother.
So the overall process of reproduction contains more (and more varied) satisfactions for the woman, and over a much longer period of time. The father’s only essential involvement in the whole process is through an act which may not require more than a few minutes: that is his only biological link with future generations. How could this act not be of particular importance to him?
If this does not make the matter sufficiently clear to the reader, let him consider the beehive. It is a feminist’s dream come true. Not only is it a perfect matriarchy, but nearly all the functions of the hive are carried out by female worker bees. In fact, the males—drones—perform only one useful task: fertilizing the queen. Under these circumstances, might it not be possible to forgive drones for being rather keen on fertilizing queens? If you are a drone, that is pretty much what life is about. Being blasé or indifferent to this function would be neither appropriate for the drone nor beneficial to the hive. The same principle applies in a milder way to the human male. And we are not quite as useless as drones, after all, nor do we want to spend our whole lives in bed. When not fertilizing women, we can often be found building civilizations.
The women who complain about men’s sex instinct might do better to be grateful that husbands are so easy to keep happy. And the old saying about being careful what one wishes for certainly applies, for recent times have thrown up some unusual warning signs. A couple of the most striking come from the Far East. Brith rates as low as 0.68 children per woman have been reported from South Korea, something that would result in a two-thirds decline in the population within a single generation if maintained. From Japan we read of the proliferation of “herbivore men”—unambitious, non-assertive, and uninterested in women or sex. As Ed Dutton has written, North East Asians are more environmentally sensitive than other races; accordingly, any mismatch between modern conditions and human evolutionary history reveals itself first and most strongly in that part of the world.
But just beneath the surface, the same trends are afoot in the West. Both sperm counts and testosterone levels have dropped alarmingly in only the past few years. Both men and women are remaining virgins longer than their parents did. While the older generation continues to wring its hands over what it imagines is universal Dionysian debauchery on college campuses, the reality is that campus sexual activity has been dropping off markedly in recent times. If this indicated a shift to more careful mate selection it might be a positive development, but that does not seem to be the case. Young men and women are simply losing interest in one another. The final result of the sexual revolution may be to kill off sex entirely.
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16 comments
It has become verboten to mention the differing sex drives of men and women. Once upon a time a common TV sitcom trope would be the husband trying to woo his wife with gifts or flattery to get some sex while she would say, “Not tonight” to each increasingly valiant try. But even this seems to have gone away. The last decade or so you see films where the man is not showing interest in sex proposed by a woman who says, “What’s wrong?” What’s wrong is that we are being shown something as common as an eclipse.
Couples of different ages may once have been one type of diplomacy to bring peace, instead of other less holy endeavors. But the demands of feminism have some role in this. Even they are recognizing with regret that they didn’t have the families they dreamed of, and seek some sort of Marxist government type fantasy initiatives to solve a complex problem. What ends up happening is an influx of immigrants to fill in the workforce… South American, Middle Eastern… and they are ironically much more patriarchal.
In a fictional scenario, I’d be tempted to ask the Martians to tinker with white female Earthlings’ DNA to make them a little less difficult, though that might have untoward consequences. But would the situation likely be much worse than it is now?
Persians had a solution to the issue of sexuality before Islam (and consequently monogamy) was forced upon them by the Bedouin Arabs. Sources indicate that Persians were actively pursuing or engaging in what may be coined “strict communism” – in that coitus was free to indulge in by anyone and with whomever you wanted. All you had to do was to place your bow or arrow, or some other object or belonging, outside the house of your mistress/love to display your interest. Meanwhile everyone was made aware of the fact that someone is visiting someone else because his bow was visible outside her house. At times and places it was even forbidden for males to have sole right to a female. In such cases others would forcefully give the female to another male who wanted her, so that she could be shared.
People in the rural parts of Persia were rejecting the ways of the Arabs and held on to their own traditions even for some time after the invasion of Islam. Some of those traditions have lived on to this day. I strongly recommend the history book by the late professor Crone for more insight into the ancient culture and traditions of the Persians.
I looked into what Persia was like during the era Crone focuses on, and it honestly sounds like a dying civilization. Their morals were very different when they were strong.
Ancient Greeks said that ancient Persians were mostly monogamous:
https://www.biblioiranica.info/polygamy-in-greek-views-of-persians/
Wealthy men were polygamous:
Families were patriarchal, polygamy and concubines existed; marriage with close relatives even brothers and sisters was practiced.
Source: https://www.iranchamber.com/history/articles/women_in_ancient_persia.php
They would sometimes kill women who engaged in adultery:
It was also possible for a husband to divorce his wife because of her extramarital sexual activity, although in one series of marriage contracts it was stipulated that adultery would result in the death penalty for the wife (for references, see Roth, pp. 197 ff.). In the ancient Near East a man’s extramarital sexual activity was not considered an offense against his wife (Roth, p. 186 n. 1). From Achaemenid Babylonia there is no documentary evidence that a wife was entitled to divorce her husband.
Source: https://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/divorce#pt1
[Note: I am not advocating killing adulterers, just pointing out that they had sexual values when they were expanding and became libertines during the time they were conquered and weak].
Quite the contrary, in early Islamic Iran men were fighting and dying for their ancient civilisation, which is a great value in and of itself. These fightings were prolonged in the rural parts. But civilisations don’t just “die” or cease to exist as if they were static, rather they change over time because they are malleable. It is us humans who create and alter it with our minds, e.g. Persians altered Islam to a Shia version which is partly influenced by Zoroastrianism.
I read through your second source and found out that the writer is focusing on the norms of royal families for the most part. There was a significant difference between aristocratic royal families and ordinary people or peasants. I am sure that rules and norms regarding sexuality were different at different times and places in Persia, but “strict communism” played a significant role in it, albeit with adaptations.
Lots of Iranians are ashamed of this historical fact (many are not even aware of it) and try to circumvent it, but they are looking at it subjectively with the contemporary Islamic gaze. Certainly the regime feels that way and are trying hard to cover, disguise, obviate or reject it altogether.
…I am sure that rules and norms regarding sexuality were different at different times and places in Persia, but “strict communism” played a significant role in it, albeit with adaptations.
I agree, but I also think there is a reason this behavior preceded their fall to the Arab invaders.
JD Unwin did some excellent research documenting the pattern of civilizations abandoning sexual restraint and then being conquered:
https://www.kirkdurston.com/blog/unwin
My best guess is that the original Persians who arrived in Iran circa 1,000 BC had similar sexual morals to other Indo-Europeans in the region (the Hittites of that era were monogamous: https://www.bestturkeytour.com/hittites-and-the-hittite-empire/#Marriage_in_Hittites). The Persians then mixed with the locals and the population slowly abandoned the sexual practices it once had. These people were then conquered by a warrior tribe with a strong binding myth (Arab Moslems).
As far as I can tell, the historical pattern of race-mixing -> morals change -> civilization begins to weaken -> get conquered by stronger nation… is very hard to overcome.
That doesn’t mean we need to be prudes, but I definitely think we need to promote certain things as ideal.
Too much focus on sexuality leads to obsessions and eventually to pseudoscience. In the end we are all primates: you don’t see an alpha chimpanzee or baboon and his colony fall to the nearby colony (they are brutal in such scenarios) due to too much mating. It simply makes no sense.
The main reason behind the fall of the Persians to the Arab invaders was that the Persian army was worn-out and exhausted after just having fought on several other fronts. Another reason was that Islam sounded convincing to some members of society. Yet another reason was treason.
The reason women’s libido has to be discouraged and downplayed, is that the female unleashed leads to the destruction of the family which leads to the destruction of the society. Men generally aren’t fond of raising another man’s child, or of supporting a woman who spends time with other men, or who has spent a lot of time in other men’s arms. It was one of the reasons your grandpa had a shotgun and was willing to use it to keep the rakes away and to persuade a suitor to marry.
Men generally aren’t fond of raising another man’s child
Could’ve fooled me. I see countless men marrying women with children. And no, they aren’t all pedophiles looking to get their hands on the woman’s female offspring.
There used to be some stigma attached to marrying a woman with children, especially when you have had none of your own, but that sure seems to have changed. I don’t like to see this, though. It somehow has “cornuto” written all over it.
“The women who complain about men’s sex instinct might do better to be grateful that husbands are so easy to keep happy.” A hundred times yes! Just do this thing and I’m in a good mood and treating you well all day. Whereas there are sixty seven things I’m supposed to do a certain way to maintain good relations during the day. When people say women are expensive, this is one of the main reasons they say it.
Thank you for a very good article. These are probably the best articles about sex in the postmodern world and the female sexuality and mind that I have read.
I very much appreciate this article, I think it addresses many questions that I find important and that I find too little discussed. E.g. yes, the question: do women even desire sex; does a man only want her body or is it different / more; could this all be different (or is it inherent).
Are there answers? Because IMO men spend very, very much time pondering over such questions. If we had answers, it would save us a huge amount of resources ! (there was a joke pointing out how many miles are driven by men only in search of women… 😉 )
This is an insanely complex issue. The variables effectively are: what do boomer/zoomer males/females have/want? It’s a total mess – after all, even such basic things as the female expiration date no longer apply (boomer females turned unmarriageable at 30, but now 50 year old milfs can get a hag-maxxing 20 yo stud due to the SMV of pussy skyrocketing for non-chads (apologies for the technical jargon)).
Hell, as an incel, I’ve been exposed to a total inversion of the above trope – while nobody sensible contests the supremacy of male libido, the easy access to sex has turned zoomer females into quite sexual beings, whereas, as the reverse meme goes, it is the modern male who is pining for a wholesome, suprasexual relationship.
Feel free to have a look at these three different articles, too.
https://zinnia01.substack.com/p/a-partial-explanation-of-zoomer-girl
https://mystyvis.substack.com/p/the-primary-obstacle-to-sex-is-female
https://blog.reaction.la/culture/how-to-restore-a-reproductively-successful-society/
Overall, it’s not too surprising that females both covet and are oppressed by their own beauty. It’s power, and power corrupts, duh. The easiest way is not exactly the one to bring lasting happiness. Players ruin their own games if not constrained by rules and regulations.
As to the idea that women are stupid – in my limited experience, the ones on the suicide forum have been much more helpful than most of my interactions with males – although granted, the selection pressure might have been massive in this case for higher IQ, empathy and willingness to explore one another’s ideas.
Suicide Forum??
I hope things get better for you. Your life is worthwhile.
In a perfect world every man would have two women — at least — for this reason.
I am interested in women with cultivated minds, but too many of them fill their minds full of obsessive fascination with celebrities and passionate belief in astrology.
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