Men Behaving Boldly

On the week's numerous sex scandals

It’s been a week. Of course, these days, it’s been a week every week. Thankfully, almost none of the headlines of the week involved Trump (save one measly assassination attempt), but they certainly featured plenty of stories of men behaving badly. We had Diddy and North Carolina gubernatorial candidate Mark Robinson and Matt Gaetz and Dave Grohl and RFK Jr. bragging to somebody about the “demure” nudes he had on his phone sent to him by the star journalist, Olivia Nuzzi, with whom he had been having a sexting affair. That affair has now become public because of RFK’s indiscretion which will probably cost Nuzzi her job and, certainly, her reputation.

Men and sex are a potent combination. Maybe the most potent. I don’t know why that is, other than the biological imperative programmed into us by a cruel God who appears to have loves freak-offs more than He loves his own creations. Having never been a woman, I don’t understand the female libido in the same way, but I certainly understand the contours of male lust. Honestly, the whole reason I became an actor - as I wrote in an earlier essay this week - is because I had a crush on a girl who was in the summer camp play and I wanted to be close to her. I was nine.

(By the way, that was the first summer I heard the expression “blow job,” as in the girl’s best friend saying the girl wanted to “give me a blow job.”

“Do you know what that is?” she asked me.

“Yeah, it’s when a girl blows in your ear.”

She seemed satisfied with that answer because I don’t she knew what it was, either. And, just to alleviate any queasiness you might have about the matter, we only kissed that summer, and only with our lips closed.)

I suspect that a lot of male desire isn’t about sex at all. Well, I shouldn’t say at all because it’s certainly somewhat about sex. But I’m guessing that, for a lot of us, the desire to be loved physically is really about the desire to be loved deeply. They’re obviously very different things, but the differences for many men might be indistinguishable because, for too many of us, that desire to be loved manifests sexually for the same reason we have such a hard time expressing ourselves verbally. We don’t have the emotional vocabulary. We don’t know how to wrestle our complicated and nuanced inner selves into intelligible form and so what comes out are crude approximations of our actual feelings: anger, withdrawal, lust.

“What was I supposed to do? I mean, look at her!”=

Lust gives us the illusion of clarity. It gives us something tangible to work towards. We can fixate on lust and, in fixating on that one powerful feeling, we can set aside all of our other, more uncomfortable feelings of inadequacy, sadness, helplessness, and loss.

When we are lustful, we may not be any happier, but we don’t need to be because we’re focused. Think about all the guys who lose themselves in work or hobbies or some meaningless task at hand. No wonder so many of us turn to sex as a way to prove our worth and, yes, our manhood.

Men have been taught that the highest expression of our manhood is not in procreation, but in promiscuity. But talk to any man (or woman, for that matter) about promiscuity’s effects and you won’t generally hear them talk about how happy it makes them. Instead, you’ll hear narratives of loneliness, depression, emptiness. Not because they don’t enjoy the sex – they wouldn’t keep having sex if they didn’t enjoy it – but because it wasn’t the sex they were seeking in the first place. It was intimacy.

(I recommend Peggy Ornstein’s Boys & Sex for a deeper dive into the way young men actually feel about sex.)

We don’t talk about intimacy very much in the culture. We should. Sex can be a nice stand-in for intimacy, but it is not the same thing. Intimacy is vulnerability and acceptance. When we strip ourselves bare emotionally, when we present ourselves to another in our rawest form and accept another in the same way, that’s intimacy.

The most intimate relationships I have with anybody are with my children. I accept them for who they are, no matter who they are. I love them with as much capacity as I have to love. Nor do I need their love in return, although, thankfully, I believe they also love me. I was there when they were born, I’ve cleaned shit off their bottoms, I’ve cared for them when they were sick and sad and furious at the world. There’s nothing they could do that would cause me to abandon my love for them. That’s certainly an intimate relationship, but it’s also not necessarily the true gauge of adult intimacy because it’s predicated on something more fundamental than a conscious decision to love somebody.

The intimacy I share with my wife is, obviously, categorically different than that which I share with my children. Any spousal relationship is going to be more fraught because it’s an intimacy of peers. Maybe that’s a truer test of intimacy, I don’t know, but our relationship is intimate in the way of two adults who chose to bind themselves together with the hope that our sum would be greater than our parts. It doesn’t always work. Sometimes it falls apart altogether, but spousal intimacy is also trusting that the faults we both so readily see in each other are neither insurmountable nor even undesirable. Our flaws are, in some deeper sense, our true selves. The raw nerve endings we hide from the rest of the world tend to announce themselves with great fanfare behind the front doors of our homes.

Intimacy isn’t necessarily radical honesty. There are things Martha doesn’t know about me and things, I suspect, I will never know about her. I don’t think those things matter very much. What matters isn’t radical honesty, but acceptance. To really accept somebody is less a decision, and more of a process. It’s also a matter of faith. It’s a faith that the person to whom I have dedicated so much of myself will continue to love me even after she gets to know me, and I her. It’s also a faith that, as we change through time, that intimacy will survive. Obviously, it does not always. Intimacy crumbles for various reasons and relationships are lost. On the other hand, many lifelong relationships, I suspect, have never known intimacy at all.

The tragedy with men is that so many of us are incapable of intimacy because we never learn enough about ourselves be capable of intimacy. Instead, we bumble along with stiff upper lips, as well as stiff other parts. We allow our libidos to control us because we have been trained that our dicks are more important than our hearts. We seek sex because sex replicates intimacy without necessarily being intimate. And when that proves unsatisfying, we think the solution lies in more sex, or better sex, or freakier sex. And then we turn around and somehow we’ve accumulated a thousand bottles of baby oil and a thousand bottles of lube.

Don’t get me wrong. I have no problem with one-night stands or casual sex or throwing on an animal costume and getting your furry on. Sex can be great fun. But just like you don’t go to an amusement park for enlightenment, I don’t think you should go to sex for true intimacy. Or, at least, that shouldn’t be your first stop.We act out because so few of us know how to look within. I’m not saying I’ve got it figured out. Far from it. I’m only saying that I remember being 23 years old and waking up with a woman next to me and wanting only for her to be gone. Not because I disliked her, but because, in that moment, I disliked myself.

I hope anybody who committed a crime gets punished for it, and I hope those who did not but find their relationships ruined make peace with themselves and the people they’ve hurt. I don’t expect men and women to stop sleeping around, nor do I even necessarily think they should. Intimacy comes in many shapes and sizes. It can accommodate many forms. I just want people – especially men – to at least understand what they want before they throw away what they have.