Men Are Relational

Women are visual; women are relational.  Men are visual; men are relational.  These truths about sexuality are easy to verify, but the first and fourth statements are very often denied by those of a conservative mindset--and inconsistently affirmed by many liberals.  Centuries of social conditioning have embedded arbitrary norms into Western culture so deeply that even today men might still feel like there is something wrong with them simply for yearning for deep, mutual emotional vulnerability with their friends of either gender and their significant others.  Such desires are considered normal when expressed by women, but men are socially pressured to pretend like they cannot relate to them at all.

The ramifications for how sexuality is perceived are extensive.  Since women are typically treated as asexuals or demisexuals, their own sexual needs and capacity for sexual assault ignored or denied entirely, but men are expected or even encouraged to bond with their spouses on a mostly physical level.  According to the proponents of these sexist ideas, relational factors are almost never responsible for sexual arousal on the part of men, and men's sexual attraction to certain women (most men are not attracted to all women by any means) is not triggered or affected by relational closeness in any significant way.  This is just one of many assumptions some people make about men simply because they are men.

As reason and honest experiences reveal, many men who are capable of experiencing sexual attraction, if not all of them, would experience a deeper attraction to their girlfriends or wives if they were connected with them on a holistic emotional level!  Men are no less social than women are, just as women are no less visual than men are.  Any disparities are between individuals only, and even then the disparities usually have more to do with social conditioning than individual traits.  Human behavior always reduces down to one or the other rather than to gender.  Repeatedly being told that men lack complex or intense emotions other than anger and sexual feelings that have nothing to do with relational attachment can drive many men to withhold their true emotions, perhaps to avoid misunderstandings or unjust mockery.

Women are not hyperemotional beings that crave or require relational dependence upon men and have little to no interest in the appearance of the male body, and men are not hypervisual beings that have no genuine concern for knowing the particular women they are sexually attracted to in a very emotionally intimate way.  Men are capable of far more relational attachments than stereotypes about male emotions and sexuality have ever hinted at.  It is the diminishing but still-present influence of patriarchal ideas that has led Western culture as a whole to regard men as simplistic, emotionally shallow beings that never experience any kind of sexual attraction other than a visual or physical kind.