Being the bloodsuckers that they are, they prey on innocent, unsuspecting people and try to find a way to ply their wares. - “Major” Nick Clark
The one small mercy (and believe me, I really had to stretch to find one) of neo-Victorianism is that we haven’t heard much of the myth of the wanton lately. For those who may not even remember it, this is the formerly-universal belief among men that:
…the lust of women is stronger than that of men, and that women thus draw men into sin; the widespread interpretation (though certainly not the original meaning) of the story of the Fall is that Eve’s offering Adam the apple is symbolic of her tempting him into carnality, and to this very day Muslim men pontificate from the pulpit (and on the internet) about the greater lustfulness of women. The Classical Greek philosophers taught that woman was like an animal always in heat, and the mythology of every part of Eurasia is full of temptresses, seductresses, succubae, enchantresses, whores and other wanton women whose entire reason for existence seems to consist of luring men into sex…
The idea generally fell out of favor in the West during the Victorian Era, and though it experienced a brief revival in some circles during the sexual revolution I had thought it largely out of fashion again except among some sex-positive feminists who insist that the ladies are generally just as randy as the gents despite the inconvenient fact that women never seem to want it enough to pay for it, and almost never to behave in any other way that demonstrates the voracious sex drive typical in most men. Yes, there are some individual women whose sex drive is greater than that of some individual men (especially among the beaten-down variety so common in the modern West), but the fact that there are mountains whose peaks are closer to sea level than the bottoms of many valleys does not invalidate the general statement “mountains tend to be higher than valleys”. Yet every once in a while, we see somebody playing fast and loose with cherry-picked statistics and calling it “groundbreaking research”, usually to sell a book:
…Even to the most casual observer of human history, it isn’t news that women’s sexuality has been feared, suppressed and lied about. But What Do Women Want? Adventures in the Science of Female Desire by journalist Daniel Bergner uses groundbreaking sex research to show the ways in which our supposedly enlightened society still has female sexuality backward — completely, utterly, profoundly…gender stereotypes have shaped scientific research and blinded researchers to evidence of female lust and sexual initiation throughout the animal kingdom, including among humans. It reveals how society’s repression of female sexuality has reshaped women’s desires and sex lives. Bergner, and the leading sex researchers he interviews, argue that women’s sexuality is not the rational, civilized and balancing force it’s so often made out to be — that it is base, animalistic and ravenous, everything we’ve told ourselves about male sexuality…In fact, he argues, “one of our most comforting assumptions, soothing perhaps above all to men but clung to by both sexes, that female eros is much better made for monogamy than the male libido, is scarcely more than a fairy tale”…
I totally agree that women’s sexuality can be base and animalistic, that it isn’t all that well-adapted to monogamy, and that a lot of the reason it appears otherwise (and that so many women are functionally asexual) is cultural pressure. But to say that this means that the female sex drive is as ravenous as men’s is to ignore that male sexuality is also shaped and suppressed by cultural pressure, especially from women, and that functionally asexual men are extremely rare. Here’s a comical video showing what the world might look like if women really were as horny as men:
Very few people nowadays believe this nonsense, but there’s a limited form of it which seems to be crawling out of the woodwork again: the notion that while “good” women (Madonnas) are sexually pure, “bad” women (whores) are predatory succubae always on the prowl for “good” men:
…Alabama state Sen. Shadrack McGill…[said] a number of strippers had come to his work [and] even to his home in the middle of the night…his “Facebook was hijacked and women sent me pictures of themselves half-naked”…McGill’s wife, Heather, decided that she had enough and…posted a message to his Facebook page: “I am very blessed to be the wife of a God fearing, hard working, ministry minded, loving father and husband and it is not just my right but my duty to lovingly serve him by protecting him!…We have children that look at our face books [sic] from time to time! Shame on you! You know who you are. Next time everyone will know who you are!! For I will publicly share your name before we ‘unfriend’ you”…
And when we ravenous harlots aren’t stalking “God-fearing” men (to ruin their paladinhood, no doubt) we’re attacking their wives:
…Anna Burgese, the…wife of a wealthy…Philadelphia homebuilder, claims in [a] federal lawsuit that as many as 10 prostitutes pounced on her in the…lobby [of the W hotel in Miami Beach] on Jan. 19. They mistakenly believed that she was encroaching on their turf…Instead of helping Burgese catch the attackers, the suit contends that the “prostitute-friendly’’ hotel put the women in a taxi to facilitate their escape…over the past decade, Miami Beach’s prostitution rings have taken on a more sophisticated and sinister side, involving sex-trafficking and women from Eastern European countries, known as “B-girls,’’ who fleece deep-pocketed tourists…Burgese claims that the assault was unprovoked and that the prostitutes threw her face-first against a stone wall in front of hotel employees. Her husband…fought the women off with his crutches…
How fondly I remember those sinister old times, getting together in huge gangs of “high-priced escorts” to beat up aging debutantes at the W in New Orleans! And sometimes, just for an extra-sophisticated change of pace, we’d all sashay in formation over to the Windsor Court to slash the tires of Rolls-Royces and Ferraris, or perhaps to the Hyatt Regency to ride up and down in the glass elevator, running out at each floor to scrawl obscenities on people’s doors with lipstick and dump room service leftovers into the ornamental pool in the lobby. And every time guests would complain, the “prostitute-friendly” staff would whisk us off in taxicabs with “Born To Be Wild” blaring on the stereo. What carefree days those were, before all these God-fearing enemies of trafficking appeared to beat us off with their crutches and “unfriend” us on Face Books! I swear, it just makes a girl want to join the packed crowd down at the nearest male stripper club to lose herself among all the hundreds of other base, animalistic and ravenous hussies.
