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In locker rooms and on playgrounds across the country, men are taught that the goal of every encounter with women is to score. Men are supposed to be ever ready for sex, constantly seeking sex, and constantly seeking to escalate every encounter so that intercourse will result, since, as once of my students once noted, ‘It doesn’t count unless you put it in.’

[…] To rein in this constructed male ‘appetite,’ women have been assigned the role of asexual gatekeeper; women decide metaphorically and literally, who enters the desired garden of earthly delights, and who doesn’t. Women’s sexual agency, women’s sense of entitlement to desire, is drowned out by the incessant humming of male desire, propelling him ever forward. A man’s job is to wear down her resistance. One fraternity at a college I was lecturing at last year offered seminars to pledges on dating etiquette that appropriate the book of business advice called Getting to Yes.

Sometimes that hum can be so loud that it drowns out the actual voice of the real live woman that he’s with. men suffer from socialized deafness, a hearing impairment that strikes only when women say ‘no.’

Michael S. Kimmel, “Clarence, William, Iron Mike, Tailhook, Senator Packwood, Spur Posse, Magic…And Us” (via croatoan)