”While the feminists and soft men like to kid themselves that they are changing our nature, all they’ve really done is teach men to keep their mouths shut, while our minds still explore exactly the same topics they always have.” – Fairfax reader

”How to explain this to women? There is this thing about men that they cannot completely know. Few people want to believe that there could be a real chasm, a chemically induced difference of sexual drive between the sexes.” - Max Wolf Valerio, The Testosterone Files

I never know quite what to make of Australian sex therapist and professional provocateur Bettina Arndt’s writing on men and sex. Or, for that matter, that certain kind of woman-led-commentary on men and sex more generally. (See also: Vargas-Cooper, Natasha.)

The above quotes aren’t by Arndt, but they are lifted from her latest musings on the subject, published in the Sydney Morning Herald over the weekend.

I don’t disagree with everything Arndt has to say – I too am turned off by the mass hysteria over pornography, sexting and even infidelity (don’t like the latter, but have no interest in seeing it splashed over newspapers and celebrity weeklies, either). But this whole idea that men’s sexuality is not only somehow “different” to women’s, but also darker and dirtier and more repressed (by the evil feminist establishment, natch)? I don’t think I buy it.

That’s because I’m a woman, these writers would say (although, funnily enough, they’re usually women too). And a naive, social constructionist feminist, at that!

But while I don’t deny that Arndt is in touch with a lot of men (Vargas-Cooper, while compelling, didn’t seem to speak to anyone much for her own essay on porn), I also think that, as writers and social researchers, like attracts like. You write about a topic, and then everyone who agrees with you nods their heads and joins your circle. Maybe it’s in the way you frame your questions, or even in the questions you choose to ask. This doesn’t mean that Arndt is wrong, per se, but it does mean that her conclusions are only one piece of the puzzle.

(And as someone who has reviewed her work before, I’d add that there are some internal contradictions there. In What Men Want, for instance, she argues that men have an insatiable need for variety. But she also says that women are more likely to go off sex in long term relationships – not because they don’t want it at all, but because they don’t want it from their husbands.)

Equally interesting is the way in which these writers present themselves as “truth tellers” – the only people brave enough to face up to the dark, seedy underbelly of human sexuality. Again, I’m not convinced. I don’t think we try to bury men’s “lust for life” or rein in our less “savory” desires. I think we love hearing those stories, that there’s something in the way they unsettle that offers a form of comfort. It’s why they’re published so often, and why they do so well on the internet. They play to what we already think we know, and to what we want to be true.

But I’d suggest that this depiction of human sexuality – and in particular, male sexuality – as secretly and innately brute is a symptom of our hang ups about sex, not an act of resistance to it. Why does pleasure have to be dark and dirty? Why should sleeping with lots of people have to mean hating the people you sleep with? There’s no reason, nor any innate link between the two. Many people manage it all the time.

And if (as Arndt, and Dan Savage, who she quotes, suggest) gay male sex is the purest expression of male sexuality? Well, I know gay men who prefer monogamy, too – as well as gay men (and straight men, and women) who would prefer not to be monogamous but whose partners insist on it.

It’s a bit of a “duh, no shit” statement, but when it comes to sex, beware the one size fits all.

Related: You are not your sex drive: the problem with Jong
Ask Rachel: What are your thoughts on SlutWalk?
#Ladypornday: Why can’t we talk about porn?

Elsewhere: Lust for Life (Sydney Morning Herald)
Hard Core (The Atlantic)