Perhaps the men in these sexless relationships should analyze if they are capable of sustaining this relationship, considering sex is so important to them and they are not receiving it.
This entire comment does not consider the women's suffering and loss in any capacity due to abuse. Maybe it is the case that a similar complete lack of consideration is present in the perpetrators of abuse.
The suffering of the woman is real. So is the suffering of the man.
It only adds and doesn't subtract. I don't need to reiterate on the suffering of the woman because that is described very well in the article (which i posted!)
You're being insensitive, treating me as a man the way that a black person might get treated in the 1950s south USA. Sexual pleasure is one of the great things about being alive in this world. If that was destroyed for a woman by female circumcision you would see that as a bad thing. If circumstances did the same for a man it is not any different.
A man in a situation like that will get told to "leave" and that is not a good answer for many. For one there are many other kinds of love and a person in that kind of relationship might be able to give and receive all of the other kinds of love except for that.
So many people try "serial monogamy" and it so often ends in tears. In terms of sexuality a man like that might be satisfied by a woman with average sexual responsiveness or even a standard deviation below the mean. That person is easy to find, but be much more difficult to find somebody who has all the other good traits of the current partner.
A man like that might have strong loyalty and also feel that their current partner deserves to be loved in all the ways they are able to receive it even if their partner can't receive it. Their partner shouldn't be rejected and left alone because they were victimized in this past
An obvious answer is polyamory and the women might well be accepting of that but if you were the kid who was bullied in school and then rejected, made invisible, and then suffered years of self-doubt because of somebody else's crime succeeding at polyamory can look like climbing a mountain.
A woman can be very insensitive about this because a woman who wants a sexual relationship, snap their fingers, and get it. Some men who want that can get it easily but most can't. There is a huge focus on a small population of men who are abusive, attractive, rich or some combination, the experience of the vast majority of men is invisible.
This comes off as extremely insensitive and tone deaf to me.
Don't assume that I'm automatically insensitive because I am a male. I was the person who submitted this article!
I wasn't planning to say anything about my own situation when I posted it, I felt embarrassed to do so, but also compelled when I saw other people with a viewpoint like yours write vicious insensitive comments that I felt compelled to speak up about. (I wound up posting to the main thread because the comment was deleted)
There is nothing hypothetical about this scenario, it is one that I am living. I have stuck with my wife through thick and thin and I am completely dedicated and want to grow old with her. There are members of my extended family (who I love and am proud to know and would hate to be separated as much as I would from my wife) who had the same experience and suffered dramatically.
Men are continuously told that we need to open up emotionally (my mother-in-law felt that way about her otherwise upstanding husband) but we're always wary that it is another cruel trap where we get punished for showing emotions.
Some women can be high functioning in every other aspect of their life and be rather well adjusted to being asexual.
In theory a woman could benefit from several years of therapy and hard inner work but it is going be much less fruitful if they are doing it because of somebody else.
A man can be completely dedicated and loving towards a woman who isn't responsive, want to grow old with them, be giving love in many ways and be very willing to give more and very motivated to work towards change but face the reality that anything they do is "pushing on a string"
It's a cruel reality that Aella's sexuality is worth $103,000 a month but that a man's sexuality is worth negative. A man who comes clean in public about their experiences and feelings inevitably attracts insensitive comments and abuse simply because of their gender. It is one of the many double binds that we face that we're told on one hand that we're supposed to open up emotionally but we get consistently punished when we do so.
It doesn't indeed.
Because pain isn't a zero-sum game. At a funeral, the grief of a friend doesn't take anything away from the grief of the widow.
Pretending like one pain cancels another out is counterproductive. Pain causing pain doesn't just stop there, it's nonlinear.
Also suggesting that someone is basically an abuser for mentioning the pain of the families of abused people is more than counterproductive, it's gross.
Although I think the experience of ordinary men is invisible and often systematically erased (such as by people like the one you are replying to) I am not going to say that the paper omits the impact that sexual abuse has on partners because the kind of longitudinal study that paper is doing is stupendously difficult. (Read it and they'll tell you why!)
Anything that hurts one person's mental health has an extended effect on the community. If a sexual abuse victim flakes out at work because of mental health issues that hurts their employer. She might well cause suffering to her female friends. I've also seen that a woman's ability to enjoy pleasure in her own body or with other woman as a lesbian can also be impaired because of sexual abuse.
A study like that can only scratch at the surface of what a crime like that does to society as a whole.
I suppose that I was struck by the above comment mostly because it is so focused on the suffering of abused women's partners as to be jarring in the context of the OP. These sensibilities are my own however, and I should not judge so hastily
I spoke to my wife about this one sleepless night and she said "well, are you really ready to hear about it?"
Conventional therapists do the ordinary thing they do with a high failure rate. So often I see couples who are acting really cute doing the things they were told to do in couples therapy then I come around a few months they are depressed and I can swear I can smell a dead rat somewhere in the apartment. Next time I hear they broke up.
Conventional therapists think that is par for the course. Christian therapists think that means the devil wins and they see it as a personal failure, so they try harder.
I know nothing about the person who you are replying to but I can only image she's part of a throwaway culture were it is normal to abandon people because they aren't meeting your needs at this very moment and I have no idea if she's experienced the kind of deep attachment to another person that is possible, or that a mature person can be deeply frustrated in a situation but also be 100% committed to their family. As much as I've been angry and sad, understanding this situation has only deepened my relationship and increased my commitment even though I am planning to take actions that the Christian therapists would completely disapprove of.
I'm puzzled by this choice of words. Why frame it as men being "victimized" by this? Why assume it's something pathological? I feel like the default "occam's razor" take should be that those who engage in this do it because it's what they want to do. Especially the word "victimizes" is throwing me for a loop here.
One could point to many things unaesthetic about traditional pornography (the "pig face" where the model is heavily made up and scowling... makes me want to slap the person behind the camera) and point to OnlyFans and camgirling as a better product but I think it is a more harmful product because the fantasy that you have a parasocial relationship with the creator is more engaging and more dangerous.
On top of that with the last two years there has been a normalization of video-mediated interactions of all kinds, plus people have not been going out thanks to the pandemic. So I think there has been an explosion in increasingly toxic modern pornography and also the TikTok behavioral sink that has happened so quickly that it hasn't been understood or reckoned with yet.
I think this guy explains it very well
https://www.youtube.com/c/PinnacleOfManTM
particularly see the concept of "simping". I would disagree with most manospherists that you should never, say, buy a woman a drink. (Robert Greene says a lack of generosity is "anti-seductive" and he's right.) Being part of a reverse harem of 1,000s or 10,000s of men is dangerous to your pocketbook, self-respect, stunts your psychosocial development and makes it certain that you are not going to develop real satisfying relationships with women or other men.
Such a man can work really hard to please and love a woman and try to create feelings of safety. They might blame themselves, thinking that it's because of that argument they had this morning, or yesterday, or last week, or two years ago, or the time the bed collapsed when they were having sex 25 years ago. But no, the woman doesn't feel safe because of something that happened 40 years ago that didn't have anything to do with them. The need for safety is a bottomless pit. Maybe the woman sees that the man is trying really hard and fakes a response but it's not real and the man sees that and it never blossoms into real mutual satisfaction.
It' s completely frustrating because the woman has adjusted well to being asexual. Perhaps she could struggle through three years of therapy to attempt to change, but it is unlikely to be effective because she's not doing it for herself. The man, on the other hand, might be willing to plumb the depths of hell or storm the gates of heaven to change things but it's pushing on a string.
(If the man has been traumatized by child bullying and subsequent sexual invisibility, rejection and being shut out from dating in high school they can be re-traumatized continuously by this demonstration that they are unlovable.)
I was reading about how the actor Danny Masterson had drugged and raped women, stealing their sexuality not just from them but from their partners. Thus a single act of abuse affects not just the direct victim but their lovers, their children, and many others in the community.
In the past two years we've seen a normalization of doing things over video and there has been an explosion in things like camgirling and OnlyFans -- many of the performers are people who had their sexuality distorted by abuse and I'm sure than many of the men who become victims of it (paying $1000 for a jar of farts, spending $80 for an Aella video) have themselves been victimized ) or are suffering because their partner or potential partners were abused.