I am writing to express my disappointment at the mental cognitions of Dimitri Diamanti. “Unenlightening?” Certainly. I want to be very clear. I am not angry, and I will not lower myself to petty insults. Mr. Diamanti is entitled to his opinions and that’s fine. But I wish to point out that Mr. Diamanti is writing somewhat like a horse pulls a wagon with blinkers on: He can’t see enough to get a clear view of the situation. Mr. Diamanti’s blinkers is the assumption that men are “frankly mindless” and should only focus on “cultivat[ing] self-control.” I suppose his intentions are good. Self-control is certainly a quality that is generally considered desirable. However, Mr. Diamanti’s error comes with assuming that men are inherently this way and that the “mechanism of heterosexual sex” is the ladies’ job. It is assumptions like this that create a cycle of circumstances in which reckless abandonment is considered a male trait that cannot be contained naturally, and therefore should be generally accepted by everyone involved. My problem is with Mr. Diamanti’s, perhaps unintentional, encouragement of this belief. People have not always believed that men are uncontrollable sexual beings, just as they have not always believed that women are passionless creatures. In fact, we see the most recent cycle of this style of thinking with the rise of the middle-class in the 19th century, although we certainly have come a long way from bourgeois society. It is just as fallacious to attribute traits to a person’s gender as is attributing certain traits to a person because of their race. I simply wish to encourage Mr. Diamanti not to continue to engender this kind of thinking, which invariably hurts society as a whole and only leads to problems.
Lynnsey Plaisance ‘12
Let me just say that your first criticism is a complete mis-understanding of what i said when i was referring to the “mindlessness” of male sexuality. I wasn’t talking about the dogged craze of a man bent of sexual congress where the women need be protected from his loathes some wiles. Some crazy 19th century ideal where man is the constant corrupter of women. In fact if you read the tone of the rest of the article it stands in stark contrast to the tone you assert my work takes. What I was referring to was the often hilariously brief period it takes for a man to achieve an orgasm and how unsatisfying that can be for their partner. The self-control i was espousing was actually centered around the concept of pleasing their partner, not adhering to some kind of arbitrary self-restraint.
As for your claim that we can’t make certain assertions based on gender i would say you are the one with blinded. Men and women are biologically different, we have different brain and body chemistry and therefore respond to sex differently; we have also been socialized to behave differently and respond to stimuli differently. There are nuances in both sexes that sometimes make us inscrutable or incredibly compatible and claiming otherwise is sheer blind stupidity.