With No Intimacy And Sad Penises
A Colombian journalist recounts his sexual traumas. Men lack intimacy with each other. Partners are not our therapists.
A few months ago I was walking around Naples with a friend who suddenly surprised me: “Why don't we men talk about the sex we have or don’t have with our partners?”
Traditionally, male friends tend to share sexual “conquests": we boast about those one-night stands with people with whom we have no long-term affective commitment.
That is, we don't usually talk much about our sex life with our steady partners — besides for the odd reference to hint at how absent or active it is. We tend to be much more grandiloquent about those who are not our partners — narrating the unfolding of an epic night in great detail.
Yes, the classic and conservative conception of the wife (the saint) at home and the shag (the whore) outside.
We men are less likely to share our sexual difficulties or problems, whether they are physical (erection problems, premature ejaculation) or psychological, emotional or relational (not having desire with our partner but with other people, unspeakable desires or fantasies of our partner vis-a-vis another man...).
This is why I was very happy when I came across Memorias de mi pene triste (Memories of my sad penis), a courageous and risky first-person essay by Colombian journalist
, in which he reflects on some traumatic sexual experiences, their consequences, the expectations that limit him — especially as a man — and the high cost of patriarchy for men.About his twisted sexual initiation, Caraballo said: “That was a defining experience in my life. It gave way to my sexual dysfunctions and my anxiety, but also pushed me, more recently, to find another, more conscious way of being a man.”
I found the text so interesting that I contacted Caraballo to tell me about the writing process and why he decided to make it public.
“When I started writing it, I had a block for about six months and didn't know how to move forward,” he told me in a video call from his home in Medellín. “I started having conversations with friends and I realized that for many this is an issue because the way men experience sex is usually unsatisfying.”
—Why?
—This is not necessarily due to physical problems but because men have difficulties to connect and be intimate, to go deeper. The fact that our sex life becomes predictable or unsatisfactory came up in every conversation: the one who can't get it up, the one who gets bored quickly with his partner, the one whose mind goes elsewhere while having sex... The symptoms vary. Some have never had a problem with their erection but are unable to connect emotionally with their partners, or as soon as they connect they get scared shitless and run away, or those who can only have sex without intimacy (something mechanical), or are porn-dependent.
Initially, Caraballo believed that his case was an exception and that his dysfunctions were due to the particularities of his history. As he opened the conversation, he realized that his personal drama was actually a universal problem: “There are many of us who don’t have satisfying sex because we are trapped in fears, anger and systemic expectations,” he wrote.
—So talking to others helped you.
—Of course. When I understood that it wasn’t just my problem, it was easier for me to start writing and telling what had happened to me. One of my intentions is that sexuality stops being predictable and becomes a place of personal exploration in which the same script (erection-penetration-ejaculation) is not repeated all the time — because it usually prevents us from seeing a lot of other possibilities.
Pure performance
In his text, Caraballo quotes the extraordinary U.S. author bell hooks, who in the book The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love, explains the paradox in which so many of us men feel trapped, because we need love, intimacy and the possibility of surrendering and feeling safe while being vulnerable.
In that sense, sex can be healing and liberating. The problem, as Caraballo says, is that no one told us about it in adolescence: we grew up believing that sex is a test, a manifestation of power, and that courage — especially for a heterosexual male — must be demonstrated by sleeping with a woman (or many).
“There is so much pressure to prove through sexuality that one can ‘have’ a woman (or another man), that the main concern is not to connect, not to open up, not to give anything in return: the concern is to demonstrate,” the journalist wrote.
Thus a handful of years passed in Caraballo’s life, “sad” because he couldn’t sleep with the women he wanted to sleep with: “And, of course, as a good macho man, pretending publicly that I had a pyrotechnic sex life.”
“It took many years of therapy and a stable relationship to realize that my sense of self, my self-love, had been a function of whether I had good sex or not. And that what I considered ‘good sex’ was defined by what I had learned as a teenager: erection, penetration, duration and ejaculation. Pure performance,” he wrote.
Confession of an abuse
In addition to being victimizers, men are also victims of the patriarchal system. We suffer the so-called “costs of hegemonic masculinity,” an ideal of man (strong, provider, straight, brave, dominant, successful, powerful, virile) that we will never achieve because, among other things, it is as elusive as it is unattainable. And we suffer because of it.
What we men tend to lose sight of when we exercise self-criticism is that our sufferings are far from isolated: our suffering, in general, co-exists with somebody else’s suffering, or even creates harm towards someone else — usually a woman.
This is why we risk falling into victimhood and self-indulgence (poor me, I am a victim of the system, I did not know what I was doing). The other extreme is self-flagellation (we men are evil).
In Memorias de mi pene triste (Memories of my sad penis), Caraballo recounts a failed sexual encounter in which a friend of his watches the scene hiding in a closet until the girl notices and leaves. What did he and his friend do? “We looked at each other, more embarrassed at having been discovered than at having done what we did,” he wrote.
There is a key fact: the girl never gave her consent to be observed by a third party while having sex. On social networks — among a majority of praise for his text — the journalist received some complaints about this scene:
“The invitation to talk about these issues between men should not only touch on the ways in which you are victims of the impositions of patriarchy [...]. While it is honest and valuable of you to talk about the closet scene, I would have preferred it to be named for what it was: abuse.”
“What is your opinion today about what happened years ago? What happened to the girl? Was there reparation and acknowledgement of the damage? Part of resolving this issue of sexual violence happens by making us uncomfortable, and acknowledging to the person affected that we screwed up.”
To which Caraballo responded: “The scene is purposefully explicit to leave no doubts about what it was: an abuse. But with the text I tried to avoid reducing everything to that duality of victims and victimizers. I believe that healing also needs a nuanced discourse, where the damage we have done is not hidden, but neither do we overlook the complexity. Otherwise, it becomes a circle of judgment and punishment, which I don't see as very transformative.”
In the video call, I raised the issue again. I said that, in cases like this one, we men run the risk of focusing on ourselves but do not pay attention to the consequences of our actions, hence not assuming the full responsibility for the suffering caused.
I know it is a slippery slope and it is not easy, I told you, but I have the impression that something might be missing in his text. Even at the risk of losing literary quality, perhaps it would have been worthwhile to be even more explicit in recognizing the error.
“Yes, it is a point on which I reflected a lot. I think that from the eloquence of the text as a whole it was already clear that we had made a mistake. What could I do now to try to repair that situation that happened a long time ago? I could find a way to contact her and offer my apologies, I never did,” he said.
Conversation between men
Caraballo's text is also a way to make amends. In order to “completely dismantle those macho ideas in which one is educated since one is born a man,” the journalist called on other men to encourage us to talk about these issues among ourselves, convinced that “the therapeutic work of men has to become collective.”
“Intimate friendships between men are very scarce, and this lack of real intimacy — which creates more frustration and loneliness — is something that defines hegemonic masculinity,” Caraballo told me.
In his text he suggested one possible solution:
“That among men we undress and show the wounds, that we understand together how this system has hurt us individually. We know well how we have hurt women, and part of the responsibility of each one of us is to repair what we can repair. But if we really want to heal and begin to shake off the patriarchy, it seems necessary to me to look together at how this system has failed us too and to ask ourselves if we are really willing to continue paying for the illusion of power with loneliness, pain and superficial sex.”
“Important conversation that is pending between men. For us women, ‘it’s up to us’ to act as therapists many times, without being one, or to suffer in silence also without knowing what to do to help them get out of the holes in which the patriarchy has put us all,” wrote a female reader on Instagram.
—Why did you suggest a conversation between men?
—I can't figure this out by myself. It is a systemic issue. I address a personal situation, but most of us men have experienced something similar to what the text addresses. Almost all of us have pretended to be sex machines and we're not (and we get frustrated). There are a lot of masks we put on. This has to be resolved in an exercise between men. I did this to make the conversation happen, and it did: we got together.
Weeks after the text was published, Caraballo organized a virtual men's meeting on Zoom. Seven men gathered, from various contexts and ages — with and without children, polyamorous, gay, hetero.
“Despite the diversity, we found that we shared many things in our way of being men. We realized that the vast majority or all of us find it very difficult to be present in sexual encounters. A part of us is somewhere else and that makes intimacy difficult,” he told me.
—What did you talk about?
—About how difficult intimacy is. We also talked about focusing less on the performance and allowing sexual encounters where there is no erection-penetration-ejaculation arc. What is a sexual encounter without that, we asked ourselves. And there was no answer. We talked about how difficult it is for us to consider other forms of pleasure that have nothing to do with the genital. Someone told us that they have encounters in which there is zero structure: they get naked to dance or talk; or there is penetration but at one point they stop because that’s it, and there is no need to ejaculate.
—What else came up?
—Several of us hetero men said: “I prioritize her pleasure over mine.” This has to be taken with a pinch of salt because it has to do with making the partner have orgasms, which may well be a way of saying: “I can do it, I am the male who will give you pleasure so that you don’t go anywhere else.” Often in the way we approach sexuality, competition between us men takes precedence.
—What is the benefit of opening up and talking?
—The benefit is to feel that we are not alone, and also to have better sex. More men need to ask themselves: do I need this conversation? The text touched many men, because they wrote to me privately to tell me about their experiences. The challenge is to have an open conversation that is therapeutic and liberating. For many of those who attended the Zoom meeting, it was the first time they talked about these issues with someone other than their partner or therapist.
—How did your family take the text?
—(laughs) My dad acted as if I hadn't written anything, and he reads everything I write. But in this case he didn't want to say anything, he was completely mute. It was very significant. On the other hand, my mom was laughing her head off, and happy, because she liked it.
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With love,
Nacho
🙏 Many thanks to Worldcrunch for translating and editing this newsletter.
