Nadia Bokody: Terrifying reason some men love sex

Nadia Bokody proposes a controversial theory as to why a lot of guys appear to be driven by sex.

Why are men so angry?

It’s a question that’s plagued me since I first started writing this column.

Not just because my work seems to trigger a very specific (and often frightening) venom from male readers, but because men’s anger is arguably one of the greatest unaddressed issues we have as a culture, and it has real and devastating consequences.

When we talk about gun violence, for example, rarely do we acknowledge its gendered nature – even though none of the 606 mass shootings carried out in the US so far this year were perpetrated by women.

The latest ABS figures confirm almost all sexual assault offenders – 97 per cent – are men, too. It’s also men who commit at least 90 per cent of homicides worldwide (according to data reported by the United Nations).

And yet, despite the undeniable correlation between violence and rage, we aren’t talking about men’s anger.

The growth of the incel community (a group of mostly young men who declare themselves “involuntarily celibate” and complain about the injustice of women refusing to sleep with them), and the exploding “alpha male” genre (proponents of which include Andrew Tate, who infamously told his young male followers he’d “slap” and “choke” a woman who suggested he’d cheated on her) – serve as stark reminders of how this anger can permeate boys when left unattended.

Self-identified ‘alpha male’ Andrew Tate. Picture: Supplied

These movements also highlight an interesting paradox about men’s rage; at the heart of which appears to sit a palpable desire for sexual connection with women that coexists with a general disdain for the feminine.

“Alphas” are encouraged to relentlessly seek out sex while refraining from displaying emotion and adhering to a hyperbolic version of masculinity, while incels – who make no mistake about letting it be known they feel entitled to sex – go as far as referring to women as “c*m dumpsters” and “the inferior gender”.

On the surface, advocates of these ideologies appear to be fixated on getting women to sleep with them. But on closer examination, it’s easy to wonder if what these men really want isn’t sex after all.

If instead, beneath the rage, is an unexpressed hunger for the same thing modern feminism has given women (and perhaps resentment at women for accessing it): permission to subvert the cultural script around sex.

“People don’t realise how often men are experiencing a lack of intimacy, and the only way they can experience that intimacy is through sex,” The Daily Show’s outgoing host Trevor Noah argued in a recent episode.

Nadia Bokody proposes a controversial theory as to why a lot of guys appear to be driven by sex. Picture: Instagram

“For many years, great therapists have been saying that women have to be allowed to express that they want and enjoy sex. I think we also have to encourage men in society to go, ‘Hey, I want to express and enjoy intimacy, despite or apart from sex’.”

And Noah’s theory isn’t anecdotal; research indicates men are experiencing a serious intimacy gap.

According to a 2021 poll, women have more friends and enjoy closer bonds with those friends than men. In fact, one-in-five men have no close friends at all, and those with friends are less likely than women to receive emotional support from their mates.

Societal pressure to conform to an impossibly narrow ideal of masculinity (incidentally, something modern feminists have been actively fighting to dismantle) might explain this worrying trend.

“The acquisition of a masculine identity is given considerable weight in most societies and this involves distanciation from stereotypically feminine traits in boys and young men, and in particular, precludes emotional intimacy between men,” notes a paper published in the Journal of Social Issues.

Trevor Noah argued in a recent episode that ‘people don’t realise how often men are experiencing a lack of intimacy’. Picture: Rich Fury/Getty Images for The Recording Academy

Indeed, there’s a common thread of social isolation among men who express their anger through violence.

Nineteen-year-old mass shooter Orlando Harris, who killed a student and teacher at a St Louis high school in October, left a note in his car prior to the murders that read: “I don’t have any friends. I don’t have any family. I never had a girlfriend. I never had a social life. I’ve been an isolated loner my entire life.”

And self-identified incel Elliot Rodger, who murdered six people and injured 14 others in a 2014 shooting and stabbing spree, left an eerie video manifesto declaring he’d “been forced to endure an existence of loneliness, rejection and unfulfilled desires, all because girls have never been attracted to me. Girls gave their affection and sex and love to other men, never to me.”

Though so-called “alphas” and incels alike centre much of their rhetoric around the belief men are the tougher gender (Rodger himself was known for complaining about women having inferior brains on online forums), it would seem that, beneath the veil of rage and sexual entitlement isn’t a desire for more sex, or an unshakeable bruteness, but an epidemic of lonely men starved of meaningful connection.

Perhaps if we looked at men’s anger through this lens, rather than as a normalised expression of manhood, we could begin to move the needle toward a future where, as Noah put it, “We get to the place where guys go, ‘I actually didn’t need the sex. I needed to be held. And I live in a society where it’s hard to be held unless I’m having sex.’”

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