The Need and The Void

This post is intended in part as a response to Rollo Tomassi’s post You Need Sex over at The Rational Male. However, it goes beyond the bounds of Rollo’s post and covers the physical and psychological needs of men when it comes to women. Rollo’s post itself was directed at me, based on this part of it:

What prompted today’s post was my reading a recent blog entry of a notable christo-manosphere commenter. I’m not going to name him since I think most of the readers who frequent Rational Male  from Dalrock or Sunshinemary’s blogs already know who I’m referencing. What’s important is his life’s plight. The nuts and bolts of his post was his lament in finding a suitable, monogamous mate to marry, have sex with and (presumedly) have a life and children with.

It’s not too tall an order for even the most abject Beta of men. To be sure, nowadays it increasingly requires a good amount of self-delusion and / or faith for a guy to consider monogamy, and red pill disillusionment can help or aggravate, but statistically more people are engaging in monogamy than not at some stage of their lives. However, this blogger feels doomed and relegated to what I can only assume is a self-inflicted life of celibacy due to his religious convictions and his inability to connect with the properly prescribed virgin bride who fits his ideal.

While he doesn’t name me outright, it was my blog post All Alone in the Dark that Rollo was referencing. He confirmed this later in the comments section.

Physical Need

After dropping hints about the blog (and blogger’s) identity, Rollo explored the need that men have for sex.

The unhealthy disconnect here is that human beings do in fact need sex. We can attach other ephemeral aspects to the sex act (or masturbation if that’s the only recourse), like love, emotion, commitment, etc., but on a base level your body needs sexual release in one form or another. Yes, you can willfully override the need, just like you can overcome hunger while you’re fasting or on a hunger strike, but the need is still the operative in that act of will. Once hunger, breathing and thirst are satisfied, sex is the single most influential drive the human species (really, most any species) is motivated by. Society is driven by sex, cultures evolve around it and personal achievements, as well as horrible atrocities are the result of our inborn prompt to satisfy our sexual urges.

Sigmund Freud once said, “all energy is sexual”, meaning that subliminally we will redirect our motivation for ungratified sexual impulse to other endeavors. Thus it’s men, being the sex with the highest amount of libido inducing testosterone, who must look for far more outlets to transfer this motivation to than women. So is it any real surprise that it’s historically been Men who’ve primarily been the empire builders, the conquerors, the creators, and destroyers who’ve (for better or worse) moved humanity the most significantly?

There is more to it than that, of course. There are a number of scientific studies which have explored the importance of sex, including especially its role with health. Courtesy of an article at Men’s Journal, here is an example:

As it turns out, the benefits of sex are a factor in all three categories of male mortality – heart disease, cancer, and environmental causes (stress, accident, suicide) – and plenty of scientists are pushing the idea that the more sex you have the longer you’ll live. The Johnny Appleseed of the theory is Michael Roizen, a 62-year-old doctor who chairs the Wellness Institute at the Cleveland Clinic.

“For men, the more the better,” he says. “The typical man who has 350 orgasms a year, versus the national average of around a quarter of that, lives about four years longer.” And more than those extra four years, Roizen says, the men will feel eight years younger than their contemporaries. Is there an optimal number of orgasms for the average man? Roizen suggests, with a straight face, that 700 a year could add up to eight years to your life. This is an ambitious prescription: The average American adult male has sex just 81 times a year.

Roizen’s formula may be new, but the benefits of sex and orgasms have been tracked for years, and there’s some compelling hard evidence to back Roizen’s claims. A Swedish study done in the ’80s found that 70-year-olds who made it to 75 were the ones still having sex, and a Duke University study that followed 252 people over 25 years concluded that “frequency of intercourse was a significant predictor of longevity.”

Other health benefits exist as well, including:

Having sex could lower your stress and your blood pressure.

That finding comes from a Scottish study of 24 women and 22 men who kept records of their sexual activity. The researchers put them in stressful situations — such as speaking in public and doing math out loud — and checked their blood pressure.

People who had had intercourse responded better to stress than those who engaged in other sexual behaviors or abstained.

Another study found that diastolic blood pressure (the bottom number of your blood pressure) tends to be lower in people who live together and have sex often.

…

A 20-year-long British study shows that men who had sex two or more times a week were half as likely to have a fatal heart attack than men who had sex less than once a month.

And although some older folks may worry that sex could cause a stroke, the study found no link between how often men had sex and how likely they were to have a stroke.

… [and]…

Oxytocin also boosts your body’s painkillers, called endorphins. Headache, arthritis pain, or PMS symptoms may improve after sex.

In one study, 48 people inhaled oxytocin vapor and then had their fingers pricked. The oxytocin cut their pain threshold by more than half.

Based on all of this, it seems fairly clear that regular sex is important, even necessary for good health. All of which means that those men who do not get regular sex, whether they are chaste Christian men practicing abstinence, or secular men who are forced into the life of an Incel, or married men whose wives are denying them their conjugal rights, are suffering serious health consequences as a result.

Some try to escape the physical need for sex in various ways. While a few might try asceticism, many turn towards pornography as an outlet for their sex drive. Many of those who advocate the MGTOW lifetstyle also talk up “sex-bots” and artificial wombs as a means of escaping any “need” for women. However, all of this focuses solely on the physical need for contact with women, and how that might be overcome.

Psychological Need

The male need for women isn’t purely sexual, or physical. In truth men have a deep-rooted psychological need for female attention that cannot be suppressed, ignored, or alleviated through some artificial means. “Sex-bots” might be a tool to ease any physical need, but they can never truly replace a woman. At least, not replace the ability of a woman to meet a man’s psychological and emotional needs. As I have explained elsewhere:

Men need women to provide comfort and reassurance, to be a warm blanket that allows men to forget, for a short while, the horrors of the world. A man runs to a woman to escape the toils of the world.

Simply put, woman are our escape from reality. Others have stated the same before, but in my opinion the importance of this escape is not appreciated enough in the manosphere. A man without a woman feels like there is a void in his life. The longer he is lonely, the greater the void becomes. For someone who goes without female companionship for long enough, that void eventually consumes him, leaving a shell of a man behind. By the way, when I say companionship, I don’t merely mean One Night Stands or flings. I mean a serious relationship with a woman. Something lasting during which a man can give attention to a woman, and receive it back.

Unlike some out there, I have no dislike for, or distrust of, Men Going Their Own Way. I understand why a lot of men are following that path in life. But I think that many of them fail to understand just how difficult it truly is. They might be able to find substitutes for the physical presence of a woman, but I don’t for a moment think that most of them can ever escape the psychological need for a woman.  I wish MGTOW luck in their endeavors, because I think that they are going to need it.

While the marriage rate has been dropping in recent years, many men still marry. These men marry despite many of them knowing the pitfalls of modern marriage (marriage 2.0). For many many of them, I suspect their decision to marry is not based on a desire for children, or for sex, but because they seek attention and validation from a woman. And despite the best efforts of the MGTOW movement, this isn’t going to change anytime soon. Any hope that a mass exodus  of men from the marriage market will occur, and thus drive women to alter their attitudes and behavior, will simply not be realized. If your goal is to change how women behave, and thus the rules and boundaries of society, you will need to find another way. Because men want  women like nothing else, and need from them something like nothing else.

Sunshinemary expressed it rather nicely:

…What men want is for women to show them some kindness and concern.

That is the crux of the matter, when you get down to it. Men want, need,  know that a woman cares for them and is concerned about them. We need to be able to go home after a hard day’s toil and know there is a woman waiting for us who will smile at the sound of our voice, whose eyes brighten at the sight of us, who will invite us into her warm embrace and whisper sweet nothings into our ear as we lie entwined together in bed at night… all so we can forget, if but for a little while, the hardships of this world.

Consequences

And this brings us to my actual response. Rollo is right that I need sex. Men do, no way around it. But that need is greater than just sex with women, it is a need for positive interactions with femininity which sate some requirement deep inside us. Which means that I will call man’s necessity for positive interactions with the feminine The Need. The Need is real, and nearly all men have it. But what happens when The Need goes unfulfilled?

Rollo explains it like this:

If I said I felt pity for men like the blogger I mentioned earlier, who through their own conviction or bad circumstance, have never had sex in their lives, I don’t think I’d be accurate in expressing myself. I feel a profound sadness for them; a sadness similar to when you meet someone who’s lost a limb or has had to live with a physical or mental disability.

This analogy makes perfect sense to me. While I don’t always notice it, there will always be parts of the day where I sense that something is missing from my life. Something important… something vital. I imagine it is similar to what Rollo described, the emptiness, numbness and sense of loss that accompanies a missing limb. The Shadow Knight over at Sunshinemary’s blog described it like this:

The lack of the feminine is felt as an ache where she would be resting. When I lie on my side, there is sometimes a pain where she would be if she was cuddling up to you. Sometimes it will be where she would be if you were holding her to your chest. It depends on where it is felt, but one thing is always the same: the phantom touch of a woman that does not exist and pain and a sense of loss. It goes deep, her absence is felt on a visceral level.

I referenced this sensation in my previous post as the Ache, but that isn’t exactly right. While the lack of physical contact with a woman (sex) might cause physical symptoms like an ache, the real harm is mental. Instead, I think I will refer to it as The Void, because the lack of femininity in a man’s life leaves him with a terrible emptiness which nothing else can fill. While a man might use porn or “sex-bots” or a Holodeck to satisfy the physical demands of The Need, that is the limit to their capabilities.  The true harm of The Void can only be met by a real, live, flesh and blood woman, although I suspect much time and money will be spent to prove me wrong.

So this is what I must contend with in my life: The Need and The Void.

What Rollo hinted at, and I must admit is true, is that I am experiencing The Void because of my convictions. If I wanted to satisfy The Need, at least the physical part, I am sure that it would be little trouble for me now that I have taken the Red Pill. I am getting positive responses and IOIs from women in the 7-8 range, and maybe even 9’s (I admit to being rather deficient when it comes to judging a woman on the 1-10 scale). Establishing a series of Long-Term Relationships shouldn’t be out of my league either. So that would likely also satisfy the emotional component of The Need.

Yet as a practicing Christian committed to living a life devoted to God’s commands, I cannot walk that path. Or rather, I will not walk that path. I have chosen otherwise. And therein lies the rub. The proper outlet for me to satisfy The Need, to alleviate The Void, is marriage. And so until I find a woman worthy and willing to be my wife, and until the day I wed that woman, I must endure The Need and The Void. Which means that following my faith costs me dearly [in this life]: for besides the mental anguish, I am essentially hastening my death little by little by walking a path where a major way to extend my life is not available. But I am a disciple of Christ; if this is the cross that I must bear , well then, so be it.

As I contemplate those times when that cross will seem too heavy to bear, I will seek comfort in the same words that my Savior did on Calvary nearly two thousand years ago:

¹ My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?
Why are you so far from helping me, from the words of my groaning?
² O my God, I cry by day, but you do not answer;
and by night, but find no rest.

³ Yet you are holy,
enthroned on the praises of Israel.
⁴ In you our ancestors trusted;
they trusted, and you delivered them.
⁵ To you they cried, and were saved;
in you they trusted, and were not put to shame.