Governed by desire
A periodontal surgeon with a PhD in human sexuality – who also plays guitar, sings, paints and sculpts – has written a tome dedicated to the ‘disappeared’ conversation about men and their sex drives
It makes sense that Paul Abramowitz is a songwriter as discussion about SEXED – his recently published book that’s been 10 years in the writing and 20 to 30 years in the researching – is peppered with rhapsodic turns of phrase he’s coined: intoxicated entitlement, riding the spiral, overt alertness, intimacy quotient, reproductioneers, holographic hypersexual hyperspace.
“Intoxicated entitlement is a term that I came up with because I think it, to some degree, explains the misunderstanding that men have with regards to imagining a right to something which looks attractive, or someone who looks attractive – and a lot of that has to do with the way that we fantasise,” he says.
“Men’s sexual fantasies are quite different than women’s sexual fantasies. Men tend to fantasise around a body part of a woman – a breast, a vagina, a leg. Women’s fantasies are far more contextual and would tend to be around a romantic occurrence, which would be a turn-on. That’s unusual for a man to have that.”
In his work, Abramowitz focuses on the plight of the heterosexual man and his amorous relationship. A lot of his keenness to explore this subject stems from his own experience: from wanting to harness the primary “broadcast”, as he describes it, that exists for men “in terms of how much bandwidth sex takes up in our lives”.
As far as he is aware, there was only the superficial term “hardwired for sex” bandied about to describe men and their sexual makeup. Through coaching clients and men’s consciousness work (he was one of six men in 1998 to bring the ManKind Project to South Africa), Abramowitz was hearing hundreds of stories from men that amounted to a common tale of woe of living in a body designed so overwhelmingly for sex, and how that bled so totally and often ruinously into their lives.
These men were “reformatting their outlook” by heightening their consciousness in general, but were finding no parallel solutions for how to bring the sexual component of their identities into equal evolution with the rest of their development.
“And, yet, when I went to look for the literature, I couldn’t find anybody who had distilled and defined in a collated way how this happens, or project any type of a map around how it takes place and the impact that it has on our executive functioning, the decisions we make, how we action towards things.
As far as he is aware, there was only the superficial term ‘hardwired for sex’ bandied about to describe men and their sexual makeup
“And I found that to be rather odd. Also, a woman doesn’t know the extent that men are hardwired in this way. Women might feel the impact of that hardwiring as it focuses towards them, but they can’t really know what it’s like for a man to contend with the inner constancy of the drive.”
As an illustrative anecdote of that last point, at a literary festival in Cape Town in March, Abramowitz relayed an exchange from a talk he had given recently. A woman in the audience had scoffed at the idea that sex could fill up a man’s airtime to such a radical extent.
“Have you ever been pregnant?” Abramowitz asked her.
“Yes,” she replied.
“And did you have cravings while you were pregnant?”
“Yes,” she said.
“And how did those cravings feel?”
“I just had to have the thing I was craving,” she said.
“That’s how it often is for men and sex”.
In the third trimester of pregnancy, cravings often went away for women but, for men, their cravings persisted, he added.
“Biology focuses men’s attention like a laser beam from the age of 12 or 13 to construct a world that takes on what I call a holographic hypersexual hyperspace.” A feature of this hyperspace is overt alertness, a term Abramowitz uses to describe men’s ability to scan an 180-degree visual field for something that might be interesting from a sexual opportunity point of view. The medial pre-optic area in the hypothalamus – the area of the brain that spots those sexual opportunities – is two and a half times bigger in a man than a woman, he notes. There’s a heightened dopamine reward for a man “just by looking”.
While testosterone levels drop and consequently sex drive diminishes as men age, the male brain remains “formatted” by testosterone – the first “tsunami” of the hormone having been administered in utero. “At 12 or 13, our penises become the initial centre of the world, and the practice of ejaculation becomes front and centre – and always affiliated with a fantasy. It’s very difficult to ejaculate during masturbation without a fantasy. So you have a repeated practice of stimulation, visualisation, ejaculation while the brain is forming.”
For a man, aligning the outer world with his sex-formatted inner world – the “tuning fork” – often leads to misreading of cues that women put out, unaided by the stark contrast of what tends to drive female arousal. And Abramowitz points out frequently that these observations of his should be regarded as tendencies, not generalisations. There’s a “contextuality” for women and there’s also a warm-up phase “which can start in the morning towards sex in the evening. Everything during the day counts for a woman.”
At 12 or 13, our penises become the initial centre of the world, and the practice of ejaculation becomes front and centre
These often clashing approaches to desire is almost comical considering the only system in the body that requires another person’s system to realise its full potential is the reproductive system. Men’s approach, he feels, blocks them from moving into a higher “INQ”, another in a long list of Abroisms. This “intimacy quotient” is an ability to be immersive, focused, present; not to expect an outcome; to be willing to make things up as one goes along in a more curious way.
The first step in achieving this is for men to become aware of how and why they might be using sexual energy in order to find peace in their lives. After all, it’s imprinted in boys during adolescence when the glorious discovery of being able to ejaculate very often becomes “a spiritual healing balm” to combat anxiety or insomnia or boredom or to settle sexual tension, or what he calls restless sex energy.
“Perhaps most men are somewhat aware of this basic cycle. When you become aware, you are already developing a sense of knowing where the sexual urge comes from, which is helpful if your partner doesn’t want to have sex as much as you.”
Oftentimes he’s had clients who mistake high levels of anger for high sex drives, who use sex as a remedy to reduce anger and return to some kind of equilibrium. “Sometimes it is a case of the man needing to de-stress, so if he becomes aware of that, he can just go and self-pleasure; he doesn’t have to involve his partner. Or he can find another way to de-stress.
“It is often a case of coming to an awareness around what does it mean when you want to have sex a lot,” he says. Is it in search of a connection? Do I care who I’m having sex with or are you the one I want to have sex with, is another angle to consider. If the woman doesn’t want to have sex, the man might ask the question: is it something I’m doing or not doing?
He quotes Peggy Kleinplatz from New Directions in Sex Therapy, who posits that some women perhaps don’t want to have sex as much as men because in all likelihood the sex ain’t that great. To be effective in working with low sexual desire for women, as she writes, therapists will need to acknowledge that “the sex our patients are having is often dismal, disappointing and lackluster.”
A woman’s sexual physiology is far more complex than ours
“Often I think women are called to meet the very much more simple requirement of a man, which is often just to ejaculate,” Abramowitz says. “A woman’s sexual physiology is far more complex than ours – far more complex. When you start to decipher what sex means for both people, then you really expand the conversation. And in that rounded conversation often evolves a much more heightened solution.”
In his therapeutic work, he aims to highlight the “entertainment versus transformation” spectrum of intimacy and sexuality, especially for men who perhaps need it highlighted a bit more than women. He’ll encourage couples to consider sex as a potentially profoundly transformative experience, switching off the broadcast that beams: outcome. “So, in other words, orgasm or bust.”
“I’ll often say to my clients: you know, every time you make love it’s not the World Cup finals. In other words, you can do it tomorrow if it didn’t turn out so great. You can talk about it. It’s not every four years,” he says, unknowingly expressing a different slant on the comparison by footballing great Ronaldo, who said: “I’m sure sex wouldn’t be as rewarding as winning the World Cup. It’s not that sex isn’t good, but the World Cup is every four years and sex is not.”
While heterosexual men and their sexuality is his intellectual domain, Abramowitz suggests that homosexual men have an advantage in getting to grips with their sexuality and what it means in a way that doesn’t happen for heterosexual men. While “there’s a red carpet laid out for us”, he says of straight men, gay men often discover that their preferred mode of sexual expression is not necessarily what their families or religions or the mainstream suggest it should be, and that results in an inner struggle to make sense of it.
“And I don’t believe that inner struggle happens with heterosexual men to the degree that it happens with gay men and gay women. And that inner struggle is constituted by a deep archaeological exploration about who I am as a human being and how I express my sexuality and what does it mean for me to be a gay man?
“I don’t think we ask ourselves the question: what does it mean to be a heterosexual man? Unless I’m a bisexual man and there’s some tussle going on there as well. For straight guys, our biggest predicament is how to get more opportunity. And, then, our predicament becomes that which is more about an outward actioning of my heterosexual self into the world without necessarily needing to define what my humanity-sexuality dyad looks like.”
I don’t think we ask ourselves the question: what does it mean to be a heterosexual man?
Abramowitz graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia in 1985 with a Doctor of Medicine in Dentistry degree. He followed that with a Post-Doctoral Specialty Certification in Periodontology in 1990. He had always enjoyed biology, dissection and sculpture and he wanted to do surgery but not be on call as a lifestyle like his father, who was a specialist doctor.
Dentistry seemed a good option: he could work in the field of medicine and, with his surgical specialty, he could practise the sort of medicine that reflected his interest in working with the intelligence of the body. “There’s a certain protocol to doing a surgical procedure in order for the handing over of the baton to the biological intelligence to now finish off the healing process.”
Born in Cape Town in 1962, Abramowitz was two when his father had his first heart attack. A series of heart attacks after that culminated in his death when Abramowitz was 29. Returning to South Africa in his early thirties, Abramowitz never had the opportunity to discuss his latter-day second career as a sex therapist with his father, himself a sex therapist in a time when that vocation was pretty much unheard of in SA, let alone for a man who was also a practising gynaecologist and obstetrician – a triple threat in the reproductive health arena if ever there was one.
“We base a lot of our reality on what we can touch and see and feel and hear. It seemed to be the only portal that examined the things we can’t see,” Abramowitz says, describing his initial foray into eastern medicine, with shiatsu, which he studied for two years. He also became interested in intimacy as a concept: what it was and could be about. After studying eastern sexology with anthropologist Dr Shakti Malan, he went on to complete a PhD in human sexuality in 2016.
Completing the Renaissance man picture, Abramowitz paints large scale canvases in oil, produces sculptures in clay that are then bronzed, writes his own music, sings and plays the guitar. His musical and artistic careers began in primary school. He was in a band that stayed together till his last year of high school. In his school days he also obtained provincial colours in running (sprints) and was on the junior Springbok soccer team “when it was all white people” (before racial integration in South Africa).
He was always fairly clear that he wanted to be “in something that wasn’t marriage” and at best was ambivalent about having children. “They say often when you know what you don’t want, it’s a big piece of the puzzle.” What he saw as the restrictive nature of that package was not a fit for him, and he was nervous that he might pick a partner who didn’t necessarily share his enthusiasm for not engaging in those things. “So what remained attractive to me was a person who also displayed a real passion for something outside of the relationship.”
He was always fairly clear that he wanted to be ‘in something that wasn’t marriage’ and at best was ambivalent about having children
That person is Karina Andersen, whom he’s been in a relationship with for nine years – the longest relationship for both of them “by some way”. She is Danish, has a son and daughter in their twenties, has authored two books on personal development, works with private clients as well as inmates in Western Cape prisons in a coaching and training capacity, and goes barefoot most of the time. Abramowitz and Andersen spend the weekends together and perhaps a couple of nights during the week.
“I don’t think a couple should necessarily spend every night in the same bed – that’s just my take on things,” he says, referencing the work of Jane Ward, a lesbian who wrote a book called The Tragedy of Heterosexuality. Not sharing the same bed every night could be an antidote to a loss of intimacy and connection, he suggests. It could lead to a deeper communication about wants and needs, as well as create less of a prospect of taking the relationship for granted.
He says: “There are variants of unquestioned and uncharted aspects to people’s living together, and often couples don’t ask those questions or they struggle through it. The system has been set up in such a way that if they don’t do that, it means they don’t love the other person. That’s how basic it gets.
“This one-minded approach, I think, is very much a product of where our parents and grandparents come from. There’s much more licence now to reconstruct things in accordance with how two individuals feel.”
He does acknowledge that if a couple is going to have children and form a family unit, they should probably live together “and I think biology understands that as well,” he says, referring to reproductive biological intelligence as “the system that bypasses our consciousness and has us do certain things.”
Abramowitz grew up in a traditional family environment with two siblings and parents that were married; all of them living together. “I think different stages of life call for different designs of relationship, and that one is allowed to redesign the pattern accordingly to your age and stage of life. It’s like certain countries suit certain individuals for certain times in their lives. It doesn’t mean they have to grow old in that country.”
Being exposed to his father’s medical and sex therapy work helped him to approach relationships more with curiosity than the idea that “something definite had to be achieved”. He recognised early that there was complexity in adult heterosexual relationships. “I saw what life was portraying, not what the movies were portraying.”
I saw what life was portraying, not what the movies were portraying
Aligned to that is a root conversation, as he puts it, of the “magic trick” of biology that’s been embellished by the happily-ever-after-Disney-Hollywood fairytale of relationships and hypnotic love songs that cut things short before the real work begins: turning that first flush of romance into an enduring and fulfilling partnership.
“There’s the romantic industrial complex which is set up to sell us the possibility of finding this immense happiness with someone else, and it is that way in the beginning. But past the so-called honeymoon phase, biology’s not that interested anymore in trying to keep things together and it becomes up to us to do that.
“We seem to have at this point in time failed as a species – certainly in heterosexual relationships – to create a literacy around, first of all, acknowledging what happens after that phase, and then how to recognise it if one still has a deep respect and honouring of the other, so that that relationship doesn’t drop to the floor entirely.
“For me it’s not about looking for what we had during the honeymoon phase. It’s really about reconstituting that ideology into a new format of love, and I’m not keen on the word love because it’s multi-used and abused. It’s about carrying a different generative appreciation for that person and recognising that we might have both been fooled in the initial stages with our projections and our hormonal influx.”
This is an opportunity for both individuals to “ride the spiral” into a new phase of judgement-free, “curiosity-based research” of self-discovery and of each other in the relationship. Venturing into the unknown and developing a different sort of excitement about each other – one that’s not going to come from that initial spark that almost guarantees making a couple want to be together – necessitates learning how to “own your stuff, see your patterns, notice what hooks you”.
One might say to one’s partner or oneself, “I’m wondering why . . . ?” he offers, by way of example, for converting blame or judgement to compassion. “There’s a beautiful tonality to that and relationships do invite practice for that.’’ Partners with the awareness that the reimagining of the relationship in this way is inevitable, invariably will have a real respect for each other, he adds.
“Karina and I both say that it’s likely that if we weren’t together, that we would be happily single. That’s the other thing: I think singledom is highly underrated in our society. And that’s again the romantic industrial complex. Singlehood is not celebrated and there’s certainly some kind of personality defect around not celebrating an individual’s happiness at being single.”
How he sees himself as an individual and how he sees himself in his relationship – his singledom versus his unity with Andersen – are like two orbiting pieces, he says. The habit of continually noticing what one appreciates about the other person builds a “centrifugal force”.
“There’s a fierceness associated with examining every day: do I still want to be with this person? And how am I best serving this relationship and my partner? That’s a more evolutionary way of being in a relationship.
Singlehood is not celebrated and there’s certainly some kind of personality defect around not celebrating an individual’s happiness at being single
“In these relationships that move beyond the initial, what I call the PH phase – the projection and the hormone phase – in a kind, generous and generative way, often I think there’s a deep respect for who you’ve partnered with and a deep respect for who that human being actually is when he or she walks in the world.”
That idea of feeling honoured to walk the path with someone like that, combined with the idea that whatever arises is solvable, is powerful fuel for riding the spiral, he says. It’s perhaps about “becoming fit for human consumption”. Knowing what one needs to do “not to spill stuff, one’s own stuff”. In other words, taking responsibility, being accountable, doing the necessary self-enquiry, tracking one’s evolution: “what’s called ‘doing the work’”.
All of this talk seems geared towards the older person – the more relationship seasoned, one might say. The era of easy access to porn appears to be unleashing a generation of men becoming sexually active that are bound to be perpetually unsatisfied with the sex they’re getting in real life – not to mention women frequently horrified by those encounters, if the rash of accounts of Millennial and Generation Z women being strangled during sex without their consent is any indicator.
Abramowitz describes access to streaming porn at a young age as “the largest human experiment”. He quotes a statistic in his book that estimates that fifty percent of all internet traffic is sex-oriented.
“It’s devastating and incredibly destructive. It’s dystopian,” he says. “If you’re seeing hundreds of images of different women, your dopamine levels won’t be able to be reproduced if you’re just with one woman.”
Porn can be useful in certain couples therapy exercises, he’s found, but used without awareness is another ball game. “If you don’t know what it’s doing to you or how it’s affecting your relationship, then it’s destructive. If you’re looking for intimacy, do not expect porn to be an ally for you.”
If you’re looking for intimacy, do not expect porn to be an ally for you
As he writes in his book: “Porn diminishes our ability to truly see the whole woman since it’s mostly a choreographed attempt at the real thing. It’s performance. A porn performance misinforms us about what we’re capable of experiencing that is out of the ordinary and truly extraordinary. Lastly, it creates a false impression that men should want to actually be the way porn shows these male actors, and that all women actually want what the female performers act out. Keep that in mind the next time you’re watching porn.”
The internet, in general, and the profligate use of cell phones, in particular, creates a chronic pattern of distraction in our lives. The flurry to have one experience after the next without any integration of those experiences also makes for a wonderful dopamine protracted time, but doesn’t yield a deepening of the self, he says.
“Phones make urgent what’s not that important and that’s a predicament. The practice of day-to-day life with awareness is so simple and yet so profound.”
SEXED: Hardwired by Nature, Evolving by Choice is available in print format from South African site Takealot – in black and white and colour versions – and in Kindle format on Amazon
Well written article. Poignant in our times, whilst inspiring some sense of new order to an ever evolving subject. I can imagine a future where people will be more fulfilled with the knowledge that Abro is sharing 💛