A want shows up, and before you have finished feeling it your hand is already moving. The tab closes. The thought gets traded for a work email, or for a joke you tell yourself about yourself. A woman at the next table gets one look, and then you read the menu as if it owed you money. Nobody decided any of this; it runs faster than deciding. What stays behind is a low, sour feeling. Search for it and you’ll find it filed under sexual shame in men, as if it were a trait you were born with.
After years inside it, I think the feeling is made largely of the shutting down. The want arrives clean, the way hunger does. What you’re left with is the cost of cutting it off halfway, every time, for long enough that the cut feels like part of who you are.
The Reflex That Fires Before You Feel It
My book opens on the sentence “For most of my life, I struggled with sexual shame.” I was in my thirties, single, and had never been in a relationship. The night that finally sent me looking for help happened at a restaurant, with my friends around the table:
One night, I was out with friends when I noticed a woman across the room. I don’t remember exactly what she looked like, but her presence stirred something deep inside me. I wanted to express my desire, but even the innocent act of telling my friends I thought she was beautiful felt too exposing for me to admit out loud.
Look at what I was hiding.
Walking over to her was out of the question, and I knew it. What I couldn’t do was say one sentence to the friend beside me, a sentence men say about strangers every day of the week. The want came and went in a few seconds, and the only thing I did with it was make sure nobody saw it, including, as far as I could manage, me.
That night I decided to call a dating coach. On the first call, when he asked what I needed help with, I cried for over five minutes before I could speak.
Nothing had happened at that restaurant.
I had looked at a woman and wanted to say she was beautiful, and years of not saying things like that came out on one phone call.
Practicing Wanting, at Home, in 2019
In March 2019 I flew to Barcelona, approached women on the street with my coach in the same city, and it worked. By April I was back in Johannesburg on my own, and the words had dried up again. So I wrote myself a drill to do at home before going anywhere:
Practicing sexual intent at home as follows: a. Look at pics of girls online. Be honest with yourself about sexual desires + intimate romance (vulnerability) b. Practice self-respect. Must really believe it.
The first half meant sitting with photos of women online and writing down what I wanted. The list started with a line too crude to print here, then “I want to be so close to her”, then “I want to make her laugh and be happy”. What strikes me now is how ordinary it is: a man looks at a woman and wants her body, wants to be near her and wants her to be happy, all at once. The new thing was leaving the first line on the page beside the two that sounded respectable.
The second half was self-respect, and “must really believe it” meant I couldn’t just tell myself I was a decent guy; I needed evidence. I used three things I had done: the volunteer work with kids I’d been doing, an approach at an airport I had made sober, with no drink in me to blame or thank, and the risks I was taking in business. Each was a fact I could point at, and none had anything to do with the photos.
I paired the halves because every want I let through got filed somewhere in me as a charge against my character, and the list was my defence. Later the drill grew into the routine I used before going out: build the feeling at home, then leave the house carrying it.
What Sexual Shame in Men Is Doing
In the book I treat mental arousal as a level: how aroused you are in your head at this moment, a subjective reading that rises and falls whether or not you admit to it. When I noticed the woman across the room, that level rose before I had any say. Telling my friends she was beautiful would only have caught up with a want already there.
Psychologists separate two feelings that most people run together. Guilt is a bad feeling about one thing you did, while shame makes your whole self the target: a bad self, where guilt sees a bad act. Shame pushes people to hide, and guilt pushes them to repair.
Run the restaurant through that.
Wanting a stranger across a room is one moment. The reflex treats it as a verdict: a man who wants like this is a certain kind of man, and that kind of man keeps his mouth shut. So you keep it shut, and the silence is the hiding that shame produces. The want was a fact about one evening, and the reflex turned it into evidence about all of you.
The shame I mean here is the ordinary, low-grade kind that gathers around normal wanting. If yours traces back to a sexual experience that wasn’t consensual, or to years of hiding who you’re attracted to, that is a heavier thing with its own literature and its own kind of help, and a home exercise about naming a want isn’t the tool for it.
The ordinary kind comes before anything has happened, which separates it from the guilt that can follow masturbating, a crash after an act. The feeling I’m describing can run for years with no act to attach to.
Denying It Doesn’t Make It Go Away
The book describes the link between mind and body as two balls joined by a string. You can move one without moving the other, but the farther apart they get, the harder the string pulls, until the ball that stayed put gets dragged along. In the book the balls are mind and body. Here, put the want on one ball and what you let yourself admit on the other. At the restaurant the first ball travelled a long way in a few seconds, and the second never moved.
Held apart like that, the string stays tight, and you feel the tightness as a background unease, a sense that something about you is off. Because the want never finished registering, you can’t read the tightness as wanting. You read it as proof that you’re the kind of man who shouldn’t want, and the feeling gets called shame while the want goes without a name.
Pushing the want away doesn’t slacken the string. In 1987 Daniel Wegner and his colleagues asked people not to think about a white bear, and the ones who had tried to suppress it thought about it more often afterwards than people never told to avoid it. That study had people avoid a white bear for a few minutes in a lab, not deny a want for years, so I’m stretching it further than the data goes. It fits my years before that restaurant better than I’d like.
Aimed at a woman in front of you, the same held-back want becomes the freeze I wrote about in why approach anxiety gets worse the calmer you try to look. Alone, it becomes the sour background feeling, and the string stays tight whether anyone is watching or not.
Practicing Permission
The version below drops the photos, because the reflex fires on wants in the street and at work too. Start with whichever one you cut off most recently. You need a few private minutes and a pen and paper or a notes app.
- Pick the want you keep cutting short. One specific want you’ve been editing down or stopping mid-sentence in your head, the version you’d be embarrassed to say.
- Write it in full. Use your own words, as it comes to you, with no audience and nobody to answer to. If the first sentence is crude, it goes on the page crude.
- List your evidence underneath. Three to five concrete things you’ve done that have nothing to do with this want: work you put in, a risk you took, someone you helped. They are proof of worth that doesn’t depend on anyone granting the first half.
- Read both halves back. Once, out loud if you can stand it. You’ll feel a pull to soften the want, delete it or joke past it, and a matching pull to wave off the evidence. Notice both and leave the page alone.
- Run it again when the reflex fires. The next time a want gets the same shutdown, go back to the page, and keep going until naming the want stops needing the second half.
Why the second half of the drill matters as much as the naming is something I’ve come to believe from watching it work on myself, not something anyone has run a study on. My reason is the one from 2019: a want you let through gets filed as a charge against you, and a charge with no defence only confirms the verdict.
Male sexual shame comes in recognisable shapes. A 2018 study by Gordon, validating a Male Sexual Shame Scale on two online samples of 870 men and 1,082 men, found six separate factors, among them distress about sexual inexperience, remorse over masturbation and porn, and disdain for one’s own libido. Thinking your drive runs high sat apart from shame altogether, so a want you’re glad to have may, once it’s written down, carry no verdict at all.
The Want Gets to Finish a Sentence
The night you run this, watch the first line. Halfway through writing the want you’ll feel the reflex arrive, an urge to stop at the polite half and leave the rest off. Keep writing. The sentence reaches its end on the page, and for a second or two the want sits there whole, before anything has had time to attach to it. Reading my own list years later, I notice how small a finished want is: one moment’s fact about one woman on one evening. The sour feeling needed the cutting-off to keep going.
The free email series picks this up in your body: what a want like this does in the seconds after it shows up, and the gap between that signal and the reflex you trained to answer it.
My book opens on the same shame this article started with and goes where one page can’t: keeping that permission alive through a whole evening after you’ve named one want, and telling a want worth sitting with from one that says move now. It also follows what happens in your body on the day a want you finally let yourself feel runs into a woman on the street, where there’s no lid to close.