Reply #157: All I know is, his "style"- if you can call it that- is hardly indicative

[Warren DeMontague]

of the majority of what's out there. And from what I've seen, he's just about the worst of the worst. That's what I meant by the 'extreme end of the spectrum'. His popularity certainly wasn't impressive enough to make the owners of my old company go to the wall when we demanded that they stop carrying him.

Anyway, as for making noise about men 'desexualizing' their intimate relationships with women, I refer you to the quote you posted (bold added):

Once men are trained to crave sexual gratification and, at the same time, taught to avoid softness, emotionality, and intimacy, men may sexualize their relationships as a way of avoiding the dangers of a deeper involvement, such as emotional domination by women, commitment to women, and love. Recognizing and rejecting the "centerfold syndrome" is necessary before we, as men, can mature, like ourselves, become a compassionate caretaker, and become close friends with women. Brooks (1995) says men can consciously suppress their voyeurism and sexual thoughts (as they do towards a daughter), learn to love women for their abilities and personal traits, and enjoy the nurturing of others as much as women do. But as long as males are exclusively obsessed with the sexual build of any attractive woman that comes along, we have a serious social problem.

Somewhere there must be a mill or a think tank where these people come up with this stuff, and it must pay pretty well, because there are reams and reams of this kind of gibberish strewn across the semantic landscape. Where to begin? The idea that sexual attraction or desire (or even the dreaded "lust") and love or respect are mutually exclusive? The idea that men are somehow "trained" to "crave sexual gratification" like a dog is trained to salivate at the ringing of a bell?.. (Yes, it was those years of training at Patriarchy summer camp that convinced me that I should get aroused by looking at a picture of a naked woman, surpressing my natural instinct to tell her to cover up and then ask her about her hobbies.) ...And of course, liberally sprinkling it with nebulous terms like "objectification" and "centerfold syndrome" which no doubt sound good to the choir he is invariably preaching to, but don't actually MEAN anything. (Presumably, because I looked at nudie magazines as an adolescent, now I'm only attracted to women with staples in their navels) ... That's funny, I've managed to have good female friends, female co-workers, and more female relatives than you can shake a stick at, I love them for their abilities and personal traits, I'm perfectly capable of enjoying the nurturing of others... and -most importantly- I'm a mature, multi-faceted human being whose sexuality is but one component of many... all that, magically, without renouncing evil smut or getting de-programmed of all these evil "centerfold syndromes" which looking at pictures of naked women over the course of my life has supposedly mojo'd into my brain.

Actually, if asked, I would say a far larger "serious social problem" is the Neo-Puritanism some folks have, even when they dress it up in fancy language. But that's just me.