Is the Male Libido Really to Blame?

The #MeToo movement has given rise to the view, expressed with alarm in social and other media, that men are pigs. Such a view was on display in a letter an anonymous woman sent to sex columnist Dan Savage, in which she said she doubted she would ever sleep with a man again after reading so many stories of sexual harassment. “I know #notallmen, but I have to admit, I wake up and read the news, and I find myself saying, my god, men are disgusting.” Toronto writer (and Literary Review of Canada contributor) Stephen Marche expressed a similar view in in a widely discussed New York Times article. It argued that the exposure of Harvey Weinstein, Al Franken, and other harassers should prompt an overdue conversation about “the masculine libido and its accompanying forces and pathologies.” Savage vividly summed up the view of men expressed by his letter writer, Marche, and many other people who follow the news in the age of #MeToo. “Men,” Savage wrote, “are...