Needs Help: All Men Are Perverts

So, I've been looking at All Women Are Lustful, and a bit at All Men Are Perverts, and it seems to me they each seem to cover three separate related tropes.

One, possibly a supertrope of the other two is where the group in question is simply portrayed as more sexual or extremely sexual, often but not allways combined with "and that's bad". For example, the How I Met Your Mother example in All Women Are Lustful mostly talks about the women simply having higher sex drives than the men and the example from Buffy The Vampire Slayer about Xander always thinking about sex. This interpretation is supported by the claim in the description of All Men Are Perverts that "All Men Are Perverts + All Women Are Lustful = Everybody Has Lots of Sex, and is what the page image of All Women Are Lustful suggests".

A second is when on gender's sexuality tends to drive them to be stupid or irresponsible, sometimes to the extent of being lead into evil through it. For example, the women in Goethe's Faust who ally themselves with a demon because he's hot. This meaning is also suggested by the claim in the description of All Men Are Perverts that fictional men "lose all brain function" when they see breasts. Here, mens' or womens' sexuality is portrayed as overriding their common sense and wisdom.

A third, which seems to be supported by the name and image of All Men Are Perverts, is when a gender is portrayed as all being sexual predators. There are a lot of other examples of this in All Men Are Perverts, such as the guys in Revenge Of The Nerds installing cameras in a sorority house. There are possible female examples in Jason And The Argonauts and with Lot's daughters in the bible, depending on to what extent those women were supposed to be typical. Here, mens' or womens' sexuality is portrayed as overriding their morality.

How about splitting these?

Septimus Heap has suggested that these should be considered the same trope because in all cases the gender in question is portrayed as very sexual in a bad way. It seems to me, 'though, that "men are sexual and it makes them stupid" and "men are sexual and it makes them sexual predators" are significantly different, and don't necessarily serve the same role in a story.

Tropes Are Not Bad.

Just as a clarification, I was using is "in a bad way" in a very general sense.

Also, "makes them stupid" is at least related with Love Makes You Dumb, although I would not say right now that they are identical.

"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman

For the third trope, there's also All Men Are Rapists, which is a more exaggerated version of this trope. There should be some in between.

The current pages are terrible, and dividing them by gender helps no one.

I thing dividing the current examples into Everybody Has Lots of Sex, Lust Makes You Dumb and something about male predators is a good choice.

edited 29th Jun '13 8:58:33 AM by AmyGdala

That they are divided by gender is significant. How they are played should deserve their own tropes.

There's also no trope about men not being interested in sex, which I would call All Men Are Celibate, probably because it's very rare.

edited 29th Jun '13 9:04:35 AM by MikuruFan

Splitting one or both of these might be a good idea, but I strongly disagree with starting with the assumption that they ought to be gender neutral, as many examples are statements about ways in which men and women are naturally unlike.

For instance, one good trope currently lumped with All Men Are Perverts is that women want love but men just want sex. That doesn't really fit in with the OP's divisions.

edited 29th Jun '13 3:05:43 PM by Prfnoff

No no - they shouldn't be totally gender neutral. I just mean that the status quo, which is basically "lecherous characters.male" and "lecherous characters.female" keeps us from documenting the real tropes.

^^ We have a Celibate Hero trope. We may create other celibacy tropes. We shouldn't have a trope from all celibate men because characters are uninterested in sex for various reasons. And if we did create such as page, we definitely shouldn't name it All Men Are Celibate becuase all men [i]aren't[/i] celibate - MOST aren't celibate.

^ Yeah, Women Want Love Men Want Sex is a hugely important trope that we should cover.

The same could be said for All Men Are Perverts, All Women Are Lustful, All Women Are Prudes, and actually every All X Are Y trope there is. We never have proof that everyone is like this. It's an assumption, either by the viewer or a character.

So, should I write up descriptions for these tropes? I won't be able to do it tomorrow because I'll be travelling, but after that I can. I might not be able to write descriptions which aren't bad, but I'm willing to make an effort to do so. And I fear my understanding of the tropes might be inadequate, but I think I can at least improve on the current state content-wise.

edited 30th Jun '13 7:50:24 AM by kuyanJ

Tropes Are Not Bad.

Yes, please.

"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman

^^^ Are you saying that we should rename every All X Are Y page? I agree. But I think you're instead saying that those other titles justify a page called All Men Are Celibate. They don't. There is never any assumption from anyone that all men are celibate.

I said there isn't one because it's very rare.

All men being celibate is basically covered by All Women Are Lustful because it's "a world where women are the ones thinking with their crotches, and men are the ones thinking with their brains."

Then that needs a rename.

All Women Are Lustful suggests that that's the only thing that is being covered. Misuse would be partial examples, where women are lustful, but so are the men.

All Men Are Perverts + All Women Are Lustful = Everybody Has Lots of Sex is a contradiction because by definition of All Women Are Lustful, All Men Are Perverts is inverted and All Men Are Perverts does not apply.

edited 30th Jun '13 11:02:28 PM by MikuruFan

So, here is my first attempt to write up a description for each trope. I've also found some examples for two. Are these adequate? Can you suggest improvements? Should I sort more of the examples and put these in YKTTW? Female examples could probably go in the same pages with mention of their being gender-flipped.

Men Are Always Sexual

The tendency for men in a work of fiction to be portrayed as almost always wanting sex. This is often in contrast to women who, in the same works, are portrayed as never wanting sex. If any man shows an apparently innocuous interest in a woman, he probably just wants to lay her.

When this trope and All Women Are Prudes lead to the idea that sexual pleasure is something men get only by trickery or force, then Men Are Sexual Predators.

When this causes men to behave stupidly or irresponsibly, putting sex above things that really should be a higher priority, then Lust Drives Men Astray.

As with All Women Are Prudes, there is some Truthin Television at work here in that these tropes, albeit in an exaggerated manner, in that men tend to obsess over sex more than women.

Compare All Gaysare Promiscuous (what happens when there aren't any women involved to say no). May lead to claims that A Man Is Not a Virgin.

Double Standard Rape: Female on Male results partly from believing this trope is true (a woman can't rape a man because men always want to have sex and would never turn it down). Both this and its Distaff Counterpart, All Women Are Lustful, can be invoked to support claims for the Mars and Venus Gender Contrast.

Examples:

Advertising

• A Pepsi Max commercial starts off with a couple on a first date. The woman asks herself over usual questions of marriage and children, whereas the man constantly thinks about sex with her.

Anime and Manga

• In Oniichan No Koto Nanka Zenzen Suki Ja Nai N Dakara Ne, all recurring male characters are clearly this. To start with, male protagonist Shuusuke has a Porn Stash worthy to be the trope's page image, masturbates about five times a day, and his main social circle is an unofficial group call AGE Explorers, in which AGE stands for All Genre Ero. The group's main activity is Exactly What It Says on the Tin. His father seemed to be turned on with one of his SM porn. [spoiler]Even in preschool he played doctor with one of the girls specifically wanting to see her naked.[/spoiler]
• In Popcorn Avatar, this is played with by Kurando's male classmates to the hilt, to the point where they interpret Kurando's injuries after a battle as the result of him and Lisa "playing rough".

Film

• American Pie: Granted, it's a sex comedy and focuses on that issue, but the sheer length the main characters of the movies will go to for their goal is ridiculous. All they want is sex and that takes priority over everything else. Sure, by the end of the first movie, they decide it's not that important, but they get it anyway and after that it's all they ever talk about. Even Eugene Levy's character, who as far as we can tell is in a loving relationship with his wife, falls into this: for example, when he buys hardcore pornographic magazines in order to give his son The Talk.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Lust Drives Men Astray

In a lot of fiction, men seem to be perpetually seeking sex. Sometimes, this takes the form of the possibility of sex seeming to cause men to lose common sense and immediately abandon their responsibilities. This trope has been used as an Idiot Ball so many times, it's not funny.

Attempts at invoking this trope may fall under I Have Boobs, You Must Obey!, and an evil character who consistently relies on it is The Vamp.

___________________________________________________________________________

Men Are Sexual Predators

Some fiction portrays the use of trickery and force to obtain sexual pleasure as normal behavior for men, and the normal state of male sexuality. When this trope is in play, men given some chance at getting sexual pleasure, such as seeing women naked or to touching women in sexual ways, will tend to take it regardless of what the women involved might want.

Perhaps this is because, when Men Are Always Sexual but All Women Are Prudes, all sexual pleasure is obtained by men from women who would rather not give it, making male sexuality inherently predatory.

All Men Are Rapists is a particularly extreme form of this trope that shows up in Crapsack Worlds and old-fashioned romance novels.

Examples:

Advertising:

• A good example of this and All Women Are Prudes is in the Paco Rabanne perfume adverts. In the one targeted at men, (the 1 Million perfume) a man clicks his fingers and a woman's dress falls off. In the Lady Million perfume advert, a woman clicks her fingers and marriage ring appears on her finger.

Anime and Manga:

• Daily Livesof High School Boys has a milder example: the three main boys in the show have stolen Tadakuni's sister's underwear at some point.

Comicbooks:

• The Teen Titans have had their far share of these. Superboy was one, and some moron thought it was a good idea to give him x-ray goggles. However, he did grow out of that phase by the time he joined the team. Kid Flash, on the other hand, put some serious effort into seeing Starfire and Raven naked. Starfire just let him see, and commented that it was the longest she'd ever seen him stand still. Raven managed to retain her dignity.

Film:

• Revengeofthe Nerds. The things the Protagonists do over the course of the movie include: Installing cameras in a sorority house so they can watch them on their television, hiding in women's showers, and selling pies with nude women hidden in the tin for fund raising. At the beginning of the movie you see the characters calculating the number of breasts in their school. One of the main characters dresses up in a costume in order to trick a woman into having sex with him.

In Conan The Destroyer, Malak offers to apply a medicinal salve to Zula's injured thigh. She lets him at first, but then has to remind him that the wound is lower. Indeed, when the camera pulls away, the trail of medicine has journeyed far north of the injury.

edited 1st Jul '13 6:02:12 PM by kuyanJ

Tropes Are Not Bad.

Pretty good. Would you say we already have Men Are Always Sexual in the form of A Man Is Always Eager?

I think they are similar concepts, but slightly distinct. Though since they come from the same views on men and have similar outcomes and effects on other tropes, they could be the same trope.

Also, there's the question of whether people adding examples can distinguish between the two.

It's funny; I was just thinking about how All Men Are Perverts, All Women Are Lustful, and All Women Are Prudes are not necessarily all mutually exclusive. As in, "Men are all about staring at women. Women will have none of that; the only part of it they care about is the sex itself." (Wow, that made me sound really sexist...)

I'll put up the YKTT Ws now. I haven't included the examples from All Women Are Lustful yet because I'm not sure it is the same tropes. As Jordan pointed out when it was in YKTTW itsself, since both tend to be written by men one is self-deprecatory while the other is hostile. I might add them later. I've left out many of the examples because I didn't know which one to put them in, and I'm not sure about my classification of all the ones I have included.

Tropes Are Not Bad.

They're absolutely not mutually-exclusive. It seems to me that the common thread amongst all of them is that women are considered "delicate". In the case of All Men Are Perverts, men are slaves to their biological desires, but it's considered a necessary evil because babies have to happen some way. In All Women Are Prudes, women are much too delicate and pure to have sex, so men have to be the ones to draw them out of their shells. In All Women Are Lustful, once a woman gets a taste of sexual freedom, she suddenly loses all control and men have to find a way either to resist their temptations (and better focus on other things) or "tame" them.

It reminds me of stories I've seen in erotic fiction: basically, a man has to lure a woman out of her very demure virgin shell, and once she's out of it, she's suddenly a raging nympho. It's essentially the Madonna-Whore Complex.

Added in some AWAL examples.

Tropes Are Not Bad.

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"If you aren't him, then you apparently got your brain from the same discount retailer, so..." - Fighteer