Men, specifically average heterosexual men, are the simplest and easiest to understand creatures on earth. The well-known three Fs describe man’s outermost public and at the same time his innermost, intimate central focuses of his emotional life. Fuck, Fart and Football – this is the truth about man. Sometimes, when men are together and among themselves, they seem to assure each other and themselves that this is what their lives are about unless inconvenient demands by their families, partners or work are being forced on them. 

If you share this view about the average heterosexual man, put this book away, don’t waste your time with hundreds of pages of hysterical mystifications, exaggerations and dramatizations.

But in case that you allow yourself to think the possibly heretical thought that heterosexual men may have a more complex, sensitive and conflict ridden inner life, even may often feel anxious, clueless and abandoned in their battle to get the man-thing right while relentlessly driven by a constitution—the male constitution that is biologically geared to impregnate every egg that comes into reach—you will be holding a book in your hand that can give you some guidance in your exploration of what Paul Abramowitz calls the male predicament.

There is a whole world of what broadly speaking could be called health care, which is dedicated to preserving and recovering of physical and mental health on all levels. As we focus these efforts on how we run our relationships and how we maneuver our precious selves through the jungle of our western civilized world in such a way to find as much support, pleasure and fulfillment as possible for ourselves and others while trying to inflict as little damage as possible on us and others, there is interestingly, and even more, sadly, little theoretical science and even less literature on the practical application of scientific knowledge and understanding of the biological bases of male psychosexuality. The pathways of development that heterosexual males take within our socio-economic framework under the influence of our cultural conditions have yet to be finitely examined.

Where can one read about the heterosexual male’s sexual development, how it starts, what processes have to be lived through in which contexts, what the milestones, typical events, constants and results of such experiences turn out to  be? What are typical subjective experiences, where are the explorations, what terminology is used to express and describe those experiences and explorations—and in whose language do we create and understand meaning?

If you don’t have an answer to these questions you just found the answer to why we are seduced to think that there is nothing to experience, nothing needing explanations, no need for terminology, concepts, or language.

It is the longstanding omission of the discourse that perpetuates the illusion about the simplicity, baseness and emotionlessness of the heterosexual man’s inner life.

If you—the heterosexual man, the woman who is with him now or for a longer time, the practitioner who feels a need for expertise, for tools to explore, understand and facilitate or someone who is interested in the human condition and unable to find a guide for the exploration of the heterosexual man—then you hold a starter kit in your hand that contains cutting edge scientific concepts charting biology’s intelligence, enlivened by direct subjective reports and practical instructions for your own experience.

This book opens a gate to see and hear, to name and grasp, to explore and pace, to experience and map, to understand and start conversations about a most intimately unknown world that actually has always been in and around you.

Dr George Fodor

Consultant Psychiatrist and Neurologist, Psychoanalyst