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Male psychology is beginning to attract the kind of attention paid to its female counterpart over the past 15 years. However, while the assumption that female sexual masochism is primary, universal, and defining has been challenged, the popular belief that male sexuality is innately aggressive and sadistic has persisted with minimal questioning.
The cultural stereotype of male sexuality is of a kind of phallic omnipotence and supremacy, a phallus invested with the power of mastery. At the very least, this macho view depicts a large, powerful, untiring phallus attached to a very cool male, long on self-control, experienced, competent, and knowledgeable enough to make women crazy with desire. As Zilbergeld has said “It's two feet long, hard as steel, and can go all night” (1978, p. 23). In the shared cultural fantasy, even the normally reticent female is perceived to be utterly powerless and receptive when confronted by pure macho sexuality.
But phallic power is also viewed as easily corrupted into sexual domination and violence. This is clear in the common depiction of male sexuality in pornography, movies, TV, and sexual humor, and in much of the major fiction of our time.