Mine eyes have seen the future. Or, rather, the depressing present!

Last night while recording the podcast PJ introduced us to the wonder that is Chat-Roulette. I'm warning you now, that link is NSFW. Hell, it's Not Safe For Anyone.

Chat-Roulette is, essentially, a site that randomly links up webcams to each other, with a handy 'NEXT' button for the easily bored. Or offended. Or dismayed. It would be very easy to lose hours of your life at a time to random chats with people, except for one glaringly obvious problem. Nearly every 5th or 6th click presents you with a live video of some dude having an anonymous wank. If you're feeling adventurous, go and have a look.

It would be all too easy to point at a site like that and say that it's proof that the internet is a dangerous place, but I think it highlights something far more interesting and relevant, and that's the dark, dark places that unchecked male sexuality seems to go...

As an experiment, click through cameras on Chat-Roulette for, say, 5 minutes. If you encounter any girls you'll be lucky, and if the girl doesn't skip you within 3 seconds you'll be even luckier (more on this later). In all likelihood, what you will see is an endless procession of men staring (and I do mean staring) at you, OR close-ups of male genitals being thrashed within an inch of their lives. Why is this?

Well, I think it's precisely because of the psychological make-up of most men - note, I'm not arrogant enough to exclude myself from the group of people I'm talking about.

What follows will be a list of statements, things that I think are true of an awful lot of men. I haven't the inclination to organise my thoughts, so just run with it.

Men go to the Dark Places
I'm sure many of you female readers have experienced instances where a male sexual partner wants to do things you don't want to, and will get insistent the more intense the sex becomes. Women can sometimes transgress taboos when the mood takes them, but for many men it can become a fixation, and lead to fetishising said acts. Personally, I think this is the number one reason hardcore pornography exists - so folks can play out in their minds what they can't in real life.

Women keep Men in check
For the most part, women seem to know when is 'too far' - especially since for men the things they want to do that are outside the norm are by their nature probably painful and possibly humiliating. Women, since these acts normally occur at their acquiescence, also keep the presence of mind when to stop. Men, if they're decent, will. If they don't... well, that's rape. Yes, even if sex is already in progress.

This kind of explains the violent BDSM Homosexual scene. And Chat Roulette.
Y'see, without a woman around to keep shit sensible, I think men go a little crazy. People regularly make jokes about the outlandish stuff they perceive gay men to do, or what they've encountered via pornography. 

However, I don't think it's anything to do with being gay. I think it's because it's two blokes without the good sense of a woman to say 

'Quit that! That'll hurt!' 

or 

'Don't put THAT in THERE!'

or

'Stop punching each other in the kidneys!'

I'm not particularly familiar with lesbian relationships, but I can't imagine them being as fraught with physical peril - they mostly seem to be about loving each other. Again, this is nothing to do with being gay - it's mainly to do with being guys. Men have evolved to be the larger and more physically, if not psychologically, dominant partner. What happens when both partners are on equal footing, size-wise. What happens when both want to explore the darker side of their sexuality...?

Sex = Violence?
Sex and violence, sex and violence - for many, many men they are only separated by our ability for self-cognisance. In the rest of the animal kingdom, procreation is often accompanied by force, and most quadrupeds have evolved means of the male restraining the female from escaping until he's completed the act.

However, we've evolved self-awareness and the ability to form relationships that aren't based on food-supply or the ability to nurture children, and also the ability to have sex without physically restraining our partner. But the animalistic seeds remain...

So how does all this relate to Chat-Roulette?

Well, it's full of men, who mainly seem to want the same thing - a single female to get undressed for them. Men, skipping every camera of a man they get, until they find the lone female. Who then skips them. And this puzzled me - why were the girls just skipping the blokes who were wanting to chat? 

Then I figured it out, after skipping past umpteen cams of men pleasuring themselves...

THAT is what the girls were wanting to see, and that is why they skipped past the image of myself and Scott - they came on to see what was taboo, what they couldn't justify actively looking for, but what they wanted to accidentally see - men, displaying their unchecked, raw sexuality for the world to see. And why not? That's what men wanted to see - women baring their breasts or more. However, it's not something that society is comfortable admitting yet, that women's sexuality is as complex and self-contradictory as men's; that they're as interested titillation or arousal or sheer bloody sexual spectacle as men are.

Look, maybe I've got this all wrong. Maybe women are as venal and dark as men are when it comes to their sexuality. But at the minute, a quick Chat-Roulette session would seem to suggest that the number of men who are prepared to masturbate on camera FOR NO GOOD REASON other than that it turns them on is much, much higher than the number of women.

I'd really be interested in people's thoughts on this.