_Jessie Staley is a freshman studying political science at MU. She is an opinion columnist who writes about student life for The Maneater._

Poor boys. It must be so hard to deal with that uncontrollable sex drive. To fight your urge to bang every woman, or person, you come into contact with. It must be so awful to have this little sex-goblin controlling everything you do. That is the case, right? At least that is what the social stereotypes and a few questionable and dated doctoral opinions tell us.

This is not true, especially not for every man. There are plenty of asexual men and numerous nympho-esque women. To put an entire gender in a rigid box is presumptuous and unfair.

If you grow up being told you are a certain way and are socialized to act that way, then you will be the way you were raised to be. Whether that is your actual disposition or not is irrelevant to your behavior. This is what we as a society have done to men.

Society has declared that men have a much higher and sometimes uncontrollable sex drive compared to women. Society has raised every boy to believe and act like this, whether they actually do or not.

Maybe a hundred years ago, men had a substantially higher sex drive. This may have been because of higher testosterone levels. Over the past several decades, however, men’s testosterone levels have been steadily declining, which can be a main cause for low libido. A new study in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism says in 1988, men who were 50 years old had higher serum testosterone concentrations than comparable 50-year-old men did in 1996. This suggests that some factor other than age may be contributing to the observed declines in testosterone over time. This may create an equilibrium between men and women’s sex drive.

However, most studies show men tend to think more sexual thoughts, have more sex and are more easily aroused than women. This gives reasonable belief that men have a much higher sex drive, but many of these studies do point out that there are qualifying factors for this data, namely that women may not be able to identify arousal as easily as men because of less obvious physical reactions. There is also the main qualification that women have always been socialized to reject their sexuality, so the study is erroneous to begin with.

We raise men to believe that frequent sexual activity and sexual aggression is a good thing and something to be achieved, but then tell women they should avoid men like this and we should aspire to be the opposite way. Women are told to fear men, to be careful when alone, to be meek and, above all, to protect our virginity. This makes for a very “predator and prey” social design.

According to the status quo, men have a lot of sex and women do not. While modernization has worked towards abolishing this stereotype, there is still a long way to go. This is a main issue the sexual movement has neglected. Men are raised to be sexual and aggressive. If not, they are criticized and mistreated by other men.

If we spend less time judging the “masculinity” of men and the “purity” of women, then the likelihood is that we will have less trouble with overly aggressive and sexual males. Men have been bred and trained to be this way. If we stop training them and stop believing this social stereotype, then men will be free and women will be safer.

The male gender has fallen victim to sexism for too long, and it hurts everyone. Everyone is unique in their biology. Sex drive is included in that.