Joanna Trollope the novelist was explaining on the radio the other day why she wasn’t interested in writing about male couples, considering that she had centred a recent novel on the lives of two lesbians. She was saying that the predatory aspect of men was doubled in a gay relationship, and that she found it unappealing. She couldn’t write about characters she couldn’t warm to.

Predatory a. of or addicted to plunder or robbery; (of animal) preying naturally upon others. (praedari seize as plunder f. praeda booty)/

Concise Oxford Dictionary

When a wordsmith such as Trollope uses a word such as predatory she is well aware of its connotations. Gay men have always been suspected of being highly predatory, specifically around young boys. Although most paedophiles are heterosexual, and most victims of such abuse are little girls, the suspicion still rumbles around, erupting in the most unlikely of places, including our own psyches.

But she was not talking about paedophilia. She was talking about that questing, hungry aspect of human sexuality, which, when the booty is the male body, shifts in description from the non-judgmental “hunter” to the uncivilised, bestial “predator”.

At the heart of this hunter/predator split is the assumption that it is natural for women to be hunted by men. The cartoon caveman bops his mate on the head with a club and drags her by the hair to his cave. The damsel in distress is rescued by the knight in shining armour, and carried off to be the lady of the manor. Men at the ballroom of romance take their pick of the wallflowers. Women play “hard to get” to encourage the hunt.

When men are the objects of desire, of either women or men, then there is a subtle shift of emphasis. Men aren’t supposed to be desired. In the natural order of things, we are supposed to act, to do, to want. If we become conscious of our own beauty, our own desirability, our own passivity, then something is amiss.

Sexual Adventure

There are no male supermodels. Our society has been pleased to raise the status and pay of male models in the nineties, but we have not yet elevated to household name status a man whose sole claim to fame is his looks. There are, however, male porn superstars; but they of course are popular not for their passivity, but for their studied studness, the very essence of horny, active masculinity. Jeff Stryker has never been in a film in which he gets fucked. He fucks others, both male and female, with pneumatic efficiency; but in his world everyone succumbs to his phallus, which is the ultimate object of desire; not Stryker himself, with his pretty face and cold eyes.

The word predatory is free of value judgement when we talk of lions and ants. When we talk about predatory human beings, our blood runs cold. I remember when I had just come out, a man used to hang around the youth group in his car, hoping to have a word with some of the members, and chat us up. I had been warned about him: he had been branded a “chickenhawk”. His “prey” were always teenagers. He spent all his spare time hunting for “chickens” like me.

When he eventually did collar me, I was mortified. However I found that he was a good-looking man in his thirties (ancient!) who was utterly charming and pleasant. I still said no, I didn’t want to go for a drive, and he never bothered me again. This man had done nothing wrong; indeed, post-legalisation, would have done nothing illegal. My own prejudice against this man reflected an internalised homophobia; I perceived his actions as sinister, as I was supposed to.

In my experience, there is the hunter in all of us, male and female. Men find it easier to express it, indeed sometimes feel that they have no choice but to express it. It can be an expression of the instinctive and animal in us, which has its parallel perhaps in the emotional and hormonal monthly cycle of women. But it is part of who we are.

At night in any city or large town you will find a gathering of men, hunting with each other for sexual adventure and intimacy. This past week I have met a Norwegian chemist, a German combine harvester salesman fresh from three months in Kazakhstan, an unemployed bisexual social science postgraduate, and a smiling precocious youth from whom biographical details were unforthcoming and unnecessary.

There is one word that describes the framework in which all of us met and parted, that has nothing to do with predatory seizing and plundering. The word is camaraderie. It marks us as civilised.