Historical evidence of "pressures on men to be heterosexual"

SEX & CHARACTER
by Otto Weinenger
Selected by Kevin Solway
from the 1906 English Edition

excerpts from the section "Women and Mankind" dealing with sexual mores
(complaining about the morals of the early 1900s in Germany/England etc.):

Masculine chastity is laughed at, and the feeling that woman is the evil influence in man’s life is no longer understood, and men are not ashamed of their own lust.

It is now apparent from where this demand for “seeing life,” the Dionysian view of the music-hall, the cult of Goethe in so far as he follows Ovid, and this quite modern “coitus-cult” comes. There is no doubt that the movement is so widespread that very few men have the courage to acknowledge their chastity, preferring to pretend that they are regular Don Juans. Sexual excess is held to be the most desirable characteristic of a man of the world, and sexuality has attained such pre-eminence that a man is doubted unless he can, as it were, show proofs of his prowess. Chastity, on the other hand, is so despised that many a really pure lad attempts to appear blas, rou,. It is even true that those who are modest are ashamed of the feeling; but there is another, the modern form of shame – not the eroticist’s shame, but the shame of the woman who has no lover, who has not received appraisement from the opposite sex. Hence it comes that men make it their business to tell each other what a right and proper pleasure they take in “doing their duty” by the opposite sex. And women are careful to let it be known that only what is “manly” in man can appeal to them: and man takes their measure of his manliness and makes it his own. Man’s qualification as a male have, in fact, become identical with his value with women, in women’s eyes.

But God forbid that it should be so; that would mean that there are no longer any men.

(Submitted by vbk)