The school year has started once again, and the streets of Montreal's Plateau neighbourhood are full of university students. You notice the girls and watch their young, hopeful bodies whisk by. Everywhere, all around you. Dressed to the nines as they start another year of school - idealistic and energetic and brash and unknowing. Sometimes haughty and sometimes timid. Full of the lightness of youth.

   The distraction is real. You try not to let your eyes linger on their forms or be too obvious as you take in their beauty, their myriad shapes and skin tones and sizes. You're a 43 year-old man, and you're vain. Your vanity has forced you to stay in shape, to stay trim and presentable, but still... your time is past. The gulf is now too great between you and these women just starting out in life. You're aware of this. You accept it entirely.

   Your libido, however, has remained stubbornly persistent. This is a problem, of sorts. You strive for composure, for an appearance of respectability. Of course, you don't want to intimidate or make anyone unomfortable. You don't want to be a creep. You know that you're ridiculous. And yet the desire exists separately from your mind. It simmers within you, and no amount of concentration can get rid of it. It persists, even when you are happily satisfied in a monogamous relationship.

   This idea of variety, of discovering unknown bodies, hangs over some people like edenic fruit. In your private thoughts, you would gladly lose yourself in a Hieronymus Bosch tapestry of young flesh, with any number of these bright-eyed, optimistic girls from Winnipeg, Toronto, Lebanon, France, Germany. The attraction you feel for them as they pass you in the street, on their bicycles, in the metro, will not go away. It's not up to you. You are part of this category of men.

   You try to be as sensitive to it as possible. Proper conduct amounts to proper social etiquette. An essentially British code of behaviour instilled in you by your mother. But if you're honest with yourself, if you let your fantasies run wild, then of course you'd admit to thinking about the girls naked, to placing strangers and acquaintances alike in all kinds of sexual scenarios. Images pop into your head without warning on a regular basis, in strange swells of subconscious surrealism - you can't do anything about it. You see a writhing wall of flesh, a great towering collection of women bent over and stacked on top of each other, moaning and urging you to penetrate them. You imagine great heaving orgies that go on for as far as the eye can see, a riot of entangled limbs, all kinds of bodies enjoying one another in every possible way. Great waves of sperm and vaginal fluid washing over everyone, over their faces and breasts and sweaty bodies. Everything permitted, nothing forbidden, like in the final scene of Patrick Suskind's "Perfume".

   You think of the Marquis de Sade and his illustrations of chains of women on all fours licking each other from behind. You think of Catherine the Great and the infamous horses with hard-ons being lowered down onto her - of the normalization of licentiousness and decadence, of times when promiscuous behaviour was exempt from moral judgment. You think of the Emperor Tiberius at the end of his life on the isle of Capri, an exhausted lecher who went as far as any human possibly could in his enjoyment of the flesh, youths from all over the empire shipped in to stage shows for his pleasure.

   You think of the lifetime of pornography that you and most of your friends have by now consumed. How this became normalized from the 1980s onward. Some of the images and sequences remain. You carry it all within you. The images that you can still remember from childhood or adolescence are probably linked to the triggering of certain preferences that existed a priori within you. In one of the first porno films you saw, aged 12, a man ejaculated into a cup and a woman with big 80s hair licked her lips and drank it all down. You were shocked and disgusted at the time, but the scene stayed with you, wiggling around worm-like inside your head. You were molded by the things you learned were possible. A wretched beast exists inside of us, Leonard Cohen sang on his final album, and it will only be tamed with old age. Until then, you restrain it, and act appropriately. But it pants heavily in the heat and strains at its leash.

  You've been struck dumb by the beauty of the female form. You've obsessed and quested and fantasized your whole life. The fact of female beauty has moved you constantly, unendingly since you were a child. It has at times led you to be selfish and superficial. You're aware that this can sound terrible, in today's climate. A climate in which sex and sexuality have become highly politicized. You are a simple male full of lust. What do you do with this lust, this restless energy? Where do you put it? You didn't ask for it. It's a heavy albatross around your neck.

   It seems to you that in many ways, in the Western world at least, a new puritanism is emerging. It seems to you that there were eras in which the feminist movement, and women in general, were less critical of the male libido itself. The 1970s, the 1930s, the Belle Époque maybe, the Renaissance, the Chaucerian middle ages. There was a place for it, or at least an acceptance of the absurdity of it. There existed the possibility of dismissing it with humour, derision or force of character. In the '50s, '60s and '70s, the feminist struggle was for concrete advances in society and in the workplace, to undo the stigma related to a woman's desire to be free and live as she pleases. To undo the very real restraints that held her back. This was good and noble, an essential struggle. Now we have terms like "toxic masculinity" and "the male gaze", which would seem to take aim, in part, at the very nature of the male libido itself. Which is to say, "Rein in your hormones. By their very nature they are menacing." Essentially "cut off your erection" as Andrea Dworkin used to say. And this too you can understand, when you think about it. This constant insecurity, this constant threat of sexual violence that women have had to live with every day, throughout history.

   It all pains you greatly. You want to be open about your desires, your nature, your self -  but you don't want to be shamed or forced to hide. It seems to you that all of these things can be broached with kindness and humour. You think of the many unapologetically masculine authors who wrote about being men: Henry Miller, D.H. Lawrence, Philip Roth, Norman Mailer, Bukowski. You could point to Hemingway and Conrad. In music: Nick Cave, '70s and '80s classic rock and heavy metal, much of contemporary hip-hop. Many of them are now under attack, accused of being retrograde, primitive, demeaning.

   But regardless, shouldn't there be a place for such artists? Aren't their voices also relevant, no matter how much we may dislike them in a given era, or how out of fashion they become? The annals of art and literature - of the world - are littered with accounts of people who eventually found themselves on the wrong side of history. As well as the accounts of criminals and freaks and debauched people, many of them artists. Can we consider them without being accused of complicity in their sins? You feel torn between two currents. You try to navigate this new world, full of moral minefields. The current discussions are partly the result, you intuit, of the prolonged prosperity and privilege of the newer generations. A greater entitlement, thinner skin. A dangerous analysis, perhaps. A risky argument to make. Is there a way for us to acknowledge the dog-like automatism of the male libido without being considered threats, morons, vulgar trolls, drooling satyrs? Is there a way for women to forgive us for our appetites, our drives, our masculinity?

   You think of the co-writer of the Oxford English Dictionary, Dr. W.C. Minor, a veteran of the American Civil War. Subject of the popular book "The Professor and the Madman". After the war he spent years living a dissolute life. By 1868 he had blown all his money on booze and prostitutes, and was committed to an asylum for the mentally insane in London. The morality of the day was very rigid. Society at the time looked upon his behaviour as aberrant, and he was wracked by terrible guilt. In his cell he remained tormented by the intensity of his desires. A prisoner of his libido.

  In 1902, he finally cut off his own penis with a small knife that he'd managed to smuggle into his cell. You learned a new word from it: auto-peotomy. Only after this did he feel a sense of liberation, he said, from the oppressive hormonal urges that had dominated his life.