I’m just gonna go ahead and admit that there’s a particular Carly Simon song that (in sharp contrast to most of her music) doesn’.t make me change the channel or drive screaming into a bridge abutment. It.s called, ”All I Want is You,” and the best lyric in the song goes, ”I don.t want a man who tiptoes up the stairs.” I can.t think of a better one-sentence encapsulation of ds.
I don’t think most women have any idea how easy it is to neuter a man, to make him feel worthless, incompetent, fumbling, weak. Perhaps there are a few out there who do it intentionally, like some of the intentionally abusive men who destroy their lovers’ self-confidence, but I think most of it happens by accident. A few rejections here, a few rejections there, and even strong men enter a tailspin of sexual neurosis. Expecting rejection, we fear to approach our lovers and when we do approach our fear makes our advances halting, clumsy, lame.
Sex becomes a favor to be begged, a reward to be earned-and the earning makes it worse, as we enter the bedroom convinced already that the sexplay is a gift to us, not to all involved. After a little while, as though to rub salt in the wound, our lovers will start to complain that we aren’t as flirtatious, as seductive, as masculine as we were back in the early passionate days of the relationship.
The cycle completes when we, stung now by our own feelings of impotence and self-recrimination, begin to assert power and control in passive-aggressive ways. We make ugly comments about signs of aging, pretending we don’t find our lovers attractive any more when in reality we fear how little they might desire us. We discover an all-engaging hobby, a favorite chair, perhaps an affair. Worst of all, we blame our lovers instead of shouldering our portion of responsibility.
Ultimately, we don’t want sex anymore so much as vengeance. We want them to feel as rejected as we did. And the worst part is that, by then, they may have long-since stopped rejecting us and perhaps even started to beg our affection and attention. There are no winners in such a war.
Such an easy cycle. I tell the couples I work with how important it is to be sexually engaged; one of my standard lines is, ”There.s a reason it.s called making love.” Except for when such a beautiful act becomes so poisoned that it seems more like making hate.
”I don.t want a man who tiptoes up the stairs.” No, she wants a man who has no reason to expect that she wouldn’t want him to wake her up when he enters the bedroom. This is not a man who will quietly slink under the covers, hoping to not inconvenience his wife by wanting sex. It.s never occurred to him that she wouldn’t be woken, taken. Is this marital rape? No. Disrespect? No. Aggression? Maybe, but I think it.s better described as confidence. The kind of confidence that makes us good lovers, good husbands, good fathers, good masters.
Carly is singing about the kind of man Anais Nin described: the kind of man whose wife’s heart quickens when she hears the door open or when she hears his footstep on the stairs. This is the kind of man whose wife will come to greet him at the door when she awakes, who knows in advance that his wife would be bitterly disappointed were he to slink quietly under the covers instead of tearing them from her and claiming what is his. This is the kind of man who is so confident in his masculinity that some women, less confident in their femininity, fear him.
Submissives ask all the time, ”Why do you choose the awesome responsibility of being a dominant? What can you possibly get out of it?”
We get to be that kind of man. We get the kind of woman that does not fear that kind of man. For those of us who once felt like the other kind of man-simpering, weak, plagued by self-doubt-let me say something you don’t hear often enough.
Thank you.
As written by [ LJ User: drcruel ] and posted on [ LJ User: humbled females ].