Why Female Led?

They call it a female led relationship, or wife led marriage, or who knows what by someone else - I’ve seen enough terms, phrases and acronyms to realize there is no hard and fast codification. Sometimes when I think about all this, I just end up wondering why all the descriptive baggage. Let’s face it, it’s only called female (or wife or woman, or whatever) for the contrast with traditional ‘male led relationships’, or ‘husband led marriage’. Yet making either distinguishment, male or female, has always seemed unwieldy to me, perhaps because when it comes to what I want to do in my personal relationship I just don’t really care so much what is or isn’t ‘traditional’ by the majority or what even what the rest of the minority might be doing. I just want what I want.

And as far as names go, I want to believe this defies perfect codification precisely because there are more shades, tones and variables within what people want for their personal relationships than can be accounted for in the base ideology and gendered stereotypes that lie behind such a woefully inadequate grouping of words. That is rather than simply believe it’s because so few people have ever heard ‘female led’ differentiated from the leather clad dominatrix before. Perhaps I’m really bothered by how lackluster ‘history’ and ‘tradition’ seem as excuses for the false dichotomies used to represent human experience.

And of course on the other hand, sometimes a label is just a label, just a temporary net designed to catch just enough meaning and haul it across the void between persons and sometimes what we receive isn’t quite what was sent. After all, although it is something slightly different for me, when I start describing what I want with the one I love, I still start with this thing, this concept, however it is people name it.