Erotic Truth

I suppose a lifetime spent hiding one’s erotic truth could have a cummulative renunciatory effect.  Sexual shame is in itself a kind of death.  Ulysses, of course, was banned for many years by people who found its honesty obscene. ~ Alison Bechdel

Actually the material I’ve found most helpful hasn’t been online or even about female led life and culture. I think some of the best lessons from the social history of sexual repression are about the undeniability of an individual’s erotic truth. I didn’t manage to hide my female led epiphany from my wife for very long compared to what I’ve read in other places, but for me the dissonance between my inside and outside over just three months was horrific. Sure, I could have lied when my wife confronted me, but I was already looking to simply be honest, looking to examine and understand why my erotic truth was seeing and participating in my partner's attainment of her desire and pleasure. So even after initially coming clean with my wife, I’ve continued to try to explain and to pay close, honest attention.

While it is true I love it when her passion and desire is so intense she [bends me, demands me, insists me?] to her pleasure, even when her desire and passion is far less or about something passing, ephemeral or mundane, seeing her process of desire and obtainment has an erotic edge. Sexually or psychologically, metaphysically or mundane, it doesn’t matter. I love seeing inside her, seeing into her primal experience of desire, seeing how her desire, her most interior self, demands me and everything around her to her measure. It’s the way she loves, lives and desires; it's how she presses forward on her inside path toward her pleasure and personal good.

Female led relationships are mostly discussed in terms of dominance and submission, but ’power exchange’ is beside the main point for me, the occasional mere price I pay for the pleasure of seeing and loving her inside self as much as I can. I love her will to power more than her power over me. The point of letting her have the final word on the situations and circumstances of our life together is so she can do what she desires to do and I get to participate in her process of obtainment and pleasure as she makes herself happy. It’s like getting to safely stand next to the sun and revel in its glory. Who wouldn’t want to?

To Kink or Not to Kink

Speaking of watching my wants, kink is surprisingly not a question. On my list of wants to watch out for, it surprisingly doesn’t even rate. It’s surprising because ‘female domination’ and kink seem to go together so well with ‘female led,’ it’s like potatoes and gravy or peanut butter and jelly (and for some people it’s the same thing). Yet here it is: I am not particularly interested in bondage, anal play, water sports, forced male chastity or any of the rest of the mounting tactics of the wild human. My lack of interest in kink is half the reason I felt I had to start writing down my ideas - so I could have space to read and think without being constantly confronted with other people’s kink (or worse other people’s porn).

My favorite explicitly female led source is She Makes the Rules because they are tireless in pointing out female led relationships are a kind of category and so come in all kinds of varieties and there is no one right way to do it. While I defend the right of those who are kinky to be kinky, I think it says something that as a site about female led life and culture SMTR had to have a section dedicated to kink and that they have to moderate so well all the time. I admit I might be missing something by not being kinky, but I can’t help feeling sincerely thankful since I’m not sure I handle what I have well enough to handle more.

Anyway my point is, sometimes I wonder what the essential difference is between myself and the vanilla guy, or the kinky female led guy, other than that I apparently prefer potatoes and jelly. (Or is it gravy and peanut butter?) I just want my wife to be happy, actively happy, and so I want her to call whatever shots she wants to call for us and our lives together such that she is happy and actively so. And finding other adequate, non-kinky, female led expressions to help me do my best in this, well, that would be nice too.

Contradiction in Frustrated Tears

But this thing, this concept has an oxymoronic nature in wanting to be a female led man. I often find myself saying things like, “I want her to want,” right - why would I want her to want anything other than what she actually wants?

Of course, I think the idea and hope among is “once she understands it is okay if she wants this or tries that, well then, she might like what I want her to like and want what I want her to want.” But then I find myself so intently trying to explain what I want in terms acceptable to her, so busy saying “I want you to lead, live and love my way,” that I am not really listening to what she’s saying she wants. Besides I wonder if there would ever be an end to my saying, “Why don’t you try this? How about you learn like this thing I want you to want? Why don’t you just start doing all the things I want you to want to do, whether you like it or not?”

It’s either a devious and tyrannical attempt to control your partner by first insidiously convincing them that you are really under their control so they won’t suspect, or it’s the good monarch’s plan that accidentally takes the first step to the dark side and makes “I was just trying to help you understand all your options” somehow sound a lot like “oops, it seemed like a good idea at the time.” Not only is your partner likely to be smarter than that but for her sake, your sake and the sake of the land, you probably want her to be smarter than that. I do.

So I suck it up and try to keep a close watch on my wants.

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.