Men Don't Like Bitches, but They Do Like Brats
Men like to dominate...but not if it's too easy.
Recently, I wrote about how a great deal of tradwife propaganda is mistakenly identified as male-gaze-oriented but is actually male-dependency-oriented. In other words, when certain men claim they want women to be as modest, easy, unchallenging, uneducated and compliant as possible, they are either saying this to trick women into forfeiting their leverage, or they are relatively inexperienced and have no idea how bored such a woman would actually make them. They are not being honest about a genuine attraction to meekness, unconditional compliance, and Amish clothing.
Of course, this belief got twisted and I was misquoted as saying that actually, men love pointlessly oppositional bitches who demean them and argue over everything—sort of the genderswapped version of “women like criminal bad boys who hit them and sell drugs.” I was called misogynistic slurs over it a couple of times, which really gives away the game (“Misogyny isn’t real, you lying whore!”)
But my point was never that men are turned off by submission, let alone femininity. In fact, I’ve written extensively about how straight men generally prefer to take the dominant roles in their relationships, even outside of sex. This generally maps pretty nicely onto straight female sexuality, since women also tend to prefer dominant men (actually, women are less varied in this preference than men are.) When I wrote for GQ, I openly stated that to get out of the circular argument about “toxic masculinity,” we need to make peace with the fact that dominance and aggression (in appropriate settings) are turn-ons for most straight women.
But I take issue with the idea that every man’s fantasy woman is shy, soft-spoken, and as unchallenging as possible. Men may want to dominate and lead, but there’s very little fun in conquering someone who is already kneeling in surrender. A comment from Lane Scott drew a nice parallel. I may be butchering it, but she essentially said “Who could forget all those stories about the cowboy who tamed the already-compliant-and-agreeable horse?”
I don’t doubt that many men (even men who aren’t remotely regressive or sexist) want a woman to submit to them. What I do doubt is that they want this to be easy.
