Welcome to The Ick, Season 5: TABOO. We’ll be covering death, sex, money—and so much more.
Season 5 will culminate in a print magazine and launch party in San Francisco. All online articles are free, but please consider these paid subscription tiers. All proceeds go toward printing costs.
For the season opener, Eurydice explores taboos of sexual dominance and submission. In a moment where there are sex-cult allegations in SF’s AI safety scene, and a reckoning over rape allegations at Cornell, the subject is both timely and fraught.
Eurydice approaches the topic from an unexpected angle, with sensitivity and her signature straight talk.
Take it away, Eury.
It’s boring to talk about sex as taboo.
Nearly equally boring is to point out that women desire dominant men.
Women want to surrender to the right kind of dominance, while men want to receive surrender and display dominance. But this has recently become taboo to discuss or examine.
In order to understand why a man having power is attractive, you must first understand where he begins: Men lack power with women, in particular, at baseline. This is unattractive—not just to a woman, but to him, too.
In order to understand why a woman desires surrender, you must first understand that her starting position is a consistent state of vigilance. She’s usually directing her attention towards the thoughts, opinions, and needs of the people around her. Do they need anything? Are they happy with her? This is exhausting, and she wants a break.
Men are weak
A lot of masculinity makes more sense when you consider how many men feel functionally dominated by their sexual desire for women.
Not only do men feel as if they’re controlled by their own sexual desire, especially in their adolescence, they feel that they are nearly helpless to satisfy it. They often feel an acute sense that they’re forced to rely on women as a gatekeeper and judge, with her unsparing sexual decision-making standing between them and a relief of the ever-present hunger they feel.
This is a multi-layered bind. Women become not only the only thing that’s desired, but the magistrate that decides whether he receives it, and also a disruptive critic. At this stage, women’s opinions can feel particularly frightening, making it difficult to display emotional calm and competence, frustrating his ability to achieve his desire still further.
Men know that loss of face in front of women compromises something they want perhaps most of all—sexual access and often the emotional support that goes with it—and no one is more successful at making them lose face than women. They sometimes imagine escaping the confines of their own experience by having the kind of erotic power over women that women have over them, often assuming that being hot would have this effect. Intensifying this desire is an often pervasive male anxiety of being deeply sexually unappealing in comparison to women—ugly, repulsive even, at baseline.
Desire is different
The experience of a man seeing a hot woman is different in kind, and not just in degree, from a woman seeing a hot man.
I’ve heard a person describe the feeling of seeing an attractive woman—especially one wearing revealing clothing, but even some in fairly everyday wear—as causing abrupt, almost intrusive thoughts of actively having sex with her. I have no idea if that’s the median male experience, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s within a standard deviation or so from the mean, given how men talk and euphemize in general.
The underlying physiology of desire is different—a different hormonal ratio running on different physical hardware, if you will. The starkness of this physiological response simply has no analogue in women.
Women are horny, yes. Women will imagine what it would feel like to have a hot guy touch them, kiss them, or even have sex with them, sure. We’ve fought so hard to acknowledge that women are horny—and they are, incredibly so—that we’ve forgotten that women aren’t horny in exactly the same way men are. The male expression of sexuality is not the human standard. Masculine desire should not be an expectation we hold women to, something to find disappointingly absent if women don’t have it.
Sexuality is distinctly sexed. How could it not be?
The strength of the male physiological response plays a large role in why men feel controlled by their sexual desire for women, often mistaking it for being controlled by women altogether. This response does in some ways control them. Men grow to have greater mastery of many elements of this response—even including unwanted erections—but they mostly gain control by growing up and having fewer of them, rather than consciously being able to completely prevent them.
The male sense of being controlled by women is in reality a sense of being controlled by a part of himself. He must unlearn his belief that this is women’s doing.
A man often has to learn that he has no hope of causing the same physiological overwhelm in women that women do him, because women don’t have the same levers he does. He must instead gain power over himself in order to confront the power he feels women have. Talent, status, competence, athletic ability, even wealth—are all downstream of a man’s ability to exert control over himself and his circumstances. Male dominance is, in its ideal form, a dominance of the internal self, a dominance that results in better outcomes for both himself and those around him.
Note the alternatives to self-domination here: the first is being perceived as her superior. This is fundamentally playing defense for the possibility of being dominated by the woman, a root desire in conversation with the essential weakness of masculine sexuality. They seek to overpower her socially or otherwise in order to combat their fear of being at her mercy sexually. There is also, of course, the other form of dominating a woman: physically overpowering women is easy on average. Being male makes it possible to physically overpower the vast majority of women without any additional skills.
It’s impossible to respect something that’s both harmful to others and not difficult to do.
A man who can playact at physically overpowering a woman without actually losing control of himself is doing the opposite of surrendering or presenting a danger to her. The playacting is itself a dramatic demonstration of his ability to channel his own strength in a moment that would otherwise be controlled by his sexual weakness. This use of his self-direction is not only for his own well-being but for hers as well. In his case, because he desires being received, desired, succumbed to willingly—not fought with repulsion or allowed with resignation. In her case, because she wants to be released from her natural instinct to constantly monitor others’ needs.
She can only happily let go if nothing falls apart when she does, and that requires someone with self-mastery and competence.
Women are neurotic
Female desire for surrender works on a different engine. Unlike men, who are at baseline exposed and afraid in the face of their desire, and helpless in their inability to satisfy it, women are at baseline somewhat neurotic.
Women have a tendency to attend to their anxiety with constant action, over-functioning, never relaxing, and never asking for help. They’re oriented to others in a way that often leaves them neglecting themselves, but acting like that’s other people’s fault. Their sexual surrender appeals both to them and to men because it’s a full, if temporary, renouncement of all of this exhausting, not-always-purely-altruistic self-abnegation.
Desirable sexual surrender allows women, for a moment, a deeply pleasurable freedom from monitoring and managing. Dominance is both pressure and freedom (paradoxically) to surrender all this other-orientation in favor of determining what she desires.
In order for women to get what they themselves want sexually, their signals generally need to remain ambiguous enough to hide their desire, particularly their specific desire to surrender. This is in part because “surrendering too quickly” can mean being conquered only by men capable of physical dominance, which is actively dangerous—instead of what she really wants, a man with total control of himself.
A woman who takes charge romantically risks incentivizing men to be the ones surrendering, specifically to their own sexually weakest selves. Neither of them really gets what they want in those circumstances. Giving a man what he wants too quickly, making it too easy, ruins a woman’s own sexual experience.
Similarly, a man physically overpowering a woman to achieve his sexual ends doesn’t often give him what he wants out of sex anyway. He wants her to desire him in a particular way—despite her physiological differences from him, he wants to see her as bowled over by sexual desire for him, as he has felt for women for most of his life. He wants to see her overpowered, not by his physical strength, but by her desire to receive him, surrender to him, and be completely detached from all other thoughts.
He wants her desire in part because it can help him shed that nagging sense of being ugly or undesirable in a fundamental sense, and nothing short of her real, intense, visible desire and surrender will give him that.
The female desire to be dominated is taboo in part because you can’t be open about how it works without making it easier for men to game, and thereby making the available pool of men less appealing.
The cost is asymmetrical
The cost of sex and the cost of obtaining sex is asymmetrical. As a result, both male dominance and female surrender are the culmination of rigorous mutual selection processes, expressed asymmetrically. There is a cheap strength in men, and a valuable strength in men; a cheap surrender in women, and a high stakes surrender in women.
For men, becoming desirable means mastering themselves—a costly dominance not of women but of their own inherent vulnerability to lust and recklessness. For women, that means selecting heavily—only accepting exactly what they want most.
Male sexual dominance is in costly opposition to baseline male vulnerability to his own appetites, while female sexual surrender is in costly opposition to baseline female overfunctioning due to her own neuroticism.
The male desire to dominate is taboo in part because admitting how profoundly weak men often feel in the face of their desire grosses out women—and terrifies men themselves.
