SexyPrime, a blog by Susan Crain Bakos

WHY HAS SEX GONE TAME?--AND CAN MEN BE BAD BOYS IN BED--

Photo Credit:  "Red Heels" by ArieMercedes on Photobucket 

AND GOOD GUYS IN THE WORLD?

 

First, white men need love too—and everybody is dumping on them.  We all know what racial/gender group is blamed for the plague of tame sex.  Someone has to stand up for the white men who are damn good in bed; and I am rising up in my red stilettos to do just that.

Yes, I still love black men.  Many of my favorite email correspondents on SexyPrime and friends on Facebook are black men, African American, Caribbean, African.  But I love white (and Hispanic and Indian and Latino and Asian) men too.  Five –or six?—years ago I wrote an essay for The New York Press on how much I love black men.  (Read the interview with Zola on the conversation that keeps getting me into trouble.)  My very controversial (at the time) thesis:  Many white men lose their sexual mojo around the age of forty and black men don’t.  I received death threats for writing that.

Now everyone is on the White-Men-Can’t-Do-It bandwagon.  (Hey, a lot of them can.  I never said they were all bad in bed.)  A few recent examples:

Katie Rophe took on Gen X male writers (who are forty-ish now) in The New York Times, saying “…[they] are so self-conscious, so steeped in a certain kind of liberal education, that their characters can’t condone even their own sexual impulses.”

In "Ode To The Whipped White Male," Mark Morford, San Francisco Gate columnist asks, “Do you pity the sad and squishy white guys of America now?”—and goes on to call the average white guy “adrift, emasculated, slightly pissed off” and hiding out in his Man Cave where only advertisers pushing beer and fast cars are likely to reach him. 

Sometimes the critiquing of male sexuality is not so much white man specific as implied.

The Love and Intimacy Coach sites “a trend toward men becoming less and less aggressive in bed, and becoming more and more sensitive women and to what they desire.  This is good news and bad news.”

Mike Masters on Details.com laments the “very nasty trend in the world today, tame sex.”

I doubt that any of these writers have received death threats but, of course, they are not white women writing about sleeping with black men.   Today I am a white woman who has most recently been sleeping with a white man over forty, at the top of his game, both as a corporate litigator and a lover. Not only are we the same race, but—deep breath—he is an age-appropriate mate.  It is really not true that once you go black, you never go back.  Nor it is true that no white man will ever have you again.  Bust those myths. 

Let’s talk about truths—

The plague of tame sex has hit American bedrooms hard.  Men learned too well to ask permission before escalating every move and that “she comes first” always.  Women who wanted more sensitive men would now like them to be a little less sensitive and more manly.  

White men seem to suffer from the tame sex plague more than other racial groups.  Feminism was largely a white woman’s movement.  In our cultural zeal to raise liberated men who respect us as equals, we may have contributed to the creation of the monster, the un-sexed white American male. 

At the same time, more white men have found themselves in the beta role, earning less than their alpha wives, girlfriends and lovers.  (Read the alpha beta posts.)  Some betas have retreated into passive/aggressive behavior, exemplified by saying “no” to sex or masturbating to cyberporn or becoming “kink providers” like The Zola whose marathon spanking session symbolizes bad sex with the aging single white Gen X urban male.

How much has the internet/hook-up culture contributed to the problem?  Men think they have endless choices until they realize they don’t.  Women think their checklists will guarantee perfect matches until they realize they don’t.  What’s left after years of dating and hooking-up— people trapped in tame sex?

Let’s have a dialogue about the issues—

 

• Can tamed men learn how to be bad boys in bed while still being good guys in the world?
• How would you tell them to do that?
• Will women admit the roles we have played in creating tame lovers?
• Will people who have sexual relationships across the racial divides share what they have learned about the psycho-social-cultural components of sexuality?
• Who wants to have a conversation on the blog with me on the issues?

 (Thanks to Steve Otero for the research on this post.)

 

copyright 2008-2011, www.sexyprime.typepad.com; PARTIAL reposts only permitted with link back to original article on SexyPrime 

 

THE GRAND LOVE/HATE AFFAIR: The Results of SexyPrime's Dating/Mating/Hooking-Up Survey

Photo Credit:  "Red Heels" by UltraKiley on Photobucket 

 

The shocker:  Many men and women wrote at length to say they are not that happy with dating nor are they often satisfied in hooking-up.  Yes, even the men report next day buyer’s remorse, rooted in the knowledge that she didn’t come and he didn’t perform well.   People, listen:  Try doing it NOT drunk.  Drink a little to relax—and then cut yourself off. 

Some conclusions from the results—

 

• Black male professionals and white women over forty dominate the game (as do black women when they get out from under the crushing weight of cultural expectation and expand their pool of acceptable men.)

• Women in their thirties are fed up with hooking up and have retreated in cynical non-dating or internet match dating or just plain old desperate dating (I love Liz Weber’s comment on why she tried internet dating:  “I know how to fall in love and how to fuck, but I have never dated.”)

 

• My perception is that many young women in every racial group, but especially minorities, are not fully sexually empowered

And the respondents themselves were unafraid to draw conclusions, usually negative, about the other gender.

A 45 year old divorced white woman wrote, “Older white men (over forty) are evolved and likely unavailable or creepy or clueless.”

From a fifty year old divorced white man:  “I thought everything was great.  On a Sunday morning after spending the night—good sex!—she said, ‘This isn’t working for me’ and she left.  Who understands women?”

Yet men and women are driven to mate—even knowing they will have more disappointing first dates (or hook-ups) than not.

A married white man in his thirties said he never considered a relationship with a woman who had sex on the first date—but did call her after because “I didn’t want to ruin it for the other men.”  Someone married him?  Really?

And a 38 year-old white single woman wrote, “I just want to find a man of my own.  I’m lowering my standards.  I want a husband, home, baby.  And I am tired of dating and hooking up!”

That attitude is what got the above jerk married, isn’t it?

Europeans are more casual about relationships—and seem to enjoy them more too  French women don’t get fat eating bread, cheese and chocolate and drinking wine—and they don’t obsess over men either.

The happiest daters in SexyPrime’s Dating/Mating/Hooking-Up Survey were women over forty and men under thirty.  Hmmm……that would be cougars and their cubs, wouldn’t it?   There’s something to be said for the absence of biological pressure. 

From Emo Man, an ever hopeful dater whose heart breaks easily:  “I don’t like one-night stands.  They work into a two to four week fling at best.  What if you want more than that?”

What if most of us want more than that even if we won’t/can’t admit it?  We are stuck with dating and hooking-up, with the possibility of rejection and disappointment, with taking some risk or we aren’t very likely to get anything.  Remember that joke Woody Allen told at the end of “Annie Hall,” the classic relationship comedy and one of my all-time favorite films?

A man says to his therapist:  “My brother thinks he’s a chicken, but I can’t tell him he’s not because we need the eggs.”  Yes, we all need the eggs.

(See Who's Dating Now? for more survey comments.)

Here are the major stats: 

Age:  21-67, with 70% between 25 and 40.

Gender:  54% men, 46% women

Race:  58% White, 12% African American, 7% Latino,  5% Asian American, 16% White European,  3% African

Relationship status:  23% married, 21% in a relationship, 41% single and dating/hooking up, 15% single and not dating/hooking-up

32% date or hook-up outside a relationship, including marriage.

Sex on the first date?   

Yes, 64%, No, 36% with men and women split almost evenly.

Does he call after first date sex?

60% of men say they have.

Does she care if he calls?

89% of women say they do want the call—though more than half reported turning down the second date request. 

We want them to want us even when we don’t want them?  No wonder men lose their hair.

 

copyright 2008-2011, www.sexyprime.typepad.com; PARTIAL reposts only permitted with link back to original article on SexyPrime 

Is It Her Kinky Sex Or His Repressed Anger?: The New Feminist Question

Photo Credit: Color Splash in Photobucket

The questions that feminists asked in the Seventies helped define domestic abuse. Before that time, a man couldn’t legally rape his wife or girlfriend because she did not have the right to refuse him. He was entitled to take the sex he wanted from her. If a man hit a woman with whom he was sexually intimate, he probably wouldn’t get arrested and wasn’t likely to pay any legal price for his behavior  We owe those pioneering feminists a big debt.  (Many of them were lesbians, fighting for the rights of their heterosexual sisters; and we should honor that by supporting gay marriage now.  If you are on Facebook, join the group "I Bet We Can Find 1,000,000 People Who Support Same Sex Marriage.")  Domestic violence still happens, but it’s not okay. 

What is okay? Consensual rough sex. Increasingly, women—especially successful alpha women—ask for kinky sex. They want to be spanked, fucked hard, slapped, choked and have their nipples pinched and twisted and their hair pulled hard.  There is no shortage of men, often beta men dating above themselves, eager to supply the force.

A recurring question in reader emails lately has been a variation of this: If she likes it “rough” and the man gives it to her—is he just giving her what she wants or expressing his hidden anger at women? The corollary: Does she want it “rough” to force a man to be a man by playing the role of a submissive woman? Candice Bushnell’s comments on the kinky sex in Lipstick Jungle implied that.

In the now infamous post “The Fine Line Between Lust and Hate,” The Zola admitted that he crossed over the line from lust to loathing in a two and a half hour spanking session—loathing himself and the woman he was whacking.

“She wouldn’t open her legs. She didn’t want to have sex with me. ‘Smack me,’ she said; and I did. I asked myself as I was whacking her, ‘Is this the best I can do—be with a woman who jerks me around?  Don’t I have anything more going for me than this?’ My own self-loathing kicked in and I kept whacking her.”

I quoted Julie Klausner in I Don’t Care About Your Band (Gotham Books):

“…what was, at the time, I thought, a rough, kinky, exciting, crazy SM relationship with a masterful pervert, was, in fact, just bad sex with a misogynist who had no idea what he was doing.”

So many women emailed and said:  Bad sex, Yes, that’s what it really was for me too, not kinky wild fun!

And yesterday in the Auntie Sue post, I referred to a pretentious pot-belled “master” (in his own mind) who pursued an SM relationship with a creative artist, temporarily homeless and very down on her luck, via a series of embarrassingly long emails. The woman had shared an SM fantasy —and he ran with it, asking her to spend the weekend with him while his wife was out of town, so he could beat her in his bed.  She said, “I thought I’d do a lot of things to sleep in a bed rather than on a friend’s sofa or subway train—but that I would not do.”

Reading his emails (which she forwarded) made me slightly queasy—the same response I always had to Zola’s oft-repeated spanking story—but for a different reason:  The master was so eager to take advantage of a woman in her worst possible moment.  His “heart was going pitty-pat” at the thought of it, he wrote. (A real master would not begin a relationship with a woman in such a precarious life position.)

The more rough sex stories I hear and read in emails to the blog, the more I wonder: How many “rough” sex acts committed by a man upon a woman, even with her consent, are really acts of violence?

I was turning that question around in my head when I read a piece by Peter Daou on The Huffington Post:  “Male Monsters:  Girl Buried Alive For Being A Girl—and The World Shrugs.” A political consultant who worked for Hillary Clinton, Daou  leads an article on the horrible crimes committed daily around the world against girls and women with this story of a sixteen year old Turkish girl, buried alive by her father, in consultation with her grandfather, for the crime of talking to boys. She was found, hands bound, with dirt in her stomach and lungs. Where was her mother? Her grandmother? They would have found my body in that hole with the child.

Is the aging freelance editor who brags about how well he cheats on his wife (whom, it is fair to assume, would be disgusted by his proposition to the artist) merely a point on the misogyny continuum, the civilized version of the men in the Congo raping girls and women with bayonets and pieces of wood—destroying their insides in acts so heinous that the doctors and nurses who treat them are breaking down?

All men, of course, are not misogynists. Many men have a loving spanking hand. They know when a woman wants her pussy pounded and when she craves it slow and easy. They can tweak a nipple or suck it sweetly. Those men are my guys, SexyPrime readers, men who love women, the best men.  I want to hear from you guys—and from my Babes too. Post a comment. Email. Tell me what you think.

copyright 2008-2011, www.sexyprime.typepad.com; PARTIAL reposts only permitted with link back to original article on SexyPrime 

THE BEST OF SEXYPRIME: The Sciences: Alpha Women/Beta Men--and Orgasms!

Photo Credit:  "Man In Mask of a Woman" by Ilhuicamina 

Many of the conversations and commentaries on SexyPrime are rooted in sociology.  That might sound off-putting to some readers so I give the posts more interesting names.  My favorite bit of social commentary this year is Women on Top:  Now Everybody Is Talking About Alpha Women and Beta Men.  In a spoof of women's magazines (which I do love) I gave the Beta men category names.  Ever wondered why so many great women date way down?  Read this one.

Then read my science of sex pick, The Sex Lives of Alpha Women:  Why Do Strong Women Fantasize About Aggressive Lovers?  Fascinating!

 

copyright 2008-2011, www.sexyprime.typepad.com; PARTIAL reposts only permitted with link back to original article on SexyPrime 

HOW BIG DOES A PENIS HAVE TO BE TO MEAN SOMETHING?

Photo Credit:  David Thomas at Lotus Workshop sent me this image with the note:  "Now we know why Adam wanted the apple. I was cruising the net one night when I came across this picture and had to add it to my collection. I wish I knew more about it."  (Thanks--and kisses--Dave.)

How big does a penis have to be to mean something?

 

That is the question on my mind after reading two posts forwarded by my pal Steve Otero at Sexy Spirits.  The declining importance of the alpha male is one of the cultural big stories of the early 21^st Century.   In “Is The Alpha Male in Danger of Extinction?”  (Women’s Health magazine), Grant Stoddard concludes:  Yes.  As he makes the case for the coming female-centric society, he reassures us that it is not such a bad thing after all.  

 

“Women may have to recalibrate their expectations of their long-term partners”—but “As we all jettison our 20^th Century role baggage” we might lead “happier and healthier lives.”

 

Wistfully, I went back to his opening sentence:  “Having a penis used to mean something.”

 

Grant, it still  does! (Read the responses from men and women on His 7 Questions on the Penis and Her 7 Questions on the Penis)  

 

According to Elizabeth Eaves in “Hung Up On Hung” on Forbes.com, “ A Detroit gigolo is a man for our times.”

 

And what is his defining characteristic?  A big cock.  We never get to see it, but the women’s reaction shots indicate  that he has the goods (at least in the script.)

 

If you missed the short first season of “Hung” on HBO, here's the quick re-cap:  High school coach Ray, played by Thomas Jane, loses wife to rich doctor.  The teen kids live with him until a fire makes the house unlivable; and, of course, he has let the insurance lapse.  Kids go to Mom.  He sleeps in a tent on the lawn as Detroit crumbles around him and his job turns into history, not the curriculum version.   He becomes a gigolo because he has the cock for it—and desperately needs the money.  The women seem to have the money, either through their own high-powered careers or successful marriages.  What they apparently can't get without paying for it:  Alpha Male Sex.

 

Eaves concludes:  “What could have been a one-joke show about a man and his endowment became much more with Ray stepping into the role of symbol of our times.”

 

In our Great Recession, men have lost 2.5 million jobs to women’s 700,000.  Women earn more high school diplomas and college degrees than men do, a disparity even more exaggerated among African Americans.  Yes, it often does seem, as Stoddard points out, that men are not motivated while women are. 

 

Is the future Alpha Women and Beta Men?  (Read the Conversations on Sex, Money, Lies with Zola.)

 

Will that line, "A hard man is good to find" be replaced with "A good man is hard to pay for"?

 

copyright 2008-2011, www.sexyprime.typepad.com; PARTIAL reposts only permitted with link back to original article on SexyPrime 

WHY DO YOUNG WOMEN LOVE DON DRAPER?--He's The Ultimate Alpha Male

Actor Jon Hamm as Don Draper in AMC's brilliant series "Mad Men"

 

Last night I watched the third season premier of "Mad Men"--my only regular Must See date with my television.  It did not disappoint.  I love the clothes, the intelligent, sexy plot lines, the period details, the characters, especially, of course, Don Draper. Not since Bill Clinton, have I so lusted after an image on a TV screen.  Apparently, Draper's appeal, like the former President's, cuts a wide and deep swath through the landscape of heaving bosoms in America.

My pal Steve Otero at Sexy Spirits sent me to the link to a Newsweek blog:  Why The Ladies Love Jon Hamm by Katie Baker.  She writes that her friends and other women in their late twenties to early 

thirties LOVE Don Draper.  "A man's man. A virile man.  A masculine man."  But would they want to marry him?

 

No, she hastens to assure us.

 

"We know madness that way lies.  We see how Betty Draper is drowning in loneliness, one more beautiful woman trapped in her suburban prison..."

 

The mothers of these women married men like Don--"...men who were made caged animals by their domesticity...men who unleashed their restlessness in ways both erotic and destructive."  Look how that turned out.  They will marry men who are "sensitive and respectful, men who emote and help around the house and talk openly about their feelings."  Some of these husband types will be beta males, who earn less and have less status and power than their women do.  

 

Baker is almost apologetic for the women who love Don.  I say there is absolutely nothing wrong with loving a "real" man.  He makes a woman feel real too.  Nobody does it better than a man who isn't overly sensitive to his own feelings.  He explores your body, not his psyche.

 

If you drown in loneliness after he leaves, that's your problem.  It's got nothing to do with him.  Betty was trapped by the constraints of unreliable birth control in the early 60s before the pill came into wide use.  The Feminine Mystique, Betty Freidan's classic feminist rallying cry, would have been a different book on the pill.

 

copyright 2008-2011, www.sexyprime.typepad.com; PARTIAL reposts only permitted with link back to original article on SexyPrime 

THE FINE LINE BETWEEN LUST AND HATE: Or, Why Spanking Was A Victorian Obsession Or, The Spanking Man Redux

 

[This is one of SexyPrime's most popular posts.  Would you like to know how to spank your lover?  Read this post.]

Spanking was the staple of Victorian era porn.  Hundreds of thousands of engravings, photographs and drawings survive.  And the novels!—with titles like Lady Bumtickler’s Revels.  One need not be a licensed psychologist to decipher the meaning behind this spanking fixation:  In a repressed society where sex is considered wicked and sinful, it must be punished.  

 

 Do you ever wonder if the renewed interest in erotic spanking today is more than an internet-fueled phenomenon--but has something in common with Victorian porn?  Does it reflect a desire to punish women for our sexual freedom?  Yes, of course, women are complicit in our own corporal punishment, just as we were when Queen Victoria dictated morality to the masses.  (Haven't women always excelled at punishing selves and other women?)

 

When I named Alex Zola “The Spanking Man,” I created a monster.  His ego on maximum overdrive, he reveled in the title.  It seemed to inspire him to greater heights of erotic betrayal as he revealed (on his blog and mine) more of the intimate secrets of the women he put over his knee—or occasionally choked.  Some of my readers wrote saying, “Enough Zola already!”  Some of his readers wrote saying, “We really don’t like that spanking stuff, not that we read it, of course.”

 

I moved on to a new partner in conversation, Todd Wooten.  Our discussions about sex and race seem to be resonating with readers.  Enough of Zola indeed. 

 

Then I got a long email from “L”, a woman who still wants “the truth from Zola.”

 

“In all your conversations, you never got to the heart of the matter.  You threw down the word ‘misogynist’ without making him own or refute it.  Are you hiding behind the non-judgmental pose?  Can a man spank a woman for two and a half hours unless he has a lot of anger toward women?  

 

“I ask, because it happened to me.”

 

On her behalf, I asked The Zola to reconstruct that marathon spanking session, the event that he jokingly refers to as “two and a half hours of corporal punishment that I will never live down.”

 

How did it start?

 

“I ran into Linda at Molly's Shabeen on Third Avennue, the Loser Bar.  We’d had a few, a condition which in the past led to some make-out sessions, including light spanking.  We left the bar at the same time.  She invited me over; and I thought, I’ll get laid tonight.

 

“I teased her about her spankable ass; and she said, ‘Oh, just whack it.’”

 

So you did for two and a half hours?!

I took an occasional break and tried to get her legs further apart.  She said, ‘No, spank me.’  I alternated hard and soft smacks and still tried to get her legs apart.  She said, ‘Spank me.’”

 

Long story short:  He lost his erection but kept spanking. With neither party kidding themselves that the spanking was “foreplay,” the punishment continued.  Didn’t that take the act out of the realm of “erotic spanking” and into ugly territory?  Finally, he said, ‘My arm is sore.’  She said, “When I get close to men, I feel nauseous.”  She threw up.  He turned the event into a big joke that he shared with his fellow “losers” at their bar, her bar too.

 

The story makes me squeamish; and the smirk on his face as he tells it doesn’t help.  So many unanswered questions!—like, Why didn’t you stop when you realized that you were not going ‘to get laid’? 

 

“Yes, I have a lot of anger toward women.  I was angry at her.  She had this push/pull, yes/no, desire/disgust attraction to me that made me mad.  I felt jerked around.  I knew she liked thin, suave Brazilian type guys; and I am none of that. 

 

“She wouldn’t open her legs.  She didn’t want to have sex with me.  ‘Smack me,’ she said; and I did.  I asked myself as I was whacking her, ‘Is this the best I can do—be with a woman who jerks me around?  Don’t I have anything more going for me than this?’  My own self-loathing kicked in and I kept whacking her.”

The afterplay—a.k.a., the bar jokes?

"I meant to be self-deprecating when I told the story to the guys at Molly's, but it came out, ‘Look how twisted and sick she is.’  That’s the underbelly of jokey snark.  You act like you’re making fun of yourself, but you’re sticking it to the person who is the real butt of the joke.  In retrospect, I came off looking bad too.  People must have walked away thinking, ‘Look how sick and twisted they both are.’”

The moral to this story:  Yes, only a misogynist could whack a woman’s ass for two and a half hours.  That some women are drawn to men who hate them is not news.  It’s a very old story, dressed up in currently stylish fashion for every generation.

We may find the story remarkable now because the women Zola whacks have accomplished more in the world and earn more money than he does.   Remember:  these babes are only playing at submission.  Even when the game turns rough, they are in control.  She denied him entry and threw up. 

"L”, I hope the “truth from Zola”, told at last without the smirk on his face, sets you free.

 

copyright 2008-2011, www.sexyprime.typepad.com; PARTIAL reposts only permitted with link back to original article on SexyPrime 

[Would you like to read more about taboo side of sex?  Check out the results to SexyPrime's Taboo Sex Survey--including a link to "It began with a mutual admiration for the story of O."}

I HAVE THE ORGASM OF THE WEEK--AND THE ANSWER TO THE QUESTION, CAN BETA MEN RAVISH A WOMAN?

My guest post,"Can You Get Off While Going Down On A Guy?  Yes!" on lemondrop.com is The Orgasm of the Week!  (For the long version, check out The New Tantra:  Simple and Sexy.)

 

And I think I have the answerto that question:  Can beta men ravish a woman?  

Not so much.

Make yourself a lemon drop martini.  (Lemon flavored vodka, triple sec or Cointreau, lemon juice--and sugar on the rim).   And read.

 

copyright 2008-2011, www.sexyprime.typepad.com; PARTIAL reposts only permitted with link back to original article on SexyPrime 

WOMEN ON TOP: Now Everybody Is Talking About Alpha Women/Beta Men

Photo credit:  "Man In Mask Of A Woman" by Ilhuicamina

 

The Zola and I are brunching at Maxie’s Grill (19^th Street between Park and Irving), glancing through the Sunday papers as we trade gossip—and suddenly there it is in our favorite tab, The New York Post:  “WOMEN ON TOP:  Men worry they’re falling behind in a ‘he-cession’—they’re right.”

 

“It’s alpha women/beta men!  We got there first!”  he says triumphantly.

 

So we did.  If you’ve missed our conversations and interviews, read them.  We’ve been talking about these issues for months.

 

“There’s been a lot of panic recently over the current state and uncertain future of the American male,” writes Maureen Callahan who says the panic is well-founded and the crisis is global, not just American.  About Japanese Gen-X men, she says, they “…live with their mothers, rely on porn and the internet for sex…and go to the bathroom like girls, sitting on the toilet to pee.”

 

“Didn’t I just say that beta men are the new girls!”  Zola exults.

 

Yes, you did; and you were quoting me. 

 

As he tucks into his herb and goat cheese egg white omelet and I enjoy my cheddar and bacon omelet (including the yolks), we exchange thoughts on the “collective identity crisis” resulting from the “severe social, cultural, sexual and familial anxiety crippling the modern man.”  Yes, we know men have lost more jobs than women in the recession, but let’s get to the sex part.

 

Zola thinks of himself as the spokesperson for the beta male, but he’s only one slice of that custard pie.

 

I’ve identified four beta male sexual types.  (Let me know if I’ve left anyone out.)

 

 

• THE PUSSY MAN

“She Comes First” by Dr. Ian Kerner is his bible.  Like Kerner, he became a cunnilingus expert because he was a premature ejaculator.  But nobody ever gave him Kerner’s follow-up book, “He Comes Next.”  Does he come?  Who knows?  He always goes straight for the pussy and stays there as long as the lady will permit.

 

 

“Do you suppose the Pussy Man is the same guy who sits down to pee?”--except in Japan where, apparently there is no pussy for him, only porn and Mom’s home cooking.

 

“Yes, without a doubt,” he says.  “There are two kinds of men who sit down to pee:  ex-junkies who are used to sitting down because they nodded off a lot when they were using, making the stand-up pee dangerous--and the pussy man.“

 

Not that there s anything wrong with eating pussy—I hasten to add.  A lot of women only come via cunnilingus or masturbation.  Any good male lover should be able to pass an oral exam.

 

“But you’ve gotta have game.  You have to be more than a one tool player.  The Pussy Man is a Designated Licker on the male sexual team.  He never gets to hit it out of the park.  The guy is only brought in for special situations.”

 

Hmmmm.  I am recalling a Pussy Man in my own past; and, yes, he was the DL.

 

 

• THE KINK PROVIDER

He services kinky women. While he may flatter himself that he’s the dominant male—he is only playing one from a script written for him by the woman in charge.  Often she uses him for a while, then drops him.  Zola, The Spanking Man, is a case in point.

 

 

Over a decade ago when I wrote Kink:  The Hidden Sex Lives of Americans—women were either professional doms or they demurred about why they were playing kinky.  Often they said, Oh, I’m doing it for him.  I ask Zola:  “You write about your Kinky Decade, your thirties, when your sex life was mainly being a kink provider for women.  Did the game change over ten years?

 

“A decade ago, women hinted at what they wanted, making suggestions, like ‘Why don’t we try this.?  Now it’s a command performance.  ‘Do this.’  ‘This is what I want; this is how I want it.’  “

 

Clearly, you are not in control, even though you play the dominant role as The Spanking Man.

 

“Dominant men never were in control, but it’s more obvious now.  Women aren’t embarrassed or shy about expressing their sexual desires.  The culture is supporting sexually empowered women.  It’s not supporting macho men.”

 

Ah, yes, Maureen Callahan says right here in the Post that Brad Pitt and Barack Obama are the new Real Men, caring, compassionate, devoted to their strong women—and powerful.

 

“Brad Pitt,” he grouses.  “I grew up thinking that we should all be like John Wayne, the tough guy”

 

I laugh.  The Macho Man is an object of derision or pity, at best he is a dinosaur.

 

 

• THE DUKE OF DENIAL 

He has the headache.  Or he’s too tired, too stressed for sex when she initiates it, which is more often than he does.  He’s the classic passive/aggressive man with a new twist.  Where once he would have come before she was barely aroused or scratched her clit when she finally got him to go down—now he just says, NO.

 

“It is another example of beta men being the new girls.  Girls say No.  Now boys say NO,” Zola says.  Maybe it is his power sex game. “

 

 He’ll say yes if she bribes him with a new toy—or strokes his ego?

 

“These guys aren’t getting a lot of ego strokes.”

 

He’s mean spirited, like he’s saying, You have the power in the world, but I won’t fuck you and there is nothing you can do about that.

 

“Part of  the same game.”

 

Women blame themselves or another woman or think he is depressed.  They’re not in on the game.

 

“Okay, he’s playing his game.  It makes him feel like he’s in charge.  How do I know what he’s doing?  Men don’t talk about it.  Can you imagine a guy bragging, ‘I don’t give her sex so I can be in charge?  They’d take his guy card away.  “

 

 

• THE CYBER DICK 

His sex life is masturbating to cyberporn.  He prefers the screen and his hand to the real live woman in his bed.  He’s in a sexless marriage.  The internet jerk-off  is number one on many women’s Sex Enemy list.  Some experts call it “addiction.”

 

 

Why would he rather do it alone with the computer screen than have real sex with a willing partner?  I ask Zola.  Women never get this.  We would choose the guy in bed over a cyber image.

 

“They fantasize acting out the hard core stuff,” he says.  “They can’t talk about it to their partners.

 

No.  There’s seldom a good way to ask a woman if she’d accept double anal penetration as long as she got to choose both dicks.  Oh, and yeah—you just want to watch.

 

“Hardcore is all about debasing women,” he says.

 

Casting woman as whore is thrilling to under-achieving men?

 

“Sometimes hardcore porn is women brutalizing other women,” Zola says  “Maybe the guy watching wants to brutalize women, but feels guilty about wanting that.  Having another woman do it gives him the arousal and the orgasm without the guilt.”

 

Go out there and find men like this to interview!  I tell him.  We’ve already got the Kink Provider story covered.

 

“It’s difficult to figure out what these new types are thinking because they don’t talk to anybody about it, not even to each other.  She might be crying to her friends about no sex, but he’s silent.

 

“See?  In their own way, these guys are the silent stoical John Wayne types.”

 

Men!  I order another Mimosa.  But we are not finished with this subject yet….Stay tuned.

 

copyright 2008-2011, www.sexyprime.typepad.com; PARTIAL reposts only permitted with link back to original article on SexyPrime 

 

 

 

 

 

 

THE SEX LIVES OF ALPHA WOMEN: Why Do Strong Women Fantasize About Aggressive Lovers?

 

Photo credit:  "Beautiful Woman" by Alaskan Girl

Why does a successful career woman, not intimidated by any man in her professional world, fantasize scenes of erotic domination?  And why does she sometimes live out those fantasies, with carefully chosen male partners who let her “top from below”?

Because it makes her feel sexually desirable—not because she likes being hurt, rejected, humiliated.

In SexyPrime conversations and interviews with my guy pal Alex Zola (The Zola System blogger), I’ve been exploring this phenomenon.  I named him The Spanking Man after he confessed that his sex life in the decade of his thirties—He’s forty now—consisted of “being a kink provider for the women who want it,” with a specialty in erotic spanking.  I’ve had some interesting emails from readers in response to Zola’s confessions.

Some women hate him; other women say, “I use guys like that to get what I want.”  Some men identify with him; others say, “It’s assholes like this…”  And every now and then I hear from a total jerk threatening me with physical violence for daring to say there are alpha women and beta men—a dumb total jerk unaware that his computer’s IP number is on record, attached to his threats in a permanent file. 

As it turns out, Psychology Today‘s news editor, Matthew Hutson, is blogging about the same subject—powerful women who fantasize domination.  (My pal Steve Otero at Sexy Spirits sent me the links.)

Interestingly, the alpha woman who dreamed of having it rough caught the attention of researcher and therapist E. Barbara Hinton back in 1973, when the modern women’s movement was emerging, putting more women into alpha roles.  She interviewed women about their fantasies and found many dreamed of being “forcefully taken.”  They fantasized aggressive lovers, she said, because they felt more desired by men who were so passionate about having them.  (What is spankiing if not a lot of attention paid to one's ass?)

University of Kansas psychologist Patricia Hawley published a paper in the Journal of Sex Research in April that studied how both men and respond to domination fantasies. Both enjoyed fantasies in which they were dominant.  But here is the surprise:  “socially dominant women” were more turned on by submission fantasies than any other groups in the study.

Hawley concluded, as Hinton did, that women are more turned on by the idea of  the forceful man’s passion than the domination itself.  

Yes, that reinforces conclusions I’ve drawn in my own interviews with women about their BDSM fantasies—BUT a sizable segment of alpha women also act out their fantasies, finding men like Zola who will, for their own complicated reasons, provide the kink.   The Alpha woman assuming the submissive role and the Beta male playing dominant is an interesting dynamic, an apparent flip-flop of their positions in society where she has more money and power than he does.   A power exchange, however, is not a reversal of power.  When she pulls on her panties and goes home, she is still the Gold Card Babe and he is—what?

Resentful, according to one beta male reader.  “These women think they can get anything they want from us, sexually or domestically—and they can discard us the way men discard women.”

Yeah.  That would be so unfair.

Into denial, writes another.  “I pretend I’m her equal because we come from the same backgrounds.”

The Zola speaks best for Beta men.  So I go to him.

“It’s her fantasy but it’s our reverse egotism get-back.  We long for women.  We want to get them but we want to get at them for all the years they rejected us in favor of Alpha males.”

 

 Aha!  Spanking is a passive/aggressive act!

 

“When I started spanking women,” he says, “It was 90/10 erotic to passive/aggressive.  Now I’m never quite sure which is which.  I look at the redness of her bottom and ask, is that erotic?  Or is that about me wanting to smack her?”

Would you rather spank an Alpha woman or a Beta woman?  I ask. 

“Alpha women are more cock-sure of what they want…”

Wait a minute!  I stop him.  Are you saying that a sexually empowered woman is masculine?

“No.  She’s the ultimate feminine, projecting all the qualities of a woman.  Beta males want the Alpha woman but they’re afraid….so they work out a way of dealing with her.  Those guys who are into cheating on her or refusing sex have found the way to regain their manhood.”

That will take us into new territory, a blog post for another day.

Are you happy being a beta male? I ask Zola.

“No, but I try to see the humor in it.  I just want to be a regular guy. A pretentious Joe Six Pack.”

I doubt that.  He wants to be widely admired and desired by many women.  In the act of dominating a woman, he can believe that he is all that and more.  His fantasy and hers interact in one fine moment of perfect equilibrium.

Babes, this is social progress.

 

 

 

copyright 2008-2011, www.sexyprime.typepad.com; PARTIAL reposts only permitted with link back to original article on SexyPrime