Not Fair

One of my big pet peeves is when people ask their partners not to just try a particular kink (domination, for example), but to feel a certain way about it. I understand that for a lot of people it’s not satisfying to be dominated by someone who’s just going through the motions, but telling your partner how they have to feel about what they’re doing is completely unfair. 

It’s absolutely fine to ask your partner to try something, it’s fine to tell them you really really hope they enjoy it, it’s fine to tell them it’s important to you, but it is not cool to tell someone how to feel about what you’ve asked them to do. Even if it were possible to feel a particular way on command, that would be a ridiculous amount of pressure to put on someone you supposedly love.

Trying something completely new sexually is difficult and scary enough without any added pressure to feel a certain way about it. Unless you’ve spent your entire life living under a rock, you have to have noticed that women spend their whole lives being taught that nice girls don’t, that men only want to marry ‘nice girls’, that doing anything ‘freaky’ in bed means you’re a slut and your partner won’t respect you anymore, that once you’re a ‘slut’ you can’t say no ever again, and so on and so on. There’s kind of a lot of cultural programming to get past just to try anything kinky, let alone to like it. For fucks sake, let your partner get comfortable with the idea of doing some kinky stuff before you push her to be enthusiastic about it.

Speaking of enthusiasm, it’s impossible to manufacture. All you can do is make your partner feel like she has to lie convincingly, and if you do that it shouldn’t be any kind of news that you’re being an asshole. Aside from being tremendously douchebaggy, making your partner lie to you is just counter productive. If she’s busy convincing you she likes whatever it is you want her to like, how is she going to find out what she actually likes? I’m certain that at least some of the women who ‘were never able to get into kink’ could have found something they liked if they had just been allowed to explore at their own pace instead of being pressured to love it all immediately.

Guys, you can ask your girlfriend/wife/partner to try things, you can help her work through her feelings about it, you can be patient and try things until you find something you both like, but you can’t ask her to magically like something just because you like it.

2 thoughts on “Not Fair

  1. Actually I’m going to disagree on some points here-

    Obviously pressuring someone into sexual acts is a bad thing, and you can’t *make* anyone feel a particular way. And I think from context of what you’re talking about that entitled pressure tends to typically follow gendered lines in a highly unhealthy fashion *but*…

    It is a really bad habit that we tend to treat kinks as an ‘extra’ that get put up with. It promotes the idea that kinks are something that are secondary to say vanilla. It’s the same attitude that treats gay partnerships as less valid than straight ones (for example that’s used to say it’s not worth changing laws to accommodate them because it’s a fringe thing) and it really doesn’t make allowances for the fact that for a kinked person, performing as vanilla may be just as much as a stretch.

    But this never gets addressed, and becomes a source of self loathing- you end up feeling lucky that a partner puts up with you at all because you’re broken and mentally invalidating that the efforts you go to to satisfy them according to their particular needs.

    Additionally, while you can’t make someone feel a particular way, it’s also largely useless to just go through the mechanical aspects of kinks for many people, myself included. If there’s no connection or chemistry through my kinks, it’s depressing and useless and I might as well just go masturbate. Patience is key to helping people explore things with you, much more so than magically expecting your partner to be visited by the kinky fairy, but as much as some of the “please make my wife into my fantasy dominate” types make me want to bash heads, I’ve been on the other side of that- and have many friends who have been on the side of “you spanked me so now you owe me”..

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