The Bored Sex vs. the Increasingly Indifferent Sex

All right. All right. Welcome back to the Onyx Report, people. Hope everybody's well.

I am your host, Dr. T. Hassan Johnson, and uh make sure you like, share, subscribe, join, donate, hit the hype, support the show so we can continue to bring you these independent blackmail thoughts.

Well, today I wanted to cover an article that came out of the Atlantic uh very recently, and it's called the the board sex. you know, it's called the board sex and it's dealing with women who um you know are are really describing their experience as boredom. So um let me try and get some of this featured correctly so you can see it on my screen. Bear with me for one moment. Let's start there. All right. So, there you go. Oh, yeah. All right. Looks like it ain't a aimed out well.

All right. So, as I said, it's called the board sex written by Wednesday Martin. All right. Says, "Women more than men tend to feel uh stoaltified by long-term exclusivity despite having been taught that they were designed for it." I can smell the feminism already. Um, so let's dive in. Right. So you got the you know the theme uh image of it couple walking down the street and a woman is admiring a man who's walked by her while her boyfriend appears to be you know shocked about it and he's trying to grab her and get her back. Right? So the idea being well the caption reads the distracted boyfriend meme gets reversed. Right? So, it's I guess a popular meme where we've seen the re genders reversed. And of course, feminists will never lose out on an opportunity to prove that they um can match men in anything, right? This competitive thing is always coming back. But this is dated February 14th. This is 2019. So, it's an older piece, but it nonetheless uh brings something to bear that I think is interesting to think about.

So, it reads, "Andrew Gotsus, and I probably butchered that, a Manhattan psychiatrist with an extensive psychotherapy practice, has been treating a straight couple whom we'll call Jane and John for several years. They have sex about three times a week, which might strike many as enviable considering that Jon and Jane, who are in their 40s, have been together for nearly two decades. Based on numbers alone, one might wonder if they need couples counseling at all. But only one of them is happy with the state of play, and it isn't Jane. The problem is not that they are functionally unable to have sex or to have orgasms or frequency. It's that the sex they're having isn't what she wants. Right. Gotis told me in in a recent phone conversation and like other straight women he sees, she's confused and demoralized by it. She thinks there's something wrong with her. John, meanwhile, feels criticized and inadequate, excuse me. Mostly he can't understand why. If his wife is having sex with him and having orgasms, she wants more or different. Right. Despite fears of seeming sex addicted, unfaithful, or horish, Godis doesn't like these terms, but they speak to his patients anxieties. He explained Jane has tried to tell Jon in therapy and outside of it what she's after. She wants to want Jon and be wanted by him in that can't get enough of each other way experts call lirance. the initial period of a relationship when it's all new and hot. Jane has brought lingerie and booked hotel stays. She has suggested more radical seeming potential fixes too, like opening up the marriage."

Now, let me let me let me start with a little bit of why I chose this piece. Even as a young man in the 80s, right, the birth I don't know if I'd call it the birth, maybe the rebirth of the talk show era or whatever, or at least the birth of the talk show era and its newest iteration. This is the Oprah era in the 1980s and forward. I've been hearing women all my life talking about these issues long before I even understood what they were talking about. And of course, a lot of the what they said that I didn't understand came up later when I came of age. So, I've been thinking about and pondering these things. And of course, by the time I started dating, hearing these things from various women for decades now. And one of the things I remembered hearing most consistently from feminists was that, you know, women really because remember the ' 80s was the era where all women were faking orgasms, right? So this this is where that time period came out of. And the idea was that men really didn't know how to please women. You know, women were never really pleased. The best that they could do was fake it for men. This was all the kind of rhetoric that was coming out in the 80s, right? And of course, if men were confident with women and they believed they were pleasing them, then they had only just been successfully fooled by an unhappy woman, right? These were the kind of narratives that were going on even in movies at the time, right? Talk shows, movies. This was the kind the kind of conversation women were having. You know, women weren't truly having orgasms. Men uh, you know, didn't know how to supply them or provide them. And of course, the subtext was that men were sexually happy because all you got to do to make a man sexually happy is give him a wet hole, right? That was the that was the idea. And I don't believe that in the minds of many women that that idea has changed much. They fundamentally believe that men must be happy because he ejaculated or he hasn't said anything about it. Right? And we'll get to that in a minute. But the idea here that I think is still playing out in this article decades later is coming back to this idea that men cannot really fundamentally please women and that women have to tolerate them. Right? And the subtle suggestion is that this is the status quo and it's very one-sided because these kind of articles don't ask men [ __ ] Now, they're asking a male psychologist and he's telling them what his female patients are talking about, but none of them really talk to men. And I would venture to say that there are many men that uh will only share so much, especially when you're talking about couples counseling. Right now, the the going discussion in men's spaces about couples counseling is that, you know, female counselors especially, but couples counseling period, you can't just say whatever you want to say. Patrice O'Neal used to talk about, you know, the way men have to edit themselves to be heard by women and you have to edit it multiple times and he would contrast that with the fact that women didn't have to edit themselves at all. They just say whatever they want. And he made it, he likened it to the sound of a chicken just, you know, it just come out in any old kind of way. But for men, it had to be edited at multiple stages so as not to hurt anybody's feelings. That doesn't ever come up in these discussions. the extent to which men cannot say what they want to without having to deal with a frustrated girlfriend or wife who takes what he says out of context, applies a momentary critique to the entirety of their existence, whatever that may be. So this is one-sided. These conversations, these articles, these discussions, these talk shows, these even these psychological, you know, think pieces are all written from a gyocentric frame. And it's always about pleasing women or articulating their experience or their random feelings. And those feelings change every 30 seconds. But men, they don't ever seem to have much of an opinion of men, at least in terms of what men are experiencing and what they think about it. And not just what they feel about it, but what they actually think about it, too. Because that actually means something for a lot of men, right?

Anyway, let's continue here. Right. Jane's pers perseverance might make her a lot of things. An idealist, a dreamer, a canny uh sexual strategist even. Again, channeling typical anxieties, unrealistic, selfish, or entitled. But her sexual struggles in a long-term relationship, orgasms, and frequency of sex notwithstanding, make her something else again, normal. Well, at least one of the main differences between the 80s and now is they they admit that they're having orgasms. But it's interesting to see the transition of that discussion because in the 80s they weren't seeming to have them. Now they're having them, but it still doesn't matter. It still it still doesn't matter. But anyway, although most people in sexual relation sexual partnerships end up facing the conundrum bi biologists call habituation to a stimulus over time, a growing body of research suggests that heterosexual women in the aggregate are likely to face this problem earlier in the relationship than men. And that dispar disparity tends to not even out over time. In general, men can manage wanting what they already have while women struggle with it. Now, this is interesting. That last sentence, I'm going to read it again. In general, men can manage wanting what they already have while women struggle with it. Now, this is the subtext I just told you about a minute ago. Notice that he didn't quote from the male in the in the coup's uh session. He didn't talk about what men have said to him. Now, maybe he will later in the article. Haven't, you know, read it yet all the way through. And notice that the author doesn't seem to introject any of that information for men yet. We'll see if they do, but normally they don't in these kind of articles because again, it's always about the women. The men are in, you know, are aren't really relevant. And in this sentence, we've just heard how men are are categorized. They manage wanting what they already have, right? While women struggle with it. I find that interesting, you know? I really do because this keeps coming back to this whole idea of the difference between men and women, but we're only going to double down in detail for what the women experience. You know, the men are just happy. They can they as long as they can bust a nut, they're good.

Anyway, Martina of the University of Nevada at Las Vegas spelled it out simply in an interview with me at the annual Society for Sex Therapy and Research conference in 2017. Long-term relationships are tough on desire and particularly on female desire. I was startled by her assertion, which contradicted just about everything I'd internalized over the years about who and how women are sexually. Somehow, I along with nearly everyone else I knew was stuck on the idea that women are in it for the cuddles as much as the orgasms and besides actually require emotional connection and familiarity to thrive sexually, whereas men chafe against the strictctures of monogamy. Oh god. Men do chafe against many of the strictctures of monogamy. That is true. But they're they're acting like there's no information, no new information about men's responses since the 1950s. But it's interesting cuz so many of these articles have come out over the decades and they always have a new take, a new research on what women are experiencing. But men stay static, crystallized, as if they don't move. The stereotypes about men's sexuality not moving at all. I mean, look, we had this idea for the longest that women uh were were either didn't know their bodies well enough because society, you know, discouraged them from finding out and therefore they couldn't have orgasms and men were at fault because the patriarchy didn't care about them and and I even heard feminists complaining that porn was always centered around men's ejaculation and so on and so forth. But one of the things I noticed is that society was comfortable with collapsing men's ejaculation with orgasms. And what I found over the years, not only from personal experience, but also from conversations with men, is the two are not the same. You can have sex with a woman, you can ejaculate, and you can completely fake it in terms of how strong that that ejaculation was, whether or not you actually had an orgasm. And there are so many women that have never even contemplated that there's a difference between the two, right? Especially if you've been in a long-term relationship where your concerns or the things that turn you on are not even up for discussion, not even up for reflection. You know how many men have reached out to me to tell me their wives have stopped having sex with them or stopped talking to them because he's watched porn? I find it interesting. I've actually heard of women who are jealous of a man who's watching a porn. Not just the fact that he's watching it, but jealous of the woman in the porn. As if he's got an opportunity to have a relationship with this woman and she might lose him. It It's Now, we all know at this point that we can talk about the long-term impact of watching porn and what it can do to men's erections and relationships and all of that. We can talk about all of that and there's I I have no problem doing so. But at this moment, I'm just observing how interesting it is that people are comfortable with the idea that men are just fine. As long as they can ejaculate, they're good. There's nothing else to really talk about with them. So, let's let's focus on the highly complex, you know, a woman's mind in regard to sex and sexuality and orgasms because there's no new information under the sun. As far as men are concerned, as far as people are concerned, men are static figures. We are walking fallacuses that all just need to ejaculate in a wet hole and any wet hole will do. So there's nothing more to think about or talk about if that's all he needs. But yeah, they at least acknowledge that men chafe against the strictctures of monogamy. I wonder if they're going to talk about why. I wonder if they're going to actually frame for the article what men actually need for sex to stay lively for them. One of the things men also grapple with is access to sex and how many things often come up in the way of that access. Is she mad at me for something I said a month ago? Is she just in a bad mood? You know, all these kind of discussions that go on amongst men about regular access, right?

I can tell you, you know, and I've said this over the years, so this is nothing new. you know, uh, I did marry a woman that I deeply loved and was happy to be with. We had all the butterflies and all of that stuff, especially in the early period. Um, but, you know, there got to be a point where it was about 5 years of of sexlessness in the marriage, you know, and so later after she passed, um, when I started dating again, I noticed women were real quick to want monogamy and marriage. I reached this point where and I didn't have the vocabulary for it at the time, but I reached this point where I didn't trust monogamy because I never knew if I was going to be married again and my wife would just stop one day. No discussion, no dialogue, no reflection. Hell, we even went to counselors and there was nothing even the counselors could pull out of her to explain why she stopped. And I didn't want to experience that again. I hated the idea of being married and if we had more kids, you know, I I now have to weigh the difference between cheating, divorce, separation, court, custody, all because my partner made a decision. My wife made a decision that did not include my my analysis, my thought process, right? And I'm just sitting there. So, if I go cheat, I got to wonder, you know, what that's going to do and how that's going to impact me. And contrary to popular opinion, not all men are comfortable with that. Not all men are comfortable with cheating, right? But at the same time, you can hit a rocking hard place and be with a woman who doesn't want to get a divorce, but doesn't want to have sex and doesn't want you to have sex with anybody else. And I especially notice this when women get, you know, past uh uh, you know, 40, 50 years old, when menopause hits in, they get real comfortable in a relationship and they're great and they are completely happy to not have anything else to do with sex. Now, I know the popular narrative is that they go have sex with a bunch of other men. And there are plenty of women that do that. But there are also women when they hit menopause where their sexual drive shuts down, where the hormones shut down. And unless they get hormone therapy, you'll find that those very women that loved your dirty draws think sex is yucky and they reach that point and here you are married to this woman. You done had two or three kids with this woman and now she's decided that sex is yucky. But you can't go be with anybody else. Nobody discusses the sexual process going on in your mind because all the information, all the emphasis is on her. She's going through these changes. her body's done this, she's had kids. Shut up and take it. Don't you dare say anything to her. How dare you think about another woman. All of these process, all of these thought processes come into play when critiquing men because society does not want to hear what men's thoughts are about sex and relationships. They want to frame what they've believed about men for the longest and keep the discussion on women. And why? Well, these articles and talk shows, they cost money and women are more apt to spend it. So, let's keep the focus on women who are going to spend money to hear about these things in regard to their own experiences. And we don't really need to hear from men because they don't really spend a lot of money on these areas. They don't buy Cosmo. They don't watch daytime talk shows. They're not buying articles or or subscriptions to the Atlantic to hear about women's sexual feelings about things. So, so it's unimportant. And you end up walking away with the assumption that men must not have any of these experiences or any any accompanying experiences that you know are on par with what women are dealing with. They might they they must not have any significant differences or new insights because nobody's talking about it, right? But men have started talking to each other about it.

Now, the last thing I'm going to say before I jump back into this article, and I meant to say it earlier, but I said I'd put it off for a little bit, but I don't want to forget a lot of these articles when they fixate on women's feelings and excitement and the, you know, the all the the the butterflies and the crazy sex at the beginning. The problem is that there's an expectation, and I think it can happen with both men and women, but I think women are more notorious for this. They want things to stay the same as the honeymoon stage of the relationship. This does not happen. This does not generally happen. I've known a couple of couples. I've heard about a couple of couples that have maintain that for longer periods of time, but in the aggregate, not really. And if you don't really understand that in long-term relationships, this doesn't work like that. You might be holding somebody to an unfair expectation, an unrealistic one at that. Now, I've known plenty of men who've said, "You know what? I'm just going to do the honeymoon phase and keep moving and that's their right to do it. I have no problem with it. I'm one to, you know, to suggest being honest and straightforward with women whether they like what you have to say or not. But in truth, none of it really works as far as that. I mean, women are going to be upset with you. They're going to be upset no matter what. You can try to cater to them. You could try to kiss their asses. You could tell them everything they want to hear, or you could tell them the raw honest truth. And truth be told, mo most of them are going to be pissed off with you at some point anyway. It's just part of the the dynamic. There's no escaping that. So, I give it to you raw and keep it pushing. And you know, if you stay, then that's great. If you don't, then hey, I knew what I was dealing with. I used to lie when I was a lot younger, and that just meant it was a lot of work and it was a lot of lies I had to remember. I don't have the energy for that [ __ ] now. But this idea that you're supposed and it's usually the man's responsibility with romance and flowers and trips and you know wellthoughtout strategized dates that you have to as a man keep the honeymoon phase alive indefinitely. And as far as women are concerned, you are punished if she no longer feels like she's in the honeymoon phase because that means you failed at a social expectation that nobody says aloud, but men definitely feel from women. It is your job to keep her feet off the ground, floating as it were, maintaining something that's not meant to be maintained. I don't really believe it is. I think it's just a natural occurrence in relationships. Now, you can try having more than one that might, you know, you can do the multiple marriage thing or multiple women and you know, you have the open conversations, open relationships. I'll be honest with you, I've seen a lot of people try it. I've experimented with it. I've rarely seen it work. Usually, the only people I've seen it work with are people who are selling the idea online and asking you to pay for their program to show you how to get in the same position. So when I say worked in that context, it's with quote quotation marks. I really haven't seen it work um well and when I've known people who have done it, it didn't work long. And I've I'm telling you some of the most interesting stories in the world are what some of these people have tried to do. I it but if it's worked for you, great. I don't have a critique of it. If it works for you, I have no problem with it. If you like it, I love it. I'm just saying in the aggregate, I don't really think it works much. But worse than that, the social expectation that men create and maintain the honeymoon stage of the relationship for women indefinitely is part of why many of these relationships fail. And nobody has anything to say about how unfair or unrealistic these expectations are. And it doesn't fall on women in the same way. I mean, yeah, we want women to stay lively in the bedroom and lingerie and maybe role playing and there's a number of of of of things that men enjoy, but when you talk about society's expectation in relationships, it really doesn't fall on women to maintain the honeymoon phase. Tends to fall on men. And the failure of men to maintain this is seen as some kind of failure for all men and not as something that women have unfairly expected.

But let's continue. Let's see. All right. Uh, all right. I'll just read this again. But Mina discovered that uh institutionalization of the relationship, overfamiliarity, and desexualization of roles in a long-term heterosexual partnership mess with female passion, especially a conclusion that's consistent with other recent studies. That's interesting. I didn't expect them to admit that. They talked about the desexualization of roles and its impact on heterosexual relationships. It might be something as simplistic as she has to take the trash out and that impacts her. That shifts even her desire for you if she believes she has to now do male roles or expected male roles in relationships. I hear this from stay-at-home fathers and the extent to which their wives sexuality will shut off because he's not a provider. But at the same time, feminists will tell you that the goal of relationships should be to desexualize the roles. So here you have a society that's pushing to desexualize roles, right? To dismantle the nuclear family. And yet at the same time, you're punished for the extent to which they succeed in getting from you what they've been asking for for several decades now. They wanted to kind of blur the lines on what men and women are supposed to do. But for the for for men who've done this to some extent, I've had them tell me about how they felt punished for doing so. Right? So here you deal with what the society says women want and then you deal with what women respond to or don't respond to. And this is why the discussions that go on in certain places of the of the manosphere or online and social media, this is why they can tag it as misogynistic because they think it's just a bunch of men that hate women that are in conversation. No, it's men who have decades of experience dealing with women's responses to what they've asked for from men, and men have often given it only to find that it's not appreciated. The man who actually gets with a woman and pays her bills and marries her and takes care of her and takes care of the kids finds himself dealing with a woman that either on the extreme end cheats on him or on the less extreme and more common end doesn't respect him and then is quick to divorce him and take as much as she can and leave him with nothing even though he did everything she asked him to do. See, those are the men that are coming to these spaces to dialogue with other men. It's not men that just hate women because they woke up on a Tuesday and decided to. It's men who have been comparing and contrasting what society and women in particular have asked them to provide. They've provided it and they have responses that they can't talk to women about because women will not acknowledge it. They'll gaslight you and tell you that their responses are not their responses. But men have started have been comparing notes with each other for the last 10 to 15 years and realizing that there's a huge rift between what women ask for and how they respond to it. And that's what men are comparing. That's what society is calling sexist and misogynistic. It's not a hatred of women. That's just how it's being framed. It's a realization that there is conflict between how women act, what they say they want, and how men in turn experience the difference between the two.

But anyway, I'll continue. Moving in with your boyfriend can kill your sex drive was how Newsweek distilled a 2017 study of more than 11,500 British adults 16 to 74. It found that for women only, lack of interest in sex was higher among those in a relationship over one year in duration and that women living with a partner were more likely to lack interest in sex than those in other relationship categories. See, basically what they're saying here is familiarity breeds contempt. And although we were always comfortable with men having these feelings, they, you know, feminists can't wait to say, "Well, women have them, too. We have them, too." There's always this underlying competition with men. This is what this is. This is a feminist uh think piece or short piece that wants to basically say that it's not just men that have this. Women have it, too. They always have to compete in some form of fashion. But anyway, that's what it's really coming down to, right?

All right. Uh let me see where I leave off. Um a 20 a 2012 study of 170 men and women aed 18 to 25 who are in relationships up to 9 years similarly found that women's sexual desire but not men's was significantly and negatively predicted by relationship duration after controlling for age, relationship satisfaction and sexual satisfaction. Two off-sided German long longitudinal studies published in 20 uh 2002 and 2006 show female desire dropping dramatically over 90 months while men's holds relatively steady. Tellingly, women who didn't live with their partners were spared this amusement park ride like drop perhaps because they were making an end run around over familiarity. This sounds like they're kind of trying to advocate for women being um uh you know going out and experimenting as this is the terrain of men. So this is a justification that women should do the same. Well, you know, do it if you like to, but we'll get to the fact that, you know, men have a response to this as well. And this is something that women don't haven't actually thought about over the last four or five decades. They've been so adamant about what they want in the world, what they want in relationships and families and so on and so forth that they don't often understand that men's responses are just that, responses. They just think men have just not caught up. Men are not intelligent. Men don't know how to deal with women and women are so far ahead. Men just have to go to school to learn how to deal with them emotionally and so on and so. In other words, women believe that men just need to catch up, grow up, catch up. These are all synonymous terms. What they don't understand is it's not it's not a matter of catching up. It's that just like in a game of chess or just in nature when you do something there is a response and men are responding. It's not an aberration. It's not a misunderstanding. It's not men's incapability. Men are responding to women's behaviors. That's what it is. So, if you tell men you want to have, you know, less uh monogamy, hey, but again, this is 2019. This is precoid. And even though we know during CO there was a lot of long-term relationships and marriages that fell apart due to overfamiliarity and the stress of of of COVID and all of that. But notice in the last years, the economies began to get real questionable how all of a sudden people are real open to long-term relationships. Women in particular, they're real open now to 50/50. They want to negotiate, you know, company and companionship. They're forming moms where all women get together, especially groups of single mothers, and live together if they can't find men, but complain when one of the moms decides to leave for a relationship, right? In other words, all of these things shift when the environment shifts, and that's what's been happening. So even though this is a 2019 piece that's basically trying to tell us that women want the same things as men, they need to be able to run the streets the way they imagine men run the streets and this is what this seems to be advocating for. They haven't anticipated what's gone on in the last 6 to seven years that would make women shift and it doesn't necessarily reflect what this article in the Atlantic is saying about women, what women are actually saying themselves. They're two they're two different things, right?

And it says, "Anna Finnish 7-year study of more than 2100 women published in 2016 revealed that women's sexual desire varied depending on relationship status. Those in the same relationship over the study period uh reported less desire, arousal, and satisfaction. Anukica Gunst, one of the study's co-authors, told me that she and her colleagues initially suspected this might be related to having kids, but when the researchers control for that variable, it turned out to have no impact. Many women want monogamy. It's a cozy arrangement and one our culture endorses to put it mildly. But wanting monogamy isn't the same as feeling desire in a long-term monogous partnership. The psychiatrist and sexual health practitioner Elizabeth Gordon told me that in her clinical experience, as in the data, women disproportionately present with lower sexual desire than their male partners of a year or more and in the longer term as well. The complaint has historically been attributed to a lower baseline libido for women, but that explanation conveniently ignores that women regularly start relationships equally as excited for sex. Women in long-term committed heterosexual partnerships might think they've gone off sex, but it's more than they've gone off the same sex with the same person over and over."

Well, I think it also might have something to do with the kinds of uh expectations of men that that really lead into fantasy in the sense that when you hear these women talking about their requirements for men, you can tell they're living in a fantasy before the relationship even starts. how tall you have to be, how much you have to earn, what you have to own, how you need to talk to them, how you need to treat them, knowing when to be sexually aggressive, when to be sexually uh, you know, passive, when to to all these kind of crazy expectations about what a man is supposed to know. You damn near need to be telepathic if considered a good man. And I think as the honeymoon phase drifts off naturally in a relationship, the expectations stand stark against what he is no longer doing. And re in reality, he may not have ever been doing that. Just might be part and parcel to her fantasy during the honeymoon stage. But the more she begins to pay attention to him outside of this honeymoon era, when all of the the the the hormones in that era start to drop off a little bit, she starts to measure him by a different standard, one that he's not been told about. I think those things also begin to happen. And it's less about what he's doing wrong because in many instances I think he's doing the same thing he was doing before and more about how as she begins to come down off that drug, she's still holding him to a fantastical standard. And from there, her disappointment in the extent to which he doesn't meet her fantasy plays a role in a lot of this behavior. But see, you can't say that in these discussions because it always has to be his failing in some fashion. It can't be that she's responsible for participating in this by having standards that don't make any diff that don't that aren't rooted in reality. See, you can't say that because that would be a critique of women. And you can gently critique them as but mainly if you're another woman. Short of that, as a man, you're expected to go along with whatever that you're told women think and feel. Critiquing them is tantamount to an attack as far as they're concerned. That's what one brother told me. He was talking to a feminist about some of my work and she called it, "Oh, that's violent." She said that was violent. And I was like, "That's funny to me." But that's how women often perceive critique from men. They see it as inherently violent because it doesn't reinforce the worldview that they already have and it doesn't communicate in the manner they act they want. They they expect you to communicate in even if it's truthful. Right? How many times did we hear Kevin criticized for not packaging his statement right? Even if he told the truth, the truth they needed to hear that wasn't going to be flattering. It didn't matter. Right.

Anyway, so um there we go. So what does it all mean for Jane and other straight women who feel stoified by long-term exclusivity in spite of having been taught that they were designed for it and are naturally inclined toward it? What are we uh to make of the possibility that women far from anxious guardians of monogamy might on the whole be more like its victims? See, this is a part of the reality that men confront. We were also told that women uh were inherently monogamous and that was often by women. Women told us and pressured us in the relationships and you know we just want I just want to be with you and I don't want you to touch anyone else. We've heard women pressure men about this especially as it related to marriage. Especially as it related to marriage over the years. But interestingly enough, we've also witnessed those very same women cheating on you, leaving you and taking what you have in a divorce and find and immediately finding out she had someone else before the divorce was over. He might have been part of the inspiration for her divorcing you because as soon as the the paper was signed, the ink wasn't even dry yet. and all of a sudden she had this boyfriend at her at the house you bought. Right? So again, the contrast between what we're told about women and how women actually act. Men have been confronting this for years.

Anyway, um when couples want to remain in a monogous relationship, a key component of treatment is to help couples add novelty, Gordon advised. Tammy Nelson, a sex therapist and the author of the new Monogamy and When You're the One Who Cheats, concurs. Women are the primary consumers of sexreated technology and lubricants, massage oil, and lingerie, not men. Well, you're talking about industries that are overly marketed to women in the first damn place, especially at this time. Anyway, of course, as Jane's example shows, lingerie might not do the trick. Nelson explains that if their initial tries don't work, women will many times shut down totally or turn outward to an affair or an online friend, creating a flirty texting or social media relationship. When I asked where he thinks Jon and Jane are headed, he told me he's not sure that they will stay together. In an upending of the basic narrative about the roles that men and women play in a relationship, it would be Jane's thirst for adventure and Jane's struggles with exclusivity that tear them apart. Sure, women cheating is nothing new. It's the stuff of Shakespeare and the blues. But refracting through data and anecdotal evidence, Jane seems less exceptional and more in every woman. And a female sexual boredom could almost pass for the new beige. Oh goodness. See how it's framed as sexual boredom. But men have been framed by women as nothing but um you know sexually immoral, incapable of monogamy. They just want whatever they can get their stuff into. You know, we've heard this for the longest, but notice there's no nuance in trying to understand how men engage these things. It's all about women. Says, "It's not uncommon for women to let their straight partners play in a monogamy gray zone to give guys access to tentional outlets that allow them to cheat without really cheating. Happy ending massages, oral sex at bachelor parties, lab dances, escorts at conferences, influenced by ubiquitous pop cultural cues. Many people believe that men need these opportunities for recreational sort of sex because it's how men are." Well, in true feminist compan uh competition, she says in that the next sentence, it's how women are too. It seems you got to compete with the boys. Anyway, women cannot be pigeonholed. The glory of human sexuality is its variation and flexibility. So, when we speak of desire in the future, we should acknowledge that the fairer sex thirst for the friction of an encounter with someone or something new as much as if not more than men do. And they could benefit from the gray zone hall pass too. See, this is We're still back to the competition. We're still back to the competition. You know, the men, the women want it, too. You know, got to have that. The women want it, too. They're being pigeonholed. Now, that's another thing that they have problems with when it comes to men online having these discussions about women. The problem is that um anything that seems to describe women's behavior is viewed as pigeon holing them, and thus it's considered wrong. and inherently sexist that men are having discussions about men women's behavior. This goes back when you talk about the the origins of the manosphere. What's generally regarded as as the first phase or the first group that began, you know, some of this were were um what do you call them? Oh gosh, I forget the term. Um the the men who uh were were practicing, studying and and dialoguing about seduction, right? The pickup artist. That's the one. Forgot the term there, the pickup artist. And what they hated about the pickup artists is that they had they had actually kind of figured out what women responded to and were actually successful. And when women started to find out that this was a product of study, analysis, and and experimentation, they got real frustrated. They framed it as as pigeon holing, as sexist, and so on and so forth. But what men were experimenting with was female sexuality. See, you're only supposed to experiment with it if you do it in the manner in which this article does it, where it's approved by women, it's filtered through feminist narratives and thought processes. But when men begin to do it themselves, it's a whole different thing. See, the fish are allowed to do it however they want, but the fishermen damn well better not start talking to each other and and exchanging strategies, cuz when they start catching more fish, that's sexist. No, it was working because men actually began to study women, not as in past eras what women say they wanted. They started, and this was the thing about the pickup artists, they started studying what women responded to, right? And this made many women, I believe, very insecure. And they began to frame it as predatory. See, but I think pieces like this are predatory. They're just packaged and given out to society in an attempt to normalize, you know, feminist analyses about dating and mating and make it such that women's approach to predatory behavior is reasonable. And it's only men's approaches that are problematic and predatory in nature. But I look at a piece like this that does have some things to say about women's sexuality that men have long since figured out but are not allowed to say to this day without contestation. But at the end of the day, it's still very much rooted in a a competitive feminist kind of approach. And it's also rooted in an attempt to let women have whatever they want to do whatever they want with no accountability, no responsibility. Right? They can't be held to their word. They can't be chastised or critiqued for breaking their word. This to me is aggressive. It's basically a justification for women to do whatever they want. But when men push for those justifications, it's considered violence.

Right now, I told you I would tell you why I picked this article after we went through it. And basically, the reason is is as follows. Women have been saying that they're bored or that men can't please them in any way or that they can only be happy with and some of these even come down to you they can only be happy with other women. You know, when I think of the um oh, what is her name? There was a movie done on um first black woman millionaire, what is her name? Um man, I'm seeing her face in my head. Um Madam CJ Walker. That's right. There was a movie on Madam CJ Walker. It came out a few years ago. And I remember one of the things about it that that I found interesting was that in the movie, by the end of it, the women had to live by themselves. You know, much like The Color Purple, right? At the end of The Color Purple, what did you see? The women living all by themselves without any men or at least without men that were not, you know, supplicants to the gyocracy, right? Proven servants. And this is not just black media. Hell, I was going through YouTube the what earlier today and I ran across a recap. You know, I I got addicted for a while to these movie recaps, these 10 15 minute movie recaps. Sometimes it's movies I've never even heard of. But I ended up watching uh one of Angel Angelina Jolie's flicks, Maleficent, right, which is kind of a retelling of Sleeping Beauty. And by the end of it, right, instead of the the prince who loves her and his kiss being the thing that wakes her up, no, it's Angelina Jolie's character Maleficent whose kiss wakes up Sleeping Beauty. Right. women are being pushed being pushed as a a superior alternative to traditional heterosexual love for men, right? And we see this in all kinds of ways. I mean, how many different Disney princess movies have we seen in the last 10 to 15 years that have tried to reframe men's space in romantic stories, right? The Princess Kiss has gotten rid of. Hell, I told you guys even a couple of months ago, I was uh I tripped up on this song by the singer Khalani called Folded. And if you look up the ac cappella video cuz she she did a bunch of different versions of this song apparently, right? There's an ac cappella version of her in a washroom with little girls. And now understand, and I said this before, the song itself is about a woman who regrets ending a relationship. and the song folded in terms of like folding clothes. She's contemplating if she's made a mistake. And in a way, she's trying to tell this man, I want to start over. All of that is is in there. And and I've seen her do interviews on the song, right? And women didn't understand what she was singing about. Apparently, women were waiting for the song or thinking that the song was another condemnation of men when in actuality, she was saying, "No, it's a song about a woman who made a mistake and wanted a man back." And I remember one of the women that interviewed her was like, "Well, what did he do? He probably cheated on her." And I remember Colani's face looked real confused because it had nothing to do with anything a man did wrong. It had to do with the

fact that she made a mistake and let go of a good man and was trying to see if she could get him back. But you'll notice in this ac capella video, there's no men in the video at all. She's walking around what do you call those? Uh, uh, laundromats, just singing, sitting around the washing machines, folding clothes, but there's no man.

See, she, you, you women can't make songs about being wrong and pursuing a man and apologizing for a mistake. See, they can't, they can't do that. The imagery has to, has to conform to the feminist idea that men are no longer needed. Women just need each other. That's all. Right. So, there's been a lot of that. You know, that's a lot of media around that. Women not actually needing men, valuing men. You know, they, they basically been removing their prioritization of men for decades now.

Here's the problem. They never planned for men to adapt and respond accordingly. Now, understand what I just said, adapt and respond. I said earlier, they think men's behavior is just that it's a misunderstanding of women. Men are too rudimentary. They're too understudied. They don't understand women because they're so far behind. And any conversation men have with each other is dismissed as inherently misogynistic and backward.

What they don't understand is that men are having a conversation above and beyond what they anticipate and how they framed men's discussions because men are actually analyzing what women respond to, not just what they say. And so they are adapting and responding to women's behavior. And the primary response that I'm starting to observe, and you guys correct me if I'm wrong, talk to the fellas who, you know, who get in the comment section and chop it up, what I'm starting to notice most about relationships here in the West is that more and more men across race have been dabbling with or embracing varying degrees of indifference. That's what they've been dealing with. They've been moving more and more into indifference. And the worse the economy gets, as they study women's behavior in this economy, they delve more and more into indifference.

When the very same women that's that laughed at 50/50 a year and a half, two years ago are asking for it now. Indifference. When women are begging online but trying to make it look aggressive and somehow trying to suggest that the men are the problem while you're begging strangers for money or to take you out to expensive restaurants when they've never even had a conversation with you. Indifference when the expectations that men have to be all of these varying, these incredible things. They have to be in the top nine to five to nine percent in terms of income and muscle mass and property ownership. That's really what it waters down to. Men have to be in the top 10% to be worthy of the most average basic woman. Indifference. The more the expectations increase of men, the more the discussions show women are frustrated with their, with what they're not getting from men, the response from men is indifference and it's growing. It's growing.

I'm going to show you, uh, now there's a woman I'm about to play for you and she's going to talk a little bit about how the mind works. Now, she's talking about something and I think it's useful in general, but I'm approaching it from a slightly different angle. So, let me play it and then we can talk about it from there.

Now, here's something I do want you to keep in mind, though, as you listen to this. For some reason, the, the transcription AI, every time you see the word parent, that's not what she's saying. She's not saying parent. She's saying parrot, like a bird, like a parrot, right? And she's talking about the mind. Let's check this out.

"You've already heard it all. You are not your thoughts. Don't believe your thoughts. Don't listen to your thoughts. Change your thoughts. But I'm going to reframe this for you so that you really learn how to disidentify from your mind. Your mind, your beautiful, incredible, imaginative, creative mind is nothing more than a parrot that learned how to talk. The negative things it says about you, every single point of criticism is as important and meaningful as a parrot memorizing your phone number. It is a recording device that has been absorbing, downloading every single piece of information it has ever received from outside of you and from within inside of you. And so when you hear things like, 'I'm not capable. I'm not worthy of this. I'm not.' That's like a parrot learning how to say, 'I love you.' Does it actually mean the parrot loves you? Obviously not. It just has a vocal system that allows for it to repeat those sounds. Your mind also has a system that allows it to repeat things that it's heard before. I mean, have you ever even stopped to consider why it sounds like you? It's like your accent. It's your voice. It's not someone booming over a radio being like, 'You are ugly.' Or like in a French accent or something like that. It sounds like you. And that's why a lot of times you think it is you, right? Because it imitates you just like a parrot would. But imagine if you took every single thing a parrot said seriously. That a goddamn parrot would be running your life. And that's what's happening. You've been hijacked. You've been possessed by this mind that has memorized you and your voice and all of the thoughts that it's been downloading all this time. It's posing as you. You identify with every single thought. Every time you hear a negative thought about yourself, you're like, 'Yep, that's true.' You got to know that that's your mind. You got to know that that's the parrot and be like, 'Shut the [ __ ] up.' Like, I know that I taught you how to say that, but I don't want you to say that anymore.

Now, a parrot's not going to understand when you say that, right? If you tell the parrot to stop saying the phone number or 'I love you,' it's not going to know to do that. It does not understand English. It understands behavior and attention. And so, what you have to do is to stop paying attention to that. Stop feeding it thoughts like that. If you stop saying your phone number to the parrot and start saying other things, then it'll learn how to say different things. You can teach your parrot curse words. You can teach your parrot your address. You can teach your parrot greetings just like you can teach your mind positive affirmations and encouraging thoughts about yourself. And so once again, you are not your thoughts. You are separate from them. You can observe them much like you can observe this parrot. And so this mind, you want to turn it into your tool and your servant rather than being its servant and letting it be the master. This is a beautiful tool within your own brain that you can use to create literally anything. But right now, it's creating your own suffering. So, the first step in taking your power back is in realizing that the voice you hear in your head, it's not you. It's programming."

All right. Now, this is basically, um, what I call consciousness is reality, right? That's basically what it is. But here, everything she's talking about in the mind is actually accurate. And this is great, especially if you've been dealing with meditation and you've been trying to really kind of, you know, deal with the question of how your mind works, all the random things that pop in at random points in time, you know, and dealing with all that. Everything she said is definitely useful and accurate in that regard.

But I'm playing it here for a different reason. I've been talking for years about the gynecracy. And I've been talking about the way black men have been raised by a gynecracy, especially in single parent households and family families full of women, right, who run these households. And men only come in for short periods of time for sex, entertainment, maybe even impregnation. And those men are put out. And you all know these families. You've either dated people in them or you've grown up in them. You've seen families that were comprised of nothing but women, right? That's what you've seen. They have layers and layers of women and households that are connected to each other, all ran by women, right? Sometimes they'll have sons, boyfriends, you know, not as many husbands, but sometimes husbands will come into play. But one of the things you notice most is the relationship with men tends to be very temporary.

And this is where the language about men being deadbeat dads came about in the '80s. But they didn't want to actually admit that through the family court, women had the power to decide who was even in the family. And much of the time they pushed men out. It wasn't that men left or abandoned families. It is that they got tired of being pushed out over and over again except when it came to whatever material needs she had and could secure through child support or alimony.

But anyway, the point I'm getting at here with the gynecracy is that in these family dynamics, boys are raised into the ethics of the gynecracy. And in many respects, I talked to men, thousands of men over the last decade who have talked about hearing their programming in their heads, their mother's programming, their aunties, their sisters, their grandmothers, their. And the strange thing about it is when you grow up hearing these things and having these kind of thoughts implanted into your, your mental framework, it relates directly to what your girlfriends and wives are also saying to you, right? And this amounts to a degree of programming that black men in the last decade or so have been pulling away from, have been openly challenging and breaking from.

This is why I say men are responding and adapting and responding to women because the, the other element of it is we're also adapting to our programming via the gynecracy. And so as many women as, as many men can hear the social expectations of them by the women in their lives, you're supposed to prioritize her. You're supposed to pay for everything. You're supposed to anticipate her feelings, her moods. You're supposed to provide emotional labor that you were never asked to provide, but you were expected to provide nonetheless. And if you don't provide it perfectly, you might be replaced. Right? All of these kind of thoughts, you know, that you're supposed to be the protector and provider, but she gets to be whatever the hell she wants to be. She doesn't have to be concerned with the domestic aspect of the relationship, whether it's cooking or cleaning or whatever other arrangement you two have made. She is beholden to nothing. You are beholden to the expectations of men that were prominent in the 1950s. They have not evolved. They are crystallized.

Just like in the Atlantic article, men are crystallized in, in the public's view as in, you know, as operating in one way only. And women are trying to justify why they should be allowed to operate any, any damn way they feel like because they're special snowflakes and they get to be different in every context. You, your ass got to be the same. You still got to pay the mortgage or the rent. You still got to pay the bills. And if you decide to not do those things, all hell breaks loose. But if she decides not to do those things, that's just what it means to be a woman, right?

The programming that men have gotten from women, especially in their upbringing, and black men most particularly, is deep set. And it's one of the reasons why black men have always given black women the right of first refusal long before they started talking about passport bros. Every passport bro I know in the black community still gave black women the right of first refusal before they began to look out, look elsewhere. Even within the boundaries of the United States. Most of the cats I know, unless they grew up in an entirely white area or something like that, they didn't start dating interracially until long after they'd had several relationships with black women.

It's only the younger guys like Gen Z that are that are actually, you know, beginning to make their decisions based off of seeing how their parents lived or their elders, you know, but from my generation and older, we always gave black women the right of first refusal because that's how we were programmed. We were programmed to prioritize black women. Not them, not only them themselves, but their feelings, their worldviews. We knew what to say, what not to say. We were the generation that made all the jokes about, "You say that, she going to hit you." I don't know if you guys, uh, what's, oh man, Key and Peele had that joke about [ __ ] you know, and they, the two husbands, the, the whipped husbands that, you know, fantasize about calling their wives the b- word. Um, you know, and and whisper it to each other. All of all of that humor came out of the gynecracy. It came out of a generation of men or multiple generations of men who were trained right to serve women.

And the extent to which men are breaking from that programming is frustrating women across the board. And so what this woman is describing here in terms of seeing your mind or at least that part of your mind that operates like a parrot, not as some kind of divine instrument that's telling you what to do, but as a, almost a tool, a machine that operates much like a parrot does. It just, it just absorbs information and throws it back at you. And the more, the more you focus on particular types of information, the more it gives you more of that. It's just like the algorithm on any social media platform. The more you delve into more into it, the more they give to you.

I got, I got [ __ ] that still pops up in my algorithm just from something I looked up once or an accident, a video I accidentally clicked on and next thing I know for years I got videos that I'm not interested in popping up in my stream. Right? And if you don't believe me, go to a porn site and try that mess and watch how long you have to see porn you're not interested pop up because of something you clicked on. But my point is simply that just like that, just like an algorithm in a social media framework or a website, it's the same with the mind.

You know, I think there's an old story I, when I first heard it, it was coming from a Native American man in the story, but, you know, a young boy asked his father, you know, um, you know, in terms of the nature between us, the, the two wolves as it were, you know, we got two wolves. We got light and dark, good and bad in us. And the young boy said, "Which wolf is going to win? Grandpa or father?" And he said, "The one you feed, right?" So, whatever you pay attention to, consciousness is reality. That whatever you pay attention to is what you're going to get back, especially from your own mind. And if you view it like a tool and manage it appropriately, you can actually get back more of what you want, even if it's just peace and and stillness if that's what you choose.

And that also goes for dealing with this deep set programming that you have to prioritize women who do not prioritize you. Hell, in the black community, we've learned to interpret disagreeableness and disrespect as sexy. This is how far men have gotten. This is why in many ways people have called black men the, you know, the, the, what, what's the term we are the, the scri, like the lowest level of the dating market, the trash men as it were. Shout out to Officer Charles, right? The trash men of the dating market. This is because we've, we've been socialized to take the worst behavior and see the good in it. We can look at a woman that we're not even physically attracted to, who's rude and disrespectful, and we can find it cute. We can make reasons to find it attractive. And these are the very same women who act this way that cannot appeal to any other group of men.

By that, I'm not talking about all black women. I'm talking about black women that are disagreeable and unattractive for, you know, to you. And you'll notice she can't attract anybody else, but she can rely on a steady stream of black men who've been raised in a manner to where they've determined and interpreted how to receive her behavior and her aesthetic as attractive, even though she can't go anywhere with it. This is how the, this gynecratic thinking has set in. And so just like deprogramming anything else, this, what this woman is describing also applies to how you deprogram yourself from how the gynecracy has trained us to see women. You can actually rewire what you interpret and how you interpret it and liberate yourself from the same relationships over and over again with women that you might even sometimes ask yourself, why am I even with this chick?

I can't tell you how many men I've, I won't use the word counsel, but I've dialogued with who who've reached out to me for advice. And one of the things I noticed is that they find themselves in the same types of relationships over and over again fundamentally with women that they weren't attracted to, but they really didn't know they weren't attracted to until I brought it up. Cuz many of us are socialized to be attracted and never ask the question, "Is this something I'm even attracted to?" You've been told as a black man in the black community what's supposed to be attractive to you long before anybody asked you what you were actually attracted to.

So take what she says, don't take what she says. Embellish on it, come up with your own, whatever you need to do. And share in the comments section with other brothers other ways of looking at this if you think this, if those things have been successful for you. And I would ask you to only share, you know, what's been successful for you if you're going to give advice about how to do this differently. But I'm questioning the programming and I'm asking us to challenge it by using a variety of different techniques, right? Cuz it's important. And I want to hear from you on on on what you've experienced, how many, how much of this uh relates to your own experience. And I will highlight y'all later. All right. Peace.