How America’s Woman-Dominant Sexual Dynamic Is Destroying Marriages And Families By Suzanne Venker for The Federalist
That’s the missing element in the push for the so-called equal marriage. By suggesting men and women are essentially the same, we set them up to fail.
Susan Forray is a 44-year-old divorced actuary who wrote in The New York Times about her relationship with a man unlike all the others she dated in the past, in that he believed in traditional gender roles. This gentleman told Forray flat-out one day, “I’m the man. I should be in charge of the money.”
Forray felt a “jolt of anxiety.” Here she was, an actuary—someone who analyzes statistics and uses them to calculate insurance risks and premiums—and the man she’s dating tells her managing money is his job, not hers.
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“I found his bluntness surprising but also alluring. He was confident in his desires…I craved a man who sought to take financial responsibility for his family, even if I didn’t need it,” she writes. “The men I’d previously dated thought of themselves as staunch feminists—in hindsight, frustratingly so, at least in the sense that they were too inclined to defer to me (under the guise of respecting me) to ever take charge, either financially or sexually.”
This sexual dynamic Forray describes is not an anomaly—it is the norm. I’ve heard countless stories of strong and successful women who are dating or married to a man who, in an effort to appear liberated, has either curbed his ambitions or simply follows rather than leads. Just the other day I had yet another conversation with a mother whose 20-something daughter is moving in with a man who lacks the direction and ambition she has, and the daughter told her mother she’s worried he will come to resent her.
She’s right to be worried. That will happen.
I’m not alone in recognizing the seismic shift that has occurred since I was on the dating market, but my experience with this phenomenon isn’t relegated to conversations with friends. As an author, speaker, and relationship coach, I deal with this new reality every day. The vast majority of my clients are individuals and couples who are grappling with a new sexual dynamic: one in which the woman, not the man, is the dominant partner.
