Sexpert Julie: You May Want to Try Talking Dirty to Your Man… Even If You Hate It
To unlock his emotions and rediscover your erotic side, it may be time to go outside your comfort zone.
-Julie Elledge, Ph.D.
Your man wants to talk dirty to you and you’re not sure that you like it. As if that’s not enough, he also wants you to talk dirty to him! So why is this a turn off for you?
It all has to do with the stress of culture pitted against human biology. From a very young age, men are asked to disavow their intimate self with “real boys don’t cry” (whose bright idea was that one?) and girls are encouraged to disown their erotic self when they are told that “nice girls don’t…”
The truth is, boys do cry and girls do…
For boys, the story is a little easier. Emotions are contagious and you might have noticed that your man hates to see you cry. Your tears may be causing his well-trained composure to crack. That composure has its roots in his biological history of having to defend the family. It can feel pretty scary if you are facing a threat that might kill you (think tiger), and anger is a better state of mind and body to help you tap into your adrenaline. Blood pumps into your fists and thighs and your heart beats faster. Your whole body goes on alert focusing your senses on the danger, whereas sadness has the opposite effect. When unhappiness invades your body, you tend to close down so that you can contemplate what ales you. While both emotions are very functional in the right circumstances, danger calls for anger. It isn’t hard to imagine why the man that fell down crying when the tiger attacked may not have survived in the gene pool.
Read Sexpert Julie: Understanding Why Men and Women Bond Differently
Fast forward to today: not many men are fighting tigers, but the legacy still remains. Since your man has been biologically and culturally conditioned to believe that it isn’t manly to cry, he may be a little slow in making the connection to his sadness and other vulnerable emotions. He may have had to disavow his emotions to not show them. This leads to a disconnection between him and his intimate self. So, if your man gets mad when you cry, you can understand, he isn’t mad at you. His wires are crossed.
Now on to the ladies. Women are given the message in so many subtle ways that it is not okay to be aggressive, much less lust after a man (or two). Wandering through history, consider how a man could know if that child that he’s protecting is his child if your sex drive is driving you to be opportunistic? Well, if women were only interested in love and commitment and our sex drive could be killed off, then there would not be questions of paternity. The problem is, earlier in history, sex drive was important to the survival of the species, shaping women’s (and men’s) desire for sexual variety and novelty. Women do have erotic feelings, but the cultural legacy that women shouldn’t have erotic desires still persists. To make things more complicated, most men want to see that womanly erotic persona in the bedroom – “A lady in the living room and a prostitute in the bedroom” – as the saying goes.
