⭐️ No prompt today. Instead I wrote a blog post after finishing Femininity and Domination by the brilliant feminist philosopher Sandra Bartky.
#Translated Reciprocity
Read the full piece → here
Bartky traces how affective care in heterosexual intimacy, including and pointedly the care owed after sex, typically flows toward men without returning, and how any inch of return gets treated as license to demand the woman give double. She names a familiar arrangement. Men report wanting a woman who is powerful yet docile, who wants them but not so much that her wanting becomes a claim. The asymmetry governs even the duration of sex, which is typically for the men to adjudicate (not the orgasm alone!) the sense of when the whole thing is finished. He leads each stage while speaking the language of attentiveness. It’s then reported she often works around his needs, afraid that disrupting the flow will render her whichever version he does not want: too powerful, too needy, too much.