One Penis Policies, Or How Girls Don't Count

[joreth]

http://the-orbit.net/brutereason/2016/04/04/one-penis-policies/I had a partner once who, when I found out that their pattern of both he and his wife only dating women was partially instigated by his discomfort with having his wife date a man and not fully because she was really more into women than men, I got really upset with him and pointed out

Comments

[belenen]

This is a brilliant deconstruction of that attitude, particularly when desensitization is the end goal rather than changing the core issue. I hadn't realized that was what was bugging me about how some of my past lovers have reacted to things (because there wasn't the issue of control).

[joreth]

Thanks! It's taken me a few years myself to deconstruct it this way. As I mentioned in the post, when they first described their process, it *seemed* like they were "getting better" on the surface, but the fact that he had to go through the same freakout every single time she wanted to do something new didn't seem very much like "progress" to me. They were judging their "progress" by the number of activities she was allowed to participate in, but I was judging "progress" by actually becoming a self-contained, secure, and healthy human being who recognized his partners' agency and the idea of that agency didn't send him into panic attacks