“F*ck him and he’ll be nicer”: Why this advice made me sick
“Fuck him and he’ll be nicer!” ~ Dr Shefali Tsabary
This phrase offered by Dr Shefali yesterday to a woman whom she was coaching live during a Couples Session … caused nausea in my stomach.
I respect and admire Dr Shefali’s body of work. I’ve learned so much from her over the years, especially on the subject of Conscious Parenting.
But to advise a woman who has felt disconnected from her husband for years, who feels neglected and resentful – to “fuck him and he’ll be nicer” feels tone deaf to me.
Women have used sex to appease men for generations.
Having sex without desire is what women have done for centuries, providing sex as a way to secure their shelter and survival.
Yes, we’ve used sex to get our needs met. The power of seduction was often the only source of power women had access to in previous generations.
But using our bodies to appease someone is Sexual Fawning.
And fawning is a trauma response, a protective mechanism.
Disconnected from our bodies for generations, we continue treating ourselves (and others) as if we have no feelings, opinions, preferences, or desires of our own.
The expectation that anyone should just be “on call” and ready to “provide” sex any time their partner may have an urge feels outrageous to me.
These assumptions display rampant dehumanization of our relating partners that is normalized in our society. We are unable to see the other as a being in their own right, with their own wishes, needs, preferences, desires.
It also reveals an insidious sense of entitlement in our relationships. There is the assumption that the other person belongs to you and is here to please you and appease you, as if their whole purpose of existence is to fulfill your every need.
Of course, I come from these same dynamics and have written extensively on these subjects over the years. You can read more here and here.
So what is Sexual Fawning?
It is when we connect to someone sexually in a way that is incongruent with how we really feel or want to connect.
Sexual fawning can save us during assault and abuse. But it really happens in all relationships, even the ones that are in fact safe and loving.
Sexual fawning happens most chronically in long-term relationships, even when they are satisfying overall.
Sexual fawning is a habit, especially for women.
More women than not have been sexually fawning for most of their lives.
We’ve all done it: to keep the peace, because to refuse would create a situation we didn’t have the capacity to deal with, because we didn’t want to hurt their feelings, and – often – because we are not even connected to our own preferences or know that they matter enough to be expressed.
So yes, we’ve “fucked them” in order to control their mood or to keep the peace.
But this obviously has not lead to greater connection or increased sense of safety in relationships. Most women just dissociate and then either hate themselves or their partners for it.
Because fawning overrides body’s signals like protest or disgust, sexual fawning in long-term relationships often compounds further resentment toward our partners. Although the process is automatic and habitual, the resulting disrespect of our own boundaries can lead to hating the person with whom we perpetuate this behavior.
But something new has been emerging: women are reconnecting to our bodies, to our agency, to the fact that we are sovereign beings, and that access to our bodies is in our control.
After many decades of sexual fawning in our relationships women are starting to refuse sex to partners with whom they no longer feel connected.
Sexless marriages are an epidemic of sorts. And it is neither forcing sex nor its systematic refusal that are the solution.
Couples therapy that advises us to have more sex without seeking to understand the underlying causes of disconnect or repulsion within the couple perpetuates and promotes further disconnect and growing resentment.
Telling two people who have lost connection to themselves and to each other to have more sex seems to me not only cruel but completely out of touch with the complexity of what awakens erotic pull.
So how do we recover from all the yesses that were not true and renegotiate our boundaries within a relationship which has been built on fawning?
When we are used to fawning to survive, our sexuality probably was developed from the fawn response as well.
This means we systematically prioritize other people’s needs and desires over ours. We don’t ask for what we want, often because we are unsure of what that is. And yes, we are afraid to hurt their feelings or rupture the relationship by saying no.
Our body is so used to pretending to consent that we don’t even know how to tell the difference between fawning and actual desire.
The key is in coming back to our bodies.
Building capacity for pleasure.
Actually feeling the parts that are frozen and the parts that can experience pleasure.
Nurture those parts, this way you can be in deeper relationship with your desire, capacity and even agency to express those.
Solution is in the practice of telling the difference between your fawning and your desire.
This is what must be repaired: the broken connection between ourselves and our bodies, with respect to its feelings, senses, protests, desires.
The coming together of two sovereign, self-confident, emotionally mature people, heightened by a sense of being safe, seen, and understood is what actually activates desire within a couple.
Intimacy, connection, and sex follow.
Come work with me! This subject is delicate and for now I reserve it for 1-1 work. Take advantage of my 30-day 1-1 experience, where you get 4 private sessions and unlimited access to me between sessions for extra support, as well as a playlist of recorded somatic practices.
Book a free 30-min conversation on zoom and let’s chat!
Warmly,
Galina
PS: I have been inspired for some time to talk about my journey of becoming an Elder. Last week I started a series on the subject. If interested, here’s the one I recorded over the weekend.