title: The Illusion of Dominance: Why The Redpill Is Wrong
author: J Sanilac
content_type: article
publication: J. Sanilac
published: 2024-12-29T00:00:00
source_url: https://www.jsanilac.com/dominance/
word_count: 14093
The Illusion of Dominance: Why The Redpill Is Wrong
The “redpill” is a loose body of seduction instructions for men and supporting analyses of female sexual psychology. It contains some truths and some falsehoods, and this brief essay won't go over each of these point by point. Instead I'll explain something very fundamental it gets wrong. So fundamental, in fact, that you'll discover the redpill is supporting the very system young men believe it overturns. It promises to empower men to get what they want; instead it makes them into the submissive slaves of women. In explaining why this is the case, I'll provide an analysis of male sexual psychology and the process of courtship that will be useful to men and women alike even after the redpill fad is forgotten.
I've never had any interest in writing seduction advice for men, and yet my starting point here is indeed seduction advice—for *women*. In the process of producing an explicit account of how women can better seduce men, I realized what was missing from the redpill. Namely, an accurate analysis of *male* sexual psychology. In their narrow focus on manipulating women, the pick-up artists behind the redpill looked too little in the mirror. They glossed over male sexuality and courtship behavior with simplistic explanations that don't stand up to scrutiny. They failed to understand what men's true goals were and why they held them, and accepted a caricature as if it were living flesh. This made it impossible for them to see the bigger picture.
Their error hinges on the *problem of dominance*. It will take a while to both explain what I mean by “the problem of dominance” and provide enough context for you to make sense of this problem, so please be patient.
I. Most women want to be sexually dominated.
Perhaps it's best to start on a topic that's familiar ground for redpill devotees. Women find violent domination arousing. Today it's no longer even shocking to say so. I should probably write “many” women or “most” women, but when we're about to tread so deep into the muck of human psychology these weasel words seem inappropriate. The truth is indeed that a large majority of women find violent domination arousing, though what differs to a very important extent is the degree. For some an aura of strength and an intimidating gesture are enough, and the right tail of female taste seems outright repulsive, and scarcely believable. Yet one doesn't have to go very far along that right tail to find women who are aroused by extremes of violence no sensible person would speak of in public. The bulk of women fall between these two groups, and the exact degree of violent domination they enjoy is hard to discern. Not only hard to discern because they conceal their preferences for the sake of social respectability, but also because, as I'll explain later, the preferences themselves appear to be flexible.
Submission to male dominance is an ego boost coated in the fluffy frosting of freedom from responsibility. It's gift-wrapped for someone else, but you get to eat it yourself and still take credit for giving it to him. If worst comes to worst, you also score points for being a victim, because he brutally stole it from you right before he forced you to savor it. And he has nothing to complain about. After all, the whole thing was about what *he* wanted. (Or was it?)
When I analyzed a random selection of bestselling vintage and modern romance novels written for women, scenes that glorified forceful male domination and even outright rape were ubiquitous. This does not, however, imply that the women who read and enjoy these novels all want to be raped. Rather, they like the idea of being desired and dominated by someone stronger—and “forced seduction,” as the euphemism calls it, is the most vivid representation of this. A key word here that many overlook is *desire*. As I explain in *Dispelling Beauty Lies*,
“Men's erotic sensibility focuses on the female form. Women's erotic sensibility, however, does not focus on the male form. Rather, it focuses on the pleasured female form as an object of desire. That's why the erotica commonly preferred by women includes 'forced seduction' (an enactment of desire), lesbian pornography (a spectacle of the pleasured female form), and even solo girls (female form as object of the desiring male gaze), but not male centerfolds. Male beauty is relevant because it affects the value of the desiring subject. Only to a lesser degree is it the object of erotic contemplation.”
The rape fantasy is the most striking example of this sexual psychology. It mixes together a heady cocktail of male power and dominance in a scenario that centers around the heroine, and specifically the heroine's *desirability*. The hero's desire for her is so strong that he becomes caught up in emotion and physically overcomes her resistance to his advances to give her, against her will—well, exactly what she actually wanted anyway. As an extra bonus, the fantasy completely frees the heroine from any guilt for seeking out the jouissance she herself desired, because she bears no responsibility for what happens.
If we view the rape fantasy purely as a psycho-literary figment, we're forced (against our will!) to recognize it as ingenious and perfect. And yet it's a fantasy, not reality. It's a fantasy that the common run of men are better off not knowing about, because its real meaning is so counterintuitive to them that it's almost impossible to grasp. “All women want to be violated so get to work,” is not only *not* the message, it completely misses the psychology at play. Women are looking for signals of strength and power here, yes; but also for desire, and specifically desire that comes from a worthy subject whom they secretly desire in return. Were the rapist-hero's skill at mind-reading any less precise, were his attractiveness any less magnificent, he'd be little more than a villain.
So to repeat, women are looking, among other things, for signals of desire. This isn't only because high desire indicates a healthy libido. It's because a man whose desires are fixated on you to such a degree makes a better mate than one who doesn't. He will be less likely to stray, less likely to set you aside, and more likely to treat you well. Here some will object and say that a weak man with low libido will treat a woman better than a lustful, violent romance-novel hero. But that's a meaningless kind of “better,” because it comes at the cost of masculinity and health. It's painless, but flaccid—need I say that this isn't what a woman wants? For men who have both masculinity and health, he whose sexual desires are stronger and more fixated on you will make a better mate when all else is equal. Naturally it's not that women are thinking this through with logic, but that the logic—which is accurate, by and large—has shaped their instincts.
II. Men don't actually want to dominate you—sorry!
To understand why this point about desire is so crucial we need to turn the mirror back on men. Men are little inclined to self-reflection, and women too understand male sexual psychology much less than they believe, because the temptation to project their fantasies of men onto real ones thoroughly tramples their intuition for character. Women become so enamored with erotic dreams of dominant heroes that they fail to notice actual men* don't want to dominate them. *My assertion that men don't want to dominate them even seems unbelievable to women on first blush, and offensive on second. Bizarrely, a lack of introspection leads men to accept women's fantasy projection of male psychology as if it were, or should be, reality, when it's very far from it. The result is that everyone thinks they understand male sexual psychology, but they don't. They are badly wrong.
To explain I'll cite a few relevant passages from the section on seduction in *Dispelling Beauty Lies*. You can find further evidence for my claims there if you are in doubt.
“It may be tempting to project a lust for domination onto men, but this gives you the wrong idea of what actually turns them on. Women are far more aroused by male violence and dominance than men are. BDSM is sexual entertainment for women, not men. And not only is violent pornography not reality, it's a false representation of male desire. Men who engage in consensual violence beyond mild rough behavior usually do so to fulfill female sexual fantasies, not for their own pleasure. This means consensual violent male 'domination' is in truth male submission to female wishes, and quite the reverse of genuine domination. When a man ties you up, gags you, or chokes you, he's submitting to you, not the other way around.”
Men's indifference to or rather distaste for the dominance/submission dynamic isn't an accident. It's part of their broader mate-selection strategy. And that strategy isn't complicated. As soon as you notice men don't want to dominate and ask why (few people have done one of these things, let alone both), the correct answer presents itself: men want to be desired, and for exactly the same reason women do.
“Much like women, men do want to be wanted. And for good reason. A partner who wants you is always more reliable, and therefore more valuable, than a partner who doesn't. That remains true no matter how strong and powerful you are. This is an important point you should read twice. There are no exceptions.”
So *both* sexes like to see signs their lover desires them. The signs they look for have the same meaning, but they're superficially opposite. Women want men to demonstrate desire by overcoming their resistance to its fulfillment. This manifests as a *constraint* (for example, “he desires me so much he'll force me to submit”). Men, on the other hand, want women to demonstrate desire by expressing it spontaneously and voluntarily in both words and actions. Women can only do this when they're *free from constraint*.
Obviously freedom and constraint are contradictory. And that's the crux of what I call the problem of dominance.
III. The redpill prescription is a fraud.
The fact that there's a gap between women's desire for dominance and men's inclination to provide it is hardly news to redpill proponents even if they've never phrased the issue in this particular way. That gap is indeed the main reason for the redpill's existence. But they've overlooked its source and significance in the rush for a band-aid that can promise men an easy shortcut to getting laid. Their proposed shortcut is, in brief: fake dominance, provide women whatever violence they desire, and wrap the whole thing up in a bow of feigned indifference that serves as a display of status. Too easy. (Or is it?)
When we reevaluate the redpill band-aid in light of our analysis so far, we come upon a series of troubling contradictions. Both courtship and sex are made into chores where men do things they don't like to appeal to female fantasies that are disconnected from reality. Redpill men are effectively barefoot in the kitchen doing the dishes for women—but while posing in a very dominant way and “maintaining a dominant frame.” If you're not laughing, maybe you should be. This is male *submission* packaged as dominance for women's entertainment. The dominance isn't just an illusion, it's a fraud, because what it's covering up is precisely its opposite. It's a fraud when men make a show of violence during sex, and it's a fraud when men play dominance games during courtship.
If you want a memorably catchy phrase for this form of male submission, “black knighting” will do nicely. The submissive nature of black knighting is made clear by the fact that it *undermines* men's natural mate-selection strategy. Why so? Because men's natural mate-selection strategy doesn't emphasize dominance. To the contrary. If it did, you wouldn't have to *advise* them to “act more dominant.” They would do it without trying.
IV. The redpill account of male behavior is incoherent.
Here you might object that men's natural mate selection strategy doesn't work very well. There is some truth to this I'll address further in a moment, but for now I'll point out that it depends entirely on what you mean by “work well.” If “work well” means maximizing bodycount, men's natural inclinations lead them astray. But as much as some want to claim that maximizing bodycount is men's evolutionarily enforced goal, that's just not the case.
There are very few Genghis Khans, but many farmers with farmer's wives. “Who would make a good farmer's wife” was therefore a much more important question than “how big a harem can I build.” So we should expect men's strategy to be geared not just toward maximizing the number of mates, but toward the more common and realistic goal of determining who would make a good farmer's (or hunter's or herder's) wife. The Genghis Khans loom large in our minds, but their net evolutionary effect is overridden by the mass of normal people living normal lives and raising normal children in normal households.
I don't like to get too far into the weeds on evolutionary psychology. It's an unreliable field I normally avoid scrupulously, because it's easy to invent just-so stories that prove whatever you want. I've completely omitted any reference to it from *Dispelling Beauty Lies*, and that wasn't an accident. So I'd prefer to stop at the very simple point that men's instinctive strategies are not what they “should” be if maximizing bodycount were the main goal—and, therefore, it *cannot* have been the main goal.
Now, the redpill has an explanation for this that's persuaded people for a long time, but is wrong. Their story goes that there are “alphas” who try to maximize bodycount and “betas” who instead offer resources in exchange for wives because women don't really like them. While not completely false, there's a deep flaw in this argument. When you look closer at how betas are thinking and what they're looking for, you see that it doesn't resemble prostitution at all. Yet the redpill explanation of betas' behavior treats marriage as an extended form of prostitution enforced by society. In reality, even men who do hire prostitutes often want “the girlfriend experience.” But why?
If strict social enforcement of marriage were the end-all-be-all that made “betas” competitive in the past but not now, then we should expect “betas” to be *indifferent* to their wives' affections. Once you've bought the cow, you can do whatever you want with it. You don't need the cow to like you. Once you've paid for the prostitute you don't need to curry her favor. So according to the redpill story we should expect “betas” to treat their wives like chattel, careless of their desires. Yet instead they're said to be characterized by the *opposite* attitude. They're said to care *too deeply* about their wives' affections and treat them *too well*. So the explanation for “betas'” behavior and attitudes is in direct contradiction with their actual behavior and attitudes. It's an explanation, dear readers, that just doesn't work.
What explanation does work? I've already given it. A mate who desires you is more valuable than a mate who doesn't. She is less likely to betray you. She is less likely to run off. She is more likely to treat you well. She is more likely to stay with you when times get bad. She makes, in short, a better wife than a woman who's merely been bought. And men are looking for the best wives, not simply the highest bodycount. They will try to fluff up their bodycount with hanky-panky on the side, but in the end their legacy is secured by the success of their family, which requires a quality wife, and a quality wife is one who desires her husband. And to repeat, a man who wants to identify a quality wife *must not dominate her*, because *only freedom* gives her an opportunity to demonstrate her desire.
These so-called “betas'” attitudes are therefore not those of men who are simply trading resources for wives (a description that better characterizes a sultan or a slaver, neither of which fit into the proposed “beta” mold), but rather those of men who are looking for the best quality mates within a largely monogamous framework. Men who are indifferent to whether women desire them in return are either not looking for a quality mate in a monogamous framework the first place, or they've given up all hope of being able to secure such a woman. Such truly indifferent men exist, but constitute a small minority of the total, and an even smaller minority of the highest-quality men.
Now we can return to the issue that brought the redpill to public attention in the first place. Nice guys don't win. “Beta” strategies seem particularly ineffective in the modern age. Well, perhaps there is a better answer to this than submitting to women while posing dominantly. Perhaps becoming a sexual house-slave in shining armor is not the solution.
V. Men have turned into simps and wimps.
So, the dominance-submission binary is inherently foreign to men's mate-selection strategy. The redpill band-aid is for men to embrace this binary anyway because it impresses women. And yet—do we really *need* to think within this dominance-submission binary? What if trying to solve the problem within that binary is a mistake from the get-go? I believe this is the case. In what follows, I'll explain why.
When I hear about men acting wimpy in relationships or simping for egirls, my first reaction is, “Did their fathers really teach them *nothing* about how a man should behave?” Simping is transparently disgusting and unmanly behavior. It's mystifying that anyone at all has so little shame that he would take more than one step down that path without immediately turning back after being alerted by friends or fathers to his misstep; and yet here we have millions of men throwing money at egirls for mere winks of faux affection in return. The problem with this sort of behavior goes beyond just being submissive or dominant, and isn't well characterized by either of those words. It's a broader failure of masculine virtues. These masculine virtues should be inculcated early on from father to son, and by society as well. But instead the reverse has been happening.
Parallel with the rise of feminism, there has been a Great Wimpification. Whether this is a consequence or an accident I don't know, but my feeling is that the breakdown of traditional gender roles that was supposed to “free” women also caused a loosening of expectations for men to behave in a masculine way and exhibit masculine virtue. Not that they ever did so perfectly; but a slackening of such virtues is undeniable, and especially salient in the wimpy “average Japanese high-school student” who typically serves as the protagonist of animes written for the descendants of samurais. Perhaps fathers heeding feminist announcements of a new era even thought it morally right to shirk their responsibilities in this regard. The result, as we can see all too clearly in retrospect, has been generations of increasingly wimpy young men. I don't believe these wimpy young men deserve all the blame, because society as a whole has let them down. There is a failure of education, upbringing, culture, and basic physical health as well (contaminants in food and water may play a role in the dysfunction). Not least of all, our wicked “elites” prefer that they *stay* wimpy, for reasons that need hardly be spelled out.
VI. We need a genuine revival of masculine virtue.
Now, as soon as you bring up the topic of masculine virtues, redpill proponents will accuse you of white knighting. That is, telling men they need to behave in a chivalrous way that actually subordinates them to women, who therefore lose respect for them and take advantage of them. Or telling men to “man up” and work hard to just give women everything they want. Well, this is certainly not the kind of masculine virtue I'm talking about.
Properly masculine men need to stand independent of their women and not dependent on them. The ideal man “needs” you but doesn't *need* you. This is about mindset (almost always a useless concept but actually appropriate here) not necessarily about material reality. A man who's stood strong and independent of his woman will be nursed by that same woman if he becomes too ill to care for himself. The relevant strength and independence pertain to attitude, outlook, and choice of behavior.
This mental strength is not a frame you need to maintain perpetually without interruption. Nor is it a game you need to play with your lover; nor do you need to take her down a peg so that your own perch seems that much higher. An occasional sign of weakness will drive a bad woman off, but it will tell a good woman there's room for her to contribute something to your life. That's reason enough not to wear a mask of perfect control at every moment.
Even so, the line between insatiable desire for a woman and emotional dependence on her affections is one which, while fine, must never be crossed. Today wimps and simps *start* on the wrong side of that line, and even superior men, who have, as we've analyzed, very good reasons to want their lovers to want them in return, are tempted to cross it at one point or another in their lives—and sadly *most* tempted at the precise moment they encounter the woman they most desire.
Where masculine virtues hold firm, the woman will play a supportive or supplementary role in a man's life, but not a “submissive” one in the sense implied by the dominance-submission binary. Hers is a supportive role undertaken willingly, to a man whose strength does not manifest in the form of posturing or dominance games. The man *leads* but does not need to *compel *nor *demean*. Rather, he takes on the male part we see acted out in traditional dances of all sorts. A tango where the male had to compel the female to carry out her steps would be even worse than one where the female leads, and this is hardly an accident. We can already sense on an aesthetic level what the relationship between the sexes is supposed to look like.
Overnegging The Pudding*Negging is a seduction technique that can occasionally make sense in playful flirtation, but becomes harmful when used persistently in a relationship. Sadly, the redpill has convinced some men that they need to neg their lover continually to seem tough, and instead of being playful, they're clumsy and cruel. Nice guys might show too much affection and be too complimentary, but playing Opposite Day with them isn't a solution. A relationship should be positive and supportive. If you want to seem tough, lift yourself up. Don't tear your lover down.
I don't have time to write a complete analysis of masculine virtue. That would be a book in itself, and not one I'd nominate myself to write. Others can flesh it out both more accurately and in greater detail. My only concern here is to sketch out a basic outline of how these masculine virtues differ from and are superior to the “dominant” role in the dominance-submission binary, and to open your eyes to the possibility that black knighting is dispensable.
But—is it really? To answer this question persuasively we need to turn back to women and paw again through the dirty underbelly of the modern libido.
VII. Women are quietly hooked on violent pornography.
In recent years there's been a growing movement to highlight the negative effects pornography use is having on men. Yet at the time of writing few (if any) seem to be aware that it's having *much greater* negative effects on women. Indeed, few are even aware of the basic facts in that regard. Ever since smartphones were first put into the hands of children there's been a substantial increase in female use of video pornography, often starting in the preteen years.
In some countries women are now an absolute majority of video-pornography users, to say nothing of what would happen if we included written erotica as well (very popular, and far more so among women than men). And while the chart above is already compelling, it still doesn't do this secular shift justice. That's because the numbers are skewed downward, not only by a concomitant increase in male pornography use, but by the demographic pyramids of the listed countries. For instance, Germany is an old society, so the near doubling in female pornography use in just ten years is concealing a much greater increase focused in the youngest generation (old women are not the ones changing their habits). Young countries like the Philippines show the greatest rise, and there women now dominate video pornography use not just outright, but by a large and growing margin.
This increase in women's video-pornography use has been accompanied by an increased preference for violent sex, shown quite clearly in the next set of charts. I find any attempt to excuse this as mere correlation and not causation implausible, and I'm certain you will too. When I've casually asked young men about the tastes of their lovers, there's been broad agreement that they do indeed frequently ask or expect to be choked. This comes as a shock to older generations, for whom such a taste and such a request were very rare indeed.
Fantasies of violence were already the norm in vintage historical romance novels. However, these novels had an imaginative character, and my feeling is that women registered them metaphorically, and this muted their impact. The concreteness of visual pornography seems to have a stronger effect on real-life behaviors and expectations. Where modern romance novels and erotica fall on this scale is hard to say, but it's safe to bet that today's bestselling BDSM erotica has done considerable net harm.
VIII. Pornography use has escalated women's taste for violent domination.
To understand the magnitude of this impact we need to consider the *escalation of desires*. Women seem to be subject to an escalation effect similar to the one whose results can be seen here (NSFW), but applying to the taste for violent domination rather than physical proportions. While the link shows that only around ten percent of men are subject to this degree of pornographically induced escalation (some examples of feminine beauty dating back millennia still match or exceed the median male tastes today), it appears to affect women more broadly. Women who begin consuming mildly violent pornography escalate to more and more violent pornography, until they reach an extreme scarcely comprehensible to those who've never stepped on the ladder. And sooner or later, they try to chase after this extreme in reality.
What matters here isn't whether women are using more video pornography than men or vice versa. The evidence available does not, at any rate, constitute definitive proof in either direction, because it comes from a single site. I've highlighted these comparative statistics to jar men out of a dogmatic slumber that assumes the innocence of young women, so they take the issue seriously; and also so the women reading this who've struggled with pornography addiction don't feel alone in their plight. What does matter for our project here is that women are using pornography *enough* and *early enough* to bring about a broad shift in their tastes, and this shift creates an additional obstacle for us to overcome if we truly wish to dispense with the absurdity of black knighting.
So even as men are succumbing to the Great Wimpification, women are becoming addicted to more and more violence. Often addicted to degrees of violence that only the worst psychopaths would impose on them happily. One can hardly blame the younger generations for this when their parents handed them, at age twelve or earlier, a battery-powered pornographic escalation machine. Nobody can expect children to exert a level of self-control that takes effort even for adults. It was the responsibility of those adults, and society in general, to protect them from the trouble they could get themselves into, but instead they were left to their own devices—if you'll excuse the pun. And here we are.
IX. Women are being entrapped in aggressive indifference to male desire.
Pornographically induced escalation isn't the only problem. The modern confusions that inflict the Great Wimpification on men have equally damaging effects on women. However, instead of emotional feebleness, women are pushed toward a roughly inverse attitude. I call this attitude *aggressive indifference*.
Aggressive indifference to the desires of the opposite sex sounds contrary to nature. But it's pervasive among women today nonetheless. That's because three ingredients—self-defense from unattainable ideals, modern ideology about independence, and the pornographically escalated desire to be dominated that we've just discussed—have accidentally mixed together into a poisonous cocktail. This cocktail intoxicates women with the feeling that *not caring* about men's desires is the ideal feminine attitude, and one that they ought to pursue *deliberately*. Over time aggressive indifference takes root on a deep subconscious level, where it's protected by the psychological equivalent of moats and battlements and spikes and hot oil, making it almost impossible to unwind.
To explain what I mean, I'll go over the three ingredients in the cocktail one by one.
The first ingredient is modern ideology. Modern women are trained to believe that indifference to men's desires is one of the central pillars that guarantees their strength and independence, which, they are told, is a very important thing. Caring about what men think, according to this ideology, would make them weak and dependent, which, they are told, is a very bad thing. It's effectively their moral duty to be aggressively indifferent, because otherwise they're threatening the holy independent strength of all womankind.
This unfulfilling ideology is based on a lie. The sexes are complementary and *not intended to be independent from each other*. So independence is a nonsensical goal in the first place. The important thing (for either sex) is just to avoid being trapped in bad relationships you're unable to exit, and avoid being brought so low by rejection that you're unable to enjoy life. Because heaven and earth treat men like straw dogs and the chance at romance isn't available to all, many of us need to do our best to tolerate solitude with equanimity. But to insist on idealizing independence when it's not forced on you by necessity is another matter entirely—a hunger strike in the presence of food for no purpose but to spit at nature.
The second ingredient in the cocktail is self-defense. Precisely because women do want so much to be desired, they also fear not being desired, and resent being judged undesirable, which they find extremely demoralizing.
Aggressive indifference promises to fix this problem at the ground level by means of a Buddhistic approach. By eliminating her desire to be desired, the strong, independent woman can preclude any chance of feeling distressed that men (the right men, obviously, not hoi polloi) don't desire her as much as she wants them to (or rather, as much as she wanted them to before her enlightenment). In this way she can attain the painless peace of nirvana. It's a tempting promise, and today large numbers of women have embraced it almost unconsciously.
When you try to explain to women that society has nudged them into aggressive indifference they will at first deny it very confidently (aggressively, even), pointing out that mass media is filled with messages telling women they have to be attractive to men, that egirls are abundant everywhere on social media, and that sexy C-list celebrities fill the sidebar of the Daily Mail. This might sound like a persuasive refutation, but it's quite the opposite. It's actually the main reason aggressive indifference has become such a tempting self-defense mechanism.
Aggressive indifference coexists perfectly with sexualization in the media, and in fact uses it as fuel. That's because these ubiquitous images of desirable celebrities inspire feelings of inadequacy in women who are prone to self-criticism. The faux everydayness of beautiful influencers, who spend hours choosing camera angles for their “just woke up, no makeup” clips, makes the issue worse, because it hits closer to home than the glossy, airbrushed magazine covers of times past, which seemed to float, like icons and statuary, in their own universe. Sensitive women perceive the prominence of all these sexual luminaries as a continual assault on their self-esteem from which some continual defense is required. And aggressive indifference is the most impenetrable of all possible defenses.
The third ingredient in the cocktail is the pornographically escalated desire to be dominated. As we've already discussed, women want men to demonstrate their desire by overcoming resistance to that desire, and the greater the resistance overcome, the more compelling the demonstration. Now, if a romance-novel heroine dolls herself up and flaunts herself before the hero-rapist, and then is subsequently violated in the standard fashion, could we honestly say that she's put up a thorough resistance? Certainly not. By making herself appear available she's diminished the meaningfulness of the hero's assault by allowing him to entertain the idea that she wants it to happen. If she, on the other hand, were to put on a show of indifference or even distaste instead, the meaningfulness of her “forced seduction” would be increased, since this amounts to an additional resistance the hero has to overcome to conceive and fulfill his desire.
In short, aggressive indifference presents itself as a form of *resistance* that will make a woman's eventual submission to male sexual dominance *more meaningful*. And as the desire to be dominated escalates with pornography use, the appeal of aggressive indifference escalates as well.
You might wonder if the same logic will extend all the way to the traditional question, “Would you still rape me if I were a worm?” But past a certain point the plausibility of being desirable to the hero would be stretched too far, and the fantasy bubble would pop. That's why indifference is never in fiction, and rarely in reality, actually carried to the limit of aggression. Instead it tapers off at some middle ground.
This view that “if I don't try to make myself *too* attractive, his desire for me will be more meaningful” is widespread today, even beyond users of violent pornography like romance novels. This seemingly innocuous attitude is perhaps the most destructive of all. Not only will it *not* make his desire for you more meaningful. It will ensure instead that he ends up *resenting you for not trying.
certified seductressis a
more fun than turning yourself into stone.
lot*## X. Aggressive indifference is extremely damaging to relationships.
None of these three ingredients alone would cause an attitude as harmful and unnatural as aggressive indifference to be so widespread, but the combined cocktail pushes many women over the edge, so they become hooked on a poison that's bottled as a cure. And aggressive indifference isn't just a bad attitude amounting to a minor annoyance. It's extremely damaging. In fact, it does just as much to impair love between the sexes as its male counterpart the Great Wimpification.