You're Dating All Wrong

Dear E. Jean: I don’t know how to delicately put this—but I tend to be more aggressive about sex, despite being a female.

I like to initiate with men and to be very active—often taking more of the lead in the bedroom. Not to be graphic, but I can’t get enough. I love the way sex looks, smells, feels, and tastes….I think about sex constantly and enjoy the raunchiness and animalness of it. I feel like I relate more to stereotypical male sexual expression than my own gender, ( and, yes, I know gender is a construct).

Yet I often feel like men end up being very turned off by me. They find me too aggressive, or too “slutty.” They assume I might later prove to be “crazy,” that I will inevitably cheat on them, that I’m threatening, or that my aggression relates back to some kind of trauma.

It’s frustrating! I don’t feel like I earned any of these attitudes—I rarely have casual sex and I prefer to be in a caring monogamous relationship. I don’t have sex immediately when dating. I have never cheated in a relationship. I feel like I’m pretty normal and down to earth. I’m not too demanding or clingy. I just really like having sex and don’t quite understand why this is a problem.

Talking to other women doesn’t help either. I feel weird when women talk about how annoying it is when their boyfriends ask for BJs or saying that their partner sweats too much during the act…knowing that I deeply enjoy all of those things and don’t find them off-putting at all! I tried looking it up online to see if other women are struggling with this problem but all I see is complaints from men that women are “too submissive” in bed.

I find myself sometimes envying gay men because I see how sexually open they can be without being stigmatized. I’ve tried to tone it down and be more “submissive” but I feel like eventually I’m going to slip up and show too much of my sexual side. I guess I just don’t know what to do anymore! I feel like I am too amorous and I don’t know how to quit being this way. —Can’t Restrain Myself!

Restrain, My Rhododendron:

Bah. Date more men.

You’ve leapt to a conclusion—you scare off men cuz you’re frighteningly sexy—based on a tiny number of chaps. This is called the Law of Small Numbers. You’ve made a generalization from insufficient evidence.

I don’t know how old you are, but if you are around 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, 70, 80,