Good At Sex: Antagonistic Seduction (pt 8)

How to tell when it's the right move

I’ve been writing this Good At Sex series from a lot of theory and survey data. Below, Diana Fleischman guest posts by brings in her expertise in evolutionary psychology. -Aella

Diana also included an audio narration of this post, included at the bottom.

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Women’s fantasies vary quite a lot. While most women are interested in displays of dominance-as-status, even if it’s not expressed via actual bdsm, a significant subset of women are also interested in more concrete displays of power. This kind of thing goes by many names because it’s edgy, and people don’t know how to talk about it. Some of these are forced sex, rape play, ravishment and consensual nonconsent (CNC).

24% of women fantasize about having this kind of sex often! In a previous blog, Aella showed that role playing forced sex is one of the sexual behaviors where there is the greatest disparity between how much women like it (a lot, but with high variance) and how much men do it (not enough).

This is surprising to many people because we learn that sex is supposed to always be nice, loving, and safe. Any ambivalence on the woman’s part means that sex is unwanted and should stop immediately. Good sex requires enthusiastic affirmation at every step. “YES! NOTHING WOULD MAKE ME HAPPIER THAN FOR YOU TO SQUEEZE MY LEFT BOOB”.

We do this because there’s high consequences for failure. If you’re miscalibrated, displaying force in sex can end up with serious trauma for women, and so society has been very careful to warn against this. The intent is great; on this blog, we support not psychologically scarring your sex partner. Consent can be complicated, but rape much less so. Part of the reason antagonistic seduction is underdiscussed is due to its proximity to truly bad things, and fear of conflating them and misleading people into thinking they can simply violate consent as a seduction method.

But it is true that human sexuality is not as simple as an enthusiastic request for boob squeezing.

If it were, there wouldn’t be so much misunderstanding between men and women. There would only be one attitude that ever led to great sex- an enthusiastically affirmative attitude. Sex is often antagonistic- a meeting of opposing forces rather than cooperative forces. Like capitalism, the meeting of selfish forces can result in something (s)exalted.

And, if you want to see an example of how complicated the line between consent and nonconsent can be, I can recommend this infamous scene (nsfw!) from Straw Dogs where Amy is initially forced, but ultimately yields to have sex with her ex-boyfriend Charlie.

Having a good model of how and why women evolved to appreciate (precisely applied) force in sex can help you navigate the minefield. For a significant number of women, if you aren’t capable of displaying some masculine aggression, they won’t view you as a sexual object at all. So how do you do this without genuinely causing damage?

One important thing to understand here is that for women, sexual ambivalence is normal. Almost all female animals are coy when it comes to sex and women are no exception, even if they are slutty. I’m going to flip through a few examples of how evolution has designed this in other species.

Another important thing to understand is that women’s mate evaluation for casual sex is correlated with change in her preference for demonstrations of force.

So let’s get to it: