What Exactly Are We Calling Normal?
What If Your Deepest Fantasy Isn’t Going Away?
“The first time I can remember being drawn to powerful women, I was about 6, and Sally (also 6) walked up to me in the school playground, dug a finger into my chest and said definitively, ‘You are now my boyfriend, and you will do what I tell you.’ I was spellbound and happily followed her wherever she wanted to go.”
I love to get nosy with clients and potential clients, going all sluthy to dig into why they are drawn to being under my control.
Thus far, I have noticed that almost all of them report feeling drawn to this from an early age. Often unable to pinpoint a starting incident as clearly as the example above, however, it is rarely new or fleeting.
In my experience, I have noticed a difference between men and women.
Men more often report feeling drawn to surrender and being under the control of a woman at very young ages, typically somewhere between 3 and 7 years old. Women are more likely to describe the spark arriving around puberty or in their early twenties. They often recall masturbation fantasies they secretly wondered meant they needed therapy.
I have also noticed differences in how desire gets described.
Women tend to speak in broader strokes. They may describe a general feeling, dynamic, or scenario that turns them on. A woman might say the idea of being pinned down or choked fuels her spank bank.
Men, on the other hand, are often startlingly specific. They are more likely to tell me what everyone in the room is wearing and what colour of wooden spoon or hairbrush is being used.
The specificity fascinates me.
It could point to many things. Perhaps an attempt to untangle an early emotional imprint, a meaningful memory, an experience that landed deeply, or simply the way desire wired itself to a particular image or feeling.
Some clients begin with the intention of coming for a few sessions to “get it out of their system” and then go back to being “normal.” For some, this is enough. For others, it deepens their desires and creates a new longing to explore, uncovering new levels of surrender.
Which begs the question:
What exactly are we calling normal?
Historically, what we considered “normal” has shifted dramatically.
Homosexuality was pathologized and criminalized
Left-handedness was punished or corrected
Women with strong sexual agency were stigmatized, institutionalized, or labelled hysterical
Perhaps normal is simply what enough people are willing to admit publicly.
Which raises another question: if these desires show up early and quietly persist for decades, are we looking at something chosen, conditioned, or wired in?
I have just finished reading Sex at Dawn by Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethá, which I highly recommend and suspect will inspire many future articles.
In the book, they reference a scientific study involving baby sheep and baby goats. Researchers switched the babies, placing the wee ewes with goat mothers and the baby kids with sheep mothers.
Once the babies matured, they were returned to their own species and monitored over the following years.
What surprised me was that the males of each group showed more mating interest in the foster species, while the females adapted over time and showed more interest in their own species. I would have expected more of a “love the one you’re with” fluidity in both sexes.
A similar study involving meadow voles and prairie voles reportedly found something similar. The males maintained stronger imprinting toward the foster species.
Can we extrapolate that the same applies to humans?
Perhaps it gives us clues. But humans are infinitely messier when it comes to desire.
There is the desire of the flesh, yes, but we also override ourselves in order to fit social expectations.
We do not have to go very far back in history to find people attracted to the same sex while living in a world that deemed those desires immoral or illegal. Many entered heterosexual marriages while still privately longing for, and often secretly seeking, same-sex relationships. Sometimes at tremendous personal risk.
I am not suggesting these experiences are identical. They are not.
But the emotional pattern feels familiar: hiding something core in order to fit social expectations.
So it begs the question:
Are our desires fixed, fluid, or something in between?
And is the answer different for men and women?
From what I see in my practice, many people are in deeply loving vanilla relationships while a profound longing for kink quietly sits in the closet.
Most often, I see this conflict in men, which I suspect has much to do with social expectations and rigid gender norms. It is culturally acceptable for women to want to surrender. For men, surrender is still often viewed as weakness, failure, or something unnatural.
So some men stay in the vanilla marriage much the way many gay men once kept wives. They may love their partner deeply, while privately feeling sexually unfulfilled.
Again, I am not suggesting these experiences are the same. But I do think the emotional tension deserves compassion rather than judgment.
I do not know whether desire is fixed, fluid, or somewhere in between.
I suspect the answer is messier than either side wants it to be.
But I do know this:
The people who sit across from me rarely speak about these longings as something new.
More often, they describe them as something remembered.
Something quietly waiting beneath the surface.
Something asking to be acknowledged.
Perhaps the more useful question is not:
Why do I want this?
Perhaps the better question is:
What happens if I stop pretending I don’t?
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Might I suggest a book or two???
https://www.amazon.ca/stores/author/B00PKKYCEK
