2. 2.I refuse to engage in sex with a woman, anymore in my life, until it has become clear, really clear, on some distinct level, that this woman is willing to invest emotionally in a relationship with me, has the emotional capacity to do so, and has compatible interests and goals. My reasons are:
   

1. 1. a.That sex before a clear emotional investment is emotionally and sexually quite unsafe for me, and is a repetition of far too many of the relationships I had as a younger man.
      
      

   2. b.I refuse to share my sexual and emotional energy with someone who could care less whether I live or die, who views me as just the latest and most immediately available ‘financial object’ to satisfy her need for feeling ‘cared for’ and as a ‘spare penis’ for her short-term sexual pleasure.
      
      

   3. c.It is clear to me, as a lesson both from age and experience, that the only way to determine whether a woman is willing to eventually invest in emotional intimacy is to have a lengthy friendship, wherein a wide range of sexual and intimate issues are openly, sincerely, respectfully, and honestly discussed. My own terminology for this is  ‘establishing sexual honesty’ -- ensuring that what a woman says about her values before sex is the same thing she will say about them after the intimate connection of sex. Failure to engage in this clear and honest discussion and, instead, engaging in sex quickly, has always lead (in my experience) to an avoidance of and negation of the possibility of true, authentic intimacy.
      

2. 
   

3. 3.If a woman is operating on a obligation system, whereby she is providing sex for money, there is a real question, at every step of the process, if she is in the relationship because she truly desires sexual intimacy with this man or is simply responding to the cultural imperative that demands a sexual trade for a financial investment. As a result, if a female is operating on that obligation system, there can be no real intimacy, because the lines of clear communication are immediately blurred by the assumed sexual/cultural obligation.
   

4. 4.It is not she alone who is providing sex; so is he. She is not the only person who is ‘providing sex’, since he is an active participant in the sexual exchange. If she were to jump on him, while he lay in bed totally passive, make passionate love to his body and ‘screwed his lights out’, then she would be ‘providing’ unilateral sex. But if he participates at all, or if -- as is often the case, in my personal experience -- he does most of the ‘work’ or ‘performance’ or ‘love-making’ [as purely genital encounters, that have been given no time to reach real intimacy, are so often mislabeled in this culture] in the sexual exchange, then it would be more likely reasonable to say that he provided his body and the sex and she provided only her body. So what is he paying for? Or more to the point, why is he paying for and providing the sex? What is he getting in return that makes his unilateral payment a reasonable bargain (since, in this perspective, it is, after all, an economic arrangement)?
   

1. 1. a.In my personal experience, this one-way ‘performance’ in sex, in general (even when it occurs later in the relationship, after some degree of emotional intimacy has been established) is left as the man’s ‘responsibility’. It has happened so much to me in my attempts at sexual relations that it often has gotten to the point that when a female partner would say “let’s make love tonight”, I would finally get so profoundly frustrated by the expectation of unilateral energy that I would respond with “that would be great, but only if ‘let’s’ means both of us making love to each other”!!
      
      

   2. b.This unilateral expectation reminds me, conversely, of a very empowering quote I read in  The Girls Next Door, by Lindsy van Gelder and Pamela Robin Brandt, which is about lesbian sexual experience. The writers quote a self-identified ‘butch’ lesbian woman who in speaking about her sexual partners.
      
                 

      It was a whole seduction thing: powder in the sheets, music, courtship. Girls love it! And they don’t get it from guys, okay?
      

      
      

      About a third of Kathleen’s conquests were straight women. “You give he a present. You get a split of champagne for someone who’s never had champagne, and two glasses, and you’re standing there in your white shirt, grinning at her... You say, ‘This is for you, baby.’ And she cries. I’ve made love to women who started to cry, and I’ve said, ‘What’s wrong?‘ And they’d say, ‘No one’s ever touched me like this, no one’s loved me like this.’ That’s what they were after: the touch, the gentleness, the kindness. Somebody who was going to be involved with them, not somebody who was gonna do something to them. See, because even with all this butch stuff, I never believed that you make a woman come. That’s not your prerogative. That’s hers. When you go in with that attitude of: We’re gong to do this together, that’s different from someone who goes in to prove himself as a man on your body. Which is what I think had happened to a lot of these women.” (pp. 173-174).

      
      

      Yet, in spite of this experience by straight women of not being subject to involvement with a male partner, when they are given the experience of being allowed to return that ‘with’, they often falter. They’re passively waiting for sexual pleasure from their partners, rather than mutually engaging in sexual play with their male partners.

      
      

   3. c.Again, my intensely painful personal experience [though other men have told me they have had similar experiences] is that, when it comes to ‘love-making’, I make passionate love to women, slowly and all over their bodies, from a deep heart-space and yet, all too often, they have either ‘laid there’ passively -- and probably dissociatively [making it practically a necrophilic experience, like sex with a cadaver] -- or have at most been ‘responsive’ to my overtures, but have not made passionate love to me. They fully expect, and nearly demand, proactive lovemaking from me as a man, but rarely, if ever, engage in proactive lovemaking with or directed toward me. And that is profoundly painful and strikes deep at my sense that I am invisible to these women.
      
      

   4. d.A further way in which this “provision of their bodies” by women and “provision of sexual performance” by men is exhibited in a culturally expected manner is the way that women often say that, because they are the ‘feelings-oriented’ gender, they can’t engage in mutual love-making with a man until they ‘feel a deep sense of love’ toward their male partners. The problem with this argument, though, is that, in my experience, women expect a man “to prove his love” toward them by engaging in extensive sexual pleasuring even before he has had the chance to know, in his own heart, whether this woman is a sexual partner with whom he wants to invest his sexual and intimate energy. In other words, while she is culturally allowed to ‘wait’ until a later point to know whether or not to ‘invest her mutual sexual energy’ into love-making with her male partner, he is fully expected, from the outset of the relationship, to “invest his sexual energy” into this female and thereby ‘prove’ that she should return the intimate investment. That is not only extremely inequitable, it violates the ‘yearning’ that many modern women state they want from their male partners: that of a man who is in touch with his feelings. My point here is that if a man is in touch with his feelings (and therefore has a conscious respect for his own sexuality), then he is likely to feel oppressed by this unilateral expectation of proving his love via sexual play when his partner is not culturally required to exhibit a similar involvement at such an early stage of the relationship. In a more healthy interaction, that is equitable and mutual, both parties would slowly and carefully engage in graduated love-making with their partners, without either person being expected to ‘prove’ their ‘love’ via a unilateral investment that is not reciprocated, in the same graduated manner, by their partners.
      

2. 
   

In summation of this section on the economics of sex, I think that in a positive, emotionally healthy relationship women have vastly more than their bodies to ‘provide’. There is their intelligence, humor, pleasantness, wackiness, ‘spunk’, personal abilities, joy, anger (when appropriate), sadness etc. etc., all the myriad of human emotions and abilities, all the qualities that one hopes the man will provide also. So, why should he pay for the encounter unilaterally or even in the main, when both parties are getting the same benefit from the relationship? And if the encounter is not mutually beneficial, why do these people continue to date? If the woman is not getting from the man as much as she is giving, why is she hanging around, except for the financial support [which again gets back to objectification] or due to low self-esteem, which is a subject for a different essay? Continuing such an arrangement is tantamount, in my perspective, to masochism, which is not something I wish to engage in, at least not when I am consciously aware of it. (And having a ‘conscious relationship’ is, to me, the only kind worth having!)

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Mariposa Men’s Wellness Institute was founded in 2001

to help men become emotionally healthy.