Why More & More Feminists Seem to Long for a Strong Man

Recently, a friend of mine was talking about how much she needs to have strong men in her life. Masculine. Powerful. Financially successful. She likes to date men like that and likes to be surrounded by them, in general. Not exclusively, of course. She just wants them to be a regular presence in her life.

Why?

“I need that,” she told me. “As a woman, I need that. Sometimes, I need to feel protected. I want to be able to just let go. I want to be able to let him hold me, keep the world at bay for just a few minutes. I need them to share their knowledge with me. I want to ask them questions and get their advice so I can sharpen my money skills and the other things that men are encouraged to do in this culture that women are not. I need them to empower me to do that.”

I knew it was probably not easy for her to say this. She’s an independent woman, like me, and doesn’t want to feel like she has to rely on a man for love, money, or the recognition of her own worth. In fact, women like us know you can’t rely on men (or anyone else) for that, which is why we became so independent in the first place.

To get to the place where women like us are at requires the process of forging. It usually involves circumstances in which we were so repeatedly burned that the heat of our pain literally changed our shape. And the only option from there was to let the world hammer us into whatever it wanted us to be, or to pick up the hammer and get to work on reshaping ourselves.

It’s terrifying and painful in ways I can’t describe. It requires cutting away whole pieces of yourself, your life, your dreams. But when we come out of it, we discover we are stronger than we ever could have imagined. We are the embodiment of everything we could have wanted for ourselves, as women.

And after all that, the last thing we want is to let the warmth in. We know that heat is dangerous. We know how much it costs to get to where we’ve gotten. Even just warming and softening enough to admit that we need or want strong men in our lives, even in platonic ways, can be terrifying. It can feel like a failure of the forging process. It can feel like we’ve let down our inner Amazon.

And yet…there’s a truth in it. We sometimes need strong men. And we always need the Masculine.

There’s no getting around it.

I’ve been struggling with my own feelings about men and my need for the masculine for a long time now. When people talk about it, it’s often in such a binary, hyper-traditional way that it doesn’t always sit right with me.

What’s a “strong man,” for instance? The only men that I don’t see as strong are the ones who engage in toxic displays of false masculinity (intimidation, for instance, or the inability to apologize because it’s “weak”). I don’t need a man to be “masculine” in order to think he’s strong. Jonathan van Ness comes to mind — I think he’s one of the strongest men I’ve ever seen and he might be more feminine than I am.

And what does it mean to be “feminine enough” to “receive” the masculine energy that we women need? I don’t want to give up being an independent woman, folks. No fucking way. I worked my ass off to get here and some part of me seriously objects to the idea of letting a man take the lead or pay for my dinner or open a car door for me. I don’t ever want to make myself vulnerable and weak ever, ever again. The price of that is too high.

Yet I cannot deny that, just like my friend, I long for the masculine, too. When my friend, Frank, takes charge of things and (in pre-pandemic days) says, “I’m coming over in half an hour to take you out to dinner. No arguments,” it feels so good to let go into that. When I’m struggling and feeling scared, I can reach out to my friend, Peter, and his protective, loving energy always makes me feel better. And honestly, as I get to know my new male friends, some of whom are far more successful than I am, it feels really good to make an effort (even if a silent one) to acknowledge the masculine energy they bring into my life. It feels good to let them help me.

Sometimes, I can’t even understand why they would want to. I feel like such a little fish in the world, too small and insignificant for most of the men that I’d consider “successful” to notice or care about. Don’t they want to build friendships and partnerships with women who are as successful as they are? Who know how to walk out into the world and conquer everything they see?

“You’re soft,” my always-wants-a-strong-man friend said. “You are the embodiment of loving, feminine energy. It oozes out of you. They need that. They want that. They don’t want more of themselves, conquering the world. They want something soft and gentle to relax into.”

I recently read a beautiful and brave article byabout how an illness and a lot of soul searching helped her discover how much she needed a strong man in her life. Honestly, I wasn’t sure how I’d feel about it when I clicked on it — I’m wrestling with this subject so deeply right now.

The article turned out to be lovely and thoughtful and something I could relate to.

And yes, it brought up a lot of turmoil for me, mostly by reminding me how I was taught to behave in the world and, particularly, in relationships. Learning how to cultivate feminine energy in this world is absolutely valid and important — but the ways that that often manifests and how it manifested in my own life can be and were very harmful.

And then there’s, of course, the whole issue about how easy it is to fall into gender stereotypes and labels that confine people’s sexuality. Exploring these ideas of Feminine needing Masculine and vice versa, often devolves into heterosexual, gender binary explorations that I don’t think are helpful. As Ana pointed out, the Masculine can exist in any gender (as can the Feminine) and it’s even important for us to find our own inner masculine, as women.

These are all things that I’m grappling with, things that I’m constantly examining, having the sense that there really is something to this, so long as it doesn’t get lost in these false divisions and cultural stereotypes.

One thing I’m not contending with anymore is the idea that maybe it isn’t “feminist” to want a strong man. Why can’t that be feminist? Maybe it’s even okay for us to sometimes collapse in our sheer exhaustion over living in a world like this, to be the embodiment of the damsel in distress and let our knight in shining armor take us in his arms and renew us with a kiss. That seems perfectly feminist to me…so long as the man has the same option, so long as the woman is willing to be the knight from time to time, and so long as she has her own bank account or her name on the title of the castle.

As my friend and I have been talking about this more and more often, and as I continue to see feminists bravely sharing their desire to have a strong man in their lives, I’m coming to realize something. This is about something much bigger than men and women.

What does our culture prize? Work, domination, accomplishment, money, success, drive, force, volume, noise, strength.

What does it disdain? Rest, contemplation, compassion, openness, vulnerability, ease, mystery, nuance, gentleness, silence.

When I look back on my life, I feel overwhelmed by how hard I have had to shape myself to the masculine world in order to just toe the line. The word “succeed” doesn’t even come to mind, thanks to the gender pay gap and the amount of sexism I have contended within the workplace.

Why do we want a strong man? Maybe because we want to be able to express our feminine energy, which is about the most rebellious thing we could do in this society. Maybe it is because we are done playing by the rules of man. Maybe because we know that we can create more space for the respect of feminine energy in this particular realm — the relationship realm, our realm.

Sometimes, I wonder if this is part of the reason why there is such a fetishism of marriage and motherhood. There are lots of reasons behind that, I suspect, but what if one of them is that women feel free enough in those areas to be feminine, to honor the feminine, to escape the constant tyranny of our masculine-dominated culture? No matter how much the patriarchy wants to suppress the feminine, it cannot defeat the archetypes of Wife and Mother — especially the latter.

Knowing this, I think it’s entirely possible that the desire to want a strong male partner is, indeed, a feminist act. Not the only feminist act, or the only valid relationship preference, of course, but one that might be far more empowering than it first appears.

©2021