“Patriarchy teaches boys that masculinity means control, emotional invulnerability, sexual access, public authority and distance from everything coded female. It teaches them that anger is strength, grief is weakness, care is emasculating and women’s attention is a resource owed to them if they perform masculinity correctly….

 

….This is the crisis. Not ‘men are monsters.’ Not ‘boys are born bad.’ Not ‘women good, men bad, please clap.’ The crisis is that boys are being handed a broken emotional toolkit and then told the hammer is the only instrument a real man should need….

 

….I hate the system that teaches boys to amputate parts of themselves and then calls the wound masculinity…

 

…Need is human, while entitlement is political. A man needing love, care, intimacy, friendship, sex, belonging, respect, purpose and tenderness is not a problem. Those are human needs, Everyone has them. Everyone is shaped by whether they receive them….

 

…..Patriarchy is killing us. It is killing women through violence, control, medical neglect, forced pregnancy, economic inequality….It is killing men too, through isolation, emotional repression, grievance, politics, violence, addiction, despair (war – my addition) and the lie that being loved is less important than being obeyed. Feminism did not create this crisis. Feminism is just one of the few traditions honest enough to name it….

 

….Men and boys are not in crisis because women got too mean, too educated, too independent, too feminist… They are in crisis because patriarchy promised them a throne and gave them a cage. And some of them are so attached to the cage they cannot even see the bars.”

 

 Professor Meredith Bitchy History on Substack

 

I read Professor Meredith’s brilliantly written and sometimes laugh-out-loud funny article while drinking my morning coffee in the garden as the day warmed up. It had been another viciously hot week and being able to sit and enjoy a coffee was a rare treat. The birds were singing and the garden humming with life – so much abundance, so much joy, so much life. 

 

I watched the cats stretch out in the early rays, enjoying the soft breeze before the heat of the day became something to hide from, and I wondered how did we all get so lost? How did we all get so disconnected from how beautiful and magical and abundant life is?

 

The answer is always the same. 

 

A system of hierarchy and control that was created to separate us from the world around us and from each other. Separated and disconnected from the magical abundance of life and our innate creativity, we flap around like fish out of water, desperate to breathe but in completely the wrong environment to do so. 

 

Of course a fish out of water won’t survive long. The GENIUS of patriarchy is to make it survivable but only that – survivable.

 

Let me be clear. Patriarchy is not men. Men are not patriarchy. 

 

Patriarchy is a system of extraction and exploitation. It uses hierarchy as an instrument of control. Of course, if you are slightly up the hierarchical ladder you feel “good” when you look down on those beneath you, but it’s still only survival, just in a slightly nicer suit.

 

To thrive humans need to feel connected. We need intimacy, both platonic and sexual. We need belonging – with an intimate partner (or partners), within a family and within a community of deeply trusted friends. In order to develop and nourish these intimacies we need the emotional skills to ask for what we need/desire and to hear (without defence) what others need/desire from us.

 

We need to reach adulthood skilled in kindness, compassion, love, patience, honesty, courage, open-heartedness, tenderness. We need to be able to feel and safely express the full range of our emotions.

 

But patriarchy does not want us to thrive. A thriving population would learn its collective power and so would strive together, in unison, for independence, self-governance and sovereignty. 

 

You can’t exploit a thriving and empowered population. 

 

You can’t control people who know their own power and see and celebrate the power in the people around them. 

 

You can’t control people who collaborate with one another instead of competing as they have been programmed to do. 

 

But you can control people if you train them from a very young age into roles that will define them, and their relationships with other people, for life. The Jesuits famously proclaimed, “Give me the boy until the age of 7 and I will give you the man.” I watched as my children were conditioned, despite my best efforts, by people and wider society around me.

 

One day particularly stands out in my memory. I had walked the youngest across the fields to meet his school bus at the other end of the village as we did most mornings. We had had a particularly lovely walk, he has always had an incredible, enquiring mind and interesting perspective on the world and I have always deeply valued our chats. 

 

On that morning we were feeling particularly connected and him leaving me to go to school, which would bore his beautiful, inquisitive mind to death, felt like a cruel wrench – for both of us. 

 

The mini-bus drew up as we were swapping red wellies for black school shoes and we both started feeling really emotional – we weren’t ready for the impending separation. Neither of us wanted to be separated (separating children from their families for compulsory education is an essential tool of patriarchy), I was holding back tears and “being brave.” 

 

My little boy was less tightly programmed than me – he was still young, they’d had him for far fewer years than they had had me – and he started crying in great big sobs. It really tugged at my heart, but that was not what was making me want to cry. I wanted to cry because I didn’t want to be parted from my joyous, beautiful boy any more than he wanted to be parted from me.

 

As we stepped onto the bus so that I could settle him into his seat, the old, kindly Santa-look-a-like bus driver said, “Pull it together lad – look you’re making your mother cry – man up!”

 

I was furious. I turned on the sweet old man who was, after all, only repeating the harm done to him, and hissed, “How dare you! Crying is a perfectly acceptable and honest expression of emotion and a sign of a healthy person. DO NOT presume to tell my son how he should behave.”

 

Of course my words were wasted. The damage was done. Patriarchy had won, again. My boy didn’t come home a completely changed being, but it was another brick in the wall. 

 

The kindly Santa-look-a-like bus driver seemingly played a very peripheral role in my son’s life – he only drove the mini bus to and from a school. Yet he was one of the men who raised my son, the men in society beyond my front door, and therefore beyond my control, who taught my boys what it is to be a man. 

 

I am a woman. I cannot raise boys to be men. I am a model for girls, not boys. On that morning the bus driver amputated a part of my young son’s emotional body. My boy carries that wound into adulthood, it was one of the lessons that helped him to define and understand what it is “to be a man.” 

 

It’s such a cliché but in 2016/17 my beautiful boy learned that TO BE A MAN you must:

 

1. Not cry
2. Not upset your mother

 

This is a huge wound that needs healing. 

 

Children are NEVER responsible for their parent’s emotional states – that is the job of adults, not children. Yet my young boy had just been told by an older (thus to be respected) MAN (i.e. role model on masculinity for my boy) that he was indeed responsible for my emotional states. 

 

And worse, he learnt this in the year his parents – the people who should keep him safe – were themselves going through a divorce thanks to their own unresolved childhood trauma.

 

I hope that my son, now a young man, will be challenged in relationship to heal this wound. Or maybe he will find a good therapist, a men’s healing group or a shaman skilled in using plant medicine? Sadly the wound is below the level of consciousness and he lives in a society in which carrying this wound is the entry criteria to “masculinity.”

 

So, when after a particularly beautiful and intimate session with a client, lying, limbs entangled on the bed, he mused that feminism had gone too far and made intimacy too difficult for men and women I was honestly lost for words (a rare event for me!)

 

I clearly live in a completely different algorithmic world to him. I am not fed manosphere diatribes against feminism, I am fed Bitchy History diatribes against patriarchy! I am not reading that the feminist fight for bodily self autonomy and the right to choice in our lives is somehow to blame for the crisis in “masculinity.”

 

I think he thought that because I am a sexually active woman who loves cock and offers a professional sex service I am somehow not a feminist? I took a deep breath, reminded myself to be kind and said something like, “How does women having choice harm men?”

 

Flustered, (he obviously realised a bit too late that he had ejaculated all over a real life feminist) he replied, “No….but it’s gone a bit too far hasn’t it?”

 

“In what way?” I asked.

 

When he didn’t reply I offered, “It seems to me that you think feminism is some kind of war against men? It really isn’t. It’s a war against a system of oppression and control that harms men just as much as it harms women. If only men could see how trapped and exploited they are and then either join women in fighting patriarchy as feminists or create a parallel movement to fight with us for freedom for us all?”

 

I had said too much. The cognitive dissonance was writ large on his face and he muttered about not being as well read as me and fled to the shower. 

 

When you’re not enduring a relationship with a man who’s stuck in the algorithmic manosphere it is easy to have compassion for them. They are clearly being manipulated into hating and fearing THEIR PATH TO FREEDOM. 

 

Yes women were the first (of the two genders) to see that patriarchy is shit, we’ve read, written, talked, marched and even self-pleasured our way towards freedom and we love nothing more than when men (with the beautiful cocks we so enjoy sucking and fucking) join us in that fight.

 

But obviously patriarchy is going to fight back. Obviously the machine will pay to boost a few toxic individuals who eagerly tell men, “It’s all women’s fault” to keep men from the warrior women who could work with them towards freedom, power, personal sovereignty and meaningful connected community.

 

The cage that patriarchy works so hard to keep men in is incredibly brutal. From birth boys are conditioned to disconnect from, suppress, judge and shame essentially human traits. Let’s list just a few:

 

Sensitivity – being alert and receptive to the mood in the room, your own and other’s emotions, states of wellbeing and energies. Shut down because a “sensitive man” is a sissy. (Patriarchy doesn’t only seek to shut down sensitivity in men – I was raised in a family that used the label “over-sensitive” not as a compliment, but as an affliction to grow out of.)

 

Collaboration and cooperation – sacrificed on the altar of competition as boys are taught that being Number 1 – A Winner – is more desirable than working collectively within community to reach an outcome that benefits everyone.

 

Kindness – left to women.

 

Compassion – left to women.

 

Empathy – left to women.

 

Tenderness – what even is that? Definitely left to women.

 

Crying – don’t ever do this!! And never, ever allow yourself to feel anything that might make you cry. Crying effectively equals woman. Only women and babies cry. A man who cries is effectively cutting off his own balls. 

 

Which brings me onto: 

 

Circumcision – the single most effective and brutal act inflicted by patriarchy on infant boys. You cannot argue that it’s not both cruel and unnecessary, yet half the planet is still circumcising their infant boys who live with the consequences of trauma and reduced sensitivity for life. 

 

You still think patriarchy is something you want to defend by attacking feminists?!

 

In my session today I was very preoccupied with the concept of tenderness. What would tenderness even look like in a man? What is tenderness? How is a man tender? 

 

I was musing over these questions as I lit my candles and incense, connected my playlist to the speaker, showered, dressed, applied lipstick and mascara. Could I think of a moment when I had witnessed or experienced tenderness in a man?

 

My client arrived – a Musubi/Kama session – I invited him to undress and lie down and guided him through a short body meditation. He relaxed quickly and fell into a deep trance, “excellent” I thought. I asked him to roll over onto his front which he did almost without stirring, again – “excellent” I thought. 

 

His body reacted quickly to the massage and despite the heat in the room I gave him a really sexy, deeply sensual and highly erotic massage. He hadn’t been sure whether he wanted a prostate massage, I had suggested that we follow his body’s desires (or lack of) and go where the energy flowed. His body screamed for a prostate massage – all the classic signs – bum pushing up towards my hands as they glided over it, relaxed buttocks, soft anal rose. 

 

Gingerly and very slowly, I entered him. I applied gentle pressure to his prostate whilst I stroked his shaft, frenulum and balls with my free hand. He was moaning with pleasure, his cock hard, he was pushing back against my finger, but I knew this was the first time for him and I know the released energies are powerful. He had a beautiful cock which I wanted to feel deep down my throat and deep inside in my cunt, I didn’t want to make his energy too powerful for him to ride.

 

So I withdrew my finger and sat astride him, grinding my vulva into his buttocks for a few moments, moving the energy I had just activated between and around our two bodies, while I removed the glove I had worn to penetrate him. Then I leant forward and whispered in his ear, “Roll over.” I raised myself up allowing him to roll over underneath me so that as his face came around he was met with an eyeful of oily breast. 

 

He immediately took hold of them and buried his face deep into their generous flesh, his fingers finding my nipples which you will know, if you have ever spent any time with me, always makes me come. He hadn’t met me before, he felt my juices beginning to flow over his cock and between his legs, “That feels amazing” he sighed. 

 

“Pinch harder” I replied, kissing him full on the mouth knowing that what was about to come would blow his mind as it always does. He pinched and then, as invited, bit down on my nipples. The heavens opened, the longed for rain gushed over him and he was soaked. 

 

 It was too much for him. 

 

“I’m going to come,” he gasped. I could see him desperately fighting the urge to come, tensing his body, tightening his face – tension and tightness accelerate the process and before I could coach him into long gentle exhales to relax and allow, he had come – copious amounts of beautiful sperm all over his sacrum and hip, my thigh and the bed. There is something endlessly magical and miraculous about sperm isn’t there?

 

His exhilaration and intense pleasure was immediately fighting disappointment and shame. 

 

Disappointment that his session – for him – had come to an end and shame that he had failed to control his pleasure and come “too soon.” I could see his inner turmoil and frustration and I did what any self respecting tantric whore would do, I invited him to relax and receive pleasure in a softer, gentler, calmer state.

 

I have brought countless men to orgasm post ejaculation. Many are only too pleased to lie and fully relax, even sleep lightly, as I work my magic with my hands. Post ejaculation men can fall into a deep, deep place of relaxation and in this place it is so much easier to move energy around the body. Very often, whilst almost asleep, they will then feel the unfamiliar experience of orgasmic energy in their chest, arms, hands, legs, feet.

 

Their cock hardens but hasn’t got the same urgency to come because they are so deeply relaxed. It’s beautiful to watch and very empowering. Yes, I was sad not to ride my client’s cock today, but I was equally excited about pleasing him as he dozed off, building his energy until we were both caught up in the dance again.

 

We had plenty of time left on the clock. I wiped away the sperm, picked up my little bottle of coconut oil and settled myself between his legs to give exquisite pleasure.

 

“Thank you, that was amazing. Can I have a shower?” said the voice at the other end of the bed.

 

“Would you not accept my invitation to receive pleasure in a softer, gentler, quieter state?”

 

He lay quietly for a bit, but his legs stayed upright, feet planted on the bed either side of me, knees restricting the movement of my arms, creating a protective barrier around his cock. This was not a body open to receiving or relaxing back into pleasure.

 

I persevered. I stroked, twisted, licked and even sucked his beautiful soft cock. At moments it throbbed its appreciation and I smiled back, “I know it’s lovely to experience tenderness.”

 

TENDERNESS. 

 

That word again. In that moment I was in the wound. And I understood what tenderness is. 

 

Tenderness is softness. 

 

Tenderness is being soft, feeling soft, sharing soft.

 

Pleasure can be so soft – think of a feather stroking across skin. But men are conditioned to expect and require their cocks to be hard. Only a hard cock earns the right to be grasped, stroked, teased, licked, sucked, fucked. 

 

My client today was clearly deeply uncomfortable receiving pleasure in softness. His cock wasn’t. It was throbbing appreciatively in my hands and mouth. But his mind – the seat of patriarchal conditioning – was roaring NO!!! YOU HAVE NOT EARNED THIS!!

 

When he asked again if he could go and have a shower of course I didn’t deny his request. I was sad that he was unable to receive my loving attention post ejaculation, but I wasn’t going to force myself on him. 

 

I smiled, held his cock in one hand, placed the other on his heart chakra, took a few deep heart connected breaths, sent my love through my hands to his heart and his cock and then withdrew my touch and escorted him to the bathroom.

 

And I’m left with a new question to muse over this afternoon – how can a man show tenderness towards others, his partner, children, friends, society, the planet when he can’t allow himself to feel tenderness within himself? 

 

If he’s uncomfortable with being soft, how can he give the people in his life and beyond, the softness that they yearn for, crave and need? 

 

Can you feel the wound?

 

Can you see how patriarchy harms men and the people that they love?

 

Are you beginning to see the bars of the cage?

 

Are you ready to join us in resistance to reclaim your personal sovereignty, or will you carry on blaming women?

 

26.06.2026

 

Photo by Nour Wageh on Unsplash