Desired/Desirer.

I got an email the other day offering me "tribute" for my "time" as a dominatrix. A little annoyed and a little amused, I shared this with a male friend. "It must be interesting being a woman," he said.

In other words, to be the desired instead of the desirer. Because he actually is a top, and although he's young and good-looking and lots of fun, ain't no one paying him. There aren't a lot of men who get paid for sexual acts with women, and guys don't spend a lot of time fending off unsolicited offers to get paid for fucking women. (If they did, they'd swiftly realize that "I'm not someone you'd actually like, and I'm not interested in making this good for you, so would it help if I asked you to break the law for me?" is not all that that awesome a proposition.)

I try to not be too sexist in my relationships with boys, but I have to admit, I sometimes fall into the "desired" mode, just because it's available to me and it's so easy. I let myself be picked up more often than I attempt to pick up, I receive more date-requesting emails and phone calls than I send, and although I sometimes go halves on dates and sometimes let the guy pay if he insists, I never insist on paying for him. I should, because in the long run it would help combat the highly damaging "woman has something man wants" sexual paradigm, but I never feel that I have to, and hey, food's not cheap. Taking the pursuer role would even the Great Balance Of Gender Roles, but it just wouldn't make my life any easier.

It's unfortunate, though, because guys do have something I want, something I would pursue and possibly even pay for if I had to. Society just doesn't force me to prove that. I accept the attention of pursuer-mode guys because free food and free sex is too good a deal to pass up, not because the food compensates me for the sex--but it looks the same from the outside.