What She Wants

In my world, when it comes to relations between the sexes, the female is the aggressor. Men send signals of availability, and women make the choice of whether they are interested in them or not. Sometimes, women make unwelcome advances, and it is impossible for men, being so much weaker physically, to resist them. Furthermore, the legal and economic framework in my world doesn't make it easy for men to refuse. Men have few legal rights even in relatively progressive cultures here. To press a case, they require a female representative, usually a family member or a wife, in court to represent them, and cases of rape and harassment are civil, not criminal, matters. Furthermore, the court testimony of a male requires the backing of a female.

In other respects, the economic situation of most unmarried men is also quite unstable, and the prospect of having a regular female lover who may provide some financial support, even if she already has husbands, can be quite hard to turn down. For men in my world, choices are sometimes very easy to make, but very hard to live with.

Incidentally, the usage of language in my world is not exactly the same as in yours. Words that exist in your English may have a completely different significance in mine. One such word, in this context, is mistress. In my world, it can be used to describe the usually already-married woman in an extra-marital relationship with a single male, usually much younger than she is. Many words exist in my world to signify the male in such a relationship, many of them diminutive and condescending, such as boy, toyboy, hobby horse and side dish.

In the future, whenever appropriate, I will write more about how languages differ between my world and yours.

Update: Made some small modifications to the text, but not the image. Feb 8, 2009