Thinking about male privilege and how that is mostly what people talk about when they discuss differences between men and women. It isn’t the uterus that makes women less likely to state what they want openly, for instance. If a woman wants a gift, she has to hint. A man can simply go buy whatever he wants. He doesn’t bother “hinting” at it. If a man wants to go out to a restaurant for dinner, he drives there. A woman who wants to go out to a restaurant, vaguely talks about how much she likes the food there and hopes a man will take her.

Male privilege in my opinion also extends to little boys who are “allowed” to talk about things like farting and genitals. Girls, never. Bodily functions that are male might be considered rude to talk about, but people simply roll their eyes/laugh and say “boys will be boys.” If women talk about their bodily functions, however, men will end the conversation immediately. They don’t want to hear “female problems.” So when women get together, they talk about childbirth, menstruation, and things they can’t talk about when men are around.

Men get so frustrated that women don’t just “say straight out” what they want, but this is why. It isn’t because we aren’t capable of speaking directly. Or that we somehow “like” making things more difficult for men to understand, because we want to be some kind of “mystery.” Ha! It’s that we have been conditioned socially not to. And that we have seen the consequences for women who say directly what they want.

This problem has created a ton of issues in romance literature about what women can say directly, and how men in romances always seem to know what a woman wants intuitively, as if a man who loves you can read your mind. Ladies, men who love you cannot read your minds. Men, if you love a woman, it does not mean that you will automatically know what she wants. You must ask. You must ask many times before she will learn to believe that you want to hear the answer.