Is "Male Headship" Actually A Kink?

Trust versus "consent" in long-term relationships

***Content warning: explicit***

Porcelain crabs are called crabs. They look like crabs. But in fact they’re more closely related to lobsters.

Before you think I’m about to go full JBP on you, this is an example of what biologists call “convergent evolution": a phenomenon where genetically distinct species end up with a strong resemblance, after evolving in response to similar environmental pressures.

And something I’ve been puzzling over for while now is the convergent evolution of relationship subcultures in very different contexts: “lifestyle BDSM” and “surrendered wives”. These subcultures are typically associated with very different demographics: lifestyle BDSM connotes (usually secular) Left- or libertarian-leaning cultural preferences, while “surrendered wife” relationships map to more religious conservative inclinations. And yet they share a commitment, by mutual assent, to an explicit embrace of hierarchy in an intimate relationship.

Like porcelain crabs and true crabs, on closer inspection the genetic differences become clearer. Lifestyle BDSM is rationalised by a lot of stuff about natural preferences, communication, negotiation, and consent, while surrendered-wifedom (especially when associated with “male headship”) generally comes with a sheaf of Bible quotes and often an overt critique of modern feminism. In lifestyle BDSM the submissive one is commonly but not always the woman; for “surrendered wives” the submissive one is always the woman.

But the convergent evolution is also strong. In both cases, the parties agree that one person (typically the man) is going to be in charge, all the time, because both parties prefer it that way. Both subcultures are the subject of extensive online advocacy, by practitioners. Both emerged concurrently (if Google Ngram is to be trusted) in the 1990s. And both are treated with (at best) suspicion by outsiders, for whom the setup is often just dismissed as domestic abuse with extra steps.

So what are the common environmental factors triggering this convergent evolution? I suspect the larger picture here includes the now nigh-compulsory norm of egalitarianism-across-every-imaginable-metric that began to take hold in the 1960s, with the slow emergence of “information society” work that can be done by either sex, and with it the feminist-inflected aspiration to treating all as interchangeable, sexless “human” individuals.

From the ‘60s onwards, this transformation - which I think of as our entry into the cyborg era - has enabled us to treat every sexed asymmetry as purely incidental, or imposed out of sheer bigotry - and, backed ever more vigorously by public institutions, to try and eradicate such asymmetries wherever they are detected. Since then, both sexes have sought to square the circle between this increasingly compulsory egalitarianism, and the asymmetries that invariably emerge in long-term heterosexual relationships. For as I’ve argued at length in Feminism Against Progress, the cyborg era only apparently eliminates embodied asymmetries. This is most visible in the domain of sex, where birth control promised to flatten our differences - only for distinct male and female mate choice preferences to re-emerge as a key cultural battleground.

All of us are vulnerable, when naked in bed with someone. And it’s unlikely that anyone will be able to second-guess a stranger’s sexual preferences, boundaries, and history without ever putting a foot wrong, especially in a casual encounter where neither party cares a great deal either way about the other person’s wellbeing. And yet, since the sexual revolution, we’ve agreed to treat sex as a consequence-free leisure activity.

Then, in an effort to guard against the inevitable misunderstandings, we developed an elaborate rubric of “consent”, in which every sexual act must be preceded by an explicit, enthusiastic “yes”. This makes sense, if your basic paradigm is hookup culture, which is to say anything-goes sexual libertinism plus zero interpersonal intimacy.

But turning this into a general social norm in turn affects how people approach long-term relationships, as seen in this deeply sad little story from the Reddit sex boards:

This poor guy seems to have so fully embraced sexual norms calibrated for zero-trust encounters, that even in the context of a three-year relationship he recoils from an unexpected but affectionate overture by his girlfriend. Then, belatedly, he realised that it was fine, and he’d be delighted if it happened again, but now he’s upset her and doesn’t know how to restore the implicit trust she believed was there and that he’s now dissolved.

In other words: there simply isn’t space within the procedural, bureaucratic “consent” rubric for the very things that make an intimate, longstanding relationship better than a hookup: the tacit, the understood, the habitual, and the implicit. At scale, this implies that “consent education” produces people conditioned to run every interaction, in even long-term relationships, through a kind of mental HR filter. And this erotic managerialism in turn forecloses the kind of unspoken shared intimacy which is precisely what makes a loving relationship nicer than a hookup.

What does all this have to do with the convergent evolution of “power exchange” relationships among “kink” libertines and the religious Right? I submit (no pun intended) that both represent, albeit clumsily, subcultural efforts to carve out a domain of tacit trust and acceptance of asymmetry, in long-term relationships, within which partners can find some relief from the burden of endless “negotiation” on the assumption of zero baseline trust.

Revisiting Google Ngram, we find that “male headship” and “male supremacy” emerged concurrently in the ‘60s. And while correlation is not causation, my hunch is that “male headship” discourse almost certainly appeared as an effort to make the positive case, against the emerging cyborg norm, for sexed asymmetries that had been reframed from “normal” to “inexplicable and morally indefensible”. And while ‘lifestyle BDSM’ and ‘surrendered wife’ demographics are typically older than your average anxious, consent-educated zoomer, if we’ve been wrestling with the mismatch between compulsory egalitarianism and lived experience since the ‘60s, we shouldn’t be surprised to see subcultures developing elaborate formal justifications for doing an end-run round norms that don’t work for them in practice.

So even if the resulting subculture looks weird or cringe to outsiders, the convergent evolution of power-asymmetry subcultures suggests something provocative: that many long-term couples find leaning into sexed asymmetry much more congenial than compulsory egalitarianism. And, still more provocatively, it implies that for some at least, the relationship between “consent” and power asymmetry is much more complicated than the now-normative liberal claim that all relations of authority are by definition tyrannical.

Of course, it goes without saying that you can do all this without needing an elaborate narrative. You just have to accept that every relationship has multiple asymmetries, and be willing to navigate more of these on a trust basis, instead of subjecting every nuance to an exhausting round of “negotiation”. (I suspect that most longstanding couples do this in one form or another, even if most don’t theorise about it.)

But how might we convince young men and women to sack their inner HR department, and accept that the tacit is not a threat but a key upside of intimacy? Many have been conditioned from childhood to treat every interaction as a zero-trust “consent” negotiation, and furthermore to evacuate their every inner experience into the realm of social media.

I don’t envy Gen Z this predicament, and would love to hear from anyone - especially Gen Z readers - with thoughts on how to address it.

***THANK YOU***

Finally, a huge THANK YOU to everyone who has sent me a story about meeting and surviving a rough patch in your marriage. I’ve been truly honoured and humbled by your wisdom, candour, and generosity in sharing sometimes acutely painful stories, and your words are all hugely inspiring. I’m working on putting these together for the newsletter - there have been quite a few, so it may end up being a short series. Meanwhile if you have a story you’d like to share please still feel free! And for now just thank you all so much, and stay tuned. M