After all, having a man push himself into your most sacred and sensitive opening is about the most surrendered and yielding experience one can imagine. So it’s understandable that while women are in the “receiving” role sexually and are also usually less physically strong than their male partners, the vulnerability is held by the women.

I’d like to connect with you deeper in this vulnerability and share something I haven’t spoken about before.

It is extremely vulnerable for us men to be the “penetrator,” too.

As much as we work on raising our sensitivities and empathy to women, unless we enjoy our own anal penetration, we don’t know what it’s like to be “pushed into.”

Today, the social climate around men’s sexuality includes a lot of past trauma from abusive and violent sex or just insensitive or immature men of previous generations who had no clue what they were doing to their women. Today’s women bear the scars of past, male-dominated, unfeeling sexual experiences.

It has only been recently that the law and society’s moral compass has even acknowledged a woman’s right so say “no” even in the middle of sex and even if she’s married to the man with whom she’s having sex. Unbelievably, still, in most countries there is no law against a man raping his wife. She has no legal right to refuse him and no legal protection if he rapes her.

Even in the United States and the United Kingdom, the law has only been passed to protect married women in the last 50 years or so, and across Asia and Africa they think I’m crazy to even bring the subject up.

So the idea that men could be the vulnerable ones in love-making may sound puzzling at first.

But I want to express that as a man, carrying the burden of women’s often negative expectations and the ever-felt sexual wounds of all mistreated women of the past creates a unique and sensitive vulnerability of it’s own—for the men.

Perhaps it could be likened to German grandchildren of the Nazis who themselves played no part in the abuses of World War II but, in the post-war decades, couldn’t help being tarred by the same brush and unjustly carrying some of the guilt and rejection.

Men carry the shame of our abusive, sexually incontinent forefathers, and we don’t want to bring that trauma into the bedroom anymore. It’s in the way of us having incredible, heart-bursting sex with you.

Today, if you are a man with any degree of sensitivity, it is a vulnerable thing to penetrate a woman.

I don’t want to abuse you, trigger you into past trauma or in any way mistranslate your wants or needs. I would hate to accidentally touch you in a way that jarred you or misread your passion. So if you notice my hesitancy or any held-back-ness, please do not translate this as any lack of desire on my part. I may be waiting for a clearer invitation.

Women, please invite us clearly and unmistakably to make love with you. Only when we are certain that your invitation is whole-hearted and clear can we melt into devotional service to your pleasure. We need to be total, unbridled by doubt, to allow the strength of our male physicality to take you.

We want to explode you into light and usher you to the door where you can dissolve into pure sex with the Big Spirit in the field that is beyond us both.

But until we are certain that your invitation is total, we can’t surrender to giving you our gifts fully. Your vulnerability is my vulnerability. Let’s melt deeper into it together and heal the past traumas with our love-making.

Bonus: Enlighten your Sex Life:

Love elephant and want to go steady?

Sign up for our (curated) daily and weekly newsletters!

Apprentice Editor: Pamela Mooman / Editor: Rachel Nussbaum

Photo: elephant journal archives