In my Daddy-little dynamic with Don, I can still find it impossible to reconcile my adult agency and power with my inner spiteful baby’s righteous entitlement to thrash and be met with overpowering, loving containment. I feel incredulous when Don gives me space when I tell him I don’t want to be around him, positive that he is latching on to any opportunity to get respite from me because he doesn’t want to deal with me. When my own daughter angrily tells me to go away and that she hates me, I know that she wants stable attention, not space. Doesn’t he see that in those moments I am trying to prove to myself that I don’t need him so that I feel less overwhelmed by my dependence on him?

Last week it was my birthday, and Don and I went to see Obsession for the second time. We love horror movies and deconstructing the symbolism of their minutiae. Since it was our second viewing, I kept having new thoughts that I’d lean over and whisper to him. At a certain point he told me that he didn’t want to talk during the movie. I hadn’t seen it coming and his words made me freeze and tense up and quietly cry next to him. And he didn’t even notice! I was doing my best to hide it…but still, how can he even be my Daddy if my ability to hide from him is more developed than his ability to notice me?

When the movie was over he asked me if he had hurt my feelings and I said no and went to the bathroom to cry some more. If he didn’t even notice my tears in the theater, I certainly didn’t want him to know I was still crying. Except I did want him to know. I wanted him to know that he hurt me so badly that I couldn’t even cry in front of him. I wanted him to know that obviously I couldn’t just say that to him because that would be manipulative and childish and I’m a reasonable adult who is just as capable as he is and I don’t need a Daddy and he should feel really really bad for making me cry. I wanted him to know that it was TOO LATE for him to really be my Daddy and that he ruined everything ON MY BIRTHDAY NO LESS!

When he put me to bed that night I didn’t say anything about any of it. I just snuck out of the room and cried some more by myself, secretly hoping he would come find me. But he was asleep and he didn’t and after an hour the fullness of my self-imposed loneliness hit so hard I couldn’t breathe.

“He’s not coming,” I sobbed to myself, out loud but alone in my upstairs bedroom, still somehow hoping he would sense something, wake up and come witness what was happening.

A month earlier, on our three year anniversary, Don had carved a mark with a scalpel right at the center of my ribcage. I’d been asking him to mark me like this for months and yet he still managed to surprise me with it. It was supposed to be a portal—where pain I couldn’t name or verbalize could flow out from me to him when he put his mouth over the open wound. The first time he opened that portal, I felt claimed and changed. I could feel his desire for everything inside of me. I could feel the sheer force of our shared yearning to transcend earthly, creaturely markers of separateness. And the power of that forceful yearning cradled me in a way that was new.

Now, alone, in the middle of the night, it all felt like hubris. Like we were just two arrogant souls in love thinking we could cheat the human experience of aloneness in our own bodies. That night, tracing the raised, scarred remnants of his mark with my finger, I couldn’t access anything.

The next day I slept until noon. All of the urgency I had felt the night before was gone. Don was at work. Somewhere in my indulgent numbness a thought sparked. I wanted to carve myself. Open my own portal. I snuck downstairs and found his scalpel. I felt knots in my stomach. I looked out the window at the sunny green pasture outside. In my chair I brought my knees up close to my eyes. I wanted to honor the one thought I felt I’d had all day so I did it. I pushed the scalpel gently into the flesh of my knee and wrote the word “me.”

Some self-judgment flickered. “I’m so dramatic.” “I shouldn’t do this without telling him.” “This isn’t me, this is PMS.” But mostly I felt a curious, aesthetic joy. The m was so delightfully curved and rounded. The way the word sat on a diagonal on my knee was so whimsical. The thin line of blood was controlled and small, not gushing or accusatory. “I’m an artist,” a part of me thought, self-consciously. I took a lot of pictures of it—the way I’d sometimes take photos of a particularly beautiful bouquet of wildflowers. I staged myself against different backgrounds and angles of light. When I caught myself worrying about what Don would think, I noticed that the anxiety was reflexive, from past lives, and it disintegrated on its own. I knew that he wouldn’t meet this act of self-authorship with anything but curiosity and compassion.

But when I finally showed it to him I felt guilty, and the fact that I felt guilty made me angry at him. I’d spun all kinds of narratives in my head about what the mark meant—each narrative tethered not quite to reality but to a certain nervous system contortion. (I’m aware that that is itself a narrative…when I inception my own stories too much it is hard to know what is real anymore).

One story that swirled was that I’d needed to mark myself in order to belong to myself again. There was maybe some of that—but belonging only to myself wasn’t comforting. It was more like being stranded on an island where, sure, no one could bother you, but no one could talk to you or hug you either.

Another story was that I needed Don to show me that he would still claim responsibility for caring for me even when I was rejecting his dominion over my body. And that if he couldn’t I would be able to do it for myself.

Another story was that I needed to remind myself of my own free will. And that I could do “crazy” things and still be worthy of love.

All of that swirled in me—but what I said to him was simply, “I felt like I needed to do it for some reason that still maybe hasn’t been fully revealed to me.”

Don doted on me in these types of moments. “One of the uniquely beautiful things about you, lamb,” he said, “is your ability to feel things that are murky and not foreclose meaning on them before it’s arrived. It’s a skill I want you to continue developing.”

Suddenly it all felt so simple. It isn’t that a narrative to explain my actions has revealed itself to me yet. It is that I get to rest in the certainty of my Daddy’s love even if other things remain uncertain. Even if they remain murky forever. Even if I can’t render myself into something that is easily understood.

The mark I gave myself is fading. I think it will heal completely and leave no trace if I decide I want it gone.

Don has asked that I point to my face next time I’m crying so he doesn’t miss it. So now I do, and he takes his mouth and drinks up all the tears as they run down my cheeks. He really does want all my pain.

But I still feel so overwhelmed knowing that he can’t just take it if I don’t give it to him. I’m still uncomfortable with having to own that power and responsibility.

“Yes, Daddy,” I said, as I focused on tempering my excited breaths.

As my body softened into his competence, he explained that he used this type of handling to calm horses.

My great-grandmother Greta Sofia was terrified of horses. In 1898, when she was only ten months old, her uncle set fire to the stable next to her home and the horses went fleeing into the cobblestone streets of Stockholm, wild and untamed with terror. Greta claimed to have a vivid memory of the stampede, one that she spoke of freely and often to my mother, her granddaughter. It must have been scary to see. Was it really possible that the memory was so strikingly terrifying that it imprinted on the mind of a baby?

I’ve never been particularly comfortable around horses myself. I don’t know how to read them and they are so big and capable of destruction. I’ve never seen one in a state of terror, but that just means my catastrophic imagination fills in the blanks. Could these hands now on me, one on my back and one on my front, large but still just human, really soak away that level of terror and restore a big beast to a state of docility?

There were so many things Greta didn’t speak about that my mother only learned after she died. My mom knew that Greta’s mother died of tuberculosis when Greta was just four years old. But she didn’t know that Greta’s father left her to grow up in an orphanage after her mother died. When I researched it, Malmqvistska orphanage, I found it described as a place for “fattiga och värnlösa flickebarn.” Poor and defenseless girls. While Greta was there, her father left Sweden for America where he started a new family. When Greta died, there were photos of her father with his new family among her keepsakes. She never spoke about wondering if her father would ever return and bring her with him to America.

He never did. But I was born here. Because after Greta died, her granddaughter, my mother, came to America herself. She met my dad in New York in 1985 and in 1991 they had me. There was a story in my family that I was born stubborn and resolute—that I was determined and that I had a temper. In many of the family photos from when I was a child I am defiantly scowling. But I always felt more like a defenseless girl. The temper that my family saw never made it out of the home. As a child I never let my friends or teachers see it, but my younger brother felt it as thwacks on his innocent back and my parents heard it in slammed doors and thrown books. Later, after I became a mother, my coworkers wouldn’t have been able to imagine it, but my children felt it in exasperated screams and grips on their wrists that were a touch too tight.

The handyman who came into my apartment when I was 11 and made me dance with him while his penis grew hard against my leg would never know the type of anger I was capable of. Because it didn’t come out in moments like that. Later that year, the stranger who grabbed my butt on the subway with a force strong enough to strangle a baby chick wouldn’t know either, because none of the hot energy of my anger came to thaw me then.

Nearly three years after our first date, Don still puts his hand on me to center me. But sometimes I feel it less as a comfort and more like a branding iron—when the heat of his fingers touch me their calm makes me livid. I’m so angry that he doesn’t know what it feels like to be defenseless. He doesn’t know what it feels like to be a baby while wild beasts rage in terror outside your window. He doesn’t know what it feels like to be frozen—calm—when you need to be something else. He doesn’t know that being calm and docile isn’t always good. He doesn’t know anything and he is supposed to know everything. Isn’t that what it means to be Daddy? I imagine him in those stables, his hands trying to calm the horses who will burn if they don’t break free. Then my mind turns him into the uncle who set the fire. Or the father who will leave me in an orphanage if I don’t calm down. Because isn’t that what it means to be Daddy, too? To be willing to carry the burden of my projections? And to absorb all of the pain that my little girl body has endured and all of the pain that every girl has ever endured at the hand of a man? Can’t you see how crazy and sad and terrible it is that her whole life Greta was afraid of horses when she should have been afraid of the man who set the fire? I want to feel that your hands can hold that. Can they?

Don wants so badly to understand. And he molds his hands into gripping restraints that hold me with a force that honors the depth and opacity of my anger when I reject his calm. His mouth vacuum-seals on my neck and when I look in the mirror the next morning at the purple, I know that part of him understands. Because he knows that I need something real to look at and he wants to give that to me. He tells me how much he wants to help me make art out of it—this thing I can’t explain that he wants to understand—and my purple neck feels like art.

He wants to show me that I can let terror flee in the streets untamed, because untamed terror doesn’t scare him. Even my fear that he won’t ever understand all of it.

I remember as a teenager spending hours in front of a specific mirror in my house that was dirty and speckled in a way that made it blurry. It was like a filter that erased pimples and body hair, and I loved seeing myself in it—restored to an unthreatening smoothness that made me feel unsullied and pretty. It was exciting when I first overcame my embarrassment about shaving and made the mirror smoothness a reality.

But something made me not want to tell my mom about it—she didn’t shave her underarms. I could sense that there was a darkness in it and I didn’t want to reveal to her that I was giving myself over to it. But also, I loved feeling the smoothness with my fingers. I liked this version of myself who knew how to restore my body to a state that made it pleasing—yes to compulsory mainstream aesthetics, but also to my own touch.

The Epstein files have provided a stark illumination of the darkness I was sensing. That my ideas of femininity, girlhood and self were being shaped by a culture that told men that it is ok, manly even, to sexualize the aesthetics of childish pliability. Tara Tyrrell voices this horror in her recent essay “The Mass Grooming of Gen Y.” She writes:

I think it’s somewhat easier to cope with one or even a handful of horrible memories of assault than it is to face the truth that our entire girlhoods were shaped by pedophiles.

What do you do, when your abuser isn’t one single person? Your trauma caused not by an event, but an entire cultural period?

Feminist philosopher Kate Manne has written movingly about her own experience of wearing a school girl outfit at the request of a much older man in her younger years and how she is grateful for the disgust she now feels toward anything associated with the male gaze. She writes:

There is a tiny silver lining to this cultural moment that I know I am not alone in experiencing. The aesthetic and sexual standards that long haunted me feel disgusting, all of a sudden. They no longer tempt me. I look at the sexy school girl type I briefly tried to instantiate, when I was nineteen and twenty, and thin enough (for five minutes) to pull off some approximation of this look. And I feel beyond repulsed, not by my own coerced conformity, but by the culture of sexual violence and pedophilic abuse that recommended it to me strenuously. I gaze at the male gaze, and I feel a sense of nauseated contempt. Not trying to look small, smooth-skinned, hairless, and above all young, suddenly got a whole lot easier. Because the thought of even vaguely satisfying the men who would be gratified by such appearances now turns my stomach.

When I read Manne’s words last week, I felt a deep resonance. I remember how freeing and empowering it felt to finally break up with the man who always wanted me to wear sleek black womanly silhouettes and tasteful—but still sexy—heels. I can still feel in my stomach the vague bubbling of awareness as I scoured my closet for something that would suit his tastes and found I only had a hastily purchased funeral skirt and bralette to choose from. I’m changing myself to please him and I don’t know how to stop. It was deeply liberating to eventually metabolize that feeling of self-erasure into a disgust toward him.

But Manne’s repulsion also made me feel lonely, because I love the aesthetic that she is describing. I love girlish cuteness. I love rubbing my freshly shaved legs together in the shower, when they are smooth and wet like two baby dolphins. I love how thigh-high socks look under a miniskirt. I love painting my nails with cartoon unicorns that remind me of childhood. I love oversized bows. The man who insisted I didn’t dress this way wanted to sleep with me, but he didn’t want to deal with how society might view him with my girlish aesthetic on his arm.

But right now all of that feels flippant and frivolous. Of course I can see how this aesthetic is entangled with pedophilia, and how generations of girls were groomed into embodying its worst traits—malleability and a desperate hunger for male approval. Why do I feel so attached to the aesthetic joy it brings me? Surely as a good feminist, I can give up my clearly corrupted love of girlish innocence for the sake of the safety of girls and women. For my 10-year-old daughter. What is it that I am holding on to?

And it is worse—I don’t just enjoy embodying this girlish aesthetic. Around age 30, after two kids and a divorce, I admitted to myself that I have a Daddy kink. I don’t think I fully knew what it meant at the time, but it was something about feeling safe and alive in the presence of great power. It was something that I discovered about myself during a two-year period of celibacy and introspection. After a long relationship that began when I was 17, I was trying my best to tune in to what my desire looked like when it wasn’t filtered through the expectations of a man.

I joined a sexuality reflections group with an amazing facilitator. In response to thoughtful prompts, I reflected and wrote. Some of the statements that came out felt like internal truths, others aspirational—how I might feel about myself and my sexuality with enough distance from the near universal shame bequeathed to all women and my own personal sexual trauma. I spent some time rereading those five-year-old excerpts this afternoon:

• My sexuality is an integral, non-compartmentalized part of who I am.

• I am not troubled or ashamed by the things that turn me on and I am excited to share those things with a partner

• I am so proud of myself for valuing my sexuality

• Sometimes I still wonder why I’m so turned on by the unrestrained alpha male. Why I want to call men Daddy and delight in being physically overpowered. But I no longer view any sexual preference that emerges from me, including the desire to be dominated by a man, as problematic or at odds with my values.

• I am not sure, but I suspect that the physicality of sex is much less important to me than a shared understanding of what we are experiencing together and the dynamics of power, desire and connection between us

• I want my erotic self to be seen not as sultry, but as innocent and precious, in need of careful holding

Reading my past reflections, I felt such tenderness for the young woman who was trying so hard to filter out the world and the culture around her so she could access the innocence of her unpolluted desire.

But Manne seemed to be arguing that the degree of harm associated with the aesthetics and language of my desire was so great that it demanded a forceful disavowal. She writes:

It’s taken for granted in my liberal circles, for instance, that any sexual predilection is valid and no form of kink should be shamed, as long as the way it is played out is safe and fully consensual. As we fall over ourselves to avoid kink-shaming, though, we run the risk of suspending our basic critical faculties. The iconography of “sexy school girls” is demeaning to women and dangerous to girls, normalizing as it does the pedophilic tendencies that are rampant in our culture.

I know what she means—I know she is talking about men imposing this aesthetic on reluctant partners. And yet, I felt so misunderstood. Manne is one of my academic heroes—the way she conceptualized misogyny in Down Girl played a central role in framing my graduate thesis on misogynistic gaslighting as a tool of state power. And I knew she wasn’t targeting me or wanting to make me feel wrong—but I still felt a stinging wounded defensiveness about her claim that the place I found aesthetic and erotic aliveness was demeaning and dangerous.

She seemed to be confirming my worst fear: if this grooming is everywhere and I’ve been receiving it my whole life, then I, too, am tainted. My desire, my aesthetics, my erotic pulse, all of it needed to be scrubbed clean of this influence. But when I try to remove the fingerprints of pedophilia culture, of rape culture, when I try to exorcize myself of its influence, is anything left?

In her essay rebutting the idea that Sabrina Carpenter is indulging the pedophilic fantasy in the way she dresses, Cricket Guest names the impossibility of feminine expression within a culture of pedophilic grooming. She points out, for example, that one of the looks called out for speaking to this fantasy was a pink corset, because it mirrored outfits young girls wore on Toddlers and Tiaras. The feedback loop between girls being encouraged to dress like grown women and women being encouraged to dress like girls is so pervasive, she argues, that all feminine aesthetics end up tainted. She writes:

If I express myself in any type of feminine way I am likely referencing something that is referencing something which in turn references something rooted in this so-called ‘pedophilic fantasy’ — a fantasy that places juvenile feminine beauty on a pedestal.

I don’t dispute that the schoolgirl iconography has its roots in an eroticization of helplessness and innocence. Or that it was elevated by a culture that prioritized the proclivities of men who wanted to access young bodies for their own pleasure, with a sickening disregard for the girls and women those bodies belonged to. But what I do reject is the idea that the group of men who colonized the symbols of girlhood innocence have also stolen from us the possibility of reclamation.

I have my own relationship to my girlhood innocence that they don’t own. I have my own relationship to my memories of feeling unsure and naive about my sexual awakening that these men don’t own—even though they tried to feed on this in me, it is mine. This plane of consciousness, and the aesthetics that help me embody it, belong to me.

I don’t want to limit my self-expression by eliminating what gross men like, just because they like it. But more than that, I don’t want to distrust the parts of myself that are drawn to the aesthetics of innocence just because men corrupted them. To me, that feels just like a reproduction of the self-doubt those groomers attempted to cultivate so they could control us.

I do appreciate that Manne points out that within such a corrupted set of norms, relying on consent alone as a measure of whether or not something reproduces misogynistic sexuality may be crude. But I think writing off a specific aesthetic entirely also minimizes the interiority and intention of those who approach its embodiment with an attitude of reclamation.

What I’ve also been trying to hold on to, is that even within the limits of deeply flawed and tainted symbols and language, love flourishes. I can’t help but think about the women who weathered girlhood with me. How we didn’t have body positivity language, or a way to understand that we didn’t need boys thinking we were pretty to be valuable, but we were able to use the imperfect language and aesthetics we were given to make each other feel deeply loved. In the hours we’d spend in the luxuriously carpeted Victoria’s Secret dressing room after middle school we didn’t tell each other that the beauty standards were bullshit—we hadn’t found a way to know that yet—but we found ways to convince each other that we met them, that we belonged.

“That bra looks amazing on you! You literally look like Kate Moss,” we’d say. Or, “Oh my god, that diet is really working, your abs look sooo good!” Or, “how did you get your legs so smooth, can you please show me?”

Even while the culture tried to tell us we were ugly, or prudes, or sluts, we told each other that we were perfect—because we loved each other and we wanted more than anything to make each other feel good.

And I also think about the way my partner Don embodies what my Daddy kink was calling out for. It represented a longing to have my girlish innocence held without exploitation or extraction. It was a way for me to communicate that the part of me that still craved intimacy with men was deeply wounded, and it wanted to be held and reparented. I understand that if I’d grown up in a different culture, one where children weren’t raised in patriarchal nuclear families, that the language of my desire would likely look different. My mind was relying on undeniably imperfect and corrupted language to express this longing, but the longing was wholesome.

And also, the people who have taught me the most about sexuality after sexual trauma have been incest survivors, and I’m not sure I would have encountered their work if my sexuality reflections hadn’t put me face to face with the word “Daddy.”

In her exquisite narrative of revisiting her own incest trauma through kink scenes, aya iwa writes:

part of what intimacy with my survivor sexuality requires is for someone to really see the way that I’ve been altered by my experiences of abuse and trauma, and then to want to get closer to it. To want to understand it.

I can’t just leave trauma fully behind if I want to hold onto my sexuality. And now my experience of violence and violation, and my experience of my sexuality, are interdependent and they coexist.

aya iwa also talks about how frustrating it is for her when well-meaning people clam up and refuse to take a risk to learn more about how incest trauma has shaped her.

I often long for more enthusiasm, curiosity, cavalier levity, the ability to joke about it, questions. I long for the presence of someone who is not too careful or afraid or uncomfortable to engage with an important aspect of my life.

I have no doubt that part of my draw to the aesthetics of childhood innocence was formed in relation to the “mass cultural grooming of Gen Y,” as well as individual experiences of sexual assault. I think part of it is also innate because I’ve been drawn to exaggerated cuteness for as long as I can remember. But either way, I crave engagement with this part of me—I don’t want to be with men who try to make me dress more grown up just so they don’t look like creeps. And I don’t want to surrender the relationship I still have with the aesthetics and innocence of my own girlhood to a culture that tried to colonize it.

I’d clawed my way out, through the maze of marital obligation and fear of single motherhood. And now I had a life that was my own—untethered to any man. I felt unstoppable.

Single motherhood was hard—I spent a lot of time wishing I had more help and feeling overwhelmed. The way my patience faltered in direct proportion to the quality of sleep I’d had the night before made me feel fragile and crushingly limited. But there was something more combustible, more existentially threatening brewing inside me than my occasional mom rage. Ever since weaning my youngest I’d noticed it. My eyes lingered a little too long on the principal’s open collar during an assembly. I counted the seconds that one dad at pick-up held my eye contact before I bashfully looked away. It was coming back—the irrational and dangerous longing for a man’s touch. Why!?

After everything I’d been through—including an actual PTSD diagnosis—why couldn’t I rid myself of the dangerous compulsion to want sex with men? I was studying gender-based violence in graduate school. I wrote my thesis on patriarchal coercive control as a tool for strengthening state power. How could my body, this traumatized body, still salivate at the sight of a beard? Wasn’t it supposed to be keeping the score?

I didn’t have a way to make sense of it. All I had was a constant influx of data, news, and lived experience showing me how dangerous men were. Even the “nice” ones. Even the “feminist” ones. The holy grail of protection and freedom would be swearing off men altogether. That was what I was absorbing from “men are trash” empowerment narratives—if I could repress my sexual desire for men I would finally be safe.

I didn’t have a story that framed my desire as anything but pathological.

When I started dipping my toes into dating again I told myself that I was going to do it in an empowered way. On my own terms. I was going to center my own pleasure—and I narrated that as a radical act of taking up space. But my faith in that story eroded quickly—it felt hollow. After orgasm, I still caught myself dodging impulses that might inadvertently place me between these men and their masculinity. My body still knew that was a dangerous place to be.

After a few more experiences of failing to make myself small enough to avoid patriarchal retaliation, I was back to believing that my sexual urges could kill me if I didn’t carefully monitor and contain them. The narrative road that always led me back to “sexual repression is the only way you will be safe” left me feeling cynical and unmoored.

At its core, trauma is an experience of narrative collapse. It comes from events that shatter our beliefs about the benevolence of the world, the meaningfulness of our lives, and our own self-worth. Recovery and realignment with purpose depend on integrating traumatic events into a view of the world that retains meaning. After sexual assault, survivors need a story to make sense of their experiences and their continued urges. I still didn’t have that. I had some tools to protect myself from men—my own bank account, location sharing with friends before dates—but no comforting story to explain why my body still wanted them.

In his 1973 book The Denial of Death, Ernest Becker argues that stories about our significance are the key way we cope with the uniquely human condition of being aware that we live in decaying bodies. The knowledge that we are fragile creatures who will die is too terrible to face directly, so cultures and individuals construct stories that transform our small, finite lives into something transcendent and therefore immortal. We matter because we are good mothers, or good radicals, or good writers—whatever story we are able to believe in. The more we believe that we matter, according to the tenets of the story in which we invest ourselves, the less we are plagued by fear, anxiety, depression and self-doubt.

Sex has always been one of the places where these stories are necessary. Because, as Becker writes, “sex is of the body, and the body is of death.” To mitigate the death anxiety that sex brings up, we imbue it with symbolic meaning. Sex is never just an act. It is always embedded within a story that tells us what the act means. It is an expression of love between two souls. It is a holy act whose holiness makes itself known through the creation of children. It is a radical reclamation of persecuted pleasure. It is a sign that other people value you. It is a political statement against repression.

I still didn’t have a good story I could believe. I still felt that wanting sex meant I was powerless—unable to protect myself from danger. It was the opposite of a death-transcending story. It was a story that painted me as just a creature, beholden to creaturely urges, and it was corrosive. I needed a way to explain this urge to myself that made me feel like more than just a body.

As bell hooks pointed out in her 2004 book The Will to Change,

Militant feminism gave women permission to unleash their rage and hatred at men but it did not allow us to talk about what it meant to love men in patriarchal culture, to know how we could express that love without fear of exploitation and oppression.

On my first date with my current partner, Don, we had a brush with death. While we were sitting by the East River, two people nearby were fighting and one of them pulled out a gun. Don and I had just met—I didn’t have any reason to trust him, and one giant one not to: he was a man. But when he put his steady hand on my shoulder and told me to just breathe and keep my eyes on him, my body felt calm. I watched him survey the scene and saw that behind his eyes a strategy for keeping us safe was forming. The fight nearby dissipated quickly, but my draw to be close to him didn’t.

A few weeks later, my dog died in my arms. Right before he took his last breath, he looked up at me with a face of pure fear. I imagined he was begging me to save him. But I was powerless—I couldn’t. When I told Don about it, he gave me a different story about that moment.

“I know you read his look as a plea,” he said, “and I can imagine that was a piece of it, but also, whatever pain or fear he had was lessened by looking at you in that moment. And if karma exists, I believe that showing up for someone to bear their fear as they let go is about the best thing anyone can do.”

Don introduced me to Becker’s ideas, and in particular, the power that co-creating shared narratives can have on our sense of self and well-being.

It can be easy to read Becker and come to the conclusion that because the stories we tell ourselves about the importance of our lives are only powerful if we have faith in them, that they are flimsy or not ultimately real.

But Don always emphasized Becker’s ultimate optimism. He’d often remind me of this passage:

When we talk about the need for illusion we are not being cynical. True, there is a great deal of falseness and self-deception in the cultural causa-sui project, but there is also the necessity of this project. Man needs a “second” world, a world of humanly created meaning, a new reality that he can live, dramatize, nourish himself in. “Illusion” means creative play at its highest level.

Don helped me see that together, we could create new stories about my life and the things I had experienced. Don offered me the story that maybe my willingness to continue to date men wasn’t stupid, but courageous. That by indulging in my “irrational” longing instead of succumbing to cynicism I was making the brave choice to have faith in my body.

Of course, my body wouldn’t have been able to believe this story if it didn’t also feel safe in his presence. But it did. It felt not only safe, but alive.

In Trauma and Recovery, Judith Herman emphasizes the importance of healing trauma in relationships.

The core experiences of psychological trauma are disempowerment and disconnection from others. Recovery, therefore, is based upon the empowerment of the survivor and the creation of new connections. Recovery can take place only within the context of relationships; it cannot occur in isolation.

My relationship with Don helped my mind and body feel aligned again. It gave me a story in which my desire wasn’t evidence of weakness or damage, but a form of intuition—something that could lead me toward connection instead of danger. My urges led me to him—he has the best beard—and he taught me how to tell new stories about myself and my body.

Healing from patriarchal trauma requires rebuilding meaning around the body. We can’t heal if we keep treating our bodies as sites of danger rather than sources of wisdom. Otherwise we wrest control of our bodies away from men only to impose the same domination on ourselves.

The narratives that restore meaning often sound grandiose, or naïve, to people who don’t share them. I know how the promise of heaven has always sounded to me. I imagine some people look at me trusting my body to be held by a man again and feel afraid—because you can never be sure. And they’re right. My safety is not guaranteed by anything besides my faith in the way my body feels around him. But even if it were, safety alone is a faulty substitute for meaning, and it is always temporary.

There is no one right story that allows us to reconnect with meaning. But I do believe we owe it to ourselves to find the story that allows us to feel alive in our bodies again. If we can surround ourselves with people willing to build meaning with us—not through stories of cynicism but transcendence—then we may end up with something deeper than short-term safety: a life wide enough to hold risk, and still choose aliveness. Without that, trauma strands us in a world where cynicism sounds like wisdom and withdrawal passes for security.

I immediately took a screenshot and sent it to my partner Don, with a two-word text: “Complicated feelings.” Don and I have had a Daddy-little girl kink dynamic for almost three years—something I asked for explicitly. When we met, I didn’t really know what love meant to me, but I knew that I was attracted to paternalism in men.

I don’t have complicated feelings about my relationship with Don. The ways he supports me emotionally, financially, and logistically have allowed me to thrive in ways I never thought possible. But the White House’s explicit deployment of Daddy politics did bring up a familiar worry: was my eroticization of the powerful father figure part of the fuel that was allowing fascist politics to thrive?

Since Wilhelm Reich published The Mass Psychology of Fascism in 1933—a book that describes fascism as an ideology with a uniquely libidinal quality—many thinkers have viewed the relationship between dictators and their adoring masses through a gendered, sexual lens. As Laura Frost describes it, many see fascist politics as a “sadomasochistic encounter between a male leader and the collectively feminized masses.”

Fascist movements have always operated on spectacle. Think uniforms that harden and sculpt, synchronized marching and mass rallies, chants that collapse the distance between leader and crowd, simple physical gestures of allegiance. They make hierarchy feel intimate. Put another way, fascists understand how to unleash erotic energy to amass power.

When I was twenty and a student in Hong Kong, I traveled to North Korea as part of a tightly controlled tour group. On a bright, almost aggressively clear day, we were taken to the towering bronze statues of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il and instructed to bow—a ritual rooted in decades of North Korean state propaganda that casts both men as not only political leaders but also as fathers of the nation.

The women visiting the monument wore traditional dress: jeogori jackets fitted tightly at the chest, long chima skirts flaring down to the ground. Two of them wore Barbie pink, trimmed with satin ribbon and tulle. They wept as they bowed. As their bodies folded forward in synchronized reverence, I saw that their faces were streaked with tears. I knew the regime they were bowing to was violent and coercive, and that no one was allowed to refuse to bow.

But as I watched them, something shameful moved inside me.

I did not want to bow to those men. But I did want to bow. I wanted to feel what it would be like to surrender to something vast and unquestioned, to lay down the burden of discernment and simply fold myself into obedience. I wanted the spiritual clarity of kneeling before a power that felt larger, wiser, steadier than myself. It was scary—feeling in myself the very emotional, libidinal charge that fascists exploit for their own gain.

Before I met Don, I spent many years chastising myself for clinging to the white knight fantasy. I felt convinced that the longings I had for a strong man to take care of me were not only individually dangerous, but societally dangerous—that my submissive fantasies were fuel for oppressive political structures. And so I did what I was supposed to do—I supported myself financially and I accepted that romantic relationships with men were only safe if they were symmetrical. And only if I didn’t depend on them.

But I was exhausted. My job was demanding, I was a single mom, and I just wanted someone to take care of me and tell me what to do. I wanted to end each day nestled under the strong arm of a big man. Right-wing politics offered a simple answer to this longing. It is natural. It is feminine. It is your path to safety. Submit to the right man and you will be protected. Left-wing politics offered another answer. It isn’t your fault that you feel this way, but it is dangerous. Your body still hasn’t shed its internalized patriarchy and it is on you to analyze, unpack and ultimately exorcize it. When you do, you will develop less dangerous desires.

On an individual level, I felt that there was something wrong with me. That until I healed from my childish, codependent fantasies of rescue, I would be unhappy, and I wouldn’t be able to know real love.

The only spaces I found in my progressive, New York City circles that treated my yearning for submission as worthy of exploration were kink spaces. I got the message that it was ok to indulge in submission as long as it was contained in compartmentalized roleplay. Basically, I told myself, as long as I remained self-sufficient, independent, and emotionally self-regulating in my “real” life, my pathological desire wouldn’t metastasize into something politically dangerous.

But those scenes, while often pleasurable, exciting, and novel, ultimately felt hollow. And I resented the fact that I was still internalizing the message that the fullness of my longing was dangerous. Letting a man dominate you during sex is fine, calling him Daddy is fine—but be careful that you don’t get sucked down the trad wife rabbit hole. Don’t actually depend on him for anything.

It is true that dependence makes you vulnerable. And for many women, submission is purely utilitarian—a practical response to oppression, stripped of erotic charge. I certainly do not subscribe to the Freudian idea that female sexuality is inherently masochistic, that women are wired to eroticize their own subordination. But I also don’t fully recognize myself in feminist critiques that say we eroticize powerlessness only because patriarchy trains us to. I think submission can also be engaging something deeper than patriarchy—our existential powerlessness. Because even in a utopia without patriarchy, the human condition is ultimately one of powerlessness against our own mortality.

The more I interrogated my longing, the clearer it became that there was an uncorrupted eros in my attraction to dependence and paternalism—one I didn’t want to quarantine. What my body was reaching toward was not domination, but love that could hold my dependence and my existential powerlessness without exploiting it.

In Rest Energy, performance artists Marina Abramović and Ulay lean apart from one another for four minutes and ten seconds, their weight pulling in opposite directions on a bow, creating the tension needed to potentially release an arrow pointed at Marina’s heart. If either of them let go, Marina dies. The piece makes visceral the power that the people we love have over us. To love is to open yourself up to the possibility of being annihilated. The only antidote, besides a life without love, is trust. Trust transforms that power into vitality.

It is frustrating to me that right-wing ideology still feels like the only political place that acknowledges the erotics of asymmetrical human relationships. Because there is a difference between mandated asymmetry, which keeps women powerless in order to extract their sex, labor, and performances of devotion, and asymmetry that is chosen, loving, existentially honest, and a source of vitality.

Left-wing politics has the concept of interdependent solidarity. It is rational and practical—we must work together to achieve collective liberation. This is important. But I want a political home that treats my body’s existential eroticization of dependence and submission as something valuable that contributes to liberation, too. Because I believe that it is. Because love is necessary for liberation and for me, love looks like surrender.

bell hooks wrote:

Loving fatherhood embodies feminist masculinity in its most divine form… we must dare to proclaim our adoration, to bow down not to the male dominator, but to the male as embodied divine spirit with whom we can unite in love, with no threat of separation, knowing a perfect love that is without fear.

Before bed each night, I kneel at Don’s side and tell him what I’ve been thinking about that day. I give him my internal world because I trust him to take it and use it to take care of me. It is a ritual that I asked for.

When I kneel to him, I am not kneeling to male supremacy. I am kneeling to a man who has earned my devotion through consistency, steadiness, and care. Who doesn’t exploit the part of me that continues to feel a charged longing—simultaneously childish and erotic—for paternalistic care. He acknowledges that to love him, I am submitting to giving him the arrow pointed at my heart, and he holds that power benevolently.

I’m still not sure where the erotic energy of my desire for submission belongs in the public political conversation. Obviously not anywhere near a wannabe fascist who calls himself “Daddy.” And I certainly don’t think the solution to late-stage capitalist malaise is for each individual woman to find a strong man to protect her. But I do believe that daring to love, daring to follow our erotic desires, however they manifest, is not politically irrelevant. It is one of the few forces powerful enough to reorganize a life. And if we refuse to acknowledge the power of eros, someone else will be more than happy to weaponize it.

For a long time I tried to quiet this longing in me. I felt convinced that it was manufactured—evidence that even my sexuality had been colonized by patriarchy’s central lie: that women are perpetually vulnerable, and submission and loyalty to male dominance keep us safe. It wasn’t lost on me that the same masculine visuals that Trump romanticized in places like Russia or Poland—think buzzcut soldiers waving at adoring children with calm resolve—infected my fantasies. It felt obvious that I’d fully internalized the right-wing logic of “the only thing that can protect you from a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.” That’s what I thought my desires meant.

And so I tried to contain them. I dated self-avowed feminist men who were in therapy and read bell hooks. They knew all of the modern progressive rules about consent and boundaries. With them, I explored my desire to be dominated. We had safe words, discussed limits, and together we had sex that was “safe”—meaning it happened under spoken rules and agreements and when it ended we were equals again.

But this post-sex return to “equality” disgusted me—my body physically rejected it in the form of the ick. The pleading eyes of the first man I called Daddy still haunt me. When our roleplay ended, those eyes would look at me and openly beg for affirmation. Please tell me I did a good job, they seemed to say. And without quite meaning to, before he even asked me with words, I would find myself reflexively soothing him. I hugged him. I made a point of looking effusively satisfied. I made sure he felt like a man. There was a forcefulness in the desperation in those eyes that made me afraid of what might happen if I didn’t.

Sometimes he’d cry to me because he felt like he couldn’t be himself around his friends, or because he thought his colleagues disliked him. Gross, I thought, and immediately felt guilty about feeling so repulsed. Here was a man, openly sharing his feelings with me, and yet it made me want to recoil. It felt like further evidence of how thoroughly my body had absorbed patriarchal rules around what makes men attractive. Pushing through the repulsion felt like the right thing to do. It made sense to me that I’d have to work to decolonize my own mind of internalized patriarchy.

But the ick grew sustained and undeniable, and even though I felt guilty, I eventually broke up with him. When I did, he yelled and cried. I don’t remember what he said, but I remember his red face, the spittle flying from his lips, and myself vomiting in front of him out of fear. When I went home and stopped answering my phone, he bombarded me with texts.

I can’t believe you
You are awful and selfish
You won’t even talk to me?!
You said you loved me!
Please call
I don’t know what to do please
I will be ok if u can just call me
You are the only person who can help
Please
As a mother can you please

In that moment the wisdom of my ick became clear.

I wasn’t recoiling from his vulnerability. I was recoiling from the hypocrisy that his idea of “equality” was still riddled with expectations of maternal care. Our Daddy roleplay was negotiated and explicit and yet, when we returned to our status as supposed equals, what that really meant was that I was the caretaker. That I was the one expected to be the emotional sponge, porous and absorbant, able to cleanse him of his bruised masculinity with my gaze of unconditional, feminine love.

Katherine Angel writes about this demanded gaze in her book Daddy Issues. She describes the expectation that a woman become a mirror for another’s need, reflecting back reassurance, steadiness, affirmation.

Describing her own rejection of this expectation, she writes:

The people whose eyes I cannot meet are those in whose gaze I can detect the overwhelming clamor of requested affirmation. Those in whose gaze lies a demand for recognition, and a request for compliance. I hate to be made into the mother whose maternal gaze is demanded, the gaze of mirroring and recognition. When I only exist as a mirror for someone else, I cannot go on looking.

Despite a supposed commitment to feminist, consent-forward relationships, many men were still expecting me to demonstrate my love by disappearing into mirrorhood. As a mother, can you please…disappear. Become a mirror for me. Only don’t show me what I am, show me what I wish I was. Make me believe I am who I want to be.

What that man was really asking for when he invoked my motherhood to implore me to stay, was to continue the patriarchal charade of love that has long been demanded of women. He was asking me to stifle my desires and intuition in order to protect him from the pain of my rejection. He felt entitled to it.

His avalanche of emotional dumping wasn’t vulnerability, it was what Isle McElroy has called “petulant vulnerability.” In their 2022 essay in The New York Times they describe the difference, writing:

If true vulnerability means accepting change, personal fallibility and the human condition of reliance on others, petulant vulnerability feigns emotional fragility as a means of retaining power.

I wasn’t wrong to feel the ick. I was wrong to override it.

In her book, Uses of the Erotic, Audre Lorde writes:

As women, we have come to distrust that power which rises from our deepest and nonrational knowledge. We have been warned against it all our lives by the male world, which values this depth of feeling enough to keep women around in order to exercise it in the service of men, but which fears this same depth too much to examine the possibility of it within themselves. So women are maintained at a distant/inferior position to be psychically milked, much the same way ants maintain colonies of aphids to provide a life-giving substance for their masters.

But the erotic offers a well of replenishing and provocative force to the woman who does not fear its revelation, nor succumb to the belief that sensation is enough.

When I started treating my ick as wisdom, I saw that my longing was wisdom, too. And when I stopped trying to justify my desire, I began to see that my longing for a Daddy had always been pointing me away from reproducing patriarchal relationship scripts. I didn’t want compartmentalized kink scenes in otherwise “equal” relationships—I wanted a fundamental reshuffling of unspoken expectations. I wanted relationships that relieved me of this patriarchal burden of disappearing into mirrorhood. I wanted to be seen by someone who could reflect back reassurance, steadiness and affirmation, not because they were afraid of what I would do if they didn’t, but because they chose me and believed in me.

The thing that made me light up wasn’t a performance of masculinity—it was a grounded, earned paternalism that didn’t demand I show love by disappearing. Once I understood that my desire wasn’t just about a certain type of sex, but about designing entire relationships around redirecting the flow of emotional regulation, it became clear that my body had been on to something deeply aligned with my values, not in contradiction with them.

In those early days of exploring my Daddy desire, I hadn’t yet learned to trust my body’s alarm system. That was the patriarchal conditioning that needed to be undone. I needed to give myself permission to stop feeling guilty about my ick, because that was a part of my “deepest and nonrational knowledge.” That knowledge was not something that needed extraction or undoing. Whether it manifested as ick or yearning, that knowledge, and my ability to trust it, needed nurturing and tending. And that is what my desire for a Daddy has always been: a desire to have that part of myself, my deepest and nonrational self, revered, encouraged, and parented.