If you’ve ever complained about men’s lack of understanding of the female species or exhausted all options when it comes to helping your partner understand you more, Tom Ford has an interesting suggestion: penetration. That’s right. According to the designer and filmmaker, if all men were penetrated just once they might understand women a bit better.
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The suggestion actually isn’t a new one from Ford. In 2004, the American designer told GQ magazine, “Every man should be f-cked at some point in his life.” He didn’t offer much of an explanation for his stance at the time, and 12 years later the mag wanted to see if Ford still feels the same way. Indeed he does.
“I think it would help them understand women,” he told GQ in their December issue, explaning his point. “It’s such a vulnerable position to be in, and it’s such a passive position to be in. And there’s such an invasion, in a way, that even if it’s consensual, it’s just very personal. And I think there’s a psyche that happens because of it that makes you understand and appreciate what women go through their whole life, because it’s not just sexual, it’s a complete setup of the way the world works, that one sex has the ability to literally—and is expected to and is wanted to—but also there’s an invasion. And I think that that’s something most men do not understand at all.”
And in five sentences Ford summed up everything women have been trying to explain to men for centuries: why we wait — for emotional connections or marriage; why most of us don’t want just anyone on top of us or inside of us; why sex just being a physical act is a little more difficult for us because of our anatomy; and, most importantly, how that anatomy trickles down into the expectation that we should take whatever we’re given in life.
While there are some men who try to understand the position we’re in — literally and metaphorically — without having ever been it it themselves, all the opposite sex can offer is a listening ear and, hopefully, patience. Penetration, however, might lead to actual understanding, which is all any woman really wants when it comes to expressing her needs, especially to a sexual partner. Of course such an act would lead to all sorts of conversations about the man’s subsequent sexuality should he choose to be penetrated for the purposes of better understanding women because that’s yet another double standard society has yet to undo, but at it’s base I like Ford’s suggestion and I agree that it would make a world of difference in the male-female dynamic. What do you think?
Photo: Shutterstock
