Don’t Ask: A Middle-Aged Man’s Creepy Roadmap to a Woman’s “Secret Garden.”

Sometimes I scour the internet for hours in search of material for this blog. Other times it just plops right in my lap. Today, it plopped, in the form of a new visitor to this blog by the name of J.S., a 52-year-old married farmer (he said) who brought with him some very old-fashioned ideas about love and romance and how men can best access the “secret gardens” of the pretty ladies of the world.

No, really, he did,proclaming himself an infallable guide to

the ‘secret language’( sub and non-verbal communication), the dating game, or how very attractive women go about choosing which men they let into their secret garden and which ones they don’t.

The primary lesson he tried to impart: that the “secret garden” is a little bit like Fight Club: The first rule of Secret Garden is that dudes can never ask to enter Secret Garden.

As he put it:

You never ask a feminine woman ‘what she wants’.

If you ask what she wants, you will kill the attraction immediately.

Her desire is to be led by a masculine man.

This is what bad boys do. They don’t really give a shyt about her. It’s all about them and the conquest. Women respond to this because sex is virtually all they think about and nice guys are always supplicating towards her hoping she’ll give them the go ahead to seduce and have sex with her. Wrong, wrong, wrong. You’d might as well let your child drive your car on your next vacation.

Oh, he later amended this a tiny bit. You can ask a woman if she wants to have sex if, like, you’re already married to her or something. But you can never ask to enter her Secret Garden unless you’ve already entered her Secret Garden.

The fact is, you don’t ask women to have sex unless you’ve known them for a good while, or are in a relationship. And you never ask them to ‘have sex’ before you’ve actually had sex with them the first time. Or the only thing you’ll be getting is a cold shoulder.

So if you can’t actually use human language to find out if you can enter her Secret Garden, how can you enter for the first time  it without, you know, being “falsely” accused of rape or something?

As they say in real estate, it’s all about escalation to the sex location, location, location.

Ok, that’s not exactly what they say in real estate. But here’s J.S., explaining the proper way to open her garden gates:

[W]hen interacting with a woman there should be only one thing on your mind… Is it cocky, funny? Is it humor. Is it talking about the weather? Nope. It’s about escalation to the sex location. If you don’t do this, you will be disrespected as a man, and find yourself lonely.

I’m sorry, I’m still stuck on “escalation to the sex location.”

escalation to the sex location

escalation to the sex location

escalation to the sex location

escalation to the sex location

Once you get her to the sex location, though, it’s important to remember not to ask her anything about her Secret Garden, or really anything at all. By agreeing to go to your sex location — probably just your apartment — she basically is agreeing to you groping all over her trying to get into her Secret Garden.

I mean, this is all covered in your basic Being A Human manual, but in case you missed it I’m just repeating it.

Anyway, once you’re both there, you need to keep escalating so that sex will “just happen” without anyone checking in with anyone else verbally or anything, because actually getting some sort of verbal go-ahead for anything sexual is totally against nature.

This is why women are so fond of the expression, it just happened.

Again, nope it doesn’t ‘just happen’. It happens early in relationships because she allows him to be alone with her, allows herself to become aroused, then doesn’t resist.

Then the relationship starts.

Let me just repeat the bit I put in bold there:

she allows him to be alone with her, allows herself to become aroused, then doesn’t resist.

That may be the creepiest, rapiest description of sex (and/or the start of a relationship) that I think I may have ever read.

Remember, dudes, according to J.S.’s Rules of Secret Garden you are supposed to keep escalating (in the sex location), but you are never, ever, ever to ask her if anything you are doing is ok with her.

But ladies, if you want things to stop, you need to answer the question he hasn’t actually asked with a clear verbal “no” or “stop” or, you know, you could fight him.

Because it is so important that men never ask a woman for consent that it’s better for women to be put in the position where they have to literally fight off their dates to make clear they don’t want to have sex, rather than simply have a very brief conversation that would make the issue of consent completely clear.

The evil genius of this “don’t ask, because if you ask she’ll say no because you asked” formulation — which is common amongst MRAs, PUAs, and assorted other rape apologists — is that it puts the responsibility for date rape not on (male) rapists but on their (female) victims by making the issue of consent entirely her responsibility and giving him an excuse to pretend he didn’t know she wasn’t consenting.

I didn’t know she wasn’t into it, the rapist can say, because it’s not like I could just ask.

But of course you could have. You should have. The responsibility for obtaining sexual consent belongs to whoever is “escalating” the sex. If there is any any doubt about anything at any point, ask. Using actual words.

Yes, potential partners are likely to be turned off by neediness. But the idea that getting consent is the same as supplicating is ridiculous. And the idea that it is inherently unerotic will come as a surprise to anyone who’s ever engaged in cybering or phone sex or dirty talk in bed.

Are there really women out there who are so turned off, so offended, by the idea of a man asking for consent that they would reject a man they were interested in just because he asked, possibly in a charmingly filthy way, for a “yes” before he put his hand up her skirt?

They must exist. Louis CK has a famous bit about a baffling and unconsummated encounter he had many years ago with a woman who had what you might call an extreme “don’t ask first” fetish. I can only hope she eventually managed to find her way to a local BDSM group so she could explore her submissive fantasies in a safe, sane, and consensual way, as they say.

It’s bizarre to have to point this out, but, dudes: If a woman is into you, and into sex, she’s going to want to have sex with you even if you ask her first. Indeed, if her attraction to you is so fragile, and her sexuality so dependent on fantasies of being “taken” that merely asking her to have sex is enough to kill the attraction, well, you’ve probably dodged a bullet, to be perfectly honest.

Making consent clear is good for both partners. Not only does it, you know, prevent rape, but it makes for better sex. The partner who “escalated” the sex knows that what they’re doing is ok with their partner, who, in turn, knows that they’re with someone who respects their boundaries.

When you talk about sex — before, during, and after — you can find out all sorts of things about what your partner likes and doesn’t. You can share your own personal kinks. This actually enables you to do a lot more sexually than people who don’t talk, even if the man in that relationship is the most alpha alpha who’s ever alphaed, because you don’t have to guess.

We have language for a reason. Use it. In bed.