Thanks, sounds like great advice. Anyone else care to share their thoughts, opinions and experiences? I'm new to this and trying hard to do right in my role as head of the household so can use all the help I can get.

Excellent advice. I wish I'd learned 6-8 by reading this article rather than from painful experience....

The key to having the right stuff with a man, no matter the harshness and severity, the "demands" and "scolds" of the actual content of the communication, is to do this as a woman, not as an aggressively hostile (and therefore defeminized) lesson-wielding schoolmarm.

The rhetorical success of the piece lies in the fact that the substance of the content remains focused on womanly need, vulnerability, and fears. Notice the phrasings of the second paragraph in particular: Iteration of "She needs to know that...", "She needs to be reassured that..." Notice here that at no time is focus brought to the ways in which the man has been inadequate, has failed her, has been insensitive, or less than fully loving to the woman. Only the "pompous ass" remark at the tail end of the article is a lapse to the overriding protocol at work here.

My counsel to women: learn to speak to your man in these ways. There is an attitude and disposition in a woman such that she can effectively "call out" the best in her man. In subtle, indirect fashion, she can "promote" him to his proper role as her man. She does so by addressing the bests within him. This is the proper way to "scold" a man. Not through reproach and rebuke, but by effectively asking him to more fully be your man. If he proves himself over the long term unresponsive to you in your use of that modality, it is perhaps time to put on your thinking cap. You might well revisit the notion of the nature of his love for you. I cannot myself fathom why an honorable man, deeply in love with you, would not step up and be your man through this manner of approach.

I think of the Boss's Seventh Commandment as one of the very foundation stones of proper man/woman intimacy, though the injunction requires rounding out to full mutual reciprocity. The article implements that reciprocity in its assumption of addressing "well-intentioned" men, but here the urgency of the requirement begs explicit stating. If man and woman can achieve that disposition of expecting the best from each other, I am persuaded that little positive "work" is required to build a fulfilling structure of intimacy between the two. The relation will grow quite nicely under its own spontaneous powers, through male impulse to lead, and through the natural resources that man and woman bring to the encounter.

I quite agree with the Boss that the deepest of wounds can be inflicted when either man or woman impugns the good heart and earnesty of the other. I go so far as to counsel that if one finds that such wounding words were actually meant, the relation may well be irreparably damaged. If trust has been lost in this way, it is perhaps time to wish each other well and part ways. (I realize as well that many folks have ways different than my own, ways that tolerate "I didn't mean it" modalities of interaction. I have nothing useful to say to those comfortable in such protocols. They are not my own.)

A further warning to men in this regard. It is in womanly push and test that he will find the demands of this priniciple most difficult to honor. It is best that men get through their own noggin, that the most sweet, tenderhearted woman, earnest and fully given over to you, will inevitably, through the involuntaries of her womanly nature if not in explicit, consciously awares trial, almost as a matter of biological rhythm and periodicity, put her man to the test: do you have to cojones to stand up to me. Gentlemen, it is best to just accept this as an inherent aspect of the womanly mischief that nature reserves to us, and never more so than with a strongly spirited, proud and powerful woman. A man can turn this to the most delicous fun of all. If you do not savor the prospect of dealing with your woman when she goes to this challenging mode, you've got more woman on your hands than you can deal with. Leave her be for she will put both herself and you to deep misery. Do not fault her in this. She needs it to fuel her proud spirit, just as she needs your will and strength to prevail over it. She doesn't wish to lose, she wants you to win. If you want her love and all of her, you've gotta earn it.

I will note, in very explicit caution, that if either party intuits that the other is not in earnest, not of good will, actively harming and hurtful of the other, that such intuitions should not, must not, be dismissed. Not myself a "gut feel" sort of man, I have learned through bitter experience that such contrary "evidence" against the fundamental health of a relation in the making often proves, in retrospect and Monday morning quarterbacking, to be a sort of boomerang that makes its return in stab to the heart and what-was-I-thinking palm-slap to the head. No man or woman should ever ignore those silent whisperings of "not right". And, if one must act or choose in conditions of less than full certainty in such matters, I say, boogie out the door.

I largely endorse the Boss's injunctions. The preamble about putting the woman first and the post-amble about sense of humour would require lots of unpacking and unraveling to explore all of the dimensions and implications bundled in these short but wisdomful paragraphs. Oneth and Ninth, that run to male fallibility and apology, well, of course. Sixth is hugely important. To discover the ways and to handle her such that her man "positively excites and delights her" is the very core of the manuscript that is my current vocation. Control, discipline, punishment, these are all terms that a man must learn to charge, in connection and "correction" of his woman, with the hottest of arousal and aggressive, possessive intensity. My nutshell advice: don't spank her until you are certain that your doing so will make her go to the most intense of womanly gratifications.

I have serious reserves to voice about injunction Fifth. I think it falls to a man, not to a woman, to determine just what is "taking things too fast for her." While I agree that this must be very carefully calibrated by a man and that this can only be properly done in attentiveness to his woman, a woman, ultimately, needs deep lesson from her man that she is no longer in control and that she will feel the forcefulness of male need and push. I quite realize that women will forever remain incorrigible in this, to the most extreme degree in obviously successful, powerhouse women. There is something quite adorable in the fact that the proudest, strongest, most admirable of ladies of such lovely womanly bearing and stature, can remain such silly ninnies as to think that the man who will be answer to their needs, will not fundamentally shake up their notions of pace, their cautious control and wariness, their self-possession and strong womanly certainties. My darling ladies, when it happens for you with the right man, he is going to take control of you in ways that will leave you breathless, shocked and stunned in your sudden new identity as his woman. Get over it: it is not going to happen the way you think. A strong man will make sure that it does not. He is not going to leave you any power to regulate and "authorize" and "permit" how he will treat you. When you speak in such terms, you give every evidence to an experienced man that you have yet to be properly initiatied by a man into full womanhood. Few and far between, there are some men who have over the years made brief "appearance" on the forum who are quite evidently "in the know" about these realities of a woman abandoned to her deepest needs and to what she most truly needs from her man. Just as woman (and other socially, hierarchical, deeply relational mammals) have an acute intuitive sense of who can be trusted, who makes them feel safe, who is the boss, men have ways of knowing and recognizing what other men know about women. (I'll not resist saying in this regard that men and women who reveal in their sexual "knowing" that they think the little womanly rabbit the seat of her sensuality and pleasure have much to learn about the best of full bore female sexuality).

Golly Moses, do I dare make, in my arrogance, amendment to the Ten truths we've been revealed? Of course. Male consistency. (I am glad to see that Sully has made mention of this crucial requirement) Putting this in my goofy way, I would say that to the world and reality that is the private realm of male-led man/woman intimacy, it is properly to the man to provide the framework, the structure, the intimate "metaphysics" that fixes the absolutes and foundation to the structure of intimacy that man and woman can come to create together.

And I do wish to echo a crucially important sentiment that shines through very clearly in the Boss's enumeration of some of the roots of womanly fears. A man should make utterly clear that intimacy is a cooperative art like teaching or healing that requires the active awareness, initiative, and powers and resources of both man and woman, even, that his woman's thoughts, needs, feelings, fears, and vulnerabilities have a certain implicit primacy in the whole engagement. Such is entailed by man/woman relations where woman is the value, man the valuer who has chosen her as his most precious value.

It is clear to me that I conceptualize man/woman intimacy in far different terms than I have seen expressed on this forum. Even the one woman whose self-disclosures reveal some acquaintance with the real protocols and actualities of natural man/woman passion and the extreme complementarities that are its realities, is, too, afflicted with notions that womanly control and "permitted" protocols will rule the day. Girls, wake up, you'll not be the one's doing the choreography. My best wish is that some day some good strong, loving man awakens you to the delightful surprises that your own womanly nature has in store for you.

I have a few suggestions for men with regard to their woman's fears and vulnerabilities. I think a man should properly handle this inevitable aspect of relations with his woman through his own initiative, proactively, even before there may be reason in the growing intimacy between them for her to actually feel fears and vulnerabilities. I realize that in my own relation these were among the very first "rules" that I advised her of. Firstly, that she should not hesitate to speak her fears and vulnerabilites directly to me. I remember telling her that if she ever felt diminished, demeaned, dismissed, or disregarded in our interconnection, that she was to immediately call my attention to the issue and that we would take care of it. The important principle here, with regard to a woman's relaxedness and ease with her man, is that the very resistances and reluctances she carries in voicing her fears directly can have the direct effect of putting her to further anxiety, sometimes all the way to frenzy and panic, the very attempt to "control" and "manage" the frights and feelings of risk escalating and amplifying the actual "dangers" to lurid and incommensurate scale.

One may think of these precautionary measures a man may take with his woman as "trump cards" or special exemptions that he explicitly gives her to insure that she always knows she has a way out, a way through with him. The most powerful and functional of trump cards he can give her is to promise to her that she has a way of calling him to order and honor with her, should she ever feel the need. It is certainly the closest I come to providing a "safe word". The words my woman has been told to speak when she is feeling overwhelmed, fragile, frightened, are as follows: "Please, be gentle with me." "Please, be sweet to me." Personally, as a man who can sometimes be very powerful and passionate in his words and behaviors with his woman, all the way to harsh and severe, I find it useful self-handicap to be laden with in the derby ride that is an aspect of the sexual politics of man/woman intimacy. Oddly perhaps, it gives a man an added sense of safety for his woman that he can grasp from his side of the connection, necessary perhaps to a man who has wide personal experience with the unfortunate and unintended effects of his tendency to come on like gangbusters and intimidate even those who he is reaching out to for concernful loving connection.

The framework of "personhood", that of personal autonomy and full self-possession, as well as that of the individualism of juridical rights of full, deliberately aware consent and lawyerly contractual engagements and commitments, is one totally inadequate to properly ground and explain the evolution and growth of the structure of relations in full man/woman intimacy. A strong man is not going to address your womanly "person" and enter into negotiation with your "autonomy". He will rather speak directly to your anatomy and to the feminine and female within you that largely escapes your conscious awareness, control, and deliberateness. A man leading his woman to richer, more intense intimate connection, discovers how to handle her by making direct contact with and in awakening the involuntaries of her erotic psycho-sexual/emotional nature. A man who keeps her safe, who takes her in his charge and takes care of her, soothing and comforting her fears and vulnerabilities, can put her to such states of high arousal that can effectively shutdown the frontal lobes where the scaredy-cats and risky vulnerabilities attempt in vain to keep their voices alive. A woman come to such intense excitement can become eager indeed that her man pick up the pace, and go to silent or even overt pleading that he not hold back any longer, not one moment longer.