The Paradox of Softness: Why Men Crave Maternal Care Yet Disrespect the Woman Who Offers It

There is a crazy paradox I see constantly in my BDSM and somatic intimacy work, especially when clients come to me wanting to experience some level of "mommying." Beneath the surface of power exchange, there is often a very real longing for softness, care, emotional nourishment, and warmth.

​Yet, roughly 70% of the time, we never even get to the point of making the appointment happen.

​It falls apart before it even begins—not because the desire is too complicated, and not because the logistics are hard, but because of how they approach the interaction itself. Arranging a session is a simple thing: you express your desires and needs, while also understanding that this is my work and has to be arranged within a specific time frame and structure. I expect to be treated normally within the context of someone asking for a professional service. I need to see that you are respectful and sensible.

​Even through that basic back-and-forth, it becomes immediately obvious how deep of a conflict these men carry within themselves. While they are yearning for care, nourishment, and softness, they also carry internalized misogyny that makes them disrespect those exact feminine qualities.

​A lot of the time, it is clear they have a complicated relationship with their mother and are trying to heal a mother wound through this dynamic—whether they are fully conscious of it or not.

​The problem is, you cannot heal your mother wound if you don't have respect for the very thing you are yearning for. Think about what that creates internally: if you have so little respect for softness, caretaking, and the maternal feminine, yet you desperately crave it, you end up feeling bad about yourself—like a piece of shit—for wanting something you secretly look down on.

​I understand that this is a collective societal problem created through thousands of years of gender inequality and misogyny. Still, in today's world, when an individual clearly wants to do something about their wound on some level, the way so many men approach it is completely backwards. You can't heal that wound by trying to take nourishment from a woman while refusing to respect her time, her boundaries, or her humanity. They confuse being nurtured with being served without limits.

​The Double Standard of the Mother Wound

​What makes this even more frustrating is how differently men and women are treated around the exact same trauma.

​The mother wound is very real, and women carry it too. Daughters also grow up with mothers who can be toxic, or mothers who were simply so undernourished themselves that they had nothing left to give. How can a woman have the resources to nourish her children when society, family structures, and the dynamics between men and women leave her completely depleted?

​Yet, there are always endless excuses made for boys and men who grew up with absent fathers and undernourished mothers. Meanwhile, girls go through the exact same thing, and the expectation is completely the opposite: girls are expected to mature earlier, and women are expected to just have their shit together all the time. Women are automatically expected to lead emotionally, regulate everyone, and fix everything, while men are given a million excuses for not doing the exact same thing.

​Unlearning the "Traditional" Illusion

​I didn't figure all of this out overnight—I had to learn it through my own life and relationships as well.

​My mother died when I was young, so I didn't grow up inside conventional family dynamics. Because of that, there was a point in my life where I consciously chose relationships with men from very "traditional" families, thinking that through that lens I might experience or learn something I had missed.

​I woke up from that pretty quickly.

​More than once, I had to look at partners from those backgrounds and tell them directly that I was not okay with their behavior toward me—that they were treating me the exact same way their father treated their mother, and I wasn't interested in that.

​What struck me most was how glorified and idealized those dynamics are, even though they are completely unfair. In those traditional arrangements, women are expected to just care, look after everyone, and nourish the whole family, while getting very little genuine respect in return. It's treated as something "nice" that women just naturally do, rather than something profound that actually requires real effort, energy, and reciprocity. Care isn't something a woman owes for free—she deserves to be respected for it, compensated for it when it's her work, and given that exact same care back from her partners and the people around her. Mother is not an unpaid servant, cleaner, cook and nurse. There should be an entirely another level of respect towards her autonomy, care, manager skills to get family through, intelligence, resilience and bringing life to this world. 

​Madonna–Whore complex

This is also why it scrambles their heads when they see me in the full context of who I am—which, honestly, is something I'm quite happy to disrupt.

​In my real life, I am a mother. I naturally have all of these very caring, nourishing, and soft aspects of femininity in me. At the same time, through my life experiences, I learned to have really, really strong boundaries around them. I realized how much the whole society is structured to disrespect the very qualities people are so yearning for, and how entitled people feel to take them without giving respect in return.

​When men see that I am multifaceted—that I am a mother, an artist, an erotic woman, and a professional with firm boundaries—it runs straight into the classic Madonna–Whore complex. They are conditioned to put women into separate boxes: either you are the pure, self-sacrificing mother who has no boundaries or sexuality, or you are the erotic woman who isn't worthy of genuine reverence and care.

​When you refuse to split yourself in half—when you hold both genuine softness and uncompromising boundaries—they don't know how to handle it. You cannot receive real nourishment from a woman you refuse to respect, and you cannot expect softness without bringing basic human decency and reciprocity to the table. 

(written by Beatha.)