“Don’t Hit Girls!” (Getting Your Partner to be Rougher)

This post is mostly going to focus on women with male partners. It might apply to other relationship dynamics, but one question I see asked a lot, mostly by women with male partners, is: “How do I get my husband/boyfriend to be rougher with me? He’s always afraid he’ll hurt me.”

Read more: “Don’t Hit Girls!” (Getting Your Partner to be Rougher)

There are many reasons a partner might have trouble doing some of the rougher BDSM activities. It can feel very violent at times and some people just aren’t made to enjoy that. There is the fear of accidentally hurting your partner that is a real hurdle for some people to get over. That applies to everyone.

To be clear, anyone can have trouble with this no matter the dynamic or gender.

However, it seems to be more of an issue when it comes to men. And I’d say the main reason is just how they have been raised. So let’s get into a little bit of history, because we need to talk about where this comes from.

For generations boys have been taught from a young age to be gentle with girls, not to hit girls, not to play rough with them. It was pushed on them almost before they could crawl, that boys were meant to play rough and get dirty, while girls were supposed to wear frilly clothes and have tea parties.

The gender segregation is a real problem. You only have to walk down the toy aisles to see how much of a problem it is. The girl aisle is almost blindingly pink. You can’t take two steps down the boy aisle without passing something in camo or weapon related.

It causes a lot of kids who don’t follow the stereotypes of their gender to feel out of place, like misfits. There has been some progress, but children are still being taught this. Sometimes it’s intentional and sometimes it’s subconscious. Check out the gender bias studies that have been done with kids. Babies who are too young to know their names are already being trained into their gender roles.

When male daycare staff workers were asked to wake up children, without being given any specific direction, their behavior was remarkably different based on the gender. Boys were woken up loudly. Maybe shaken a little. “Time to get up champ! Up and at ‘em!”

While girls got woken gently with soft voices. “Time to wake up, sweetie. Awww, I know you’re sleepy, but it will be snack time soon.” It was instinctive to be softer with the girls, because that’s how they were raised.

I’m not getting off track, don’t worry. It’s all connected.

Because of this early, often unintentional training, you still have boys being taught that girls are fragile and delicate. And on the flip side you still have girls being taught they are supposed to be better behaved, quieter, and in general easier. You might even say… submissive.

This is all connected to the older idea of chivalry that presents women as the weaker sex, needing to be protected, and it is something that we, as a society, have started to grow out of. Change is slow, but it’s happening, and that’s good, because while chivalry probably had its place, it caused a whole bunch of problems to overcome.

The most obvious is that if women have to be protected because they are ‘weaker’, then women also have to be controlled ‘for their own good’ and that helped to establish men as the rulers and the boss of the family.  It set up a world where women were dependent on men for all their needs. I think most of us agree that this is better left in the past.

And yes, I say this as a woman who identifies as mostly submissive.

It might be fun to fantasize about living in older times when you were forced to obey, but I don’t think very many women would enjoy the experience. Willing submission, made with eager consent, is a much better reality.

Now, in many places there is a growing trend to teach all children not to use their hands or be rough with anyone, which is better than focusing on just being nice to one gender. It sets up equality from an early age, which is good for both boys and girls. How many men, remember, as a child, getting in huge trouble for hitting a girl who hit them first? Lots, I bet.

And I bet it felt really unfair, especially when she didn’t get in trouble.

How many women, remember as a child, being expected to be quieter, cleaner, to set an example for the boys? How many remember being told, as little girls, that a boy was being mean to you because he liked you? “Oh honey, Timmy only pulls your hair because he thinks you’re cute.” That was also unfair and sets women up to believe that men who are being mean or abusive are doing it out of love.

All of these are problems that come from raising kids to think one gender is weaker than the other, but that was the norm up until the newest generations. Which means, many men grew up with the lesson being ingrained in them, that you ‘Don’t hit girls!’ and “You can’t be rough with girls!” and it stuck.

Now, you might be thinking… “Well, if they’re being taught not to be rough with anyone, won’t that still mean they feel it’s wrong even when consensual?”

Maybe. But when you approach your partner in equality, without thinking of them as being more delicate or fragile, it’s a lot easier to take them at their word, when they say they want something.

You’ll always have partners, of any gender, in any pairing, who worry about being too rough, or hurting their love, but probably not with the same frequency that we find men unwilling to try out kink with female partners. And it most likely won’t be with that same sick feeling inside that they are doing something bad and wrong.

What we have now, is kinky women who would love to play with their partners in a submissive or bottom role, but their male partners are struggling with that early life training, which tells them it’s wrong.

You can ask to be spanked or choked. You can say you want it. You can even beg, but something deep inside of them says, ‘You can’t be rough with girls!’. He might be kinky himself, but has suppressed it his whole life, because it feels wrong.

Or he might be vanilla and normally willing to try new things with you in the bedroom, but in this case… he just can’t. Maybe he makes the attempt, but it falls flat. He doesn’t spank hard enough. He won’t grab you and throw you on the bed the way you want him to.

It can be an extreme source of frustration on both sides. Sometimes it leads to women deciding to fill their needs with someone else. They might end the relationship. They might decide together to open it to allow another partner (with or without sex) specifically for those kink needs. Or the woman might just hide a Dom on the side.

I don’t judge people who do this, because I don’t think a ‘need’ is optional. If your partner won’t give you something that you consider a need, your choices are limited, and sometimes you have to work with that.

But most of the time I do see women trying hard to make it work with their partner. They come into groups asking, “How can I get my partner to do XYZ? I feel like I’m going to go crazy if I can’t have it, but he just won’t.” And it’s heartbreaking, because their partner might be a perfect match in every other way.

Now, I do see this changing with the younger generations.

With Boomers, X-gen, and Elder Millennials giving up and taking a Dom on the sly, was just something you had to do most of the time. People got married without ever discussing their darker fantasies, or kinky desires because they were ‘bad’.

And women could usually tell instinctively if their husbands would not only refuse to act in a Dom role, but would also react very badly to finding out their wife was kinky, especially when it came to physical acts like spanking. I know women who lost their kids, their jobs, even their families, because their husband exposed their kinky side in court.

So admitting these things to a husband/boyfriend if there was the slightest possibility he would be judgmental about it, was a real risk prior to about 2005-ish.

And I have focused mostly on women who were trying to get their male partners to play with them, because, as I said, I see them asking about it a lot. It’s their question I’m trying to answer here, and I want them to feel seen, but since I’m not going to go over all of this again in an article specifically for the men, I want to point out here that men often had similar issues about confessing kinky fantasies.

Men who were kinky, and expressed desires to spank their wives or tie them up were often met with shock and horror, because the women had the same early training, which told them that men were supposed to always treat them gently.

It translates to ‘A real man wouldn’t hit a woman!’. So if your partner wants to hit you… that means he wants to abuse you. That’s bad and wrong even if he’s just asking you to try it. And women often reacted badly.

Submissive men who wanted their wives to dominate them sometimes did better, but not always. Women who are raised as the ‘weaker sex’ often have trouble dominating men, unless it comes natural to them from their own desires.

Things are changing. Even before 50Shades came out in 2011, kink was edging its way into mainstream. People were starting to understand it better, which set the stage for 50Shades to blow the roof off the paddle closet.

So for the last 15 years (or so) open communication in relationships, about kinky desires and needs, has been become increasingly more common. Which sometimes leads to women finding out much earlier if their partner is going to be a complete match. Also open relationships, poly relationships are much more common, which can be a solution for a man who doesn’t want to be involved in a kinky dynamic.

But these changes are relatively new, and many people were still raised with gender stereotypes, which leaves us with a problem to deal with. Knowing how we got here and why can help sometimes. That’s why I went through the whole history.

It’s possible that talking through the situation with your male partner, logically dealing with what might have caused this issue, may help him to move beyond those early childhood lessons. We don’t always know why we react in certain ways to certain things, and sometimes having it pointed out to us can help. An outside perspective can open things up.

I do have one other suggestion that might help. Sometimes getting out of your own head and situation can give you a new point of view. Roleplay in the bedroom can be great for this.

Maybe husband John has problems tying up and spanking his wife Jane, and he can’t get past the idea of hurting someone he loves, no matter how much she wants it. But the angry stalker who trailed Jane home from the grocery store, to punish her for stealing his parking space, may not have that same issue.

If he can’t move past the conditioning he got as a child, maybe being in the headspace of someone else can help. It may feel a little silly at first, but Roleplay (RP) is a tried-and-true method of adding some spice to the bedroom, for multiple reasons.

One of them is that you get to try on another personality for a while, and that can mean doing things you wouldn’t normally be comfortable with. Imagine being an angry mob boss, or a super villain, or even a college professor who is tired of a bratty student being sarcastic in his class.

Pick your role and do a little homework on it. Hype yourself up for the game. Maybe watch some movies on the theme to get you in the mood. Consider props, even clothes that go with that character.

The deeper into the headspace you go, the easier it will be to act like that character would. Maybe John can’t spank the mother of his kids hard, but he can paddle the heck out of some Karen who slapped him in a bar.

It’s definitely not going to hurt to give it a try. But it might take a few attempts to get past feeling silly about it. In the end, you have to want it to work, and not everyone will want to get past this issue.

And that’s the real problem. If your partner genuinely does not want to engage in kink, you can’t force them to. They have the right to their boundaries, but you also have the right to have needs met.

So if they won’t make an effort there may not be a resolution to the situation. That’s an unfortunate reality in some relationships, and it’s going to leave you with some tough decisions. Is this a need you can’t live without? Or is it just something you want, but you can enjoy vicariously through romance novels and handle never getting to live it out in the real world?

I’d love to hear from women who have been in this situation and how they resolved it, if they ever did. Comments are open, and as always if you need privacy you can email me through the contact form.