It’s probably fair to say David Deida is the darling-in-chief of the men’s movement for conscious sexuality and relationship. Deida is a prolific writer and speaker about the “sexual and spiritual relationship between men and women.” His most famous work is The Way of the Superior Man, subtitled A Spiritual Guide to Mastering the Challenges of Women, Work, and Sexual Desire, and described as The Ultimate Spiritual Guide for Men.
I’ve casually encountered this book – and glowing mentions of it – both online and in meatspace, but it wasn’t until an intelligent, open-hearted, attractive female Facebook friend posted an extensive quote from it that I began to engage with it in a significant way. And when I did, I was profoundly troubled by what I found.
The Way of the Superior Man comprises 51 short, almost pithy chapters. It begins well, with Part One (“A Man’s Way”) giving excellent advice on how to live in a way that references your own values and purpose, continually invites challenge and growth, and takes personal responsibility for the unfolding of your relationship and your life at large. There’s nothing in this section that’s peculiar to men – it’s excellent advice for human beings, not only those of us who identify as male.
Part Two, called “Dealing with Women,” is where things start to get murky, if not yet bat-shit crazy. In its first chapter, Women are not Liars, Deida explains that what women say “is often more a reflection of a transient feeling-wave than a well considered stance”. On balance, this is probably true, albeit (a) true also of men’s pronouncements and (b) troublingly close to suggesting that men not take women seriously (which he does actually go on to say explicitly, unless, he qualifies, “she is in the full flow of love when she says it”). Other chapters in Part Two encourage us to stay present with her even when she is intensely emotional, and to praise her often (women respond better to praise, astoundingly. Men, as we all know, can’t stand the stuff.)
Starting with the idea that a woman’s word is not to be trusted, Deida moves on to say that “when a woman is bitchy and complaining”, that’s not entirely her fault – it’s more that she lacks being penetrated by love – and the action of the Superior Man here is to do whatever he can to open her. This assertion and several others in Part Two are easy to deride in a superficial or acontextual reading that ignores their underlying wisdom (e.g. encouraging men to remain present, demonstrate direction and decisiveness, give love before analysis, and not to tolerate in a way that leads to resentment). But to deride them is entirely valid: despite (or even because of) the wisdom Deida points towards, it is shocking that he makes these assertions without the caveats and cautions that rescue them from unreconstructed gender-essentialism and outright sexism. Deida is intelligent enough to have included said caveats, but he did not. That it is possible to read misogyny in his writing is his fault alone, and a grievous one.
Part Three, Working with Polarity and Energy, is easier on the brain. Some quotes detract from its value (e.g. “Feminine women are free to feel flows of natural livingness that you are unable to feel”) and some statistical assertions seem pulled from thin air (“80% of all men have a more masculine sexual essence”) but overall it’s a useful piece on exploring the texture of sexual desire, appreciating the invigorating beauty of the feminine, and how to relate with a woman who complements (not “compliments [sic]”) your own energy.
Part Four, What Women Really Want is the most egregious in the book. Although it opens with a pithy injunction to seek honest feedback on whether a potential mate really wants you or is simply playing hard-to-get, it continues to a chapter called What She Wants is Not What She Says. Alarm bells ring, and rightly so. The theme evidenced in this chapter characterises the book as a whole, and is the single greatest reason to reject it with contempt.
The chapter features a heterosexual encounter in which the woman literally begs the man to come inside her (“I want you to come inside of me,” she begged. “I want you to fill me with your seed.”) When he does, she is upset, responding to his confusion with, “Yes, but I said that in order to feel that you were strong enough not to!”
This, Deida tells us, is a woman’s way of testing us in order to feel our masculine strength and clarity of purpose, without which she cannot trust us, without which she cannot “relax into her feminine.”
Your woman probably tests you in this way all the time. Her ultimate desire is to feel your full consciousness, your trustable integrity, your unshakable love, and your confidence in your mission. Yet she will rarely ask you directly for these things. She would rather try to distract you from your truth, and then feel that she cannot—that you hold fast to your truth while you continue to love her.
If you are a weak man, this feminine trait of wanting one thing and asking for another will piss you off. You will wonder, “Why don’t you just tell me what you really want, instead of saying one thing and meaning another, expecting me to figure it out?” This is the view of a man who does not understand that women are an incarnation of the divine feminine.
It’s hard to take this seriously enough to critique it with a straight face, as the sheer number of Deida’s apologists suggests I ought. Let me list a few of the questionable assertions at play here:
- Your woman is not to be indulged when she asks for something.
- Instead you must do what you want, because that is more masculine.
- You will please your woman more if you do this.
- If it annoys you that she wants one thing and asks for another, you may be a weak man.
This is all three of (1) sexist, (2) contradictory, and (3) psychologically twisted. The sexism is obvious and needs no elaboration. The contradiction lies in the man’s motivation for denying his [sic] woman’s request and going his own way instead: he chooses thus not in order to be true to himself but because it will please her. It is twisted because, as Deida would have it, women will test their man’s masculinity (twisted) by pretending to want something (more twisted) so that he can withhold that thing (very twisted) and, in the withholding, please them (twisted all the way round).
Are men to have no more truth-to-themselves than that which pleases their woman in this twisted way, a way that depends upon both parties accepting dubious and prescriptive notions of masculinity and femininity? Are women so vacuous that they cannot be relied upon to mean what they say, or so weak that they cannot “relax into their feminine” without first testing their man’s masculine? For me, the answer to both questions is a resounding no. Men and women are much greater than that. If that is Deida’s world, I want precisely none of it.
It stands as a curious and somewhat aggravating irony that it’s precisely in burying Deida in this way that I fulfil his prescription of masculinity. I don’t give two figs for his vision of my masculinity (and therefore I match it well) but I do care that attractive and otherwise intelligent women might make Deida-fanhood a sine qua non of thinking well of a man.
I’m also sensitive to the possibility that, as a man who has meditated for nine years and worked quite avidly on my inner world and intimate relationships, I’m not Deida’s target audience. Perhaps he will be of more use to men with less experience of emotional intimacy and self-awareness work, but I remain disturbed that such toxic dynamics are endorsed by people who mean so well. As an unknown man on a Deida-appreciation Facebook thread said to a woman, “May I pass every test your love can devise for me, and more.” It’s that kind of horror I won’t ever sanction.
Asylury 