Patriarchal Sex: The Pattern Keeping Couples From Real Intimacy

I truly believe that the doorway of perimenopause and menopause is not just a woman's story. It's a man's story too. 

The evolution of woman. The evolution of man. And the evolution of relationship.

This is what our times are calling for us all — to evolve beyond what has held men and women in gridlock, and evolve towards Love. It's the only logical answer right now. If we are committed to living in Love, then we must commit to live beyond conventional sex.

Men and women have been hypnotised into thinking what we have lived with sexually is all there is. Blindfolded. It's time to let the light in.

This was my reflection after I recently sat down with Devashi Shakti in this episode called Menopause and Making Love for her Podcast, Beyond the Patriarchal Spell, a conversation that stayed with me long after we finished recording. It was one of those rare exchanges that felt less like an interview and more like a shared inquiry — two people willing to look honestly at something most of us were never given permission to question.

Devashi has a phrase she uses in her work, one that I have to admit I found challenging to sit with at first: patriarchal sex.

Since it's not a term I coined, if I'm honest, speaking to it directly stretched something in me. But it also opened something. It gave language to a pattern I have felt in my own life, and witnessed in couple after couple, for a very long time. 

Because so many of us have been living inside a version of sex — and a version of ourselves — that was never actually ours to begin with.

When I contemplated with this term Patriarchal sex, four words kept surfacing: performance, pressure, pleasing, appeasing.

It's not about men as such. It's about a pattern in both genders. When I first sit with a couple, I often notice the same pattern underneath - the yearning to reconnect, the tension, the distance, or quiet resentment.

Intimacy that is often absent. Sex that is trying to get somewhere, rather than simply be. Bodies bracing instead of opening. One partner performing so as not to disappoint. The other pleasing so as to feel safe and keep the peace.

It's often not that love isn't there. It's that love and sex has become distanced, as if almost divorced from each other, and nobody had ever taught us how to bring them back in alignment with one another.

Not his fault. Not her fault.

When I sit with a couple, I often say:

This is not a "him" problem. This is not a "her" problem.

The distance they feel, the devastation, the mismatch is a sexual conditioning issue. It's universal. It's not personal. His, taught to perform. Hers, taught to please and appease to ultimately keep the peace. Neither of them chose it consciously. Both of them are, in their own way, longing for the same thing: to connect, to love.

Men often carry a pressure they rarely get to say out loud — the fear of never quite being enough. Women often carry a quiet erosion of self, learned so early we don't even know it's happening.

Both are true. Both deserve compassion. Neither is the villain.

From Absence to Presence

Here is what I have come to believe, in decades of doing this work:

The pain in so many relationships isn't a lack of love.

It's absence.

Absence dressed up as normal. Absence we've called "just how sex is." And that's what hurts so much. What causes so much damage.

And the way back isn't more effort, more technique, or trying harder at the same old pattern. or just avoiding it altogether. Which admittedly many women decide to do. For good reasons.

But the way back is presence. It's slowing down enough to actually feel — sensation, emotion, each other — instead of performing our way to the end. 

Because our sexual conditioning is so strong, a re-learning is required. It's a gentle, sometimes tender unraveling of everything we were quietly taught to believe about sex, love, and our own bodies.

But it is possible. I have watched it happen, again and again, in the couples who let themselves be met differently.

When couples begin to shift from performance to presence, something in the whole relationship begins to soften. Not just in the bedroom. Everywhere.

If something in this has touched a place in you — if you recognise the absence, the performance, the ache for something more real between you and the person you love — you don't have to carry that alone, and you don't need to have it all figured out before you reach out.

Join the Waitlist for The Making Love Retreat HERE and you'll be the first to know of the newly released dates in 2027. 

You're welcome to book a private 30-minute call with me. We can simply talk about where you are, and what a different way forward might look like for the two of you.

Or you can read more about The Making Love Retreat here.

~ Listen to Janet's conversation with Devashi Shakti on the Beyond the Patriarchal Spell podcast — you can listen to the full episode there. As part of this ongoing inquiry, Devashi is also collecting anonymous responses from men and women for the book she's writing alongside the podcast — if you'd like to add your voice, you can do so here. ~

***If you're navigating anything involving coercion, abuse, or an unsafe relationship dynamic, please reach out to an appropriately qualified professional — this work is not a substitute for that support.