The myth dies hard because it was baked into the bedtime stories we never questioned. Somewhere between the fairy-tale castle and the wedding aisle we absorbed the quiet promise that women are a gentler species, softer of gaze and instinct, stumbling through life with their sexuality switched off unless love provides the password. The screen glowed on our desks and in our palms, and still we pretended the digital world had not followed her into the bedroom, had not slipped beneath the blankets while the fairy godmothers weren’t looking. We kept the story going because it felt safer than admitting that the same internet opening worlds for us also opened worlds inside her, and that she walked through them with curiosity that was sometimes tender, sometimes ravenous, sometimes both in the same hour.
The truth is less picturesque and therefore more human. She has seen the same cascades of images you have, maybe earlier, maybe more quietly, because society trained her to mute the volume. She has googled questions her mother would flinch at, deleted browser histories not out of shame but out of habit, laughed at memes that would make the wedding photographer blush. She has measured her own body against the bodies on the screen and arrived at a verdict that fluctuates by the day, sometimes by the minute. She has imagined strangers in detail and then closed the laptop to make tea, has felt desire arrive uninvited and dissipate before the kettle whistles. None of this makes her fallen, nor does it make her heroic; it makes her alive in a century when electricity travels faster than shame.
Men who still clutch the angel story are not protecting virtue; they are protecting a script that keeps them in the spotlight as the sole authors of desire. The fantasy insists that she waits, pristine, for awakening by someone worthy, which conveniently places him at the center of her narrative. It spares him the discomfort of imagining that her fantasies might not include him, might not include anyone he recognizes as himself. It spares him the more vertiginous thought that she may already know exactly what she wants and has simply decided he is not it. The angel story is not about preserving her innocence; it is about preserving his insulation from rejection, from competition, from the possibility that her inner world is richer and more crowded than he ever supposed.
Letting the story die means sitting with the throb of ordinary insecurity that every human confronts when they realize the world does not revolve around their own hunger. It means recognizing that her sexual imagination was never a vacant lot waiting for someone to build; it was always a city with neighborhoods, traffic patterns, districts under renovation, some places open to tourists and others gated, and the map keeps changing. She is not a mystery to be solved but a sovereignty to be respected. The passport stamp she offers is temporary, revocable, and does not grant ownership of the territory.
This is not an invitation to cynicism, nor is it a claim that every woman is secretly libertine. Some women cultivate quiet gardens, some host carnivals, some alternate between the two according to season. The point is that the choice is hers, shaped by appetite and context and chance, not by a cosmic assignment to keep men morally comfortable. What she desires today may bore her next year; what repels her tonight may beckon in a decade. The only constant is that the steering wheel is in her grip, and the destination is not required to match the travel brochure you once drafted for her in your head.
The healthiest gift a man can offer is to stop auditioning for the role of awakener and simply ask, with sincerity and no script, what she is looking for right now, knowing the answer might be nothing, or something he cannot provide, or something delightful they can build together for as long as it lasts. If he can hear any of those replies without crumbling into resentment or triumph, he will finally be talking to a woman instead of a pedestal he keeps hoping will lower itself to his height.
