“The Way of the Superior Man” (David Deida) is about a lot more than pleasing “women”
David Deida’s little handbook “The Way of the Superior Man: A Spiritual Guide to Mastering the Challenges of Women, Work, and Sexual Desire”, from Sounds True (Boulder Colorado) or from Simon and Schuster, originally published in 1997, updated in 2004 and 2017 for paperback, seems at first glance to apply to heterosexual men gaining satisfaction from women. Perhaps the table of contents looks sexist and offputting, perhaps for today’s culture wars and especially in Portland.
The meat of this book is in the introduction, which refers to his earlier 1995 book “Intimate Communion” (I can remember a literary agent’s marking up my Introduction more than anything else in a critical edit of my first book back in 1996; I even remember reading his entire edit in a bar in Washington State as I took it with me on a trip!) He talks about the results of feminism, which itself has become a convoluted topic (look at the uproar about trans women in women’s sports, for openers).
Before going further, let me share a twitter thread from the Associated Press Stylebook about the proper words for women in reporting, like “mistress”. Yes, the news sensitivities of the Left!
Deida writes candidly, p. 3, “Sexual attraction is based on sexual polarity, which is the force of passion that arcs between masculine and feminine poles”. On p. 5 he writes with emphasis “You don’t need this difference for love, but you do need it for ongoing sexual passion.” On p. 6 he refers to a masculine “mission” as freedom (or power) for feminine it is love.
On p. 7 he writes about the “more balanced essence” of many men and women, with emphasis on gay men and women. (He doesn’t mention non-binary, but that was hardly discussed in the 90s.) The way our brains work, we need to experience polarity in order to “get it up”. That means even a cis male who is less capable of projecting power might feel excitement at submitting to a male who is more powerful, which presents a practical and perhaps a moral paradox, offering kinks into the way a larger society will work. Although almost the entire rest of the book defines a heterosexual man’s success relative to the way he relates to his woman (women), the author seems willing, if unsure, to try to apply it to gay couples, realizing that superiority lives here. His approach seems to put women in an unbalanced position, to say the least.
As I’ve covered before, Paul Rosenfels had covered polarity (e.g. “the polarities”) and personality rebalancing (or “character specialization”) in his books, and with his leadership of the Ninth Street Center in New York City (East Village) in the 1970s and 1980s.
The titles of the eight parts of the book (rather like the eight parts of Shakespeare’s theater), like “working with polarity and energy”, “what women really want” (this was a 2000 film that Roger Ebert liked) , “your dark side”, and “body practices” (like “body analysis” in the “Andromeda Strain”, hopefully without photoflash epilation by whole body radiation) – he gets into ejaculation and what getting on really means.
The other concept that goes along with this discussion is “personal agency”. More “balanced” people may still have a lot of individual agency and become influential publicly, and that drives a lot of the culture wars (it contradicts “critical theory” and more general ideas in Marxism, that people have no right to benefit from unearned wealth created by the previous sacrificial labor of others). Sometimes the term is associated with George Mack (typical tweet about “high agency”). But the motive for personal autonomy (a synonym) can under the surface involve sexual satisfaction, even with paradox (like in cis gay men, at least in my own person experience and life story, filled with ironic turning points like a TV series of many episodes). Ib my own blogging I have previously tended to use the terms “hyperindividualism” and “personal autonomy” interchangeably back to 2006 or so. Another convenient term is “personal sovereignty”.
Sometimes, personal agency increases with a process I have called “upward affiliation“, for which some gay men find to be an inviting, if paradoxical “quantum” strategy, almost a psychological diffraction process. In the straight world, you hear this idea expressed when a heterosexual man is judged by the women he attracts, “that’s the best he can do.”
There is a “review” of the book by screenwriting guru (“Practical Screenwriting” group on Facebook) Tyler Mowery, in a series called “The Writers Mind”, Episode 11, “Processes v. Goals””), dated March 26.
But Episode 13 deals with “The Superiority Complex” in a constructive sense as in this book (here talking particularly about impulse control) and also mentions a 2014 NY Times op-ed by Amy Chua and Jed Rubenfeld, “What drives success?”’ since then, Any Chua has written a lot about identarian tribalism (even in Portland!) and “individual success” has come to be viewed as an oppressive expectation by the far Left. Then Episode 16 talks about a “high agency person” (as just did above), and refers to “The Ayn Rand Lexicon” (edited by Harry Binswanger) at about 17 minutes in. This is a subscription Patreon channel, and the viewer must purchase a subscription to watch the even-numbered episodes (a common way Patreon channels are customarily set up).
Author: David Deida
Title, Subtitle: “The Way of the Superior Man: A Spiritual Guide to Mastering the Challenges of Women, Work, and Sexual Desire”
publication date 1997, 2004. 2017
ISBN 978-1-62203832-9
Publication: Sounds True, 201 pages paper (e-book), 8 parts, 51 short chapters
Link: official
(Posted: Wednesday, April 14, 2021 at 2 PM EDT)