Women’s Greatest Enemy

Kate Burton, MD
ILLUMINATION’S MIRROR
6 min readJan 9, 2024
Overcoming pride means embracing humility, openness, and connection with others. Designed by the author using Canva pro images.

I’m Dr. Jane, and today’s topic is women’s greatest enemy in the context of the sexual marketplace.

Women’s Greatest Enemy

What is the one thing that most prevents women from getting the relationships they want with the men they desire? It’s very simple, ladies. In a word, women’s greatest enemy is pride. Your greatest enemy is pride. Everything you want with respect to men is on the other side of that pride.

Let me tell you, ladies, pride is very cold company; it will not keep you warm at night. In today’s article, I’m going to be discussing three of the main ways your pride is keeping you single.

Pride and Self-Perception

First and foremost, your pride tells you that you are the prize, and you are not, at least not after you turn 30. At 30, the average man’s sexual marketplace value exceeds the average woman’s sexual marketplace value for the very first time, and that gap only increases as time goes on.

Believing that you are the prize intrinsically and not just the prize relatively and temporarily is a form of pride. This pride motivates you to squander your most fertile and attractive years, the years in which you would most likely be able to secure a committed relationship with a high-value man by either having fun or prioritizing your career.

You’ve conflated the privileged moment you pass through with your inherent self-worth, and this is why you think that there’s no hurry. Once the prize, always the prize.

Pride and Initiation

This sense of pride also stops you from initiating. Like, why would I do that? I shouldn’t have to make anything happen for myself. That’s the man’s job. In any way, it will happen when it happens. I have plenty of time.

Okay, just go back in time, like 60 years. Men didn’t pursue women; it was women who pursued men. It was women who dragged men, sometimes kicking and screaming, to the altar. They did this because they are the ones on a tighter timeline. For better or worse

Okay, all right. The second way that pride is obstructing your success is that it’s causing you to disparage male sexuality.

Perception of Male Sexuality

A lot of Western women even seem to find male sexual interest insulting. It’s as if men should be appreciating the beauty of your mind and the depths of your soul rather than your physical appearance. You think that men’s attraction has little to do with you, the person inside your body, and that, in any case, if they just want sex, they’d be better off hiring a prostitute. This attitude is basically that sex and physical attraction are beneath you, which is a form of Pride.

The Role of Sexual Attraction

Now, this might hurt some feelings, but ladies, you have to understand that if men did not experience sexual attraction to you, the vast majority of them would have nothing to do with you. This is because men can generally get all their other needs met more cheaply, more easily, and more enjoyably with other men. For example, men would rather talk about quantum mechanics and Shakespearean literature with other men. They’d rather problem-solve with and confide in other men. They’d rather hang out with and have fun with other men.

Understanding Male Behavior

Do you see, without men’s sexual attraction, (heterosexual man), is primed for feminine traits? More generally, a man might only rarely have dealings with women in the normal course of events, and this is really how humans have organically organized themselves across cultures and throughout history. Men generally spend their time with other men. Women generally spend their time with other women, and there’s some social commingling at the end of the day.

Reframing Male Interest

So rather than see male sexual interest through the lens of your pride as something beneath you, ladies, you can see it as an opportunity to gain access to a particular man who may not yet have another reason for dealing with you. I get that you want to be seen for who you are deep down inside, but spoiler alert: men can’t see who you are deep down inside. What they see is your body, and if they didn’t see that, they probably wouldn’t be making the effort to see anything else.

Dealing with Unwanted Attention

What’s more, men can hear what comes out of your mouths now, and they can appreciate that unwanted sexual interest is awkward and uncomfortable. I understand that, but I don’t believe men genuinely care about getting to know you if criticism, judgment, and shame are the initial emotions that emerge in response to my attraction. What’s just on the inside is distasteful enough.

Pride and Domesticity

The third thing that gets in women’s way in the sense of their pride is their contempt for anything related to domesticity, cooking, cleaning, or childcare. “Just hire a maid. Just hire a nanny.” You think that this is low-value, degrading work that, in any case, would prevent you from fulfilling what is apparently your true calling in life: being an employee.

The Irony of Obedience

The same women who insist that they could never ever be obedient to a man spend the majority of their lives being obedient to their often male employers; they trade a family for a paycheck.

This is the pride that cuts off the nose to spite the face, ladies.

The Simplicity of Laundry

It’s not laundry, which, thanks to modern technology, is literally the easiest of all the household chores to complete. You’re not down at the river bank with a washboard, scrubbing out the stains with a lie you rendered yourself from pig fat. You’re moving the clothes from the hamper to the washer and pushing a button. Laundry is not your enemy; it’s your idea of laundry that is. And this goes for most of the other domestic activities.

The Key to a Successful Relationship

As I mentioned in the first episode of this series, the key to getting the relationship you want with the man you want to have it with is to be useful. And in order to be useful, you have to allow yourself to be used. Your pride will rankle at that, but that’s a fact.

The Reward of Being Useful

The good news is that as long as you exercise good discernment, you will be rewarded for being used. It’s just like a job. Because you allow other people to use your time, skills, and expertise, you are compensated with money. If you don’t allow people to use you, you don’t get paid, right? The same is true for relationships. If you want a high-value relationship, you must allow yourselves to be used and to be used in the way that those who are paying, i.e., the men you want to have a relationship with, want to use you.

Useful or Decorative

And keep in mind that if something’s not useful, it’s decoration. So ladies, if you don’t want to be useful, then you damn well better be decorative. And the fact of the matter is that most of you are not attractive enough to be decorative, and that you might not like it even if you were. Why? Because what do decorations do? Nothing. They sit nice and quiet up on a shelf where they belong, attesting to the reflected stat of the man who bought them.

So, if you want a relationship with a man who isn’t primarily decorative, then you have to allow yourselves to be used by him. If not, then you are useless, and the world will pass you by. The things that make a man’s life easier and better are not beneath you; they are your ticket in. So those are the ways that pride is standing in your way, ladies. Resolve these issues, and you can have the relationships that you want with the men you want to have them with. What do you think? Does this fit with your own experience? As always, thank you for reading.

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Kate Burton, MD
ILLUMINATION’S MIRROR

I’m Kate, a doc and an audiobook narrator. Cat mama. Health/beauty. Got an audiobook project? Shoot me a text! 502-286-6346