Confident, not controlling: what "take charge in bed" actually means

When a woman asks a male partner to "be more assertive in bed," those words are typically landing differently than she intends — and differently than he's hearing them. This is a gendered language problem, and it's causing real confusion, frustration, and disappointment in real relationships. There is a real vocabulary mismatch about "dominance" and "assertiveness" rooted in how men and women are socialized differently as children around anger, aggression, and sexuality — and once you see it,...