"I, with a deeper instinct, choose a man who compels my strength, who makes enormous demands on me, who does not doubt my courage or my toughness, who does not believe me naive or innocent, who has the courage to treat me like a woman"
About this Quote
Nin is staging desire as a referendum on power, not protection. The sentence is a long, accumulating act of selection - "I...choose" followed by a relentless list of requirements - that reads like both confession and manifesto. Its momentum matters: she doesn’t drift into attraction; she argues herself into it, as if she’s rewriting the script that casts women as fragile and men as caretakers.
The key bait-and-switch is in "compels my strength". Compulsion usually implies coercion, yet Nin frames it as the condition that summons her best self. She’s not asking to be dominated; she’s asking to be met. "Enormous demands" becomes a form of respect, a refusal to patronize. The subtext is a rejection of the soft bigotry of low expectations: the man she wants is not one who reassures her, but one who assumes she can take the hit - intellectually, emotionally, erotically.
Then Nin sharpens the blade: "who does not believe me naive or innocent". That line isn’t just about sexual experience; it’s about refusing a cultural fantasy of female purity that keeps women legible only as girls. When she lands on "the courage to treat me like a woman", she’s reclaiming "woman" from its usual double bind (saint or siren) and making it mean full agency: complex, durable, desiring, accountable.
Contextually, it tracks with Nin’s lifelong project: using erotic and diaristic writing to insist that female interiority isn’t decoration. The provocation is that equality, for her, isn’t gentleness - it’s being taken seriously enough to be challenged.
The key bait-and-switch is in "compels my strength". Compulsion usually implies coercion, yet Nin frames it as the condition that summons her best self. She’s not asking to be dominated; she’s asking to be met. "Enormous demands" becomes a form of respect, a refusal to patronize. The subtext is a rejection of the soft bigotry of low expectations: the man she wants is not one who reassures her, but one who assumes she can take the hit - intellectually, emotionally, erotically.
Then Nin sharpens the blade: "who does not believe me naive or innocent". That line isn’t just about sexual experience; it’s about refusing a cultural fantasy of female purity that keeps women legible only as girls. When she lands on "the courage to treat me like a woman", she’s reclaiming "woman" from its usual double bind (saint or siren) and making it mean full agency: complex, durable, desiring, accountable.
Contextually, it tracks with Nin’s lifelong project: using erotic and diaristic writing to insist that female interiority isn’t decoration. The provocation is that equality, for her, isn’t gentleness - it’s being taken seriously enough to be challenged.
Quote Details
| Topic | Romantic |
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