Love & Passion Quote by Betty Dodson

Sex is one of the few arenas where masculinity is still graded like a performance review: either you "know what you're doing" or you don't deserve to be on the stage. Betty Dodson punctures that script with a blunt reversal. The line sets up a familiar assumption - that asking questions is embarrassing, unmanly, proof of incompetence - then flips the moral math. Silence stops being stoic; it becomes stupid.

The intent is practical and political at once. Dodson, a sex educator who spent decades insisting that pleasure is learnable (not mystical, not owed, not automatic), frames curiosity as a form of intelligence and care. "Very hard" acknowledges the cultural penalty men pay for vulnerability. But the second sentence functions like a permission slip with teeth: if you're smart, you ask. Not "if you're sensitive" or "if you're enlightened" - smart. She recruits ego to dismantle ego.

The subtext is consent and reciprocity. Questions are how you find out what someone wants, where boundaries are, what language feels safe, what history is in the room. Dodson is also side-eyeing the porn-trained myth that sex is a universal user manual men are supposed to have memorized. If you treat your partner as a person rather than a puzzle to solve alone, you ask.

Context matters: Dodson emerged from post-60s sexual politics and the feminist push to demystify anatomy and pleasure. Her work challenged the idea that women should quietly accommodate male certainty. Here, she offers men a way out: drop the act, pick up the vocabulary.