55% of Men Are the Guilty Traditional, and They Don't Even Know It
55% of Men Are the Guilty Traditional, and They Don't Even Know It
Master and I made a quiz. Two of them, actually. It was pretty impromptu, even though he had been wanting to do a quiz for Why Submissive Women Are Happier since before I was even done writing the book. He loves a quiz. I love a quiz.
We put it out, I posted it everywhere, Instagram, X, Facebook, YouTube, and within not even six hours we had around fifty people answer. When I asked my Claude, my personal AI, how many that was per hour, he said 5.6. That surprised me. That is a lot of people sitting down to answer a quiz about submission.
And one result kept coming up. Over and over. 55% of the people who took it got the same thing: the guilty traditional.
What "the guilty traditional" actually means
You know how quizzes work. You answer some questions and you get told you are a romantic boheme, or a hardcore worker, or you are Hufflepuff, or you are Gryffindor. Same, same. So we built categories. Answer this way, you are more like this.
And 55% of people, mostly men, landed on the guilty traditional.
Here is what that means. These are men who want a submissive woman, and they know they want it. This is the important part. They are not on the fence. They are not looking to be convinced. They are not saying, oh, maybe, I don't really know. No. They know they want a woman who is at ease in her femininity, nurturing, who supports a man and his decisions. They want traditional gender roles. They want to be the man who leads.
And again, I am not talking about BDSM here. I am not talking about a girl who stays home barefoot. I did not Google that expression, by the way, the pregnant and barefoot one. I have a feeling it means what I think it means, so I left it alone.
What I mean is, a submissive woman can still be empowered. She can be the best woman you have ever had in your life. She can be me. I am a submissive woman, and I run this podcast. Same, same, but different.
So these men know exactly what they want. The catch is they feel terrible about wanting it.
They are not asking for permission. They are asking if they're a monster.
This is the line from the quiz results that I cannot stop thinking about. These men were not looking to be told, oh no, this is the right way to live. The quiz just let them input what they actually wanted in a person, anonymously, with nobody watching.
And what came through was not a request for validation. It was something sadder.
"They're not asking for permission or validation. They're just saying, and I love this thing, please tell me I'm not a monster for wanting this." — Marian
Please tell me I'm not a monster. For wanting a woman to lean on him. For wanting to lead. Master heard that and his reaction was immediate.
"That is scary. Again, they're guilty. They want it. More than 50% of men that answer want it. They feel guilty." — Master
And then he said something honest, which is that he still feels it too.
"And to be honest, I still feel that way. I mean, it's okay, we're in a relationship, it's fine. But if I would be single, I think I would feel with the 50% of the guy." — Master
So this is not some fringe thing. More than half of the men who answered carry this around.
Where the guilt comes from
The conflict is not hard to trace. Most of these men have been told, over and over in recent years, that wanting a more traditional dynamic, wanting a submissive woman, makes them something. Toxic. Controlling. Misogynistic. Bad for women.
And that messaging has done something to them. It has left a lot of men just throwing up their hands and saying, fine, equality, because I do not want to fight. I do not want to be misperceived. I do not want people thinking I am this bad person, which I am not. I'm just a guy.
Wanting to be a man is treated as wrong now. Just being masculine in a healthy, normal way gets called extreme, unhealthy, toxic. So men retreat. They stop saying what they want out loud, and they feel guilty for still wanting it underneath.
What they are actually hungry for is rare. A woman's perspective that says, your preference is okay. That is what I keep running into when I talk to other women, and it is the part that confuses everybody.
"When I talk to most women, like on Bumble or just most women, a lot of them are like, oh yeah, I'm submissive, I totally agree. But then when they go on dates with guys, they're like, no, I'm not submissive." — Marian
Between women, they will admit it. With men, suddenly they have something to protect, so they are not anymore. No wonder the men are confused. No wonder they feel like they are wanting something forbidden. They keep getting told one thing and shown another.
What this tells us about modern men
So here is what 55% of our audience is quietly saying. They know what they want. They want traditional gender roles, they want a submissive woman, and they want to be the man who leads. Not oppressive. Leads. They want a woman who can lean on them, while they make decisions and move life forward. They want to offer that kind of support.
They are tired of being told it is wrong. And they are hungry for a woman's voice that validates the preference instead of shaming it.
That is what stays with me about this whole quiz. Not the number, though 55% is a lot. It is the guilt sitting underneath the number. There is nothing monstrous about a man wanting to lead and a woman wanting to lean. I have lived inside that exact dynamic with Master for eleven years, and it is the opposite of a cage. So no, you are not a monster. You just got told you were for too long, and you started to believe it.
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