THE WAY OF THE SUPERIOR MAN

This work by relationship counselor David Deida has some of the flavor of Kahlil Gibran's The Prophet. The exotic setting, the dialogues with interlocutors are not there. But Deida's work is organized into similar essays varying in length, similarly conversational in tone and, like Gibran's, Deida's advice is often radical and counter-intuitive.

A more meaningful comparison is to Sam Keen's Fire in the Belly. Deida demands the same sort of steadfast, passionate integrity and uncompromising self-examination. Just as Keen does, he discusses the ways that manhood and womanhood have changed over the past half-century, and explores their still-evolving character.

However, Keen's discussion is wide in scope, examining the whole subject of modern American manhood and womanhood and illuminating specific points with personal anecdotes. Deida, by contrast, focuses narrowly on the sexual relationship between a man and his woman, a relationship the man can perfect by emulating the "superior man". Where Keen is analytical, Deida is prescriptive. His goal is to enable men and women to envigorate their relationships from moment to moment, thereby maintaining the vigor and integrity of their larger lives in the world. He begins his introduction with these words:

Deida returns again and again to this theme of personal integrity, advising the masculine reader to own all his emotions and fully express them in the appropriate circumstance. This is the way to build and maintain one's masculine core, a vital faculty in every endeavor. At the same time, his "superior man" is constantly engaged in the world, always ready to meet it on its own terms. He directs his advice to the masculine partner of the couple, first defining the essentially masculine character1, then exhorting that character to be true to its nature when relating to its complement, the feminine. (Note that while the masculine partner is typically male, this is not always the case. Deida takes pains to be inclusive, pointing out that while 80% of men have a masculine core, 10% are essentially feminine (which is not to say they are gay, though they may be) and the remaining 10% are balanced. His advice, then, applies across the entire spectrum of sexual orientations.)

Challenge, or testing, is another of Deida's themes. He holds that a woman, by nature, will constantly test her man against aspects of her own femininity, hoping he will respond with mastery. If he does not, the relationship is diminished. Eventually the passion is leached out of it, and the two become estranged, either hostile and contemptuous or polite and distant. Deida views this loss of mutual passion, which he calls "depolarization", in rather apocalyptic terms. Consider this passage from page 167:

The superior man avoids this dismal outcome. He is not discomfited by even the wildest moods or the most contorted logic from his woman.1 Honoring the complementary polarities of their natures, he knows these are expressions of her feminine essence. He will proceed to "pervade" or "penetrate" her with fearless love. In this way he fulfills her deep nature as she, responding with feminine energy, fulfills his, thus rejuvenating their relationship. The highest form of this electric encounter leads to masculine and feminine polarities "feeling through" and blending into one another in ecstatic temporary dissolution of self.

Indeed, this comes across as the central idea to Deida's book — one he repeats in slightly different wording in almost every chapter. I surmise that it is also the core idea of the workshops he conducts. If in the book it seems rather vague and abstract, I trust this is only because details of application depend on the unique circumstances of individual cases. Clearly, as Michael Tucker says on the back of the book's dust jacket, David Deida "gets it" — he understands male-female relationships deeply. And there are other deep insights in these pages, notably the one about the virtues of older women.

Deida does delve into physical techniques in Part Seven of his book, Body Practices. He is an advocate of delaying or suppressing ejaculation.2 His "superior man" does this to prolong the time he spends being truly present for his woman in lovemaking. Only thus is he enabled to ravish her at her deepest core.

If the man does not learn this control, thus compensating for the physiological mismatch between male and female orgasms, his woman will be unsatisfied on some deep level. If she remains unsatisfied long enough, Deida warns, the results can be extremely unpleasant. He states:

The shortcomings of premature ejaculation, and the desirability of delaying it until the woman also reaches orgasm, are common knowledge. When a man ejaculates, he is almost certainly finished, exhausted, wiped out. His wad is shot. He is a victim of the "spurt and snore" syndrome. His woman may be pleased that she has given him pleasure. But on a deeper level, she is left unsatisfied. This leads to resentment and distrust. She begins to treat intercourse as a sort of contest, as Deida described it in the passage above. Nevertheless, I have three concerns with what Deida expresses here (and elsewhere in the book) — which, the way I read it, effectively forbids ejaculation at any time during the lovemaking.

First, I doubt that more than a small percentage of men can attain such a standard of control. And I doubt that many men seriously want to. Delay, yes; the majority are willing to hold off (or at least to keep going after their own release)3 until their woman reaches orgasm. But suppress it each and every time, no. (Another, more cynical reading is that Deida himself has natural gifts that make "The Way of the Superior Man" easy for him4, and that he's built a good thing by selling that "Way" in his workshops — for which books like this are marketing tools.)

Second, the picture I get from this paragraph is of a woman routinely humiliating her man in bed (and, by implication, at other times too). In Deida's phrase, "she can drain you of life." This sounds rather harsh and extreme, doesn't it? What normal woman would want to drain her man of life?

In truth, part of the problem is that I've taken that short paragraph out of its context. Deida's message in this chapter is that some women, because of a previous hurt, may resist giving themselves completely. In such a case, anything the woman can do to shorten the interaction becomes a defensive measure. He holds that it is the superior man's duty to gently break through these defenses. Suppressing ejaculation is a means to that end; it allows him to focus on her responses rather than his own, and to persist in loving long enough to ravish her totally, ultimately healing her emotional wound. My first concern, then, most likely results from sloppy writing on Deida's part; the image of the "ball-breaker" is not something he intends to convey.

However, my third concern is harder to dismiss. It has to do with the larger implication of his phrase "she can drain you of life". Deida, like Balzac5 and many creative people, apparently feels that orgasms can drain away the creative faculties. And more than that, he seems to claim that ejaculation per se robs a man of all the qualities that the book describes as essential: courage, keen intellect, the will to succeed; his "edge". He puts it this way:

I feel the two paragraphs quoted immediately above convey a contradictory message. It is that, if ejaculation so weakens a man, and if his woman so easily forces him to ejaculate, then it seems the wisest course for him would be to avoid intercourse. It may be that I'm still reading him wrong, so I won't belabor these points. But his assumption that ejaculation is enervating is controversial, and should be discussed further.

In the final analysis, I judge this book as useful more for its inspirational qualities than for any instruction it provides. Note: It's not that the book contains no instruction. Deida does present many concrete suggestions for modifying your behavior and more closely approaching that of the superior man. But I feel these were overwhelmed by the repetition of its central theme, and I was distracted in places by the nebulous mysticism Deida purveys. The latter is also true of the section on physical techniques for suspending ejaculation (Part Seven, Body Practices) by using breath control and by learning to "consciously contract the muscles of the floor of your pelvis".6 Of course, these techniques work. But there are far better guides to getting them to work for you.

As far as inspiration goes, Deida's repetition of his main theme is a virtue. Much in the nature of a pep talk, it sets a persistent tone that no matter how bad things may be in a relationship, you can turn them around by reaching for your inner strength of purpose and showing that to your woman. Another virtue is his avoidance of overly clinical or stilted language. He writes in a smooth, conversational style, quite often using common terms like "pussy" or "tits" for body parts, and he does not shy away from common parlance like the word "pussywhipped". My opinion is that the best use of this book is what Michael Tucker has done with it: buy a copy, read through it — it is a good read — and then pass it on to a friend.

Errata

There are only a few typographical errors. Once or twice, Deida writes "compliment" when complement is the proper word. On page 146 he uses the non-word "valiancy", and on page 197 lightning is misspelled as "lightening". I don't feel the need set up a separate Errata page for this paltry number of mistakes.

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This page was last modified on 20 July 2014.