Masculine/Feminine Energy: An Intro Without the Woo
It has been a minute since I've posted here - I have been heads-down building something I'm genuinely excited about, and I wanted to promote it in the most helpful way possible. So let's talk about the phrase that gets thrown around but that rarely gets explained: masculine and feminine energy.
If you've spent any time in conscious relationship spaces, tantra workshops, or a certain corner of Instagram, you've heard it. You also may have rolled your eyes at it at least once. Crystals, breathwork, someone telling you to "drop into your feminine" while you're just trying to figure out why date night felt off. I get it. A lot of the language around this topic can sound “woo” (slang for ideas or practices that lean heavily on spiritual, mystical, or New Age-sounding language) and therefore, ‘not for me’ if this isn’t part of your identity.
Underneath the “woo” is something real, something you can actually use. So here's my no-nonsense, no-incense, direct-as-always breakdown.
First: What I Don't Mean
Before I go any further, I want to be really clear about something. When I say masculine and feminine, I do not mean the tired cultural script: women are emotional, men are rational. Women are nurturing, men are stoic. Men lead, women follow. Now my eyes are rolling in my head and that's definitely not what this is.
Here's the nuance: the feminine may be more driven by emotion, by feeling, by flow, but every single one of us has both masculine and feminine energy inside us, regardless of gender. Men have feminine energetic traits. Women have masculine energetic traits. Some people are wired with a stronger pull toward one or the other, and that wiring may have very little to do with what's between their legs.
So this isn't a personality assigned to you at birth by your sex or gender. It's a lens. A tool. The goal is to get familiar enough with both energies that you know when to call on your masculine and when to step into your feminine for yourself, in your own world, in your own relationships. That's it. That's the whole game.
The Actual Mechanics: Giving and Receiving
Okay, with that out of the way, here's the part that I find useful (simplified here, of course, for the purpose of this article).
Masculine energy tends to be the giving energy. Directional, grounded, focused on providing - a container, a decision, an action, an experience for someone else.
Feminine energy tends to be the receiving energy. Responsive, expressive, expansive - feeling and taking in what's being offered.
Neither is "better." They are complementary. When they are both fully engaged with each other - one giving, one receiving - you get polarity: that electric charge that makes attraction feel alive instead of flat.
This isn't a new idea, by the way. The 1908 esoteric text The Kybalion lists seven Hermetic principles, and the seventh - the Principle of Gender - states that gender exists in everything, on every plane, and has nothing to do with biological sex. Every person contains both the masculine and feminine principle. The masculine tends toward will and direction; the feminine tends toward receiving and generating. And per the text, neither one produces anything of real value without the other. You can see this dynamic in plenty of examples — an idea (feminine, generative) doesn't go anywhere without direction and will behind it (masculine), and pure will without anything to receive and shape it doesn't produce anything either.
(Worth noting: the Kybalion also has a separate, earlier chapter literally called "Polarity" - that one's about how opposites like love and hate are really just two ends of the same spectrum. Different chapter, different idea. The "polarity" I'm using here is the more common coaching-world sense - the charge between two differentiated poles - not that one.)
Where this gets really interesting is in the bedroom, because pleasure runs on this exact same current.
Picture a woman on top, fully in her body, fully in her own pleasure - in her feminine, fully receiving. It's hard to imagine a scenario where the man underneath her isn't right there with her in full sexual pleasure too. Her receiving is his experience. There's no separating them.
Now flip it. Picture a woman stepping into her masculine - she's in giving mode, focused entirely on her partner's experience. If he's in his feminine, fully receiving, fully expressing what he feels - his pleasure becomes hers. Her giving only lands, only means something, when he's actually receiving it.
That's the whole secret, honestly: the best sex happens when giving and receiving are matched. When one person's pleasure and the other's become genuinely indistinguishable from each other. Not two people taking turns performing for each other, but two people plugged into the same current.
Compare that to a more culturally "default" script - a man in lead mode, doing what he's been taught sex is supposed to look like, largely centered on his own experience. She may or may not be having a good time. The energy isn't matched. The charge isn't there. It might still be sex. It's rarely the energetic exchange of polarity.
So Why Does the Lifestyle Tend to Be Female-Led?
I think there are two answers to this.
The energetic answer: if feminine energy is the receiving, expressive, desire-generating current, it makes sense that a room built around amplifying pleasure would take its cues from the people most attuned to that current. Female pleasure and desire often set the emotional temperature of the space.
Another answer - and maybe the more relatable one - has less to do with energy and more to do with our social norms: it is culture.
Women have far more at stake in this lifestyle than men do because of the contradictory messages we've absorbed our whole lives about female sexuality. Be sexual, but only with your partner, and only on cue. Media will sexualize you at every turn, but be too sexy on your own terms and there are consequences. Porn has spent decades telling us sex is for men, women's sex included, and that we should enjoy it that way. Step outside those lines and get labeled, and the fallout is real: reputational, social, sometimes professional.
Compare the cultural reflex when a couple is non-monogamous. The first instinct toward the man is often something like, "dude, that's awesome." The first instinct toward the woman is closer to, "wait, your wife does what?" In a culture that's still deeply monogamy-normative, both partners get judged for the relationship structure. Only one of them also gets judged for having a sexuality at all.
Given that imbalance, of course women end up setting the pace, the boundaries, and the tone in these spaces. They are the ones carrying the bigger risk.
Where This Leaves the Men
If these spaces are naturally female-led - energetically and culturally - a real question follows for a lot of men in this lifestyle: what's my role here, if I'm not the one steering?
My answer, and the whole premise of what I've built this fall, is that the job isn't to lead these spaces, and it isn't to passively go along with them either. It is to complement. To hold a masculine container solid enough - steady, grounded, unselfish - that the feminine energy in the room can actually relax into itself instead of managing everyone else's experience. That's a skill most men were never taught, because most of what they were handed about masculinity was either "take charge" or "keep quiet and go with it" - generally not, "hold space." What does that even mean?
That's the exact territory I'm digging into all year in a free monthly series called The Masculine/Feminine Playbook - yes, that word is doing double duty on purpose, and if you're reading this, you already know which duty.
We kick off September 9th at 6:00 PM MST with MarcAnthony Chiaramonte on "Masculine Containment: Inspired to Lead." It's free to attend live, and there is an all-access recordings pass if you want to build a library to come back to.
Register for the free series → The Masculine - Feminine Playbook
No incense required.