In comments to my post about the relationship between low self-esteem and privilege/entitlement TLT said

I thought it was me that makes the girl this way.
I came to find out she’s like that every day.
I thought it was me that made that girl so wild.
I found she’s like that with all the guys.

Those lyrics are from a song called “I thought it was me” by an early 90s hip-hop/R&B group called Bel Biv Devoe. Back when it was on the radio every five minutes in the town I lived in, I didn’t think anything about it. (I didn’t even really know what they were talking about.) But I heard it the other day and thought it would make a fantastic opening quote for a book about worthiness and expectations.

If sex is meaningful to you, you’re probably best off only having sex with partners you know well enough to know whether sex is meaningful to them too. It might reduce the number of people you’ll get to have sex with, but that’s vastly preferable to the humiliation of being blown off or finding out that you’re just someone’s person of the week.

She said it here

I still think this is a hugely big deal. You’ll often hear men, MRAs particularly, complaining about the consequences of male “expendability” or perhaps interchangability, including the bitter lament that they’re appreciated only for their ability to provide, to compete, or otherwise do as opposed to be. And most feminists, correctly I think, point out that it’s an artifact of men’s dominant paradigm, and therefore something for men to address. And that since women meanwhile are struggling with the roles that same generally-male paradigm prepares for them, it’s not really feminism’s business to tackle the fact that men screw themselves and each other. And indeed men really can and really should address it. (And doing so would even make feminist’s lives a lot easier.)

But before you can start working on solutions you really have to get clear about the problems. And this self-esteem/privilege/worthiness-trap business really isn’t even well enough recognized, let enough well enough acknowledged, let alone well enough understood to make headway against.

Men might create much of the mindset wherein they mostly aren’t special. But that doesn’t change the fact that they too-often feel that way. Or that they (very mistakenly!) think that women’s role is to affirm their specialness or even to bestow it on them the way a medieval damsel would bestow a kerchief to a knight before a tournament.

But really, that’s not what sex, or even love, is all about. Expecting the fact of a sex partner to validate us, or believing that only the fact of being loved exclusively affirms our worthiness just overloads what’s great about love, sex, companionship, and intimacy and makes it difficult to appreciate it for what it is. Or to appreciate the people we share it with for who they are instead of for what they do.