Dunno. I don’t think she literally expects him to read her mind but this is rather an allegory of sorts.
And here comes the thing that her life doesn’t happen in a vacuum. She has been conditioned in all other parts of her life since she was only 12-year-old to not show sexual desire outwardly. It takes a lot of wisdom to understand not to apply in this situation something that you have accepted as a basic axiom of life.
Yeah, it would be much better to be outspoken about one’s needs, but that’s a very big thing to demand of a young and inexperienced woman. Relationship skills grow during the relationship. They are not something innate.
As long as the rest of the girl’s life conditions her to a certain behaviour, I would be primarily angry at those things conditioning her to that shit and only secondarily to her not recognising she has been conditioned to bad behaviour and should unlearn that usually necessary behaviour in certain contexts.
Yup. Completely agreed.
Romantic relationships have a strong tendency to be very dysfunctional precisely because of this. It’s made worse by most girls not knowing how limited a guy’s emotional repertoire is required to be, and most guys not knowing how strongly the society is conditioning girls to mute their desires.
And for this, that you ask for, to be possible some day, we really must do better!