What Women Want, Part II
January 26, 2009 § Leave a comment
One of the scientists in the New York Times Magazine article on female desire, Dr. Marta Meana, citing research that women are, on average, less lustful than men, theorizes that it takes more to kickstart a woman’s desire. This goes some way toward explaining why women have such frequent fantasies of sex with strangers and of rape—the latter being in the class of “only fantasy” (we hope), while the former is often acted out.
One can interpret these fantasies in many ways, and the interpretations differ from woman to woman. But what strikes me as incomplete about this idea is that while male lust on the physical level is more demanding and constant (married men retain their desire for marital sex longer than their wives do), male desire and fantasy is every bit as novelty-and-thrill-seeking as women’s. So if you explain women’s fantasies as compensation for a lower or fluctuating sex drive, what do you make of all the bizarre male porn?
I would say that desire by nature tends toward the extreme because it’s always constrained by reality. Most of what turns us on we can’t have, or won’t do, or wouldn’t like if it were done to us. How is this different from the rest of a person’s daydreaming? I want an impossible amount of recognition and well-being; I mentally murder my loved ones often; when I have insomnia I imagine terrible disasters far away, a practice that works to draw off the catastrophe demon, keep it from summoning my real fears.
The first time I went on Zoloft, I was driving my car alone in the country, in a state of calm euphoria, when I saw children playing by the side of the road up ahead. I had a sudden impulse to run them over, imagining the crunch under the wheels as being pleasurable in the same way stepping on a dry twig is.
I resisted the impulse without difficulty but kept thinking about it, as I drove on—specifically about why I couldn’t act on it. What was strange was that while I could imagine vividly the negative consequences to me should I do such a thing, and I understood that killing was ‘wrong’, I couldn’t feel that wrongness; the concept was empty; I was taking it on faith. I was, for that period of time, phantom-sociopathic. Only the fact that I remembered my previous self and was aware of this one as somehow ‘not me’ kept me not only safe but sane.
I told my sister this story and she said, matter-of-factly, “I know what you mean. Sometimes when I’m chopping vegetables and the children’s hands are spread out on the counter I have a desire to chop off their fingers. Not because I’m feeling hostile; it just seems like it would be satisfying.”
My boyfriend Philip is creeped out by these stories, and quick to see them as being somehow confined to my family. I think these things lie around in everybody’s psyche, like the most grotesque sexual fantasy you will never admit to. On the other hand, I’m put off by his tales of daily in-your-face male insult and challenge, what is sometimes banter and sometimes humiliation but for him simply part of the human spectrum. He takes for granted that men have all those macho qualities that, at 15, reading second-wave feminist literature, I thought brutal and anachronistic, soon to be swept away. More than taking them for granted, he sees the artistry in them, and though I can’t yet see themthe way he does, I’ve learned to trust his feeling for artistry.
I guess my point is that desire has evolutionary, survive-and-propagate roots, but for a long time now it has been riffing on itself. It evades or overflows categories, finds a way out, in or around; what it’s exists to ‘do’ and ‘why’ is no longer entirely relevant. How can we tell what’s the score and what’s the improv?
Imagine the day when computers finally become sentient. Maybe this excites you; maybe you’re afraid. The one thing you don’t think is that consciousness will simply help them do the job better. If you’re human, you know being aware of yourself as a separate being is dangerous.
This has been a long post. You are now excused to your own fantasies. I’m in the mood for tea and chocolate chip cookies. I baked them for Philip but he made me bring them home. I’m glad. I like the silky pleasure of my own apartment, my poetry books, my thoughts up in the corners and my cookies.
Some books I love
Mostly in the Afternoon 
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