The desire of the man is for the woman, but the desire of the woman is for the desire of the man. – Madame de Stael
One of the drawbacks of the daily column format is that it’s sometimes difficult to summarize all of the aspects of a complex issue in under 2000 words. Try as one might there are always loose ends, and any short discussion of general rules allows little space even to mention the exceptions, much less analyze them; this unfortunately allows desperate people with agendas to dismiss one’s entire point with a mental “Aha! She didn’t mention such-and-such so she’s full of shit!” I don’t know if anyone has done that with any of my columns so far, but I may have come close yesterday because a careless reading of that essay might suggest to some people that I was either denying the female sex drive or portraying women as paragons of control, neither of which is true. Undoubtedly, the promiscuous woman is not uncommon, and since time immemorial her existence has been used by men to shore up the doctrine of the wanton. But as we shall see, the reasons women seek sex are not usually the same as those of men, and the nature of those reasons generally precludes paying for sex even in women who are not in a position to give it away (such as those who fear the public exposure which might result from an affair or bar-trolling). In other words, even women who seek promiscuous sex generally do so for reasons other than overwhelming physical lust such as men experience.
The first and foremost reason women seek sex is to attract men. This is the last psychological vestige of the estrus or “heat” cycle which affects every mammal other than humans; when a woman wishes to attract a mate or bond a newly-attracted mate, she experiences a much greater sex drive than at other times. I seem to recall reading that the period of increased drive lasts for about 18 months from the onset of sexual activity with a new partner, but I couldn’t find the exact figure while writing this. In any case, this increase is wholly involuntary; it is Nature’s way of bonding the male to the female for long enough to protect her through pregnancy and the early infancy of her child. Once this initial period is over a woman’s sex drive will generally decrease to a marked degree or (if she’s tired due to work and baby) even vanish altogether. When this happens, a man may feel betrayed or lied to; he may even feel as though his wife has consciously engaged in a campaign of deceit intended to ensnare him into marriage. But she cannot help the variation in her sex drive any more than a man can help being attracted to other women; both derive from evolutionary necessity, and the fact that we humans use sex for lots of things other than reproduction is neither here nor there. The male who brands the lonely woman a “bad girl” or his unresponsive spouse a “bad wife” would profit by remembering the words of Jessica Rabbit: “I’m not bad, I’m just drawn that way.” Women and men are each “drawn” in a certain way by Nature, and though unlike cartoon characters we can alter our own designs to a degree, this requires both conscious effort and a clear understanding of what it is we’re trying to alter in the first place. Expressed another way, it’s impossible to reach any specific place without having both a map and knowledge of one’s current position on it.
Unfortunately, many people of both genders refuse to accept their current positions or even to acknowledge the need for movement; they simply whine “but I shouldn’t have to!” or insist that it is their partners’ obligation to do so. This attitude is both immature and counterproductive, yet it seems to have become the norm nowadays. Men moan that wives lose interest in sex, and women bitch that husbands should simply accept the lesser supply; neither of these is realistic, but IMHO the typical male response is far more sensible than the typical female one: He satisfies his need elsewhere, usually with a whore. At one time, the wise wife understood this; she may not have liked it, but she realized that it was the way of things and tolerated it as long as it was discreet and had no obvious effect on her standard of living. But the typical modern Western woman is the product of over a century of brainwashing that the male sex drive can be artificially repressed and several decades of propaganda that men and women are the same, female psychological norms are the standard, and male norms are a pathological deviation from it. These fallacies, combined with her profoundly overdeveloped sense of entitlement, create the usual histrionic display which ensues when the spoiled modern woman discovers her husband has employed a whore.
Don’t get too smug, guys; I’m not giving your infidelities a free pass. Note that I only mentioned whores; it is my considered opinion that for a married man to have unsanctioned affairs or one-night-stands with non-professionals is irresponsible and wrong (albeit predictable). An amateur who has sex with a married man is driven by the same needs as any other woman, and if her primary motivation is mate attraction a fling could potentially turn into a disaster. Thus the value of understanding why women act as we do: If a man is laboring under the delusion of female lasciviousness he will no doubt interpret a “slut’s” attraction to him as engendered by pure animal lust (just like his for her), when in actuality she might be desperately lonely and unconsciously seeking a husband. She might be completely unaware of this motivation and even think of her affair with the man as a mere dalliance, until she suddenly finds herself in love with him and starts calling his home, demanding he leave his wife for her or even provoking major public scandal.
The whore, on the other hand, has absolutely no interest in attracting a mate; for her, sex with customers is a business, a means of support. This is not to say we are immune to love or have no desire for marriage; far from it, and many a working girl is either married or attached, or else eventually leaves The Life for a husband (as I did). What I am saying is that for a whore the extension of a general offer of sex has nothing to do with either lust or husband-hunting; it is merely the advertisement of a service for hire. I’m not sure why so many people are confused about this; nobody thinks that an accountant loves to prepare tax forms, or that a roofer has ulterior motives for advertising his services. On the other hand, nobody insists that it is impossible for a chef to enjoy cooking, nor that an actress must be “damaged” for playing different roles on screen rather than just being herself. Men and women both are so psychologically invested in their stereotypes about sex in general and prostitution in particular that the vast majority of people simply cannot recognize that a whore is no different from any other professional: Though she may or may not enjoy her work, her primary motivation for doing it is to earn a living. Therefore, she is the only safe and moral outlet for the married man’s desire for extramarital sex; the cost is specific, she has no interest in him outside the business relationship, and her discretion can be relied upon. She therefore poses no financial, emotional or social threat to the wife.
Like any other businessperson, the whore must advertise in order to attract the attention of potential customers and to motivate them to choose her above her competitors. One common method of doing this is to appeal to male fantasy, and since the “wanton woman” is such a universal theme it is one many whores (and strippers, singers, actresses, etc) choose to appeal to. Many males may be tempted to view this as a “lie”, but seen dispassionately it is no different from one company’s claim that its products are of higher quality or more “fun” than those of the competition. Once a man learns to think critically, he can shed the preconceptions on which advertisers attempt to capitalize and judge any product, whether it be beer or automobiles or sexual services, on its actual merits rather than on hype.
The third most common female motivation for sex is one shared by both professionals and amateurs alike, and is the one to which my epigram refers. Since Nature has programmed women to attract men, it stands to reason that women should enjoy being attractive to men, and indeed that is the case; the desire to be desired is a very powerful stimulus indeed. Every normal, well-adjusted woman wishes to be seen as attractive, and no amount of neofeminist propaganda will ever change that because it springs from the very core of the female experience. Having said that, I must point out that a powerful enough trauma can distort natural drives into unrecognizability, so many women who have been raped or sexually abused (including most neofeminists) may come to view male attention as threatening because such interest resulted in their being badly hurt. But for undamaged women, male attention is both exciting and validating. When I first embarked on my career of harlotry the dear, late friend I shall refer to as Dr. Helena (who was a prominent sexologist and sex therapist in New Orleans) warned me that it could be addictive, and she was absolutely right: The sheer thrill of being offered large sums of money for my sexual favors was the most intoxicating experience of my entire life. The neofeminists love to pretend that sex work is “demeaning,” but the truth is that a large percentage of women in the trade (including strippers and porn stars) find it more empowering than anything else we have ever done, sometimes even more gratifying than romance.
Because romance, of course, is the closest amateurs ever get to that feeling. For a man to offer not merely his attention but his heart, his goods, his name, his time and even his life to a woman is just as exciting and intoxicating to the average woman as the offer of financial tribute is to her harlot sister, which is why romance novels are a multi-billion dollar industry and the fantasy of romance has just as powerful a commercial appeal to women as does the fantasy of unbridled sex to men. What the gigolo or the young boyfriend of a “cougar” brings to the table is male sexual interest (or at least the appearance thereof), for which the rich matron is willing to pay money and the “cougar” is willing to trade sex. And knowing this, it should be obvious why it is a rare woman indeed who will pay for sex with a man: It is an undeniable statement that he is not attracted to her, and that invalidates the primary reason for which she might seek unprofitable, non-relationship sex.
In the sphere of sexual relationships, as in so many other things, knowledge is the key to understanding why things happen as they do; one who denies the validity of verifiable facts merely because they conflict with his preconceptions condemns himself to unending confusion, but one who accepts the facts will find that they provide a useful map with which he can chart a course through the convoluted landscape of relationships with the opposite sex.
“And knowing this, it should be obvious why it is a rare woman indeed who will pay for sex with a man:
It is an undeniable statement that he is not attracted to her,
and that invalidates the primary reason for which she might seek unprofitable, non-relationship sex. ”
Now.
*That* makes sense to me. Something that by its very nature defeats its own purpose…
How easy is it for a prostitute to play her part if the man concerned is personally unattractive to her i.e. smelly feet, bad breath, body odour, etc? That’s something I’ve always wondered about.
Also, in the case of cougers, wouldn’t most of them be inclined to delude themselves that the man is attracted to them? And isn’t it quite likely that a young man may be flattered by the attention of a attractive, experienced woman and have some genuine feelings for her?
I can’t speak for streetwalkers, but for the most part call girls haven’t got to worry about exceptionally poor hygeine because most men paying that much at least make an effort. But at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter; you aren’t going to marry him, just give him what he wants for an hour. I think most working girls would agree with me that the client’s manners vastly outweigh his looks.
I think Sailor Barsoom is right, and most of the guys are indeed attracted to them, for the easy sex if nothing else. The point I was making is that being young, he has little else to give her BUT romance.
The young guy who has a thing for cougars is attracted to her. No delusion needed.
There are men who won’t pay for sex on the grounds that “I should be hot enough that she just wants me; if I have to pay her that means she doesn’t want me, and I fail.” While it hardly surprises me that more women than men feel that way, I’m not sure it rises to the level…
That’s not the right way to phrase it. Not sure what the right way is. I think I’m trying to say that men with that attitude are a bit high on themselves, and maybe the women are too, though they have a bit more justification for it.
Given this, I can see why “man brothels” aren’t successful.
OK, how do I italicize, or bold? Can I do that at all?
is
{italic}is{/italic}
All men pay for it, and free pussy is the most expensive kind. Men who convince themselves otherwise are just kidding themselves. When he got divorced, my favorite cousin calculated how much the sex had cost him (using weekly averages) and it turned out to be something like $1000 a pop, which is more than three times what it costs in New Orleans and five times what it costs in your neck of the woods.
As for the markup, I can edit your posts from my end…I don’t know what it looks like from yours, though. Can you see an “edit this” button?
No edit button. But the second attempt is italicized. I did this: italics here. But stuff after that is too, so maybe I need to ask how to STOP italicizing things. We’ll see how this goes.
I guess I could just *do this,* like I did back in the days of newsgroups. Ah yes, newsgroups; I remember those.
“All men pay for it, and free pussy is the most expensive kind.”
The last time in your life as a man there is at least the illusion of “free pussy” is high school, but that’s only if you don’t make a baby.
After adulthood, maybe you can find some college partyers, but other than that…pay you must. Is there a “free” category that I’m missing?
While your general point is valid, you overstate it; there’s plenty of men who are *richer* married than they would be single, indeed this covers the majority of men in my neck of the woods.
Most of this is just a result of a couple having double earning-potential, yet nowhere-near double cost though. If you’re married to a woman who earns the same amount you do (I am), but your combined costs are at most 1.5 times that of a single person, the end-result is both partners are wealthier than they’d be alone.
This is less true in areas of the world where most wives bring no cash home, offcourse.
As always, good column.
Regarding “free pussy”, one can minimize the costs, but one always has and always will pay (at the very least with one’s own time). For the ladies, cock can cost as well. The trick is finding the transaction that benefits all parties.
I have found that many European women seem to acknowledge this. Even European feminists.
Thank you, kind sir. I always endeavor to please my clientele. 😉
This column, and the preceding one, form a nice pair, Maggie, and touch a topic that has always been a source of sadness to me.
The starting point is: what you said in the first of these twin posts: “Men in general were (and still are) galled by the fact that no matter how much stronger, tougher, better at mathematics and more inclined to dominate their environments they are than women, when it comes to sex they need us a great deal more than we need them. So I suppose it’s not surprising that, in the face of this humbling and annoying fact, many of them simply choose to deny it.”
This is a very good starting-point, and touches the truth closely enough to make my heart ache. But there is one thing to add: it is not so much that this difference is humbling because of some competition between the sexes (‘who can control his/her desires bettert?’) that women always win, or even (though it’s closer) that wanting someone more than this someone wants you gives them power over you (you’ll do things for them to get what you want/need). Oh, I’m sure that these things are strong enough already; but at least in my mind (and what other mind, male or female, do I have a direct access to?), it’s not the deepest point.
To me, what hurts more is that women mean so much to me sexually; I would thoroughly enjoy being able to mean just as much to them. The attraction I feel for them endows them with such an aura of light, that I wish I could give them the same thing back. But sometimes it seemed to me that at best we get something like that portrait of the angel offering consolation to the desperate man in your post on the Madonna-whore dichotomy: I would be condemned to being in the position of the desperate man, never in the position of the consoling angel; I could therefore never be an angel myself (as far as sex is concerned — there are of course other areas of interaction), but only an admirer of angels.
The burning sensation is that everything would be so much prettier, so much deeper, so much more meaningful, if I could play both roles; if I could bask in the desire a female feels for me just as much as she can in mine for her; if I could give her the (sexual) consolation that she can give me; if we could Be The Same, both angels and both humans, both mirror images of each other’s desire, companions (hetairai…), partners in crime, brother-and-sister-in-arms, sources of light (= attraction, pleasure) for each other… Both really together…
But instead, often enough, it feels more like these ideals are at best peak experiences, and that normal interactions have to be unequal, that I cannot be or do for her what she is or does for me.
Sometimes this just feels so god-damn unfair!… If other men feel like this, it is not difficult to believe that they would want the ‘wanton woman’ to exist; it is the vision of paradise that would make them feel (sexually) whole, ultimately not alone.
Some situations and relationships came very close to that. Some girlfriends I had seemed to have (at least for a while) stronger sex drives than I do (my wife, god bless her soul, is one such woman). But they were few and far between; the more typical situation was more like what you describe.
Ah! how I longed for the wanton woman, my kindred spirit, my soul mate! Or, at other moments, how I wished I could somehow reduce my sexual interest in women! Either way I could be like the angel in that painting…
“Ah! how I longed for the wanton woman, my kindred spirit, my soul mate! Or, at other moments, how I wished I could somehow reduce my sexual interest in women! Either way I could be like the angel in that painting”
I didn’t want to paste your entire post, but a rousing Hell yes is in order. This is so true for men. And it’s so damn frustrating I don’t know what to do either. But it seems to be a fact that’s rooted in human biology.
Consider, however, the alternative, as I have been challenged before to do.
One of the best parts about women is that, if they fall in love with you, they are much more likely to stay faithful if you meet their emotional needs, *precisely because* they aren’t driven by a need for sex and sexual variety in the way that we are.
What if your wife was like us…she could take one look at a fine specimen of a man that’s in every way physically better than you and cheat on you just because she wanted to fuck him?
If we give women as much testosterone as we have, besides the other obvious undesirable consequences, it would mean that they might develop a greater taste for variety, like we have, and might be attracted to someone purely on a physical basis, like us. And um, ugh at that thought.
But I’m with you. The ideal woman is one who wants me as much as I want her sexually, but JUST ME.
It’s not the fact of a cock that does it for females, like it’s the fact of the pussy with us; Romance & money tends to make the pussy wet; it looks like we’ll have to stick with those.
You know, it’s not that important to me that she doesn’t fuck anybody else.
Scorch has already answered for me quite well, but I want to add this: Two people who are alike do not form a pair; think of how clumsy a set of chopsticks is compared to a knife and fork. Needle and thread, bowl and spoon, plug and outlet, pen and paper; all the most useful pairings in the world are of two different things working together to one goal, like man and woman. 🙂
Christmas is already over here, and the family is asleep; so I have some time to thank you guys for your comments. Well, thanks! I hope y’all had a wonderful Christmas; you sound like good people. 🙂
Maybe I sounded a bit sadder than I actually am. Maggie, I understand that two equals don’t form a pair — hell, even men are so different from each other in many ways that I’ve never had a male friend who was ‘like me’; there always were important differences, and these were part of what made the friendship important to me. Wanting someone who is really ‘like me’ is a conceptual trap; there is no such person, male or female, anywhere; and why should I want him/her, when I already have me?
The reason why we entertain such dreams is of course to the fear of loneliness. When talking about men and women, the misunderstandings are often so many and so deeply rooted that it’s sometimes possible to become paranoid. The typical example is the wife who fears, every time her husband’s eyes stray to an attractive pair of legs walking by, that this means he doesn’t love her. The wife who would faint if she knew her husband watches porn. Because if she isn’t ‘the only one’ object of his desire, then they cannot really be sexually happy, they cannot be really in love… right?
The desire for a woman who desires like me is perhaps my version of that ‘loneliness-paranoia’ combination. Because sometimes I was indeed with women who were like that , and I had a similar feeling: is she pretending, just to ‘please me’?
I remember a former girlfriend who did things like waiting behind the door to jump on top of me as I walked in, yelling “I want you! now!” The paranoid approach: ‘is she doing this only because she knows I like it?’
Or my wife now, who knows I actually like it when she shows interest in other men (so, Scorch, I actually agree with Sailor Barsoom on that: I don’t care so much if the woman I’m with is attracted to men other than me) — because it makes her more ‘like me.’ After all, I can deeply love her and still turn my eyes to look at an attractive lady walking by; so when my wife does the same for a hot young male passer-by, I get a feeling of ‘ah! she gets it! she knows what it feels like!’ that makes me feel a closeness to her that is hard to describe. My wife knows this; I’ve seen her look with hungry eyes at other men, then smile suggestively to me and say ‘he’s so hot! I’d do him in a heartbeat!’; and this makes me feel so connected to her. So, again, the paranoid approach: ‘is she just putting on a show because she knows I like it, but feels actually nothing of the sort? Is she just pretending to be “like me” but actually isn’t, so the closeness I feel is actually false?’
Like the wife who gets insecure about her husband’s love and affection for her every time she sees evidence of his desire for other women, this feeling is self-defeating; if I let it dominate my thoughts, it would end up just killing anything good and beautiful between my wife and me. When I was young and unexperienced, I used to pay attention to this kind of loneliness-paranoia feelings. But then I had a conversation with a friend — a young man, extraordinarily wise for his years — to whom I once told the whole thing: how I wished I could be for women what they are for me, so I could give it back to them; and how I felt insecure about the few women in my life who did seem to be ‘like me’; and he said something like: ‘Let me see if I understand this. You’re telling me that you would like to give to women something like the strong positive sexual effect that they have on you; you would even change yourself, in order to achieve this; and now you’re telling me that if you are with a woman who — maybe — is ‘changing herself’ (=pretending) so as to give you an experience similar to what she has from you, it makes you feel sad?”‘
Oops.
It’s bad to be paranoid. I feel great when I am with my wife; she tells me she feels great when she is with me. If I really spend time thinking about how ‘similar’ we ‘truly’ are, how much we ‘really’ are soulmates, how much is ‘pretend’… then I miss the fact that so much of what we do to each other we do because we want to enjoy the fact of pleasing each other.
So maybe the ‘hot wanton woman’ doesn’t exist, or is very rare; and maybe my wife is one of them, or she just (just?…) very much enjoys playing the role for me. Either way, I’m a lucky guy; and I’ve long ago stopped looking for a ‘perfect symmetry’ and settled for what feels good. I don’t know if I can ever look as much like an angel surrounded by sexual light to my wife as she does to me; but whatever it is I ‘really’ look like to her as a sexual being, it’s something damn good too. I’m happy with that.
And that’s how it has to be. 🙂
One thing, though; Christmas over already? We celebrate it on the 25th here.
In Brazil (and I keep the Brazilian tradition), usually what happens is a big banquet on the 24th that goes on till midnight; then, precisely at 00:00, we all go Feliz Natal! (Merry Christmas) and the children go open their presents. Then we go to sleep, and the 25th is just a day of resting (and eating whatever leftovers from the previous night there still are). Here in the Netherlands they also do it on the 25th, but I’m so used to the Brazilian way that we do it like this in my house. (My wife, being Russian, is used to having Christmas on the 7th of January, which is the Orthodox date; she plays along with me…)
But today’s the 23rd, not the 24th! 🙂
Oops — you’re right! (Here in Holland it is actually the 24th, but still morning…) Hm, can you tell I’m a bit absent-minded? 🙂
Did your family accidentally celebrate a day early? 🙂
Ahn… [blush] yes. [/blush]
So now, what do I tell my daughter? Let’s put the presents back in the boxes under the tree and do it all again?
Ah life! 🙂
Not at all! You tell your wife, the two of you have a good laugh about it, then you turn it into an annual family tradition to commemorate the “early Christmas of 2010” by exchanging small gag gifts on the 23rd before the real ones on the 24th. 🙂
I don’t know if it’s the unscrutable female mind, or if it’s Goethe’s Eternal Feminine (“das Ewig-Weibliche / zieht uns hinan“, the Eternal Femine pulls us upward), but my wife laughed and proposed that we do exactly what you suggest here. Eerie! Now I have to show her your website so that she’ll see this example. (She’ll say it’s synchronicity because she’s Jungian, I’ll say it’s just a coincidence because I’m a shameless empiricist, and we’ll have another good laugh. :-))
Definitely the Eternal Feminine. 🙂
I have a different comment to make, also, so I’ll make it a different post. There is one thing with male sexuality, or the way it is discussed in our society, among men or among women, and (I fear) even in your discussion here, Maggie, that I think (at least for me, at least in my experience) may be too simplistic. It’s the “they just want the cookie” meme.
Indeed, men seem to feel sexual attraction very strongly, and to be attracted to many women, to enjoy variety, in a way that is more ‘urgent’ than what women feel. This is usually translated — by both men and women — as a description of men as sex-driven robots, ready to do anything (‘nothing short of incredible’) to get ‘the cookie’. This, I think, is simplistic.
Not because I want to claim that men also have hearts and fall in love and enjoy romance (which they do; at least I remember being as involved in the ‘romancing game’ as the women I was with, especially when they reverted the expectations, as, for example, when a girlfriend once on a whim gave me a rose in a restaurant and told me she loved me, prompting applause from a neighboring couple… ‘romancing’ is about attention, and we all like getting attention).
No, that’s not it. It’s the impression that the male sexual drive, the impulse to ‘fuck yet another female body’, is felt as an impersonal, automatic, emotionless robotic drive, like a computer program. Given how complicated human minds are, even if the sex drive is essentially some sort of computer program, it interacts on several levels with so many other ‘programs’ in our mind that it is not really felt like this.
After all, what is this ‘urgency’ about? Is it about getting an orgasm? Well, there are easier ways to get an orgasm — if you are good at masturbating, you can get longer and stronger orgasms from it than you do from many a sexual encounter with a woman who is naive or unexperienced. If blowing your load was all that the sex drive is about, men wouldn’t need women. No, the male sex drive is ‘about’ something a little more complicated than that.
Is it about the female body then? About touching, kissing, smelling, fucking it? And also of course getting the orgasm, but the touch (ah! tits and ass!), the smell (hm! pussy!…), the heat (hm! she feels so hot…), the moans, her movements… ah! that’s what men want. Right?
That’s closer, but I don’t think that’s it either; because if this were the case, then simulations of these elements (which is what porn is about) would be sufficient. And indeed porn is great, and sex toys are great, and the sexbots of the future will be great, too. You can see, and in the future probably also touch and smell and kiss and suck and fuck, all the skin, all the body parts and female pheromones that you want. And yet I don’t think this will ever drive prostitutes out of business.
Oh yes, there are men who become obsessed and addicted to porn; there are men who have become unskilled at, or even incapable of, handling sex with a real human woman, because of too much imagination, porn, and self-pleasure. But my gut feeling is that these are people with relationship and social skills problems that predate their ‘porn addiction.’ They would have serious problems in their sex lives even if they never saw porn.
Most men will still want women, together with their dose of tits and ass. Why? What is this all about? Am I saying that ‘men are really just like women’, that they need companionship, they want to express their feelings, etc.? No… not exactly; because even though this is true and men need that, this is not what I’m talking about, because it goes beyond sex. Sex… I’m reminded of the question Ken Wilber asked in one of his books once: ‘Do you really think that all those naked bodies with exaggerated genitals that keep forever copulating in your imagination are about sex?’
Men want variety, it is said. But variety of what? If it were all about tits and ass and wet pussies, well… is the level of variation for these anatomical elements really so high? After you’ve seen a few dozen pairs of boobs, a few dozen ass cheeks, a few dozen wet pussies, do you really think that the next ones will be so terribly different that you’ll go “aaah, hot! I’ve never seen one like this before!”?
In his book The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera describes a character — Tomás — who, taking advantage of the ‘climate of sexual freedom’ in Prague at the time, had one women after another, one affair after another; his motivation, as the author described it, was that he wanted to see that little thing which would be different in the next woman during copulation: her motions, the smell of her sweat, the little cries of joy, the way she would touch him, what her face looked like when having an orgasm… there would be something different in this woman; he couldn’t know what it would be, but it would be there; when he saw it he would know it, because it would be like a window suddenly opening into her soul, showing a glimpse of what is there; of what makes her different from all the others; and that was so overwhelming, so beautiful, so transcendent.
Kundera makes it all sound abstract, but I think he’s onto something there. It feels to me like the desire to fuck yet another woman is not really a desire for new bodyparts, but a desire for a new whole, a desire to connect with that female body, to experience its depth, its difference (because the external features aren’t, after all, all that different from the ones we’ve had before). It’s ultimately not so much a thirst for more tits and ass as it is a thirst for a new (sexual) individual, a new (sexual) soul. Not because the man is necessarily interested in a new relationship (though that’s possible, too), but because the very satisfaction of his ‘need for variety’ is in finding someone as a whole different from what he had already experienced.
The thirst to find, to drink from another individual. Not so much the need to fuck her, too, but the need to fuck her, too. Not so much a simplistic, automatic, robotic Drang nach dem Orgasmen, but something more… human, even more humanistic. A need for… another person. To fuck, yes; but a person.
Like the little black dot in the middle of the white half of the yin-yang diagram: at the hart of the masculine, we find something… feminine. A need for connection with an individual. Of course, the coloring is masculine; both in action, in intensity, and in results, this is probably very different from the ‘need for connection’ of women. Still, it is sufficiently similar that I keep imagining this as implying that men and women are like different variations on the same theme, the game of loneliness and togetherness, the game of contact and misunderstanding, the game of love and pain.
Possibly true.
I tend to be attracted to particular women for particular reasons. So there may be some merit to what you’re saying…if it was just some type of automatic or thoughtless or actually purely feral response, then a warm body would be a warm body.
But when I look at the kind of woman I attract vs. the kind of woman I’m attracted to….*headdesk*
Precisely.
At least in my case, even when I fantasize for masturbatory purposes, I don’t just think of big secondary sexual features and blurry out the face or the attitude women; it’s what they’re doing and why (= desire) that really gets me going. Fantasies are dynamic, not static shots. I don’t deny that a close-up look at a wet pussy is a great experience, but this is in me always linked to something happening, either to me or by me, or both. I sometimes feel my sexual fantasies, no matter how explicit, are more about certain kinds of female personalities, women who would like doing this and that and who would react to me like this and that, rather than simply women with certain body specifications — the latter also count, but are far, far, from sufficient to be interesting. Even when looking at pictures of naked women, I imagine them doing something, having (sexual) likes and dislikes, reacting in certain ways to my touching them. It is ultimately about the whole, even when I concentrate on the part.
Asephe, have you ever thought about doing a blog on this subject? Your musings in the past few days are certainly eloquent and interesting enough to support one! 🙂
I did try once, but I didn’t go very far (though the topic was not exactly male and female desire, but gender equality and its problems). It seems I’m better at reacting to ideas that other people throw around — and since your site is a little treasure chest of interesting and beautifully expressed ideas and thoughts, I find it difficult to just think about them without writing something down. :-))
Thank you! I’ve always wanted to be a Muse! 😉
Oh my, you’re very welcome!
There is a long tradition of courtesans being Muses, isn’t there? My own personal courtesan hero is Ninon de Lenclos (I wrote the article on her in the Volapük Wikipedia), who inspired many poems, and even left money for the young Voltaire when she died so that he would be able to buy books.
Yes, right back to the beginning. 🙂
Hm, I do like to talk a lot, don’t I? Sorry if I end up clogging your pages with long-winded posts (I’ve been accused of that before)!… I’ll make sure other comments are shorter.
Feel free to be as long-winded as you like; at the rate I’m using space it’ll take 50 years to exceed my allotment. 🙂
I’d also like to thank you for your long-winded posts. 😉
I’m reminded of one time when my sweetie and I went grocery shopping. As usual, I was noticing pretty girls. I’ve never really learned the sill of hiding this from the woman I happen to be with at the time, so I’m glad Pumpkin (a need a name for her other than “my sweetie”) isn’t the sort to freak out over such a thing. There were a lot of Asian girls there that day, and Pumpkin at one point asked, “What is it with you and Asian girls?”
I told her that I like all kinds of girls. She already knew this.
“Yes, but there’s something special about the Asian girls.”
I thought for a moment and told her, “Well, I’ve never had one.”
And really, that’s exactly what it is with me and Asian girls: I’ve never had one. It isn’t that the parts are different (human beings are human beings and besides, I’ve seen Asian porn). It isn’t that I think that Asian girls do something in bed that white or black girls do not. Nope, it’s just that, well, I’ve never had one.
But that’s just the variety issue. You’re talking about more than that.
For a short time in the mid-90s I was a partner in a bookstore, and my oldest male friend used to come in frequently; I noticed he looked at Heavy Metal magazine in the newsstand whenever he did. “If you like that so much you ought to buy it,” I semi-teased; “You could enjoy the stores better sitting down.”
“Oh, I’m not really reading it, just looking at the titties.” I laughed, then pointed out that his wife had a very nice set of her own. “Yes, she does,” he replied, “but these are titties I haven’t seen yet.”
…Because men only have two switches when it comes to women….old and new.
Old meaning I’ve seen it/had it, new meaning I haven’t.
That is literally all it takes for a man to get turned on.
Maggie, what’s the female equivalent/counterpart of this trait?
Mostly the same, except we react the opposite way; women tend to be more open to sex with familiar men than with ones they don’t know. That’s why so many divorced couples fall back into bed; many women would rather have sex with an ex than with someone they don’t know.
Good! 🙂 And still I think that saying the motivation is just “I want to see a new set of titties” is a bit of self-delusion — he wouldn’t want to see them if they were floating in free air, unattached to a woman. To me, at least, the attraction of the new pair (or of the Asian girl) is not that we scientifically think they will be ‘new’ (as Sailor Barsoom says, we know they won’t), but something in us still expects them to be different (‘what’s it like having an Asian girl? is it — despite my knowing that it isn’t — different from having a white girl?’).
When I was an adolescent, I had a thing for redheads in my fantasies — they are almost non-existant in Brazil, which made them to me way more interesting. But the interesting/sexy thing was not just the color of the hair (on the head or elsewhere — it it really everywhere the same?…), but the impression that, despite my knowing that it wasn’t so, there would be something ‘different’, ‘exotic’, ‘new’ in sex with a redhead. She would be different — let’s say her soul would also be red-haired… and I’d feel the difference. Or so it seemed to me.
And maybe women also feel that, too.
An American friend of mine, a blond, blue-eyed Michigander from a Norwegian immigrant family, told me than when he first came to Northern Brazil to work (also as a field linguist), he was surprised by the amount of attention he got from the local girls only because he is blonde and blue-eyed. Especially in small towns in the North, the blond, blue-eyed type is never seen. So he reports girls actually going after him just to see if his eyes were really blue (not contact lenses), and if his hair was all blonde…
Another friend, a fromer Dutch graduate student who went to the field with me once, a very good-looking young woman, once remarked, when we both met another Dutch guy who worked at an NGO interested in rainforest conservation: ‘He thinks he’s hot, but he isn’t; in Holland he’d just be a plain guy, undistinguishable from a zillion others; but here in Brazil, every girl falls for him! He’s so exotic! I’ll bet that’s why he works here!’ To which I replied something like: ‘And wouldn’t you like to be in a place where your particular body type is widely appreciated?’ (It’s as if she thought that, since her sexual experience comes from Holland, then Holland standards are The One True Set of Standards, and if that guy was a B- in Holland that he really was a B- and Brazilian girls were simply wrong to think he was an A+… Ah, our unwarranted assumptions of cultural universality!… Even from an anthropology grad student! :-))
Just positing an exception to the rule:
Women will want sex with a guy they are attracted to and who they feel has the potential to “pay” later on.
Sooo, back when I was in my 20s and my early 30s I was lucky enough to have a few long term gfs who wanted a LOT of sex with me, for years at a time, even though I have (almost always) been very, conspicuously poor. I’ve been a musician for a lot of that time… 😉
Only one of those relationships seemed to have cost me noticably at the time, to the point that when we split I realised I was financially better off cos I wasn’t going out to restaurants twice a week. Eating out is expensive in the UK.
As I got older (40 now) I had at least one gf break off a long term relationship with me, in part explicitly because I was unable / unwilling to go halves on buying a house and having kids. Women don’t see potential in an older fella, they want you to already have cash / resources / a nice place etc.
I was talking to a younger impoverished musician type who the ladies LOVE right now. I explained to him: “Mate, you’ve got about ten to fifteen years of being pretty AND being seen to have potential.”
Maggie–
I’m very familiar with this general notion from evo psych, though I’ve never seen it expressed in just this way before.
The evo psych / sexicology period I’ve seen is anywhere from 6 months to 4 years. This is the period during which she may, if it’s a love/lust match, feel deeply “in love”. That as opposed to closely identified companionate love rarely lasts longer than that.
I think if she doesn’t turn into a whore once her intense attraction wanes a man SHOULD feel betrayed if he’s married her, has children with her, and hence is marriage and divorce 2.0 in indentured servitude to her.
Which brings me to this. Why isn’t marriage a fool’s bargain for men these days? At least alpha men who can get low cost sex outside of marriage, or call girls?
I’ve several years older than you. Was married quite a while ago, divorced, no kids. Lower upper class income. I thought giving her half my wealth accumulated during our marriage was incredibly unjust. She divorced me for infidelity. I started doing that after she stopped wanting sex enthusiastically, the great majority of the time. Low libido. Hers was high during the period we were dating and then living together (about 1 year) before marriage I think for just the reason you say. Mate ensnaring. Post marriage she turned all ardent neofeminist in your terms.
Well I had tons of fun post marriage. Not never gonna marry again. Been living w/a 9 almost 20 years younger for 3.5 years. Keep her keen in part by making her jealous. Threesomes, me then she dominant. Well two of them, but one continuing over all last summer, at the weekend place. I also think NOT marrying her, but providing nicely for her (she’s a young professional herself by I earn tons more) keeps the attraction stronger too.
I think the deal of marriage 2.0 and divorce 2.0 is way to heavily female advantaged and sucks for men.
Kudos to both Maggie and Asehpe! You both display remarkable insight as well as candour in your respective writings. Deeply personal and yet with general applicability.
Maggie: your description of the female perspective explains a lot for us males. As you say, to get anywhere, you need a map. While there certainly are individual variances, you provided a, much needed, general topology of (to us)Terra Incognita! And you also neatly explained how people like Barbara Cartland could make a fortune on sappy romance novels. (For a few moments, that sentence ended “when they are so formulaic and fake” until I noticed what a ludicrous statement it was, coming from a porn-watching male… 😉 ) But I suspect that the appeal of porn to males is as mysterious to females as romance novels are to males.
Asehpe: What you describe certainly resonates with me as well. Both the mixed reverence/envy towards women’s sexuality and the feeling that there is something else involved with the need for novelty. If it was just a question of sexual imagery (or body-parts), then the best porn-stars would be the extreme-augmented ones with make-up laid on with a trowel, but it isn’t. There is some reason why my fantasies of some women instinctively (not having any knowledge of what they actually like in bed) involve soft, sensuous love-making while for others it is intense, passionate “mutual conquering” (and the gamut in between).
But, then again, these vague feelings may just be my conscious mind desperately trying to explain (away) the base urge so that it can maintain the illusion that it is in control…
Thank you, Paul! 🙂
It’s also possible to argue that women need men far more than men need women, assuming both men and women are fully developed and normally socialized. The fully developed normally socialized woman is passive, submissive and lives for pleasure, whereas the fully developed normally socialized male is active, dominant and lives for power. These characteristics are more nurture than nature, but they are so deeply imprinted that it makes no difference since they can’t be changed regardless.
For the fully developed male, sex with a woman is merely one outlet for his dominant and power-seeking tendencies. He could just as well run a business. Whereas the woman has no other outlet than sex for her submissive and pleasure-seeking tendencies. For a woman, masturbation and paying for sex are very poor substitutes for real sex, because she is not being dominated, whereas for a man there is something inherently dominant about paying for sex, at least if he approaches the transaction in the right frame of mind.
Masturbation is normally degrading for a man IF he has the alternative of sex with a woman, but not otherwise. A man at sea in the Navy for months at a time with only other men on board, for example, will not feel degraded by masturbation, provided he feels masturbation is merely a temporary substitute until he arrives in port somewhere. Also, a man who needs to save money for some reason, and hence can neither hire whores nor spend money dating or marrying women, will not feel degraded by masturbating. Finally, there’s homosexuality. The ancient Greek males were very masculine, and also given to homosexuality. Male-dominated institutions (military, sport teams) have always had a strong undercurrent of homosexuality, which often manifests in group sex with a hooker or groupie.
All flesh-and-blood humans have both masculine and feminine characteristics. When a whore is paid for sex, and feels empowered as a result, she is satisfying her masculine side. Her feminine side, if she has one, has to be satisfied elsewhere. I say “if she has one” since it is probably true that most whores who enjoy their work have a very strongly developed masculine side, compared to other women.
Men like Asehpe, who want the woman to want him, have strongly developed feminine sides, which is something modern society encourages in men. This feminization of men is deeply frustrating to modern women. Truly masculine man, the type truly feminine women want, don’t care that much about women and what they want or think, because women and children are financial albatrosses to a man nowadays. This implies women in modern society must chase the man, then work to get him aroused, until finally he looks up from whatever he was occupied with, throws her down and dominates her sexually.
Many women find chasing men to be degrading, but they shouldn’t. It’s similar to how female cats/lionesses/tigresses behave. A man who loves women in the way Asehpe describes is repellent to women, because he is acting like a woman.
Masculine men left to themselves tend to engage in violent and risk-taking behavior and die young. But this is not an argument that men need women. We all die in the end. A truly masculine man WANTS to die in action rather than safely in bed, and this means he will probably die sooner than later.
Feminine women left to themselves seem to function well enough, but in fact they are often just walking corpses, with lives that revolve around redecorating, shopping, gossiping, feeding their cats, etc. A pleasant but passionless existence. They live a long time, but what’s the point? Instead of being bored silly for the last thirty years of life, they get to be bored silly for the last forty or fifty years or whatever. Even worse than the empty existence of old women is the despair of single women in their 30’s, of the sort who are too refined to let themselves be picked up in bars but also unwilling to chase the sort of refined but masculine men they could enjoy submitting to. The only way these women can exist is to utterly suppress their feminine side and act like poor imitations of men. This denial of their true nature brings on depression.