l liked the new Woody Allen movie, "Vicky Cristina Barcelona," not only because of the splendid beauty the moviemaker captured of Barcelona–and of his stars, Rebecca Hall, Scarlett Johansson, Javier Bardem and Penelope Cruz –but because Allen so clearly grasps and dispels some of the most tiresome myths perpetuated about women (that we don’t know what we want; that we want "relationships" while men want "sex" ) and pokes fun at the idea that What Women Want is a mystery no one can comprehend (just because Freud couldn’t). Through characters who take up the cause–one claims she doesn’t know what she wants; another that she does; a third that she can only have what she wants under certain conditions and will fall apart otherwise) he creates a wonderful bedlam–showing what they’ll do for love; where lust can take them when they’re in its grip. Allen grasps desire–men’s and women’s–that phenomenon we all talk about but know so little about.
What IS desire after all? Is it a thought, idealized love? Delight? Dementia? A hormone, a brain chemical? Who has it –and is there anyone who doesn’t? Where does it reside–in our brains? In our loins?Why does it come (Estrogen? Testosterone?) How come it goes? (Familiarity? Boredom? Diminishing hormones?) Can it ever come back (with the same person it once poured out with)? What Allen does is to show us not only desire itself, but its unreliability. One couple, passionately in love, are able to want each other only if there’s a third person (Cristina) around to neutralize their impulse to kill each other. Another couple, not passionately in love, stay together once Vicky gets enough sexual desire out of the way to make her life work the way she wants it to. Desire knows no bounds, it occurs when we least expect it, and it promises nothing but itself and that, only while it lasts.
The Love Goddess thinks a lot about desire, obviously. I see how the culture believes that desire somehow can (or should) go on unabated, pouring out endlessly, as if it were a faucet that turns on at puberty and pours out uncontrollably until old age. You mortals dote on the idea of Endless Passion, and imagine you’re desire-impaired when you discover how sputtering, even trickling desire really can be. It happens up here in the pantheon, too: We blame our partner for the trickle and the sputter of desire, as if it were our right to have it flowing all the time and as if, were we still in love with our partner, the faucet would go on pouring out unabated. In my lifetime I’ve seen a few couples who make love eagerly and steadily year after year, but most of them say bouts of sexual apathy are commoner than the cold. No surprise the number one reason cited by couples who go to sexual therapy is Inhibited Sexual Desire.
Some people know how to get the desire flowing again. whether by bringing in a new person or a third person or a vacation apart (or together). And they know, if they’re grownups, that desire is by nature an impermanent and even an unstable state–which doesn’t make it less desirable, as Allen’s delightful movie illustrates. At the end of Vicky Cristina Barcelona, we see that some women will never know what they want, and other women may have to sacrifice what they want–but sooner or later, desire will get us. And that’s a good, glorious thing. But it, like everything else, will never pour forth in satisfying abundance always and forever.
I don’t know whether it’s because I’m a woman of a ceratin age, but I am not all that interested in erotic relationships these days. I’m much more interested in self-mastery and learning how to influence the world around me–in self-empowerment. Sorry, such a cliche I know but is there a better word?. I sometimes wonder what it would have been like to feel this way when I was in my twenties and thirties. I would have made some very different decisions. Especially about men.
Dear DesertMother,
I love what you say, because I believe that desire isn’t limited to love of the opposite sex, but is a more broad longing for connection–whether that be with the self, the soul, or with humanity. Only in what feminists once called “the erotic plot” was women’s desire confined to the Domestic. And that was because women themselves (not here in the pantheon, but down there on earth) were confined to domesticity! That your pleasure isn’t focused on the domestic, now, but on a larger canvas, feels healthy and exciting to me. And proof that desire isn’t a reductive idea stuck in a narrow narrative, but that it can be as big as all outdoors.
–The Love Goddess