Penis Envy and Other Bad Feelings by Mari Ruti

Author:Mari Ruti
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Columbia University Press

WANTING TO BE WANTED

In some societies, heteropatriarchy takes the form of suppressing outward signifiers of female sexuality through practices such as veiling. In contrast, Western heteropatriarchy has long displayed female sexuality for male consumption. Within older versions of this paradigm, men were explicitly portrayed as active subjects of desire—as individuals who get to “own” their desire—whereas women were portrayed as its passive objects. Until recently, the only form of desire that was available to women was the desire to be desired, to be the pleasing object of male desire. In this sense, women’s desire was indirect, so that the closest they came to expressing desire was by desiring men’s desire; essentially, they wanted to be wanted.7

As I already noted, things seem to have changed: even if our society still reads female sexual penetrability as a signifier of passivity and submission in the manner that I discussed in the previous chapter, it’s now acceptable for women to look at men, assess them, and desire them. If anything, acknowledging active female desire has become one of the main advertising tricks of the twenty-first century, used to sell us everything from clothes, makeup, and perfume to cars and condos. However, the makeover culture I’ve just described illustrates that traces of the old order of things still linger, and arguably quite emphatically, in the sense that many women are still working overtime to elicit male desire; they still primarily want to be wanted.

If one wished to insist on the accuracy of the mythology that tells us that men are more sexual than women, one could point to this predicament as the reason for this phenomenon: being asked to desire one’s own objectification is much more complicated than the process of objectifying another person. According to this interpretation, it’s not biology that might make some women hesitate in the face of their own desire but rather the psychological contradictions of having to eroticize their subordination as passive objects of someone else’s desire.

Granted, the play of desire can take unpredictable forms. For example, it’s possible that the bearer of the look fails to dominate the object of the look but is instead flustered by it. Being able to capture another person’s attention can be a form of power, so that it’s legitimate to propose that the one whose gaze is arrested by a beautiful object—whether animate or inanimate—in many ways surrenders to that object, allowing himself, his desire, to be disoriented by it.8 This is why contemporary movies and television shows repeatedly offer us women who use their sexuality to manipulate men, why the guy who drops his stack of business documents when a stunning woman walks into his office is such a familiar trope.

Yet in the world of straight romance, women are still in many ways expected to signal their desirability rather than to approach the object of their desire directly; they’re expected to send (usually discreet) signals of availability in the hope that the man they’re interested in will act on these signals and approach them.

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