Women and Desire
by
elisabeth
05/27/2008, 12:14 PM #
I can only speak for myself, the generations of girls I knew in school and college, and half a century of women friends and relatives at all different stages of their life cycles, with men or without. I lived through that brief wrinkle of time, post-pill and pre-aids, when many couples felt obliged to experiment with the very notion of marriage and when honesty about one's fantasies and experiences seemed the sole defining characteristic of fidelity. During the era of open marriage, couples discovered (as if they had never intuited it before) that having multiple sexual partners is excruciatingly painful and difficult to mange in a monogamous relationship. While women have been trained to forgive if not entirely to forget over the years, the jealousy and feelings of inadequacy experienced by men know almost no bounds when unleashed. Many an "open marriage" flounders despite a priori permissions and parameters when women decide to take up with other men, or even other women.
I have seen no evidence that women desire less than men, rather that their longings tend to be laced with romance and fix themselves on a particular person rather than an diffuse desire to go out and get laid. Mature women are often in love with several people at the same time, at least in their fantasies. Some of this longing is sanctioned by a society that allows wives to have "crushes" on Hollywood stars or musicians who appeal to "women of a certain age" (Kojak, Bogart, Engelbert Humperdink).
Reason may tell wives that their spouse and their spouse alone is the most practical, ideal person for consummated sex, and that other loves work best when transmuted into comradeship, creative collaborations, mentor or pseudo-sibling relationships, platonic ideals, or just plain desire from afar. Nevertheless, in all these safer guises, full-throttled desire may be lurking right under the surface to pop up in dreams and in moments of luxurious solitude. If women are between relationships and blissfully free of health and pregnancy worries, they tend to embrace casual sex as enthusiastically as men, but those adventures are often seen in retrospect as failures if they lead to nothing more binding or durable.
Women often desire the men they are married to be or do something differently than they do. This cannot always be worked out so women simply desire their husbands in fantasy as different from the more limited husband they must settle for in real life. This enables sex to take place with multiple lovers in one partner.
I never met a woman who stopped desiring, even when her body or her health and fatigue became too wearisome to translate desire into conventional sexual activity. Different acts become erotic: massage, hand holding, complete uninterrupted togetherness. In this as elsewhere, desire is linked to romance even with one's lifetime companion. Look at the depth of physical understanding that sometimes takes place among the very oldest couples -- it is a form of experiential communication and an adventure in itself. Perhaps all the mating and breeding and prowling is simply a rehearsal for the truest of loves.
