Desire affects your decisions more often than you think
Exploring the contours of desire beyond sex
Desire reveals itself in many forms—some prickly, some mundane. To some, it is a familiar sensation. To others, it can feel like their throat drying up as their words retched in it. To few, it looks like the struggle of choice and autonomy. Desire resides somewhere between longing and secrecy. For most women, the shadows that follow their desire have shadows too.
“The worst thing you can be is a happy brazen woman,” journalist and author Lisa Taddeo unhesitatingly sets forth to Roxanne Coady, host of Just the Right Book podcast. In a patriarchal society that dictates women must accept and relinquish themselves to the reality of silenced desires, judgment and guilt are pointed at those who know how to own and act on them. Women constantly second-guess expressing themselves and perpetually fear the consequences for when they do. Society has never favored a happy brazen woman. Instead, she is shamed for acknowledging the very thing that makes us human. “We were taught good women should be traditional, conservative and silent about sex. We were taught not to talk about it so what we do is that we hide it from other people,” sex and relationship therapist Rica Cruz explains. As women, it has become second nature to conceal our desire and everything that surrounds it—the impulses, the craving and the lustful proclivities. While this culture of repression has hindered our identity in more ways than we can imagine, it also leaves us with the question: When we don’t express our desire, where does that desire go?
Lisa Taddeo, author of the acclaimed Three Women, reveals the intimate, honest and erotic lives of three complicated women through her journalistic work which reads quite like fiction. The book is a product of nearly a decade’s worth of immersive reporting on three females (two of which are given pseudonyms) entangled in their own desires: Lina, a housewife pursuing a cathartic affair outside her loveless marriage, Sloane, a restauranteur who is married to a man who likes to watch her sleep with other women and men, and Maggie, a young woman facing the consequences of her illicit relationship with her teacher in high school.
There is a fear among women—a fear that the only things waiting for us at the end of every conservation on our desires are rejection, shame and indifference. “When there is shame, we start to project that onto others,” Taddeo observes. Society has been the farthest thing from kind to women who have learned to own and act on their desires. The belief is that the way women were configured is that what they have ought to be good enough for them, however much or little it may be. There is this idea of women
“WE WERE TAUGHT GOOD WOMEN SHOULD BE TRADITIONAL, CONSERVATIVE AND SILENT SEX” ABOUT
being perpetuated that they don’t want more than what they have. Community plays a huge role in what a woman allows herself to feel and want. When Lina shares that her husband refuses to touch her and that the sensation of kissing her on the mouth offends him, she is told by other women to accept that reality and be content with the house, the children and the financial security the marriage offered instead. Women can be the most unforgiving to other women.
Judgment stems from the unshaken belief that when men desire, it is the norm, but when women desire, it is the most unnatural thing in the world. “It’s the patriarchy. Men control women’s bodies and men control women’s desires,” Cruz elaborates. For years, women have found ways to live and respond to their desires within the confines of the system and society that entraps them. In her marriage, Sloane has unconsciously learned to anchor her desires to her husband’s and derives her pleasure from service. Women tend to behave in ways that are easy and convenient for others, or even to themselves. It’s funny who gets to switch things on and off, Sloane catches herself thinking.
When you talk about sex, it’s never just the act itself. It is a multitude consisting of every romantic encounter, every childhood trauma and all the small and large assaults one endures as a woman. More often than not, how a woman expresses her sexuality is the product of her trauma—it could be one big thing or a hundred small things. Facing the difficulties of her parents’ alcoholism and a scandal on her sexual involvement with an older man, Maggie finds comfort in confiding to her high school teacher. What started as after-school chats evolved into hours-worth of phone calls and text messages that eventually progressed to a sexual relationship. Attention is an incredibly powerful thing. He gave her the validation, the attention and the time she had yearned for and she accepted it. Women want to be seen and to be heard, yet sometimes it could feel like the most difficult thing to have. How much of our desires are moved and urged by what satisfies our longing to be acknowledged? Maggie describes it best, “Sometimes there’s nothing better on earth than someone asking you a question.”
Oftentimes, people blur the lines between desire and sex, sometimes misconstruing them as one and the same. As desire constitutes the cognitive, sex is the behavioral manifestation. “Female sexual arousal is different from male sexual arousal in which males get desire first, then they get aroused. For women, it’s a bit more complicated because they have to be aroused first most of the time before they get the desire or the wish or the want to have sex,” Rica explains. Throughout her career as a therapist, she has found that the most common misconception patients have coming in is that women do not have any desires.
Female desire is prismatic, unbelievably complex and transcends beyond the act of sex. “Sexual desire isn’t just about sex, it’s about their whole life per se,” Cruz enthuses. Sex and romance have allowed us to expose, magnify, and heal old and unconscious wounds. Our desires do not only live in the moment when we act on them, but they also live in each and every way we retell, narrate, and express them. Through their raw and real work, Lisa Taddeo and Rica Cruz encourage women to embrace their desire and the pleasure it can give them— that there is absolutely nothing wrong with being a happy brazen woman. Desire dictates the way we talk, the way we behave, and the conversations we choose to be a part of. We relate to ourselves through our objects of desire—how we express it and how we repress it. After all, isn’t desire the driving force of living?