What Does a Woman Want?

Freud famously expressed a frustration born from his inability to fathom the feminine mystery: “The great question that has never been answered, and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is ‘What does a woman want?’” That Freud, one of the most insightful thinkers ever, failed to answer this question satisfactorily speaks less to the difficulty of the question and more to the thickheaded nature of men when it comes to women. Because this is actually not in the least a difficult question to answer. A woman’s core desire is to have a desirable partner of her choosing, and, more importantly, to be the most important thing in the life of her chosen partner. There are of course individual exceptions, but by and large if you spend any time with women and listen to them talk it becomes clear how central the desire for this ideal union is to almost all of them. Women may want more out of life than this, but never less.

And yet we all go around acting as if the answer to Freud’s question remains a mystery. I think that we do this because we focus on the “more” that women may want out of life, while ignoring the foundational desire common to almost all women. The “more” will of course be unique to each woman, and certain patterns may emerge in the female collective. The great mistake is to look at these patterns as if the answer to the question of what women want is to be found there, rather than in their (mostly) uniform central desire. Women themselves make this mistake, too. Carol Queen, noted author on female sexuality, wrote an essay in which she lists top five things that a woman wants, and the entire list consists of trends that exist in the “more” of female desires: 1) Equal pay for equal work, 2)Respect, 3) Trust, 4) Communication, 5) Sexual Permission. While each of these desires is reasonable, and while numbers two through five would be elements of a harmonious partnered relationship, a woman with all five of these elements in her life but who lacks a partner for whom she is the most important thing of all, would still exist in a state of fundamental discontent. Whereas a woman who has a desired partner for whom she is the most important thing of all, but who lacks one of these five elements, is still likely to feel a core of contentment that is unavailable to a woman who has a fabulously high paying job that has burst through the glass ceiling, and even has a desired partner who gives her respect, trust, communication, and sexual permission, if, for example, this partner’s career is more important to him or her than the woman in question.

Everyone knows this, but we like to pretend we don’t, so the obvious question is why? Freud posed the question well before feminism had achieved its greatest accomplishments, so we can’t lay the blame for our collective faux-beffudlement at the feet of the feminists, but they may play a role in its current version. Feminism, rightly, demanded the right of women to pursue the “more” that had been denied to them down through the ages. So when a feminist like Carol Queen thinks about what a woman wants she is going to emphasize those aspects of female desire that have traditionally been denied to women. A feminist who responded to the question of “what does a woman want” with the real answer would risk rolling back all of the triumphs of the past century which allow women to pursue the “more.” So, by definition, a committed feminist is someone who can’t correctly answer the question, “what does a woman want?” Of course, that does not stop women, feminist and otherwise, from constantly talking about what they really want, the aforementioned chosen partner for whom they are the most important thing of all. They just can’t have this discussion in the context of the question, “what does a woman want?” If asked what they want, feminists must provide answers that only provide “the more”, or, if they reveal their desire for a chosen partner who values them more than anything else, this desire must be portrayed as an ingredient to satisfaction in life, thereby disguising its true status as the sine qua non of female happiness.

Men take this opening and run with it as an excuse not to do the hard relationship work involved in valuing their female partners above all else. The cost of doing business paid by the feminists is that they have allowed men the stance that as long as they are respectful, trustworthy, etc. towards their wives/partners, then they have done their best to give women what they want, even if they have not made their women number one. It is, as one of my astute female colleagues pointed out to me, easier for a man to stay late at work then it is to come home from work and take equal responsibility for helping to raise the three children and do a fair share of housekeeping. But it is only by doing the latter that a man will communicate to his female partner that he values her above all else. This is called doing the dirty work, and men too often like to keep their hands clean under the cover of career advancement or by simply spending too much time attending to their own set of interests. But the price paid for this is to never experience the truly adoring female partner, which is the best that life has to offer (straight) men. Nothing in the world glows like the woman who feels that her chosen partner values her above all else, because nothing comes close to a woman who has her central desire in life met consistently. The selfish man pretends that he doesn’t know what women want in order to avoid the labor necessary to achieve relationship greatness. Labor is a term not coincidentally connected with giving birth, that other greatest thing that life has to offer, which underscores the fact that anything in life worth having requires labor. The love of a man’s life should be his central labor. I would argue that what you choose to labor for most intensively should be something that can love you back.

Perhaps we are also all invested in maintaining the “mystery of woman.” This element of mystery could be seen as a necessary ingredient for the sexual dance, and as such our blindness to the lack of mystery as to “what does a woman want” could be seen as biologically determined. But I’m not so sure. I believe that it is us humans, men and women alike, who are mysterious, and that this mystery comes from the “more” that each of us wants out of life that is so individualized and can be so inscrutable to the other. Every individual on Earth wants something different, but all women want the same thing, and all men (or women who love women) would be wise to give it to them; it is our surest route to happiness, “more” notwithstanding. Another astute married female colleague of mine taught me the phrase “happy wife equals happy life.” These are words to live by. The real mystery is why we so often don’t.