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.

The Importance of Being Richard

Decades of feminist toil notwithstanding, the framework of the relationship between the male and female of our species remains on display in the exchange between male John and female prostitute: women continue to be granted access to the means for economic survival only to the extent that their sexual wares remain for sale. The inviolability of this sexual paradigm in late twentieth century and post-millennial America is writ large in the Hollywood career of Richard Gere.

Gere first shot to fame via 1980’s American Gigolo, in which Gere flipped the sexual script in his portrayal of the male prostitute servicing a female clientele. The success of this film hinged on the erotic potency of the violation of taboo found in its illicit rearrangement of sexual typecasting (re. the box-office potential of taboo-busting, witness the aptly titled pornographic film Taboo, one of the highest grossing blue movies to date, in which a male in his late adolescence lusts after, and ultimately consummates a sexual relationship with, his mother). The success of American Gigolo simultaneously made and unmade Gere, as he had unquestionably ascended to star status, but on his way up became marked as persona non gratis, effectively emasculated by the viral femininity that had leeched into his Hollywood aura during his turn as prostitute, i.e. Woman.

It is crucial not to let the box-office success of Gere’s 1982 smash hit, An Officer and a Gentleman, muddy the waters. Understood correctly, An Officer and a Gentleman is the exception that proves the rule that when one swims against the tide of masculine domination, one swims at one’s own risk. Gere’s ability to temporarily transcend the stain from American Gigolo is secured in the famous final scene of An Officer and a Gentleman in which Gere, in full Marine dress blues, storms onto the factory floor and literally sweeps Debra Winger off of her feet and out of the factory, to the cheers of her female factory co-workers. Each element in this scene is crucial to Gere’s brief transcendence. The marine uniform as warrior’s cloth cloaks Gere’s sexual stain, obscuring it from the viewer’s gaze. Gere sweeps Winger off her feet in a factory, the archetypal site of involvement in the wage economy, symbolically removing Woman from the labor pool and placing her economic survival back in its rightful domain of sexual object-hood. Winger swoons in Gere’s masculine embrace, an embrace which clearly references Man’s purchased ownership of Woman’s sexuality via marriage as rendered in the traditional carrying of the newly betrothed bride over the threshold, which is always a precursor to laying the virgin down in the marriage bed and taking possession of her sex. This shot reverses the transgressive act of taking women back across the threshold into sexual freedom that Gere, by bedding them for pay, had symbolically accomplished in American Gigolo. Finally, the cheers of Winger’s female factory co-workers signal their complicity in the sexual status quo, as they long to be liberated from the oppressive workaday life of factory labor by their own knight in shining armor; a life of indentured sexual servitude seems a small price to pay at the end of an eight hour shift on the factory floor for peanut wages. These women’s cheers signal that the feminist’s victory has in fact been Pyrrhic in nature, as the fruits of liberation from masculine domination are revealed as but a subjugation of a higher order. The song of women’s liberation is lost in the throbbing beat of workingman’s blues.

Post- An Officer and a Gentleman, Gere’s career entered its wilderness period, as the stain of American Gigolo, temporarily undone in the narrative of Officer’s denouement , reasserted itself in a near-decade long series of box-office disappointments. The only heat Gere generated during this period came in the form of a perverse urban legend. Legend has it that Gere engaged in a radical form of bestiality, inserting a mouse encased in a condom inside his rectum, with the frantic scratching of the mouse intended to generate sexual stimulation. Gere almost certainly never actually engaged in any such sexual shenanigans, but the viral spread of this rumor, which became so commonplace as to be considered a matter of course, had nothing to do with whether Gere actually stuffed a mouse in his arse. The ubiquity of this urban legend was an expression of zeitgeist, a collective recognition of the stain attached to Gere as a result of his actions in American Gigolo. The urban legend was a reformulation of the cultural stigma attached to Gere’s transgressive sexual persona. It was the very success of American Gigolo, in which mass culture encountered its own unacceptable desire for non-traditional sex, which foundered Gere. Gere’s stain, translated to narrative form via the urban legend, was the accompanying equal and opposite reaction to our collective repression of unacceptable, libido-driven desire.

Gere’s salvation as Hollywood leading man came with 1990’s Pretty Woman, in which Gere permanently erased his stain by renouncing American Gigolo’s radical core. By portraying a man paying to have sex with a female prostitute, Gere is able to stuff the terrifying specter of our sexual unchaining back into Pandora’s Box. It all plays out like a failed psychoanalysis, in which Gere shares his dream/nightmare of being paid to provide sex to a woman, only to have the analyst misinterpret the potentially transformative content of the dream as a symptom of pathology, the only available treatment for which is a reversion to socially acceptable sexual norms, a real, yet cloaked, pathology invisible to the incompetent analyst; the failed analyst, of course, is you and I.

The erasure of the stain enacted by Gere’s performance in Pretty Woman is as comprehensive as it is pathological. Pretty Woman is Gere’s public recital of the requisite Our Father’s and Hail Mary’s, proscribed by that other analyst figure, the Priest (we are, of course, also Priest, in the church of public opin{repress}ion). One conjugal embrace with girl-next-door cum slut Julia Roberts later, and Gere’s sins are completely absolved. The absolution’s probation period ends with Gere’s installation as People Magazine’s Sexiest Man Alive in 1999. Gere’s new status as Hollywood’s (un)enlightened uber mensch is then codified by his exalted gig as the Dalai Lama’s number one Hollywood henchmen. Namaste!

Gere’s talent as the reverse Harry Houdini, inexplicably capable of re-chaining himself to social sexual norms after the near symbolic-death experience of American Gigolo , is celebrated in 1993’s Somersby. Gere portrays a returning Civil War veteran who, while physically resembling himself as he was before the war, is somehow just plain different enough to raise the question of whether he really is himself after all. Jodie Foster, a real-life “glass closet” lesbian, here dressed in (patriarchal) period costume, perfectly representing the figure of unacceptable, repressed desire, says to the new Gere, in order to prove to him once and for all that he is not the man whom he once was, “I never loved him the way I love you.” Foster’s stated passion for the new Gere is the acceptable, sublimated version of a passion our society is clearly not ready to own: our unequivocal, secret and diabolical desire for our American gigolo.