What Do Women Want? (21 page)

—ELINOR GLYN

 

 

 

Sex appeal is a quality
of mystery and accessibility both at the same time. It is out there shimmering for you—slightly out of reach. It is related to beauty, but it has nothing to do with perfect features or a perfect body. It is related to physical passion, but it is in no way hydraulic. Human beings are most aroused by fantasy and dream, not by swollen red vulvas—like baboons—or by erect feathers like peacocks. One reason sex videos and X-rated cable channels do nothing but
anesthetize
some of us is that they make sex too literal, too available.

Surely I am not the first to say that our primary erogenous zone is the brain. But this is why some people are erotic for kindred spirits only, and not for everyone. Then there are others—Marilyn Monroe and Paul Newman are examples—who seem to evoke that quality of mysterious sex in
many
people. At the heart of this universality is their appeal to daydream. But I’m not interested in talking about movie stars and media images; I’m interested in the sexuality each of us has and often does nothing to tap.

What makes a woman or a man sexual? Is it a question of scent, of pheromones? Or is it a question of evoking
yearning
?

When we read about the lives of the great courtesans and heroines, we always hear that they had physical flaws but they knew instinctively how to stimulate yearning. They made themselves selectively unavailable. Of all the women Henry Miller loved, the only one he never
stopped
loving was one who was married to another: Anaïs Nin. She came and went—off to her husband, Hugo, back to Henry, off to her analyst lover, Otto Rank, off to her social life, her voluminous journals, the drama of her daily life. Henry wanted to marry her, but she would not marry a vagabond/pauper/novelist. She made her house outside Paris (in Louviciennes) into a cave of dreams. There she entertained her admirers in a setting she controlled. Her journals became another snare. Often she would read her lovers selected sections of her journals to arouse them. Sometimes these journals would deal intimately with
other
admirers. She wove a web made of words, of costumes, of mysterious disappearances. Henry Miller mistreated many of the women in his life, but he never mistreated Anaïs. Her unavailability, above all, prevented it.

Many women know that it is better to be a mistress than a wife. Mistresses are never associated with the broken water pipe or with the baby vomit on the silk blouse. Mistresses receive their lovers at appointed hours. They insist on controlling the light show and the sound effects. (I am not speaking of unwilling mistresses, longing to become wives. I am speaking of wise women who know what they have.)

What is their principal lure? Fantasy and dream.

The people I have loved most deeply in my life are those who have shared the water main breaks with me. But the people I have fantasized about most obsessively were those who were never present for life’s disasters. They have been ubiquitous in my dreams, oddly absent from the dailiness of my life.

Is this odd? Not quite. Always, daily life is anaphrodisiac. Daily life is the necessary evil. Fantasy is the
relief
.

We all want both: “The flesh and the vision together” (as Anaïs Nin said of Henry Miller’s writing). But our lives defeat us. We are mired in the quotidian. Perhaps the appeal of elegant brothels to nineteenth-century gentlemen was just this lure of a secret world out of time, a world where erotic fantasy reigned.

I have often fantasized about creating a world like this for women. Liberated women have too
little
fantasy in their lives to refresh them. They run from the school meeting to the lawyer’s office, to the teaching gig, to the writing table—and where is the space for renewal except in their dreams? The men of today have also lost those special islands of bliss. Instead they are offered the grossness of sex by video or online. It simply won’t do.

A few years ago, computer wonks used to engage in an activity called (in America, at least) “hottalk.” On their video screens, they would exchange fantasies with other computer wonks, whom they never met. They’d call themselves names like Lady Chatterley or Rambo. They’d sign their love notes “Tarzan” or “Jane.” They were looking to reestablish fantasy in our all-too-literal world. They were looking for new fables and fairy tales of sex. They wanted to get away from the literal sex offered in the sex shop. They longed to return to the fantasy that makes the flesh rise. Françoise Gilot has said that “the best way to be attractive is to be playful about life,
playing
in the sense of being an actress.” This is profoundly true. We respond to those people who bring out the playmate in us. We respond to those people with whom we can be characters in fairy tales, characters from history. A woman who has the ability to evoke the playful boy in a man will never lack for lovers. She can be bald under her wig, toothless under her bridgework, flabby under her girdle—but if she can make a man feel he is a boy again, she will be loved and made love to. Chaucer’s Wife of Bath knew this secret—despite the gap between her teeth.

Or maybe
because
of it. Françoise Gilot knows it. Women who have it never lose it. Perhaps it can be learned, but perhaps not.

Most women let themselves be led astray by the glossy images in slick magazines. These images imply that we have to be anorexic models or bodybuilders to be lusted for—or even to be loved. Nothing could be further from the truth. The stress on being perfect actually
turns off
lust. Have you ever watched the studs and studdesses in health clubs? In front of the mirror, they are lusting
only
for themselves. The truly sexy woman evokes not an image of herself in the mirror but the image of the man she stimulates as a laughing little boy. He loves her for the way she makes him feel.

Gilot, that wonderful witch, also says that “love is perhaps a Utopia.” She says that the essence of love is not wanting anything from the other but
pleasure
. In our daily lives, everyone
wants
something from us. Imagine meeting a person who wants only to laugh, to touch, to make you feel
good
! What a relief! Wouldn’t you do anything for such a person?

The poet Neruda describes adulterous lovers as sailors on beds “high as ocean liners.” The image evokes the solitary sea and the splendid isolation of lovers. Sometimes adultery is just the desire to have a place where no one wants anything of you but pleasure. You don’t have to answer the phone. You don’t have to be a big girl. You don’t have to shop for groceries. You don’t even have to swear undying commitment. All you have to do is play.

We all need mystery and danger in our lives. And sometimes we are attracted to someone, almost telepathically, because we understand that
this
is the gift that person brings. Wishing very hard, the other person catches our wish and sends it zinging back. This is deeply erotic. Sometimes the
zing
doesn’t end in bed. Sometimes a touch on the hand or the neck or a phone call late at night proves enough. Sometimes your whole life changes, and you end up building new bookcases and hanging new curtains. But your fantasy has been awakened, and you are reborn. Without fantasy neither woman nor man can live. Why do we have to learn that again and again?

—NANCY MITFORD

 

 

 

It’s hard to be a novelist
in the age of soap opera. The slow accretion of five hundred well-wrought words a day seems pointless beside the dizzying and breathless plotlines served up by the evening news. The semen-stained dress! The tape-recorded confessions! The thrilling revelations of dubious details that seem to vanish overnight. All the national soaps tend to blend into one: the brothers Menendez, O. J. Simpson, Monica Lewinsky. They burn brightly for a while, then disappear into the archives of old news.

But they preempt the other stories we might tell, hound the subtler tales off the screen. And we are the losers. We tell each other stories to get human truths. And there is no truth in the national soap opera—only sound and fury. But the national soap opera has such power to absorb all our storytelling energy.

We turn to these tales to show us shadows of our own lives. And shadows are all they show. But they do track our changing mores. Just a few years ago, the mere hint of monkey business was enough to bring a presidential candidate down. (Remember Gary Hart in 1990?) Now the evening talk shows are full of jokes about White House knee pads, and nobody seems to care.

Are we bored with sex? Has the soap opera mentality so permeated politics that we are unsurprised by these revelations? We know that presidents are flawed and interns will be interns. Or is it that we are going back to a pagan view of the gods, in which they partake of all our most human failings and we laugh, seeing ourselves in them?

I think we are witnessing the delayed effect of all those revelations about FDR and JFK that have filled our cultural discourse for the last several years. We learned belatedly that our heroes had feet of clay. Now we learn about their feet of clay contemporaneously. That’s the only difference.

Bill Clinton fits nicely into the Zeus archetype of king of the gods. Why should he be bound by bourgeois constraints? We expect a larger-than-life appetite from this larger-than-life leader.

JFK got us ready for this. So did LBJ and FDR. Though the press protected them while they were alive, the last two decades stripped them of their secrets.

Since we already know the worst about Bill Clinton, the verdict of history can only ennoble him. Already it seems he is being redeemed.

I happened to be in France at the height of the Lewinsky-Willey madness—right before the Paula Jones case against President Clinton was dismissed. “Of course the president cannot tell the truth about all these women,” said a French friend. “A gentleman never tells the truth about ladies. It would be rude.”

I had a vision of Bill Clinton addressing the nation at prime time:

“I am a gentleman,” the president says, “and a gentleman must always be discreet. To set an example for the nation, let me say I never touched that woman or that woman or that woman or even that woman, for that matter. . . .”

The French believe that the president’s penis is entitled to privacy. Apparently Americans are starting to agree. I came home to an article in the
New York Times
about people turning off their TVs when the president’s sex life was mooted. Just as we don’t want to think of our parents having sex, it turns out we don’t want to contemplate the president’s penis too closely. Or is it that we don’t like his notion of foreplay? Whipping it out seems unromantic. Maybe we want a little candlelight and champagne. A little soft music?

Have we forgotten that the president is the alpha male of the tribe, and the alpha male gets the youngest and the most nubile females with or without foreplay? It’s like that with chimps, gibbons, and even presidents of the United States. What the alpha male wants the alpha male gets. It was Evelyn Lincoln, JFK’s secretary, who reported having to beat the women off with sticks. Does it count as sexual harassment if women are harassing the
president
for sex?

Let’s be honest about this. Why do guys
want
to be president? It’s not for the rubber-chicken dinners.

Anyone who has ever watched women falling all over one another to date fat middle-aged moguls should have no doubt about the desirability of the president’s penis.

When we are confused by the current political scene, we ought to look to the animal kingdom for guidance. A recent political cartoon showed elephants, zebras, and antelopes looking at Bill and Hillary Clinton and saying: “They have strange mating habits.”

But their mating habits are all too predictable. “Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac,” said Henry Kissinger. And he wasn’t even as cute as Bill Clinton.

—ANNA AKHMATOVA

 

 

 

Whenever I go anywhere
but
Italy for a vacation, I always feel vaguely disappointed, as if I have made a mistake. All too often I have changed my plans and left—a ski resort in the French Alps, a fairy-tale mountain town in Switzerland, a
mas
in Provence—to get to Italy as soon as possible. Once across the border I can breathe again. Why bother to go anywhere, I think—in those first ecstatic moments of reentry—but Italy?

What is the fatal charm of Italy? What do we find there that can be found nowhere else? I believe it is a certain permission to be human, which other places, other countries, lost long ago. Not only is Italy one of the few places left on the planet where fantasy runs unfettered and free (where, as Luigi Barzini said in
The Italians,
“even instruments of precision like speedometers and clocks are made to lie in Italy for your happiness”), it is also one of the few places that tolerate human nature with all its faults. Italy is the past, but it is also the future. It is pagan but it is also Christian and Jewish. It is grand and tawdry, imperishable and decayed. Italy has seen marauding armies, fascists and communists, fashions and fripperies, come and go. And it is still, for all its layers of history, a place that enhances existence, burnishes the present moment.

Consider the Italian art of making the small transactions of life more pleasant. One of my earliest memories of this comes from my very first trip to Italy. I remember a train conductor who, when I was nineteen and by mistake riding in a second-class carriage with a third-class ticket, refused to charge me the
supplemento
I readily proffered. He said (in Italian, in which it sounds even better than in English): “Signorina, you have given Italy the gift of your beauty; now let Italy give this small gift to you.” The implication, of course, was that my beauty was so large that the gift of a piddling
supplemento
could not possibly compensate for it. Nor was the conductor coming on to me; he scarcely believed that I would be led to fall in love or lust with him by means of this mild flattery. Rather, it was Italian charm at work. And Italian charm often consists of a delicious combination of rule-bending and harmless flirtation. Now imagine how that exchange would have gone in Germany—the country of
ordnung
and charmlessness. No wonder the Germans themselves come to Italy when they want a holiday!