Here is a woman's story from an article about a book that purports to tell us what women really want in sex:
A 25-year-old woman has a friend who is a virgin. She's not physically attracted to him, nor does she want to be romantically involved. But she feels sorry for him, pities his inexperience. So she decides she will go home with her friend—to show him how it's done. As she undresses, she feels powerful and sexy—and that feeling (not the presence of her soon-to-be deflowered friend) turns her on. "It boosted my confidence to be the teacher in the situation and made me feel more desirable," the woman says.We could say a lot about that. One obvious, and very interesting connection could be made with courtly love. She is not unlike the cruel lady in that even in granting sex she denies him. She quite literally denies him: "and that feeling (not the presence of her soon-to-be-deflowered friend) turns her on". I mention this now because I'm not going to get to it until the end. But we can see here a raw desire for sexual power and we can see how you could erect the apparatus of courtly love on such, if you'll pardon the expression, base desires.
(And if you don't think this is about base desires, try imagining an equivalent male story in which the actual woman present for the sex act counts for nothing. Pretty bloody offensive don't you agree? Odd that we pretend it isn't offensive coming from a woman isn't it?)
But what I want to notice first is the script for there is a script at work in the background here. And both the woman who told the story to the social scientists who included her in their book and the woman who wrote about it in Newsweek have willingly incorporated the script into the story.
How can I tell? Because of the lie at the heart of it. What the script assumes is the unexpected nature of the arousal. The twenty-five year old woman is telling us that she never expected to be aroused by this experience. Like fun she didn't. She'd fantasized the whole thing out ahead of time. She's probably done something like it before and even if she didn't do exactly this thing, she has tended to frame some of what she remembers as her more rewarding sexual experiences and/or fantasies in just this way. This wasn't some surprise but rather it was exactly what she was hoping would happen.
If there was any genuine surprise at all in the experience it was that it turned out so well (assuming that any of this really happened as she tells it). Because that is always the risk with a script.
If we take a step back from this story we will also see that it is a story of failure wrapped in a mantle of triumph. The triumph is that the actual sexual experience worked out as well as she hoped. That all depended on the guy playing his part. She'd imagined the part about her taking her clothes off in front of him. What she had no control over was whether he would be suitably awed. Apparently he was. Assuming she isn't making up everything about this (always a real possibility), he was either genuinely moved at having an experience that so wonderfully matched up with his own script or he was smart enough to play along in order to get the sex he really wanted. (And one should not discount the possibility that he was not a virgin but a clever con man who has figured out some women really get turned on by this scenario.)
The failure is implicit in the whole story. Everything about it is intended to conceal her sense of vulnerability, even from herself. She insists that feels nothing but pity for him and that she takes off her own clothes. He most emphatically does not undress her either literally or figuratively speaking. You wouldn't want to have an actual relationship with this woman although the sex could be pretty good. And that, by the way, is why the possibility that the guy was just acting a part in order to get her should be taken very seriously. There are guys who specialize in getting pity sex out of women and they get to be very good at spotting their victims. Consider how easily even the stupidest schoolyard bully can pick out the most vulnerable kid in the yard and you can see how easily the man in search of pity sex can size up his next victim. The fact that he is a loser doesn't make him less good at manipulating her; it makes him better at it.
And that is why I say you wouldn't want an actual relationship with this woman. It wouldn't make any difference if you did want a genuine relationship because she isn't capable of one. You can be her friend, perhaps even the friend she trusts most, or you can be her fantasy lover. What you can't be is her real lover. You could even be her husband provided you are willing to live with second rate sex all your life.
A while ago I wrote some articles about some heroic teachers. These guys, and they are all men, specialize in teaching the kids that always fail. These teachers succeed because they won't let the kids who have always failed fail.
One of them told me an interesting trick he uses. 'These kids often act as if they want to get thrown out,' he told me. 'They don't really want to get thrown out but getting thrown out is one thing they actually do know how to do. They start off wanting to succeed but also very insecure because they haven't got a clue how to play their part in a successful classroom experience. When things start to go wrong it's almost a comfort to them because now they at least know how to play their part.' So what he does is simply to refuse to kick them out.
That 25 year old woman above has another script. It's the script that goes with what happens afterward. Ideally, the guy just goes on his way after the sex always keeping a special place in his memories for that wonderful experience. Yeah, he'll do that; if he is an idiot. More likely he wants more sex. Because the thing that is most important in that story above is her arousal. The experience of power really turned her on. And she got visibly excited. And that is going to mark our guy. He'll crave a repeat. And thus the follow-up script. I'm sorry to point it out but you can imagine it can't you? I mean, we'd all rather not because you just cringe to imagine even imagining it.
But she knows that part too. (BTW: The question that always goes unasked with this sort of social science research is what the fact that someone is willing to sit down and tell this sort of detail to a stranger tells us about them. It is entirely possible, for example, that she has had the fantasy described above all her life and either never had the courage to make it work out in real life or never had it work out as well as she imagined and is now using the social scientist to make it seem more real by telling it to someone else.)
We will be tempted at this point to think that the problem is having a script at all. Better to just dump all scripts and experience"reality". Except that in practice reality tends to be another character in another script. "Truth" seems like a simple enough word but, as Wittgenstein keeps reminding us, it needs a whole lot of stage setting in order to have a part to play. "True" always means true according to a certain set of shared social practices.
To go back to the students who have always failed before, what they need is not to reject the script of failure but to learn their part in a different script that goes with success. The script doesn't lead to success; it isn't a recipe. But it goes with success and it is important to know it. It never quite connects the dots because it can't. You do have to kiss him or her at some point.
Fantasy scripts like courtly love and the story above don't go with success. They can come true however. And we've all known the man or woman who has many partners but never actually connects with anyone. They are very good at playing one kind of script.
Personal detail. I used to be in a relationship with a woman who was very good at playing the kind of script that does lead to sex but doesn't lead to any kind of real human connection. It wasn't the script above but it was kind of akin to it. For if you read the story of the 25-year old above again, you can see between the lines the story of someone who hates being vulnerable and powerless. Everything about her story is, as I said above, about not being had by someone else. That, of course, inspires a natural desire in the other person to manage the trick anyway. The funny thing is that is the mark of the person who know hows to succeed that they know how to be had by someone else. They differ from our 25-year old in that they like the power sharing. In the words of the immortal Abba hit: 'I feel like I win when I lose.'
The next move in Cristina Nehring—and no I haven't forgotten about her—is to talk about that sort of power game. It's a move that CS Lewis hated. But all that is for next week.
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