Women as objects of love and desire

Photo: The Sandstone Pudendum in Kolob Canyon, Zion National Park, Utah, USA (c) KR Silkenvoice
This is an essay about women as objects of love and desire. It is long and rambling, but it does have a point. Hopefully you will get it.

I tried to deny it for years, but I finally came to accept that my earthiness and sensuality can be powerfully attractive to people--regardless of gender. I am open, warm, relaxed, and most people feel comfortable around me--and feel comfortable talking to me about things they normally wouldn't dream of discussing with someone else. Due to the type of work I moonlight at (that is, writing & recording erotica) I come into contact with a lot of people who are already primed for conversation with sexual content. Especially men. Especially online.

Often, when I am conversing with a man, it becomes apparent that he is married or otherwise partnered and looking for a vicarious sexual outlet. Now, I'm not interested in wrecking homes or stealing husbands. Nor am I looking for another lover. I've never had an interest in marrying, and my chosen love-style, polyamory, is one that most people cannot handle well -- they're conditioned to the possessiveness and jealousy and insecurity which the socially-approved institution of serial monogamy engenders. So men talk to me. And depending on my intuition, on their responses to my questions, or the ideas I put out there, I'll often guide them towards erotic objectification of their partners -- instead of (or at the very least in addition to) me.

Now, I should state that I've observed that when men have been with their women for an extended period of time, their women become 'self' instead of 'other'. Which is a good thing, right? Well, mostly. The problem is that when a man internalizes a woman -- takes her identity into himself and begins to see her as an extension of himself -- she is no longer an object of mystery, novelty, denial, teasing. She is no longer a stand-alone individual -- instead, she is his, a part of himself, loved as he loves himself -- and thus she is no longer an object of erotic desire.

The happiest couples I know, the ones who are powerfully in-love after years and years together, seem to have one thing in common: a heathy sex life centered on her erotic objectification. For him, she is a fetish object, a talismanic creature radiating mystery and sensuality -- a Goddess. For her, he is the Summer King, her lover and acolyte, eternally in her thrall. They re-enact the ages old rites of worship between male and female, seeking to penetrate the barriers of their solitude in order to become as one, even if only for those few moments of orgasmic bliss.

Otto Kernberg wrote a book on love relationships which contained an analysis of a Hindu text known as the Ramayana, and in this book he stated: "...the beloved presents himself or herself simultaneously as a body which can be penetrated and a consciousness which is impenetrable. Love is the revelation of the other person's freedom. The contradictory nature of love is that desire aspires to be fulfilled by the destruction of the desired object, and love discovers that this object is indestructable and cannot be substituted."

At some point we all make this discovery, realizing, at least subconsciously, that the object of love and desire is both within our grasp and eternally beyond it. At this point, one of three decisions is made: one, to abandon the object and go in search of one that can be fully possessed/internalized, two, to hold on to the object, internalize what we can of them, and ignore/deny/attempt to destroy what we cannot possess, or three, celebrate the oft-times conflicting duality of love and desire, taking as much of the other as we can into our selves, and enjoy the mystery and delight of trying to grasp what can never be held -- no matter how hard we try. The way in which we cope with this love conundrum determines how well our relationships work, and how long they last.

End of spiritual and psychological analysis. Lets get back to sex.

So, as I established earlier, when men are with women for a long while, the women become 'self' instead of remaining 'other', and in order to re-eroticize their partners, men seem to need to objectify them -- to restore the mystery to the object of their sexual fulfillment. And for some reason I want to help make this happen.

How? Well, I'll sometimes guide conversation or role-play towards erotic objectification of their partners... sometimes the fantasies will be woman-woman, asking questions like, "Would you like to see her face between my thighs? Watch her press her lips to my bare pussy?" I sometimes invite them in..."Would you like to slip up behind her, and fuck her nice and slow while she eats me?" Once I have made the decision to re-eroticize someone's partner, I rarely, ever, suggest sexual intercourse between myself and him. I do not want him to focus on me as an erotic object, but on his wife. In general, my goal is for him to get 'off' thinking about HER, not ME. If he has D/s leanings, sometimes I'll suggest that I'll make his wife submit to me, and allow him to watch -- so long as he does not move or speak unless given permission -- regardless of what I do to her or what she says. This suggestion is powerfully erotic to many men. Sometimes I'll guide him through use of his wife in such a way that will 'please' me.. get him all worked up and then tell him to go to bed and wake his wife and take her... and report back to me on her responses. This has had spectacular results for some couples, results that have amazed the men... they wonder how I know that their wives will respond well to x or y or z, and I tell them its from what I learn from them about their wives...

I am sure a lot of women would freak out about this type of exchange... and here is where the humour of it all comes in. I am a woman who understands men. But I also understand women -- as much as it is possible to understand women. And women, well, we are raunchy. We tell our girlfriends things that make grown men blush. Our girlfriends tell us things that make us roar with laughter, make us horny as hell. We tease each other, flirt with each other. We talk about the best places to buy lingerie and sex toys, about the latest things we tried on our lovers. But heaven forbid if our lovers talk about it. Especially if the person they are talking to is another woman. Heads will roll. Tears will fall. Words like 'betrayal' and 'violation' will resonate in the air. And its ridiculous, the hypocrisy of it. Because for women, their lovers are also no longer 'other', they are 'self' and so talking about their lovers to whomever they choose is their right. But heaven forbid their lovers show an ounce of individuality and discuss such deeply private and personal things with someone else--especially another woman! Oh my.

It is illogical. I call it fuzzy feminine logic. And unfortunately, we're stuck with it. But we can work with it, keeping in mind that simply because women often defy logic does not mean they are irrational. I mean, part of what makes women an eternal mystery to men is this fuzzy, nuanced, emotional logic -- men don't 'get' it. In the everyday world, women are nuts and men are baffled. What men need from women is very simple, and what they want from women is very simple, but women are not simple. We are complex. We think that what we want most is to be understood, but really, we do not. We are complex and what we want from men is not that they understand everything about us, but that they understand that our natures dictate that we be true to the moment, and that this is both valid and rational. We like change, we need change, we are change. We are the source of creation and sustenance. We are mystery incarnate. We are objects of love, of desire, of denial, of fulfillment.

I suppose, when it comes down to it, my argument is that 'objectification of women' is a good thing. Perhaps the feminist movement's efforts to change the fundamental tendancy of men to eroticize women needs to take into consideration the archetypes which this touches upon, the deep-seated psychological reasons for objectification, and how it benefits both genders. Because as I see it, if romantic relationships between women and men are going to be fulfilling in the long term, women need to find ways to continue being erotic objects -- and men need to find ways to continue being enthralled by the objects of their love and desire.

Nietzsche on Love and Avarice

The things people call love.— Avarice and love: what different feelings these two terms evoke!—nevertheless it could be the same instinct that has two names, once deprecated by those who have, in whom the instinct has calmed down to some extent, and who are afraid for their "possessions"; the other time seen from the point of view of those who are not satisfied but still thirsty and who therefore glorify the instinct as "good." Our love of our neighbor—is it not a desire for new possessions? And likewise our love of knowledge, truth, and altogether any desire for what is new? Gradually we become tired of the old, of what we safely possess, and we stretch out our hands again; even the most beautiful scenery is no longer assured of our love after we have lived in it for three months, and some distant coast attracts our avarice: possessions are generally diminished by possession. Our pleasure in ourselves tries to maintain itself by again and again changing something new into ourselves,—that is what possession means. To become tired of some possession means: tiring of ourselves. (One can also suffer of an excess—the lust to throw away or to distribute can also assume the honorary name of "love.") When we see somebody suffer, we like to exploit this opportunity to take possession of him; those who become his benefactors and pity him, for example, do this and call the lust for a new possession that he awakens in them "love"; and the pleasure they feel is comparable to that aroused by the prospect of a new conquest. Sexual love betrays itself most clearly as a desire for possession: the lover wants unconditional and sole possession of the person for whom he longs, he wants equally unconditional power over the soul and over the body of the beloved; he alone wants to be loved and desires to live and rule in the other soul as supreme and supremely desirable. If one considers that this means nothing less than excluding the whole world from a precious good, from happiness and enjoyment; if one considers that the lover aims at the impoverishment and deprivation of all competitors and would like to become the dragon guarding his golden hoard as the most inconsiderate and selfish of all "conquerors" and exploiters; if one considers, finally, that to the lover himself the whole rest of the world appears indifferent, pale, and worthless, and he is prepared to make any sacrifice, to disturb any order, to subordinate all other interests—then one comes to feel genuine amazement that this wild avarice and injustice of sexual love has been glorified and deified so much in all ages—indeed, that this love has furnished the concept of love as the opposite of egoism while it actually may be the most ingenuous expression of egoism. At this point linguistic usage has evidently been formed by those who did not possess but desired,—probably, there have always been too many of these. Those to whom much possession and satiety were granted in this area have occasionally made some casual remark about "the raging demon," as that most gracious and beloved of all Athenians, Sophocles, did: but Eros has always laughed at such blasphemers,—they were invariably his greatest favorites. Here and there on earth we may encounter a kind of continuation of love in which this possessive craving of two people for each other gives way to a new desire and lust for possession, a shared higher thirst for an ideal above them: but who knows such love? Who has experienced it? Its right name is friendship.
- Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science (Book 1, § 14), 1886.