There is a small matter that works at my thoughts, demanding attention. Obviously, the way we approach our need for one another can and has resulted in some terrible abuses. Because it’s such a powerful fundamental aspect of our identities, because it’s so tied to our life and survival as a species, its a pretty sharp sword to be swinging around. And any time we misuse it or use it reductively, turning one another merely into “that which fulfills my need”, a world where only I truly exist, and ends are but means to myself, not ends that force me to humble and surrender myself, we end up with a terrible monster.
Unfortunately, I think the rejection of those needs, denying they exist, is just another way of misusing them and has the same ultimate result, depriving us of the thing that we have to surrender and humble ourselves to and reach out to, reducing those parts of ourselves only to means to ourselves. So both extreme pro-sexism and extreme anti-sexism make the same mistake and end up in the same place. Neither embraces the prickly ends of the fundamental mystery.
Anyway, the thing that puzzles me, though, is why it should seem so clear what men want and so obscure what women want. So I’ve given it some thought. And I think I have some speculations, at least, that agree with both biological, psychological, and mythological data. I think they all indicate something similar.
First, I’m not so sure that it really is that unclear. I think men just complain about it more, or are more petulant about having to embrace a system of value outside their own, or in addition to their own. “Why can’t women be just be like me, and value me and react to me the same way I do to them?” is the cry of many men (Why can’t a woman be more like a man!), and in fact I think this is the entire central fantasy behind pornography. It presents an idealized world where the women are simply mirrors of the psychology and biology of the men. And life becomes easy. And in so doing, you both figuratively and literally love yourself. Which is a corruption of the intended purpose of sexuality. It was supposed to drive you away from yourself toward the other, but you turned it in on itself, spending its power on devouring your own desires, like a snake eating its tail. So some portion of the problem is, I think, unwillingness, not lack of knowledge.
But I think there is also a knowledge gap, and I think I can articulate why. Fundamentally, what you give to your partner is yourself, and that’s the same for both sexes. And of course, women do desire men in the way men desire them, and vice versa. But there’s also a broad difference of technique and means that each generally embodies more. We each contain the masculine and feminine, but generally men have more on balance of one and women on balance have more of the other. The reason I think it’s harder for men to figure out what attracts a partner than women is because the means of fulfillment (of their partner) for women is contained in their own person, and for men it’s mediated by something they do.
C.S. Lewis expressed this idea, reflecting on poetry, psychology, and biology by noting that the object of erotic love for both masculine and feminine was contained in the female. This is clearly true in the biological sense. The object of sexual love, the product of it, may be given quickening and fertilization by the male, but the life of it, the carefully prepared garden from which is grows, is contained in the female. She is the repository of erotic attention. He is the initiator that sparks potential into growth and realization, but she is the guardian of the future in her role as steward over that garden. She gets to decide who to allow to fertilize and so initiate and perpetuate the potential they envision.
It’s a fairly well known fact in biology that human females are very choosy compared to our closest comparable species, the chimpanzee. Since DNA, especially human DNA is largely unrealized potential, the enormous success of humans in all kinds of different environments is largely attributed to the choosiness of women. Women’s choosiness basically ensures that the next generation is going to be fathered by people who figured out how to succeed and survive in whatever the situation is. We can adapt to a new country or climate or anything simply because of the selective power of women.
They did a study of Y chromosomes and mitochondrial DNA (the DNA that is unique to each sex and exists is selected and develops separately from that of the other sex; the two diadic genomes that are only common to each sex and not to both). Each tells a different, separate story. Generally, reproductively, every woman is about as valuable and has as good a chance of surviving as a genetic ancestor as every other woman. They all do roughly about as well as everyone else in their circumstances (time, society, land, conditions). But among men there is a huge disparity. Men face a vastly greater competitive pressure, genetically, than women do. In the female specific genome, it’s a fairly level playing field; you’re descended from a wide variety of mothers who all did fairly well. But in the male genome, it’s been a battle for survival, with the majority dying off, their descendants dying off or failing to reproduce.
Men are made to be more disposable, and they are. A huge amount, genetically speaking, fail and die off, leaving a much smaller pool that succeeds and has families and contributes to the genetic future of the species. And because they were successful and passed on some of that success to their kids, those kids also succeeded more than the children of less successful men, gradually out competing them and outnumbering them over time. Women are more likely to die by having children, but men can keep starting new families even if that happens; women have a narrow reproductive window, but even if a man doesn’t find success till later in life he can still have a family. Men who take risks but fail die off, men who can’t get it together to succeed in their environment fail to find mates and start families. And nature provides more men as a pool to start with and keeps them viable so even if a huge amount are lost (basically, about half averaged across time) the species continues. It’s also the case that what you might term “genetically dying men” (men who have failed to find much success and prove their fitness), even if they do manage to have children, pass on their disadvantage at a higher rate to their male children; those men will be starting off worse and have a harder time escaping that trap. Whereas women don’t seem to inherit their father’s genetic survival disadvantage.
One of the curious results of this is that there’s a sense is which success and failure can be said to be heritable traits. For men, at least, (in the male exclusive part of the genome) whose genetic/social/relationship/economic value is more tenuous than that of women. The species needs all its women; it not only doesn’t need all its men, it actively doesn’t want all of them. If you have a mother, you’ve already inherited some stability of value. Just having her means you were the product of some selection, some discrimination. You’ve got just as good a chance, through her, as anyone, if you have her. If you don’t have her, you either don’t exist or you’ve lost something of devastating value. It’s far more easy to find children who get along with just a mother than just a father. The mother is the basis of stable value. Generally speaking, most mothers do about as good a job as most mothers, on average. Most of them will stick with the kids and do their best to create a good environment for them to grow and succeed and develop, and do well enough. And people generally understand, from experience, that fathers are more disposable, their loss more survivable, but losing a mother is like losing everything, and fortunately is far more rare.
But having or not having a present father, or having a successful father (I mean in a wholistic way, able to provide success, whatever that means, however it’s done, adapted to the situation, able to create promote and produce success and growth and stability and value to be added to the value the mother provides) or an unsuccessful father can make a big difference either way. A bad or not present father can destroy the stable value, the success and security, a mother provides. Or a good one can really enhance it. You can usually count on women (or we would all be dead). You often can’t count on men, they’re more hit and miss, but when they do come through it can make a big difference.
If you’re a kid and you have a good mom and a good dad, you’re about as set for success as you can be. If you only have a mother, you’ve got a good chance, but you might lack some advantages. If you don’t have a mother (or have a bad mother) you’re in a really hard place, and if you also have a bad or absent father too you’re really in trouble. It’s hard to survive, as a functional human, without the stable value of a good mother. Luckily most mothers are at least decent; they’ll stay with you and give you care. Fathers are much less consistent (luckily there’s some selection on the part of women about who gets to become them, and generally the less picky women get the worse the fathers tend to be, and the pickier they get the better the fathers have to become). All this is borne out by statistics.
So the long term result is that we all have about twice as many female ancestors as male ancestors on average. We’re descended from a lot of choosy women and a much smaller group of successful men. In some times and places when life was particularly rough, the disparity is actually much higher. In some time periods, only one man survived as a genetic ancestor for every seventeen women who survived. The selectivity of human females is the number one selection pressure within the human race (because it’s so much more rapid than all other types), and it disproportionately affects males, working by removing massive amounts of them from the human race. So there’s a huge competitive pressure on men to risk and prove themselves. Because statistically, historically, genetically, most men will fail and be lost to time.
So males feel that pressure, that drive to initiate, to carry themselves forward, and females feel the drive to discriminate, to decide with care which of the males will actually get that chance (at least in her back yard). And they’re both well justified in those roles. Females are the gatekeepers and repository of the future. They are what selects. Men are the initiators that seek to spark a future into growth. This, at least, is how the biological world works. And I think we can see it operating at higher levels of psychology and mythology. We make word pictures of mother earth and father sky because they represent our lived species experience. The earth is the life, the potential, the proving ground, the place of growth, stable value. The rain is more random, less consistent, mercurial, it may fall and give abundance or it may fail and parch the land; it provides the inciting incident and transformative material that potentiates growth or dessication in the fruits of the earth.
Men are driven by a certain sense of aggression, sometimes a bit indiscriminately. They can be a bit haphazard about spreading their seed around. And women are driven by a sense of responsibility, a need to ensure that the best choice was made. Thus lots of hopping and head butting and nest building and singing and tail slapping on the part of male animals, and thus a lot of critical gazes on the part of females.
Within a species, of course, we share a common nature, and each share variously in the traits of the other, as I have said. But we also differ, we play different roles, have different leanings and averages, and have different capacities (as well as burdens; I’ll never know what it’s like to nurse or carry a child, but I also never have to deal with having a period or dying from ecclampsia).
They’ve done quite a bit of study on men’s and women’s sexuality, actually, for therapeutic reasons, and they’ve found some key differences. For men, it’s mostly about the accelerators. There are things that get men going, revving up, ready to initiate contact, ready to be venturesome, and if you want men to enjoy better sex you just figure out what those accelerators are for them and step on the gas. But for women, it’s largely about removing the brakes, not adding accelerators. The key to helping women enjoy sex is removing the things that hold them back, not adding things to drive them forward. Both sexes have both, of course, but are affected very disproportionately. Men are weighted much more heavily toward their accelerators and don’t have as strong as brakes, women have strong brakes but not as powerful of accelerators.
Men have the drive (maybe too much sometimes for even their own happiness), women have the the brakes (maybe too much sometimes for their own happiness). Considering men need to be able to perform their function consistently, it needs to be fairly easy for them to get excited and reach climax, and that is indeed the case (“Oops, sorry!”). The number one sexual dysfunction men suffer from is premature ejaculation. The number one sexual dysfunction women suffer from is lack of desire.
Women need to be able to discriminate and negotiate. And you can’t do that if you don’t have the ability to walk away. So women actually need to be less sexually driven, less obsessed, less the initiators, less easy to please, or they risk bad outcomes for themselves, their young, and the species. They need to be able to refuse a man. Whereas a male needs to–and does–find that pretty hard to do.
The solution to those differing pressures is what I’ve explained, locating the object of desire for women at a slightly further remove, mediated by a complex process of actions and signs that prove value, so it can be carefully judged and considered rather than just being overwhelmed by the immediacy of “You’re a man, let’s do it!” Instead, all us males, from humans down to birds and frogs, have to demonstrate this value through displays of fitness. Having things be set up the way they are actually plays to each others’ strengths and needs and challenges.
It’s a brilliant design, really, a perfect complement. Yes, it’s not always easy to make it work, but that’s sort of the point. We’re not just trying to make more monkeys or lizards. We’re trying to make more humans, and humans are super complex, high-risk, high maintenance creatures that take years to raise and develop and can go wrong in a thousand different ways. So you need a process that demands a lot and contains a lot of judgment and discrimination and care. But that system also needs a bakancing amount of drive and energy and competition to get it done. Otherwise you end up with pandas, who are so fussy they can hardly survive as a species without our help now, or
Anyway, that’s all getting a bit abstract, but the point is, the female contains in herself the object of the male’s desire and possesses within herself the means to demonstrate it (in fact she does so simply be being, by being herself). They have by nature the thing men desire. It doesn’t have to be mediated outside themselves. But men can’t do that. We don’t contain the thing that’s desired. Or rather we do, but it has to be mediated and manifested by the results of our action upon the world. We don’t directly possess the means for mediation. It’s indirect. It has to be proved and judged, and we both desire and fear it that judgment. It’s a doing, not a being for us (or rather a being mediated by a doing). In the end it is all being; we just get more of it more easily in ways that play to our respective designs and capabilities and responsibilities.
I can’t create new life in me, but I can initiate it in you. I have to prove myself worthy, but you actually have to take on the difficult, high-risk task of bearing and delivering and nursing the child. The task of men in this arena is fairly low-risk. And we can do it about as well at sixty as at twenty. So of course women need to discriminate more. There’s a lot more risk in it for them. They could literally die. We might get a bit sleepy. So that discriminatory instinct, those built-in brakes in women, are there for a very good reason. They’re protecting your life, the potential lives and health of your children, and the well-being of our species. The future of us all is in women’s hands. So thank God for the sensibility of women. We would all be lost without it, from octopi to eagles. Not that it can’t be taken too far. Birds of paradise and bower birds clearly have developed some overly picky females.
So men have to become something that women value, have to deliberately prove their fitness, and then show it by means women can recognize and judge. And it’s not simple and obvious, and they don’t feel the same positive prejudice as men. Women are generally less surfacey and immediate in their judgments, less about physical or initial appearance. Their fundamental power is discrimination, where men’s (as far as sex goes) is initiation (or demonstration, possibly?). The human sperm is the only cell in the human body whose essential function is to leave the body and go off into the dangerous world and have adventures and start something new. It’s a risk-positive cell. Men feel compelled to get the ball rolling; women want to decide which ball gets to roll, and how. Men want to conquer the wilderness, women want to actually make something more than a wilderness out of it. Men want to overcome challenges, women want the overcoming to actually be for something, to some end that actually produces something worth having.
So in the work world it’s generally easier to find men who are willing to blindly and unilaterally sacrifice themselves and their whole life to some challenge, often without a clear end state or goal in mind, whereas women are more likely to take stock and actually consider if that mere pursuit is worth its eventual end, and what the real goal is and what sort of world and life they actually want.
I’m making a ton of generalizations here, but they are generally true about us as a species (true on the basis of average values) and have a basis in our biology, psychology, and mythology. They all tell the same general story about ourselves to us. And the story makes sense, based on what we’ve learned about ourselves.
A lot of the things we associate unthinkingly with attractiveness among men are a mediated symbol of who they are, what kind of life they promise to be able to initiate and propagate. I think this is why money, cars, older/experienced men, the trappings of security and wealth and (presumably) the underlying competence and stability they demonstrate, are generally recognized as attractive features of men by most women. Even strength itself (which arguably is more a factor for competition between men, not a major value for attracting women) really isn’t even a primary quality in itself, it’s just a capacity: the capacity to create change, to protect, to achieve, to discipline oneself, to control the world. It can only be seen in the effect we are able to produce on the world (and when you can physically see it, in a body builder, it’s kinda gross; the exaggeration, the desire to make it physically apparent, has made it disfiguring).
And beauty, friendliness, loveliness, kindness, care, sociability, poise, and the appearance of youth and health (which is itself a type of stored potential) are generally recognized as attractive features of women. Women display these qualities directly in their persons and in their behavior, and men take them signs that they are, in fact, attractive mates.
By these means we judge fitness, and by recognizing them we add acceleration (if we’re men) or remove brakes (if we’re women). I’m not commenting on the accuracy of those assessments or their overwhelming unitary value, against which no other values matter, I’m just observing how people generally work on average. Women see the value of the potential the man presents in the way he affects the world around him, and by this they discriminate between potential mates and potential futures they will allow those mates to initiate and realize. Men see the value of the potential the woman presents primarily in the woman herself, without much external mediation.
Unfortunately for many men, they’re really not sure what the thing is that they need to become, or how to do it, and in any case doing so would require a lot of competence and effort and growing up, becoming a mature man who actually has something to offer. And that being a difficult and humbling and confusing task, men aren’t super pumped about it, and would prefer it if women were as shallow (or, to be more generous, as straightforward and strongly motivated) as themselves. If you could just mirror our adolescent drive toward desire and mating and skip all this maturity and competence and productivity and stability, that would be super awesome. We just want to bang, we don’t want to have to become something worth banging in anything but the barest, most basic biological sense. We don’t want to have to build something with it.
To put it in a metaphor that works on both biological as well as psychological/relational levels, men need something to put themselves into to realize their value to women. The woman already contains the value within herself. I think biology, psychology, and mythology all tell us this over and over and over again. And I think this is why there’s this apparent difference in one side knowing or not knowing what the other one wants, and why it’s such an issue of annoyance for both.
Of course, there are an infinite number of ways to actually realize this giving of ourselves to one another, many that seem in contradiction even to the most obvious ways of accomplishing them. Humans are very very adaptable. We can make things work. We can’t necessarily change what we need, but we can change how we get it. For example, I could provide money that gave you opportunity, the time to make our home and lives and kids’ lives what you want it to be, or I could provide money so you could pay someone else to make our home and lives what you want them to be, or I could provide those things directly (by cleaning up, cooking, taking care of the kids, fixing up the house, planning vacations, etc). And since different people succeed at or enjoy different tasks, humans have that flexibility about the means we use to achieve our ends.
And, like I said, it’s not like our needs and abilities and things we like don’t overlap, we just major more deeply in certain areas of both need and natural aptitude (how easy it is to take a task on), tend to react more strongly to certain things, ten to invest our effort in certain means, and those differences have a real biological and psychological reality we can’t easily escape and need to recognize, but not simplify or leave unimproved.
So when I asked the question, during my early unemployed days, “How can I provide even if I can’t provide? How can I succeed even I can’t succeed?”, I started myself onto a way to much greater relational and psychological health. I let go of my preconceptions about the answers without losing the reality of the question. I found ways to provide even when I couldn’t provide, and it made me feel good, it made me grow, it made me more able to do it. I may not have been able to show you competence, stability, productivity, care, and safety through the means of a traditional job structure. But that doesn’t mean I couldn’t find some way to show it to you and give it to you. Ice cream stores, child care, home renovation, all of these can be used for those same purposes. It might be a bit more complicated, less easy to figure out, less to my initial aptitude, less straightforward, but it’s surely doable.
All that matters is that you find a way to give it, and you find someone who appreciates the way you give it, because they’re all just mediated ways of giving yourself to someone else. Even beauty and kindness are really just a different kind of mediation between some sort of an inner and outer reality of personhood. The main difference is just that they belong to you directly and are in your control more directly. The workers control the means of production, as Marx would put it. The main point is, there are a thousand ways to display the same desirable qualities, as a man, beyond the typical normative examples. Those normative examples are helpful, and will work without too much thinking or figuring out for most people; they’re a sort of shorthand, an easy map we’ve inherited to get us where we all want to go. But for those of us who find the landscape not quite rising before us as the map pridicted, sometimes you need to hold the maps a bit more loosely, abstract to the principles and goals of the map, and figure out your own best way navigate the terrain you face. So all men don’t need to do or be the same, far from it.
And on the other hand, there are a thousand different ways for women to look and act and be, all different types of lives and abilities and personalities, and there are men who will love all of them and feel so lucky to have them, no matter what combination you consider. They will all be a world that someone loves. Yes, there are some typical markers that most men will easily respond to and find value in, some shortcuts to how we judge, but there’s also a lot of flexibility and interpretation. And since men are so desperate to prove themselves to women, so eager to initiate, so happy to be judged worthy, and have biochemical mechanisms in place to help them be attracted to whatever woman decides to invest in them, women have a pretty clear strategic advantage and can usually find someone to love them, no matter who they are.
Of course where all this can go pear shaped for women is once you get past a certain age point in life, when more men have died off or crashed and burned in life, or all the obviously attractive men have already been taken, greatly reducing the available pool of acceptable mates. Women have far more pressure to figure all that stuff out much earlier than men. In fact it’s often to women’s advantage to be a bit younger and to men’s to be a bit older. In later life, outside the typical female family establishing age of 18-30, that’s where things start getting rough, and women often will have to get more conpetitive or lower their standards or look for the good guys outside their own age range. There’s a much smaller pool of acceptable men as mates, than females (as a genetic fact, and because of how the sexes select their mates, what they want). And that pool gets smaller and smaller as women age.
Having said everything I have about mediation, trying to solve that problem of why it’s easier for women to be attractive than men, I’m not sure I got it dead on right, or rather I think what I said could still be misunderstood. Young men are often terrified of women. Because when they see a woman they aren’t just seeing a woman, they’re seeing their concept of ideal femininity, a thing of infinite perfection and value, and their acceptance or rejection by her can either validate or destroy them as a human being.
Part of learning to be in a real relationship, though, is realizing that although your mate is indeed a representation of ideal, archetypal femininity to you, she’s also an actual, individual person. And women go through a similar process. After all, both the feminine and masculine means for demonstrating fitness and being attractive are types of mediation, and they’re things we manipulate. Men try to make themselves seem successful and attractive, more than they really are. They love to advertise and adorn themselves. They love to brag. And women do the same. They adorn themselves, they show themselves off, they put their best face forward. But once you actually get to know someone, you see behind the curtain. And that revelation, that disparity between the ideal/archetypal and the specific/actual can be pretty hard for some people to handle.
Good relationships, the best relationships, are usually ones where people are able to see through that outer show faster and deeper and are able to reconcile and come to terms with the actual person. Because if you’re going to be with an actual person, you have to give up your pursuit of the ideal man or woman. Some people, of course, don’t, and jump from person to person, chasing their passion for the ideal in a new partner, finding it disappointed eventually, and moving on. A lot of highly visible serial monogamy comes from men jumping from idealized beauty to idealized beauty and women jumping from idealized big shot to idealized big shot. Because they never seek or see anything else in their spouse, once the veneer begins to wear off and they see someone else who seems to better represent their ideal, who will give them more of it, off they go.
The stories that touch us, of course, are those of couple who have been in love for years, who truly know each other better than themselves, but still see one another as just as beautiful and attractive and worthy of praise as naive newlyweds. And that’s the key, clearly they aren’t naive any more. They’ve been around, through the hard times, they’ve seen behind the curtain. They’ve lost their illusions, they’ve given up chasing the ideal and accepted the person before them. Their spouse has become their ideal, they see that perfection and value in the reality of their partner. So every little sign, even their wrinkles, even their smallest triumphs, glows with a transcendent beauty in their eyes. The transcendent and ideal and archetypal has become the immanent and actual. Love has descended to the rough earth but has not ceased to be elevated; instead earth has been lifted into heaven.
I really don’t think it’s wrong for men to seek out and desire beautiful women, or that it’s wrong for women to seek out and desire successful men. Let’s face it, it’s inevitable, that’s what they do, that’s what they’ve always done, that’s what they’re going to do, that’s what they’re made to do. It’s not an escapable part of human nature. It’s a fundamental reality. We can’t fight it (or we could but we can’t defeat it). But we can control it. We can direct it. We can define it. What we can do, and where we can go wrong or right, is in how we choose to signal and define our terms for beauty and success. They’re both just instinctive means for mediating the value of ourselves to the other, and they work as well as they do because of certain defining characteristics of who we are. In both of them there’s just a process, and behind both of them there’s just an actual person, trying to be seen. The process is just a tool whose effectiveness is largely predetermined, how we use that tool (what we use it to discover and select, what we use it to measure) is what can have better or worse real moral value.
So the really important question isn’t, should we judge one another this way, it’s how shall we judge one another this way? In a way that is true, honest, and lets us most easily get to the truth and reality of what is truly good to desire and seek in one another most effectively.
Women should marry successful men, but we shouldn’t define successful shallowly and narrowly. Men should marry beautiful women, but we shouldn’t define beauty shallowly or narrowly. We need to add wise counsel and add layers of complexity to those instincts in us. We should search for honest signs, truer signals, deeper realities. We get to decide what beauty and success really are. It’s when we define them poorly that we go wrong and encourage badness to flourish, and it’s when we define them well that we do right by each other and encourage goodness to flourish. We learn to love and value what is truly good within one another. How good our marriages and families and ultimately our future society will go is largely dependent on how good a definition we can come up with for true beauty and true success.
Biologists have a term they call “true markers”, meaning external signs that accurately reflect the state or fitness of one organism to another. Humans are more than merely physical, we’re also emotional, social, spiritual, psychological, and economic beings. And so we need to learn to see the true markers in one another. I believe that’s what the Bible does in various passages. It doesn’t say women aren’t beautiful and desirable, but it wants us to redefine how we conceive of and recognize beauty.
Sure, men will always be impressed by looks. It’s instinctive, it’s essential power is beyond our conscious control. But since looks can be manipulated, we need to strive to see deeper. We need to mediate that instinct through the lens of a broader wisdom, a more wholistic picture of beauty and success and personhood. And that’s where the difference in our approaches start to fall away. Because we’re getting closer to the real person, to where we actually meet one another.
When we accept the inevitability of the search for beauty and success in one another, but we have added wisdom so that both seek and see the inner reality of the person behind the ideal, it ultimately becomes just a difference of approach, of means, not content. We both are ultimately seeking the truly good and lovely within one another, in the actual person, and seeing that as being beauty or success. At that point, there isn’t really much difference between the two. Just a different learning style. We may call it by different names, we may come to it through different paths, we may find it easier to find it or embody it through one way or another determined by individual or societal or gender differences, but at heart, when it is defined deeply, what we seek is the same. The goodness of men and women is the same goodness. And the correct approach to seeking it is one that works with who we are, not against it.
We’re probably all going to be just a little disappointed sometimes, men and women. After all, my success (or potential for it, or how I present it) isn’t really me. It’s a sign of me, it’s about me, but it isn’t me, the whole real me. And I could easily lose it. And your beauty isn’t you either (even if it is something you directly possess). I don’t want to unfairly dismiss the oerformative aspect of feminine beauty; it’s just as performative as the mediated “success” beauty of men, the only difference is the stage. Your stage belongs to you, you possess it directly, it’s closer to you. But it’s still a performance. You’re beauty isn’t you. You may have it, but it isn’t you. It’s a sign. And since these signs have so much power to attract the notice of the other person, but also aren’t us, they’re a little terrifying, and a little burdening. Because we either have to keep up the appearance of the ideal we presented but aren’t actually identical to, or risk disappointing our mate. It can seem like a prison, an obligation, rather than an opportunity.
If our mate has seen the real us, though, and accepted the exchange of the pursuit of the ideal mate for an actual person, if they’ve accepted us an an embodiment, a type, of the ideal in an actual specific human being, that’s when everything can change from burden to opportunity. Your spouse knows who you really are, they’re not chasing some fictional ideal. They’ve accepted you as the real expression of that ideal. And it’s hasn’t destroyed the ideal, it’s incarnated it. Yes, I know you’re true beauty and your ugliness, I’m not naive, so when I look at you and see the ideal before me, it’s a true marker. There’s no illusion that you’re keeping up. No ideal you’re living up to. You are the reality. You have become the ideal. So the expression of your power in your beauty isn’t a false signal obscuring some rougher reality in favor of a false ideal, it is the revelation of the accepted and loved reality and the manifestation of the true ideal. Expressions of beauty, even shallow ones, become elevated to transcendent interpersonal value when we understand that our spouse has seen and accepted us as the realization of their search.
Bragging and showing off, these can be false signals to one another, and our pursuit of them in ourselves and others can be false worship of an ideal we’re burdened to playact for one another. But everything changes when we truly make the sacrifice of our ideal for an actual, known human. And I think that what marriage in its essence really is. The moment we give up that ideal for a single, actual person. That transforms our relationship to it, and to our spouse. If we try to hang back and hold on to the old mental outlook, we aren’t really giving ourselves to the marriage. In our mind, we’re still trying to be married to the ideal, and if the illusion ever breaks then the relationship might too. In which case there’s a question of whether you were ever really married to that person at all, or just to your idea of them. That’s the real test of a relationship.
In the new, transformed relationship, bragging and showing off make perfect sense, because we know they aren’t false signals, and we know they aren’t serving a false image. Instead, they mediate the true image in a convenient way. I already know your true value, I see in you the perfection of the ideal not as an illusion, but as being, so when I worship and delight in your beauty (even in its most shallow manifestations), my delight is directed toward the real you.
Of course, we all participate to some degree in the desires and fulfillment of the opposing sex. We all share in a common humanity, and we can all find the value in one another’s values, our story in one another’s stories, if we try hard enough. Women, as a class, are far more interested in people, and men are more interested in things. But we can all appreciate the other’s perspective to some degree. And even those at the furthest extremes from one another can learn to love the difference of the other and value it, even if they don’t share it by nature, and so learn to share in it by their love of the other person. And often that’s exactly what we need. The closer we come to loving the other person, truly seeing and loving their difference, the more alike we become in our unity, the more complete, the more able to add the beauties of the other to our lives.
Some women will want a very straightforwardly masculine man who complements their own strong femininity, whose difference enables and reinforces their own identity by conforming very closely and conventionally to certain roles. Other women will prefer a more androgenous man who finds ways to fulfill their femininity through more unusual or creative means, by combining their two sides in a dance to fulfill the more balanced two sides of their partner. A man who has figured out how to give through another means what he cannot give through typical mediated means is still achieving the same end. There’s room for all kinds of improvisation, all kinds of people, even people like me. There’s room for me to be successful man, even if I don’t achieve that success in the most common way. I’m a “sneaky male”, to borrow a term from seal and cuttlefish mating habits. But the end result is the same. I’ve got a happy, growing family. I’ve got a wife and two children whose future success I’m working to ensure. All different types of people can figure something out if they can just get lucky and be a little flexible.
None of this really matters that much, of course. But I think it goes a little way toward explaining why there’s this odd seeming imbalance in how men and women evaluate and please one another. And of course I’m not meaning to reduce women merely to how they look, nor men to what they can provide. People often do make that simplification, but that’s being reductive. Both are giving themselves. Both are being inherently discriminatory, because that’s what selecting a mate is all about. It’s not arbitrary. The whole process has very high stakes and is about discrimination and judgment, hopefully good judgment. And women and women broadly value certain things differently and have different interests and concerns to protect. And I really do think, as I said, that in both cases both really are offering themselves, so ultimate value is contained in themselves, but one more clearly contains and presents it in themselves and the other mediates it and presents it by what they do. And this is largely a good thing, considering their respective biological roles, but is somewhat inescapable, regardless. Men are driven by a fire within to be initiators and pursuers. Women are driven to be discriminatory and cultivators. We live out this reality biologically, we live it out psychologically, and we reflect that experience mythologically. We aren’t only those things, but we are them to some degree at least. We might not like it, might be frustrated by it, might not be sure how to handle it especially if we have a more neutral, mixed composition ourselves. But if we participate in sexual relations of the most basic or most complex variety (casual sex on up to marriage), we’re going to run headlong into these realities in one way or another. So we may as well confront and understand them so we can better understand the context of our specific relationship.
To get back to my original question then, my conclusion is that, no matter how clear what men want seems or how obscure what women want seems, what they both want really is essentially the same thing, at its heart. But since we present it and get at it by different means, mediated either by ourselves or by things we do, one seems clear and the other obscure, one seems simple and the other complex. And, unfortunately for men, that extra layer of distance really does present a challenge. Statistically, only half as many men have successfully figured out what the other sex wants as women.
But that’s just appearance. How we are is how we are, and it makes sense. What we do with how we are, how we define our values, how we deepen and add wisdom and understanding to our instincts (or how we allow them to become shallow and reductive) determines their real value.
A reductivist might argue that that’s all just so much fancy language covering a selfish reality, that both really just want the other for what they can do for them, as a means to their own desires, a means to themselves. Love is merely mutual exploitation. Or a skeptic of a different stripe might argue that neither really does need the other, they already have everything they need in themselves and are simply mistaken. You don’t need the other sex, and they don’t need you. But it can be a pleasant diversion and amusement for both to indulge one another. Both arguments would reduce our needs and desires to an exchange of favors, on hopefully fair and mutual grounds, but basically just an exchange of selfish pleasantries. But I suspect a more terrifying reality, one of mutual need, where neither is safe and both are incomplete, where both find themselves more completely in their loss to the other.
What we both really want is the glorious revelation of the other, to enjoy and participate in it, to see them revealed in the beauty of the fulfillment of their potential, and to live in a world where we experience it and see it worked out, and that living creates life more abundantly. How we perceive and judge that beauty, though, can differ. And in fact, the best guides to love will counsel us to do more than rely on our usual means for judging people, or to take them deeper, beyond the typical level of understanding. Sure, she’s beautiful, but is she smart and diligent and reliable in her work? Yes, he’s successful, but is he kind and gentle and patient with his inferiors? You might need more than just that one need met. You need a whole person to fit your whole you, so look a bit deeper to see how they might measure up in ways you didn’t consider. No, she’s not the most lovely, but her generosity and vitality is far more beautiful and lasting than any mere appearance. No, he’s not the most successful doctor, but he works hard and strives to meet every need and help and provide for everyone around him.
In this way, “smaller” lives or less typical lives are seen to be every bit the equal, or even better than those of more typical, shallowly computed value (movie stars and CEOs). I don’t want to eradicate the means by which the majority of humanity has judged one another, there’s clearly something there there, some enormous reason for it. But we also want to figure out what’s really being searched for, to deepen and add complexity and balance to that process, so we can do it better. Because, for better or worse, there is something amazing going on. Somehow, in seeking one another, in the way we desire the beauty of the realized potential of one another, in the way we recognize and choose and embrace it in one another, we create life. Literally and psychologically/spiritually/aesthetically. We need our needs, as a species. We would die and wither and cease growing and cease creating life without them. That desire for one another, that need that drives us toward one another, that insufficiency in ourselves, is what our entire race depends on. Somehow it is good, even better, to be two seeking oneness than one alone complete. Somehow it makes us more.
Even biologists can’t quite explain why diocetious sex (two sexes) is the preferred pattern for almost all life, and of all complex life, but it is. Its reality to us biologically predates everything but life and specialized biological function itself. It was a path to more and better life despite the enormous risks and complications. Mythologically, in Genesis for example, somehow one containing both (presumably androgenous, presumably complete in itself) was good, but not good enough! It was better to be two divided, more distinct, seeking union. It was a path to more and better life, despite the enormous risks and complications. Dividing us, making us different, making us need one another, it’s a peculiar move, and hard to bear, much less justify or understand. It makes us weak, vulnerable; it makes something fairly simple (structuring and propagating the species) super complicated to figure out and not mess up. And yet somehow, in that liability, the life and future of our species is bound up and fulfilled. Our ability to grow and learn and adapt is somehow furthered by it rather than hindered. (And not just us but virtually all complex life. We just take it to new levels of complexity.) Anyway, I think at this point I’m not adding anything, I’m just searching for a conclusion. So I think I’m done talking about that subject.
On a random side note, it is strange how much our body reinforces the emotional power of these aspects of our outlook and personality. When you were breastfeeding, your own body was forcing your mind into submission to the role your baby needed you to play. You felt paranoid and protective and a need for things to be clean and proper, an intense need for security and safety and order. And I think men maybe notice the effect of their own body on their feelings and thinking in those rare occasions it lets them alone, often the day after sex, when they’re fully expended, when they’ve finally got the reality of the thing they’ve been chasing and start to find themselves calming down and their own passion subsiding. And suddenly you feel a bit silly, maybe a little embarrassed about how worked up you got. And men often find themselves having done things that were really dumb, that messed up their lives, that cost them an awful lot (one way or another), or that embarrass or even disgust them, in the heights of their passion. At the time, it seemed like nothing in the universe mattered more! Their burning heart told them so, and their mind could not resist and was forgotten and then!!!! Squirt squirt…..huh. Hmm. All for that, huh?
I think this is more and more true the further you take sex from the context of being part of a larger, protected, meaningful, interconnected relationship. In that context, your revelation of yourself in your foolishness is safe, and the sex is literally safe. You’re not going to disrupt some essential structure in your life or misuse an important means of attachment (since sex is one of the only ways men get that shot of attachment hormone) on something that competes against and distracts from your chosen attachments. Yes, you raised someone and something else into a God, but because it wasn’t all about you and fulfilling your momentary pleasure, it was part of a larger motion toward someone else, it wasn’t idolatry. It elevated someone who deserves and should be given your occasional worship. It reinforces your bonding and mutual acceptance, acceptance of your unprotected, unedited self, in all its weirdness and imperfectness. You’re not trying to fool your spouse that you’re hotter stuff than you really are, so the revelation is genuine and self-affirming. And you have persistence across time, so any one failure or moment doesn’t matter as much, and you can feel free to think about them sometimes and not only yourself, because you’re in it for the long haul.
One psychologist I listened to phrased it that there are some games you don’t get to play unless you play for keeps. Humans are so selfish and weak and afraid and lazy, its so hard to get them to do the hard work of confronting their flaws and pain and vulnerabilities and truly reveal themselves, that the only way you can convince them to do so is, on the one hand, to hold over them the terrible threat of having to live with the consequences of not dealing with those issues every day for the next fifty years! And on the other hand you make them feel safe by giving them a guarantee that they’ve been chosen and are safe here for the next fifty years; you’ve been given grace, so you might as well use it, it won’t hurt your chances of being accepted because you already have been. Tom Segura had a much more profane way of expressing this. He said everyone has some thing they’re into that they’re ashamed of, because they’re afraid it’ll cause them to be rejected. But then he got married and realized it didn’t matter, when he suddenly realized that he got to be with his wife forever. “It’s fine,” she said. “I’ll spit butter on you, whatever.”
Anyway, I did want to let you know there are times we men see how silly we are. Often men get a little antsy and low in confidence and apologetic and start looking for reassurance that they did right by their partner…right after orgasming. Suddenly they crash back to earth, much harder and faster than women do, and for a moment are left feeling kinda dumb and need some reassurance. “Why did I act like that? Why did I get so worked up over a fairly little thing? Did I really say that? Did I really do that? There isn’t really a forum in normal society for that behavior.” Jim Jeffries once observed that the most embarrassed and apologetic man in the world is one who has just finished ejaculating.
There’s nothing quite like coming down from the divine ecstacies of our mad obsession and landing with a thud in the sticky aftermath of the ordinary world, where we appear not to be such gods and goddesses as we imagined, wrestling with the titanic forces of creation. Instead, we’re a somewhat out of breath, flabby, sweaty non-god who’s wondering now whether his erstwhile goddess really was so impressed by his acts of creation as she seemed, or if it seemed rather a bit of an imposition and discomfort. “Thanks for that,” you offer meekly. “Was that ok for you?” A rather amusing coda to such a display. No wonder those who seek such pursuits outside the walls are so often characterized as slinking away afterward. It’s hard not to feel embarrassed and a bit vulnerable even under the best, most controlled and agreed upon circumstances.
A lot has been made of the significance of Song of Songs, of course. Some want to tame it by reducing it merely to erotica, others by elevating it entirely to allegory, to render it either wholly sacred or wholly profane. But I think its mere inclusion in the Bible, in the most serious and sacred scriptures ever, written by some of the people least likely ever to make such a mistake, is in itself an answer of how we should treat it and what it means. It’s in the Bible. It’s pressed right up between Ecclesiastes and Isaiah, the greatest book of philosophical truth and the greatest book of prophetic truth. I think the lesson is quite literal. This is a locus, a chiasm, where the carnal and the temporal meet the divine and eternal. Thus the radically conflicting opinions about its nature.
Our coming together with a mate is, in many ways, the most animal thing we do. And yet it’s also meant to be a picture of the divine relationship. It’s a sanctified profanity. And in that way, it sums up our very identity. That’s why Song of Songs fits so well right into the middle, the very heart of the scripture, between the most honest assement of our relation to ourselves and the most honest assessment of our relation to God. Right in the middle of all that, take some time out to hear about what someone else’s breath smells like. Hear about her erotic fantasies about grinding it out on her parents’ bed and his desire to put his mouth on her mouth. Check out those breasts, that navel. In fact there’s a whole Greek chorus there telling you to look, to participate, to cheer them on. Drink yourself silly like the lovers do on the language of ripeness and fertility and luxury, heady smells and dripping nectar and the tasting of delicious fruits. I could be wrong, but I’m pretty sure the honey he’s getting drunk licking from the honeycomb and the wine he’s getting from his milk is a word picture for devouring her nipples and licking out her wet vulva. I mean, I’m sorry, it’s not super subtle, the language, if you’ve ever actually experienced these things. It’s pretty explicit. She praises every specific bit of his body in detail, being only slightly more subtle when she praises his “appearance” as being like Lebanon, choice as the cedars, those huge, stiff, long woody things. That’s in the freaking Bible! And it goes on and on like this for chapter after chapter. And I don’t believe it was an accident. I think they recognized its significance and why it had to be left in there.
Controversial as it was, even to the Jews, before Christianity, they kept it in. Even a first century rabbi who criticized the tendency of people to sing Song of Songs drunkenly as a bawdy song in the wine taverns reacted with horror when someone asked him if it should then be removed from the holy scriptures. “God forbid,” he said. “For all of eternity in its entirety is not as worthy as the day on which Song of Songs was given to Israel! For all the writings are holy, but Song of Songs is the Holy of Holies.” And the later Christian councils agreed.
This idea, of course, of mating being somehow a picture of or means for encountering the divine is a very very widespread idea. And it’s easy to see why. It dissolves some part of our aloneness, our existence as a particular thing in the world. It connects us to the future, through our children and the creation of life. It connects us to our past, by participation in the act that gave us life and beginning. It connects us to our unique identities and physical pleasures. It furthers our species and creates life. It blends our identity with that of another and makes something new. It reinforces our social and ethical bonds. It removes the layers of construction we place between ourselves and the world. It makes us vulnerable. It makes us feel powerful. It engages our mind, bodies, and hearts. It draws a circle of fundamental social order within which we exist and can create and cultivate new life, forming the first level of a deeply interconnected civilization. In uniting, it helps complete a lack or need we feel, both physically and psychologically. It fills a void and finds a home. It’s both safety and risk at once.
No wonder, then, that we humans find so much mystical significance in something fairly ordinary that everything alive is doing every day, right down to the birds and the bees and the single celled organisms. Somehow, this very pedestrian facet of human experience draws a line right down through all the dimensions of life, from top to bottom. And no wonder we feel a bit embarrassed about the fact that it is, upon more sober reflection, a fairly ungainly and sticky commonplace affair (drape it as you wish in poetic metaphors).
And this is why it’s such a mistake to either condemn it to banality and mere animal significance, as some do, or elevate it to unreachable, refined heights of spiritualization. Erotic love is just an aspect of romantic love, not its totality. Pleasure is not it’s only end and effect. It isn’t something without deeper meaning and risk and opportunity. And it’s also not just a means to divine metaphor and transcendence, leaving the carnal behind. Song of Songs isn’t just a bawdy lyric or a distant metaphor. It’s the place where the two can meet. It’s the place where creatures like us, that straddle the worlds of rough animal existence and refined ideal contemplation, can experience, in its proper context, a bridge between the two that extends through and reinforces and informs all the various levels of our existence. Physical, social, familial, spiritual, ethical, emotional, financial, creative, psychological. The two becoming one sets branches through all of that. The actual physical act is the incarnation, the signitory, the avatar or expression of a deeper, more connected experience.
This is why, I suppose, we’ve need to put so many walls around it. Partly because what we reveal inside is makes us so deeply vulnerable that it’s hard to be safe without those walls, partly because what it creates has such extensive effects and significance and power over us, that we need to make sure that power is being directed into reinforcing the various dimensions of our life and person and not diluting and degrading them. It’s not a game with no stakes, no dangers, no risks, no benefits. It’s not one we’re likely to play well or fairly unless we play for keeps. It demands all of us because it touches all of us. It either can draw those parts into harmony or expend them in disorder. Sex can either draw you into your marriage or it can blow your marriage apart. You’re planning on revealing yourself in your most earthly, unmediated, raw, fleshy reality in there. And you’re planning on lighting sacred fires of passion and meaning and shared purpose and connection to the deep realities of human life. Those walls keep the raging fires contained so they feed the furnace instead of lighting the countryside. And they keep the flickering candleflame from being snuffed out by the waves and winds of the wild world. They provide safety for vulnerability and direction for power. Freedom and responsibility. Safety and opportunity.
Kierkegaard conceived of love in three levels like this. Erotic, passionate love, animal love, self focused love, at one end. At another end, divine love, the love of God, love of essence, love of the other. In the middle he placed what he called ethical love (and we might call romantic love). Not something that could be reduced to either, but the intermediate stage between. Passion with purpose. Instinct with understanding. Freedom with direction. A sort of mystical meeting place from which we can travel to both and round and round to the other in an infinite double loop through the chiasm of romantic union (which, visually would be the infinity sign).
On a side note, he also saw this structure of love as being why love of self and love of God were best expressed in our lives through the love of others. It meets in the middle space and gains power from and effective presence in both, where the other two tend to go round and round their own respective circles if we focus too hard on them. Loving others places us in the center of both circles, and of ourselves, and so fulfills both. This is why it is so often commended to us as a means of loving God, fulfilling the law, and achieving personal good and beautification and fulfillment.
I suppose one very good question to ask so late in the game is, why bother with all this? To what end do I pursue so many threads. Why and I trying to synthesize things I’ve pulled from nature documentaries, gender studies textbooks, psychology lectures, Danish and French philosophy, articles on sexual health, poetry, fiction, and religious texts? Well, I guess the answer is, I already care, so I prefer to understand. And because I don’t take anything for granted.
I can’t take for granted what anyone tells me I should want or should do when it comes to sex and relationships. The traditional concept of marriage and fidelity isn’t just an assumed default for me. I can’t just assume that it’s what I really want or need or deserve. After all, I find plenty within my own heart to contradict it. My natural instinct runs against it in ways that make it difficult, encumbering, restrictive, frustrating. I can’t just take for granted that those instincts are wrong. They have a reason to be there. They argue very strongly that they should have their way, are fully justified, and would make me ultimately happy. So I don’t want to just assume. I want to be persuaded. I want to learn the purpose of love so that I may say what is true or not of love.
If there is a good reason why I should take and use my instincts in a specific way, if I’m to suffer the pain and deprivation of resisting and training them to other causes, I want to know why. Should I obey them, of should they obey me? Do I exist for their purpose, or do they exist, like wild things, to be tamed and made useful and ethical for a higher purpose? Are my desires their own self-validating instruction? Or do their require teaching? I want to know. I want to be convinced. I want to be given a positive vision of love worth turning chaos and instinct into order and civilization. I’m not going to fight this kind of fight with myself for nothing.
So that’s why I care, why I synthesize and order arguments. Only a grand, unified vision can convince me. Something that can account for all of it. Rejection of the passions isn’t enough (and I don’t think I have the strength of will to do it), submission to the passions isn’t enough (I have too much good sense to do that). The only thing that can possibly sustain me in such a spot is a compelling positive vision that drives me on toward something, a goal of becoming and creativity. Mere control or mere license cannot sustain me, cannot tell the story of me in a sufficient way to make me walk it. There must be a vision of what it is for.
And that vision is, I think, the primary disagreement between different approaches to sexuality. And the answers most give seem far too limited to tell the whole story, casting either us or love too low, or casting love or us too high. Either it’s an animal pollutant, or it’s a god we cannot resist within, or it’s an angelic perfection, or it’s a God beyond us we cannot touch. It’s unquestionably good or unredeemably bad, it’s mystically divine or it’s humiliatingly carnal. We’re shamed for being men, for being beasts, and then told that we are beasts and it’s wrong to restrain our wildness. What are we supposed to do with that?
So that is why I want some answers and some good ones, with some meat on their bones. I want a vision that preserves both the divine and the carnal, the safety and the danger, the animal and the god, the power and the purpose. And that’s what all this talking was really about.
Making Nobody Happy 