Female Trouble: I Can't Get No Satisfaction

I was asked by Psychoanalytic Perspectives to write a commentary on a roundtable on “female sexuality,” but when I received the transcript, I was a little taken aback by the full title. I wondered, Is there a chasm I don't know about? What is “hotness”? Whose hotness are we talking about, and who is hot for whom? Or for what? The reference to the “digitized,” “surgicized,” and “pornographized” age suggests something new, and yet the themes in the discussion seem to take us back to Freud, and to an old, unchanged landscape. In “The Three Essays” Freud said women are vain and that trying to be beautiful was an effort to make up for being castrated. He also said that the desire (to love) is stronger in men (and more altruistic), and women want to be loved, which makes them more narcissistic. The Orna Gil reference knocked the wind out of me. Like Freud, she seemed to be saying, “I'm just reporting observed facts.” The masculine/feminine binary of active/passive, subject/object, in the 21^st century, appears to continue unmodified. If anything, according to the panel, things may have gotten Worse, because it seems women get no lasting satisfaction from their efforts toward beauty, despite hours at the gym and money spent on the plastic surgeon, and they (still) aren't interested in having sex.

The painful obsession with food that Janice Lieberman focuses on made me wonder about the depressing tensions between the drive to make one's body the object of a man's desire and the emptiness that ensues, whether one succeeds or fails. Filling up the emptiness with food, or the latest restaurant, becomes part of a vicious cycle of unsatisfied hunger and an inability to name what one is hungry for.

It's apparent that some members of the roundtable are troubled by cultural trends having to do with the construction and marketing of an image of a desirable female. There's some trouble with pornography, too. There is a feeling expressed that