Introduction, Desire Portfolio

I first became aware of the power of desire as I was becoming a teenager. It wasn’t my own desire that I noticed, but others’ – specifically men’s. Their desire transformed me from something invisible into something powerful. For many years, I’m not sure I had words for all I desired; I just knew that I wanted them, too—boys then, and later men—their bodies, their sandpaper faces rubbing mine raw, and, always, more of that power that trickled down to me as a result of being seen by them.

Just by existing, I could now make men look at me, even get them to do what I wanted them to do. I could make women I didn’t even know hate me. I possessed the sudden superpower of being a young, attractive woman in a world that places value on those things. I liked that power, but I didn’t think much about where it came from. I couldn’t yet see that, like so many seductive things, what was readily visible was attractive, but it was far outweighed by what lurked beneath the surface. While men’s desire gave me a certain power, it also made me vulnerable. But at thirteen, I only saw the upside. 

During my first pregnancy, I became even more cognizant of that power — because it waned. I got big, devouring ice cream and avocados, and gaining fifty pounds so quickly that even my crunchy, homebirth midwife suggested I reel it in a little. Obsession with body image is one of the few neuroses I’ve been spared, but even so, celebrating my body as it expanded, feeling the desire, as a woman, to gain weight, felt like a liberation. And it led to an experience I hadn’t really had since I was a little girl — that of walking (or more accurately, waddling) down the street more or less unseen by men. Only once I started living without it did I realize that always being seen is also a burden. Invisibility started to feel like my new superpower, and I desired more of it. I’ve rarely dressed in a way that shows my body since.

Then my first daughter was born. Motherhood almost instantaneously shone a light into areas of myself I’d never considered, and catalyzed changes well beyond my control. My understanding of my own experiences as a woman shifted dramatically when I reexamined them through the lens of what my daughter would live as a girl, and then as a woman. Yes, I had been afforded numerous opportunities and privilege, and I’d had some real success in setting my own terms for my life. My life had surpassed my grandmothers’ wildest dreams. Despite that, I couldn’t ignore all the opportunities that remained closed to me. All around me, I watched as men blithely scooped them up. 

But one of the deepest realizations, landing with a shudder, was the visceral understanding of my own vulnerability as a woman. Once I had a daughter, I couldn’t afford to minimize it anymore because I couldn’t help but see hers. 

For my daughter, of course I desired a world that would treat her fairly, an even playing field where she could live her best life. But on a simpler level, I just wanted her to grow up in a world where she could move about safely, one where she would never have to walk home at night in the middle of the street rather than on the sidewalk, her keys clenched between her fingers just in case.

I have seen some men tilt their heads quizzically at this description of a woman walking home in the middle of the street to avoid the shadows; or express bewilderment at a woman refusing to leave her friend alone at a bar. The don’t seem to have ever imaginined how it feels to have to pretend you don’t see the man waving his penis around on the subway platform, or the one slipping his hand up a skirt during a work meeting, or to be fucked by a man you considered a friend because there are only so many ways to say “no.” There is a certain kind of white man who has never deigned to consider what it feels like to be a person who is not him, walking around in his world. 

But it’s not just white men, unfortunately; that would be tidier. It’s men. One can pull up the news any day, anywhere on this planet, to read about what happens to women who men desire. One in three women will be sexually assaulted in their lives—with two daughters, I don’t love those odds—but that’s “just” actual assaults. What about all the rest? I don’t think I entirely understood how vulnerable men’s desire made women, not until I watched them comment on my daughters’ beautiful wide-set eyes and lips (my younger daughter is three). Of course, what I desire above all else is to protect my daughters from all of that, from all of them, and of course, I can’t. 

But I didn’t really think about the weight people might attach to the word “desire”—or even that I could assign to “desire”—before we started to put this portfolio together. I just thought about the word, how robust it is, and all the ways that it could be construed. Something that is open to broad interpretation makes the best creative prompt, after all. And desire is vast. But I hadn’t considered that it might mean something different for men than for women.

I certainly didn’t consider that men just wouldn’t answer. A roughly equal number of men and women got the original request, asking for their creative take on what they desired. Most of the women answered quickly and enthusiastically.But men? A few tackled it, and their responses are shared here. But so many more didn’t even reply, and most of those who did politely passed. It had never occurred to me that desire, at its core, could be considered a feminine concept.

I think, my partner (a man) said, that the word “desire”feels different to men than to women. It makes me feel kind of gross.
Gross? I ran this idea by other men, who laughed uncomfortably, but ultimately concurred. Men, who live in a world built to satisfy their every desire, from fucking to dominating and everything in between, feel gross when asked to define what they desire? It seemed so counterintuitive to me that I had to sit with it for a while. 

To express what you desire—what you really desire—requires a certain vulnerability. When you say out loud that you want something, you make public the truth that you do not already have it. Maybe as women we have more practice with this. Maybe we’ve had to. As I sat writing this on March 5th (in a different time, in a different world—more on that in a moment), Elizabeth Warren was giving a press conference to announce that she was dropping out of the presidential race. Maybe Next Time, Ladies, read one of the headlines. That story is woven through the female experience, more often than not.

Or maybe we find it easier to express desire because, for all the things women aren’t allowed to be, we are allowed to be—in fact, we are required to be—vulnerable. Men are allowed to be a lot of things, but vulnerable isn’t one of them.

There is a longing implicit in desire, my partner also said. And men aren’t supposed to long for things. They are supposed to go out and take them.
I have two daughters and a stepson, too. He has been with me since he was a toddler, now an unimaginably giant teenager. Reading Peggy Orenstein’s book, Boys and Sex, I was gut-punched by what the boys profiled have to say about the pressures the world puts on them to conform to very constrained gender norms, about the limited space they are given to express themselves and the social cost leveled on them for deviating, and about the price they pay when they attempt to defend women against other men. It filled me with such a deep sadness.

Men are not given space to sit with their vulnerability. And that vulnerability, and ultimate powerlessness, is an integral part of what it is to be human. It’s why most religious traditions lead us towards surrender, because there is actually no other reasonable path. Surrender is the only end game of the human experience—surrender, and on the way to surrender, sex.

Sex is always in the air when you bring up desire. It’s the shorthand people use for Playgirl, too. But sex, for all the cultural weirdness that exists about discussing it, is still an easier conversation than expressing what we really want.

Most of the answers we received for this piece weren’t about sex. Sitting in the fall of 2020 and looking back to January and February, when these responses were submitted, provides quite a fascinating lens. Some are darkly funny. (Oh, you want more time to spend with your family? How about this? Is this enough time?) Some have taken on a deeper, sadder poignancy. (“Safety. Unbroken sleep.”) And some have circled right back around to relevance (“a world that’s not on fire”) in this year’s merry-go-round of hell.

What seems clear, after half a year of forced reflection, is that in order to create the kind of world we want to live in, we must be intentional. Lack of intentionality, hoping that things will somehow kind of sort themselves out, has proven to be an unmitigated disaster on just about every imaginable front. We must consider the values that undergird our society, and examining what we truly desire can begin to provide a roadmap. We have to make compromises; only children (and Americans) believe they can have everything. What do we truly want? What is actually important? Those desires have to be spoken out loud, however improbable they may seem, in order to begin to move them from the realm of the impossible into the imaginable. Women have practice sitting in the space of vulnerability that comes from the possibility—even probability—that when we voice our deepest, truest desires, they might not be realized immediately, if ever. Perhaps we’ve put in more time in this state of longing, in the space of desire. Maybe that vulnerability is a power after all; maybe that power can help lead the way.