Most men, it seems to me, occasionally covet other women, no matter how loving their wives or girlfriends might be. We are presented–in movies, particularly–with bright shining images of beautiful, emotionally engaged women who seem to possess something that we lack. Or we are presented, in pornography, with sexually available women who will do anything we want.
Everywhere there is this bright shining lie–if I may borrow a term from a liar–that over the hill, happiness awaits. In contrast, what we have comes to seem dull and dreary. This is the myth that leads many middle-aged men into what can become the crisis of infidelity.
It seems to me, though, that all of these images subtract from the particularity of the women. They have needs, they have desires, they have bad days, they get grouchy. And at an increasingly early point in their lives, many women become cynics. Subjected to objectification from a very early age, it seems to me most women fall in love once in their teens, and a second time, if they are lucky, some time in their twenties. After that, they are spent. They have risked, and lost, to men who had been conditioned by a relentless media advocacy campaign to view sex as an object, not a type of emotionally involved relationship.
Clearly, the biological imperatives of men differ from those of women, but we both need love. This doesn’t change. And one of the principle arguments against the sexual revolution in the 60’s was that it would lower women to the standards of men, which seems to have happened.
So quite often what we have is objects interacting with objects. This is what you have when there is no genuine affection. This is the logic of oral sex, for men at least, in that you have a power relationship, and are freed from the need to look in anyone’s eyes with affection.
Women, it seems to me, come into their relationships with men in their teens with very glowing hopes. They feel love, and think that love is being given back to them, and so readily surrender their bodies. And most of the time, they are betrayed.
What is lacking in this whole process is creation. In order to love, you must exist as a person first. You must understand that you must be able to resist your own most primal impulses, so that you can connect on higher levels with other people. A lover is just a friend with whom you have consummated the deepest level–not of physical–but emotional intimacy. Women think they can get love with sex, but in general they don’t. They get used, then abandoned when they become “clingy”. This drives some women crazy. You see them in middle age, in constant pain, unable to understand why no one wants them, and becoming steadily less attractive as this frustration eats them. This is the “crazy bitch” that men can’t comprehend. What they are seeing is 20 years of emotional abandonment, and emotional silence, tempered only by the companionship of their female friends.
Creation, here, is adding energy to the system. It is deciding to give first, then receive later. Women do this easily when young, and very poorly after getting stung repeatedly. Men, in our society, do this very poorly.
I do not think I am misstating the facts when I say that there was a time in the not too distant past when men would court women. When they would offer up effort to win them, and offer unconditional loyalty, having done so. When they would serenade them, figuratively or literally. When poetry evoked deep sentiment, and when women were considered special, and their tenderness and sensitivity valued.
So often, now, women are seen simply as sexual objects, and on this view there is no major difference between heterosexuality and homosexuality. One orifice, by and large, is as good as another. The emotional quality is the same: that of two animals in heat, bound only by desire, and who for that reason only stay together until that particular passion is spent.
And when emotions do enter into it, when people “fall in love”, what is happening is that one person is asking another to “complete” them, as in Jerry McGuire. If you don’t know who you are, and find someone who can tell you, that is the person you love. But this, too, is compulsive. If you need that other person, in order that you can exist as a person, then you can never see them as they are. You never complete them.
Many women will settle for being needed, but this is far short of love, and will lead to chronic levels of emotional malnourishment. This has been the lot of countless women over the ages.
By and large, though, what I see on our cultural scene as it exists today is everyone searching for someone to complete them, and never quite finding it. They search and search. Momentarily they may find someone, but wind up rejecting them as not enough.
People want someone to tell them who they are. No one is creating. There is leveling process where no one is creating anything. Practically, this gets expressed as women want money, men want good sex with attractive women. Marriage becomes a de facto business proposition, particularly after the “starter marriage” in their twenties.
Yet, there is nowhere to run when no one is adding anything. Everybody is looking for soemething and not finding it. Dissatisfaction is everywhere.
You can’t find yourself if you don’t exist, and you won’t exist until you create yourself, by determining what you stand for, and what you are willing to suffer for; what your unique brand of Goodness will be.
Expressed poltically, this is the problem of socialism: it reallocates wealth, it doesn’t create it. This is the point Ayn Rand wanted to make. Everything, in the end, depends on people who put out more energy than they consume, who take nothing and make something.
The outcome of a lack of individuation is a lack of love, which leads to alienation, which leads to frustration, which leads to anger and violence. Any loveless sex for a women is a type of cruelty. Men need love as much as women, perhaps more. Everyone is losing.
These musings are not yet as tight as I would like them to be, but will have to do for now. More on this later. When I understand something, I can be concise. I’m not there yet.