LUST
Mad in pursuit and in possession so,
Had, having, and in quest to have, extreme . . .
William Shakespeare, Sonnet 129
Money can’t buy me love.
Paul McCartney, “Can’t Buy Me Love”
Last month’s “View” was about fear, which got me to thinking about drives—those instinctual urges that help us survive as individuals and as a species. This month I’d like to talk about another drive, lust, with a focus on men and on one man in particular. Next month, we’ll talk about mother love, in honor of Mother’s Day.
Unlike most of the other drives we’ve inherited from our pre-human forebears, such as hunger, thirst, respiration, sleep, excretion, and avoidance of pain, fear and lust play a role in perpetuating our species. Avoidance of pain may look like fear, but anyone who suffers from migraines—sickening, random, and unavoidable—knows the difference. We don’t fear pain. We just want it to stop, as the word’s derivation from Old French—vuide (“empty”) and evuider (“get rid of,” “clear out”)—suggests. What we fear is the threat of pain. What we fear is that a migraine is “coming on.”
Fear helps keep us alive long enough to reach sexual maturity and reproduce. Lust urges us to make it happen. Both are reactive and occasional rather than, like the other drives that sustain life from day to day, proactive and (relatively speaking) regular. Although they may, like the other drives, be potentiated by things (hormones) happening inside us, fear and lust are triggered by threats and opportunities arising from outside, in the world, prompting us to look out for enemies and be on the lookout for allies. And mates. Fear and lust are, like mother love and the need for human contact generally, social drives.
There’s practically nothing new under the sun to be said about lust. As usual, Shakespeare, in Sonnet 129, hogged the best descriptors: “perjured, murd'rous, bloody, full of blame,/ Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust.” But lust’s myriad forms of expression—and perversion—can call our attention to things we sometimes need reminding of. The running sore called “The Epstein Files” is a never-failing source of such items, beginning with the nature of power, which is, after all, what fear and lust are all about: the power to escape or attack, the power to force or seduce.
First thing to remember: power corrupts, and absolute power . . . .
Right. Let’s move on.
Second, power attracts. Many who lack power are drawn to those who have it like iron filings to a magnet and become magnetized themselves, pulling more chums and sycophants and bootlickers and factotums into the radius of influence like the tiny petals of an iron rose. This is true regardless of income, age, class, or sex. Some of those drawn in are the last people you’d expect.
The “cheerful competency” of Epstein’s “brightly facilitating” female assistants and enablers, for instance, is a source of wonder to Anne Enright, reporting back to readers of the March 26 issue of the New York Review of Books after a deep dive into the Epstein Files online. The women “sound so willing and nice,” she writes. Their alacrity, even enthusiasm, in carrying out their sordid assignments helps “capture the feeling of normalized perversion”—what Hannah Arendt famously termed, “the banality of evil” [1]—conveyed by the record of just a single day in the life of Epstein, who “wasn’t depraved, corrupt, or dodgy some of the time,” says Enright, but “depraved, corrupt, and proud of it all day long.”
Along the outer margins of the iron rose, where the power of attraction has dwindled to mere coercion without empowerment, are the unwilling victims—the exploited and the collateral damage, the trafficked teens and anyone of any age whose reputation has been ruined by the mere mention of their names in the Epstein Files, even if they only happened to meet the man at a film festival or a charity fund-raiser.
Which brings us to our third reminder: when the center cannot hold and the rose dies, power stinks. The smell clings and spreads and no deodorant or stain remover can make it go away.
And you can’t redact it. You can make the visible invisible, but the more you cover up, the more noticeable the stink becomes. Our Crybaby in Chief can keep insisting, like a two-year-old, that the bulge in his diaper isn’t there. But you can smell it all the way to the election booth. And it keeps getting bigger. The sheer size of the Epstein Files as of this writing is enough to stagger the imagination: some 300 gigabytes of data containing roughly 3.5 million pages of documents, 2,000 videos, and 150,000 images. The redactions vary in length but can go on for several lines or paragraphs at a time. Some pages are entirely blacked out. Page after page.
That’s a lot of manure to shovel and it won’t fit under a rug. Without a doubt, there’s more to come.
At this point, some of you are probably thinking about patriarchy and male privilege and others are thinking of the disparities in wealth that enable rich men to manipulate, coerce, and otherwise exploit women who haven’t the means, monetary or otherwise, to defend themselves. Often these women, if they happen to have “the goods”—looks, youth, personality—will settle for relationships we call “transactional.” (Think “trophy wives.”) Where power is in play expect power plays.
But why settle for negotiation if you already have the upper hand? Bigger, stronger, faster, and physically dominant (generally), why don’t men just take what they want? And yet, as a rule, they don’t. This goes not just for binary males, but for gay and transgender big people as well. Yes, there are Jeffrey Epsteins to be found in corner offices, classrooms, dark alleys, and confessionals in every nation on earth, at every income level and in every profession. Men who will rape their own daughters, incels who feel entitled to take what they want because no woman will give it to them of her own free will. What’s amazing is that there aren’t more, since there’s nothing, physically, holding back any man, or anyone powerful enough regardless of sex or gender preference, from getting what they want except, perhaps, a bigger, stronger competitor. (Or anyone holding a gun.)
The question, then, isn’t “Why do men misbehave?” but “Why do any of them choose not to?”
Legal punishments? (Didn’t work for Epstein.) Shame? (Or that either.) Good mothering? Sunday School? Dance classes? Low libido? High self-esteem? Empathy? Introversion?
I think it’s because, like most people, including women, they want to be wanted.
Ideally, of course, as a lover.
William Blake, our foremost poet of free love before the phrase “free love” was invented, put it best in Several Questions Answered:
What is it men in women do require?
The lineaments of Gratified Desire.
What is it women do in men require?
The lineaments of Gratified Desire.
There is no bigger turn on than seeing your partner respond in kind. Everything else is transactional at best, cruel and coercive at worst.
But that’s what men like Jeffrey Epstien and Donald Trump and their superannuated frat brothers feel most comfortable with, because they live in a transactional world. Also, because getting to mutually gratified desire—let’s call it “MGD” for short—is, when you look at it straight on, scary. It makes you vulnerable, not just to outright rejection, but to the more subtle humiliations of disappointing your partner—after you tried so hard!—or, perhaps worst of all, getting duped. That’s a risk no serious mover and shaker can countenance, even if they’re used to taking risks, because this one can never be resolved without asking, “Was it good for you?”
And for a heterosexual man, there’s no way to know if your partner is answering truthfully.
Do you remember that episode of Seinfeld where Elaine demonstrates for Jerry how easy it is for a woman to fake an orgasm? Or the scene in When Harry Met Sally when Sally (Meg Ryan) teaches Harry the same lesson in a restaurant and gets a woman at a nearby table to tell her waiter, “I’ll have what she’s having”?
It’s the Epstein gang’s worst nightmare. They’re used to buying and selling. Safer to assume it’s a lie from the outset and settle for pretend. I’ll “get off” and pay you—in cash, or trinkets, or an expensive night out, or whatever you want—to pretend you like it, or at least not object, and I’ll play along to persuade myself you really want me.
Or what the hell—just give me what I want and I’ll give you what you want and we can skip the histrionics. I don’t need to believe I matter to you.
Or just give me what I want.
Or else.
How is any of this different from self-pleasuring with a prosthesis, a picture or an inflatable doll or (coming soon to Amazon!) a menu driven AI robot [2]? None of whom (or which) can answer the $64,000 question truthfully because no one and nothing can speak the truth if they’re programmed to say “yes," let alone incapable of speech to begin with.
We live in the age of consensual sex. No complaints from me. I’m part of the generation that pointed us in this direction. After all, just consider the alternatives. (See above.) We didn’t anticipate, however, how close to transactional our desideratum would appear once we got a close-up look at it. “Getting to yes” has spread from the boardroom to the bedroom.
The real danger of consensual sex, however, isn’t that it borders on the transactional. It’s that, if you’re not careful, it can make sex perfunctory, which I grant is low on the register of MGD turn-offs—just below transactional and far, far below coerced. Lurking there just the same.
There are other things pushing MGD in this direction. It doesn’t need help. Take media saturation. Sex, like violence, sells, but just like any other commodity, it’s value falls in direct proportion to its availability. And these days, fucking on screen is all but ubiquitous, both in word (choose any random episode of “The Bear” [3]) and deed.
Finished with lunch? Hosting a New Year’s Eve party? Walking the dog? If the audience-response algorithm demands it, you can bet a quickie is coming up. No scenario is too implausible.
And if you need an excuse, there’s always sex as panacea or celebration. Your eight-year-old drowned? Dad just died of terminal cancer? Your eight-year-old almost drowned? Maybe someone you know? Someone you read about? Fucking will relieve the pain. You just got a promotion? You won the lottery? Your eight-year-old didn’t drown? What a relief! Hey, how about. . . . ?
At some point along the way to overload you begin to realize that, in the gamut of human activities, watching people have sex (and yes, President Clinton, that includes more than coitus) is not very interesting unless you’re watching it because you can’t get it. Sex can have interesting motivations, aims, and unintended consequences, but the thing itself is repetitive, and when it’s not, the variations are too idiosyncratic to mean much to the viewer or the reader except as framed by the emotional complexities and life trajectories of the participants.
Sex, when you get right down to it, is animal—dare I say, subhuman? It’s something Nature tricks us into doing. Without those hormones driving us on, it would never occur to us. “Eeeyew!” says the prepubescent homo sapiens, or else stares back in wonder and disbelief, more sapient, in this regard, than its parents.
Being subhuman, sex robs us of our dignity, something the United Nations, no less, assures us we’re entitled to. [4]. Like murder (the association of orgasm with death is as old as humanity) or any other abrogation of human dignity, sex needs a rationale that will give rational human beings a reason to behave like subhumans when they’ve gone temporarily insane. “Except in self-defense” or “except in war” or “except to protect your family” will do for murder. What will do for sex? God wants us to multiply? You hurt me? My mother or father or teacher hurt me? You’re the enemy? (Speaking of war.)
And the ultimate: “I love you.”
Makes transactional sex look pretty good, doesn’t it? You scratch my itch and I’ll scratch yours and we’ll call it a day. Or night. Let’s keep it at the level of bartering airport runs for house cleaning, or buying groceries.
Right here’s where I think MGD proves useful, because it’s more honest than a made-up reason (which is what a rationale is, after all) without being transactional. We’re not mere animals giving and getting. We’re animals getting off on getting each other off. This makes pleasure more than a quid pro quo, something we merely reciprocate. It makes pleasure something we share.
Transactional sex doesn’t work that way, nor does merely consensual sex, and rape sure as hell doesn’t. I don’t buy or barter for groceries to share with the cashier, and I don’t steal them, either.
But I might grow my own and share them with someone I love for the pleasure of knowing that person will take pleasure in eating them, perhaps in a soup or a stew they’ve prepared to share with me.
Not a bad example, I think, of how mutually gratified desire works when it’s truly mutual and not just a trade-off. Sharing a meal and showing your pleasure in pleasing your tablemate. Satisfying an animal need by way of an activity that preserves human dignity, even when you’re stark naked.
“Love is all you need,” sang the man who told us money can’t buy it. Not just saying “I love you” or hearing it said. Showing it, too.
And if she’s faking it and you can’t tell, so what?
At least she cares enough not to hurt your feelings.
Notes
1. Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. New York: Viking Press, 1963.
2. It may not be available on Amazon, but it's been around for almost ten years. See David Moye, "Engineer Creates Sex Robot that Needs to be Romanced First," Huffpost, March 17, 2017. At https://www.huffpost.com/entry/ai-sex-doll-human-touch-sergi-santos_n_58cc0db7e4b00705db4f1d3a
3. In one episode the word was spoken 68 times, the word “chef” only 22. Aired Jun 26, 2024. https://m.imdb.com/title/tt32330860/trivia/
4. United Nations, Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 1: “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.”
