What Do Women Want?

In the various lines of research described by Daniel Bergner in his account of investigations into female desire (Jan. 25), it is interesting that almost all of the stimuli presented to female subjects come in the form of photographs or film and video. Theorists of art and visual culture have long recognized that vision is not simply a neutral, physiological act, and that the act of filming or photographing encodes gendered forms of looking.

It may be, in fact, that the “narcissistic” form of desire described by Marta Meana is a response to the ways in which the female viewer is often made to identify with the object of desire (the object of the desiring gaze) rather than the subject of that gaze (the protagonist); this is an argument that has been made by Laura Mulvey in relation to classic Hollywood cinema, but holds true in a variety of other visual modes as well. Women may not, in fact, have an innately narcissistic form of desire, but may be offered only the position of narcissism by the visual culture that is called upon to evoke desire.

ARUNA D’SOUZA
Visiting Associate Professor
University of California, Berkeley
Berkeley, Calif.

I would never deny that being desirable is a turn-on for many women, but what one has to do to be “hot” in our culture fosters a double consciousness that might well confuse scientists about women’s sexual desires. For many women, it’s occasionally hard to know the difference between sexual agency and male-driven definitions of sexiness, which have the effect of regulating or reshaping women’s subjectivity. Twenty years ago the American feminist Catharine MacKinnon wrote, “All women live in sexual objectification the way fish live in water.” Despite the subtitle of Daniel Bergner’s article, we are not “postfeminist” yet.