Desire

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From Three Women (2019)

  And finally, here is a man, a teacher, with a biggish ego. He’s attractive and his students confirm this with blushes. He began texting with Maggie a little by accident because she’s pretty and smart and engaged. She’s a little tomboyish, likes Led Zeppelin and Trailer Park Boys, yet her hair is blond and her panties are feminine under her sweatpants. The texts turned, as texts do, and Aaron Knodel liked it and then he didn’t and then he liked it, and at last he didn’t. He read Twilight because it turned him on that someone thought he was a vampire lover. He pulled away when she pitched forward and then there were days when he felt her evanescing, another chance at youth was petering out and so he wrote, I am falling in love with you. And what he meant was, I am in love with who I am now, again, so please don’t leave, because this fresh me will die if your crush on me dies. To consummate his own idealization, he invited her into his family home and he liked it but hated it afterward; she fell too much in love. For the next few months he had to end it slowly, slough her heart off like a callus. To do this, he had to inspire pity. He had to be the man who did not love his wife and whose wife did not love him. He had to be the man who was staying for the children. Occasionally, even through all this sloughing, there were times when he was in the car, bored, and instead of listening to music or NPR he called up a girl who made him feel like someone who didn’t pass gas, lose at poker, or worry about his mortgage. On counts one, two, and five, he was found not guilty, even by the juror who was hospitalized. The remaining two counts—three and four—cover what took place in his home the night they were the most liberated to be together; to wit, they allege penetration of her vulva by his fingers and contact between his mouth and her vulva. For these counts no verdict is reached. The rumor is that the female juror in the hospital was the lone holdout against finding him not guilty of these two counts as well. The room hears that the State can file for a mistrial on all five counts, or just on the two counts for which no verdict was reached.

• From Working Girl: On Selling Art and Selling Sex (2023)

  On Fantasy12​My ambition is to be unmanageable: H. C. Wilentz, “The Challenge of ‘L’Inceste’ and ‘The Incest Diary,’” New Yorker, February 15, 2018, newyorker.com. 12​the prostitute imaginary: Melissa Gira Grant, Playing the Whore: The Work of Sex Work (Verso, 2014), 4. 13​The world of the Young-Girl evinces: Tiqqun, Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl, trans. Ariana Reines (Semiotext(e), 2012), 76. 13​one of the last surviving Surrealists: Elaine Mayers Salkaln, “The Mystery Woman,” New York Times, October 13, 2002, 46. 14​Fantasy is the means by which: Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Duke University Press, 2011), 2. 14​bride of the wind: Salkaln, “Mystery.” 15​Art or whatever I call art: Sarah Nicole Prickett, “First Interview: Artforum’s New Editor-in-Chief David Velasco,” SSENSE, January 2018, ssense.com. 16​The manipulation of affect is stock-in-trade: Nicholas Ridout and Rebecca Schneider, “Precarity and Performance: An Introduction,” TDR / The Drama Review 56, no. 4 (Winter 2012). 17​Also like, what’s driving sex work: Anh Vo, “Sophia Giovannitti in Conversation with Sarah Michelson,” Critical Correspondence, October 12, 2021, movementresearch.org. 17​What is art? Prostitution: Charles Baudelaire, Intimate Journals, trans. Christopher Isherwood (Dover Publications, 2006), 31. 18​Of course it was a pure fiction: Julia Bryan-Wilson, “Dirty Commerce: Art Work and Sex Work since the 1970s,” differences 23, no. 2 (2012): 73. 18​The woman was paid somewhat less than her usual fee: Ibid., 71. 18​It was rumored: Ibid., 73. 19​It happens pretty often that artists, or writers, or documentary filmmakers, will want to make pornography their subject: Johanna Fateman, Lorelei Lee, and Tiana Reid, “Virtual Roundtable,” Sublevel, 2020, sublevelmagazine.com. 21​Desire describes a state of attachment to something or someone: Lauren Berlant, Desire / Love (punctum books, 2012), 6. 21​I believe the difference between “escort” and “prostitute” is that: Charlotte Shane, “Calling My Work What It Is,” Pacific Standard, September 12, 2015, psmag.com. 22​It appears that all of the concreteness of the world: Tiqqun, Preliminary Materials, 91. 23​There’s a little rip in my brain: Michael Clune, White Out: The Secret Life of Heroin (Hazelden, 2013), 6. 24​The lenses are tiny and basically rubbish: Hito Steyerl, Duty Free Art (Verso, 2017), 31. 25​She’s marrying a baby?: The Sopranos, season 3, episode 12, “Amour Fou,” directed by Timothy Van Patten, aired May 13, 2001, on HBO. 29​Imagine, for example, someone who fucks like a whore: Maggie Nelson, Bluets (Wave Books, 2009), 18–19. 41​Women and girls of color, including the trafficking victims whom the criminalization of sex work: moses moon aka thotscholar, “Symposium Introduction: Sex Workers’ Rights, Advocacy, and Organizing,” Columbia Human Rights Law Review 52, no. 3 (April 2021): 1067. 41​listed as “arrested” for violating, NYPL § 230.00: Queens County District Attorney’s Office, “Redacted and Abridged Yang Song Investigatory Report,” contributed by Melissa Gira Grant, June 21, 2018, 16, https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/4551646-Redacted-amp-Abridged-Yang-Song-Investigatory. 42​evidence of [her] criminality: Ibid., 22. 43​The public is fed the racist myth: Red Canary Song, “The Massage Parlor Means Survival Here: Red Canary Song on Robert Kraft,” Tits and Sass, April 11, 2019, titsandsass.com.

• From The Myth Made Fact: Reading Greek and Roman Mythology through Christian Eyes (2020)

  Early Christian theologians, beginning with Clement of Alexandria and Origen and climaxing with Augustine and the medieval fathers of the Church, found the allegorical method helpful for opening up difficult passages in the Old Testament and for culling wisdom from the best of the pagan writers. {N1} Boethius (bo EE thee us), a Christian writer who put a high value on the pre-Christian poets and philosophers of Greece and Rome, lived a century after Augustine. A respected scholar and man of letters, he was appointed a consul of Rome in AD 510. Alas, fortune is a fickle mistress, and the one-time consul found himself in prison, accused of treason by Theodoric, king of the Ostrogoths—most likely because Boethius stood up for Christian orthodoxy against the Arian beliefs of Theodoric. Boethius was martyred in 524, but not before he wrote one of the most popular and influential books of the Middle Ages, The Consolation of Philosophy . Although Boethius had written a number of Christian books on a variety of subjects, when he sat down in his prison cell to write his Consolation , he decided to do something unique, something from which many a modern preacher and evangelist could learn. He decided, for this one book, to confine himself to the kinds and degrees of wisdom available to Plato, Aristotle, Homer, Virgil, Ovid, and Cicero. That is to say, Boethius, though he personally had access to the special revelation of the Bible, only included in his Consolation the fruits of general revelation. As part of those fruits, Boethius offers, in books III and IV, allegorical readings of the tales of Odysseus and Circe and Orpheus and Eurydice. {N2} After meditating on the latter tale, Boethius, in the manner of a higher pagan allegorist, extracts a lesson and an exhortation for all those who seek to lead their thoughts upward toward the light. Such pilgrims must not allow their desires to so overcome them that they lose their focus on the light and turn their gaze toward the darkness beneath the earth. If they do so, if they look on hell rather than heaven, they will lose the beloved prize for which they have sought so boldly and passionately. If the Christian disciple is to continue on his path to the light of God, then he must not, like Orpheus, cast a backward glance at his unregenerate life. Rather, he must imitate the journey of St. Paul: “forgetting what lies behind and reaching forward to what lies ahead, . . . press[ing] on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus” (Philippians 3:13-14, NASB). A pplications What can Christians today learn from the tragic story of Orpheus and Eurydice? What are some of the distractions that cause us to look back rather than press forward toward God?What are some things of the world that will hurt us if we hold on to them too stubbornly?

• From The Fixed Stars (0)

  But what about Brandon? What about June? I swing like a pendulum from sadness to relief, sadness to relief. A disaster averted; it could have happened, but it didn’t. The bus is nearing my stop, and I yank the cord. I step out onto the sidewalk. The air is still warm, barely perceptible where it touches my arms. Brandon’s car rumbles at the curb, and I open the door and climb in. [image file=image_rsrc2FK.jpg] I told Brandon about the trial, but I didn’t tell him about Nora. I decided not to. The next morning, I woke up thinking about her, and the morning after that. I allowed myself to do what I hadn’t during the trial: I searched for her online. It didn’t take long to find her last name, along with a couple of photographs. Her smile was disorienting, like being blindfolded and spun around. I thought of a friend who’d suffered a recent bout of vertigo, how he described that these tiny mineral crystals from one part of his inner ear had wound up in another part, a wrong part, so that when he looked down, they’d roll around and trick his brain into thinking the floor had tilted. Nora’s smile did that to me. It located a feeling where it wasn’t supposed to be, turned the room on end. [image file=image_rsrc2FK.jpg] In a book on amateur astronomy, I read that if you can identify Orion and the Big Dipper, you can use them as guideposts to find every major star and constellation visible from the Northern Hemisphere, no matter the season or time of night. I had found my stars. I had Brandon. I had June. I had love. I had only to redirect my focus, surely that was it: look at them, look at us, look at me. I knew who I was in this constellation, beside my two people. I know how to stop this. I could interrogate my feelings for Nora into oblivion. But the questions that had once been persuasive seemed useless now. Then, I’d had the perspective of experience to draw on. I’d had relationships with men, enough to allow me to generalize, extrapolate, connect the dots into shapes. Here I had nothing. I’d never been with a woman. What if the view would be different there—different in ways I couldn’t imagine, like the view from a galaxy a billion light-years away? Constellations, after all, are a trick of perspective. [image file=image_rsrc2FK.jpg] My friend Matthew and I often meet up to work together, and one afternoon at his apartment, I tell him about Nora. Have you talked to Brandon about this? he asks. He’s doing this thing where he talks slowly, pointedly, so serious he almost overdoes it, as though he might burst into tears. Not yet, I say. I’m kind of afraid to. I think you have to.

• From Little Women (1868)

  Oh, when these hidden stores of ours Lie open to the Father's sight, May they be rich in golden hours, Deeds that show fairer for the light, Lives whose brave music long shall ring, Like a spirit-stirring strain, Souls that shall gladly soar and sing In the long sunshine after rain. "It's very bad poetry, but I felt it when I wrote it, one day when I was very lonely, and had a good cry on a rag bag. I never thought it would go where it could tell tales," said Jo, tearing up the verses the Professor had treasured so long. "Let it go, it has done its duty, and I will haf a fresh one when I read all the brown book in which she keeps her little secrets," said Mr. Bhaer with a smile as he watched the fragments fly away on the wind. "Yes," he added earnestly, "I read that, and I think to myself, She has a sorrow, she is lonely, she would find comfort in true love. I haf a heart full, full for her. Shall I not go and say, 'If this is not too poor a thing to gif for what I shall hope to receive, take it in Gott's name?'" "And so you came to find that it was not too poor, but the one precious thing I needed," whispered Jo. "I had no courage to think that at first, heavenly kind as was your welcome to me. But soon I began to hope, and then I said, 'I will haf her if I die for it,' and so I will!" cried Mr. Bhaer, with a defiant nod, as if the walls of mist closing round them were barriers which he was to surmount or valiantly knock down. Jo thought that was splendid, and resolved to be worthy of her knight, though he did not come prancing on a charger in gorgeous array. "What made you stay away so long?" she asked presently, finding it so pleasant to ask confidential questions and get delightful answers that she could not keep silent. "It was not easy, but I could not find the heart to take you from that so happy home until I could haf a prospect of one to gif you, after much time, perhaps, and hard work. How could I ask you to gif up so much for a poor old fellow, who has no fortune but a little learning?" "I'm glad you are poor. I couldn't bear a rich husband," said Jo decidedly, adding in a softer tone, "Don't fear poverty. I've known it long enough to lose my dread and be happy working for those I love, and don't call yourself old—forty is the prime of life. I couldn't help loving you if you were seventy!" The Professor found that so touching that he would have been glad of his handkerchief, if he could have got at it.

• From The Ice Storm (1994)

  The freezing rain was still pelting the Cadillac, and a thick glaze shellacked his windshield. —We’re going to have to defrost this thing for a while, Williams said. Elena wondered if the car would even start. It started on the first try. This was a Cadillac, after all. She wondered if the other revelers had found, as she had, that their resolve failed them outside, in the elements. If you weren’t into adultery for the erotic dementia, she thought, the amnesia it brought with it, why bother? But in the midst of the storm, infidelity felt almost ridiculous. She was about to tell Jim this when he leaned over to kiss her. The heating vents blew cool air on them; the exhaust bellowed clouds of obfuscation. —Do these seats go back? she said. And that, suddenly, was the beginning of it. Elena had never made love in a car before. It was one of those rites of passage that she had read about in books. She hadn’t known about rock and roll, she hadn’t known about racial strife, and she hadn’t known about heavy petting in cars. The logistics of it were demanding, she was finding out. Jim was unfastening her pants and getting right to business. She had trouble getting any purchase on him. She was pulling down her panties with one hand and settling herself across his lap. She whispered reassuringly about birth control pills. Then he was inside. It was urgent and painless and soon it was over. Jim moaned plaintively. In less time than it takes to defrost a windshield. Kinsey: “The quick performance of the typical male may be most unsatisfactory to a wife who is inhibited or natively low in response, as many wives are; and such disparities in the speed of male and female response are frequent sources of marital conflict, especially among uppersocial levels where the female is most restrained in her behavior.” Jim Williams was rubbing his neck. —That was really awful, Jim Williams said, that was really awful. I’m so sorry, Elena. They had trouble untangling themselves. Elena worried that she might have to open the door and slide out headfirst to regather herself. Eventually she slid down into the cavity by the glove compartment, and there she worked her trampled flannel pants around the right way. —Things are rotten at home, Jim said. You wouldn’t believe how rotten. Janey’s sick. She’s unstable. I guess.… It’s not the right time to tell you … but that’s it, Elena. That’s it. She can’t be happy. I don’t know why. I can’t make her happy, the boys can’t make her happy. She just can’t do it. It’s like she thinks I lied to her or something. She treats me like I promised her something I have welched on.… She just doesn’t want the life she used to think she wanted. It’s not going to turn out well, I can tell you that much. —Let’s go, she said.

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  But as we have no imagination, whereof we have not formerly had sense, in whole or in parts; so we have no transition from one imagination to another, whereof we never had the like before in our senses. The reason whereof is this. All fancies are motions within us, relics of those made in the sense: and those motions that immediately succeeded one another in the sense continue also together after sense: insomuch as the former coming again to take place, and be predominant, the latter followeth, by coherence of the matter moved, in such manner, as water upon a plane table is drawn which way any one part of it is guided by the finger. But because in sense, to one and the same thing perceived, sometimes one thing, sometimes another succeedeth, it comes to pass in time that, in the imagining of anything, there is no certainty what we shall imagine next; only this is certain, it shall be something that succeeded the same before, at one time or another. This train of thoughts, or mental discourse, is of two sorts. The first is unguided, without design , and inconstant; wherein there is no passionate thought, to govern and direct those that follow, to itself, as the end and scope of some desire, or other passion. . . . The second is more constant; as being regulated by some desire and design. For the impression made by such things as we desire, or fear, is strong and permanent, or, if it cease for a time, of quick return: so strong is it, sometimes, as to hinder and break our sleep. From desire ariseth the thought of some means we have seen produce the like of that which we aim at; and from the thought of that, the thought of means to that mean; and so continually, till we come to some beginning within our own power. And because the end, by the greatness of the impression, comes often to mind, in case our thoughts begin to wander, they are quickly again reduced into the way: which observed by one of the seven wise men, made him give men this precept, which is now worn out, Respice finem ; that is to say, in all your actions, look often upon what you would have, as the thing that directs all your thoughts in the way to attain it. "The train of regulated thoughts is of two kinds; one, when of an effect imagined we seek the causes, or means that produce it: and this is common to man and beast. The other is, when imagining anything whatsoever, we seek all the possible effects that can by it be produced; that is to say, we imagine what we can do with it, when we have it.

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  In the mixed associations which we have hitherto studied, the parts of each object which form the pivots on which our thoughts successively turn have their interest largely determined by their connection with some general interest which for the time has seized upon the mind. If we call Z the brain-tract of general interest, then, if the object abc turns up, and b has more associations with Z than have either a or c , b will become the object's interesting, pivotal portion, and will call up its own associates exclusively. For the energy of b 's brain-tract will be augmented by Z's activity,—an activity which, from lack of previous connection between Z and a or c , does not influence a or c . If, for instance, I think of Paris whilst I am hungry , I shall not improbably find that its restaurants have become the pivot of my thought, etc., etc. But in the theoretic as well as in the practical life there are interests of a more acute sort, taking the form of definite images of some achievement, be it action or acquisition, which we desire to effect. The train of ideas arising under the influence of such an interest constitutes usually the thought of the means by which the end shall be attained. If the end by its simple presence does not instantaneously suggest the means, the search for the latter becomes an intellectual problem . The solution of problems is the most characteristic and peculiar sort of voluntary thinking. Where the end thought of is some outward deed or gain, the solution is largely composed of the actual motor processes, walking, speaking, writing, etc., which lead up to it. Where the end is in the first instance only ideal, as in laying out a place of operations, the steps are purely imaginary. In both of these cases the discovery of the means may form a new sort of end, of an entirely peculiar nature, an end, namely, which we intensely desire before we have attained it, but of the nature of which, even whilst most strongly craving it, we have no distinct imagination whatever. Such an end is a problem. The same state of things occurs whenever we seek to recall something forgotten, or to state the reason for a judgment which we have made intuitively. The desire strains and presses in a direction which it feels to be right but towards a point which it is unable to see. In short, the absence of an item is a determinant of our representations quite as positive as its presence can ever be. The gap becomes no mere void, but what is called an aching void.

• From On Becoming a Person: A Therapist's View of Psychotherapy (1961)

  If I am to be more helpful, then I must myself grow and accept myself in these respects. 8. A very practical issue is raised by the question: Can I act with sufficient sensitivity in the relationship that my behavior will not be perceived as a threat? The work we are beginning to do in studying the physiological concomitants of psychotherapy confirms the research by Dittes in indicating how easily individuals are threatened at a physiological level. The psychogalvanic reflex—the measure of skin conductance—takes a sharp dip when the therapist responds with some word which is just a little stronger than the client’s feelings. And to a phrase such as, “My you do look upset,” the needle swings almost off the paper. My desire to avoid even such minor threats is not due to a hypersensitivity about my client. It is simply due to the conviction based on experience that if I can free him as completely as possible from external threat, then he can begin to experience and to deal with the internal feelings and conflicts which he finds threatening within himself. 9. A specific aspect of the preceding question but an important one is: Can I free him from the threat of external evaluation? In almost every phase of our lives—at home, at school, at work—we find ourselves under the rewards and punishments of external judgments. “That’s good”; “that’s naughty.” “That’s worth an A”; “that’s a failure.” “That’s good counseling”; “that’s poor counseling.” Such judgments are a part of our lives from infancy to old age. I believe they have a certain social usefulness to institutions and organizations such as schools and professions. Like everyone else I find myself all too often making such evaluations. But, in my experience, they do not make for personal growth and hence I do not believe that they are a part of a helping relationship. Curiously enough a positive evaluation is as threatening in the long run as a negative one, since to inform someone that he is good implies that you also have the right to tell him he is bad. So I have come to feel that the more I can keep a relationship free of judgment and evaluation, the more this will permit the other person to reach the point where he recognizes that the locus of evaluation, the center of responsibility, lies within himself. The meaning and value of his experience is in the last analysis something which is up to him, and no amount of external judgment can alter this. So I should like to work toward a relationship in which I am not, even in my own feelings, evaluating him. This I believe can set him free to be a self-responsible person.

• From What Do Women Want?: Adventures in the Science of Female Desire (2013)

  Proof ran like this: If, right after a rat finished a long-lasting session of mating, she was placed alone in another chamber, she would associate the new chamber with the sex she’d just had. Next, when given a choice between this new chamber and yet another, she would spend her time in the one linked with mating. She would make this choice even if the alternate chamber was set up to be much more inviting in other ways—even if the alternate space was dark, speaking to the nocturnal rat’s sense of safety, while the chamber linked with pleasure was brightly lit, screaming of mortal danger. Run the same test with a female who’d just had quick—unsatisfying—intercourse and she would, afterward, opt for the dark space. One of Pfaus’s graduate students had lately performed and filmed a straightforward demonstration of desire—of motivation derived from the learned expectation of reward, just as desire develops in humans. Sitting with me in his office a few floors above his rat chambers, Pfaus played the video. The student picked up a female rat and, with a tiny brush, stroked the clitoris, which protruded from the genitalia like a little eraser head. She stroked a few times, then put the animal back down in her cage. Swiftly the creature poked her nose out of the open door. She clamped her teeth on the white sleeve of the student’s lab coat and tugged the woman’s hand inside the cage. The student brushed the rat’s clitoris again, set her down again. And again the rodent bit into the sleeve, pulling, communicating unmistakably what she craved. This went on and on and on. As we watched, Pfaus mentioned the anatomical oversights that had squelched our understanding of the clitoris—rat and human—until a decade before. The organ has sizeable extensions, lying internally in the shape of bulbs and wings. These are positioned, in part, just behind the front wall of the vagina. Yet these nerve-rich formations had gone mostly unnoted by modern anatomists, who either left them undrawn or gave them no import. Science seemed almost to have willfully diminished the organ, cutting it metaphorically away. It was another lesson in the minimizing of women’s desire. Then, beginning in the late nineties, Helen O’Connell, an Australian urologist, detailed the organ’s sprawl, its many inches in reach. And she championed its sensitivity to pressure through the vaginal sheath—sensitivity perhaps responsible for vaginal climaxes and possibly the explanation for the fabled and debated G-spot. O’Connell was blunt about the averted eyes of her scientific predecessors. “It boils down,” she said, “to the idea that one sex is sexual and the other is reproductive.”

• From The Ice Storm (1994)

  Jim Williams didn’t say anything. —So what I’m proposing is that since your wife has gone off with a boy, and since you are standing here alone, I’m proposing that you and I just do what makes sense. Stay warm. Pass some time. That’s all. It’s not elegant— They were looking at their hands, looking at their coffee cups, looking at the lacerations in the very wood grain of the chopping board—celery ends stacked upon it; they were looking at the bowl of dip and the cellophane wrap crumpled next to it. They were looking around the room at refrigerator magnets and salt cellars and church keys and the stems of freshly cut flowers in the sink and bottle caps and a lone spice jar marked marjoram . —I’m already married, you know, Elena said. I don’t have any use for you in the long run. If that’s what you’re worried about. If you don’t want to talk about it ever again, you don’t have to. Now don’t make me feel as though I’m being too forward, okay? Don’t make me feel that trying to persuade is unbecoming. Because I can tell it’s not the furthest thing from your mind. A long, silent communion between the two of them. —What the hey , Jim said. Let’s go for a drive. And then she hesitated. —Okay. Okay. Should we clean up around here first? Elena said. Do you think it’s all right— —Nah, he said, that wasn’t in the contract. But they walked around the first floor turning off lights. Elena didn’t pay any attention to the sound of running water in the bathroom there—where not so long ago Mark Boland had stared at the panties knotted around her bony legs—or to the light that still shone beneath the door there. They turned off the appliances in the kitchen, the lamps in the dining room, in the den, and back in the living room. They pushed the sculpture in the foyer back into the open space by the guest room, where Dot usually kept it. They helped each other into their coats. Outside, everything had changed. Meteorologically, the phenomenon, which occurred rarely in that part of the Northeast, went like this: rain, sleet, and snow, propelled by subfreezing winds—warmer temperatures aloft and freezing temperatures at ground level—began to harden instantly on trees, rooftops, power lines, and other surfaces. The ice built up on every surface. (The worse such storm in thirty years, according to Mike Powers, spokesman for Connecticut Light and Power. Stamford Advocate , November 23, 1973, p. A1ff .) Moving up the East Coast, the low-pressure system spread from Virginia to Maine and from four hundred miles out on the Atlantic Ocean to Pennsylvania. Elena and Jim Williams, therefore, like the rest of the carnal refugees from the Halfords’ house, were traveling out into a storm that was no longer safe. Three or four inches of snow had accumulated now, around Jim’s tires.

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  Indeed, there is scarcely any phenomenon so well fitted for the study of the causes which are capable of determining the attention. It is not enough to form the conscious intention of seeing first with one eye then with the other; we must form as clear a notion as possible of what we expect to see. Then it will actually appear." [365] In figures 37 and 38, where the result is ambiguous, we can make the change from one apparent form to the other by imagining strongly in advance the form we wish to see. Similarly in those puzzles where certain lines in a picture form by their combination an object that has no connection with what the picture ostensibly represents; or indeed in every case where an object is inconspicuous and hard to discern from the background; we may not be able to see it for a long time; but, having once seen it, we can attend to it again whenever we like, on account of the mental duplicate of it which our imagination now bears. In the meaningless French words 'pas de lieu Rhône que nous,' who can recognize immediately the English 'paddle your own canoe'? [366] But who that has once noticed the identity can fail to have it arrest his attention again? When watching for the distant clock to strike, our mind is so filled with its image that at every moment we think we hear the longed-for dreaded sound. So of an awaited footstep. Every stir in the wood is for the hunter his game; for the fugitive his pursuers. Every bonnet in the street is momentarily taken by the lover to enshroud the head of his idol. The image in the mind is the attention; the preperception, as Mr. Lewes calls it, is half of the perception of the looked-for thing. [367] It is for this reason that men have no eyes but for those aspects of things which they have already been taught to discern. Any one of us can notice a phenomenon after it has once been pointed out, which not one in ten thousand could ever have discovered for himself. Even in poetry and the arts, some one has to come and tell us what aspects we may single out, and what effects we may admire, before our æsthetic nature can 'dilate' to its full extent and never 'with the wrong emotion.' In kindergarten instruction one of the exercises is to make the children see how many features they can point out in such an object as a flower or a stuffed bird. They readily name the features they know already, such as leaves, tail, bill, feet. But they may look for hours without distinguishing nostrils, claws, scales, etc., until their attention is called to these details; thereafter, however, they see them every time.

• From What Do Women Want?: Adventures in the Science of Female Desire (2013)

  Her unruly red-blond hair tufting atop her head, Deidrah sat beside Oppenheimer. She lipped his ear. She mouthed his chest. She kissed his belly over and over, lips lingering with each kiss. After a while, he pulled himself up and strolled away from her attentions, glancing back over his shoulder to see if she was following. She was. Deidrah, who was probably the most reserved female monkey in the compound, started in again on his white-haired torso as they sat together on a concrete curb. The habitat, a one-hundred-and-twenty-foot square, was filled with ladders and ropes and assorted apparatus donated by a local fire department and by McDonald’s; an environment of trees and vines would have been too expensive to create and maintain. A trio of monkey children sprinted toward a tube, disappeared inside it, burst from the other end, and raced around for another run-through, berserk with joy. From a platform on a steel tower, I watched with Kim Wallen, his beard silver, his eyes alight. A psychologist and neuroendocrinologist, he spent much of his time here at Yerkes, an Emory University research center outside Atlanta that was home to two thousand primates. We gazed down at the habitat’s seventy-five rhesus, a monkey species that had been sent into orbit in spaceships, in the fifties and sixties, as stand-ins for humans to see if we could survive trips to the moon. Wallen had lived on a farm as a child when his father, a psychologist, decided to try out a utopian dream of cooperative goat-rearing. Wallen’s observation of animal sexuality had begun then. He’d been watching monkeys now for decades. “Females were passive. That was the theory in the middle seventies. That was the wisdom,” he remembered the start of his career. Deidrah’s face, always a bit redder than most, was luminous this morning, lit scarlet with lust as she lifted it from Oppenheimer’s chest. “The prevailing model was that female hormones affected female pheromones—affected the female’s smell, her attractivity to the male. The male initiated all sexual behavior.” What science had managed to miss in the monkeys—what it had effectively erased—was female desire. And it had missed more than that. In this breed used as our astronaut doubles, females are the bullies and murderers, the generals in brutal warfare, the governors. This had been noted in journal articles back in the thirties and forties, but thereafter it had gone mainly unrecognized, the articles buried and the behavior oddly unperceived. “It so flew in the face of prevailing ideas about the dominant role of males,” Wallen said, “that it was just ignored.”

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  And what a convenience would it not be for the psychologist if, by the adding together of various doses of this separate-cell-consciousness, he could treat thought as a kind of stuff or material, to be measured out in great or small amount, increased and subtracted from and baled about at will! He feels an imperious craving to be allowed to construct synthetically the successive mental states which he describes. The mind-stuff theory so easily admits of the construction being made, that it seems certain that 'man's unconquerable mind' will devote much future pertinacity and ingenuity to setting it on its legs again and getting it into some sort of plausible working-order. I will therefore conclude the chapter with some consideration of the remaining difficulties which beset the matter as it at present stands. DIFFICULTY OF STATING THE CONNECTION BETWEEN MIND AND BRAIN. It will be remembered that in our criticism of the theory of the integration of successive conscious units into a feeling of musical pitch, we decided that whatever integration there was was that of the air-pulses into a simpler and simpler sort of physical effect, as the propagations of material change got higher and higher in the nervous system. At last, we said (p. 20), there results some simple and massive process in the auditory centres of the hemispherical cortex, to which, as a whole, the feeling of musical pitch directly corresponds. Already, in discussing the localization of functions in the brain, I had said (pp. 110-11) that consciousness accompanies the stream of innervation through that organ and varies in quality with the character of the currents, being mainly of things seen if the occipital lobes are much involved, of things heard if the action is focalized in the temporal lobes, etc., etc.; and I had added that a vague formula like this was as much as one could safely venture on in the actual state of physiology. The facts of mental deafness and blindness, of auditory and optical aphasia, show us that the whole brain must act together if certain thoughts are to occur. The consciousness, which is itself an integral thing not made of parts, 'corresponds' to the entire activity of the brain, whatever that may be, at the moment.

• From The Whole Lesbian Sex Book: A Passionate Guide for All of Us (2004)

  Having an open, honest discussion can help illuminate what each person wants from the experience and why, so that both people are less likely to make incorrect assumptions about the other person’s desires and expectations.You can ask each other, What do you want? What do you expect? What are your needs and desires? • I want to work my way up to one finger, then stop. • I want to be able to have the small dildo in my butt. • I want everything to feel safe. What have your previous experiences been with anal eroticism? Share them, discuss them.Why do you want to explore anal sensuality? • I want to explore something new with my partner. • I’m curious about what it feels like. • I’ve done it before and want to do it again. • You want to do it and I don’t want to say no to you. • I want to feel closer to my lover. • It’s something special and intimate and something I want to share with my partner. • I saw it in a porn movie, it turned me on, and I want to try it. • It’s always been a fantasy of mine. Fantasies can be incredibly powerful forces in our lives, erotic and otherwise. Many people fantasize about erotic activities like anal sex but are afraid to vocalize their desires.The myths and misinformation about anal sex contribute to the silence and sometimes prevent us from satisfying our curiosities. Sharing our sexual fantasies with a partner can deepen a sexual relationship and help us communicate our needs and desires. It is equally important to distinguish our fantasies from our realities. If your favorite masturbatory fantasy involves someone ramming your butt repeatedly with a swollen silicone dick that makes you come every time, don’t be surprised if you don’t get the same result when you try it out.There are some fantasies that we can share and help bring to life and others that should probably remain fantasies. Have realistic expectations for yourself and know the limits of your own body, especially when it comes to anal sex. One finger in your anus and a whisper in your ear about that big dick might just do the trick. During the experience, talk to each other, find out what feels good and what doesn’t, what’s working and what’s not. • How does this feel? • Would you like more or less movement? • Do you want me to play with your pussy while I’m doing your ass? • How is this position? • That feels great—keep doing it. • I love doing this to you. • Do you want another finger now?

• From What Do Women Want?: Adventures in the Science of Female Desire (2013)

  A woman in the Bible’s Song of Songs: I sleep, but my heart is awake I hear my love knocking. “Open to me, my sister, my beloved, My dove, my perfect one, For my head is wet with dew, My hair with the drops of the night.” . . . My love thrust his hand Through the hole in the door. I trembled to the core of my being. . . . Passion as relentless as Sheol. The flash of it a flash of fire, A flame of the Lord himself. There is no sign of terror here, only a sacred glory of thrusting and trembling. And there is this recognition of women’s erotic need from Exodus: “If he take him another wife; her food, her raiment, and her duty of marriage, shall he not diminish.” The archaic King James phrasing can thwart contemporary understanding; the same line in more recent biblical language reads, “He must not neglect the rights of the first wife to food, clothing, and sexual intimacy.” From Paul in First Corinthians, in King James: “Let the husband render unto the wife due benevolence.” Or, in a modern edition’s version of “due benevolence”: “The husband should fulfill his wife sexually.” A steady heat and urgency rises from the quills of the Bible’s compilers in classical times and rises, too, from classical poetry and myth and medical texts. “Eros, again now, loosener of limbs, troubles me, uncontrollable creature,” Sappho wrote. And Ovid’s Tiresias, who lived as both male and female, declaimed that women take nine times more pleasure in sex. And Galen of Pergamum, physician to the Roman emperor and great anatomist of antiquity, pronounced that female orgasm was necessary for conception: a woman’s climactic emission had to meet up with a man’s. The contents of this female substance seem never to have been specified, but the requirement of ecstasy—a moment that appears to match our current definitions—was, for Galen, absolute. For the next millennium and a half, until a few hundred years ago, Galen’s understanding dominated science. A woman’s “certain tremor” was a key to procreation for the fifth-century Byzantine physician Aetius of Amida. The Persian scholar Avicenna, whose eleventh-century Canon of Medicine was studied throughout the world, worried that a small penis might be an impediment to reproduction. The woman might not be “pleased by it,” might not feel enough sensation to send her into blissful spasms, “whereupon she does not emit sperm, and when she does not emit sperm a child is not made.” Gabriele Falloppio, discoverer of the Fallopian tubes in sixteenth-century Italy, stressed that a man’s malformed foreskin might impede a woman’s orgasm and impregnation.

• From The Great Believers (2018)

  Well, getting ready for a party was an excuse not to call Cecily. And she really didn’t have it in her to call Cecily yet. —Fiona wished Jake weren’t with them, weren’t holding the Métro bar with two fingers and looking down at her. Richard and Serge sat behind her speaking rapid French, so Fiona had no one to talk to but Jake, and no way to talk to him but quasi-flirtatiously. The one dress she’d brought, a pale blue wrap, was low cut—and although she had a light coat, the buttons were broken and it hung open. Jake was staring straight down her cleavage. When they disembarked in Vincennes and walked through the dark, quiet streets, past shops and restaurants and then beautiful, narrow houses, Jake got close to her ear and said, “So is this the Evanston of Paris?” and she couldn’t help laughing. She stopped herself, though, so he wouldn’t think he’d earned it. He smelled of gin, and she wondered if he’d been drinking at Richard’s or before. She checked her phone, although she’d just checked it two minutes ago and the ringer was on. And there was no reason Arnaud would be calling yet. But she couldn’t help refreshing her email, clicking on her empty voice mail. It struck her that she could get rid of Jake by fucking him. It would be fun, she’d get it out of her system, and then he’d do the inevitable and graciously disappear. If he lingered, if he showed up tomorrow, she could always pretend she was in love, ask when they could see each other back in Chicago. “You know,” she could say if the situation got desperate, “there’s a chance I’m still fertile.” Would he even be able to perform, drunk as she assumed he was? He held each syllable a bit too long (“Check out that mooooon”), held her gaze too long, moved his feet too slowly. Not enough for Richard or Serge to notice, apparently, but enough to irritate Fiona. Why was he allowed to go through life drunk? Why was he allowed his boomerang wallet? —And then she was stuck with him at the damn party. Both of them hung by Richard and Serge in the entryway at first, where Corinne (in a yellow tunic dress and a necklace of enormous wooden beads) greeted them warmly, made sure they had drinks, beckoned her husband from the next room. Fernand Leclercq’s beard was, as Serge had promised, prodigious: chest-length, as snowy and curled as the beard on a Claymation Santa. Importance radiated off him, a buzz that filled the foyer. “Feel free to look around,” he said, and she couldn’t figure out why she’d need or want such an invitation until she realized the house was filled with incredible art, that guests were sticking their necks into corners and back halls and even upstairs to glimpse Fernand and Corinne’s acquisitions.

• From Sex Love & Misery: New York

  - "Flexibility will be promptly tested." And that's it. - My husband, French. - She makes me want to see her. - Number two, French. - She's full of joy and funny. - Number three, likes wine, likes French wine. Number four, collects French wine (gagging). Literally, get me pregnant. - I have energy for that. - I need someone who is confident in themselves 'cause confidence itself is sexy. If you don't know, confidence itself is sexy. You gotta have that confidence. No matter who you are or where you come from, when it comes to being that confidence, that's sexy. So it takes confidence. You gotta be doing something. Hopefully during the COVID, you ain't sit on the couch, and eat bonbons all pandemic and now trying to figure it out. Hopefully, you wised up and did some smart shit. Oh, I don't know if I can curse but hopefully not. - I am looking to find someone so that I can have kids and a family 'cause I'm getting old, getting so old. I'm 29 so I really need to find someone quick. - You've gotta have the attractiveness. I'm attracted to attractiveness for myself. I am pan-sexual so I like kind of an array of different things. So it's not about how you look, ultimately. You could be the hottest thing in the room to everybody, but I might not be attracted to you, that's just me. But you just gotta have that confidence, you gotta have something going for yourself, and you've gotta be attracted to me as much as I'm attracted to you, and you've gotta be ready to take on any spontaneous, adventurous, crazy things that happen in my life 'cause I like adventure. - I want someone sweet, someone funny, athletic, smart that has a good head on his shoulders and charismatic. Someone that has a job. I don't know, is that too much to ask? I don't know. - I feel normal, I always feel normal. I don't get nervous going on dates anymore. And I don't know what that means and I'm missing all the buttons. Oh my God, wait. (heels clacking) I literally look so ugly (wailing), like I can't. I can't button my coat, I can't fucking cover my face. (sighing) Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God, oh my God, oh my God. (laughing) ♪ Time itself ♪ (heels clacking) ♪ That simply never lasts ♪ ♪ I know some day I'll be somebody to you ♪ ♪ Everyday I'm thinking of ways to see it through ♪ You know what I wanna do? Go get sushi. With miso soup. Wow Shannon look at that. Not the garbage pile. Oh no, there's no way, there's none.

• From What Do Women Want?: Adventures in the Science of Female Desire (2013)

  “Would you go to bed with me tonight?” Depp asked the female subjects. So did Brad Pitt and Donald Trump. The males were approached by Angelina Jolie, Christie Brinkley (chosen by Conley because she wondered whether at fifty-something a woman’s age would undercut her appeal despite her extreme beauty—it didn’t seem to), and Roseanne Barr. The experiment stripped away the social expectations, as well as the physical risks, that auger against a woman consenting to have sex with a stranger. Conley’s setup left only fantasy, frequently a clearer window into desire. The subjects scored how they felt about the propositions. The women were just as avid about saying yes to Depp and Pitt as the men were with Jolie and Brinkley; the women were just as hungry, impulsive, impelled. Trump was dismissed with as much distaste as Barr. Chivers, when she moved on to her next study, found something that complicated what she’d been seeing. But it also crystalized the raw portrait of female lust that was emerging in her work and the research of her colleagues. A set of straight women looked at pictures of male and female genitalia. There were four kinds of photos: one with a dangling penis; another with a taut erection; a third with a demure vulva half-concealed by coy thighs. The fourth was a “full-on crotch shot,” Chivers said, with typical wry humor, of a woman with spread legs. In all four, the genitalia were tightly framed, mostly disembodied; there was little else to be seen. This time, the subjects’ blood wasn’t indiscriminate. It rushed much, much more when an erection occupied the screen than when any of the other images were on the monitor. Paradoxically, here was objective evidence that women were categorical after all. And this jibed with what Rebecca had said, that she didn’t quite think of herself as bisexual, that she felt an inescapable preference for men even as she harbored plenty of lust for women. It resonated, too, with the faint reactions of Chivers’s earlier subjects when the Adonis with the slack penis walked along the shore. It seemed that the visible slackness had nullified the rest of his impressive body. More than anything, though, as an isolated, rigid phallus filled vaginal blood vessels and sent the red line of the plethysmograph high, niceties vanished, conventions cracked; female desire was, at base, nothing if not animal. Chapter Three The Sexual Fable of Evolutionary Science The history of sexuality, and perhaps above all the history of women’s sexuality, is a discipline of shards. And it is men, with rare exceptions, whose recorded words form the fragments we have of ancient and medieval and early modern ideas about female eros. Such glimpses are worth only so much. But what can be said about these fragments is that they add up to a particular sort of balance—or imbalance—between an acceptance and even a celebration of desire and drive on the one hand and, on the other, an overriding fear.

• From Three Women (2019)

  She means the Cadbury crème and luckily there are baby wipes in the center console and she uses them to wipe it off his penis and then lowers onto him, squatting on the floor of the vehicle. When he slides in, she feels that every single need of hers is met. That she is a machine fueled with exactly what it needs to work the way it’s supposed to. The first hundred pumps feel like the first one. When she gets tired he takes over; he grabs her waist and plunges her whole body down onto his lap, using her like a tool. And then she starts moving again, too, and they are expertly locking themselves into each other. He gets on top of her and in missionary he is rhythmic and when he gets to going real fast she loses control and has little orgasms with every pump. They are kissing most of this time and her head is on fire. She comes a hundred small times and he takes himself out because he is about to come and asks if she has and she says yes and then he goes back in, bang bang bang bang, and then he pulls out and comes onto her stomach and they lie there on the floor holding each other and she is already afraid because the countdown to his leaving has begun. She says, Wait mister, when she feels his body turning indifferent. She says, Wait, finish me off with your fingers. I thought you came, he says, out of breath. Not all the way. He puts one finger inside her and plucks at her slowly. Then he slips another one in and she moans. This goes on for minutes and she is almost there but can’t quite get there because she knows the second she does he will leave. When the French called the orgasm la petite mort they meant a happy little death, a satisfied death; this is not that. This is a fearful death. Every time could be the last time she will ever feel this way. Woman, you’re gonna wear me out! She knows he’s restless, that he feels confined in tight spaces. She says, Go on, go. I’ll finish myself off. Get out. He says, Hang on a sec, I gotta pee, and he goes outside and pisses into the clearing and then he gets on the phone and she can hear through the steamy windows of the Suburban that he is on the phone with a man and not a woman and thank God for that, but still. Then she starts to finger herself but feels silly doing that in the car alone. He’s not even watching her through the window. So she puts her clothes back on and gets out and sits on the hood of the car and lights up an American Spirit from the pack that she bought for him.