Why do women always have to come off clean?
Three Women, I Love Dick, and the dynamics of desire.
It was a toss-up between the Spice Girls or U2 as an opener , but in the end, ‘Desire’ won out over ‘Wannabee’. 1980s-Bono and co. look like perfect 2021-Neukölln hipsters of a certain stripe, it has to be said:
A duo of books - lyrical non-fiction and epistolary autofiction - were the beginning- and endpieces of my otherwise-nearly-bookless summer. (Between these two, I only managed a couple of drippy ‘beach reads’ better left forgotten.) And coincidentally, these two books articulated graph points on the same multidimensional, vast emotional map of female desire.
In our collective understanding, desire mainly belongs to the realm of love and sex, although I think this definition limits our appreciation, and perhaps even capacity, for desire as a broader force that animates and propels our lives. Carnality makes sense as a domain of wanting; desire, like satisfaction and satiation, is at its most vivid in corporeal experiences. But extending ideas of desire beyond sex and love is to allow it to be both an abstract noun and an active verb. To desire is to be attentive to the body and its environment, to engage with the spectrum of physical experience, and to take an outward-facing position in how one relates to the world and others. For the abstract noun of desire to be sustained, the active verb of desiring needs an object; it’s a relational dyad of physical experience and active association with the external world.
Filmmaker Joseph Cornell1 shares this perception of desire, as recounted by Maggie Nelson in her poetic memoir, Bluets:
“For Cornell, desire was a sharpness, a tear in the static of everyday life - in his diaries he calls it ‘the spark,’ ‘the lift,’ or ‘the zest.’ It delivers not an ache, but a sudden state of grace.”
Desire exists for desire’s sake, to strengthen the connection between body and space.
It doesn’t mean that this animating force is always comfortable. Artist and essayist Larissa Pham says as she queries the depths of art and intimacy:
“As for me — I see how desire could obliterate me; I stand watchfully at its edge.” 2
The perilousness of allowing oneself to want is that it requires contact with the external world, which is always an uncertain and unpredictable confrontation.
Desire exists for desire’s sake, to strengthen the connection between body and space.
More specific to love and sex are the dynamics of desirability. To be the focus of another’s desire is to become an object. Desire and desirability aren’t mutually exclusive, but desirability too often asks for the relationship with the world to take precedence over the attention to one’s own body, and soon the dyad is unbalanced. Under capitalism, perceiving oneself as a desired object is also often followed by self-commodification; actions taken in pursuit of desirability are then framed as empowerment, falsely conflated with celebratory expressions of desirousness.
Lisa Taddeo’s novel-esque reportage on female desire, Three Women, gives voice to private and messy yearnings that are paradoxically specific and universal. The book interweaves the personal stories of, yes, three women in alternating chapters. One underage woman has a love affair with her married teacher, a Midwestern housewife channels her dissatisfaction with a sexless marriage into frantic liaisons with an old boyfriend, and a successful entrepreneur practises her sexuality and self-worth through the lens of others’ desires. To draw close to the women through their stories is, in my experience, to excavate one’s own history of sexual desire and desirability - as uncomfortable as that can be.
If Three Women is the call, I Love Dick by Chris Kraus is its response and contrapuntal antidote (despite being published more than 20 years earlier). Protagonist and failed artist Chris becomes infatuated with Dick, her husband’s colleague whom she meets at a small dinner gathering. Over the course of several months, Chris’ obsession with Dick spirals beyond unsent love letters into a tsunami of desire that alters her life, self-concept, and creative practice.
Repeatedly, Chris explores the anthropology of desire, taking herself as a ‘case study’:
“...for the first time it occurred to her that perhaps the only thing she had to offer was her specificity.”
“By writing Dick she was offering her life as a Case Study.”
When she rediscovers a short story that she wrote years earlier, Chris also observes:
“It was written in the third person, the person most girls use when they want to talk about themselves but don’t think anyone will listen.”
Chris’ behaviour raises questions about consent and privacy, but her reflections have beautiful perspicacity when pointed towards her identity, and (gendered) interactions with the world. She writes:
“To be female still means being trapped within the purely psychological. No matter how dispassionate or large a vision of the world a woman formulates, whenever it includes her own experience and emotion, the telescope’s turned back on her.”
Maggie, Lina, and Sloane of Three Women don’t think anyone will listen to them even if they offer their specificity, and in this, their wanting makes victims of them. These women suffer within their own explosive desire because of the willingness of others to light the fuse and then hide as best as they can behind the blast shield. One of the most agonising chapters of Three Women follows Lina as she organises a rendezvous with her lover:
“Please, she writes. I’m almost there.
She doesn’t hear from him for entire minutes. Her eyes begin to twitch. She can barely concentrate on the road. She hired a babysitter she couldn’t afford, she ordered a pizza, she lied to her husband and her children. She put forty miles across two separate vehicles, one of them a lease with a limited number of free miles. She picks at something that isn’t there on her face. She can’t believe she is still driving the car. She will not turn around. He has to meet her. She begs God.
Aidan? Please.”
After the two have sex in Aidan’s truck, Lina seeks to counteract her earlier desperation:
“He is about to say something and she goes, Shh for a sec, let me hear about the Cubs, and she turns up the radio. This is a huge victory for her. To be the one who pretends there is something to her life beyond him.”
The chapter ends with cruel clarity, for the reader if not for Lina:
“Later she will text him, Thank you for taking the time, for spending so much time with me today.
If you ask her how long it was she will say, Gee, I’d say it was almost thirty minutes.”
Chris’ desire is implosive: the creation of a supernova. Dick is a talisman, an avatar; Chris doesn’t know him, really, so her desire for him is about her own aliveness and Eros. She notes in a letter to Dick, “I think desire isn’t lack, it’s surplus energy.” Whether Chris is participating in a situation that hurts her is a secondary concern; the energetic primacy of her desire drives her forward. The desire also doesn’t hinge on the acquisition of its object. Again, here is desire for desire’s sake.
The generative and creative power of the female imagination has long been systematically discredited.
Dick is silent and passive for most of the book, and Chris’ experiences of desire are paramount. She doesn’t wait for him to love her back, because that would be to relinquish narrative control, although she asks in her own roundabout ways whether he will take up the role she is writing for him. This is Chris’ story: both as character and author. After Dick protests that she’s violating his privacy by writing about him, she cedes a point and censors his last name. But Chris doesn’t engage with questions of truth and representation, either as character or author. Her story is true because it’s hers - and therefore must be shared. She writes:
“ — Because I’m moved in writing to be irrepressible. Writing to you seems like some holy cause, ‘cause there’s not enough female irrepressibility written down. I’ve fused my silence and repression with the entire female gender’s silence and repression. I think the sheer fact of women talking, being paradoxical, inexplicable, flip, self-destructive but above all else public is the most revolutionary thing in the world.”
The final chapter of I Love Dick is a flourish of petulant misogyny. Dick writes letters to Chris and her husband, and his manner of addressing the two of them reveals how unwilling he is to accept Chris’ narrative authority. (The inconsistent spelling of her name in his letter rings of studied callousness.) Chris is firmly the book’s protagonist and, as is the case for most women both in and outside of books when they step into an authorial role, her vocal nonconformism is met with censure and suspicion. The generative and creative power of the female imagination has long been systematically discredited. Especially when it comes to love and sex, female fantasy is more likely to be labeled “needy” or “clingy” than recognised for what it is: beautifully and powerfully imaginative.
“Why do women always have to come off clean?” Chris asks. Why, indeed.
Questions to Ask in a letter.
More on the cinema of Joseph Cornell.