E—:‘It’s a total mess. You can go nuts trying to figure out what tack to take. She might go for it, she might not. Today’s woman’s a total crap-shoot. It’s like trying to figure out a Zen koan. Where what they want’s concerned, you pretty much have to just shut your eyes and leap.’
K—:‘I disagree.’
E—:‘I meant metaphorically.’
K—:‘I disagree that it’s impossible to determine what it is they really want.’
E—:‘I don’t think I said impossible.’
K—:‘Though I do agree that in today’s postfeminist era it’s unprecedentedly difficult and takes some serious deductive firepower and imagination.’
E—:‘I mean if it were really literally impossible then where would we be as a species?’
K—:‘And I do agree that you can’t necessarily go just by what they say they want.’
E—:‘Because are they only saying it because they think they’re supposed to?’
K—:‘My position is that actually most of the time you can figure out what they want, I mean almost logically deduce it, if you’re willing to make the effort to understand them and to understand the impossible situation they’re in.’
E—:‘But you can’t just go by what they say, is the big thing.’
K—:‘There I’d have to agree. What modern feminists-slash-postfeminists will say they want is mutuality and respect of their individual autonomy. If sex is going to happen, they’ll say, it has to be by mutual consensus and desire between two autonomous equals who are each equally responsible for their own sexuality and its expression.’
E—:‘That’s almost word for word what I’ve heard them say.’
K—:‘And it’s total horseshit.’
E—:‘They all sure have the empowerment-lingo down pat, that’s for sure.’
K—:‘You can easily see what horseshit it is as long as you remember to start by recognizing the impossible double bind we already discussed.’
E—:‘It’s not all that hard to see.’
Q.
K—:‘That she’s expected to be both sexually liberated and autonomous and assertive, and yet at the same time she’s still conscious of the old respectable-girl-versus-slut dichotomy, and knows that some girls still let themselves be used sexually out of a basic lack of self-respect, and she still recoils at the idea of ever being seen as this kind of pathetic roundheel sort of woman.’
E—:‘Plus remember the postfeminist girl now knows that the male sexual paradigm and the female’s are fundamentally different—’
K—:‘Mars and Venus.’
E—:‘Right, exactly, and she knows that as a woman she’s naturally programmed to be more highminded and long-term about sex and to be thinking more in relationship terms than just fucking terms, so if she just immediately breaks down and fucks you she’s on some level still getting taken advantage of, she thinks.’
K—:‘This, of course, is because today’s postfeminist era is also today’s postmodern era, in which supposedly everybody now knows everything about what’s really going on underneath all the semiotic codes and cultural conventions, and everybody supposedly knows what paradigms everybody is operating out of, and so we’re all as individuals held to be far more responsible for our sexuality, since everything we do is now unprecedentedly conscious and informed.’
E—:‘While at the same time she’s still under this incredible sheer biological pressure to find a mate and settle down and nest and breed, for instance go read this thing The Rules and try to explain its popularity any other way.’
K—:‘The point being that women today are now expected to be responsible both to modernity and to history.’
E—:‘Not to mention sheer biology.’
K—:‘Biology’s already included in the range of what I mean by history.’
E—:‘So you’re using history more in a Foucaultvian sense.’
K—:‘I’m talking about history being a set of conscious intentional human responses to a whole range of forces of which biology and evolution are a part.’
E—:‘The point is it’s an intolerable burden on women.’
K—:‘The real point is that in fact they’re just logically incompatible, these two responsibilities.’
E—:‘Even if modernity itself is a historical phenomenon, Foucault would say.’
K—:‘I’m just pointing out that nobody can honor two logically incompatible sets of perceived responsibilities. This has nothing to do with history, this is pure logic.’
E—:‘Personally, I blame the media.’
K—:‘So what’s the solution.’
E—:‘Schizophrenic media discourse exemplified by like for example Cosmo—on one hand be liberated, on the other make sure you get a husband.’
K—:‘The solution is to realize that today’s women are in an impossible situation in terms of what their perceived sexual responsibilities are.’
E—:‘I can bring home the bacon mm mm mm mm fry it up in a pan mm mm mm mm.’
K—:‘And that, as such, they’re naturally going to want what any human being faced with two irresolvably conflicting sets of responsibilities is going to want. Meaning that what they’re really going to want is some way out of these responsibilities.’
E—:‘An escape hatch.’
K—:‘Psychologically speaking.’
E—:‘A back door.’
K—:‘Hence the timeless importance of: passion.’
E—:‘They want to be both responsible and passionate.’
K—:‘No, what they want is to experience a passion so huge, over-whelming, powerful and irresistible that it obliterates any guilt or tension or culpability they might feel about betraying their perceived responsibilities.’
E—:‘In other words what they want from a guy is passion.’
K—:‘They want to be swept off their feet. Blown away. Carried off on the wings of. The logical conflict between their responsibilities can’t be resolved, but their postmodern awareness of this conflict can be.’
E—:‘Escaped. Denied.’
K—:‘Meaning that, deep down, they want a man who’s going to be so overwhelmingly passionate and powerful that they’ll feel they have no choice, that this thing is bigger than both of them, that they can forget there’s even such a thing as postfeminist responsibilities.’
E—:‘Deep down, they want to be irresponsible.’
K—:‘I suppose in a way I agree, though I don’t think they can really be faulted for it, because I don’t think it’s conscious.’
E—:‘It dwells as a Lacanian cry in the infantile unconscious, the lingo would say.’
K—:‘I mean it’s understandable, isn’t it? The more these logically incompatible responsibilities are forced on today’s females, the stronger their unconscious desire for an overwhelmingly powerful, passionate male who can render the whole double bind irrelevant by so totally over-whelming them with passion that they can allow themselves to believe they couldn’t help it, that the sex wasn’t a matter of conscious choice that they can be held responsible for, that ultimately if anyone was responsible it was the male.’
E—: ‘Which explains why the bigger the so-called feminist, the more she’ll hang on you and follow you around after you sleep with her.’
K—:‘I’m not sure I’d go along with that.’