Twilight, Lady Gaga, and women’s structure of desire

This post is badly written, and I apologize, but it is a complicated post and would take longer than I want to write it well.

What do women want has been an age old discussion. It seems what teenage girls (of a certain kind) want can be more easily described at the moment, and this might be a good start to understand the general structure of desire, especially as most women never completely grow up from the 15 year old fantasy of desire (nor do men).

“To be courted you have to have two suitors and not one.”  All of a sudden I understood, through Twilight,why is that. There has to be a loser! To be desired means, for women, someone not getting you. This is unintuitive, but I’ll explain why.

To be utterly passive, a bare source of extreme attraction. Think of a very strong magnet which pulls everyone towards it. But what is interesting is not merely the pulling, but the managing to keep away. As Margaret Mead so eloquently and brilliantly put, quoted in post, women need both to attract but also to provide a hindrance. It is their responsibility to make sure that the deed is not consummated. The ultimate woman can thus manage to keep at bay the most extreme attraction.

So also the need and desire for someone strong to “protect them.” If you have protection you can have the strongest attraction, shine the brightest, and still be safe, while without a protector it is dangerous to shine even a  little bit, at least in the utterly passive state.

The place of desire they want is to be this extremely powerful source of attraction, of beauty, while creating a certain force that will keep people at bay. They want to feel like a magician who can control the forces around them, with attackers and protectors as ways of not piercing the shield,  but yet extremely attractive.


In several discussions here the structure of desire, how desire works, has been debated. The basic contentious point of view is that of “Desire is always the desire of the other.”  Note discussions on Jealousy, and desire is always the desire of the other; What is Valentine’s day like in the Girard household; The spark of love; and other discussions whose thread can be found through those.  The topic of Vampires should also be mentioned.

The Twilight series is all about these triangles of desire. The question is not who Bella, the leading character, is attracted to, it’s the fact that both men are attracted to her and they can’t both have her. Perhaps this is a major point in women being for monogamous relationships? Clearly Bella would want to be with both of them, but then how could one of them lose her. The latest film, Twilight Eclipse is all about the men having to see the other man touch her. Why is having the men suffer in seeing her touch the other so important for the women to feel the desire?

No, desire is not simply the desire of the other, it is not simply that she needs a different woman to want her man, what she further needs is different men to want her, or simply a certain complicated case of strong attraction which remains in tension. Unfulfilled desire.

 
One important note further make is how What women want is not the man but the life. They want the (fantasy?) world, the life, which comes with the man and not just the man himself.

I will leave it here for now, but I wanted to also connect this with the question of Lady Gaga. There are many similarities between the two phenomenons.

(A popular must add caveat for such discussions. Women and men have long since stopped being seperated entities. Men are feminine and women are masculine and the structure of desire I describe is perhaps what could be called feminine, with many men being feminine and women masculine, etc.).