First there was centuries of patriarchal religious and social subjugation of women, then they didn’t have the right to vote or curse in public or spit on the sidewalk and then there’s been all those breast cancer scares and now—this: “persistently or recurrently deficient (or absent) sexual fantasies and desire for sexual activity” among eliteist women.”
Oh sweet lord. What to do what to do they ask hungrily.
These are women, as a “NY Times Magazine” article spells out, who want to want…Want to want what? Women who want to want desire. And when do they want to want it? Soon. Very soon.
“At her group therapy sessions for women despairing of low sexual desire, therapist Lori Brotto likes to pass around a plastic tub of raisins. The women, usually six to a group, sit around two pushed-together beige tables in a fluorescently lighted conference room at the British Columbia Center for Sexual Medicine in Vancouver. A little potted tree is jammed randomly in one corner. Ragged holes scar one wall where a painting used to hang. The décor doesn’t speak of sensuality. That is the job of the raisin.”
Raisins? Yes. Pure Genius. This is therapy at it most sublime. Raisins. It’s so simple its beautiful “I’d like you to start by examining your raisin…Study its shape, its contours, its folds. Touch the raisin with a finger. Look into the valleys and peaks, the highlights and dark crevasses. Lift the raisin to your lips.”
Oh sweet lord I just got an erection. And over raisins for chrissakes. But the rasin of course must be intently symbolic (if these girls could just, you know, adaquately visualize the it as symbol). There’s more. Remember, with a rasin you can’t eat just one (which is a line I believe from a potato chip company).
So here they are, a room of passionless women who want to want. Raisin-as-libido-fruit consciousness raising. Do they get the message? Do they feel now the raisin bursting. Can they feel the love. The self love. Raisin as symbol? I wonder if the Beatles are playing in the background (if not, it’s a good gooey idea). I Want to Hold Your Hand…I Saw Her Standing There (although in that song “she was just seventeen if you know what I mean”—and these babes I presume are older).
Here comes more symbolic intent… “ they are instructed… to place the raisins in their mouths, to ‘notice where the tongue is, notice the saliva building up in your mouth [wow it sure is doing it for me]. . . notice the trajectory of the flavor as it bursts forth [oh yeah], the flood of saliva [I'm drooling I'm droolin], how the flavor changes from your body’s chemistry.’ ”
As a guy what guilt I feel. I just got off with merely reading this raisin part of the therpay and these hungry wanting wives of the elite or women who are the elite are still hungry, groping through the webs of mental sexual dysfunction therapy: “I want to feel horny. I want to want.” They shout it. They cry it out loud: We want to want–Desire.
Raisin therapy is merely the intro. It will not in itself produce the end result of the wanting to want syndrome. Psych doesn’t work that fast. There’s more goodies to come. We want to feel IT… Alas, the terapist must make an attempt to go beyond raisin babble into that old standbye—yoga:
“She went through her usual yoga poses, but with ‘a cognitive reframe,’…She told herself, ‘over and over like a mantra,’ that she was an especially sexual woman, ‘capable of a high level of desire, a high level of response.’ And, she recalled, “there was a deliberate intent not only to listen to my body even more than I normally would in yoga but also to interpret the signs from my body as signs of my sexual identity. So my breathing was not just breathing…it was breathing because I was highly sexual.”
Beautifully put (it also gave me another erection).
Porn movies follow. They’re boring.
They still want to want. The women still want to want Desire.
As they work through the hierarchy of inner-self sexual self-discovery what is the key to success, the one super electrifying synaptic charge that will unfold the body like a flower? Think shudders, violent uncontrollable shaking; think with sexual desire like the killer purr of a big cat.
Where are we headed girls? Right here. To a truth, the, er, the simple E=MC2 formula of lust. Here it is—“desire follows arousal.” Get aroused and you got what? Desire. Ladies, write it down quick in your little notebook. And remember, it all started with a rasin. Yes, of course. Arousal. But then again these women could’ve found that out by spitting those rasins out in the early session and going outside and asking just about anybody on the street: Pardon me a moment please, would you mind telling me what follows arousal? Certainly you poor passionless sexual knave: Desire follows arousal.
The wanting part is really wanting arousal because why? Because arousal will lead to desire. See? It’s downright mathematically logical. And to think it started with raisins. And so we can assume now at the end of the therapy sessions they found a modicum of arousal technique. The big question is: What comes after desire? Desire requires an object. Problem is, the object of their aroused desire may not be aroused to desire them in return.
Arousal. Desire. Object. But isn’t there a little pill for all this nowadays you can take with a glass of water, something, say the size of a rasin?
Note: I’m trying not to laugh but did you know theres a book out there called “The Other Side of Desire: Four Journeys Into the Far Realms of Lust and Longing.” Sounds like its from someone who’d write that “NY Times” article linked above.
