Men's Needs, Women's Needs, Whatever
The late, legendary television programmer Brandon Tartikoff used to tell a story about a famous producer (reportedly Robert Evans) who once opened a pitch with the line, “A woman’s pussy hair is stronger than the trans-Atlantic cable.” The show being pitched was a series of love stories, and that line was meant to suggest that women crave love so deeply that they’ll sit through pretty much any old crap for the promise of somehow having that part of their psyche rewarded with formulaic trash which, in their smarter moments, they knew could never come true.
We all know the basic narrative: women need love, men need to get off, blah blah blah. I’m not saying it’s not, for the most part, true, but I think we do a major disservice to both sexes when we reduce it to that. Of course women have sexual needs. Of course men crave the feeling of companionship, of relating to someone else, however fleeting the encounter might be. These are the things that make us human.
I was reading Susannah Breslin’s great piece on why guys fuck whores, and this jumped out at me:
Often these guys aren’t just looking for sex. Many are depressed or stressed, lonely or bored, looking for intimacy or a connection, no matter how transient, no matter the cost. One john who was rejected on a regular basis in the dating scene wrote that, in contrast to the women he met at bars, prostitutes saw him as “a normal and charming guy.”It’s hard not to read that and just be simply heartbroken. The idea that a fellow human being feels so rejected, so unwantable, that he needs to pay someone to simulate an interest in him makes me want to cry. There are a lot of terrible things in this world, but for whatever reason, the idea of loneliness is the one that makes me the saddest.
On the other hand, what do I know? The guy could be a real dick. Isn’t it more likely that he’s actually one of these jackasses who won’t let a couple of girls get a drink after work without asking them whether or not he should buy a wallaby? But then it’s just as easy to turn that one back around: Maybe the guy’s that way because he is so cripplingly lonely and sad and awkward and that’s what he thinks is somehow going to help him get that spark, make that connection he so desperately craves.
I guess what I’m saying—or not saying—is who the hell knows why we do what we do? One of the five people whom I consider vastly more intelligent than myself once told me his theory that human beings “nearly always end up working out traumas and rejections and fears in their sexual desires,” and I don’t doubt the essential truth of that. Why did Eliot Spitzer screw whores? Maybe it had to do with all those Monopoly games. I don’t know and I don’t care; the only thing this story proves to me, once again, is how badly we fuck ourselves up when it comes to sex. At the end of the day it’s probably just easier to say “My cock made me do it.” You don’t have to look at any of the deeper causes that way. Which just seems like a tragedy for everyone.
