wanting to be wanted

Every woman I know wants to be wanted, and almost none of them will say so. They will say they want love. They will say they want partnership, respect, safety, to be seen and known. They will not say they want to be desired, looked at, ached for, chosen again and again with the eyes. The wish is too naked to speak aloud, and so it has been made shameful, when it is the most ancient and honest hunger a woman carries.

I don’t hide. I dress to be looked at. I want the glance to land. I want to be the thing someone reaches for across a room, and I have learned that saying this out loud frightens people, because a woman who admits she wants to be desired has broken an agreement she never signed.

We were liberated and something fundamental was lost in it. A generation of women was told, correctly, that they did not need a man to be complete. That their worth did not depend on being chosen. That they could build and earn and think and live without waiting to be selected by anyone. This was true and necessary and I would not return a word of it.

Somewhere in the freeing, a second message slipped in alongside the first, and the second message was a lie. It said that because a woman does not need to be desired, she should not want to be. It took the appetite itself and folded it into the category of weakness. To want to be wanted became evidence that you had not done the work, that you were still seeking validation, that you had failed to find it within.

So women had to perform a self-sufficiency they did not feel. We learned to say we dressed only for ourselves. We learned to call the wish to be looked at internalised misogyny and to feel ashamed of the heat that rose in us when someone looked anyway. We built whole personalities around needing nothing, wanting no one’s eyes, living beyond the reach of desire’s economy. Underneath the performance, the appetite went on living, because it was never a cultural habit. Here is the distinction the culture failed to make: Wanting to be wanted is an appetite. Needing to be wanted is a wound.

The woman who wants to be wanted is already full. She has a life that satisfies her, a self she can stand inside, work that feeds her. The wish to be desired is, for her, a wish for more. More sensation. More aliveness. More of the current that passes between two people when one reaches for the other. She wants the look without requiring it, and if it does not come she is disappointed and intact.

The woman who needs to be wanted is empty, and she is trying to be filled from outside. She reads the attention as evidence. Proof that she exists, that she is worth something, that the emptiness can be plugged for an hour by another person’s eyes. No amount of being desired will ever satisfy her, because the hunger underneath it is for a self she has not yet built. The attention of others is the wrong food for that hunger, and she eats and eats and stays starving.

These two women make the same gesture. They both want to be wanted. From the outside they look identical. The culture, watching, could not tell them apart, and so it condemned them both. It saw the wound and decided the appetite must be the same sickness. It threw out the hunger to be rid of the disease. Two generations of full, satisfied, self-possessed women were taught to be ashamed of an appetite that had nothing wrong with it at all.

The appetite belongs to something far older than culture, and older than the human species itself, written into the oldest machinery of life.

Every creature that reproduces sexually exists because, somewhere back along the line, an ancestor was desired. The peacock’s tail is heavy, useless, a liability in flight, and it exists because peahens, across uncountable generations, wanted it. They selected the males who displayed. They chose. Desire built the tail. Desire builds everything that two creatures make together. To be wanted is to be selected, and to be selected is to continue, and the wish to be wanted is, at the root, the wish not to be erased from the future of the living world.

A woman past childbearing still wants to be wanted. A woman who will never reproduce, who never intended to, who is decades beyond the reproductive window, still feels the heat rise when someone looks at her with appetite. The wish outlives its biological function entirely. The genes are finished with it and the woman is not. The body wants something the body no longer needs. The hunger points past survival toward something survival cannot explain.

The traditions that tried to account for how the world began reached, almost all of them, for desire. The Rig Veda, in its hymn of creation, says that desire, kama, came upon the One in the beginning, and that desire was the first seed of mind. Before matter, before light, before the gods themselves, the wish. The Upanishads tell of the One, alone, who found nothing else and was afraid, and then was lonely, and then desired: let me be many. From that wish, the world. Hesiod, building the Greek cosmos, placed Eros among the very first powers, older than almost everything, the force that draws all separate things toward each other so that something new can be made. In the Tantric understanding, creation is the meeting of Shiva and Shakti, consciousness and the energy that longs to be known by it, and the universe is the child of that longing.

To want to be wanted is to stand inside this. It is to feel, in a single body, the same pull the traditions say made the world. The woman at the mirror, hoping to be seen, is not indulging a weakness. She is echoing the first desire, the one the hymns place before everything. Far from vanity, the appetite is the creative principle of the universe running through her, asking the question it has asked since the beginning. Will you reach for me. Will you want me into being.

John Berger wrote the sentence that still governs how women think about being seen. Men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. He described a split inside every woman, between the one who surveys and the one who is surveyed. A woman, he wrote, is almost continuously accompanied by her own image of herself. She walks, and she watches herself walking. She weeps, and she sees herself weeping.

For half a century this has been read as a pure indictment. The male gaze installed inside the female mind. The woman colonised by the eyes of men until she cannot exist without imagining how she looks to them. Truth lives in the indictment. The surveyor inside a woman can be a jailer. She can rob every unselfconscious moment, turn every meal and every cry and every act of love into a performance witnessed by an audience who is not in the room.

The surveyor can also be an artist. The same faculty that imprisons a woman can, turned around, free her. To watch yourself can be to author yourself. To know you are seen can be to choose what is shown. The difference is whether the woman performs for an imagined judge or composes for her own pleasure, whether she is asking am I acceptable or declaring this is what I am. Berger saw the prison. He saw less clearly that the same window could open.

Anne Carson, writing about desire, said that eros is a reach toward what we lack. We want what we do not have. We long across a distance toward the thing that is missing. If this is what desire is, then to want to be wanted is to want to become the thing at the end of someone’s reach. To be the lack in another person. To be what they ache across the distance toward. Nothing in this is small. It is the wish to matter so much to another consciousness that they feel your absence in the body. The woman who wants to be wanted wants to be someone’s missing piece, which is the most ambitious wish a body can hold.

For most of history the wish was sacred, and the women who held it openly are the ones we remember. Sappho wrote, on an island, twenty-six centuries ago, the most enduring lyrics of longing in the Western record. She wrote of wanting and of the wish to be wanted back, of the girl who left and the fire under the skin and the tongue that breaks. She was not ashamed, and she was the most celebrated poet of her age, called the tenth muse, honoured for the open, unembarrassed anatomy of desire.

We have softened Aphrodite into the goddess of love. She was the power of being desired, enormous enough to start wars and topple kings. To be touched by her was to become magnetic, to pull the eyes of others toward you without effort. The Greeks did not pity the woman who wanted this; they built her temples. Radha, in the devotional traditions of the subcontinent, lives for the gaze of Krishna, aches for him, and is worshipped for the aching. Her wish to be wanted by the divine is the model of the soul’s relationship to God. The most exalted spiritual posture in an entire tradition is a woman wanting to be desired and saying so out loud. The hetaerae of Greece, the most educated women of their time, the only women admitted to philosophical conversation, made an art of being wanted and were honoured for it. Unlike the wives kept indoors, they were the companions sought out for their minds and their bodies at once, and they understood the wish to be desired as a craft, a power, a discipline worth a lifetime.

For most of human history the wish to be wanted was understood as feminine power at its most concentrated. The shame attached to it is recent, younger than almost everything else a woman carries. And here is where it hurts. The appetite does not leave when a woman marries. It does not dissolve in the safety of having been chosen once, years ago, by someone who chose her and then stopped choosing. The wish to be wanted is innate, fundamental, written into the body and modelled by the cosmos, and it goes on living inside the woman in the marriage exactly as it lived in the girl at the mirror. Now it goes hungry.

Familiarity dampens the signal. The man who once could not stop looking now looks past her, at the wall behind her head. She is no less worth wanting; she has only become known, and her appetite to be his object of desire has nowhere left to go. She still wants to be wanted, as much as she ever did. This is the cruelty at the centre of a long relationship, and the shame makes it crueller. Because she has been taught that a mature woman should not need this, she cannot even name what is missing. She knows only that some current that once ran through her has gone still. She feels the stillness as a personal failing, a sign of vanity, a hunger she should have outgrown. She does not say: I want you to want me. The sentence is too naked. It would expose the appetite she has spent her life learning to hide. So she says nothing, and the appetite that biology demanded and the hymns of creation modelled goes unfed in the one place it was promised a home.

Most women have felt the appetite go still inside a love that was supposed to feed it forever. To be wanted changes the body. A woman who knows she is desired moves differently. Her spine lengthens. Her breath drops into her belly. The skin along her arms wakes to the air. Something that had been folded begins to open, and she is more alive in her own flesh for hours, sometimes days, after a single look that landed with appetite.

I have felt this, and I do not believe I am unusual in it. The flush that has nothing to do with embarrassment. The heat that rises when a person looks at you and does not look away, when their attention has weight, when you let yourself feel yourself being wanted instead of deflecting it with a joke. The body drinks it down, having been thirsty for so long.

I have felt the opposite too. The long flat stretches of not being pursued while still being loved. A woman can be loved completely and not be wanted, and she will wither in a way that has no name in the language we are given, because we are not allowed to say that love was not enough, that we needed also to be desired, that the soul has an appetite the heart cannot satisfy.

To want to be wanted on my own terms is to become the author of my own desirability. I decide what is shown. I dress for the woman I am, and if the dress also makes me magnetic, I do not pretend the magnetism was an accident. The look I am after is the one that reaches for the real thing, the woman underneath the performance, and I would rather go unseen than be wanted as someone I am not.

The wanting, freely chosen and openly held, is one of the great pleasures of being alive in a body. The appetite is older than the shame. Older than the culture that shamed it, older than the religions that tried to discipline it, older than the species itself. It is written into the tail of the peacock and the hymns of creation and the body of every woman who ever stood at a mirror and hoped. A woman is allowed to want to be wanted, without apology, without performing, without pretending she assembled herself in a vacuum and needs no one’s eyes. Tomorrow I will dress to be wanted, even when no one is coming to see. The wanting is reason enough.