What Do Women Want

being wanted so much that the aggressor is willing to overpower, to take. “But ‘aggression,’ ‘dominance,’ ” she sifted through the terms that came to her as she tried to express the wish. “I have to find better words. ‘Submission’ isn’t even a good word.” It didn’t reflect what women were imagining as Meana’s scene culminated: their willing acquiescence.
    Yet she looked vaguely stricken; she knew her parsing of language couldn’t tame the subject. The fantasy of the alley, no matter how much she focused on vocabulary, retained its aura of violence. And as Bivona and Critelli had pointed out, the paradox in logic, in conjuring one’s own lack of control, didn’t exactly mean that the fantasizing woman wasn’t immersing herself in an experience of sexual assault. The assault wasn’t real, of course; the immersion was only partial; but the violence, the overpowering were being lived, if only in the mind. The fantasies occupied a realm that was both infinitely far from the actual and yet psychologically close to it. Were they different from any of our other intensely felt and yet idle wishes? To commit crimes and become rich? To inflict awful harm on our enemies? We don’t act on these imaginings, and in one sense we don’t want to transpose them from the world of the mind to the world of the real. We don’t want that at all; we would then have entered a nightmare. Yet our fantasies do speak of our desires.
    When Meana first talked with me about the alley, I was interviewing her for a magazine article. Just before the story went to print, we spoke on the phone. She suggested a change in the way I presented things: I should specify that it wasn’t a stranger who pressed the woman against the wall; it was someone she knew.
    I didn’t remember this detail from our discussions. I asked if she was sure the change would represent the truth of her thinking. She hesitated. She worried that without the addition, the scene would seem very much a rape and that she would appear to be endorsing this kind of attack. I assured her that I had made the difference plain: between the gratifications of the invented and the horrors of the real. But she was in agony. She believed that all of her work would be reduced to the alley, that it was all people would remember. That dark place seemed to loom in her mind, almost as if it really was the only thing she had spoken about. We went back and forth about noting that the man was not a stranger. I asked her, Who exactly was he?
    And we discussed possibilities: his being a date; his being someone the woman had just met. But there was no nailing it down. It seemed more faithful, not only to her thinking but to the variations within women’s fantasies, to leave the man undescribed except for the force of his desire.
    We agreed not to make the alteration, she in deep discomfort, still wishing somehow to soften the scene. When the article came out, she was barraged. Her in-box filled with hundreds of emails. Oprah asked her to be on her show. “I’ve become the overpowerment lady,” Meana said to me later, when I met with her again in Las Vegas. The alley wall had been central in the reaction to her words. And some of the reaction was vehement. “There was hatred. People said I was part of the machinery that puts women down, that I was inciting men to rape.”
    Yet there were plenty of other responses. Oprah, as she introduced Meana, voiced her own troubled feelings about the alley but played, at the start of the segment, a taped interview with a perky, middle-of-the-road woman who echoed the allure of Meana’s scenario. And the emails were also full of gratitude. “There were lots of messages from high-powered women thanking me for allowing a discussion of elements of sexuality that don’t fall neatly into an ideological box,” Meana said, relieved. “One woman, in the art world in New York, told me, ‘I could not say what you said without feeling shamed, as though my eroticism made me a willing participant in a patriarchal system.’ ”
    Still, Meana remained unsettled. All the attention had churned up something submerged, a latent distaste about studying sex at all, a shame about it, a fear of it. “Even we who do this research have internalized the culture’s sexophobia. It was fine when it was just me in my lab, me with my students. But with the spotlight on—no. Suddenly I was asking myself, Why was I studying something so inconsequential? Why