Desire, Pleasure, and Romance: Post-Feminism and Other Seductions

Abstract

What is it that causes men to ponder this question? Do women ask this question of themselves? Or do they know what they desire and therefore consider the question redundant? Does the reiteration of this question throughout time and across popular culture, psychology, theology, philosophy, and literature mean that we have failed to find the answer? Common sense tells us that women desire different things. This knowledge, however, does not seem to call a halt to the question which continues to be the holy grail of masculinity’s quest for domination or redemption: both are possible motivations. If we switch the gender subject of the question would women claim to know the answer? Or would they not bother finding out? It seems to me that asking ‘what is it that men most desire?’ lacks the sexual intrigue, the implicit thread, that runs through the question and wraps itself around the heart of attempts to answer it. Working within a Post-feminist/Third Wave Feminist context, this chapter explores how various narratives for young people construct desire and how it is played out as part of uneasy gender relations. Desire is the structuring principle of literature in that it drives a narrative and seduces readers by working on their own expectations, anticipations, and need for fulfilment of desires. The texts I have selected for this chapter structure desire in different ways by casting it as the driving motivation behind the characters’ quests for independence, adventure, sexual freedom, love and romance.

What is it in all the world that women most desire?

(Joanna Troughton, Sir Gawain and the Loathly Damsel, 1972)