Libby Brooks Body Language Her head is thrown back, exposing her lovely throat. She cups one breast. Her emerald-shaded eyes are closed, but her legs are open, feet arching into opulent gold stilettos. The pose is strikingly erotic. It has power to excite and, it would seem, to offend.
The advert for the Yves Saint Laurent fragrance, Opium, featuring model Sophie Dahl has received more than 200 complaints since it first appeared in Britain last month. In France, the campaigning feminist group Chiennes de Garde (Guard Bitches) has condemned the advert as “porn chic”.
So what is it about this photo that causes such offence? What is this image about: ecstasy or exploitation, pleasure or danger, the watcher or the watched? It begs one question: what does she want? To be fucked? By you? By herself?
The reason it illicits such a powerful reaction is that it strikes at the centre of the complex, uncomfortable relationship between gender and desire.
What is desire, in all its forms? It is a memory, and a vision. It is engulfing, and unselfconscious. It is about self-determination, about taking responsiblity for, and responding to, one’s sexual impulses. But taking the initiative is a trade-off for many women: bursting the bubble of sexual tension, taking control on a practical front where pregnancy or safety are concerned, but seldom embracing sexual appetite. It requires more than a flipping of the binary vision of male and female as doer and done to change this.
Female sexuality is generally construed as passive. The image of Dahl is threatening because she looks as if she knows what she wants and that continues to alarm. Popular culture offers the superficially subversive notion of woman as sexual aggressor. But in private we still teach girls a romantic narrative of which sex forms one element, while teaching their male peers about a discreet act that underpins masculinity.
So how much of this passivity is constructed by social imperatives, and how much is an unconscious response to them? Jacques Lacan, the French psychoanalyst, once said that women want to be wanted, not to be loved. In the sexual realm, this could be taken to mean that women are so uneasy about desiring directly that they can only experience it in a mediated form.
Essentially, wanting to be wanted stems from a desire for power that has been transformed and ultimately hidden. Female power continues to be experienced as dangerous or exotic, and not something that can be directly expressed.
So we find our power in the image we project rather than in our actions. Appearance whether that is looking good or acting sweet trumps what we actually want for ourselves; reliance on others to provide our own feelings of worth traduces emotional authenticity.
If women have so little confidence in their desires, then it is not surprising that they present themselves as less sexual beings compared to men. Most surveys show that women want sex less often than men, experience orgasm less often and find satisfaction in emotional intimacy.
The pop psychologists would have it that women are cuddle-obsessed, finding it impossible to separate sex from love. The evolutionary psychologists tell us that the higher male sex drive has a Darwinian rationale. But do men and women experience desire differently?
“Women supposedly have a lower sex drive than men do,” writes Natalie Angier, the Pulitzer prize-winning science correspondent, “yet it is not low enough. No, there is still just enough of a lingering female infidelity impulse … to justify infibulation and purdah … How can we know what is ‘natural’ for us when we are treated as unnatural for wanting our lust, our freedom?”
Women may be more aware of their sexuality than ever before, but they continue to offer it an ambivalent embrace. How does that aped, or genuine, sexual confidence play out in the masque of flirtation? Although our sexual conversations are highly nuanced, negotiating the path from bar to bed can often feel like a war of attrition. Although chastity and sexual passivity are no longer openly fted, both men and women retain a lingering suspicion of promiscuous women.
Desire is also about greed literally. Women are bad at admitting to hunger. And if, as Naomi Wolf suggested in the Beauty Myth, dieting is the essence of contemporary femininity, are we starving ourselves of lust? Studies have consistently shown that with dietary deprivation, sexual interest dissipates, and fertility plummets. Meanwhile, self-consciousness is the enemy of desire. Erotic abandonment and fretting over the flatness of your tummy are mutually exclusive.
Finally, women’s desire has always been mediated through a male prism. Our culture is suffused with the homogenous imagery that has come to represent What Turns Men On (though the reality of male desire doesn’t necessarily conform).
Although discussion of women’s pleasure has lately entered the mainstream, it remains minimal and reductive: the saucy scandals of tabloid nymphets, advertisers who link ice cream and seduction, or the censoring of parodic “laddish” behaviour.
Female sexuality remains a dark continent.