THE SINCERE
WANT

What he says he wants

A man says that he wants a woman's sexual submission. He is a composite, built for this file, and no real person stands behind him. He is not lying and he is not performing. Asked whether the want is his, he would say that nothing is more his. It arrives without argument, in the body, ahead of any opinion he holds about it. He may hold opinions against it. He may be, in every position he would sign his name to, opposed to the arrangement the want belongs to.

The file accepts all of that. Intake puts three questions, none of which asks whether he means it.

1. What taught him to experience submission as erotic?
2. What taught him that being desired was not sufficient, and that he must also possess?
3. Would he want the same thing if his standing as a man did not depend on wanting it?

The first two ask for a history. The third asks for an experiment, and section VIII records that it cannot be run.

A standing that can be revoked

The form he answers on has a property the psychology literature has measured. Manhood, across the samples studied, is treated as a status that has to be earned and can be lost: something demonstrated in front of others, and withdrawn when the demonstration fails. Womanhood is not treated the same way in those samples. The researchers who named this called it precarious manhood, and found that men told they had performed like women felt threatened, where women given the matching news did not, and that the threat brought aggressive thoughts closer to hand.¹

The sociologist Raewyn Connell supplies what the proof is measured against. In any period one pattern of masculinity is the honoured one. Very few men embody it. Nearly all are graded by it, and it is defined by its relation to women and to the men ranked beneath it.² Dominance, conquest, possession and control are among its usual terms.

A want that grows up on this form does two jobs. It is a want, and it is a credential. To desire in the approved way is to show that one is the thing the form asks for, and to desire otherwise is a failed demonstration, with what follows a failed demonstration among other men. He cannot tell the two jobs apart from the inside, because they have never come apart in his experience. That is what the third question was trying to separate.

He is not standing outside the arrangement, deciding freely what he wants while she is trained to supply it. He was trained first.

Wanting to be wanted

A file on his want is half a file. The other party to the arrangement has a want of her own, equally sincere and equally unexamined at intake, and it was issued in the same place.

Catharine MacKinnon's account of this is the hardest version. Sexuality, on her argument, is where dominance and submission are made erotic, so that inequality is lived as desire and not only as a limit placed on it.³ That both parties then defend the desire as their own is this file's addition and not hers. Sandra Bartky describes the second file from the inside: a discipline that no one in particular administers, kept up by the woman herself under a gaze she has taken in and now supplies unprompted.⁴

The two wants fit. Each completes the other, and the fit is the most persuasive thing about them. Two people who each sincerely want what the other sincerely offers appear to have found one another.

The fit, entered as evidence

The fit is then put to use. It is offered as proof that men and women are naturally like this, since here they are, wanting it, without anyone making them.

Pierre Bourdieu described the circuit. A social order trains the bodies and perceptions of the people in it, and then points to those bodies and perceptions as the natural fact the order was built upon. The division seems to be in the nature of things because it has been put into things, and into the habits of those who look at them.⁵ The proof and the thing to be proved are one object, presented twice.

So the arrangement is not organised around what men naturally want. It teaches a want, teaches the answering want, and files the result as evidence of sexual difference. On the intake form that evidence ticks the box marked Nature. Elsewhere on this site the word for a thing nobody can see because everybody is in it is the water.

The Other at the intake desk

Jacques Lacan's formula is that

“man's desire is the desire of the Other.”⁶

He did not mean patriarchy in particular. He meant that desire is never a private invention. It takes shape in language, in being recognised, and in what others want. A person comes to desire in a place that was furnished before they arrived, with meanings and prohibitions they did not write, and learns there what is worth wanting and what it would mean about them to want it. What feels most private is organised around a set of expectations that was running already. Michel Foucault made the companion point about power. It has not mainly silenced sexuality. It has multiplied the occasions for speaking of it, sorted it into kinds, and taught people to look in their desires for the truth of who they are.⁷

Read against that, neither party in this file hears the arrangement speaking when they speak. He hears himself. She hears herself. Each reports a want, correctly, and each want was learned at a desk neither of them staffed.

The usual statement of the damage is that one person becomes an object. The file records a second injury beside it. The other person has learned to experience someone's objectification as closeness, and so has the first. Both may come to desire the arrangement that prevents either from meeting the other as a free subject, and both will call what they have intimacy, because it is the only form intimacy was ever issued in.

Who is served

The obvious answer is that he is. The arrangement delivers what he wants, so it must exist for his pleasure. The file does not find this. He is frequently not pleased. bell hooks spent a book on what the arrangement takes from men: it asks boys first to cut off the parts of themselves that feel, and teaches them that manhood is dominance, so that the loss looks like the price of power.⁸ A want that doubles as a credential cannot be satisfied in any case. A credential expires and has to be presented again.

The better answer comes from the sociology of organisations. Robert Merton observed that an institution's rules, made to serve some purpose, become ends in themselves, and that the people who keep them come to treat conformity as the point. He called it the displacement of goals.⁹ Marx's older word is alienation: something people make comes to stand over them as a foreign power and directs the people who made it.¹⁰

On this reading the arrangement is organised around its own continuation, and it will spend anyone's pleasure on that, his included. It does not need to be enjoyed. It does not need anyone to intend it, and it is reproduced daily by people who would vote against it. Louis Althusser's account of how this is done is that a person is hailed as a certain kind of subject and answers, and the answering feels like recognising oneself.¹¹ All that has to be inherited is a way of understanding oneself in which these relations look natural, inevitable or desirable.

When the institution is asked to justify itself, this is what it enters.

1. The family is preserved because it is the family.
2. The roles are preserved because they are traditional.
3. The hierarchy is preserved because someone must be in charge.
4. Departures are punished because they threaten the order.

Each line gives the arrangement as its own reason. That is the form a justification takes after the purpose has gone.

An institution can outlive the satisfaction of everyone who reproduces it, provided it has taught them to read its demands as their desires.

What the file must not be read as saying

None of this makes the two files symmetrical, and a reader who leaves with everyone is a victim equally has misread it.

Connell's term is the patriarchal dividend: the advantage in income, authority, honour and prestige that accrues to men as a group from the arrangement's continuing.² It is paid unevenly. That class, race and sexuality decide a great deal of who collects is this file's reading of her framework. It is also paid whether or not a man wants it, approves of it or is made happy by it. A man can be shaped by the arrangement, constrained by it and impoverished by it in the ways hooks describes, and still be paid.

The costs of refusing differ as well. He was taught to possess and she to be possessed, and those are different lessons with different penalties for failing them. Section V described an injury both parties share. It did not say they share it evenly.

Nor is the institution without owners. Its self-perpetuation and its beneficiaries hold each other up: the people who gain have reason to defend it, and its defence keeps the gains in place. The file's claim is the narrower one, that a system does not have to benefit men equally, or please any of them, in order to reproduce their dominance.

What this file rests on

The claim

That a sincerely held sexual want can be socially issued; that in this case it also serves as a credential of masculinity; and that the arrangement the want belongs to is organised around its own reproduction, which the pleasure of its participants neither explains nor is required for.

What counts as evidence

Published theory and research, cited below, and one constructed case. The single empirical finding relied on is the precarious-manhood work in note 1. Everything else is argument.

The procedure

The department's ordinary one. The presenting statement is taken as true, and the form it was given on is read: what the form offered, what it graded, and what it had no box for.

The limits

Intake's third question cannot be answered. There is no man raised outside the form to compare, and no way to relieve this one of it and look again. The file holds no interviews, no sample and no data of its own. Its subject is a composite. It can describe a mechanism and cannot measure one, and it cannot say of any actual person what they would want.

Four reasons to doubt the file

That the difference is natural after all

The direct opponent is evolutionary psychology. David Buss surveyed mate preferences across thirty-seven cultures, found sex differences in several preferences that recurred in most of them, and argued that the pattern is what evolved dispositions shaped by sexual selection would produce. He also reported how much the cultures varied.¹² On that account the exhibit in section IV is simply good evidence.

The file does not need the inherited share to be nothing, and does not claim it is. Its claim is that the exhibit cannot settle the question, because the arrangement offered as evidence is the same arrangement that does the teaching. Alice Eagly and Wendy Wood reanalysed the same thirty-seven cultures and reported that the sex differences in preference for a partner's earning capacity and age were smaller in societies where women and men stood more nearly equal, which a fixed disposition would not obviously predict. They did not find the same for physical attractiveness, and theirs is a comparison between societies, not a record of any one of them changing.¹³ The precarious-manhood findings point the same way: a disposition that was simply given would not have to be demonstrated so anxiously. That last point is suggestive and no more. Plenty of things with a basis in the body are policed as well.

That every desire is produced, so production convicts nothing

This is Lacan's own position turned against the file, and it is correct. If all desire comes by way of the Other, then showing that this one did shows nothing against it. Gayle Rubin adds the warning with a history behind it. Critiques of what people want in bed have a record of becoming rankings of sexual acts, enforced against the people at the bottom of the ranking, and consensual practices that stage dominance have regularly been among them.¹⁴

The file concedes both. It does not find the want inauthentic, because there is no unissued want to hold it against, and it gives no ruling on what any two people do by agreement. Its finding is narrower. This want was given a second job, and a want that is also a test of standing is not free in the way its holder reports. Amia Srinivasan has argued that desire can be examined politically without anyone being owed another person, and that is the footing the file tries to keep.¹⁵ It does not always keep it. Section V calls the result a tragedy, which is a ruling of a kind.

That the file is doing what files do

To tell a person that what they want is not really theirs is the oldest move the case file has. The literature on adaptive preferences, from Jon Elster forward, exists because the move is sometimes right. Serene Khader takes its danger seriously: someone declares another person's wants a product of her oppression, and uses the diagnosis to overrule her account of her own life. Khader keeps the concept all the same, and asks how it could name what deprivation does without treating deprived women as unfit to judge their own interests.¹⁶

This lands harder here than anywhere, since it is this department's own charge against the instrument, and File 001 is a record made of a subject in a room the subject did not design. Two things were done about it, and neither is a full answer. No person is named or held. And the file reports only what the form demanded, never what its subject really wants underneath. It has no access to underneath, and doubts there is one.

That an abstraction has been given a verb

“The institution teaches.” “The arrangement spends.” The instrument on this site's front door flags that construction, and it would flag this file. Elster's objection to functional explanation is the formal version. To show that a pattern benefits a system explains nothing about why the pattern persists unless a mechanism is named that carries the benefit back to the cause.¹⁷ A system that wants to survive is a ghost.

The mechanisms can be named, and wherever this file gives the institution a verb, it owes one of them. There is sanction: boys and men who fail the demonstration are ridiculed, excluded and sometimes beaten, by people with names. There is inheritance: the words for what a man is are learned before they can be assessed. And there is advantage, as in section VII: people who are paid by an arrangement defend it. Nothing in the file requires the arrangement to have a will. The shorthand is kept because the sentences are unreadable without it, and the cost is the one this site names in others, since a sentence with an abstraction for its subject has nobody in it.

Not closed

The department's three inquiries withhold their endings on purpose, on the ground that a file which resolves teaches that enough procedure produces the truth. This one is left open for a plainer reason. It ends on two questions it cannot answer.

The first is general. If an institution can reproduce itself through the wants of people it does not satisfy, then the flourishing of those people has stopped being necessary to its survival, and nothing in its own operation will bring it back. What happens to the people who live inside an institution that no longer needs them to be well?

The second is the one that stays. To recognise a demand as foreign, a person needs somewhere to stand that the demand did not furnish. Here the institution supplied the words for man, woman, desire and mine, and those are the words in which the recognising would have to be done. This file is written in them too.

One note is entered as conjecture, not as a finding. A form can be read from inside it, because a form has edges. There are answers that did not fit the box, and wants that arrived unassigned and were left off the record. This department exists on the premise that what an instrument cannot record does not stop existing. If the premise holds for a person, it holds for what a person wants, and that is where a second file would begin.

The Apparatus

1. Joseph A. Vandello, Jennifer K. Bosson, Dov Cohen, Rochelle M. Burnaford and Jonathan R. Weaver, “Precarious Manhood,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 95, no. 6 (2008): 1325–1339. Paraphrased. The samples were largely American university students, which bounds how far “across the samples studied” reaches.
2. R. W. Connell, Masculinities (Polity Press, 1995), for hegemonic masculinity and the patriarchal dividend, which Connell lists as honour, prestige, the right to command and a material share; revised in R. W. Connell and James W. Messerschmidt, “Hegemonic Masculinity: Rethinking the Concept,” Gender & Society 19, no. 6 (2005): 829–859. Paraphrased.
3. Catharine A. MacKinnon, Toward a Feminist Theory of the State (Harvard University Press, 1989). Paraphrased.
4. Sandra Lee Bartky, Femininity and Domination: Studies in the Phenomenology of Oppression (Routledge, 1990). Paraphrased.
5. Pierre Bourdieu, Masculine Domination, trans. Richard Nice (Stanford University Press, 2001); first published as La domination masculine (Seuil, 1998). Paraphrased closely, from the opening chapter.
6. Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis (Seminar XI), ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (Hogarth Press, 1977). The formula recurs across Lacan's work; it is given here in Sheridan's wording. Secondary citations place it at p. 235, which this department has not checked against the printed page. The gloss that follows it is this department's.
7. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (Pantheon, 1978). Paraphrased.
8. bell hooks, The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love (Atria Books, 2004). Paraphrased. Where this file later speaks of men being paid, the image is Connell's dividend and not hooks's.
9. Robert K. Merton, “Bureaucratic Structure and Personality,” Social Forces 18, no. 4 (1940): 560–568. Merton wrote about bureaucracies. Extending the term to patriarchy is this file's move and not his.
10. Karl Marx, “Estranged Labour,” in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, trans. Martin Milligan (Progress Publishers, 1959). Paraphrased. Marx's subject is labour and its product; the extension is again the file's.
11. Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards an Investigation),” in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (Monthly Review Press, 1971). Paraphrased.
12. David M. Buss, “Sex Differences in Human Mate Preferences: Evolutionary Hypotheses Tested in 37 Cultures,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 12, no. 1 (1989): 1–49. Paraphrased. Buss's study concerns mate preferences, not the erotics of dominance; it is cited as the strongest form of the general position.
13. Alice H. Eagly and Wendy Wood, “The Origins of Sex Differences in Human Behavior: Evolved Dispositions Versus Social Roles,” American Psychologist 54, no. 6 (1999): 408–423. Paraphrased.
14. Gayle Rubin, “Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality,” in Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality, ed. Carole S. Vance (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984). Paraphrased. Rubin's targets are law, medicine and popular morality as much as the feminist positions she answers.
15. Amia Srinivasan, The Right to Sex (Bloomsbury, 2021). Paraphrased.
16. Jon Elster, Sour Grapes: Studies in the Subversion of Rationality (Cambridge University Press, 1983); Serene J. Khader, Adaptive Preferences and Women's Empowerment (Oxford University Press, 2011), and her “Must Theorising about Adaptive Preferences Deny Women's Agency?” Journal of Applied Philosophy 29, no. 4 (2012): 302–317. Paraphrased.
17. Jon Elster, “Marxism, Functionalism, and Game Theory: The Case for Methodological Individualism,” Theory and Society 11, no. 4 (1982): 453–482. Paraphrased.

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