What does a woman want?

 

Jeffrey St. Clair > 

+ An exasperated Sigmund Freud famously (or notoriously, depending on your point of view) asked, “What does a woman want?” Having read most of Freud, I never ran across this passage and have long been curious about the origin of the quote. It didn’t sound like something the Viennese know-it-all would commit to writing. And now I know, thanks to fellow Hoosier Emily Eakin’s fascinating book, The Frenchmen…or My Life in Theory. The full quote goes like this: “[A question] that has never been answered and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul: What does a woman want?” To be clear, Freud never wrote this. Rather, it was recorded in the diary of one of Freud’s most famous patients and students, the Parisian psychoanalyst, Marie Bonaparte, great-grandniece of the wild Corsican marauder and one of the people who yanked Freud out of Vienna before the Nazis could nab him and send him to the death camps, as they did to two of his sisters.

Even as recorded by Bonaparte, Freud’s question, long taken as evidence of his misogyny, may not refer to all women, but to “a woman” in particular, Marie Bonaparte, after she informed the aghast advocate of the “talking cure” that she had twice undergone surgeries to move her clitoris closer to the opening of her vagina in order to help her achieve a satisfactory orgasm. Bonaparte must be something of a Patron Saint to the women who run with billionaires, now eager to get “designer vaginas,” through the surgical magic of labiaplasty and vaginoplasty. Most American men these days, having learned the little they know of female anatomy from watching Andrew Tate videos, have enough trouble locating the clitoris and the G-Spot without them moving around.

Speaking of the merger of Eros and Thanatos, the self-described “human Barbie” announced last month she was getting her “puff tightened” in a procedure using fat from human cadavers, which will give new meaning to the Stones’ notorious lyrics in Start Me Up (“You, you make a dead man cum.”)

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