Our homeless desire

We talk a lot about the violence that occurs in the intimacy of relationships, but very little about desire, about what happens to us women in the murky waters of sexuality. Like any other human experience, sex, love, and eroticism are also learned; they don't arise instinctively, detached from culture. From the available representations in literature, in the audiovisual world, in the stories told about us, we know very well what men's desire is like, what it consists of, how it is expressed, and how far it can go. Or rather, we know the desire of men who feel entitled to display their size, to put on a show of strength not only to impress their potential romantic conquests but also to compete with other men like themselves, to demonstrate that they are bigger, more potent, and more powerful. The sexuality that dominates the collective imagination is, therefore, the sexuality of predators who experience conquest as a hunt. To avoid appearing weak and helpless before their male counterparts, they pursue, harass, dominate, and sometimes even domesticate women to the point of annihilation, turning them into trophies.

Feminism has been challenging this sexual politics since the 1970s, tirelessly recounting the behavior of these individuals. We have identified them, we have meticulously described their modus operandiWe teach our daughters to flee at the slightest hint of "toxicity." And yet, they still get away with it, they still act with impunity, they continue to assault without any consequences. Even though, from the reactionary camp, they cry out in desperation ("Do I have to sign a contract to have sex?") about the loss of the privilege of accessing women's bodies without permission or humane treatment, using them as objects that can be bought and sold, penetrated in every orifice, and degraded with unprecedented brutality. Quoted by Coetzee, I find a phrase that D.H. Lawrence wrote for the censors of Lady Chatterley's lover"Pornography is an attempt to insult sex, to cover it in filth." Almost a century after the novel's publication, today filth covers everything: erotic imagination has been colonized by immense torrents of shit through the macabre machinery of technologized pornography. Shit full of violence, humiliation, rape of real women who have been kidnapped and assaulted in front of cameras for the consumption of men who assault them again every time they see them suffering and sadistically enjoy their suffering.

And in all this, where are we? Where is our desire or the space to understand it outside of violence? I'm tired of talking about bad men and their criminal behavior; it outrages and deeply upsets me to realize that these kinds of specimens occupy everything. We're losing the space for the representation of sex, we're letting fear (so justified, of course) dominate everything, and with fear you can't desire or enjoy. Or even think. What's happening to us? How do we feel in the face of this situation? Why don't the victims of a piece of shit like Errejón give him a good kick in the balls and knock him out? Why do we freeze up? Because they have power, you'll tell me, because you can't believe what's happening to you, etc. I've been there too, and I know the involuntary paralysis that these kinds of predators cause. That's why, perhaps, what we should look at, what we women should look at—not to excuse them, but to protect ourselves—is what happens to us with these kinds of men. Why are so many of us still attracted to violent and powerful alpha males?