“Let’s not go there.” One of my professors used to say this with an embarrassed chuckle when an especially sensitive issue came up in class discussion.
I thought of his remark reading this July 31st opinion column in The Washington Post: https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/how-literature-can-mirror-our-complicated-desires/2020/07/31/624c4798-d14a-11ea-9038-af089b63ac21_story.html?hpid=hp_save-opinions-float-right-4-0_opinion-card-f-right%3Ahomepage%2Fstory-ans The author, a reader and writer of erotic literature, argues, “Power is often a natural aphrodisiac, of course, yet sometimes it has less to do with a man’s status in the real world (in the form of wealth, say, or fame) and more to do with a woman’s subconscious wish to be abject, to surrender her inner force to a man who will tell her what to do. Paradoxically, the issue of who is controlling whom becomes an increasingly murky one: Is it the one who dominates or the one who submits?”
The author, Daphne Merkin, is a woman, and I defer to her on this subject, being largely ignorant of it myself. But the issue of subordination to power brings to mind Sartre on the subject of “bad faith,” the problematic pull that people feel toward “being-in-itself” (or etre-en-soi). Borrowing this term from Heidegger, Sartre contrasts it with “being-for-itself” (or etre-pour-soi) and “being-for-others” (or l’etre-pour-autrui).
According to Darren Guiles of Quora, “the for-itself is a nothingness between every in-itself we have been and are right now; consciousness of being a being which has the possibility to become another being. The being we become is the choice we make in flight from the in-itself we are just now towards the in-itself we attempt to become. ” As Wikipedia puts it, being-in-itself “is relevant to inanimate objects, but not to humans, who Sartre says must always make a choice,” what he describes as being-for-itself. A literary critic might call this agency.
Whether the situation is erotic or not, people in general often feel a powerful attraction to being-in-itself, namely to giving up their agency to a romantic partner, to an authority figure, to an ideology, to a drug. It seems similar to Freudian death wish, and erotic submission seems like an odd amalgam of eros/life and thanatos/death. Of course, the cycle can be broken through conscious behavioral choices. To cite Will Durant’s paraphrasing of Aristotle, “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then, is not an act, but a habit.”
I think what most women really want from men is confidence, not domination. Of course confident people can also be abusive, narcissistic jerks.