Freud asked, “What does woman want?” It’s a good question, and let’s credit him with sincerely wanting to know. Even if his answers weren’t that good, such questions remain credible.

When you ask that question of anybody, and want a credible answer, you need to ascertain what’s available, what’s realizable, in that person’s array of possible desiderata.

Of course, people can want things they cannot possibly obtain. When I was a child, I sincerely wanted to be a deer. From the way people laughed, I came gradually to understand that it wouldn’t be feasible.

Later I revised my hopes and tried to find out what objectives were accessible as well as desirable, with the aim of picking one or two of those. The items on my young girl’s revised list weren’t readily attainable either, but at least I was getting closer to the real world than I’d started out by being.

Equipped with Freud’s question, let’s look at the heroines in Jane Austen’s novels. Her women want (indeed already possess) certain socially approved accomplishments. They can dance, the dances of that era; they have poise and correct bearing in society; they have sufficient intellectual training to participate intelligently in conversation with well-educated men; their qualities of character – virtues and judgment – are sufficient to attract an effective and right-minded husband. And they’re rather good looking.

Okay Jane. Many thanks. That won’t be a problem.

Now fast forward to our own time, or at least to the era when I was coming of age. It was the Age of Conformity. “Feminism” was deemed a thing of the past. It had secured women the right to vote, to divorce, to own property in their own – not their husband’s – name. But now, as one young woman friend (I’ll call her Janene) said to me, over lunch at Schrafft’s, “we,” that is, women, had it all. At that time, Janene had a successful and well-respected psychiatrist husband, children, and a job with a well-known TV personality who dispensed advice to callers.

A few years later, the feminist wave broke over us all. My friend became one of its public pioneers, writing several books – the first on medical issues of special concern to women. While she was rising to prominence, her psychiatrist husband (whose office was in their apartment) had a woman patient whose “treatment” was becoming both audible and disturbing. The patient could be heard yelling, “Kill Janene!” What is more, while she was sounding off in this manner, another phase of the treatment seemed to involve the patient’s being brought to a sexual climax.

One of the things I regret (sort of) was that I let her down in one respect. When she implored me to come and give her my support while she listened to the tapes, I just couldn’t do it. 

     “I’m sorry, Janene, but I just can’t.”

I’m sorry I let her down, but still glad that I didn’t hear the tapes.

Much good came to women from the efforts of Second Wave Feminism. Janene gets credit for some of those good results. Many years (and two husbands) later, she and I met again for lunch at a New York restaurant.

      “Are you still looking for Mister Right?” she asked me.

I allowed as how I was.

     “If you find him,” Janene said, “I’ll believe in God.”

*. *. *

What do women want? Let’s make a short list of the basics.

(1.) Women want/need to attract. Is it biological? Social? Oh who cares! Let’s just mark it down as a datum.

(2.) Therefore, in normal circumstances, whatever women say, do, or express in gestures, they can’t – wholeheartedly and sincerely – want it to repel attraction. 

(3.) Women who attract bad guys are endangered. Therefore, contemporary women who go about unchaperoned can’t wear their vulnerability on their sleeves. You have to look tough enough to be safe, but not so tough as to discourage nice applicants.

(4.) Women, like men, desire to know. To know what? What life is about, the meaning or purpose of their own lives and those of others. So, is there a problem? Yes. Men can feel threatened if women appear to know more than they do in a given domain. There is more. Women have a shorter time allotment – time to be fertile and, in the ideal case, attract a protective partner – than men have. Female vulnerability is enacted in the sex act, where she must be – how shall I say this? – penetrable. The sex act is not an insult. But it does, in some measure, shape the story.

Partly as a result of Second Stage Feminism, a range of novel choices have opened up for women and for men. But there are still some constants, which haven’t changed all that much. (For the yes and the no, there is first Genesis 1:27-30, where “God created the human in … the image of God, male and female created he them.” But there is also Genesis 3:16, where “[to] the woman He said, ‘I will terribly sharpen your birth pangs, in pain shall you bear children. And for your man shall be your longing, and he shall rule over you.”)

We have new mythologies – chiefly that the sexes are alike in all the important, life-course defining ways. The new mythologies combine to obscure the real question, on which light still remains to be shined:

What do women really want?

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