The XX Factor: What women really think.

Susan Sontag on Female Desire

I read Susan Sontag's peculiar, amazing journals this weekend. (In the midst of lists of books she needs to read, from Brave New World to Oscar Wilde's De Profundis are resolutions to wash her hair at least "once every ten days.") But one passage from 1962 leapt out at me in connection to the discussion of female desire we had the other week:

Female sexuality: two types, the responder + the initiator. All sex is both active (having the dynamo inside oneself) + passive (surrendering).

Fear of what people will think—not the natural temperament—makes most women dependent on being desired before they can desire.

Sontag—at least in 1962—seems to agree with today's so-called "postfeminist" scientists that being desired is important to female sexuality. But here she believes it has to do with cultural, rather than biological, reasons.