Essay: The Ultimate Turn-On

If

feminism was the fight for equality, did the partial victory prove worth the burning battle? The pursuit of parity makes sense only if it is a step up, not down. The quest for the Holy Groin, as it might have been called, is now superseded by the more fundamental question, "Do Women Need Men?" Or are homo saps of the male chromosomal make-up just devices like the dew claw on the dog, something evolution is shucking off?

Henry Higgins moaned in My Fair Lady, "Why can't a woman be more like a man?" Today, the question is, "Why the heck would she want to be?" Men perpetrate almost all the world's mayhem, dig and fill its mass graves, dominate 90-something percent of the drug trade, sex tourism, child molesting, domestic and racial violence, alcoholism statistics, white collar crime. This destructiveness is not new, but now two of the hooks upon which fellows have been hanging the arguments for continuance — procreation and physical pleasure — are also going the way of Humpty Dumpty.

When not killing, raping or pillaging, men have traditionally lain down with women to fertilize eggs. Today, in-vitro unions via withdrawals from well-stocked banks of iced sperm are breaking up that monopoly. The deciphering of dna and the specter of prêt-à-porter people from laboratories is also making the reproduction defense a 10-kg anchor on a supertanker.

Ah, but what about the ineffable joy of sex? Those super-sensitive chaps with a knowledge of foreplay verging on the forensic must be thin on the ground — a recent British survey showed that nearly 80% of women are more interested in their diet than their sex life. But when heterosexual women do turn their thoughts from the fridge to the bed, neither man nor masturbation is going to be a prerequisite much longer. There have been several reports lately of what might be called immaculate orgasms. The weekly New Scientist recently cited a discovery by Stuart Meloy, a U.S. surgeon. Meloy was putting electrodes in a woman's spine to switch off pain signals in nerves, with the patient awake to help him locate the right spots. "I was placing the electrodes and suddenly the woman started exclaiming emphatically," said Meloy. "I asked her what was up. She said, 'You're going to have to teach my husband to do that!'"

Later this year trials are expected to begin on a device — smaller than a cigarette pack — designed to produce this effect on demand. For those of my gender now sniveling, shriveling and about to book in for a sex change: wait! Let's read behind the headlines here. The lady didn't say, "You're going to have to patent a gadget to do that." No, she thought at once of her good old husband and maybe raising his game a little.

What is corrupting the do-women-need-men? debate is that third word. Need is best reserved for talk of survival, to denote imperatives like food, shelter and warmth. In couples, need easily corrodes into demand. It acts as a beta-blocker to want, enjoy, share, like, love. If you ask whether women want men, the answer, statistically at least, remains a resounding yes. Despite men's abominable behavior, there are few signs of a general exodus to Lesbos or to living solo, worthy of consideration though both options may be.

American singer Leonard Cohen once spent a few hours on an unmade hotel bed with a fellow musician. In an explicit song about their romp — clearly punctuated by some of Dr. Meloy's "emphatic exclamations" — Cohen doesn't name the woman, but there are several clues that she was the late great Janis Joplin. Cohen quotes her as saying that she preferred handsome men, but in his case would make an exception. What most impressed him about her was that throughout her short life she shunned those handcuff words, "I need you/I don't need you." That way lie the minefields of debt, obligation, imposition, begging, rejection.

What would also help to defuse the who-needs-whom debate would be a male movement — masculism? — in which all men of non-Taliban persuasion would strive to emulate that half of the race which is typically gentler, kinder, less overbearing. Non-firebreathing feminists would surely support such a campaign, even though nervous good ol' boys among men have already bent New Sensitive Man into a put-down.

It would be a long battle against inbred, Hollywood-fed macho traditions and the fallout from TMT, Too Much Testosterone. But even a partial victory, even the possibility of imagining that pompous old goat Henry Higgins inverting his sexist question, now that might really turn women on. More than any electrode.