"RT: This is such the Rorschach test, because for me what it hammers home, the masturbatory stuff, is that it’s not about sex or contact or the other person at all —
RD: It’s about power, right?
RT: And humiliation. All of the details of these stories, the ass-grabbing while a photograph is being taken or while your wife is right next to you. The brazenness of some of it. Stuff that you’re like, Okay, it doesn’t rationally comport with desire. It conveys that the thrill is not in the contact, but in getting away with domination or humiliation and thus affirming your power.
RD: I think women shouldn’t underestimate the extent to which male sexual desire is distinctive and strange and (to women) irrational-seeming.
Saying “It’s power, not sex” excludes too much.
RT: That some sex is about power?
RD: That it’s always about sex. It might be about power in 17 different ways … but there’s still sex there at the heart of it. The masturbation in the plant is just not the same thing as Harvey Weinstein humiliating a male assistant. There’s a sex thing at the bottom of almost every case where someone says, “It’s about power, not sex.”
RT: This may be splitting hairs. I’ve heard that from a lot of men over the past few weeks. But women are saying this is about power. And as the people who don’t have the power, it’s very clear that it’s about power. It suggests to me that maybe a male sexual brain understands sex to be about power to begin with —
RD: Or the male sexual brain understands power to be about sex, to be a means to sex. Like the line from Scarface, the Tony Montana line: “First you get the money, then you get the power, then you get the women.” That’s not every male sexual brain … but that is a very male sexual brain, a very male way to think."
This is a great conversation to read, two people being productive from very different perspectives on society.
(I just pulled a bit where there was a bunch of back and forth)
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