A precise reminder of the damage done by monomaniac ideological 'readings' of texts. (Inverted commas here because this isn't truly reading as such: it is more a combing for props to decorate a preconceived staging of personhood.)
Unfortunately, it seems likely The Atlantic will have turned more impressionable minds with their writer's stunted imagination than your piece can recalibrate. Thank you for publishing it, though.
Of all the words in the piece, I think 'fumble' is the operative verb - and not just in a 'back row seats in the cinema' sense. Because sexuality, and its discovery and expression, require a willingness to risk misunderstanding, act without certainty and accept oneself as radically vulnerable.
It cannot be reduced to a 'safe space' without being devalued to a brief, pneumatic, physical transaction. Quite joyless, more often than not.
There is no enchantment to be had in a forest cleared of emotional danger.
In this wonderful essay, so full of truth, beauty and insight, you boldly address the lie that men don’t really like women. This accomplishment truly qualifies you to be celebrated as one who brings good tidings, and proclaims peace.
Your vision, Marilyn, offers healing balm to the relationship at the center and origin of human civilization, the loving sexual relationship between man and woman. In both Latin and German the word for “savior” and “healer are the same word, and healing our contemporary understanding of this relationship is the necessary although not sufficient condition for saving civilization. You deserve to be saluted the way Nahum does in his prophetic verses.
I’d like to provide some context for the response of your “uncommonly honest male friend” to your question about how he felt when he looked at a beautiful image of a nude woman. In essence, he told you, “Precisely because they are so high, one wants to bring them low. Male sexuality is basically a form of slave morality, in which women are the oppressors . . .This is the deep mystery—why men are so enslaved to women, so keen to please them.” You wisely accept this stark Nietzschean testimony, but I’d like to highlight your own gloss, and then add an observation about the connection between the Nietzschean and Simonian perspectives.
You rightly declare women and their own powerful sexual nature to be “the inspiration and location for the masculine imagination”. You are so right, and what you have written is so true—and it is the essential context and explanation for your friend’s Nietzschean perspective.
Men are great idealists.
Men are also the greatest lovers of beauty: that’s why men have imagined cathedrals, sculpture, painting, music, poetry, literature, jewelry and all other forms of sensory beauty, invented the methodologies to reify their imaginative visions, and then devoted the resources and effort required to bring them into the world.
Above all, men adore beauty as revealed by a woman. We know we’re not beautiful (except, perhaps, for a few years during as teenagers, as the Greeks certainly believed) and as idealists we men adore—and can easily be brought to worship and idolize—beauty in the woman we love.
Men are idealists created to exalt women, and to be ready to lay our lives down for them. It’s the deepest and most authentic part of our nature. The song by Tal Bachman “She’s so High above Me” is a great popular expression of this truth.
So what about the “bringing down” part? Well, it’s related to the fact that—astonishingly, miraculously, incredibly—a beautiful woman is also capable, in the most intimate physical way, of providing a man with uniquely intense pleasure, satisfying emotional comfort, and the existential solace for the burden of being alive. How? By simply receiving him into herself. This is a truth I don’t think women really understand, or at least they haven’t grasped its importance.
One of the most basic aspects of feminism is resentment about how easily, naturally and effortlessly men experience pleasure during sexual intercourse. Physiologically, this is about the different distribution of nerves in the penis versus the vagina. Men feel intense pleasure through their penis, while a woman doesn’t have the nerves in her vagina to experience a comparable sensation. Accordingly, the common—and thoroughly understandable—reaction of a woman who has not been aroused to sexual intercourse is, “Is this all there is?”
Toni Bentley in her book “The Surrender” writes eloquently about her annoyance that men enjoy sexual intercourse while she herself feels bored and used. Feminism has blown up this up into a case for cosmic injustice and original fact proving the intractable structural exploitation of women by men. Quite apart from the fact that this asymmetry of sexual response between men and women can be easily and enjoyably addressed by a loving couple, feminists and the other women who use this physiological fact as the foundation for a vast social, political and cultural case for injustice are missing the vital and essential truth.
Imagine a woman in all her glory, say at a Viennese ball in the 19th century: magnificent ball room gown, gorgeous coiffure, eye-catching decolletage, shining jewelry, radiant face and graceful posture: the embodiment of a man’s imaginative ideal of beauty represented by a woman. Or—to take the opposite example—imagine a woman wearing a swimsuit or bikini, simply walking out of the ocean soaking wet, healthy, and happy—shining in the sunshine as she smiles, another masculine ideal of the beauty of a woman.
In both examples, the woman exudes beauty, power, glory—and completeness, independence, inaccessibility. A woman in the glory of her beauty is intimidating. But the miracle is that a woman has inside herself a place for a man, where he fits perfectly, and where he experiences intense pleasure and emotional satisfaction. Despite her external appearance, her beauty and grace for which men adore her, a woman is not necessarily independent in her solitude or forbidding because of her attracting but intimidating beauty; the miracle is that a woman was made for a man.
Sexual intercourse confirms for him, in the most physically delightful and emotionally comforting way imaginable, that he has been lovingly received by this woman on behalf of the universe—a universe which men so often experience as challenging and threatening. Through her love a woman shows her lover there is a place for him in life far better and more delightful than he could have imagined when he contemplated his lover’s beauty from afar, confirming his ideal. Her beauty is the messenger of truth: he is safe, accepted, loved—he is home.
This transition from firing the hearts of an idealistic man with her beauty to consoling her man with her receptive, loving, intimate embodiment can be considered “bringing her down”. In a sense, that’s what it is, but her descent to primal physicality is also simultaneously an ascent confirming his ideal—her beauty is the messenger of truth—because the woman intimately expresses to her lover all the love and goodness and peace of the universe.
The cosmic significance of a woman’s duality, between the glory of her beauty in public and her naked sexual power in private, is expressed in the lovely lines from Louis Armstrong’s song “What a Wonderful World”:
“The bright blessed day,
The dark sacred night.”
I hope this isn’t too eccentric or abstract.
Regardless of whether you agree with what I’ve written, your writings are doing so much to bring peace between men and women.
To illustrate what you’re achieving in your own published writing, here and elsewhere, I’m going to connects Nahum’s verses at the beginning of this comment with a passage from one of Paul’s epistles, and imitate the example of the Apostle Paul himself in his bold typological exegesis of the Torah, by applying his methodology to his letter to the Christian community in Ephesus.
In the second chapter of Ephesians, Paul writes about the two groups of Jews and non-Jews, to whom he significantly applies the frank fleshly reference to the penis, intact and with its foreskin removed, as the “circumcised” (Jewish) and the “uncircumcised” (non-Jewish). (This sign of God’s covenant with Abraham is a reminder of the existential significance of sex in the relationship between the divine and humanity).
I’ll re-imagine this Pauline passage as a description of men and women, and this to me is what you’re accomplishing in your writing by making yourself available, like Mary herself, to be the handmaiden of God in the reconciliation of humanity:
“For he is our peace; in his flesh he has made both groups into one and has broken down the dividing wall, that is, the hostility between us. He has abolished the law with its commandments and ordinances, that he might create in himself one new humanity in place of the two, thus making peace, and might reconcile both groups to God in one body through the cross, thus putting to death that hostility through it. So he came and proclaimed peace to you who were far off and peace to those who were near; for through him both of us have access in one Spirit to the Father.”
What a beautiful, thoughtful, and deeply flattering response, Chris. Thank you. You've gotten to the heart of my entire writing project: it is a woman's glory and delight to give herself to a man so that he may experience the fullness of himself, of his ideals and his reality at once. It is a gift that can only be given in love. A gift, as I've written elsewhere, befitting a queen. (https://marilynsimon.substack.com/p/on-kneeling-towards-a-philosophy)
It is for this reason that the sexual revolution has been self-defeating for women. The gift of oneself is no casual thing. The withdrawal this gift in favour of "equality" and "liberty" (as if there could be anything more liberal than an extravegent and generous giving of one's whole self) has made men more callous and resentful, hence the rise of the likes of Andrew Tate.
You confer an honour on me, Marilyn, that means more than a rave review in the New York Times, or winning a National Book Award (especially these days), by writing that I've gotten to the heart of your entire writing project.
I've waited this long to reply to your generous acknowledgement in order to set aside time to properly re-read the wonderful essay you published in March, which I re-read several times before writing my comments when you first published it.
Your essay was just the elixir I needed this weekend, and I'm making a note in my calendar to re-read it twice a year for the foreseeable future, as I do with a select few of the most excellent essays and books.
I set aside time to write you this weekend but coincidentally / synchronistically Rod Dreher published his Substack account of dinner with you and Matthew in Budapest, with long excerpts from the Matthew-inspired passages of Rod's own forthcoming book.
I hope your honeymoon trip through Central Europe is wonderful, and also provides some solace for not being able to visit your own ancestral homeland to the north, given the tragic war there.
Dear Marilyn, I wrote in my theological and philosophical journal about your article: This nature that Simon is talking about is that elementary dimension, which in reference to work and war Jünger talks about; work does not exclude this elementary dimension, even work with oneself; Prussian or bourgeois ethics say that it is possible to do this, but to me this does not seem true. We have to respect the other who has been given to us, even if her nature functions differently from ours (our behavior can be guided) ; we have to do work with her (the beloved woman) on this issue, but also with ourselves, tending to the fact that reason alone cannot control, at least in people who need it most, the sexual instinct itself, and I don't think it does any good to create guilt on this issue; we begin by confessing our guilt, our badness, but not starting from there
Outstanding piece. I'm both shocked and impressed which is no easy feat.
In my considerable experience talking with many women in situations where everyone is interacting in an unusually open, honest, and vulnerable way, I have yet to encounter a woman attempting to put herself in the shoes of a man and try to imagine the world as seen and experienced by man. As I typed that, it dawns on me that what I described sounds a lot like a description of empathy.
Anyway, I wish to add another piece to your literary collection on this topic. It smacked me in the head quite sharply when I read it decades ago.
(for context, both Hank and Dagny are wealthy, successful, intelligent, powerful, and very honorable people in the book)
-----
"Atlas Shrugged" by Ayn Rand - Hank Reardon to Dagny Taggert
“Haven’t I? – he thought. Haven’t I thought of it since the first time I saw you? Haven’t I thought of nothing else for two years? …He sat motionless, looking at her. He heard the words he had never allowed himself to form, the words he had felt, known, yet had not faced, had hoped to destroy by never letting them be said within his own mind.
Now it was as sudden and shocking as if he were saying it to her …Since the first time I saw you …Nothing but your body, that mouth of yours, and the way your eyes would look at me, if …Through every sentence I ever said to you, through every conference you thought so safe, through the importance of all the issues we discussed …You trusted me, didn’t you? To recognize your greatness? To think of you as you deserved – as if you were a man? …Don’t you suppose I know how much I’ve betrayed? The only bright encounter of my life – the only person I respected – the best business man I know – my ally – my partner in a desperate battle …The lowest of all desires – as my answer to the highest I’ve met …Do you know what I am? I thought of it, because it should have been unthinkable. For that degrading need, which would never touch you, I have never wanted anyone but you …I hadn’t known what it was like, to want it, until I saw you for the first time. I had thought : Not I, I couldn’t be broken by it …Since then …For two years …With not a moments respite …
Do you know what it’s like, to want it? Would you wish to hear what I thought when I looked at you …When I lay awake at night …When I hear your voice over a telephone wire …When I worked, but could not drive it away? …To bring you down to things you cant conceive – and to know that it’s I who have done it.
To reduce you to a body, to teach you an animal’s pleasure, to see you need it, to see you asking me for it, to see your wonderful spirit dependent on the upon the obscenity of your need. To watch you as you are, as you face the world with your clean, proud strength – then to see you, in my bed, submitting to any infamous whim I may devise, to any act which I’ll preform for the sole purpose of watching your dishonor and to which you’ll submit for the sake of an unspeakable sensation …I want you – and may I be damned for it!”
- Hank Reardon to Dagny Taggert "Atlas Shrugged" by Ayn Rand
----
Within that, we see can the underlying essence of the masculine and feminine power element that plays out in attraction, sex and desire.
He: If he can do sexually whatever he can imagine to a woman like her, his desire to see himself as an incredibly powerful or potent man is confirmed. He wants her so bad, he's willing to risk anything to have her, including his own financial future and his hard-earned reputation.
She: If a powerful man like him desires her that desperately, her power as a woman is confirmed. She now knows that this powerful man would do absolutely anything for her, from working 80 hrs a week up to and likely including sacrificing his own life for her.
Bewitched by her spell, he wants nothing more than to take her, own her, and possess her. She knows she can choose to play along with his fantasy and grant him that illusion, and that in exchange, he will do for her, whatever she wishes.
A precise reminder of the damage done by monomaniac ideological 'readings' of texts. (Inverted commas here because this isn't truly reading as such: it is more a combing for props to decorate a preconceived staging of personhood.)
Unfortunately, it seems likely The Atlantic will have turned more impressionable minds with their writer's stunted imagination than your piece can recalibrate. Thank you for publishing it, though.
Of all the words in the piece, I think 'fumble' is the operative verb - and not just in a 'back row seats in the cinema' sense. Because sexuality, and its discovery and expression, require a willingness to risk misunderstanding, act without certainty and accept oneself as radically vulnerable.
It cannot be reduced to a 'safe space' without being devalued to a brief, pneumatic, physical transaction. Quite joyless, more often than not.
There is no enchantment to be had in a forest cleared of emotional danger.
“Look! On the mountains the feet of one
who brings good tidings,
who proclaims peace!”
(Nahum 1:15)
In this wonderful essay, so full of truth, beauty and insight, you boldly address the lie that men don’t really like women. This accomplishment truly qualifies you to be celebrated as one who brings good tidings, and proclaims peace.
Your vision, Marilyn, offers healing balm to the relationship at the center and origin of human civilization, the loving sexual relationship between man and woman. In both Latin and German the word for “savior” and “healer are the same word, and healing our contemporary understanding of this relationship is the necessary although not sufficient condition for saving civilization. You deserve to be saluted the way Nahum does in his prophetic verses.
I’d like to provide some context for the response of your “uncommonly honest male friend” to your question about how he felt when he looked at a beautiful image of a nude woman. In essence, he told you, “Precisely because they are so high, one wants to bring them low. Male sexuality is basically a form of slave morality, in which women are the oppressors . . .This is the deep mystery—why men are so enslaved to women, so keen to please them.” You wisely accept this stark Nietzschean testimony, but I’d like to highlight your own gloss, and then add an observation about the connection between the Nietzschean and Simonian perspectives.
You rightly declare women and their own powerful sexual nature to be “the inspiration and location for the masculine imagination”. You are so right, and what you have written is so true—and it is the essential context and explanation for your friend’s Nietzschean perspective.
Men are great idealists.
Men are also the greatest lovers of beauty: that’s why men have imagined cathedrals, sculpture, painting, music, poetry, literature, jewelry and all other forms of sensory beauty, invented the methodologies to reify their imaginative visions, and then devoted the resources and effort required to bring them into the world.
Above all, men adore beauty as revealed by a woman. We know we’re not beautiful (except, perhaps, for a few years during as teenagers, as the Greeks certainly believed) and as idealists we men adore—and can easily be brought to worship and idolize—beauty in the woman we love.
Men are idealists created to exalt women, and to be ready to lay our lives down for them. It’s the deepest and most authentic part of our nature. The song by Tal Bachman “She’s so High above Me” is a great popular expression of this truth.
So what about the “bringing down” part? Well, it’s related to the fact that—astonishingly, miraculously, incredibly—a beautiful woman is also capable, in the most intimate physical way, of providing a man with uniquely intense pleasure, satisfying emotional comfort, and the existential solace for the burden of being alive. How? By simply receiving him into herself. This is a truth I don’t think women really understand, or at least they haven’t grasped its importance.
One of the most basic aspects of feminism is resentment about how easily, naturally and effortlessly men experience pleasure during sexual intercourse. Physiologically, this is about the different distribution of nerves in the penis versus the vagina. Men feel intense pleasure through their penis, while a woman doesn’t have the nerves in her vagina to experience a comparable sensation. Accordingly, the common—and thoroughly understandable—reaction of a woman who has not been aroused to sexual intercourse is, “Is this all there is?”
Toni Bentley in her book “The Surrender” writes eloquently about her annoyance that men enjoy sexual intercourse while she herself feels bored and used. Feminism has blown up this up into a case for cosmic injustice and original fact proving the intractable structural exploitation of women by men. Quite apart from the fact that this asymmetry of sexual response between men and women can be easily and enjoyably addressed by a loving couple, feminists and the other women who use this physiological fact as the foundation for a vast social, political and cultural case for injustice are missing the vital and essential truth.
Imagine a woman in all her glory, say at a Viennese ball in the 19th century: magnificent ball room gown, gorgeous coiffure, eye-catching decolletage, shining jewelry, radiant face and graceful posture: the embodiment of a man’s imaginative ideal of beauty represented by a woman. Or—to take the opposite example—imagine a woman wearing a swimsuit or bikini, simply walking out of the ocean soaking wet, healthy, and happy—shining in the sunshine as she smiles, another masculine ideal of the beauty of a woman.
In both examples, the woman exudes beauty, power, glory—and completeness, independence, inaccessibility. A woman in the glory of her beauty is intimidating. But the miracle is that a woman has inside herself a place for a man, where he fits perfectly, and where he experiences intense pleasure and emotional satisfaction. Despite her external appearance, her beauty and grace for which men adore her, a woman is not necessarily independent in her solitude or forbidding because of her attracting but intimidating beauty; the miracle is that a woman was made for a man.
Sexual intercourse confirms for him, in the most physically delightful and emotionally comforting way imaginable, that he has been lovingly received by this woman on behalf of the universe—a universe which men so often experience as challenging and threatening. Through her love a woman shows her lover there is a place for him in life far better and more delightful than he could have imagined when he contemplated his lover’s beauty from afar, confirming his ideal. Her beauty is the messenger of truth: he is safe, accepted, loved—he is home.
This transition from firing the hearts of an idealistic man with her beauty to consoling her man with her receptive, loving, intimate embodiment can be considered “bringing her down”. In a sense, that’s what it is, but her descent to primal physicality is also simultaneously an ascent confirming his ideal—her beauty is the messenger of truth—because the woman intimately expresses to her lover all the love and goodness and peace of the universe.
The cosmic significance of a woman’s duality, between the glory of her beauty in public and her naked sexual power in private, is expressed in the lovely lines from Louis Armstrong’s song “What a Wonderful World”:
“The bright blessed day,
The dark sacred night.”
I hope this isn’t too eccentric or abstract.
Regardless of whether you agree with what I’ve written, your writings are doing so much to bring peace between men and women.
To illustrate what you’re achieving in your own published writing, here and elsewhere, I’m going to connects Nahum’s verses at the beginning of this comment with a passage from one of Paul’s epistles, and imitate the example of the Apostle Paul himself in his bold typological exegesis of the Torah, by applying his methodology to his letter to the Christian community in Ephesus.
In the second chapter of Ephesians, Paul writes about the two groups of Jews and non-Jews, to whom he significantly applies the frank fleshly reference to the penis, intact and with its foreskin removed, as the “circumcised” (Jewish) and the “uncircumcised” (non-Jewish). (This sign of God’s covenant with Abraham is a reminder of the existential significance of sex in the relationship between the divine and humanity).
I’ll re-imagine this Pauline passage as a description of men and women, and this to me is what you’re accomplishing in your writing by making yourself available, like Mary herself, to be the handmaiden of God in the reconciliation of humanity:
“For he is our peace; in his flesh he has made both groups into one and has broken down the dividing wall, that is, the hostility between us. He has abolished the law with its commandments and ordinances, that he might create in himself one new humanity in place of the two, thus making peace, and might reconcile both groups to God in one body through the cross, thus putting to death that hostility through it. So he came and proclaimed peace to you who were far off and peace to those who were near; for through him both of us have access in one Spirit to the Father.”
Well done, Marilyn—and thank you.
What a beautiful, thoughtful, and deeply flattering response, Chris. Thank you. You've gotten to the heart of my entire writing project: it is a woman's glory and delight to give herself to a man so that he may experience the fullness of himself, of his ideals and his reality at once. It is a gift that can only be given in love. A gift, as I've written elsewhere, befitting a queen. (https://marilynsimon.substack.com/p/on-kneeling-towards-a-philosophy)
It is for this reason that the sexual revolution has been self-defeating for women. The gift of oneself is no casual thing. The withdrawal this gift in favour of "equality" and "liberty" (as if there could be anything more liberal than an extravegent and generous giving of one's whole self) has made men more callous and resentful, hence the rise of the likes of Andrew Tate.
Thank you again, Chris. I am humbled.
You confer an honour on me, Marilyn, that means more than a rave review in the New York Times, or winning a National Book Award (especially these days), by writing that I've gotten to the heart of your entire writing project.
I've waited this long to reply to your generous acknowledgement in order to set aside time to properly re-read the wonderful essay you published in March, which I re-read several times before writing my comments when you first published it.
Your essay was just the elixir I needed this weekend, and I'm making a note in my calendar to re-read it twice a year for the foreseeable future, as I do with a select few of the most excellent essays and books.
I set aside time to write you this weekend but coincidentally / synchronistically Rod Dreher published his Substack account of dinner with you and Matthew in Budapest, with long excerpts from the Matthew-inspired passages of Rod's own forthcoming book.
I hope your honeymoon trip through Central Europe is wonderful, and also provides some solace for not being able to visit your own ancestral homeland to the north, given the tragic war there.
Best wishes to you and Matthew on your travels!
Wow! A tour de force. Thank you, Chris. And thank you, Marilyn.
Thank you Matthew for your kind comment! I've just dared to speculate where I do not know in this comment about you . . . https://open.substack.com/pub/marilynsimon/p/it-is-not-good-that-man-should-be?r=exi3h&utm_campaign=comment-list-share-cta&utm_medium=web&comments=true&commentId=63939497
Dear Marilyn, I wrote in my theological and philosophical journal about your article: This nature that Simon is talking about is that elementary dimension, which in reference to work and war Jünger talks about; work does not exclude this elementary dimension, even work with oneself; Prussian or bourgeois ethics say that it is possible to do this, but to me this does not seem true. We have to respect the other who has been given to us, even if her nature functions differently from ours (our behavior can be guided) ; we have to do work with her (the beloved woman) on this issue, but also with ourselves, tending to the fact that reason alone cannot control, at least in people who need it most, the sexual instinct itself, and I don't think it does any good to create guilt on this issue; we begin by confessing our guilt, our badness, but not starting from there
Outstanding piece. I'm both shocked and impressed which is no easy feat.
In my considerable experience talking with many women in situations where everyone is interacting in an unusually open, honest, and vulnerable way, I have yet to encounter a woman attempting to put herself in the shoes of a man and try to imagine the world as seen and experienced by man. As I typed that, it dawns on me that what I described sounds a lot like a description of empathy.
Anyway, I wish to add another piece to your literary collection on this topic. It smacked me in the head quite sharply when I read it decades ago.
(for context, both Hank and Dagny are wealthy, successful, intelligent, powerful, and very honorable people in the book)
-----
"Atlas Shrugged" by Ayn Rand - Hank Reardon to Dagny Taggert
“Haven’t I? – he thought. Haven’t I thought of it since the first time I saw you? Haven’t I thought of nothing else for two years? …He sat motionless, looking at her. He heard the words he had never allowed himself to form, the words he had felt, known, yet had not faced, had hoped to destroy by never letting them be said within his own mind.
Now it was as sudden and shocking as if he were saying it to her …Since the first time I saw you …Nothing but your body, that mouth of yours, and the way your eyes would look at me, if …Through every sentence I ever said to you, through every conference you thought so safe, through the importance of all the issues we discussed …You trusted me, didn’t you? To recognize your greatness? To think of you as you deserved – as if you were a man? …Don’t you suppose I know how much I’ve betrayed? The only bright encounter of my life – the only person I respected – the best business man I know – my ally – my partner in a desperate battle …The lowest of all desires – as my answer to the highest I’ve met …Do you know what I am? I thought of it, because it should have been unthinkable. For that degrading need, which would never touch you, I have never wanted anyone but you …I hadn’t known what it was like, to want it, until I saw you for the first time. I had thought : Not I, I couldn’t be broken by it …Since then …For two years …With not a moments respite …
Do you know what it’s like, to want it? Would you wish to hear what I thought when I looked at you …When I lay awake at night …When I hear your voice over a telephone wire …When I worked, but could not drive it away? …To bring you down to things you cant conceive – and to know that it’s I who have done it.
To reduce you to a body, to teach you an animal’s pleasure, to see you need it, to see you asking me for it, to see your wonderful spirit dependent on the upon the obscenity of your need. To watch you as you are, as you face the world with your clean, proud strength – then to see you, in my bed, submitting to any infamous whim I may devise, to any act which I’ll preform for the sole purpose of watching your dishonor and to which you’ll submit for the sake of an unspeakable sensation …I want you – and may I be damned for it!”
- Hank Reardon to Dagny Taggert "Atlas Shrugged" by Ayn Rand
----
Within that, we see can the underlying essence of the masculine and feminine power element that plays out in attraction, sex and desire.
He: If he can do sexually whatever he can imagine to a woman like her, his desire to see himself as an incredibly powerful or potent man is confirmed. He wants her so bad, he's willing to risk anything to have her, including his own financial future and his hard-earned reputation.
She: If a powerful man like him desires her that desperately, her power as a woman is confirmed. She now knows that this powerful man would do absolutely anything for her, from working 80 hrs a week up to and likely including sacrificing his own life for her.
Bewitched by her spell, he wants nothing more than to take her, own her, and possess her. She knows she can choose to play along with his fantasy and grant him that illusion, and that in exchange, he will do for her, whatever she wishes.