We do not go to bed in simple pairs; even if we choose not to refer to them, we still drag there with us the cultural impedimenta of our social class, our parents’ lives, our bank balances, our sexual and emotional expectations, our whole biographies.

In these fictions, as in reality, it is usually the men who command the greater share of power—but in at least some of them, as in some lucky lives, romantic equality is so potent that it overcomes asymmetries in situation.

sexual taste is either always socially inflected (at least to some degree), or it never is. And if it always is, then there is no form of life that could insulate it from seepage.

The clash between gender essentialism and an insistence that sex is spiritual is only one stitch in a great tapestry of internal inconsistencies.

The mores that attend any social formation, be they patriarchal or utopian, are equally bound up with the formation and deformation of desire.

UNFORTUNATELY, WE GET matters backward. The logic of justice, proper to the political and economic domain, has infused the whole of contemporary existence. While economic disparities remain fundamentally intact, we insist on equality in love and art, on order and proportion in our minds and houses.

Regardless of how we came to want what we want, desire is desire is undeniable desire, beyond decency or discipline. Perhaps there is some reason we should not indulge it, but the reason is not that it is not “really” ours, much less that it is not “really” desire.

We are drawn toward a beautiful thing, as Weil says, “without knowing what to ask of it,” but wanting to ask something. Even when we have it, we continue to want it: “We do not desire anything else, we possess it, and yet we still desire something.

Louise Perry’s