The Sex Nerd on

What Women Want

Emily Nagoski, Ph.D.
What Women Want 1: To Feel Good about Their Bodies ...........2
What Women Want 2: To Be Wanted ..........................................4
What Women Want 3: To Be Appreciated ..................................5
What Women Want 4: Not to Have to Worry about Everything 7
.
What Women Want 5: To Succumb ............................................8
What Women Want 6: Making It Easier for Your Partner (a
digression) ...................................................................................10
What Women Want 7: To Know You Thought about Her When
She Wasnt There .......................................................................12
What Women Want 8: To Get LAID .........................................13
What Women Want 9: Leave That Clit Alone! ..........................14
What Women Want 10: London Edition ..................................15

What Women Want 1: To Feel

Good about Their Bodies
Thanks to Brodys useful comment, Ive decided to spend a bunch of time focused on helping
men understand women.
We are, its true, a complex stew of contradictory feelings and ideas. We are mysterious and
sometimes demanding. But were AMAZING and totally worth the effort!
So each one of these will identify something that women want, and offer some ideas about
how to give it to them.
First thing women want: Women want to feel good about their bodies.
But its really, really, really, really, really, really difficult in the face of multiple generations of
pressure from the media to be thin, young, and beautiful or be worthless.
Easy! you think to yourself. I can compliment her!
So let me tell you this story. A couple weeks ago I met up with a friend and his buddy at a bar.
The buddy call him Ulrich seemed nice enough, kind of arrogant, but fine. My friend went
off to get another drink, leaving me and Ulrich to chat about the Olympics, which were on TV.
So Im vaguely watching the race and blathering on about how Ive had a maternal sort of
affection for Apollo Anton Ono ever since he sambaed to I Like to Move It on Dancing with
the Stars. We start talking about attractiveness and symmetricality (I swear he brought it up, not
me!) and he goes:
HIM: Youre a very attractive woman.
ME: (eyes dart from race to Ulrich and back) Uh. Thanks.
HIM: You are. Its not a compliment, its just a fact.
ME: (eyes now glued avoidantly on race) Uh thank you.
And heres what that conversation sounded like in my head:
HIM: Ive assessed your physical appearance and judged it to meet or exceed my minimum
standards.
ME: Um, ew. I have a brain and a life.
HIM: Im interested in your body. Id like you to think about me in terms of how I might
interact with your body.

ME: Um, Double ew! I have a brain, a life, AND standards. Fuck off forever!
The moral of the story here is that if you talk to a woman about her physical appearance, it
will seem like that (and only that) is whats important to you. She will feel like an object, like a
nice table lamp youre considering taking home and incorporating into your decor.
If you actually like the girl and want to get to know her better (or even if you just want a fair
shot at taking her to bed), dont compliment her appearance.
How on earth, you ask, are you supposed to help a woman feel good about her body, which is
where this all started? And fair enough if you cant TELL a woman you think she looks great,
what are you supposed to do? Well.
Step 1. Actually be attracted to her. If you cant do this, skip the rest of this post and go read
some feminist critiques of the media.
Step 2. (the hard part) Memorize this idea: Her body is the home of the person. She lives in it
every day, experiences emotions through it, has ideas in it, makes jokes with and about it. Her
body is her personhood and it belongs entirely to her; it is a gift she got for being born, as yours is
a gift to you, and folks get to decide when and where theyre interested in sharing these gifts.
Shes much more likely to decide to share if she believes youll appreciate it as the literal
embodiment of her personhood even if she has a hard time appreciating that fact herself. Her
body is? The home of the person, thats right.
Step 3. (The easy part) When she says, Oh I hate my belly, you say, I love it. When she
says, My boobs are too big/small/saggy/pointy/high/low/whatever, you say, I love them.
When she says, My thighs are huge and gross, you say, I love your thighs. Got it? And why
do you love them? Because her body, all those parts she criticizes, are HER. Again, the key is
being attracted to her as a person, and being honest about that. (Dont YOU buy into the media
myths about dangerously thin mid-adolescents as the height of attractiveness!!)
Remember, there is virtually no body party a woman cant feel self-conscious about. Facial
features, hands, feet, fingers, knees, calves, and triceps are as hateable as boobs, bellies, butts,
thighs, and genitals. She can hate anything and everything about herself. Have patience with her;
billions of dollars are spent annually to remind her that shes ugly and that her ugliness makes
her fundamentally unlovable; shes swimming upstream.
Also remember that nothing you say or do will take away the decades of voices telling her
how flawed she is. Its not your job to undo all that tangled knot of nonsense; your job is simply
not to contribute. You can be a supportive mirror (as opposed to the funhouse mirror of the
media), showing her the beauty you see, and gradually your vision, along with her own personal
growth, will countervail the cultural messages.
Eventually.
And finally, the answer all men seem to need. The only correct answer to, Do I look fat in
this? is:

Youre beautiful.
Not You look beautiful or Its fine, but You are beautiful. Got it? Okay.
Making the world a better place for women, one blog post at a time.

What Women Want 2: To Be

Wanted
Were looking at What Women Want Wednesday again. This is the second in the I-dontknow-how-many-parts series. This week women want
to be wanted.
I mean waaaaaanted.
Without that feeling of being wanted well, its awful to feel that your partner is only
interested in sex generically and that youre just the most readily available, adequate source of
this high-demand, low-supply commodity.
I want to get laid, and youre here, she can hear you think as you inattentively huff your
way toward the inevitable sweaty disappointment that is post-coitus with you.
I mean.
She wants you to be obsessed by the memory of the smell of her skin. She wants you to feel a
hard jolt of longing when she enters a room, a physical reaction that locks your eyes on her and
only her. She wants you to want her. Her.
Read a romance novel any one will do, theyre all the same and youll find that the hero is
utterly besotted with the heroine, however unwillingly, and simply cant get her out of his
thoughts. He wants her. First he wants to fuck her, then he wants to be near her, and then he
wants never to be away from her.
Dont take this the wrong way. Women decidedly do not want to be viewed as objects of
sexual gratification, not just as bodies. but we might want to be viewed, outside the cold light of
the politics of gender, as objects of sexual worship, as divine entities in physical form.
Think reverence. Think supplicant. Think vespers.
And then think tangible lovely round body of divinity in the bed, holy fucking fuck, how did
you get so lucky?
She, this one, this one you get to live with or sleep with or be with, this one is SPECIAL.
Glorious. You want her not as you want, say, a car or a TV or a promotion, but as you want as

you want to know the answers, as you want to feel at home, as you want to see your love reflected
back at you from the eyes of another. She has the answers, she is your home, and she will show
you the love that sustains you.
She wants to feel wanted not for her body, but for her, uniquely.
One blog post at time, folks.
Making the world a better place for women is a long, steady slog.
Confidence, joy, and lube.

What Women Want 3: To Be

Appreciated
Once again, the continuing series on What Women Want. This week begins a 3-part
sequence of interrelated things: (1) to be appreciated; (2) not to have to worry about stuff; and (3)
to succumb.
It turned into a three part sequence because I started writing the succumb one and realized it
needed to have worry explicated, and when I started to write the worry one I realized that it
needed appreciation explicated. (Must write book)
So here we go. Women want
to be appreciated.
Ive mentioned appreciation before, but let me be more explicit. There are two functional
definitions of appreciation, roughly categorized by my friend Steve (hereafter known, by his
request, as Her Indoors from the long-running British TV show Minder) as the British
sense and the American sense.
The American sense of to appreciate is to express a positive assessment of and gratitude for
something. You appreciate a favor someone does you or a gift someone gives you or a
compliment someone offers. Thanks, I appreciate that! you say, meaning, Im grateful to you.
This thing you contribute to my life is valuable and Im glad youre willing to provide it.
The British sense of to appreciate is to express a sensitive awareness and understanding of
something. You appreciate the subtle complexities of a fine wine or a work of art or a policy
decision or, indeed, a woman. You Get It, deeply and thoroughly.
When I say, women want appreciation, I mean both of these things at the same time
though I expect that for non-women, the British sense is harder to achieve than the American
sense.

American appreciation merely requires increasing the volume in your mind on the stuff a
woman does, says, is, or gives that makes you happy, and then saying it out loud. You cooked
dinner! This is great! Thanks! or Youre beautiful! or Youre completely right about that, I
never thought about it that way before!
British appreciation requires actually understanding her, which is hard because women are
governed by rules more intricate than the if-then conditionals that describe the behavior of
simpler animals.
Think about it this way: If hungry, then eat, you might think. But no. If youre a woman in
the western industrialized C21st, its more like If hungry, then, mediated by body image,
availability of appetitive food relative to nutritive food, social acceptability of being seen to
consume food in any given setting, guilt, shame, mood, hormones, etc etc etc eat.
Dig?
Okay.
Women want to be appreciated. Since its fairly simple to give American appreciation, start
there. Add on British appreciation over time, as you get to know her gradually.
Men are (apologies for the generalizations, as always) at a disadvantage because it is in the
nature of a womans complexity to allow her greater subtly of empathy. Its not your fault our
culture failed to teach you better; many of you have awesome empathy, and you guys are
particularly amazing, because often you had to learn it in a cultural context that did not support
you. YOU GO. Many men, with their clunky emotional imprecision, will only get really good at
British appreciation when they use a womanly exactitude of compassionate understanding.
To that end, I offer you three strategies for increasing British appreciation:
1. Be affectionately curious. When something about her behavior surprises or confuses you,
offer American appreciation (this requires that you really do love and value this about her) and
then ask her to help you understand what went into her choice. Increasing your awareness of
what its like to be her requires getting information from her.
2. Catch yourself using mens behavior as a template for a womans. Its different for girls. We
are a stew of hormones, emotions, judgments, ideas, hopes, and fears that have little to do with
the internal lives of men. If you find yourself thinking, Why cant she just do it the way I
would? its time to reframe. Think instead, What stops me from doing it the way she does?
Why cant a woman be like a man? asked Henry Higgins. Its because theyre not men
and its not like men are any kind of standard. They were in charge for ages and look at the mess
they made (she said more flippantly than she can justify, but just take it as rhetorical shorthand,
please). Which brings me to the third strategy
3. Look for what you can learn from her. The delicate web of interconnectivity in the life of a
woman has a lot going for it, compared with the robust simplicity of men. (I know its not that
simple a divide, but it helps to clarify the point.) Robust simplicity can too easily result in rigidity

and limited power. Like a bicycle with only 1 gear, there may be fewer parts to break and it may
require less maintenance, but when youre faced with a mountain or a steep decline, 24 gears, for
all their fiddliness, are a welcome help. Women are made for all terrains. Learning to be more
like a woman and youll learn to appreciate, in the British sense, what being a woman is like.
And when you appreciate that, and express that appreciation, shell feel good, your
relationship will be better, youll get more and better sex, and then, you know, world peace
happens. And Im only exaggerating a little.
With apologies for the gender binaries and gross generalizations,
e

What Women Want 4: Not to

Have to Worry about
Everything
And here we have edition 4 of the ongoing series on what women want. This week, women
want
not to have to worry about everything.
Look, sometimes the sexiest thing you can do is the dishes.
Remember how women are more characterized by responsive desire than spontaneous
desire? That is, they are less likely to think, randomly, Hey, sex would be good right now! and
more likely to experience their partner kissin on em and go, Oh yeah, sex! Thats a good idea!
And remember how the sexual response system is made of both the sexual excitation system
(SES) and the sexual inhibition system (SIS) that is, the gas and the brakes?
Your job, if you want your ladys every bone to deliquesce at the touch of your hand on the
back of her neck (and thats a very good goal to have, I approve of you for having it) is to remove
every possible thing that might keep her brakes on.
Turn off the offs.
The offs are all the things she worries about the bills, the kids, the dishes, the vacuuming,
her stress about work, her stress about her body, her stress about you and the relationship
There are some things you cant control, obviously e.g., her phase in her cycle, the insanity of

other people in her life, the economy, the perpetual decline in the quality of writing on House,
but the things that you can control, you should. These tend to be small, relatively painless
things like cleaning the bathtub or doing the laundry or taking out the trash, those little hassles
that accumulate in a womans mind and push sex further and further down the list of things to
do.
For a lot of women that seeing their partner engaged in loving, supportive participation in
managing the bullshit of life, like dishes and laundry and bathing the kids, helps to turn off the
offs, which gives the ons an opportunity to have their wicked way.
Which you want. You want the ons to have their wicked way. So do the fucking dishes.
It might be less obvious tasks. For me, answering the door when the pizza guys comes is
fraught with dread and anxiety; I dont know why, Im an introverted freak, I guess. But if
someone is ready and willing uncomplainingly to answer the door, he wins a non-stop ticket to a
high quality blowjob.
You may see now why the appreciation post had to come first. Understanding which little
hassles put on her sexual brakes will let you determine which things to help her not worry about.
Warning: you might easily ruin all your efforts by asking for appreciation for what youve
done Did you see I did the dishes? I got the pizza, so you didnt have to. Did you notice?
Resist this urge. In fact, when you feel this urge, do the opposite: GIVE HER appreciation.
And of course all of this is preparation for next weeks w.w.w. post, about how women want to
succumb. Stay tuned.

What Women Want 5: To

Succumb
Part 5 in the weekly, indefinite series about what women want. This week, women want
to succumb.
I searched hard for that verb. It means to yield to superior strength or force or overpowering
appeal or desire. Other verbs I considered: submit, acquiesce, yield, relent, let go, surrender,
capitulate, accede, relinquish or abandon control, be controlled, be dominated none of those
quite express what happens in this tricky little dynamic.
First, you must appreciate her, then you must remove things for her to worry about, and then
you must provide a force to which she cant help but succumb.

I worry whenever I talk about this that people will get it horribly wrong and think that I mean
women want to be controlled and dominated by whatever alpha male has the incapacity for
empathy to do what he likes without reference to her feelings. That is emphatically not what I
mean.
Here, essentially, is how it works:
Women spend a lot of time having to be rational and responsible. Culturally, men are given a
lot of permission to be irresponsible, to pursue sex even when its inappropriate, and women are
supposed to be the gatekeepers; women who fail to keep their gates, or who indeed pursue sex
rather than wait to be pursued, are condemned as irredeemable sluts. Reputation is a big deal for
a lot of women.
(This varies of course during WWII, many British women were impregnated by American
soldiers because in America women were the gatekeepers and stopped the guy from going too far,
whereas in Britain the men would be gentlemanly and stop themselves. So all these British
women were waiting for the guy to pull up his socks, as it were, and the American soldiers were
waiting for British women to stop them which they didnt.)
So culturally theres a great deal of pressure for a woman to resist. Biologically there are
additional reasons; apart from the metabolic mortgage that is pregnancy, a woman has twice the
risk of infection from penile-vaginal intercourse as a man. Also, with our different oxytocin
receptor systems, women might be more prone to attaching emotionally to a sex partner. Sex is
riskier for women physically, reproductively, socially, and psychologically. So many reasons to say,
No.
Under conditions of great ideally, absolute trust, women want all those reasons to shrink
into insignificance in the face of your overwhelming, passionate, barely restrained need for her.
Your job is to flood her reason, to provide so much evidence that you want her, that all her
ideas about resisting are washed away. She should feel drowned in desire, incapable of rational
thought.
Yanking off her clothes impatiently, pulling her hair, pinning her to the wall or the bed,
turning her over bodily, scraping your teeth on her lips, these are all valuable forms of physical
control and force that you can play with.
Moreover, the judicious combination of force and gentleness is particularly effective. Pin her
to the bed and then kiss her very softly. Grip her hair hard and then lightly breathe along the line
of her neck.
Because with every display of force and control you provide, shes asking herself, Can I trust
this person? Am I safe? The gentleness lets her answer, Yes, Im safe. I can let go. And then
another bit of force, another bit of control lost, and she asks herself, Can I trust this person? Am
I safe? A little more gentleness, and she can answer, Yes, Im safe. I can let go.

She wants to let go. She wants to succumb. Take her. Prove that she can trust you, prove that
she can grant you access to all of her, absolutely, and that youll reward that trust with complete,
utter pleasure and affection and love.

What Women Want 6: Making

It Easier for Your Partner (a
digression)
Dear Women,
We can make our partners lives a little easier by meeting them halfway on some of this. To
that end, I want to spend just one post dispensing some homespun advice about, you know, how
to be happy and stuff. Maybe none of this will be new to you, but we can all use occasional
reminders about how to be a person in a world that dismisses personhood.
So.
Stop, just stop, reading the mainstream glossy magazines, whose primary function in the
world is to make you feel bad about yourself so that you buy the stuff their advertisers paid them
to advertise. Im absolutely certain that the reason they still feature dangerously thin, heavily
photoshopped women is NOT that women wont buy magazines with healthy-sized, realistic
women on them (I think thats the opposite of true) but rather that their advertisers insist they
present a dangerous and unachievable image of women so that we feel a need to buy their
products because were so deeply flawed and disgusting.
So just stop. Just dont buy that shit unless theres someone healthy and natural on the cover.
Buy Bust Magazine or similar instead.
Also, only watch music videos and awards shows etc with a highly critical eye, recognizing the
extent to which the images are designed to destroy womens power, by making us small, fragile,
incurious, anti-intellectual sexual objects or cold, sexless, neurotic brain-boxes or shrews. Eschew
Lady Gaga, for example, who is bad for all women everywhere. (Many people disagree with me
about that last bit. Fuck em, I know when Im right. Usually.)
Value your sexuality as it is, not as someone tells you it should be. Women vary from each
other tremendously, so hearing about other womens experiences will only tell you how varied we
are, not what normal is. There is no normal. There is only healthy, and healthy just means
consent and satisfaction. Youre free to explore your sexuality, to play with it, to try stuff and not

judge the outcome. If something isnt right, let it go and move on to the next thing. If something
is right, remember it for next time!
Practice living inside your body. Your body is the one and only thing youre guaranteed to
have your whole life. Its your home for the duration of your stay on Earth. Unlike what both
traditional religion and new agey nonsense would have you believe, there is no mind-body
connection that phrase implies there are three things: a mind, a body, and something that
connects them. Thats all wrong. Theres just one thing, there is only the embodied mind. Living
inside your body is merely the practice of living inside yourself. Which is good for you, I promise.
And finally, listen to your instincts. Tuning out pop culture and living inside your body will
make this a lot easier because youre quieting the extraneous noise and attending to your own
inner life. The quiet voice inside you, the voice under the fear and panic, under the learned selfdoubt and the need to be right, under the need to be good, the need to be in control, under all
those defenses, youll find your core voice, speaking truth to you, quietly, steadily, if only you
listen.
I hate it when I get preachy and god knows Im no ideal role model. I pout at my fat in the
mirror some mornings. Sometimes I try to give other people what they want even if it means
ignoring my own needs and desires. Worst of all, I put up barriers between me and the world for
fear that someone will discover that I am as flawed as everyone else. As if the barriers themselves
werent a dead giveaway. I know. But I need the reminders as much as anyone else does, and so
periodically I preach.
But maybe if we all picked one of these things to practice for just a month or just a week or
just one day, maybe we could contribute a little bit to making the world a saner, safer, sexier, more
beautiful world.
I pick living inside my body. Maybe just for today, or maybe into tomorrow. Well see how we
go. You wanna pick something?
(Guys can try some of these things too; its not just chicks who benefit from being people
rather than consumers and sex objects.)

What Women Want 7: To

Know You Thought about Her
When She Wasnt There
What do women want, you ask?
They want to know that you thought about them when they werent there.
You do think about her when she isnt there, right? Then this shouldnt be too difficult for
you. If you dont well I just have no response to that. I have a hard time getting inside the head
of someone who doesnt think about the person theyre partnered with.
Anyway.
Its what giving flowers is really about. What flowers you bring almost doesnt matter; what
matters is that it occurred to you to do something for her (a) without her asking and (b) when she
wasnt right there in front of you. Both of these conditions are important.
(a) Without her asking. You know her well enough to predict what might make her happy. You
listened and remembered when she mentioned something she likes. You know what sort of thing
might give her pleasure, and furthermore her pleasure is important enough to you to go a little
bit out of your way. We like that.
(b) She wasnt right there. Shes part of your internal experience; you carry her in your heart
all the time. Showing her that this is true is a good thing to do.
CAVEAT: There is a circumstance where the specific flowers can earn you bonus points. If
she has mentioned in the past that a particular flower is her favorite, you should get her that. (I
think it is okay to say, I remember you said they were your favorite if she doesnt spontaneously
mention it.)
It doesnt have to be flowers, of course you dont even have to bring anything at all. You
could just say, I was at place X and saw thing Y and it made me think of you. Technology can
be helpful here too have a camera on your phone? Take a picture of thing Y to show her or
email her. Or if shes got something important happening in the morning, give her a call in the
afternoon to ask how it went.
So what Im saying is: provide evidence that you thought about her when she wasnt there.
Chicks dig it.

What Women Want 8: To Get

LAID
This week on What Women Want:
to get LAID.
Ive never been male-bodied so I cant say this for sure, but Im fairly convinced that the
female experience of just wanting some damn sex is not very different from the males. A little
different. Not very.
There are times when everyone really wants to be held, right? and made to feel supported
and safe? And maybe its easy to assume that thats what women want, because its a comfortable,
gendered thought. And it certainly can be true.
But dude, there are times when a woman (or anyone) really just wants the weight of another
body in the bed and hands on her skin and someone elses sweat commingling with her own and
teeth abrading her lips and someone elses genitals pressed hard against hers.
There are times, in short, when shes thinking, Just FUCK ME already! and a fucks
aerobic effortfulness is a better assessment of its quality than the luuuuurve she feels.
Dudes who are reading this: you cant just think, Yay! Thats an experience I can completely
and immediately relate to! I think the experience of just wanting to get laid is similar to mens,
but not identical.
Globally speaking, the who and the how of fucking are more crucial for women than for men.
(Nothing is ever that simple in real life context matters for men too, and not all women rely on
context. Were generalizing for simplicity.)
Want to create the right context? Then make it easy for her. She doesnt want to worry about
her body or your body or the relationship or all the other things she ought to be doing or what
anyone else might think about the fact that shes nekkid and bucking. Be trustworthy but
intense. Split a bottle of wine if you like, turn down the volume on your prefrontal cortexes.
It doesnt always have to be flowers and chocolates. Sometimes wed rather it were astroglide
and buttplugs.
Can ya deal with that?

What Women Want 9: Leave

That Clit Alone!
Women want
well, some of them want you to leave their clitorises WELL ALONE.
Have I mentioned lately that WOMEN VARY? One of the ways that women vary is in the
directness of clitoral stimulation that they enjoy/can tolerate.
Some women are enthusiastically pro-diddle they are strongly in favor of you planting a
fingertip lightly but firmly just south of the glans clitoris and bobbling it rapidly up and down.
Indeed, you may feel very pleased with yourself that youve found that a flicky tongue along the
clitoral shaft can get your gal to the heights of ecstasy very good, congratulations but if that
relationship ends and you find yourself with a new woman, you CANT assume that what
worked for Lady A will also work for Lady B. Lady B might HATE IT when you flick her clit.
Lady B may want you to leave the clit utterly alone and run your tongue in soft circles along her
left labium.
For women like Lady B, direct stimulation can be irritating or even painful. Direct stimulation
like that is way, way, way too much. You cant know until you get there (or until she tells you,
which is even better) whether or not shes a direct stimulation kind of gal.
One clit-related truth that is nearly universal (of course nothing is trulyuniversal among the
female-bodied) is that you must pre-heat the oven, as it were.
This one Monty Python got genuinely right:
Whats wrong with a kiss, boy? Why not start her off with a nice kiss? You dont have to go
leaping straight for the clitoris like a bull at a gate; give her a kiss, boy! Then: suck the nipple,
stroke the thigh, nibble the earlobe, knead the buttocks, and so on and so forth. So we have all
these possibilities before we STAMPEDE towards the clitoris, Watson.
All in aid of getting the vaginal juices flowing. (Except of course we all know by now that
just because a woman is well aroused doesnt mean shes necessarily well lubricated; and vice
versa.)
A decent rule of thumb is to begin peripherally, delicately, and slowly, and gradually work
your way closer to the clitoris, with increasing intensity and speed. Just HOW close, intense, and
fast will depend on the woman, and will vary greatly from woman to woman. You have to play
close attention to her arousal level and get all the feedback shes interested in giving you.

(This is a classic men-women difference. With guys again its not universally true, but its a
decent rule of thumb you can accost him after a shower and just put his whole, soft cock in
your mouth if you like; youll catch him off guard, but the penis doesnt need the warm-up act in
the way the clit does.)
Context, context, context. Create a sexy context first, then commune with the clitoris.

What Women Want 10:

London Edition
Im writing this in the crypt (technically The Cafe in the Crypt) of St Martin in the Fields, in
Trafalgar Square.
They have free wireless internet now, and a fancy glass elevator, two features they lacked
when I was here in 1994 half my life ago or a little more, but barely an eye blink to this C16th
cellar.
The reason Im blogging from this particular cafe, rather than any other of the myriad cafes
with free wireless in central London, is that on a gorgeous April day I came here with Winston
(the school trip chaperon) and Martin, who well Ill explain in a minute.
What women want, you see: they want or we want or I want special attention.
BACKSTORY: I was 15 when I first came to London a nerdy, hyper intellectual, socially
clueless maniac, devoted already to Monty Python, Douglas Adams, and Fry and Laurie. My
favorite English teacher led the trip during spring break, and I had saved up all year to pay for it.
On the first day, all of us students sat in the meeting room, giddy with jet lag, and Martin
came in. Our guide for the duration of the trip. I remember with crystalline clarity the moment
when he handed me my itinerary. He was tall 511, 6 with shoulder length curly black hair
in a ponytail at the nape of his neck, and he wore glasses and he radiated Smart and Curious.
His black wingtips had silver buckles instead of laces. I later learned that he was 24 and he had a
Masters degree from LSE.
In an instant, I stepped joyfully off a cliff and fell into the kind of obsessive, sustained crush
that can only be First Love.
It all could have faded very quickly, the short-lived passion of an intense and persistent
teenager.
But. Special attention, you see.
A few examples, not inclusive:

At Stratford, we saw a Shakespeare play (of course); there was typical teenager melodrama
about the tickets who wanted to sit next to whom etc but I just took my ticket and left
everyone to sort it out. I sat in my seat and waited for everyone to sort themselves out. I didnt
care who sat next to me.
Who do you think ended up with the seat next to mine?
Oh yes he did. And I felt soooo special. So favored.
The last night, I sat in the stairwell of the dormitory where we were staying, with Martin and
Kendra the Cheerleader. Pretty, privileged, popular Kendra, next to nerdy, poor, social bottom
feeder me. I was telling some story I totally forget what it was and Kendra interrupted me.
Told some story of her own. Martin let her finish and said, Oh, then turned to me and said,
You were saying?
Never, never, never before in my life had someone wanted to pay attention to me rather than
to the pretty girls, the popular girls, the girls who bought their clothes new at the mall, not
second-hand at the Goodwill, the girls who went to the ice rink, not the library. Never before had
I felt that kind of preferential attention. That moment lives with breathtaking vividness in my
memory, brings tears to my eyes even now, even here in the basement of a church, because of the
immeasurable gift of attention from a person I admired.
To any one reading this story for tips: note that it his attention was not unctuous or invasive.
He was not moving in on me, paying attention to me in order to get something from me. He just
seemed to think I was worth listening to. He took me seriously.
I can think of nothing sexier.
The next morning, the last morning, when I was standing in heart-broken misery at having to
leave, waiting for the bus to take us to the airport, he came over to me and gave me a Pogues
tape. We had talked about the Pogues and here he was giving me this thing, this goodbye present.
A gift. For me. He remembered what we had talked about, and wanted ME to have something. I
listed to that tape over and over and over again for a year.
I have no idea why all of that happened. But the special attention just HOOKED me.
Two years passed, during which time we wrote letters actual letters (I still have them
somewhere, I think) and gradually the crush morphed into a kind of neutered idolatry, without
lust or possessiveness, just a kind of adulatory hero-worship, divorced from romance.
And in 1996, I visited again. Another school trip.
My parents did not want me to meet up with Martin again, and neither did my teacher. She
didnt like him in retrospect I admit that if I were in charge of a weirdo 17 year old girl who
wanted to meet up with a 26 year old man, I would have a very great many reservations.
And that brings me to St Martin in the Fields. We sat in this cafe, Martin and me and
Winston the sturdily polite chaperon, and Martin showed us photos from his recent trip to Egypt.
We visited the British Museum too, and the National Gallery. It was all profoundly chaste,

intellectual, and restrained. Yet I remember it with the same glittering clarity because of the
delicious novelty of being attended to, being taken seriously. Being the focus of special attention.
We wrote letters for years, with decreasing frequency, and eventually transitioned into email.
Hes married and has a couple kids now. Ill bet hes a great dad.
When I teach about relationships, I say that from being attended to, being given attention, we
learn that we are worth being attended to. Its one of the gifts we give each other in relationships.
When children get it from their parents, they learn self-esteem its something Kendra and her
popular peers got plenty of, and I with my problematic older brothers, maybe got less of.
Special attention. Listening with interest. Taking her seriously. Its what she wants.