IT’S 2020, AND A TIDAL wave of anxiety
is washing over us. To divert from
his Senate impeachment trial, President
Trump authorized the assassination
of the second-most powerful person
in Iran, briefly leading our country
to the brink of war. Australia caught
fire, a casualty of a global climate
crisis that our government continues to
ignore. Facebook has responded to
a seasonal surge in political propaganda
metastasizing on its platform by
doing absolutely nothing. Harry and
Meghan quit the Firm. And drooling
bloviator Rudy Giuliani has a podcast.
Standing on the precipice of what
is surely the apocalypse, women have
decided it’s high time to say the
unsayable: In spite of everything, or
maybe because of it, they’re horny.
Publicly identifying oneself as
an aroused woman is having a moment.
Call it the hornissance. When Fleabag
creator and star Phoebe Waller-Bridge
hosted Saturday Night Live last fall,
she observed in her opening monologue
that “back in the day, horny women
were to be feared—and now they’re
given Emmys.” Her series, centered on
a depraved woman who frocked a
priest in season two, won six of them,
proving once and for all that horniness
trumps godliness. Waller-Bridge
continued her streak as our horny
emissary at the Golden Globes when
she thanked President Obama for
including Fleabag on his list of favorite
TV shows, adding with a cocked
brow, “as some of you may know, he’s
always been on mine.” Fans of the
show were in on the horny joke: In the
pilot of Fleabag, the title character
masturbates to Obama giving a speech
on YouTube.
At the beginning of Jenny Slate’s
Netflix comedy special, Stage Fright, the
comedian offers the following
disclaimer: “So let me give you some
good facts so that we can have an honest
relationship: I’m horny.” Allison P.
Davis, a writer for New York magazine,
posted a smoldering photo of Prince
on Twitter to announce her forthcoming
book, HORNY, in which she will explore
what she referred to as “one of the
last great taboos.” And the ultimate
arbiter of sexual desire, Jennifer Lopez,
recently told GQ magazine, “[a] lot
of things make me horny.”
Who’s allowed to be horny, publicly,
says a lot about where we are as a society
and where we are going. Men, for
example, have always been presumedhorny until proven otherwise. The
term itself, most likely a reference
to the shape of the phallus, was used
exclusively to describe men and
their sexual appetites for hundreds of
years. It wasn’t until sexologists
William Masters and Virginia Johnson
published Human Sexual Response in
1966 that female desire was identified
as an actual scientific phenomenon
that may possibly exist in the world.
That doesn’t mean it was celebrated.
Who can forget the scandal that
erupted 30 years ago when 2 Live Crew
released the hit song “Me So Horny,”
featuring an audio clip uttered by a
Vietnamese prostitute in Stanley
Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket? 2 Live Crew
was charged with obscenity, their
album was banned in Florida, and the
case eventually made its way to the
U.S. Supreme Court. The idea of a horny
woman was shocking and, at best,
cringeworthy, something to titter over
as Mike Myers’s Austin Powers posed his
catch question, “Do I make you horny,
baby?” The answer, at least on the part
of audiences, was an unequivocal
nope. Horniness was ridiculous, reserved
for a fictional man of mystery withMarilyn Minter’s Little Dipper (2009).Hot, but
NOT BOTHERED
Yeahhh, baby! Powerful
women are horny and proud
By Rachel Dodes
I
Vanities / State of Arousal