For what it's worth: Sex, Submission And 'Dark Desires'

Luisa Valenzuela is an important, post-boom South American avant-garde writer. Her books — Como en la guerra (1977) and Cambio de armas (1982) among them — take on patriarchy and politics. They challenge her native country Argentina's dirty past, the corruption and murderous policies of its former dictatorship. She wins awards, meets with critical success and is invited all over the world to teach and speak.

So why is she sitting in New York, unable to think about anything other than boys?

One day Valenzuela was looking through old notebooks and realized they were full of reflections about men. These diaries recorded nothing about art or philosophy or current events. They documented her encounters with men only. What, she wondered on page after page, were they thinking? Why weren't they calling her back? Why did this one stop interesting her just as he wanted to get serious? How pretty were another one's eyes? In Dark Desires and the Others, Valenzuela's new memoir/journal/confession, she works from these notebooks to inquire about a life lived with men, how she used them and they used her, and why they had such a pull on her life.

It's a little self-indulgent, perhaps, and rambling, too. But Dark Desires does rub up against an uncomfortable truth that began to emerge in the late 1970s and early 1980s, around the time her notebooks were originally written: Women were suddenly finding success in work and business, but were failing at love. Valenzuela could be a case study in Female Perversions, Louise Kaplan's groundbreaking Freudian study of this phenomenon. Women who felt powerful in their chosen professions were, in their love and sex lives, willfully subjugating themselves to their male partners.

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a bit like the Vatican and the Catholic church... full of little boy perversions Guilty