Our Greatest Need: What Is It?

What Do Women's Magazines Encourage Women to Need?

Women's magazines are filled with things they say women need—a fit body, good sex, the latest styles, various techniques on how to get a man or a job, how to have marriage succeed. But they encourage the very thing that women have been doing for centuries which is completely against our largest need—contempt, for men and for the world.

Aesthetic Realism explains that the greatest need of women in love is to have good will, which Mr. Siegel said is, "the desire to have some one else stronger and more beautiful for this desire makes oneself stronger and more beautiful. How different this is from what is advised in an article in an issue of Mademoiselle, titled, "Want to Sweep Him off His Feet? Get Inside His Head" by Colin McEnroe.

The article says what a woman needs is to get a man to love her utterly, and to do this she needs to find his "secret self" and encourage it to come out. There are these sentences:

What we're talking about is considerably more profound and powerful than mere flattery, or endorsing somebody's choice of hobby. And we're certainly not talking about molding somebody into your vision of what they are. No, this is more about opening doors. This one leads to him on a sailboat. That one leads to him reading at a poetry slam. This one leads to him as a passionate cook...It's not your job to make him walk through. It's enough to show him the door exists.

Under the guise of encouraging a man to express himself—it is really patronizing as hell and all for one purpose—to get a man to adore you exclusively. The article continues: "The thing you want to do is put yourself in the picture," and says that a woman needs to "water the part of the guy that doesn't get watered."

The article tells about Helen, who can't concentrate on her work because she is obsessed with Alex. Finally after seeing him sing at a company talent show she sends a flirtatious e-mail which asks:

If an asteroid were about to hit the planet and there were only 15 minutes left live, would you come and stand by me, humming something by Springstein?

So the world is coming to an end, but you've got your man! And if a woman does get a man through being wily and strategic she feels cold and calculating and like a fraud. I have learned that a woman needs to be passionately interested in a man's relation to the whole world—this is good will and it makes a woman feel proud and clean.

Women need to know how great and kind Aesthetic Realism is on the subject of what we need in love. In The Right Of Ellen Reiss explains:

[B]ecause of Aesthetic Realism, people can be proud and intelligent at last on the beautiful subject of need in love. We can ask ourselves: "Do I feel I need this person 1) because I see him as a means of getting rid of the world, of feeling at last I'm being made superior to everything? Do I need him in order to feel I own a human being, a person magnificently silly about me? Or, 2) Do I need this person because he is a means of my respecting every person more? Through him, I am fairer to everything and everyone." The second is the only need as to a person which can make us proud. It is real love. It is romance at its most passionate.

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