The terrible power of female desire

In 1991, when I Touch Myself was released, I was 29 and I got married but I hardly understood the terrible power of female desire at that time; it would take another eight years when my then-wife asked me to leave the house one freezing winter's night - my clothes and a few items of furniture shoved inelegantly into the back of my Toyota - before I started to get an inkling of what female desire really meant. And what it meant to ignore conjugal imperatives. A happy mother makes for a happy family, I learned, too late.

I was better prepared for love many years later, when I was firmly in middle age. This time I had better sense and fell head-over-heals in love in a kind of desperate, unutterable surrender. It worked, for as long as she wanted me, but there came a time when that fell away too. I desired nothing but her happiness, and told her so, and for some unfathomable reason she allowed me to hang about, and listen to her when she needed advice. Men rarely learn that women are always looking for advice; it's what allows them to so skillfully negotiate the traps and pitfalls that line the mundane path they so elegantly tread.

But on one occasion it was more than advice that she wanted, even though we had stopped seeing each other years before. It was because she trusted me. She knew me. She lay down on the bed in the hotel clad only in tights and a cotton shirt and asked her to rub her back, which I did. Softly, she pulled my hand down to her buttocks and soon I was stroking her intimate flesh as she moaned and moved her body out of pleasure. I was a tool. She wanted something specific from me, and I was as obliging as I had ever been. When Amphlett sings "I want you above me," there is no question what it is she is asking for. It is the observant male who must in such cases respectfully grant the wish thus expressed, and submit to the terrible power of female desire. It is our destiny, and a type of salvation, to serve a woman in this specific way.