How Do You Know If Your Desires Are Real?
All Fours, hyper-attunement, groups of women
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Ever since All Fours came out last year, I’ve belonged to a few text threads, WhatsApp and IRL groups – of women.
They function like consciousness-raising circles, but with a decidedly kink and sex flair. Whereas I imagine feminists of the ‘60s and ‘70s meeting to discuss their rights and how to gain more of them, these groups feel much more punk-rock. Very, “I think I want to be fisted – can we talk about that?” The answer is always yes.
One of the topics in one of my groups is currently, “how do I know if my desires are real?” And one woman weighed in to say:
“I will never forget the first time I got beaten by a sadist who genuinely loved inflicting pain and knew what he was doing. I was covered in bruises for weeks and I honest to God had never felt that beautiful in my life. I didn’t fully believe that my desires were real until that happened to me. I wish I could have that experience again.”
Yes, you can talk about that.
The answer is always yes.
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It’s an underground network of women who were lit on fire by that book, All Fours. I choose to believe that while the world feels scary now, we’re creating an undernetting of radical acceptance that will heal everyone, someday. But because I belong to all these groups and because I’m in therapy for many things I have meanwhile become fascinated by this question: how do I know if my desires are real?
What a potent thing to ask right now, in 2025. When compulsory everything is starting to unravel, leaving a kind of choice fatigue in its wake. Liberation too! But also, a lot of questioning.
And a lot of sexual questioning among women.
Take heterosexuality itself. Once an organizing principle as sure as the sun, it definitely seems like heterosexuality is up for grabs right now, doesn’t it? I heard the phrase “unreconciled heterosexuality” a few weeks ago on We Can Do Hard Things, which is exactly what it sounds like. A group of people, mostly women, going “wait………am I into the opposite sex? Only? Or was I just raised to be like that?” A freedom I wish more straight men were also afforded, by the way. Their own sweet version of this, their own safe space to confess; we as a culture have to make that kind of thing normalized and thoroughly OK first. Which could take a while, but I digress.
I love the raw honesty in these groups. The secrets shared, the things we can say when it’s just us.
Because there’s a kind of sexual surveillance that turns on when you become a wife, and it doesn’t always come from the husband. It comes from the public, the bonkers panopticon that is social media, whatever you want to call it. The social world. Case in point: I occasionally feel transgressive writing a sex Substack, simply because I’m married. Because the assumption, I think, is that once you are married, your desires live in your marriage container. Now, my husband is awesome, but even he knows that’s just not true – and once we got honest about that, once we de-enmeshed to the point where my desires are just…mine, they land on him much more powerfully. Do I want him? Yes, and largely because that fiction is over. The fiction I think marriage asks of every person participating in it: “my sexual self is the sole property of the other person whose name appears on this marriage license.”
This is the kind of thing you can talk about in the groups, with these women.
But still we ask ourselves: how do I know if my desires are real? We don’t always know, so we need a sounding board. Some of us are married, some aren’t. And it’s not just marriage making things hazy. Reasons abound! Like when kink hits the mainstream every so often (to varying degrees of realism and quality – big yawning gulf between 50 Shades of Grey and Babygirl) and when it does, women everywhere are like: “wait, do I want to be tied up? Do I want to be called ‘good girl?’ 🥛 🥛 🥛” and you know, maybe you do.
Or maybe, it was just something you saw.
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But there’s another reason I’m interested in the question, how do I know if my desires are real?, and it has to do with people-pleasing. My own psychological Waterloo.
I had one of those a-ha moments that made me want to shout from the rooftops last week, like when you learn a new therapy word that explains everything: “Gaslighting, of course! That’s what was REALLY going on.”
But it wasn’t gaslighting™. It was hyper-attuning. That’s the new word I learned. Here’s a definition:
Hyper-attunement, a psychological phenomenon rooted in early development, pertains to a person's heightened sensitivity and responsiveness to the needs and emotions of others.
If you’re good at reading the room, but bad at forming an opinion; if you make other people feel grounded, but feel kind of floaty yourself; if you have emotional x-ray vision for other people but a shitty dial-up connection to your own feelings, then you know what I’m talking about.
Hyper-attunement is both a social superpower and kind of a bitch, sexually-speaking. A lot of women hyper-attune. And that makes it incredibly difficult for them in particular to answer that question, how do I know if my desires are real? Because hyper-attuners focus externally. The body whispers, but it’s too faint to hear. So instead, you do what comes naturally: focus on the other person.
But you do that enough…and you start to distance yourself from your own body. You do that enough…and you start to get resentful. The animal self starts to gnaw at the Potemkin self. When I worked at a sex podcast, I read quite a few emails from straight women who disassociated during sex. And who knowingly performed service sex – providing sex to their partner even if they got no pleasure out of it, becoming a masturbation sleeve, essentially – and were burning up with resentment. I will always believe this lies at the heart of the hetero married sex cliche: if you socialize women to be sexual exciters, then sexual caretakers, their bodies will shut down at some point after years of providing and just be like…no.
Hyper-attunement can also look like perspectival shifts during sex or fantasy, when you’re turned on – you’re into it – but you’re rolling the camera from the other person’s POV. I described this in Wanting Vs. Being Wanted and to my surprise, some people (women) commented/restacked saying they could relate to this.
I always thought it was just me, and furthermore, suspected it might be a streak of narcissism. But no, turns out this is more an empath thing and no, it’s not necessarily good. Being tuned in to every little vocal pinch, every little eyebrow raise, every little muscle twitch in the neck is a) exhausting and b) a great way to absorb other people’s desires, discomforts, expectations, etc. etc. Further and further you wander from your own instincts, your own intuition, your own body-truth. Empathy on steroids.
Which explains why people like us go to masturbate sometimes and when we close our eyes we see…ourselves. Through the eyes of another.
Women are raised to be emotional custodians of the world, so maybe it’s not surprising we blur the lines between self and other. I got very into the question of selflessness vs. selfishness when I was interviewing non-monogamous moms, and you know what? Every single one of them had thought about that question too. Because the concept of female sexual selfhood is pretty new in our culture, honestly. All Fours struck a nerve because a woman with a good husband and good family explores her eroticism, simply because it exists. Babygirl: same thing. And because they aren’t morality tales, because they don’t end with a scarlet letter or an actually dead lover (thinking of Unfaithful, when Richard Gere ends his wife’s second relationship in a rather permanent way – in 2002! We were out here killing people on-screen for adultery a mere 23 years ago!), a new question is emerging for women:
What do my desires look like when they are unyoked from relationship?
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We met up once, the woman who saw a sadist. Just the two of us. She told me more.
Like the time he made her put her own used tampon into her mouth. Or the times she had to lick stuff off the floor for him. Or the times he pushed small, hypodermic needles into her skin, “like acupuncture?” I asked. “Little more intense,” she said. I nodded. “Needles – intense!” scribbled in my notebook.
She told me that when she was younger, back when the Internet was still new, she found D/s culture almost as soon as she got online. Total homecoming. The idea that there were people out there who talked like this, had sex like this, did life like this; the idea that she could submit to someone, someone who wanted to dominate her, control her – in and out of the bedroom? It hit like a gong. It took a while to find, including a nine-year stretch of celibacy.
And then one day…after app-messaging with his girlfriend…there he was.
Not just a Dom. A sadist. And someone who wasn’t cosplaying. “You need to worship me,” he told her. Which worked out well. She’d been a seeker throughout her life – Buddhism, Catholicism, yoga, witchcraft – “but I could never reach sublimity on my own,” she said. She craved that non-self state, that ego dissolve, but she needed someone else to get there. Someone like him.
“I’d known for a long time that I was a masochist, but it wasn’t just pain I wanted,” she said. “It was about hurting for someone else,” she said. “A little sacrifice, a little gift.” I thought about the Christian ascetics I studied in college, the ones who lived on top of pillars, starving themselves for Jesus.
And now that I think about it, we hardly talked about the sex itself. It was almost like actual, P-in-V sex was yet another star in her masochist galaxy, the one she got to travel with him. “It was the first time I felt like I didn’t need to tamp down my obsession,” she said. Eroticized hyper-attunement, maybe. The thrill of someone’s bigness, someone’s command, engulfing your identity so totally. The obsession was the point, the sex a manifestation.
Then again, maybe I should ask her if she’d call it hyper-attunement. She’s a professional psychologist.
As we got up to leave, pushing our chairs back into the outdoor coffee shop tables, we switched gears: mom mode. She has a daughter and partner, their AC needs tuning up, Texas is so hot, blah blah.
How do you know if your desires are real? She walked away that day, to her house around the corner. I saw her weeks later in one of the WhatsApp groups, where she wrote that message to all of us.
I didn’t fully believe that my desires were real until that happened to me. I wish I could have that experience again.
It’s such a wholesome little spot, the place we met.
And I take walks in the surrounding neighborhood sometimes, a lot actually. Pass mom-coded women on the sidewalks, strollers and whatnot, wonder which ones are cosplaying and which ones are not, which ones are in WhatsApp groups and which ones are not, which ones just scheduled their child’s dentist appointment and which ones just licked something off the floor, which ones do all these things and I just see a sliver, a cracked door that opens into a whole other portal but the door itself is tasteful, ecru, holds the AC air inside when it’s shut and keeps the room comfortable for all.
Do you wonder whether your desires are yours, or borrowed? Do you relate to hyper-attunement? Are you part of the All Fours underground? Talk to me.
PS I taped this while my power went out and came back on, which is why there’s a few beep-boops at the end.
What does it actually mean for a desire to be real? Does it mean that in the moment you think you want it? You should want it? You want it because it’s what someone else wants? Or does it not even have to do with how you feel in the moment itself? Maybe it is reflection on a past desire or anticipation for a future one. What you’re talking about relates a lot to my own work around trusting myself and being more aware of what my own body is telling me (thank you for defining hyper attunement so well). What you’re talking about has everything to do with why when some women (including myself!) are asked “what do you want?” (sexually or otherwise) and they aren’t able to answer. Because they may not know. And if we don’t know it’s hard to connect into those wants and desires as something real. Thank you for sharing :)