What Do Women Want?

“What Do Women Want?” approaches desire as its own end rather than as a condition to be negotiated. The red dress is an object of desire because it reveals everything. The dress is desire made visible, perfectly expressed without the intrusion and complexities of language, which is as likely to obfuscate as clarify.

When Sigmund Freud asked his friend, Princess Marie Bonaparte, a noted and revolutionary psychoanalyst and sex researchist of the day, what it was that a woman wanted, it is unlikely he expected an answer as simple as “a red dress” (Line 1)—and because Addonizio is a poet, it is not, in fact, a simple answer, but a metaphor. As such, the red dress is a signifier, pointing to agency, sexual and otherwise.

Clothing itself is a signifier, a way to communicate without words. To dress in a way that reveals and calls attention to the body communicates a number of possibilities, including a love of one’s own body, or an acknowledgment of the animal nature of the body—a composite of life force, potential, limitations, and vulnerability. In Addonizio’s poem, the dress is not an invitation, nor does it consent to the wishes of anyone else.