What is it that differentiates what is healthily erotic from what is morbidly so?
Let’s start with the masculine form, it’s more familiar and easier. I think it’s most women’s experience that they are frequently confronted with “sleazy” guys. Some may also be acquainted with sleazy milieux (curiously enough, while I never heard anyone say they liked sleazy guys, there are definitely women who are positively addicted to the milieux). When you ask them, though, to define what it is that makes someone or somewhere “sleazy”, you usually don’t get a clear answer (someone is going to object that you never get a clear answer from women on anything; no comment, but not the point I’m trying to make ;).
I tried the dictionaries, and they didn’t help me much either. It can hardly be, though, that such a universal experience escapes definition, so I’m going to try.
I think sleaziness is reflective of the degree to which sexual stimuli launch psychoemotional scripts in the mind of the sleazy person. These scripts absent us from the present moment and inevitably objectivize the person who originated the stimulus. This experience of objectivization and the bodily cues that accompany it – what we call “shiftiness” and involves inability to hold eye contact and jerkiness in upper body movement – is what alerts women to the sleazy character of their male interlocutor. It is pretty easy for other men to recognize also (except perhaps in themselves).
So what about sleazy women? Well, the same phenomenon exists but it usually takes a very different form. This is due to the difference in women’s scripts (read any women’s romantic novel to get the feel). What these have in common with male scripts is that they objectivize their counterparty; only what that counterparty can do for them matters. I think the experience is as commonplace amongst men as is its counterpart amongst women, whereby it becomes rapidly or practically instantaneously clear that a woman you are dating or seeing in some context assesses you solely in terms of your ability to satisfy their scripts – their need for security, to feel loved, to have children, and so on (to expand their shoe collection…). These women may at the same time have impressive powers of seduction (frequently of course they do not), but while men may be fatally attracted to them, they will never be respected by them.
Since both forms of sleaze are fairly universal and it is only a matter of degree, it’s worthwhile analyzing what happens next.
In a common scenario, the experience of objectivization is actually desired because it allows the individual to rest undisturbed in the comfort of scripts of self-loathing which he or she has no real wish or ability to escape. There is, thus, an accommodation which satisfies each party, for at least a time. Whether this is stable is going to depend on the options available to the objectivizing partner to extend or displace his or her fantasies to other counterparties and the continuing role desired for the objectivized partner in this context.
Of course it may as well be that the scripts clash. Both parties need to be dominant, or they both need to be submissive. Whilst a relationship may still form, a fiery or somnorific one respectively, such a situation is always unstable.
It is often thought that sexual interest in partners outside an established relationship is sleazy by definition. This, however, confuses correlation and causation. In fact, such interest is perfectly normal and healthy, for both sexes. It almost invariably is sleazy, though, in practice because it activates such strongly scripted emotions in one or both parties. These emotions in most cases crowd out the possibility of an encounter with the real person involved; though sometimes they may coexist with stronger feelings of love or lust.
I encounter sleaze a lot in my life, both outer and inner, but, like many of us, I long after those uncomplicated encounters where what is there, is there, and what is not, is not.