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Human beings of both sexes eroticize their primal bonds with those who feed them. When they are starved for nurture at an early age, their
character builds not upon a solid core but upon a void. To others, they may seem sturdy and accomplished, but they know that at any moment, like a house built over a sinkhole, they can vanish into it. They comfort themselves with the image of a magical Provider whose perfect love will satisfy them once and for all. Binging on sex or food tantalizes them with a fleeting taste of completeness. (So does bulimic shopping. The closet is a maw, and clothes, like our infantile selves, are full of promise, though vacant of life until we inflate them.) But the insatiably hungry revert to blaming their partners or their appetites -- and to handing out punishment accordingly -- for their inevitable relapse into the void. Their lives are a restless quest for relief from want in which the strong take the offensive. They attempt to recover an illusion of wholeness through domination, and they become the sadists and the predatory seducers of both
sexes. The weak experiment, perhaps no less aggressively, with some form of defensive self-starvation. Their voluntary privations feel superior to the despair of the famished child, which was suffered helplessly.
-- Judith Thurman in the New Yorker
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