And yet, whenever I come across the word, it troubles me longer than it should. Something about it rankles. Why thirst, precisely, and not some other basic human condition resulting from need? Maybe it has something to do with the things we thirst for — things like approval, attention, affection, recognition; all the interdependent needs. The things we deride as being “thirsty” are the things that lack value in the eyes of the macho, leather-faced American individualist, so they invite macho, stone-faced derision. Hunger, for instance, is described as a presence, a motivating fire in the belly, but thirst is derided as a girly lack. Entitlement plays a part, too. We “hunger” for success, because we approve of success. Hunger is associated with desire, whereas thirst is associated with need.

But I also tend to think that it’s because “thirst” gets at an epistemological problem: a crisis of being, or how to be, in the world as it is now. It puts you into an unsettling double bind. It reframes a basic, lower-order need as a moral, social, aesthetic and personal failure. Our strange attachment to the word is hinted at by the fact that a global water crisis is in full flower, the world is increasingly parched, World Water Day was commemorated just last month — and yet the word “thirsty” is doused in judgment. Is it because “thirst” will kill you first?

“Thirsty” is a unisex put-down, but that doesn’t mean it’s not gendered. A man is thirsty when he fails to cloak his libido or his instincts in a perfectly calibrated mix of empathy and chill. A woman is thirsty when she fails to cloak her emotional needs or insecurities behind a posture of detachment. “Thirsty” reinforces gender stereotypes while coolly pretending not to. It expresses our ambivalent relationship with desire — our constant negation of it, our vigilant policing of it. It gets at who is allowed to want things, and in what way we are allowed to want them.

Trump’s arrant thirstiness stands in particularly glaring contrast to Obama’s impeccable chill. This resembles every other time the tyranny of cool has been rebelled against. These things go in cycles: A Romantic eruption of feeling tends to follow in the wake of Classical reserve. Frank emotiveness and sensitivity become culturally sanctioned again, emo comes back and we enter a supposedly more feminine cycle. Only this time, rather than usher in a more frankly emotional phase, we’ve ushered in something suppressive — the total denial of feeling, of experience. It’s not idealism in the air around our leadership or any kind of desire (greed excepted); it’s a lack, a void, a deficit.

I recoil as much as the next person from the narcissistic behaviors “thirst” takes down. But I just as often find myself recoiling from its inhibiting effects. As Anaïs Nin wrote: “Something is always born of excess. Great art was born of great terrors, great loneliness, great inhibitions, instabilities, and it always balances them.” Nothing is born out of deficiency. Nin was reviled throughout her life and afterward for writing candidly about her desires — something few women are allowed to do without being branded an open wound — and was only recently divested of her status as one of the thirstiest women of the 20th century. (Wanting, of course, is the impetus for getting, and we’re still very selective about who gets to do that.) But after decades of enshrining power, greed, lust and other ego-driven desires as the driving forces of American life, our contempt for thirst seems to hint at a thirst for change.