The straight-lady non-bleakness manifesto you have been waiting for

What is female heterosexuality, in the age of #MeToo? It strikes me that we're stuck, as a culture, in "an evening that a woman in her early 20s spends with a man in his 30s." Time stands still at that specific life stage, at the moment when a straight (or straight-relationship-having) woman is out in the world, very desirable to others but not quite sure what she herself wants. Also, I suppose, in a specific cultural situation - the young woman is probably either a college student or a recent grad pursuing a glamorous profession, but still at the very lowest rungs. The wide range of women's romantic experiences (real or imagined) that don't fall into that framework are ignored.

Once the ubiquitous Story shifted from Weinstein and the truly vile (or, in a way, even before), it became this odd thing where entertainment narratives about powerful men seducing sheltered women got reinvented as something for everyone to be very concerned about, even if the genuinely very-concerned are a handful of earnest feminists on Twitter, and 99.99% of those following these stories are titillated or just entertained. How much of the Story is about a collective sense that the disappointing-and-worse encounters experienced by early-20s women of a certain class are among the more dire feminist causes has to do with a (justified I think!) sense that they matter, and how much is about the fact that this demographic of women plus this topic will get clicks?

But beyond this, there's a piece missing when it comes to how female sexuality itself gets discussed. There is, of course, the focus on consent, which is both necessary and something that can make it seem as though female heterosexuality consists of sometimes agreeing to what a man has suggested. Add "enthusiastic" to "consent" and what you get is a woman very happy to have said yes to acts suggested by a man, a man who had, initially, shown interest in her, before she'd had a chance to think about him either way. There's increasing understanding about the need to go beyond mere consent, which is a start. And I think B.D. McClay is onto something when she examines why female desire gets left out of the equation:

The problem is that you can't say yes in a world in which your yes is presumed until someone gets a no, just as you can't say no and be understood if no is the only word you're permitted. You can't express desire to a partner who can understand your desire only in terms of acquiescence.

Yes.

There's a challenge, though - a couple of them, actually - as long as this topic stays in the realm of arguments. First has to do with the sheer bleakness of female heterosexuality as presented even in opinion-writing I agree with (or have, for that matter, written myself.) It's not clear what to do, in opinion-land, with the existence of female desire for men. Is it a real pity? How can it be, when it is, for so many women, a source of so much joy? Or, at least, for some women. For a non-zero number of women, is the most I could state with absolute confidence. Which... gets, in turn, to the problem with any conversation about what it means to be a member of an enormous category such as 'straight women.' What does it mean, then?

For some women who so identify, straightness doubtless is about not feeling drawn to women sexually, and just sort of going along with convention - boyfriend, husband, settling down. For others, it's closer to what (some) gay men experience, and involves intense desire for men. (A sort of wiring that doesn't magically disappear upon encountering male awfulness of the #MeToo variety.) For others still, somewhere in between, or something else entirely. There's also a range in how affected individual women are by cultural scripts. It's possible to receive all those many cultural messages about who has which role, who wants what, and then go ahead and just... not live your life like that.

But I - like everyone else I suppose - have trouble believing my idiosyncratic thoughts about everything don't have broader political applicability. And really, wouldn't it be better if The Moment assumed that female heterosexuality consisted of something more than hoping the men life throws at you aren't terrible? Wouldn't recognizing I mean really recognizing the existence of women's desire for men - including for men who may not desire them back - help out in terms of banishing, once and for all, the foolish, dangerous myth that with enough persuasion (or force), any woman would want to have sex with any man? It couldn't hurt, is all I'm saying.

Why 'Ban Men' is not the answer

When Dan Savage declares himself "done with men" in a recent column, it would be a stretch to take that literally. (If nothing else, he is a man, and can't be done with himself.) But when straight or bi or otherwise somewhat-into-men-identified women make declarations along those lines, this is taken seriously. (As in the letter Savage is responding to!) Being done-with-men is... it's not a thing, exactly, so much as an ambient mood. Every day, a new story emerges about another of those men. Men in positions of power being awful. The stories are so plentiful that today, a man I'd actually encountered, in person, in a professional situation, is on the list. (I'd thought I was sufficiently out of the loop that this couldn't happen, but a brief brush with media-stuff is apparently enough.) And if you yourself are not a man, you do have that option, in the abstract at least. No men, none, done with them.

The zeitgeist, then, seems headed towards a world without men - as a dream, if not, of course, a reality. As a millennial, feminist woman, one who has authored countless think-pieces, a New Yorker living in Toronto, a woman who owns a Glossier highlighter for crying out loud, I'm the target audience for women-only spaces, but also for a very modern sexuality that allows women to just sort of opt out of men. Ban men! Men are the worst. I know I should agree to this. And I don't lack for personal experience of certain men - men I knew personally, men in public spaces - being the worst. But... yeah.

That women - some women? most women? - seek out sex with men, seek out sexually charged interactions with men, find men desirable, have partners who are men (without finding their partner's gender a drawback) becomes this lost detail. That a woman would actually want men, and would admit to this, at a time like this, is... passé? problematic? It's an admission that can be made, if at all, with a regretful tone, with this sort of, ugh what a shame, this can't be turned off. That there's any sort of positive joy in attraction to men is taboo.

The "joy" aspect might seem like a side note: What does the female pursuit of pleasure have to do with the far more pressing concern of female victimhood? (Worse: it may come across as nostalgia for old-time office 'flirtation' of the sort that consisted of what is today rightly understood as sexual harassment.) This is why it's important to see that women's desire for men and sexist oppression are intertwined. The expectation of female passivity in hetero relationships is what gives us the rom-com narrative - repeated in real-life (if embellished) examples such as newspaper wedding announcements - where a woman was indifferent to some man in her life, until he pursued her and persuaded her to get past her apathy or even revulsion. Also the pick-up artist myth that every woman is a strategy away from consent.

Female heterosexuality is understood - as I've mentioned before, likely on WWPD - not as a sexual orientation but as a lack thereof. As conventionality. As basic-ness. As agreeability. Which, I mean, I see how it can look that way - the curious privilege, as a woman, of wanting the gender one is expected to want is that one gets to play-act that role - but a moment's reflection on how teen girls (who are for various reasons that would themselves be a post largely exempt from those expectations) respond to heartthrobs suggests that straight and bi women are, yup, attracted to men.

If we were to acknowledge that women want, and more specifically, that women have desires other than being thought hot and available while 22, by men at least two decades their senior, that would... well, that would be at least as dangerous to patriarchy as the conceptual banning of men.

While there may be differences in exactly how men and women - as well as those of varying testosterone levels - experience desire, it's a mistake to imagine (or to infer from the trans man's testosterone anecdote in Savage's post, a story I'd seen somewhere else recently as well - maybe The Rebel Sell?) that women could take or leave the people they're drawn to. It's a mistake - or a fantasy? to think of female desire as the desire for, at best, a very special friend. It's a dangerous mistake, because it leads to a mistaken understanding (see also) of exactly why it is that the villain in nearly all of these cases is a dude. It leads to imagining the reason there are male but not female Weinsteins is that men, but not women, want. As versus that societal power dynamics are such that (some) men are led to believe wanting=getting, while all women are aware that wanting and acting on it entails risk. Risks of all sorts - of violence, of unwanted pregnancy, of ruined reputations, this is all old news.

But there's another risk, which is of falling into the category of... undesirable. The Woman is meant to be constantly rebuffing advances, not pursuing and - some of the time - getting shot down. A woman who pursues is one who has made peace with the fact that not everyone finds her attractive. Whereas a woman who doesn't pursue? She can live in the belief that the world's straight men are divided between those who definitely want her and those who are simply too respectful (or intimidated, or busy with work...) to express their desires for her. If pleasure, for women, involves being thought desirable, then what joy could there possibly be in verifying that the hot guy who hasn't given you the time of day is, in fact, not interested? How could the slight chance he is interested make pursuit worthwhile, if the whole point is to be thought beautiful, which would rather have to happen unprompted.

All of this - and personal bias, fine - is why I think The Conversation needs to incorporate, and not brush aside as distasteful or irrelevant, the fact that many/most women desire men. If anything, we'd all be a lot safer if that were better understood.

On just reading about Justin Trudeau for the articles

What does "sexy" mean to you? What does the word evoke?

If you're wired any way other than standard-issue hetero dude, there's an awfully good chance your answers to those two questions will not be the same. The word "sexy" evokes young blonde women with large breasts. And yet, people who meet that description - and images of the same - do nothing for me. How can that be? Does this mean I'm... sex-negative?

I've been vaguely following the discussion around Hugh Hefner, who has died, and who was - I am now learning, this is not something I'd ever given any thought - apparently not just a tame-ish middlebrow pornographer but also a social liberal in some important and before-his-time ways. What does it all mean?

Sexual liberation without feminism is not sexual liberation for all. It's sexual liberation for men. Mostly for straight men. When women push back against male sexual liberation, this gets mistaken for prudishness, when what it oh so often is, instead, is a lack of interest in... women, or women presented for a male gaze. Or sexual acts involving a man and two women, at the man's suggestion. (Our society's default where Sexual Adventure is concerned.) A lack of interest, that is, in the things straight men tend to/are expected to find sexy, paired with a visceral understanding that a good number of things men find sexy aren't the greatest for women. (As it would go, for men, were women in charge.)

Ours is a society already centered around male desire generally, straight male desire especially. More to the point, it's one centered around men - their needs, what's convenient for them - in general. So abandoning rules, unless intentionally done with feminism in mind, means giving further freedom to men, while decreasing that of women. It's not always zero-sum, thank goodness - the pill seems a fine case of everyone benefitting - but it sure can be. 

The mistake is to think differences in male and female interest in sexy-as-society-defines-it are rooted primarily in an asymmetry of desire, rather than an asymmetry of power. To imagine that men lust, women lust after push-up bras and, later, eye creams that might make them look lust-worthy.  

Remember that we are living in the era of the Savage Lovecast and nuanced, mature conversations about cuckold fantasies, but also that of "cuck" as (revived) insult. Of consensual post-monogamy arrangements and Very Modern (ostensibly) gender-neutral forgiveness of dalliances, but also of Trumpian men-can-do-whatever, women-not-so-much. We are not living in gender-neutral times, no matter what pockets of doing-its-best enlightenment might suggest. This means we haven't the slightest idea how male and female sexuality would differ without all the cultural constraints that are most definitely still in place.

Let me put it another way: Is a magazine featuring sexy photos of men, plus serious articles, even conceivable? A niche one for gay men, perhaps, but one with a mainstream or presumed-female audience? Because it's not that women just aren't visual creatures. Looking at photos of attractive men, being aware of attractive men, this is absolutely understood as a part of female heterosexuality, but one to be outgrown. In a woman, sexual desire - for men, maybe in general - is seen as incompatible with seriousness. Incompatible with maturity. Thus - maybe? - why so much of the recent feminist move to reclaim female heterosexual desire (reclaim it, that is, from the assumption that it's merely the desire to be desired) has centered not merely on younger men but on boy bands and teen idols.

The (misguided) thinking is that mature female sexuality - once you age out of caring about Jordan Catalano or One Direction or whatever - is about flexibility, malleability, being agreeable. Thus the refusal, on the part of... society? too many men?, to ever really believe a woman when she says she's straight or - for that matter - gay.

"Happy Valley" and the female gaze

The busiest year has quasi-ended with a mountain of dealing with everything practical that ought to have been dealt with months ago, but the whole three-jobs-ish thing got in the way. Fleeing this, I spent a good chunk of the decadently near-non-work weekend watching Season 2 of "Happy Valley" in its entirety. Spoilers below...

"Street"

The internet being enormous and all, I don't remember where it was I saw this, but somewhere I saw something, once, about how Idris Elba is the actor white women who don't much pay attention to black male beauty (or who don't consume much diverse or black-oriented media) give as the example of a good-looking black man. Like, to the extent that it is, if you are a white woman, borderline racist to say that you find Elba attractive, his name in this context having evolved into a trope of sorts, of the exception.

I have no idea if this is true, but if it is, that would seem like all the more reason he'd be a shoo-in as James Bond. If indeed they still make those movies (I've only ever seen one, years ago, on what was probably my only high school outing with straight 'guy friends'), which apparently they do, because this morning Twitter erupted with the news that Anthony Horowitz, probably the same Anthony Horowitz as is behind some of the better, earlier Midsomer Murders episodes, gave a not particularly borderline but rather straightforwardly racist (if coded) reason why Elba, in his view, shouldn't be Bond. The word "street" is used, which is going to seem particularly odd to anyone introduced to Elba via his role in the US version of The Office.

As tends to happen in these cases, intense, multi-hour research (or, rather, clicking the link from the Independent to the original Daily Mail interview) suggests a bit of outrage-stirring on the part of the press. The "street" remark had, it seems, been immediately preceded by Horowitz naming a different black British actor, Adrian Lester, as a possible Bond. While the thing it seems as if Horowitz said (namely, that Bond can't be black because any black actor, even Elba, is "too 'street'") and the thing he actually said (a sort of casting equivalent of 'some of my best friends are black,' and then the "street" remark) are both racist, the former is so much more so that it might be tempting to cry Misplaced Outrage and dismiss the whole thing, except... the outrage is merited. The "street" remark is still racist!

The trouble is outrage fatigue. After years and years and years of offensiveness going unremarked, there's now this flood of remarks. Justified ones, but the sheer repetitiveness of the 'can you believe X said Y?!' headlines has ended up numbing too many readers to what are, at least in my opinion, real and important concerns about representation, subtle bigotry, and so forth. People then end up sympathizing with the gaffe-maker, who will inevitably have said something a notch or two less offensive than first thought. And so the conversation will get diverted from issue at hand. My question, then, is really one of strategy. If you support the politics of the 'can you believe' headlines, but wonder about their efficacy... what's the alternative? Is there one?

Surf, turf

Hadley Freeman brings our attention to a lip gloss named "Underage." Should we protest? Perhaps, but in the U.S. (where, it sounds like, this product is mainly being sold), underage can refer to a 20-year-old, too young to go to a bar legally but otherwise an adult. It's not necessarily Roman Polanski territory, but it's also not necessarily not that.

I'm thinking the name, though, is less about helping grown women (if, indeed, that's who buys lip gloss) resemble the 15-year-olds that pop-evo-psych-type men claim are the only "women" worth looking at (search WWPD for "Derbyshire" to see what I mean), and more about tapping into a less directly sexual fantasy: that one will be carded. And the threshold for that is probably more like 25 or 30 - anyone who could plausibly be under 21. As such, "Underage" is evil only insofar as the entire beauty industry is guilty of tapping into/inventing the desire to be a young-but-adult woman forever.

While denouncing lip-gloss labeling is one strategy, a more effective approach to dealing with the obsession with female youth-and-beauty might be to acknowledge that youth is associated with beauty in men as well. Or, at least, not to perpetuate the myth - as Stella Grey does - that women are somehow nobly immune to appreciating the beauty of beautiful younger men:

There seems to be a gender imbalance, vis-a-vis the packaging thing. All the women I know are tolerant of middle age showing itself in a chap. We quite like a late flowering, in fact: the silvering, the smile lines, the coming of bodily sturdiness. We read these as signs that life has been lived and enjoyed. We read them as indicators of substance, of being substantial. In general, men don’t seem to grant us the same courtesy, at least not the men I meet online. They are highly focused on the packaging. It’s disheartening.

Later in the piece, Grey (a pseudonym) specifically refutes the idea that she'd check out 25-year-old men. (25, not underage, even by car-rental standards.) These men, she recalls telling someone, "'have mothers of my age, so it’d be like randily pursuing the children of your friends.'" And, I mean, I'll take her word for this - I'm sure there exist, in the world, heterosexual women who could see a pack of surfer guys walk by in the outfit they wear here, consisting of a half-unzipped wetsuit, tight pants on the bottom, chiseled shirtless torso on top, and not notice.

In all seriousness, I think it's more a case of, women are socialized to deny noticing the surfers (or the London-or-wherever equivalent), while men are socialized not only to admit to noticing, but to pursue equivalent women, regardless of their own age (or surfing ability).

A better situation might be to accept the noticing for the gender-neutral near-universal that it is, while urging friends of both sexes to be realistic about who will date them, and whom they'll have anything in common with. And the way to get there would be to stop with the (pardon my jargon) patriarchy-affirming insistence that women are actually more inclined to ogle a man the less he resembles an underwear model.

Ugly women, unconventional-looking men

Just after telling a woman that she should settle for the guy she's with because she's in her mid-30s and not getting any younger, Emily Yoffe fields a letter from a man who describes himself as "ugly." He explains that he has everything else going for him - work, workouts, clothes, hobbies - but is so unattractive that women won't date him. His question is whether he should get cosmetic surgery.

Yoffe allows that there are such things as "actual facial deformit[ies]," but doesn't seem to believe it's possible for a man to just be ugly:

There are plenty of women who would go for the guys on this list of “actors who aren’t very attractive” (I’m winking at you, Paul Giamatti). A man who is happy in his career, who is seeking a committed relationship (and who cooks and can serenade), should have had many second dates. I doubt the problem is your looks, so going under the knife for cosmetic reasons will just leave you a lonely, different-looking version of yourself. So you need to figure out what’s really going wrong.

Normally, advice-columnists take letter-writers at their word. Not here. Yoffe deems unattractiveness implausible, but suggests he might "fall somewhere on the autism spectrum"! I mean, he might, but nothing in the letter suggests as much.

Yoffe's right that plastic surgery's probably a mistake - as it is for most, male or female, if only because elective surgery, ugh. But separate from the question of whether surgery should - or could - improve dude's looks is the one of whether physical unattractiveness is possible in a man. And... why wouldn't it be? Yes, looks are subjective, and yes, most people are within normal limits. A further yes - yes, sometimes people grow into their looks at unexpected ages.

But some people - men and women - are found plain-looking by the vast majority of people they meet. It minimizes the pain the men in that situation experience to suggest that their troubles in love can't actually relate to their looks. It can.* But it also - especially in conjunction with that earlier letter - suggests that women ought to be grateful for any man who's reasonably upstanding.

I wonder how Yoffe would have answered the same question from a woman. While I doubt she'd have recommended surgery there, either, she might have advised a trip to the Clinique counter. That is, I doubt if she'd have entirely dismissed the possibility that looks were at least part of it.

*The ease with which very good-looking men succeed in dating is the subject of a really spot-on scene in "House." It culminates with Chase getting the most interest by far, despite having put on an unappealing act, and despite the well-above-average attractiveness of the men he was with. Fiction, yes, but I link to it only because of the logistical and ethical problems with linking to real-life examples of any such phenomenon.

Stories of the weekend

-The buried lede here is that looks matter in dating, for men and women alike. (As in, nearly all people, regardless of gender, eliminate most of the human population on the basis of looks alone, before even considering such things as personality, kindness, accomplishments, etc. - "looks matter" doesn't mean looks can typically cancel out deficiencies in other areas.) So it's kind of amusing to see comments along the lines of, 'duh, men are visual creatures.' This would be a relevant point to make if Tinder involved women's photos and men's CVs, but, as I understand it, it does not.

-Pretty much everything I could possibly say about the Hollaback! video controversy is on WWPD already in one way or another, but the most relevant post is probably this one. Other repeating-myself points include the fact that street harassment is - as some seem to get - about power. (Thus why a plain-looking 14-year-old girl may find herself bothered far more often than a reasonably attractive 20-year-old woman.) I also continue to think the feminist focus on catcalls is... a bit like the feminist focus on issues like how young and thin fashion models tend to be. These are absolutely real problems, but they're also photogenic ones. Along with the more productive awareness-raising they accomplish, they provoke something that might be called concern-ogling. Depending how the coverage plays out, it can end up reinforcing the idea that to be female is to be young, beautiful, and the recipient of a continuous, admiring male gaze.

-Spot-on.

Affirmative consent, sitcom edition

The Mindy Project season premiere may well be the first time female heterosexuality was depicted on television. Wait, what could I possibly mean? Aren't virtually all the women on TV straight? Perhaps so, but they're basically always objects of male sexuality, in one way or another. Even Sex And The City - there, there was so much focus on looking perfect (despite the tremendous tragedy of crossing the threshold of 35) so as to get a high-status mate. Mr. Big... I mean, separate from my subjective indifference to Chris Noth, there's the fact that Carrie was always interested in being rescued by a car-and-driver, and a Big without those trappings clearly wouldn't have been of interest. There wasn't a whole lot of... female gaze, I suppose, with the exception of Samantha, who was always sort of a hollering-at-Chippendales joke of a character. And her lust had to be presented as mutually exclusive with any interest in a relationship - something never expected of men.

But TV changed when Mindy, at the end of the episode, put on her nerdy-but-not-hipster glasses to get a better look. A look at what, well, go check out Hulu, or, if you don't care about context, click here. But the gaze is definitively in the female-looking-at-male direction. Female vanity in no way enters into the scene. There's no desire-to-be-thought-beautiful. That's not the fantasy. This has been the case for a while on The Mindy Project - thus the way that every episode finds an excuse to have two hot guys in a "fight" of some kind. But that's a bit too subtle - it's possible for male viewers to take that in as slapstick, without catching on to the fact that it's the same, for the equivalent audience, as if two hot women were in an equivalent tumble. This was... quite a bit more straightforward.

A fan letter to The Cut

NYMag's The Cut is kind of great. So, two links to it:

-The first is just to say that what Maggie Lange calls the universal boyfriend shirt is one I own and wear all the time. Except that mine is from Uniqlo, not J.Crew, and is flannel-material. Another for the why-do-I-identify-as-feminine-yet-dress-like-an-adolescent-boy files. Part of it is, I just really like that shirt. Although the likeliest answer is laziness - it's much easier to read Garance Doré or Elle about the cutting edge in Fashion than to actually wear the dresses and skirts I do own, when the jeans are in a pile on top of the dresser.

-The second is Kat Stoeffel's post on why it's OK to objectify men. And while I agree with the premise, I'm not so sure about the reasons:

“Not being objectified” is just one of the many advantages of being male. When we selectively revoke this freedom from body scrutiny, we don’t do anything to diminish the meaningful economic and reproductive advantages men enjoy. 

Put another way: We will stop Dong Watch once there’s a female president, zero wage gap, and Swedish-level paid parental leave; once tampons, birth control, and abortions are all available free and on-demand.

All fair points, but they make it seem as if women are merely pretending to lust after men, to make a point. Then she seems to kind of address this: "Male objectification isn’t about making men feel bad. It’s about not caring how men feel. Or at least, putting it aside long enough to think about what we desire." But then the concluding sentence? "As long as the covers of men's and women’s magazines are both devoted to what men want, that will feel pretty cathartic." Maybe?

But the point of appreciating male beauty isn't catharsis. It's... that many women already are already doing this appreciating. The idea isn't to punish men by objectifying, or even to disregard them. Seeing as women aren't under quite the same pressure to be attracted only to the conventionally attractive (except for the whole height thing, which I tend to think is more about perceived status than beauty, but I digress), freeing women to be openly attracted to men is arguably a good thing for men, including the one or two men who don't look like Jon Hamm.

Made-to-order

Another for the how-did-I-just-find-this files: Bento Monogatari, a Belgian (Flemish) short film about a woman who becomes obsessed with Japanese culture, cooking in particular, and inflicts this on her husband who prefers cheese sandwiches (and nice-looking young men in their underwear). The wife even watches "Cooking With Dog" at one point! You see Francis!

Given the themes this movie addresses, it seems as if it were created from some kind of algorithm designed to find me the movie of my dreams. That said, it wasn't the best movie I'd ever seen. The homoerotic subplot is maybe done in too generic of a 'this is a European art film' way, and the bit in the synopsis about how the wife is making all this Japanese food to save her marriage doesn't really come through at all. What comes through is that she's super into everything Japanese, including looking like a Japanese teenager, which isn't a look that comes naturally to a middle-aged Flemish woman.

(Flashback to the great joy I experienced upon finally seeing those teen clothing stores in Harajuku... only to remember that what works on a 15-year-old looks odd, not cute, on someone twice that age. A realization that saved some yen, but still.)

In other Japanese-cooking news, I recently met a Japanese woman who cooks bagels from scratch at home. Grass is always greener and all that.

Bragging rights

I've tried, on so many occasions, to explain that while women care just as much as men about a partner's looks (yes, all women, I have surveyed all of womankind individually), the way this caring expresses itself is quite different. Then along came a Vows that summed this up perfectly. It's about a self-identified geeky guy who marries a bona fide model. The passage in question:

In July 2011, Ms. Perez and Mr. Sirpal, along with some of his friends, took a trip to Nashville. It was an opportunity, he said, for his friends to see he actually was dating a “10.” 

“The guys couldn’t believe she was dating me,” he said with a laugh.

This - this desire not merely to date a "10", but to be witnessed doing so, strikes me as male. Has a woman ever, in the history of humanity, done the same? Most likely. Do all men think like this? Probably not. (Would most men say something like that so openly, to a NYT reporter? One hopes not. Although it has that grating "Vows" quality of, he must think it sounds meet-cute, or benignly flattering to his new wife, and is oblivious to the cringe factor.) But this seems particular to what it means for a man to want to date a beautiful woman. It matters that he finds her beautiful, but also that she is, in some official, verifiable sense, hot. What matters isn't just that she have a kind of beauty that does it for him personally (which will probably overlap with societal ideals), but that her beauty constitutes power in the world at large. Now granted, most men don't marry or even date women who are or ever were models (I've been led to believe the Stuyvesant High School fashion show doesn't count), but this sort of thing plays out among mere civilians as well.

Ellen Page (still) won't date you

Brain is mush from the inevitable cold-weather-doesn't-cause-colds-or-does-it cold, so I will leave you with a post I'd thought up back when my brain was somewhat less mushy, but have written in the full-on-mush state:

It's often said that gay actors and actresses can't come out because of the legions of mostly-hetero crush-bearing fans. And whenever this comes up, I wonder the same thing: why? Do fans imagine they actually have a chance with celebrities? If Harry Styles turns out to be gay (and I have no opinion on the matter), does that make him significantly less available to the girls and women 12-42 with crushes on him? Does the fact that Ellen Page is an out lesbian mean that you, shlub, no longer stand a chance with her, considering that the presumed-straight-until-stated-otherwise Page also wouldn't have given you a second look?

I understand there's a parallel phenomenon of every good-looking male actor being told to come out already by a portion of his gay male fan base, when this, too, may be wishful thinking... or maybe he's been spotted at whichever clubs and this is known in some circles, circles that don't include my bit of suburban Central NJ. Perhaps this isn't such a thing with good-looking actresses (or does one now say female actors?), what with the female-sexuality-is-fluid presumption. There's always the chance that men would be titillated by an actress coming out; when actors do, their screaming female fans, what, go into mourning?

I suppose what makes me wonder why this is a thing is that my own preferred male celebrities tend to be multilevel unattainable - like, gay or dead, gay and dead, or probably alive and probably straight but not what they were in 1980 or whatever, or Keanu Reeves, or possibly attainable but I've seen them walking around Park Slope and when not onscreen, they're nothing special. (Not naming names, but this could probably be inferred.) Part of this is that I'm married and thus not looking to date anybody, famous or otherwise, but even when single, the list would have been more or less the same. I didn't and don't stand a chance with celebrities, and that's just fine. (Exception: the 1990s B-list sitcom actor, now dating a famous model, who shot me an admiring glance once in Los Angeles. But he was never one of my favorites. This is merely an exception-that-proves-the-rule humblebrag.)

Never-gonna-happen is part of the fun of the celebrity crush, and basically defines it. The leap necessary to imagine that Mila Kunis would drop Ashton for you is so huge that it can't possibly matter what Kunis's sexual orientation is. Once you're using your imagination, you can imagine whatever you please. As long as you're leaving the people in question alone, you can imagine them at whichever age, with whichever taste, that you like.

Beware the messenger

Is it terrible that when I saw that Lori Gottlieb had a long conversation-starter article about hetero relationship dynamics, I immediately thought of her misreading of Madame Bovary? And that my next thought, upon glancing at it, was disbelief that the author of the "settle" article (and book!) is now a couples therapist? Maybe it is terrible, because if nothing else, it's a long-form, researched-seeming article. She's just, like, reporting on the latest findings! Science and all that.

It did lose me earlyish on, though, with the stuff about how women - of all sexual orientations - do not "prioritize the erotic" when initially choosing a partner, although I guess it's possible (sad but possible) that women are so thoroughly socialized not to do so that many end up married to people they weren't sexually attracted to in the first place. Which... was what Gottlieb advised re: settling, so it all kind of makes sense. If women are drawn to things like a man not vacuuming (???) and not to a man being, for example, hot, then sure, any man will do.

Vows redeems itself

This week's Vows gets the official WWPD stamp of approval. It's the very opposite of 'I found him physically revolting but he's such a kind person and so persistent...' It is, instead:

On the train, she recalled: “I started looking around and noticed a really, really good-looking guy standing about 30 feet away. It’s New York, you see good-looking people all the time, but I was really taken. I was thinking: ‘Where is he from? Where does he live? What’s he doing? Where’s he going?’ ” 

She later wrote in her journal: “I noted his outfit, which struck me as artsy. His brown boots could have passed for work boots. He had a waist-length puffy green jacket. If I had to give his outfit a residence, it would have been the East Village.” 

She told herself she would talk to him if he got off at her stop, but he got off at 59th Street. She took that as a sign from the universe that it was not meant to be, then just as the subway doors were closing, she changed her mind, leapt out and followed him. 

“I gained on him as he was walking up the stairs,” she said. “I remember thinking, ‘Oh gosh, I look terrible, but here I am.’ So I just went with it. I tapped him on the shoulder. I said: ‘You’re wearing gloves so I can’t tell if you are wearing a wedding ring. However, in the event that you’re not married, you were on my subway and I thought you were cute. Any chance I could give you my business card?’ ”

An interaction totally about his looks, his initial physical appeal. At this point, nothing is known about where the relationship will go - if there will be a relationship - but a woman noticing a man is shown as a valid, plausible reason for one to begin. I mean, it is the Vows, so you know where they're going with this.

Note that what's being romanticized isn't a complete reversal of the usual script, i.e.  there's no sense that, if his answer's no, she's going to keep at it. She gives him her card.

A non-scholarly reading of Erica Jong

I just finished Fear of Flying. And... a problem with reading a book about one's own life (if published a decade before one was born) is that in a sea of similar, the moments of difference are all one ends up noticing. And Isadora Wing, Erica Jong's narrator/protagonist, isn't me! Really! I know that detail by detail, it seems like maybe, but no. Really. But because certain seemingly idiosyncratic facts are so similar (and the author has some lovely poodles!), I found myself almost resenting the (many!) places where Wing didn't behave as I would in a given situation. Which is, let's be clear, by any definition, the wrong way to read a work of fiction. But I couldn't help it! Page after page of my own life story, and then something unfamiliar, and thus jarring.

Anyway, to return to a more reasonable (if not all that literary) reading, as with any iconic book, you're living in the world already very much penetrated (seems appropriate) by its ideas. So the ideas themselves seem old hat. (And I defy you to read the first few pages and not picture The Bob Newhart Show, at least aesthetically.) But you have to remember they were new at the time, or at least to assume they were - literature grad school has a way of teaching you that there was always something similar written before the supposed first instance of whichever topic or argument.

To press on with this improper reading, one thing I couldn't decide what to make of in the book was that Isadora is - according to Isadora, at least - not just horny for men, but spectacularly attractive to men. There's her physical appearance, but also a sensuous quality that draws men to her everywhere she goes. (No "bitchy resting face," I suppose - amazing for someone who took the subway to high school!) Every man tries to sleep with her; many succeed, with her enthusiastic consent. Sort of the opposite end of the spectrum, then, from Lena Dunham's protagonist in "Tiny Furniture," who's also up for anything, but who's not someone men want to have sex with. My guess would be that most young women fall between these two extremes - that is, that they'll generally be able to find someone to sleep with if that's their goal, but they won't inspire saw-you-across-the-crowded-room lust in absolutely every man they meet. If Isadora wants sex, which she quite often does, she simply steps outside and all-the-men are waiting.

Which... gets to the question of how female beauty relates to female heterosexual desire. Do women desire men, or just being thought beautiful by men? At first it seems like Isadora's in the first category, but the more we hear about her lovely hair and ass, the more we may wonder if it's the latter.

And then you have to wonder about the liberation promised. Isadora's in an unusual situation. Partly it's that family money has made it so she's never financially dependent on a man (although she does also work - sentences here and there suggest she lives off some combination). For her, leaving a husband means sacrificing a bourgeois identity, but not a standard of living. Which is huge - even the so-called privileged middle-class housewives Friedan, etc., were talking about generally didn't have that option.

But it's also that, although she experiences occasional romantic disappointment, she never desires without being desired. She's able to rely on passivity as a way of bringing in new partners, and is stunned to realize, at a fairly mature age, that when she pursues a man who's not that into her, it doesn't go as well. (Although she's still kinda-sorta pursued by the man in question.) But for most of the book, because she's such an outlier, liberation is a simple matter of saying yes when a "good" girl would say no.

A very Mallory post

-Do women dress for men? Hadley Freeman says no. WWPD says, it's complicated. Most women like men, just as most men like women. Women have the option of attracting men with clothes-and-makeup. The reverse isn't nearly as true. How would this not impact how (many) women (sometimes) dress?

It overshoots the feminist mark to say that women never take note of the effect certain clothing can have, and then go and wear it with that effect in mind. Feminism, in this context, means that women who wear said clothing can't be preemptively assumed to have given consent to anything in particular. Also that women uninterested in attracting men don't somehow owe it to men generally to dress in a way men like. Nor, even, is what random internet dude likes necessarily indicative of what men this woman is interacting with offline find appealing. This sort of talk is some mix of presumptuous and unhelpful. Thus why women so often balk at unsolicited advice from internet commenters about what they ought to wear.

-Is eyebrow pencil a good idea? I ordered one and it arrived the same day as Into The Gloss covered eyebrows. (Aha! I'd already decided on the purchase!) As I've mentioned on WWPD before, I have... thoughts about eyebrows. I feel shortchanged in this regard - someone of my ethnicity, and with my coloring and hair-thickness, ought to have really prominent eyebrows. Not faint ones several shades lighter than my hair, that I'm convinced belong to some blond woman who has the eyebrows that were, in turn, rightfully mine. Yet the fear in trying to correct for this is the Uncle Leo effect. And to connect today's Item One with Item Two, there's that other "Seinfeld" episode, where it's determined that men don't care about eyebrows. On at least two occasions in the WWPD comments, a commenter named Matt begged to differ (he prefers them untweezed), but I will only do so much archival research for one post, so you'll just have to take my word for it.

So I've put the stuff on and the result... I kind of like how it looks, and it's definitely what I wish my eyebrows did look like, the right color, etc., but because it isn't how they generally do look, it looks weird, artificial in a way that other kinds of makeup - including ones I rarely wear, like eyeshadow -somehow don't. Maybe it's that this type of makeup is seen as somehow shameful, so there's no general cultural knowledge regarding how to apply it? Putting on mascara or lipstick is kind of sexy or glamorous. Is that the reason? Who knows. In any case, I believe I can now conclude this post confident that I've lost any and all male readers, with the possible exception of the Matt with eyebrow preferences. With that, back to either "Family Ties" or The Magic Mountain, my two preferred bits of cultural consumption at the moment.

Complexities of desire

-The NYT deems a recent murder of a white man as not racially motivated for the following reasons:

A closer look at the shooting shows it was not about race. One of the three suspects was white, another had a white mother and a third had many white friends, including a girl he had been dating. 

Yes, if one of the alleged offenders is also white, and there was no other detail suggesting racial animosity, this would be a strange one to investigate as a hate crime. But what interests me here is the notion that someone can't be racist against a particular race if they have a parent who's that race, if some of their friends are, or if their significant other is. As came up on occasion in my dissertation, anti-Semites with Jewish lovers or spouses were plenty common in 19th-century French fiction, and not unheard-of in life. And the more familiar American example: do we really think all black people with white ancestry are the product of unions born of interracial understanding? And, you know, the some of my best friends thing?

-So, the first Prudie letter here. While there is, once again, far more going on than the angle I'm focusing on, what's interesting for WWPD persistent-motif purposes is the way female desire sometimes gets expressed as the desire to be desired. The backstory for the too-busy-for-links/the "Dear Prudence" boycotters: a married woman has this outrageous, insatiable sex drive, but because her husband isn't available every five minutes or whatever, she fears that he doesn't find her attractive. Mismatched libido - or maybe it's just that she's not particularly monogamous, it's not clear (the "I fantasize constantly about having sex with others" bit, and the cheating on her first husband one...), but in any case, why does she articulate this as being about how pretty she is? Is this, as Prudie concludes, because of this woman's "shriveled and needy ego"? While I second Prudie's suggestion that the woman seek help, this seems only an extreme example of something that goes on even among the not-unhinged: women following whichever script it is that asks them to articulate their own urges for beautiful (which is subjective) men as a wish to be thought beautiful by men.

Women are socialized to

Oh, here we go: Are women perverts if they find younger (but over-18) men attractive? The Jezebellian community does some soul-searching to that effect here. One Direction was no doubt formed with the express purpose of launching such conversations.

While arguments abound, online and off, over whether straight men are 'naturally' only attracted to 15-year-olds, or whether it's physically possible to be aroused by a hag of 22, a woman who so much as notices a pack of shirtless early-20s men running by is, if she is mid-20s or older herself, on shaky ground. Even if she isn't exclusively or even especially attracted to younger men. There's a kind of nudge-nudge acknowledgment that men are, ahem, perfectly capable of finding girls-who-pass-for-women attractive, while a woman finding a definitively adult but not-quite-old-enough man even slightly attractive gets filed under something akin to pedophilia. What to make of this?

Another entry into the 'Women are socialized to ...' category: women are socialized to find men younger than themselves unattractive. Which has its plusses - female teachers tend to think of their male students as 'boys,' even if the boys in question are of legal drinking age. And 'boys,' that's not supposed to be a good thing. Whereas 'girls'...

Given the ethical and potential legal iffiness of finding 18-year-olds attractive (given that many who are a few years younger can pass for 18, an issue even for those who aren't teaching or otherwise working with these individuals - even for those not much over 18 themselves), there's something to be said for not even seeing the potential for sexiness in the the not-much-older-than-18 set. Point being, I'm not sure straight women should mind that we were socialized in this way, that unless Harry Styles himself struts by (One Direction, the exception that proves the rule), we may remain blissfully indifferent to college-age men.

It would probably be better if men were similarly socialized, than if in this realm, as in so many others, we declared the feminist goal as the one that would make female sexuality keep pace with male. That is, if men felt squicky about whichever attractions to much-younger women. Cue here, though, the pop-evo-psych comments about how female fertility peaks at 12 and it's only natural for men to see 17 as over the hill, but there's no arguing with such people, so why bother. Cue 'boys mature later,' although how that squares with men ogling 10th graders and women self-flagellating for admiring 22-year-olds, I don't entirely understand.

*****

But the problem here is that the right to admire the young seems very much wrapped up with the right to actively seek out the people you find attractive, as vs. passively accepting the offer of the best of the bunch who've noticed you. Whereas pursuing vs. being pursued, this ought to be a separate matter. And on that matter, Rachel Hills is spot-on as always. A woman is supposed to want to be spotted across the room for her beauty. That a woman may also notice the most beautiful man in the room is not really supposed to matter, or is not even supposed to be a thing that happens. The best a woman can hope for is that the man she's noticed will coincidentally notice her.

But the world may well be divided between those who prefer to choose and those who prefer to be chosen... without the former always being men and the latter always being women. It could be - and this is my sense - that women are socialized to articulate desire as the desire to be desired. And that some women do genuinely experience desire in this way, whereas others simply learn, at a young age, to frame it in those terms.

Mindy Kaling is onto something

-I will no doubt be weighing in on this. For now, the placeholder.

-Is it really all that empowering to end an article arguing against people/women having facelifts by advising, as an alternative, "a good deal of skin care"? Yes, Luisa Dillner also advises "good sleep" and "good diet," but isn't "skin care" itself problematic for many of the same reasons as cosmetic surgery? As in, it involves spending far too much money on that which likely won't do anything positive for one's appearance, but might nevertheless have some unforeseen medical and/or cosmetic consequences? (At least if you're poisoning yourself with lipstick - and you are - your lips actually become - temporarily - whichever color you've painted them.)

If "skin care" means sun protection, not scratching at mosquito bites (or not getting so bitten to begin with - thanks very much, faulty window screens), and, if at all possible, seeing a dermatologist if there's an actual, identifiable problem, then yes, wise. But I'm not sure where, on the "love the face you have" spectrum, the thousand-dollar creams fall, relative to surgery, injections, peels (this is a thing, yes? not just something Patsy does on AbFab?), etc.

-I've been watching a lot of "I Love Lucy" at the gym, while folding laundry, and beats me why, but there it is. And I noticed something I'd never thought about when watching the show originally, as a toddler or thereabouts: Ricky Ricardo is, like, attractive. (Possibly relevant: my husband's been away for a while, as have all human beings, so I'm comparing black-and-white sitcom stars to, I don't know, squirrels, or the more strapping of the deer. And, I suppose, Fred Mertz.) Desi Arnaz must have used a really expensive moisturizer or something, because damn.

Well! Apparently (credit goes to a relative, but a different one than identified the crawfish) Mindy Kaling agrees. She calls him "matinee-idol good-looking," which about covers it. Glad to know I haven't lost my mind/taste, as presumably Kaling is comparing Ricky to a broader cast of characters.