1. Men and women seek to make themselves attractive to the opposite sex in "artificial" ways. 2. What is "attractive" varies with social and cultural norms. 3. There is a current "pornification of every day styles;" that is, women are getting their standards of behavior and attractiveness from the porn industry....and this has some special historical significance.
These thoughts, taken together, could be interpreted to mean that there is something suspect in decking ourselves up to attract others; that there cannot be deeper meanings to this activity since it varies with culture; and that, certainly, to seek to attract others for the purposes of sexual gratification is the greatest sin. Well...ahem.
So far as 1 is concerned, I do not think this is either new, nor objectionable, nor characteristic of "capitalism." Animals preen; humans are animals. But since we are artifice-creating animals, our preening is much more elaborate, symbol-laden, and time consuming than that of animals. Anecdotally, I have noticed that falling in love for me (requited or not) translates instantly into a ten pound loss and a wonderful glow. Miraculously, just when I need to attract someone, my powers of attraction seem to be naturally magnified. I doubt that capitalism is responsible for this.
Every morning, I watch my daughter get ready for school. This takes a goodly amount of time and by the time we leave she has once more created a look-for-the day. This could be a fey Annie Hallish look; a devastating vamp look; or the virginal, unconcerned gazelle look. She is eleven going on sixteen. She is tall and has a dancer's slim, shapely figure. I know what she's doing: she is experimenting--honing and testing her vital powers. I will not shame her out of it as my mother did me. She needs to do this precisely in order not to let others dictate how she should look. She is feeling her way into expressing what she understands womanhood to be and I am glad that beauty and sexual attractiveness are part of that. Is she defining herself through a man's gaze? Hardly. The boys at her school are rough and raw and still laboring at catching up to the girls. They are quite overwhelmed by her even when she doesn't try to look good. One day last week she put on platform shoes, tight hip-hugger jeans, a teal camisole top, a black lace bolero, and peackock feather earrings. She pulled her hair tightly back into a ballerina bun. No make up. It was a vampish day and she looked devastating. I said nothing. When I picked her up that afternoon she was very angry. One of the older male teachers told her that her outfit was not "appropriate for school." "What is inappropriate" she asks? He cannot say: every part of her body is covered. Her jeans are tight, but every girl in the school wears tight jeans. She tried to look good, to be attractive, and it has been thrown in her face as a kind of crime or stain. The first and most painful lesson a woman learns is that beauty is dangerous. What are we heading for when we come to that conclusion?
The eternal theme: "the falsity of women's painting." Collette writes beautifully about the choice of natural/artificial for women when they reach their invisible years:
"I give my indulgence--and I am not the only one--and approval to those who wear the colors of their survival, the signs of their activity, into the arena. Too much courage has shone among the female kind, and for too many years, for women, under the pretext of loyalty, to break the contract they signed with beauty. You all seem to have this new [plain] way about you, a look of embarrassment and apology which is not yours. "But it's my real face!" No. Your real face is in the drawer of your dressing table, and sadly enough, you have left your good spirits in with it. Your real face is a warm, matte pink tending toward fawn, set off high on the cheeks by a glimmer of deep carmine, well blended and nearly translucent--which stops just under the lower eyelid, where it disappears deep into bluish gray, barely visible, spread up to the brow; the thin eyebrow, carefully drawn out at the end, is brown like your thick, curling lashes betweeen which your gray eyes look blue. I'm not forgetting the mouth whose design--equally well corrected--is a bold arc, its scarlet color making the teeth whiter. To work! Show a little confience in yourself, the inner smile you were known for will blossom all at once over the whole of you. One will only have to see you to be certain that the false Alix was that bland, retiring, discouraged, somewhat bletted woman....The true Alix is the one who always had a taste for adorning herself, defending herself, and pleasing others, for savoring the bitterness, the risk, and the sweetness of living--the true Alix, you see, is the young one."
What is the "true" self, she asks: the person who announces to the world that it matters not in the least whether we are attractive to anyone; or that which says it matters.
Of course, the figure Collette describes, the iconic beauty of sixty years ago, would look like a clown today. Standards of beauty shift; but the impulse to attract, to shine, to dazzle is much more trustworthy than its prim-mouthed-love-me-for-myself-or-you-are-a-pig alternative.
As for the current pornification of style -- well, I've been tracking this stuff for about forty years: I notice that every five years or so, the pendulum swings: virgin, whore, virgin, whore, virgin, whore. It betrays a certain lack of imagination, but it's steady on anyway. I'm not sure whether it tracks economic cycles or what the fuck. But, you know. We've got Sandra Dee and we've got Marilyn. We've got Mia Farrow, and we've go Jean Shrimpton. We've got the long sober looks of the mid seventies, followed by the disco-tramp era; we've got the preppie look of the early eighties, followed by the bag lady look. In 1983 I had my first kid and then I kind of lost track. Judging from the videos my daughter watches, the world is now divided into pimps and ho's. It's the whore look again. Yawn.
But I feel for Dwayne's friend (sort of) who would like a taste of a woman and finds himself instead sampling Cosmo's "Ten Things to Drive Your Man Wild." The truth is that intimacy is hard and scary and that we're so emptied out and exhausted at the end of the day that when we finally come together, we can only trade these cultural tokens. Thus, being sexual never gets any farther (or less safe) than a complicated manipulation of sexual images (it would too much to call it play) and no one ever loses control.
Joanna