Friday, May 6, 2011

Womanly virtues Friday

How not to be vain?
Readers may have noticed the appearance of a new blog in the news feed called Betty Beguiles. Her motto is "Marriage, modesty and moxie with a vintage twist". A lot of her stuff is about being a good wife and that means, as she sees it, looking good. This leads to the inevitable question from one of her readers named Morgan:
“Does anyone else struggle with wanting to look nice vs not being vain? Or is it just the perfectionist in me that thinks it's impossible to do both?

For some reason this is a hard one for me. If I am dressing so that my body looks nice, am I inherently being vain?”
Before going anywhere with that, I want you to stop and consider an argument that a very devoted libertarian who was at high school with me used to make. She'd say that the fact that you get a good feeling when giving to charity proves that it's really a selfish gesture. You instinctively know that argument is crap as soon as you read it or hear it. Among other things, the person using it wants to justify never giving. But if you had to explain why it's crap you might struggle a bit.

And there are people who spend a lot of time trying to be good in ways that don't give them a good feeling. Giving more than you can afford is a great way to do this.

Except that you'll eventually come to the point where you are busily congratulating yourself for only giving in ways that make you suffer and that seems rather, what is the word I'm looking for here, well, it seems rather vain doesn't it?

So here is hint number one for Morgan, when it comes to analyzing these things, your inner feelings are useless. They tell you nothing at all. That you feel vain one day is just as likely to be a fluke of brain chemistry or some guilt-inducing remark you heard or read somewhere. It has nothing to do with anything at all worth considering.

If vanity means anything at all, it has to mean something with an objective correlative. There has to be something outside your head that can be pointed at and evaluated.

What is vanity anyway?
 In a famous Bible translation that most of us know, vanity means futility. That is one definition. When women worry about whether they are being vain they really mean something else. My Oxford Dictionary says that something else is "being excessively concerned about appearance" but I'm not sure that's quite it. Certainly it would be wrong to be excessively concerned about anything but there are an awful lot of people we use the word "vain" to describe who really ought to be much more concerned about their appearance rather than less so.

I think the real fear is being concerned about your appearance for reasons that are illegitimate. And for nice girls like Betty's reader Morgan the primary illegitimate reason is something she let's slip in the way she words her question above. Can you spot it? Here it is;
If I am dressing so that my body looks nice, am I inherently being vain?
So the thing that bothers her is dressing so her "body" looks nice. Just being pretty or even beautiful isn't the issue. What bothers Morgan is that she dresses so that her body looks nice and that makes her feel good about herself and she worries that that is vain. And that's still not quite it because there is a missing element and that is other people. She dresses so that other people will notice that her body looks nice.

What is bothering Morgan here—and this is something that neither Betty nor anyone in the comments thread in the original post never address—is that she knows that one of the reasons she dresses well is because she wants to be desired sexually. And she wants the desire apart from any actual sex she may or may not be happening.  That is what she means by "vanity" here. And that's not crazy. You can see how that might feel illegitimate.

At the same time, you don't have to be incredibly observant to notice that rather a lot of women want to feel desired apart from any specific sexual relationship they have. Anyone who was surveying human behaviour in a scientific fashion—as opposed to moral—would probably conclude that while not universal, this behaviour was common enough in women to be called normal.

So why does it bother Morgan? There is more than one possibility. It may be that walking around with her body dressed to look good gets her aroused and she feels guilty about this.  Or maybe she doesn't feel guilty about this but there is this niggling sense that she ought to feel guilty about it.

Or it may not actually be about the sex per se but rather about the sexual status. It's far from unheard of for a woman to dress in ways that attract sexual attention while actually being little interested or even repulsed by actual sex. Often the real purpose of sexual dressing is to demonstrate superior sexual status to others and that sounds about as vain as vain gets. (There are millions of lonely, love-starved men who look longingly at the way their wife dresses to meet her best girlfriend or for the office and wonder why she never does that for him. )

But before we get too worked about this, let's consider the woman who dresses in ways that conceal her sexuality because she looks at the way some other women dress and thinks ill of them. You want to say: "She thinks she is better than them! How vain."

Or how about the woman who dresses in ways that conceal her sexuality because she believes that women's sexual power is evil? Do you prefer her?

And how about the woman who dresses nicely for some kinds of social situations because she feels it is expected of her, and worries that others will think less of her if she doesn't, but hates actually doing it? If it were up to her, she'd wear the same jeans shirt to everything. If anything is vanity, that is vanity.

The whole project of defining "vanity" seems like vanity; as in futile. And it seems futile because it is futile.

Worrying about what you are and what you are trying to become is a legitimate project (it is the moral project) but this particular fear of vanity is a pseudo problem. To be a woman (or a man) is to be a sexual being. It means to play a part in a binary relationship involving two sexes and any moral person will strive to play that part well. It means to play that part well both publicly or privately. And yes, your appearance is part of it. When a woman presents herself publicly, she presents herself as a sexual being and that is not only okay, it is good.

And, quite frankly, there are far, far more "vain" women and men (including me more often than I like to admit) for whom not putting nearly enough effort into looking good is a bigger problem than the reverse. Caring about your appearance isn't a marker for vanity.

Vanity regarding appearance looks like a moral term but it cannot be made to do anything useful in moral life. Just toss it. I'm serious. The next time you see something that looks like a clear-cut case of vanity, try describing it in other moral language without using the words "vain" or "vanity". If you can't make a convincing moral case one way or another without those words, there isn't any moral argument to be made.

(This, by the way, is true of any moral concern. Our language has an incredible wealth of moral terms. If there is a real moral case to be made, you should still be able to make it without what seems like the key moral term. If you can't, it isn't really a moral problem to begin with.)

2 comments:

  1. "Worrying about what you are and what you are trying to become is a legitimate project (it is the moral project)."
    this is why I like this blog

    ReplyDelete
  2. also:
    http://varropieces.blogspot.com/2011/04/fashion-and-other-people.html

    ReplyDelete