Someone over at The Corner has this quote up today:
In my typical shallow way, I'm going to focus on just the bit I have highlighted. There is something important there. It's an odd thing for a single man to understand a whole lot about women's dress. For a married man it probably ought not to be; for his wife has presumably been telling him about this stuff and he, therefore, ought to have been paying attention. But a single guy knowing enough about women's dress to run off the designer's name is a bad thing.
Proust could do it—I've been reading Proust again—but that is no recommendation. Proust wasn't into girls and he wasn't much of a man in any case, although he was a great novelist.
When the Lemon Girl and I were just beginning dating but not being public about it, a coworker of ours once complimented her shirt. I was a little surprised by the compliment at the time because it was a fairly ordinary shirt of the sort that a lot of girls wore. The Lemon Girl just smirked at this and then patiently explained to me, as one might explain to a child, that the shirt wasn't the point. "When a guy says 'nice shirt' he really means 'nice breasts'," she said.
And suddenly all was clear; that was what he meant and I knew it because he'd expressed the thought to me privately. The point being, that is what a real man is supposed to mean when he compliments a woman on her clothes. The point of complimenting a woman on her clothing is not to compliment the clothes. The point is, "You look good in that shirt," with the emphasis very much on the "you".
Complimenting a woman on her clothing is a polite way of telling a woman she has a beautiful body without being explicit about it. It's polite because you leave her the option of not acknowledging the full meaning of what you have said. If you tell her you really like her skirt she can smile and say "thank you", thereby acknowledging what ought to be the real meaning of your compliment, or she can tell you where she bought it, thereby deflecting both the meaning and you away from her intimate self. There is an entire secret language, consisting of both words and gestures, that goes with these things.
An old roommate of mine used to spend a fortune in pursuit of women he had zero chance with because he just didn't get it. He would particularly fall for waitresses because they would be nice to him so he kept trying. And he kept trying and trying and trying and trying.
What Doug could never pick up was the subtle signals that these women were sending him. They were nice to him but they were also drawing a line. He could never see that girls had a way of receiving compliments that was receptive but would also send signals that beyond a certain point he would not go. The whole issue was particularly complicated with people in the service industry because a good part of their job requires them to be receptive and friendly so they couldn't really tell him to piss off without risking the loss of their job.
(As an aside, what Doug did was, as a consequence, very close to harassment. It wasn't overt enough to count as such legally speaking but I'm sure some of these girls felt quite pestered by the guy.)
Doug couldn't see this and after a while I began to suspect that the real problem was that he wouldn't because Doug had a deep resentment of being rejected. A big part of being an adult is being rejected. It's one of those things an adult learns to deal with.
Doug still remembered a girlfriend who'd dumped him when he broke his leg skiing (a really serious break that ended his competitive skiing). On one of her visits to him afterward, when his parent's helpfully left them alone, she stunned him by telling him it was over.
When I first met Doug, I took this story at face value. I just took it that his ex-girlfriend was a heartless bitch who'd walked into his family home to see him lying helpless on the couch, encased in this huge cast, and callously dumped him.
As I got to know him better, I began to wonder if there wasn't more to it. I never doubted the facts. I knew the facts were right as the story was later told to me by a friend of the girl who dumped him and she told essentially the same facts and she didn't think much of what her, by then, ex-friend had done to Doug either. But she did wonder why he was still going on about something that happened back when he was seventeen now that he was in his early twenties.
That bothered me too. And when I looked at the way he talked to girls, and the way he missed what ought to have been obvious hints, I began to see denial. I have no doubt that his earlier girlfriend might have been nicer about it, although we might also wonder how much nicer it would be to have nursed him through his injury only to dump him.
My guess is that she saw something in Doug when he hurt himself that she didn't like. I don't really know this for certain but I think she saw something about the way Doug was dealing with the accident. She saw a sort of victim-hood or, more accurately, an attitude to victim-hood. For Doug really was a victim, he wasn't making that part up. But she saw a guy who was responding in a way that told her he wasn't much of a man.
She may not have thought it through consciously. Consciousness is over-rated. The guy who saw the Lemon Girl girl looking really good in a shirt may not be consciously aware that the thin horizontal stripes accentuated both the curve of her breasts and the flatness of her stomach. He just knew that he really liked what he was seeing.
Doug's girlfriend really didn't like what she was seeing.
And it came out when I knew him as a kind of solipsism. He only saw things as they related to him. He didn't see women he liked as other people who needed to be impressed and he didn't see that women looked at him and they wanted to see manliness the same way he wanted to look at them and see womanliness. So he never bothered learn the language that would have allowed them to tell him whether or not they were interested because that way he'd never have to face rejection
(There will be at least one more post on this subject.)
America’s elite has a problem. It’s skinny jeans and scarves, it’s Bama bangs and pants with tiny, tiny embroidered lobsters, it’s Michael Cera, it’s guys who compliment a girl’s dress by brand, it’s guys who don’t know who bats fourth for the Yankees. Between the hipsters and the fratstars, American intellectual men under the age of twenty-five have lost track of acting like Men—and these are our future leaders. We have no John Wayne, no Clint Eastwood. And girls? Girls hate it.That's from a young conservative named Katherine Miller and it's an excerpt from a new book. You can read the entire excerpt here. (Readers of this blog should click on the link just to see whose photograph they picked to portray what a man should be.)
In my typical shallow way, I'm going to focus on just the bit I have highlighted. There is something important there. It's an odd thing for a single man to understand a whole lot about women's dress. For a married man it probably ought not to be; for his wife has presumably been telling him about this stuff and he, therefore, ought to have been paying attention. But a single guy knowing enough about women's dress to run off the designer's name is a bad thing.
Proust could do it—I've been reading Proust again—but that is no recommendation. Proust wasn't into girls and he wasn't much of a man in any case, although he was a great novelist.
When the Lemon Girl and I were just beginning dating but not being public about it, a coworker of ours once complimented her shirt. I was a little surprised by the compliment at the time because it was a fairly ordinary shirt of the sort that a lot of girls wore. The Lemon Girl just smirked at this and then patiently explained to me, as one might explain to a child, that the shirt wasn't the point. "When a guy says 'nice shirt' he really means 'nice breasts'," she said.
And suddenly all was clear; that was what he meant and I knew it because he'd expressed the thought to me privately. The point being, that is what a real man is supposed to mean when he compliments a woman on her clothes. The point of complimenting a woman on her clothing is not to compliment the clothes. The point is, "You look good in that shirt," with the emphasis very much on the "you".
Complimenting a woman on her clothing is a polite way of telling a woman she has a beautiful body without being explicit about it. It's polite because you leave her the option of not acknowledging the full meaning of what you have said. If you tell her you really like her skirt she can smile and say "thank you", thereby acknowledging what ought to be the real meaning of your compliment, or she can tell you where she bought it, thereby deflecting both the meaning and you away from her intimate self. There is an entire secret language, consisting of both words and gestures, that goes with these things.
An old roommate of mine used to spend a fortune in pursuit of women he had zero chance with because he just didn't get it. He would particularly fall for waitresses because they would be nice to him so he kept trying. And he kept trying and trying and trying and trying.
What Doug could never pick up was the subtle signals that these women were sending him. They were nice to him but they were also drawing a line. He could never see that girls had a way of receiving compliments that was receptive but would also send signals that beyond a certain point he would not go. The whole issue was particularly complicated with people in the service industry because a good part of their job requires them to be receptive and friendly so they couldn't really tell him to piss off without risking the loss of their job.
(As an aside, what Doug did was, as a consequence, very close to harassment. It wasn't overt enough to count as such legally speaking but I'm sure some of these girls felt quite pestered by the guy.)
Doug couldn't see this and after a while I began to suspect that the real problem was that he wouldn't because Doug had a deep resentment of being rejected. A big part of being an adult is being rejected. It's one of those things an adult learns to deal with.
Doug still remembered a girlfriend who'd dumped him when he broke his leg skiing (a really serious break that ended his competitive skiing). On one of her visits to him afterward, when his parent's helpfully left them alone, she stunned him by telling him it was over.
When I first met Doug, I took this story at face value. I just took it that his ex-girlfriend was a heartless bitch who'd walked into his family home to see him lying helpless on the couch, encased in this huge cast, and callously dumped him.
As I got to know him better, I began to wonder if there wasn't more to it. I never doubted the facts. I knew the facts were right as the story was later told to me by a friend of the girl who dumped him and she told essentially the same facts and she didn't think much of what her, by then, ex-friend had done to Doug either. But she did wonder why he was still going on about something that happened back when he was seventeen now that he was in his early twenties.
That bothered me too. And when I looked at the way he talked to girls, and the way he missed what ought to have been obvious hints, I began to see denial. I have no doubt that his earlier girlfriend might have been nicer about it, although we might also wonder how much nicer it would be to have nursed him through his injury only to dump him.
My guess is that she saw something in Doug when he hurt himself that she didn't like. I don't really know this for certain but I think she saw something about the way Doug was dealing with the accident. She saw a sort of victim-hood or, more accurately, an attitude to victim-hood. For Doug really was a victim, he wasn't making that part up. But she saw a guy who was responding in a way that told her he wasn't much of a man.
She may not have thought it through consciously. Consciousness is over-rated. The guy who saw the Lemon Girl girl looking really good in a shirt may not be consciously aware that the thin horizontal stripes accentuated both the curve of her breasts and the flatness of her stomach. He just knew that he really liked what he was seeing.
Doug's girlfriend really didn't like what she was seeing.
And it came out when I knew him as a kind of solipsism. He only saw things as they related to him. He didn't see women he liked as other people who needed to be impressed and he didn't see that women looked at him and they wanted to see manliness the same way he wanted to look at them and see womanliness. So he never bothered learn the language that would have allowed them to tell him whether or not they were interested because that way he'd never have to face rejection
(There will be at least one more post on this subject.)
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