Friday, November 12, 2010

Friday is Venus Day

Two kinds of narcissism (1)
Sensual self-indulgence
There are certain kinds of behaviour that we classify as self-love and that, therefore, come with moral disapprobation. I'm going to talk about two of these in two separate posts. The first is sensual luxury and the second is seeking sexual approval. The second post will come next week as this one is already too long by itself.

I don't mean narcissism in the clinical sense. Narcissism is one of those words—such as paranoid,  schizophrenic and psychopath—that we sometimes use in casual ways that have little to do with the technical definitions. There is a story to tell about the way these things do or do not relate to clinical narcissism and I'll get to that but my main interest is elsewhere.

We know sensual luxury (sluxury?) when we see it. I saw it Wednesday afternoon at the a pie shop on Bank Street. I walked in the door and saw a young woman stretching. But she prolonged that stretch and savoured it to the point that was quite erotic. The maple pear nut pie I bought from her was delicious but not nearly so delicious as she was.  We (meaning "us men") make assumptions about such women. We find it very desirable to find this quality in a woman. That she enjoys herself so much is like her giving us permission to enjoy her too. And that she is so obviously capable of taking pleasure means she is most likely going to be pleasurable, that she can respond to our efforts and that is very important to us.

It's also the the kind of self love that both immoralists and moralists love to target. The woman luxuriating in her own femininity is the subject of both sleazy pornography and the most obvious sorts of moral satire. So we take it to be a bad thing no matter how much we like seeing it.

Think of the current war on perfume, for example. Genuine scent allergies are actually quite rare and most perfumes and scented soaps and so forth are nowhere near strong enough to trigger a response in anyone more than a foot away. And yet all of society is expected to hold itself in obeisance to satisfy the usual pestering busybodies who want to eliminate everything that might possibly cause risk from our lives. The only reason they get away with this is the aura of moral disapproval that attaches itself to women engaging in sensual self-indulgence.

Really a virtue?
There are two surprising things about sensual luxury. The first is that real narcissists, I am talking in the clinical sense now, are incapable of enjoying it. That is perhaps important no? This supposedly bad tendency is actually an indicator of mental health.

Moralists always tell us that it is the pursuit of sensual luxury that causes disorder. But perhaps I should give them some due here for the person who pursues certain "pleasures" obsessively is disordered. But people with obsessions aren't really luxuriating in the pleasure. They can't and rush on to the next like someone stuffing their face with potato chips. The woman who appreciates sensual luxury savours every mouthful; she isn't in a rush to get to the next experience.

The second surprising thing about sensual luxury is how much work it is. Moralists associate it with laziness and moral laxism but the truth is that very few women (or men but I'm talking about women today) can pull sensual luxury off. There is a multi-billion dollar market devoted to helping women develop sensual luxury—soft and silky fabrics, scents, candles, bubble bath, bath oils, bath tubs, chocolate—and yet very few women are convincingly sensual in this way.

When I was in university I shared a house with six other people, five of whom were women. They all had tons of these products. All of which sat around unused most of the time. The silky clothes weren't worn because dressing up is an effort, the scents sat around unused because it was an effort just to remember to put them on everyday, the candles were lit maybe once (generally on the same day the silky clothes were worn). These women took showers rather than baths and, when pressed, admitted that they didn't like baths much and hated bath products because they left  a film on their skin afterward leaving them feeling dirty. They praised chocolate heavily but the truth was they preferred cheap potato chips to expensive chocolate.

But they also knew that sensual luxury is very attractive to most men and therefore they cultivated that image. All through the 1980s I had a girlfriend just like those women. I thought, this is what women are like and this is what you have to settle for (I'm happy to say I was wrong). They entice you with this image of sensual self-indulgence and then they give you something else.

But actually learning to savour a smell, that is hard work. And trying to buy it is usually pointless because, truth be told, the smell of lemons or coffee or dead leaves in fall or the smell of rain on hot summer pavement or the smell in the fall air just before it snows are all much more rewarding than the smell of Channel #5. Because most don't spend nearly enough time indulging these things, they don't know ourselves and they don't know what really stimulates a sensual response in them. Trying to buy this sort of virtue is impossible. To do sensual luxury well she has to know herself really well and simply buying a sensual bath oil and candle kit isn't self knowledge.

It also gets the process backwards. Most marketing pitches for sensual luxury will tell us that this stuff will help us forget our troubles. "Come to our Spa and the world will melt away."  But the woman who really can do sensual luxury knows that she has to turn those troubles off herself before she can enjoy herself.

It's something to learn while she is young if at all possible. She will forget what she has learned from time to time but, with some hard work, she can retrieve it if she spent her girlhood well.

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