Blogging The Reef: Gender Performance

(To read all posts about The Reef click here.)

It's time to move on from Book One of The Reef to the rest of the story and the theme I want to carry forward is what I call "Gender Performance". I don't use the expression the way some others do*.

For me the interesting thing is that to adopt any role first means to be alienated from it. To use a common example, if you get hired to wait tables, you learn the role by playing the part. As others beginning with Sartre have pointed out, waiters tend to over-play the part, that is to be a bit artificial about it, in order to learn it. You don't begin by considering what it feels like to be a waiter or even as yourself what a waiter believes. You begin by dressing in a certain way, walking in a certain way, talking in a certain way.

So what about becoming a woman? (Or a man, of course, but this book is about the task of becoming a woman.) In a sense it seems ridiculous because it seems a matter of what chromosomes you have. But it isn't really that way. You learn to play the part and our culture is full of games that little and not-so-little girls play on the way to becoming a woman.

Now the opposing idea is naturalness or authenticity: "just be the person you really are". Wharton plays with that idea by putting it into George's head. I think she means for us to think of it as a modern idea. In the great English Novels , "artificial" and "artifice" were compliments and someone like a Jane Austen heroine rated herself, and was rated by others, based on what she had made herself. When George Darrow sees Sophy Viner, he thinks he sees in her something he calls naturalness and he compares that with the artifice of Anna Leath.

And we should not forget that Darrow prefers artifice. He gets frustrated with the delay from Anna Leath—he gets frustrated with the reef that seems to block his approach—but there is never a time when he prefers what he calls the naturalism of Sophy. He just finds that easier.

But he bores of her.

But the thing we might wonder about is whether George is right to contrast the two women this way. He looks at Sophy's ambitions to be an actress and thinks she will not succeed because she is too natural and his experience is that great actors put their artifice into being a character on stage and are quite boring when not. That is probably true, but I don't think we should let George fool us into thinking that Sophy is not performing. I'd suggest that the real issue is that Sophy is putting so much into the act of being a woman that she doesn't have anything over to play parts on stage.

Consider this description of Sophy and George walking around Paris and her describing her life to him:

She had the gift of rapid definition, and his questions as to the life she had led with the Farlows, during the interregnum between the Hoke and Murrett eras, called up before him a queer little corner of Parisian existence.

Now George thinks that he fully grasps Sophy and that he is seeing right to the bottom of her; he thinks that she is easy to define. But we might look at the expression "the gift of rapid definition" and see someone who has so mastered a role that we get a clear vision of what they are about. A bad waiter, someone who doesn't play the role well, might get mistaken for just another customer. And, I suppose, someone who doesn't feel comfortable playing the role of customer might be embarrassed by having someone assume they are a waiter and ask them where the men's room is. But if Sophy is really good at playing the part of being a woman, then a man might fool himself into thinking he is figuring out quickly what she means for him to be figuring out.

Okay, you may say, but is there any evidence that Sophy is doing anything like playing the part of being a woman? Yes, there is and I think it is a crucial scene if we want to understand book one. It's a little earlier in chapter four. George and Sophy have spent their first night in adjoining rooms in Paris and he goes and knocks on her door:

It instantly opened at his knock, and she came forth looking as if she had been plunged into some sparkling element which had curled up all her drooping tendrils and wrapped her in a shimmer of fresh leaves.

"Well, what do you think of me?" she cried; and with a hand at her waist she spun about as if to show off some miracle of Parisian dress-making.

"I think the missing trunk has come--and that it was worth waiting for!"

"You do like my dress?"

"I adore it! I always adore new dresses--why, you don't mean to say it's not a new one?"

She laughed out her triumph.

"No, no, no! My trunk hasn't come, and this is only my old rag of yesterday--but I never knew the trick to fail!" And, as he stared: "You see," she joyously explained, "I've always had to dress in all kinds of dreary left-overs, and sometimes, when everybody else was smart and new, it used to make me awfully miserable. So one day, when Mrs. Murrett dragged me down unexpectedly to fill a place at dinner, I suddenly thought I'd try spinning around like that, and say to every one: 'Well, what do you think of me?' And, do you know, they were all taken in, including Mrs. Murrett, who didn't recognize my old turned and dyed rags, and told me afterward it was awfully bad form to dress as if I were somebody that people would expect to know! And ever since, whenever I've particularly wanted to look nice, I've just asked people what they thought of my new frock; and they're always, always taken in!"

And there is nothing to suggest George isn't fooled. In fact, as I will get to in a moment, there is plenty to suggest that he is much easier to fool than he realizes. But the thing I want to highlight is how good Sophy is at being a woman.

A hint of this, by the way, comes from their situation. Nowadays, we think of rooms with a connecting door as the stuff of economy hotels aimed at families doing the tourist thing. At the beginning of the century these "chambres communicantes", as they were called, were the height of modernity. Now note that George has put he and Sophy into these rooms and Sophy has accepted that. For what possible reason could he have done this other than the hope they would have sex? She has to have noted this and its significance.

George is the one who is just floating along lying to himself about what he is really doing at each stage. If you read the chapter carefully, you'll see lots of hints that show us that George is in full seduction mode. I described this before, again using the expression incorrectly, as "passive aggressive". Usually, we use passive aggressive to mean lying to others about our true intentions but in this case George is lying to himself about his own.

But Sophy knows him better than he realizes. She has seen him make a fool of himself in his pursuit of Lady Ulrica. In chapter two she tells him about how the other members of Mrs. Murrett's salon speculated, not terribly kindly, about this pursuit of his. And she did a bit of speculating of her own:

But of course you don't remember. We were all invisible to you; but we could see. And we all used to wonder about you----"

Again Darrow felt a redness in the temples. "What about me?"

"Well--whether it was you or she who..."

He winced, but hid his disapproval. It made the time pass to listen to her.

"And what, if one may ask, was your conclusion?"

"Well, Mrs. Bolt and Mademoiselle and the Countess naturally thought it was she; but Professor Didymus and Jimmy Brance--especially Jimmy----"

"Just a moment: who on earth is Jimmy Brance?"

She exclaimed in wonder: "You were absorbed--not to remember Jimmy Brance! He must have been right about you, after all." She let her amused scrutiny dwell on him. "But how could you? She was false from head to foot!"

"False----?" In spite of time and satiety, the male instinct of ownership rose up and repudiated the charge.

Miss Viner caught his look and laughed. "Oh, I only meant externally! You see, she often used to come to my room after tennis, or to touch up in the evenings, when they were going on; and I assure you she took apart like a puzzle. In fact I used to say to Jimmy--just to make him wild--:'I'll bet you anything you like there's nothing wrong, because I know she'd never dare un--'" She broke the word in two, and her quick blush made her face like a shallow-petalled rose shading to the deeper pink of the centre.

"Whether itw as you or she." that is a very significant line. Who led the dance between the two?  Sophy thinks, and we have every reason to believe thinks correctly, that Lady Ulrica was in control and George was the easily fooled one. And notice the way Sophy evaluates Lady Ulrica as a woman. It's not that she is playing a role in a dance of seduction that Sophy sneers at but that she plays at being something she couldn't deliver" "I know she'd never dare un—". Sophy has no such doubts about herself.

And George is fooled completely. Both times.

By the way, you'll want to remember Jimmy Brance. He doesn't come up again for a long time but it's important to remember who he is when he does. For now, the connection between Sophy and Jimmy seems to have been a little intimate don't you think?

George is a man after all. He is proud of his ability to impress women sexually. But he misses so much. Look at how the chapter 5 ends. George has been in his room speculating about Sophy next door in an erotic way. All he sees in his mind's eye is sex. But Edith Wharton wants us to notice something else:

Now and then a sound from her room brought before him more vividly the reality of the situation and the strangeness of the vast swarming solitude in which he and she were momentarily isolated, amid long lines of rooms each holding its separate secret. The nearness of all these other mysteries enclosing theirs gave Darrow a more intimate sense of the girl's presence, and through the fumes of his cigar his imagination continued to follow her to and fro, traced the curve of her slim young arms as she raised them to undo her hair, pictured the sliding down of her dress to the waist and then to the knees, and the whiteness of her feet as she slipped across the floor to bed...

He stood up and shook himself with a yawn, throwing away the end of his cigar. His glance, in following it, lit on the telegram which had dropped to the floor. The sounds in the next room had ceased, and once more he felt alone and unhappy.

Opening the window, he folded his arms on the sill and looked out on the vast light-spangled mass of the city, and then up at the dark sky, in which the morning planet stood.

 It's just the morning planet to George, But Wharton wants us to remember that it is Venus and Venus is the goddess not of sex but of erotic love. George is musing idly about the possibility of something is just sex to him but it will be so much more to Sophy. George can't see that.



* "Gender performance" is an expression coined by people who do "gender theory". For those you you unfamiliar with this stuff, tit can get pretty wacky. You hear the word "theory" and you think science but there is a subsection of the academic world who use the word "theory" to mean, making stuff up to try to make the world a better place. They are quite literally anti-realist and I think it is safe to say that whole "theory" movement has proven to be a dead end. I'm not going there but there is, of course, nothing to stop you from going there if you want.

Womanly virtues Friday ...

Body Heat Pt2: Some thoughts about women in noir and neo noir films
Most criminals are brutally stupid people who do stupidly brutal things. They don't make for good subjects for fiction. That is why there is so little really realistic crime fiction. Realism is always a series of stylistic conventions rather than actually realistic.

Dashiell Hammett's brilliant innovation was to realize that the only way you could make a story about the irrational people who actually commit crimes interesting was to write a story in which normal people end up interacting with them. In Hammett the normal person is usually the detective. Sam Spade was sleeping with his partner's wife and now his partner has been murdered. That is an interesting moral story. The three nuts pursuing the black bird would not be interesting  all by themselves. If you took characters such as Spade and the genuinely human moral tension out of them, most noir fiction would lose all its appeal.

Thus it is Ned Racine and his moral weaknesses that makes Body Heat interesting. But what about Matty Walker, the femme fatale. What is there for women in a character like this? And to ask that question honestly, we need to take seriously the possibility that the answer might be nothing at all. Obviously I am going to make the case that there is something.

An unreal person living a real life?
It seems to me that the first thing to note about Matty Walker is that the rough outline of her life is actually quite plausible. This is not a life that most people live but a depressing number of people do live lives not unlike it. Here it is in outline:

• She is the most beautiful girl in her high school and dreams of "being rich and living in an exotic land".
• Her unrealistic dreams lead her into bad choices including drugs.
• A guy bails her out, no doubt for less than idealistic reasons.
• Cleaned up and attractive again, she finds a better deal and trades up.
• Initially happy to be married to this wealthy guy, she starts to chafe at the restrictions and to tire of having sex with this "small, mean and weak" man.
• She finds another lover and soon begins plotting how to extract herself from this marriage taking the maximum amount of money with her.
• This new guy soon finds that he too is being used.

All of that is believable enough. What is hard to believe is that the woman who would do all these things could be anywhere near as intelligent, interesting and alive as Matty Walker as played by Kathleen Turner. I don't mean just that she looks better the way even bellboys in movies tend to look a lot better than they do in real life. I mean that she is far too human a person to have that biography. People who slide in and out of drugs and then commit murder are hollow vessels.

If you crave realism, this will disappoint you.

de-Baroquing the story
The key to making any sort of morale for real women out of a story like this is to smooth out the Baroque details and see the real life pattern that has been blown up into something fantastic. Make her,

•  A girl who had exotic dreams whose real life didn't match those dreams and is now in a relationship that she entered into for reasons that may have once felt like love but now feel purely pragmatic. She has lost all attraction for the man she is with and now is repulsed by him during sex. 
• She begins an affair with another man, swearing him to absolute secrecy, but slowly begins to wonder if there isn't some way to escape.
• All the time this is going on, it isn't clear whether she is really in love with this new man or just using him.

If you haven't known someone who did just that, then you haven't been paying attention. Most of us, if we are honest, will admit that, even if we haven't done quite that, we would be capable of falling into such a pattern if we just let things slide.

One of the really great things about a movie such as Body Heat is that it rewards repeated watchings. The first time, you can watch his story. The second time, you can watch hers. The merit is not the realism. This is fiction and never pretends to be anything but fiction. But it is fiction in which we can exercise our moral imagination. We can put ourselves inside her just feel like what it would be like.

For example, the sex. Why does she do it? Does she enjoy it? I think yes, but does she enjoy it because it feels good or does she enjoy it for the feeling of erotic power it gives her? Because you can imagine that. You could—if the idea appeals to you—fantasize about it. But what conditions would it take for you to actually enjoy doing something like that?

The answer to these questions are nobody's business but yours of course.

By the way, one of the fascinating things about fiction that doesn't pretend to be anything but fiction is the craft involved. Fans of Jane Austen will appreciate the way the story arc here is structured. The murder takes place in exactly the middle of the movie. There is a perfect story arc just like in an Austen novel. If we started drawing up a list of similarities with an Austen novel, we would find quite a few.


Part 3 is here.

Womanly virtues Friday ...

Homo-eroticism again
I know, I know, I keep coming back to this but not for the reasons you think. What I want to call our attention to is not something to titillate us or to make us laugh. There are already nine gazillion other people doing that. I want to remind us how ordinary homo-eroticism between women is. Here is an image to ponder (Courtesy of James Lileks who doesn't own the image but went to a lot of trouble to find it and scan it so go see what he has done with it).

The product is Bon Ami, a company that has been in business for 120 years now. A name that, as most people already know, literally means "good friend" and that is probably the idea being the image here. The good friend offers to help with the clean up but no need thanks to my Bon Ami. But an advertisement that featured two men looking at one another like that would be the subject of endless comment and snickering. But it is so ordinary between women isn't it?

Why if you were  in the kitchen at the end of a party and you saw one Elaine come in the door and look at Jill that way. You'd feel the erotic spark but you wouldn't think anything unusual was happening. If Elaine came in and looked at Ben that way you'd begin to wonder what was happening between them and likewise if Frank came in and looked at Ben that way. But a frankly erotic gaze between two women is the most ordinary thing in the world.

And remember that this ad was intended to sell products to women.  It would have appeared in a women's magazine.

The woman who has just finished cleaning the counter has an interesting Georgia O'Keefe thing going in front. I always think of this wonderful picture of Edith Wharton when I see something like that.

Note the seam that connects the bodice to the skirt of the dress and then the pattern of the stripes on the skirt; notice particularly the way the over-skirt with the vertical stripes opens up to reveal another layer where the patterns form, of all things, a series of V shapes. Why it's almost as if everything about this dress was intended to remind you of what was underneath.  It seems that way ("seams" that way?) because that is exactly what it was intended to do. (By the way: You'd never guess from that photo what a miserably unhappy sex life Wharton had.)

That a woman presents herself to everyone, including other women, in a frankly erotic way is a very ordinary thing. That is something worth remembering the next time someone tells you there is something unusual about the eroticization of girlhood today. There is nothing unusual at all about this. It's what young women do and always have done.

I'll tell you what is unusual. What is unusual is the notion of an extended period of innocence called childhood. If you go back through history, that is the thing that no one else has ever had.

Venus Day

The Season of Brideshead
She's a flapper
I've been reading Rebecca West's The Return of the Soldier at the same time as Brideshead. Not for any strategic reason. I requested a copy from the local library back in October and it seems to be very popular right now. My name didn't come to the top of the request list until last week and now I have three weeks to read it.

And yet there is an overlap and it's an intriguing one. One of the fascinating things about Julia is that she is a flapper. We see this in her dress and her haircut and her behaviour.

I think we can see in Julia a bit of a mirror for what has been happening with men only going the other way. We have a lot of bisexuality and general prettiness of boys in the novel. Julia is, as she will later admit, a very hard girl.

That's interesting for all sorts of reasons, not the least of which is historical. For many feminists of the time and much current feminist theory blame the flappers for killing first generation feminism. The first generation feminists had set about creating this ideal of a new woman who pushed for and won individual liberty. Apparently the ideal is based on Ibsen and we can see Rebecca West renaming herself in honour of an Ibsen heroine.

The story of what happened to first generation feminism will sound very familiar to anyone who lived through second generation. The movement starts out very radical. Its early authors question not just the role of women within Western society but the very basis of western society itself. They see feminism as a way to sweep away conventional Christianity, Christian morality and class distinctions. Pretty soon, however, they compromise on some of these in order to achieve more practical goals. And then along comes a generation of young women who use these hard-won freedoms not to transform society but to transform their youth by dressing in sexually provocative ways and living a sort of extended childhood stretching into their late twenties.

The sexual aspect is important. Although they dressed more provocatively than the generations that preceded them, the young women of the 1910s and 1920s were the herald of a more sexually conservative era. No one knows for certain, but there are indications that the women of the 1990s and the aughts are going to do likewise.

Anyway, back to the beginning of the last century. You can really see this in The Return of the Soldier because, contrary to what is claimed in just about every description I've ever read of the book, this is a book about women in a time when women's roles were changing. Most write ups praise it as the first book about the war by a woman but the war is only a plot device here and the case of shell shock supposedly suffered by the sole male character is ridiculously implausible. Not that it need be realistic because he  is nothing more than a  cardboard cut out of a man whose only real role is to cause drama in the lives of three women. He comes home from the war with all memory of his beautiful, tasteful, elegant wife erased and he can only remember the working class woman he once had a love affair with (consummated in, this is no accident, a folly made in the shape of a Greek temple). The story is told by Jenny a childhood companion who also loves him but has maintained a relationship that is Platonic.

The three women, On the other hand, are wonderful and intriguing characters. West contrasts them here in what I think is the most important paragraph in the book. The narrator describes how the only male character has treated the three of the women in the book:

I suppose that the subject of our tragedy, written in spiritual terms, was that in Kitty he had turned from the type of woman that makes the body the conqueror of the soul and in me from the type that mediates between the soul and the body and makes them run even and unhasty like a well-matched pair of carriage horses, and had given himself to a woman whose bleak habit it was to champion the soul against the body.

Now that is a brilliant echo of Plato's Phaedrus.

Of the nature of the soul, though her true form be ever a theme of large and more than mortal discourse, let me speak briefly, and in a figure. And let the figure be composite—a pair of winged horses and a charioteer. Now the winged horses and the charioteers of the gods are all of them noble and of noble descent, but those of other races are mixed; the human charioteer drives his in a pair; and one of them is noble and of noble breed, and the other is ignoble and of ignoble breed; and the driving of them of necessity gives a great deal of trouble to him.
...
As I said at the beginning of this tale, I divided each soul into three—two horses and a charioteer; and one of the horses was good and the other bad: the division may remain, but I have not yet explained in what the goodness or badness of either consists, and to that I will now proceed. The right–hand horse is upright and cleanly made; he has a lofty neck and an aquiline nose; his colour is white, and his eyes dark; he is a lover of honour and modesty and temperance, and the follower of true glory; he needs no touch of the whip, but is guided by word and admonition only. The other is a crooked lumbering animal, put together anyhow; he has a short thick neck; he is flat–faced and of a dark colour, with grey eyes and blood–red complexion ; the mate of insolence and pride, shag–eared and deaf, hardly yielding to whip and spur. Now when the charioteer beholds the vision of love, and has his whole soul warmed through sense, and is full of the prickings and ticklings of desire, the obedient steed, then as always under the government of shame, refrains from leaping on the beloved; but the other, heedless of the pricks and of the blows of the whip, plunges and runs away, giving all manner of trouble to his companion and the charioteer, whom he forces to approach the beloved and to remember the joys of love. 

Our narrator Jenny is unconsciously presenting herself as the Platonic ideal who can balance both horses. Otherwise, however, West has reversed the thing. Kitty's elevated tastes turn out to be slightly suspect. This comes out in a telling scene where the narrator goes to see Kitty who has failed to win her husband back. She lies in bed and has her maid bring her all her sexy lingerie one piece after another so she can review them. As she sees it, this is the investment she has made in getting this man.  The rougher horse, working class Margaret, appears to have the more noble spirit (so far anyway, I'm only three quarters through). In any case, I'm guessing we're headed for a sort of reverse Jane Eyre where we will find that Margaret is the truly noble soul. It is shaping up to be a sort of Wide Sargasso Sea where the issues that have dragged poor Margaret down are not race but class, albeit written long before Wide Sargasso Sea (I'll keep you updated just in case I have to do a humiliating admission of wrongness here).

But I trust that readers can also spot the obvious parallel with Brideshead (there is, by the way, a Phaedrus reference coming up in it too). Here Charles is the balanced man with both his horses proceeding in an even and unhasty manner. Sebastian is the one who champions the soul and Anthony is our spokesperson for the baser pleasures.

But there are also three women in the novel. One of whom represents the baser, another of whom strives for balance and third who champions the soul against the body. They are actually more important than the three men and yet rarely get their due.

The first post in the Brideshead series is here.

The next post will be here.

"Women have fought long and hard for equality."

Thus begins David Sherman in the Ottawa Citizen of November 27.

Someone sent me flowers this week and they came with some crumpled up newspaper featuring the story linked above. There is no other way I'd read the Ottawa Citizen. You probably don't want to read it yourself, it's barely coherent.

You could sum up the Sherman piece as follow: Feminists fought long and hard for freedom and women now do all sorts of stuff they couldn't do very easily all that long ago but women also "happily display themselves as sex objects".

This, apparently, is a problem. I wonder why?

Here's the thing, though, women are doing this willingly. Not all women, some women hate this stuff. Fat lot of good it does them though.

Anyway, back to our buddy David Sherman. He considers a number of possible explanations for this phenomenon but skips blithely past the most likely culprit. Sherman keeps asking how this could have happened even after feminism. What he doesn't consider is the possibility that this is the result of feminism.

Look, you tell women they can do what they want and they'll do it. Some women, a minority but a large enough minority that no one can ignore them, decided to display themselves as sex objects. And let's not kid ourselves, they are doing more than displaying: they are being sex objects for the men in their lives.

Two questions:

1. They're is something wrong with this? 
2. Are women only allowed to use their freedom to make the choices that David Sherman wants them to make?

I'm quite serious about the first. Sex is physical act. Your physical body becomes available for someone else's pleasure and theirs becomes available for yours. Your two auras don't bond in cosmic purity. You get down and ....

Don't tell poor David Sherman but my best guess is all this women putting themselves on display we've seen for, well it's three decades now the way I count it, anyway, the point is, this is normal. This is what you get in a society where women and men have equal freedoms: that is to say the not terribly surprising result that the basic biological differences between men and women translate into behaviour patterns peculiar to each sex (and I mean each sex not each gender).

Venus day

Girls and dogs
Yes, that is the kind of title that invites misunderstanding so let me state my intention right off, I think it is almost always a good sign when you meet a woman to discover that she has a history with and deep appreciation for big dogs. A woman who really loves big dogs and knows how to get along with them and how to get them to do what she wants, is most probably exactly the woman for any man worthy of his sex.

Note the "probably" above. There is no such thing as a sure thing. There are even cat people, of both sexes, who can be good partners. I can think of one off the top of my head and there must be more if I really put my brain to work.

Yes, I'm being glib but I'm not entirely kidding. It has to do with sociability and it's not really news.

A recent study purports to confirm the news that dogs are smarter than cats but this is old news. What a lot of people may not realize is the reason why they are smarter. Here's why:

It was often thought that the feline pet was smarter than its canine counterpart because it needed less attention but researchers have discovered that cat’s brains are smaller because they are less social. 

This, as I say, is old news. Animals that form social groups are unfailingly more intelligent than loners. The same is true within groups. The lone wolf, no matter what Kipling believed, is going to be less intelligent than its pack-bound companions. The same is true of humans: the romantic teenage girl who insists that the anti-social rebel she has fallen in lust with is merely "misunderstood" is deceiving herself and quite possibly drifting into a very dangerous situation.

People who like dogs are people who want a pet they interact with socially. Now nothing here means that anything necessarily follows about a person who has a cat. They may just not want the hassle.

The guy who orders Coors Light at a bar may be another helpless victim of lifestyle advertising or it may be that he just doesn't care that much about beer and is ordering the only beer he has actually heard of in order to be social. The woman who lives alone with her can't may well be another neurasthenic, high-maintenance hellcat (see the wisdom embedded right in our language) whose only successful relationship is with her cat because it requires no real effort from her or she may be a perfectly wonderful person who has a cat because she wants a low-maintenance pet that is more cuddly and animated than a goldfish or a cactus.

But whatever pet the grown woman might have, nothing, in my not even mildly humble opinion, can replace the crucial role of a great huge, slobbering, shedding dog in a girl's upbringing. A girl who has had to deal with one of these beasts will never be ineffectual and helpless  nor will she be the type who refuses to tell you what she wants or needs and then gets angry when you don't guess correctly. A dog in her upbringing will cure her of these faults early and permanently.

In addition, a girl who gets knocked flat on her butt by an unruly dog can learn to train the dog  to behave better. A girl who gets scratched by an angry feline can only learn that life is unfair and that there is nothing she can do about it but whine and cry.

Not any type of dog, but one from one of the following groups, starting with the very best and working down:

Sporting dogs (always the choice for preps)
Proper snuffling hounds (Important exception: not an Afghan Hound, a dog only too well qualified to teach girls how to be beautiful but stupid and useless)
Working dogs (with some exceptions such as Ye Olde English Sheepdog which is a fraud and not a true working dog)

Trust me, if you are raising a girl, you will do her a  huge favour by making sure she has a succession of these dogs  through her formative years.

Some Terriers are also great dogs but they are really the quintessential boys dog.

 A Clumber Spaniel demonstrate the breed's deep appreciation for the finer things in life by polishing off a crème brûlé he snagged off the table while diners' attention was elsewhere.

Venus Day

Two kinds of narcissism cont'd
The need for approval
There is nothing wrong with needing other people's approval. We'd all be horrible people if we didn't need approval. It keeps us civil and agreeable and it allows us to cooperate together far more effectively than agape has ever done (which is the root of the failure of Christian social justice).

As Adam Smith, famously, put it:

It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own self interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages.

And that is a fine way to manage our public relations. But what of intimate relations? What happens when the need to gain others approval in this way starts applying to sexual relations?

Well, I saw an example on Wednesday. There was a group of young women somewhere between 18 to 21 years of age shopping at a store I was at. One of them was wearing a T-shirt that had printed on it the following:

He saw it.
He wanted it.
He got it.

It took me back to an odd conversation I had with my friend Nanci-Jane on the very first day I met her. We were discussing various things and she obviously was concerned that I might have gotten the impression she was a goody goody. So she said to me, apropos of nothing, "Hey, I put out."

That T-shirt sent the same message to the whole world. "Don't get the impression I'm stuck up or difficult." Hell, she's even willing to wear a shirt that implies she is just a commodity, an 'it' to be enjoyed like caramel cheesecake, just so you will approve of her. What else will she do?

Anyone who has been to university knows this effect. You will remember the way that many women in university crave sexual approval. You will remember the more than one woman who was so easily seduced because she so desperately craved approval. I suspect that most women have had sex or been close to giving in at least once just because they wanted approval.

The seduction techniques that guys who talk about "having game" use are all predicated on women's need for approval. You convince her that you are an alpha male, tell her she is beautiful then ignore her. Make her earn your approval. (And most guys, if we are honest, will admit that even without having read the books we know what these techniques are.)

And the odds are pretty good that she will "earn it". One of the odd contradictions in life is that the truly beautiful women are the ones who will go to the greatest lengths to get your approval. They are the easiest to seduce. Perhaps because they know that they have done nothing to merit their special status.

And yet they are the hardest to love because, and this is the crucial thing, the need for approval is really a kind of self love not love of others.  In the short run Doug will think that Jean is the greatest thing ever because not only is she really hot looking, her need for approval makes her incredibly generous and giving in bed. But none of that giving is really for him. She does it all for her self-esteem because she desperately needs someone else to tell her she is desirable.

Later, when Doug is in love with Jean and she is in love with him, he can no longer tell her she is beautiful and have her believe it. She will say, "Oh, you're biased." And now she no longer believes that he is quite so alpha as she once did so she doesn't need to gain his approval.

But she will believe the half-hearted compliment some complete fraud who postures and boasts at the next party she goes to. The lowest gopher from some local law firm will convince her that he is a high-powered litigator and, having gotten her attention, he will ignore her and she will flaunt herself in a  desperate attempt to regain the approval he tauntingly held out to her and she may even have sex with him to prove.

And, here is the really bizarre thing about it, she'll have sex that is really good for her because she'll feel really good about finally getting his approval. Just as we often try harder to like the show we paid more to get into, she will try harder to have a good time for this guy than she does anymore for Doug who loves her. The one small consolation is that the braggart who nails her probably won't enjoy it quite so much because, no matter how effective his seduction technique, he'll never quite be able to shake the impostor syndrome that goes with it for the simple reason that he is an impostor. But, if she never sees him long enough to learn better, she may well cherish the memory for years.

What to do about it?
Oddly, I don't think there is any point in Jean trying to overcome her need for approval. That simply cannot be done. Just try pretending you don't like Frito Lays. Think you can do it? Well, tell yourself you don't and then eat just one. Maybe you really don't like them but if not potato chips, there is something else in your life that plays that role. A woman may not need some kinds of approval from some kinds of men but somewhere there are guys who really ought to be beneath her dignity that she will suddenly feel a strong need to get approval from.

The need for approval is natural and, to a point, it is healthy. What we need to do to control it is develop balance. The thing that can balance our need for approval is to seek dignity.

Okay, but didn't I just last week say that sensual self indulgence pursued to the point that it looks like blameworthy narcissism was actually a good thing? And this week I am suggesting that gaining others approval, which looks like a good thing, can easily be done to excess and be a genuinely bad kind of narcissism. I know, you are perhaps wondering if I am going to say that part pursuing  dignity for women is the pursuit of sensual self-indulgence? Well yes, I am. You can't please the woman who seeks sexual approval for very long. Maybe a few months at most. The woman who works at sensual self-indulgence can be pleased and she can be pleased by giving her things that matter to her. It gives her something to turn around to her man with and say, "Okay, now you earn it!" If he is any sort of man worthy of the name, he will.

But there is more to dignity than sensual self indulgence and I'll get to that next week.

And now a song. Madonna is a bit of a clown but she really hit something with this:

Megan!

The virtues of Mad Men
Do you believe in love?
Update: I think I mustn't have been as clear as I intended below.I meant to say that it is tempting to think that, "Faye Miller is playing a part and Megan appears to actually be the part" below. But I meant only that it is tempting to think and not that that is the case. Having just rewatched the episodes in question to prepare this post, it is pretty obvious that Megan is playing a role every bit as much as Faye. More on this later this morning.

It seems to me that what it boils down to with Megan is whether you believe in love. Do you think that love is merely an epiphenomenon  of biological adaptation? Do you think that it exists just because people who formed bonds during mating were more likely to have children who survived them long enough to also reproduce and therefore we have love as an adaptive trait and nothing more? Or do you think it is a divinely created good to give our lives purpose and direction?

If you believe the second (relevant disclosure: I do), then you will want to see this marriage play out in a certain way. It doesn't necessarily have to work. A failure can still be meaningful and beautiful but it cannot be simply absurd. The story can't end with Don and Megan going through the same old motions in a coffee shop and then a man comes through the door and the screen goes black the way The Sopranos ended.

Matt Weiner has put himself in a tough situation here.  Perhaps it is a tough situation he wants to be in, I hope it is.

One of the big questions reading anything is whether you can trust the creator. If you read 800 pages of a novel only to have the narrator commit suicide on the last page you may just feel cheated.

But then again you may not. If the novel is all satire characterized by black humour from page one on, such an ending would not be a cheat. The young Evelyn Waugh could have written such a novel. In a sense he did write such a novel and called it A Handful of Dust. It doesn't end with a suicide but it certainly ends in a giant nothing. There is no hope, no future, nothing to believe in.

Some people watch Mad Men that way. Every episode is an occasion to exercise their cynical superiority to the characters. Maybe that is the kind of narrative they like but I can't help feel that part of it is also defensive. Unwilling or unable to commit themselves to any faith, any hope or any love, they project an absurdist plot line onto everything so they can never be disappointed.

This year, Matt Weiner threw one love possibility after another at us all season long. Do you remember the nurse? I didn't. She was outside Don's apartment nailing up Christmas decorations and it seemed like something might happen between them for about fifteen minutes. I had forgotten all about her until I went back looking for all the scenes with Megan in them for this write up about her.

A beautiful girl
Rewatching things, I thought this bit of dialogue from the end of the Beautiful Girls was significant. Joyce says to Peggy:

Men are this vegetable soup and you can’t put them on a plate or eat them off the counter. So women are the pot. They pick up. They hold them. They contain them.

Peggys says, "I don't believe that," and Joyce replies that it has been her experience.*

In the end, that is certainly part of what Megan does for Don. And she obviously really wants him. Rewatching the scene where Sally comes, unbidden, to the office and then runs down the hall crying, I was struck by how much Don's approval meant to Megan at the end. 

I was also struck by the parallel between Sally's running out of the office like that and Allison's doing likewise just a few episodes earlier.

Part of the reason that Megan wins Don is that she promises not to be like that.

The other key moment was during the focus group to test the marketing concept for Pond's cream. Faye Miller and Megan are interacting and they get a momentary confirmation of the thesis. Faye Miller, lying every inch of the way about who she is and what her purposes are, gets Megan to talk about exactly the sort of feminine ritual they were hoping for. And Peggy, watching, says, S"he's amazing!" Peggy, of course, means Faye Miller. Don, who implicitly agrees, seemed to mean Faye as well. It turns out not. He thought Megan was amazing. And so did we all except we don't want to believe in that sort of beauty do we?

But what is that beauty? And there is one possibility: Faye Miller is playing a part and Megan appears to actually be the part. That is the autheniticity issue again.

Except Megan is not simply being something. She isn't any more authentic than Don. She is much more like him than Faye really. At the end, for example, we realize that Megan was, as Don's secretary, fully aware of the relationship between Faye and Don. She knew she had a rival to out manœuver! No one here is innocent. What is it that Megan has that Faye doesn't? I suspect this is part of the answer.

Season 5 will either be great or it will be a massive disappointment. Weiner has set things up for himself such that there can be no third possibility.





* An aside, notice how easily we accept the notion that Joyce's lesbianism is a moral choice that she'd made? If this had been a conversation between two men ending with one man implying that he was gay by choice, the show would have engendered so much criticism they would have had to take it off the air.

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.

Friday is Venus Day

"Did you hear that Julie got engaged?"
Just a short one today. I was on the bus this morning and there were also two beautiful young women—I'd say somewhere between 24 to 29 years old—on the bus. I happened to overhear their conversation (you can read that as "I eavesdropped shamelessly" because everything about beautiful women fascinates me).

They talked about their jobs, one of them is a staffer at the Senate. They talked about apartments and apartment hunting. They talked about politics. Then they reminisced about university days. They seem to have met when they both came to town to go to university.

They had a lot of news because they have busy, exciting lives and careers they are proud of, and justly proud of from the what I heard.

And then was one said to the other, "Did you hear that Julie got engaged?" Her companion said "Uh huh!" And they both got very quiet for a moment. I can't convey the tone of what  was said here but it was more eloquent than the words and the silence more eloquent still.

I hear a lot about change. I hear, and read, about how the world is different than it was and how the things that matter to women today aren't what they were yesterday. Sometimes I believe it too. But that question and answer was a powerful reminder that the fundamental things apply. No matter what else they talked about, both those women clearly felt that Julie's engagement trumped everything else they had to talk about.

In a flash, they were like two eleven-year olds playing with their Barbies and wistfully wondering what their weddings, husbands and children will be like.

Friday is Venus Day

On not going there
One of the many reasons that women are better liars than men (a claim that is now backed by some very solid research so let's not argue the point) is because they lie to avoid having to tell lies. Proust noted this about his character Odette de Crecy and there are no shortage of women who use the same strategy.

Here is how it works. Craig and Lisa met in third year and got married two years after they graduated. Sometimes they reminisce about their school days. Craig was doing just that when he brought up the homecoming weekends. There was always a big outdoor party at homecoming and there are lots of stories to go with it. Except third year when a freak ice storm shut everything down. Craig talks about how boring that was. Lisa says, "I missed homecoming that year because my mother was really sick."

Then Craig goes on to talk about how boring it all was and how he spend the entire weekend indoors with a bunch of boring aged alumni all telling him how much better homecoming was in their day and how a little rain wouldn't have stopped them."

End of conversation.

The truth is that Lisa's mother did get so sick that she had to go home and missed homecoming but it wasn't the year of the ice storm. The year of the ice storm, she and Craig had just met and even though there was magic right from the start they were not actually officially a couple. Even though she wasn't under any obligation to be faithful to him it's still very awkward that she actually spent that entire weekend in bed with a guy they both still know. A guy who is a real jerk actually and the whole thing is kind of embarrassing and, besides, she knows Craig will be very intimidated because this guy had a bit of a reputation, well, actually, he had a lot of a reputation and she couldn't help being curious and, well, she'd rather not talk about it.

Now Lisa knows that if the conversation gets any further, Craig is going to ask her what she did that weekend. And then she is going to have to make up a lie or, worse, say that she doesn't remember. So she tells another lie to avoid having to go there.

It's an effective strategy.

Our lives are full of dangerous intersections.  Suddenly, you find yourself approaching one and you think, "Crap, it's dangerous down here, I'd better be careful." Lisa took evasive measures several blocks before to make sure she wouldn't end up having to improvise in the middle of a dangerous intersection.

And it's easier to lie about not being at homecoming, an issue she has no serious emotional investment in, than it is to lie about having sex with a guy she'd even feel guilty telling her best girlfriend about. It's like the difference between telling a child that the present is really from Santa as compared to telling the officer how many drinks you've had tonight.

The problem is that it works on her too
I've used this example before but there was a nice instance of the avoidance strategy in a science column in the local paper here a few years ago. A woman wrote in to ask about fruit flies: Where do the fruit flies that infest fruit left on the counter in February come from? They can't come from outside and there is nowhere for them to have been inside without her noticing.



The bug expert from the local university supplied the answer. His opening was classic, "I think you've already figured out the answer to your question and you're hoping you're wrong." And then he went on to explain that the flies hatch from larvae that are already in the fruit. In the normal course of events, they get eaten along with the fruit but when we leave fruit too long on the counter they hatch as fruit flies.


That's the thing about the do-these-pants-make-my-thighs-look-fat question. She already suspects that they do but the deeper issue, the one she doesn't want to face, is that maybe her thighs don't just look fat. She is hoping that you will do the moral equivalent of telling her that her thighs don't have to go to school today.
 As a man, the thing you really want to avoid is getting co-opted into this because when women lie to you this way they inevitably end up lying to themselves. When Lisa lies about the homecoming weekend, she creates a new dangerous intersection. Now she has to tell a lie to avoid going anywhere near that subject. The next time he starts reminiscing, she tells Craig that she isn't interested in that conversation anymore. Nostalgia about schooldays has lost its charm for her. She says. Pretty soon there are whole sections of her life that are walled off by detour signs. To maintain the detour signs, she has to tell herself that she really doesn't like this stuff anymore.

Which is why Robert VerBruggen is quite correct to mock studies that say women would rather date nice guys because women say they'd rather date "nice" guys:

In that study, the researchers simply asked women what they wanted in a man. The problem with this is obvious to any guy who’s ever taken dating advice from a woman: When faced with such a question, women tend to say what they think they should like, not what they actually respond to.

Where VerBruggen doesn't go is to ask whether the women in these studies really believe the steaming piles of crap they serve up to researchers. At the risk of being tarred and feathered and run out of town on a rail, the honest answer is that they will come to believe it if we let them get away with it. That is why so many women are vulnerable to seduction techniques. They keep telling themselves that certain kinds of guys have no appeal for them and that allows exactly that sort of guy to move in on them. Pretty soon she is giving the sort of guy she claims to hate the kind of fantasy sex she denies her regular boyfriend because she told him she doesn't like that kind of thing. Of course, she will later figure out the guy is a jerk but it doesn't matter to him because he isn't planning on staying around anyway.

As a man, there is no point in dwelling on this. Just face it, you are Craig. At some point she spent a weekend or maybe even six months of weekends giving it to a guy you both agree is a jerk. And you don't really want to know about that do you? The practical lessons for you are,

1. Don't let her talk you into being some meek wimp because she tells you that she really likes "nice guys". Be the sort of man you admire not the sort she tells you she admires. That was the sort of man you were trying to be when you met her and she didn't object then.
2. If she tells you she really doesn't like the kind of sex you do really like, why exactly are you still dating this woman?

Friday is Venus Day

Is it all the fault of women
The man up post that inspired my my posts yesterday has, perhaps predictably, inspired someone to blame women. Yes, it's all because girls really go for jerks. This has its counterpart on the other side in the belief that men are only interested in big-breasted airheads and therefore it is really men's fault that some women are so ditzy.

There are, of course, cases of wimpy men who do well with women. There are examples of anything you care to look for them.

Now anyone who reads this blog will know that I am not easy on women in this post-feminist age. Like a lot of men, I had the experience of sitting in a room while a bunch of women cheered for Carrie Bradshaw and for Samantha Jones as if they were some sort of liberating heroines and thought, "Well, if that is really what you want then I'll give it to you Honey."

A lot of men, as in the link above, have responded to this stuff rather petulantly.  It's easy to see why. First we're accused of being pigs, which we know we aren't, and then women turn around and behave like pigs themselves and say, well, we're only doing what men have always done. My mother used to say, you may as well get hanged for a  sheep as a lamb; if we're going to be punished anyway, we may as well enjoy the life of crime first

But it isn't what most women really want and that is today's subject. Carrie and Samantha are fantasy figures much like James Bond. Women identify with them but most don't really want to be them and the women who try are shallow jerks just like the men who really try to be like James Bond. It's important what we fantasize about, of course, but, as I've said before, the point of fantasy is fantasy and it's not about real life.  I'm off on a pastoral visit and I won't be back until this afternoon. As I go about my day, what i will be thinking about is what women really want. I'll get back to you about that ;-)

Friday is Venus Day

Katrina Onstad has a piece in the Globe and Mail today celebrating the apparent death of American Apparel. The reason for this is a little too obvious; American Apparel profited from sale of slutwear.

The company combined sleazy marketing of slutty clothes with a claim of ethical business practices. And that really rubs people like Onstad the wrong way. It's an odd thing for ethical business practices are exactly what Onstad wants from business. Like a child, however, Onstad imagines that good things will go together as if handsome princes would always be good and ugly hunch-backed kings would always be evil. When a company with ethical business practices floods the market with exactly the sorts of clothes that Onstad wishes young women wouldn't wear, it upsets her entire sense of moral order.

But her sense of moral order should be upset if you ask me because Katrina Onstad's sense of moral order is highly unrealistic and childish. You can either take my word for that or go look up some of what she has written.

Let's have a look at her article though and note two things.

The first thing is that young women chose to buy this stuff. It wasn't forced on them and they didn't lack choice. I live near a university campus and I have seen lots of American Apparel clothing on the young women who go to university. They wear this stuff even when it obviously isn't warm enough and are just chomping at the bit to peel off their warm outer clothes on warm fall or spring afternoon. It will hit 19 degrees this afternoon (that's about 66 Fahrenheit) and the same girls who walked onto campus this morning with sweaters and jackets will walk off this afternoon wearing skimpy tops with maximum breast exposure even though it won't actually be that warm.

This is the issue that Onstad just doesn't want to face: that girls and women are  just as prone to evil and stupidity as boys and men are. Given the freedom to buy what they want and the economic means to do so, young women promptly dashed out and bought slutty clothing because young women love the sexual attention it gets them. Onstad, a woman in her late 30s doesn't like this which is perfectly reasonable. I wouldn't like it either if I were her. But if I were a hot 19 year old girl with a firm, beautiful body I might equally reasonably wonder what's wrong with getting a little sexual attention.

The second thing to note is related to the first and that is Onstad's economic illiteracy. Here is how she sets up the issue in her opening paragraphs.

A Polaroid of a dead-eyed young woman in undies and tube socks on a dirty tousled bed isn’t usually an emblem of social justice. The peace dove doesn’t get photographed like that.

Yet for nearly a decade, American Apparel has merged such DIY-porn images in its ads with an anti-sweatshop, corporate-responsibility ethos. Luckily for those whose exploding heads cannot contain this much contradiction, American Apparel may be dying.

And for the rest of the article, Onstad focuses on the declining market appeal of slutwear. The problem, of course is that American Apparel is far from the only company selling this stuff. Old Navy, American Eagle, Lululemon, to name only a few, have all done pretty well out of it too. These and other companies that capitalized on the boom in slutwear will reposition themselves to whatever new trend comes along when that new trend comes along. It is only American Apparel that cannot negotiate the move.

And here we have a dog that doesn't bark. Onstad doesn't consider even for a second whether American Apparel's financial problems might be a function of the thing she likes as opposed to what she doesn't like. That is, she doesn't ask whether it is precisely their insistence on doing the work here in North America where labour is more expensive and not in foreign "sweat shops" that caused them to suffer. And that is significant because the people who do this sort of analysis for a living all think that and not the product or marketing is probably the root of the company's financial difficulties.

And it also doesn't occur to Onstad that corporate responsibility  and the slutty image are not, as she describes it, a head-exploding contradiction but part of the same marketing strategy. Because urban young women respond to both these things. It's not a  contradiction at all and right in line with everything that gets sold to the kind of young woman who lives in the city and doesn't like to think too deeply about the contradictions in her life. The young woman who takes up Yoga as much because it allows her to wear Lululemon pants as anything else; who likes the easy spirituality of Yoga and the easy morality of vegetarianism and the easy politics of "corporate social responsibility" and the easy "freedom" that comes from dressing like a slut without having to think through the complicated issues relating to any of these things.

The second in a series of posts ...

... that will probably get me in trouble.

In Quebec we have a weird system called CEGEP. It's a publicly funded college system that is the educational equivalent of the last year of high school and the first year of university. It's a great system, at least I think so because I had a great experience at CEGEP.

A big part of that great experience was that I fell in love. Wild, head over heels romantic love. It involved a repertory theatre, a trendy restaurant, a circle of women friends who dressed like they were to pose for pre-Raphaelite paintings and I spent hours just talking, flirting joking, having fun and discussing feminism with them. They were very much feminists in a town where it was an act of physical courage to be a feminist. Most of this romance was not spent in relationships but just being around those women. I treasure that memory now and if I had a time machine ....

Only a few of them, three if I remember correctly, went to my CEGEP but I fell in love will all three, made friends with them and got to know the larger circle through them. Inevitably perhaps, I ended up having two relationships with women from the group: E and A. Both had an attitude that will seem ludicrous now but felt quite normal to me the end of the 1970s. You might sum it up this way, "Men have treated women unfairly for centuries and it is now your responsibility to make it up to me personally." I cheerfully accepted that as a governing principle of both relationships.

The first relationship was with E. It lasted a year and then she ended it. She ended it with a very nice letter. It said all sorts of kind things about what a good and caring and decent guy I was. And then she said something that was clearly intended to be criticism even though it was presented as advice. E told me that I was not as good a lover as I should have been.

I was crushed and immediately took her to be right. I was failure.

And then a funny thing happened. E was running me down a bit, not a lot but persistently and consistently, to her friends. She portrayed me a "hopeless romantic". This was and is an ill-advised thing for women in their late teens to do because there will always be a certain segment of the female population of that age who crave the idea of a relationship with a hopeless romantic and A was a classic example of same.

And so I started going out with A, although it as only later that she told me I was the inadvertent beneficiary of E's criticism. I began that relationship in a state of constant dread. Never in my life have I had more sense of being an impostor. Worse, our initial sexual efforts failed in exactly the same way that things had with E.

But then things started to change. Two months in, things started to work sexually for A. And we got better at understanding one another. E and I had tried very hard to follow a standard bit of advice from the time: "tell your partner what you want." A hated this advice and I soon realized that she hated it partly because she didn't know what she really wanted and partly because the things she did know she wanted she preferred to have me figure out than to have to tell me.

And we discovered them together. And a cruel truth became clear. The problem with E and I wasn't that I couldn't understand her when she told me what to she wanted or that she couldn't express what she wanted. The problem was that there wasn't a right thing to do. There were right things to do for A and when we hit on them it was really, really obvious to both of us.

And it wasn't just sex, in just about everything in life E was not easily pleasable. A was pleasable. And A didn't have to tell me how to please her because it showed.

Another way to describe this pleasable is as sensibility. It's what Elinor and Marianne have and it is what makes them superior to the women who surround them in the novel.

I don't think poor E ever got it. By the time we both graduated from university, she'd gone through a long string of lovers and each relationship followed exactly the pattern ours had set. Part of the problem, I now know, is that she looked to these men to help her find this thing she knew was missing from her experience.

Sensibility is primarily a feminine virtue, and I don't care if that sounds old fashioned. It's not that men don't/can't have it, it's just that if you want to acquire it you should pick a woman as your role model (although you want to be very careful who you you pick). A was my role model and the debt I owe her is incalculable. She took me sailing in a boat called Phoenix, made me rusty nails with her daddy's best scotch, she showed me how to enjoy food, nature, music, art, poetry and her. And then she moved to Belgium and I lost her.

To some extent A was also her own role model. She learned how to enjoy herself by learning to enjoy herself. I'll dig the hole I'm in deeper by expanding in that later.