Phillip Lopate: Laws of Attraction

Phillip Lopate was commissioned by Hugo House to create new work on the theme of Laws of Attraction as part of the final event of the 2009-2010 Hugo Literary Series. Lopate read his essay at Laws of Attraction on March 19, 2010, alongside poet Emily Warn, playwright and actor Marya Sea Kaminski and musical group Happy Hour Hero.

Laws of Attraction

1.

I confess I have always been attracted to affected women. It scarcely matters whether the affectation, the mannerism is that of coquette or schoolmarm, so long as she projects some theatricality. Why should artifice put me so at ease? I think because affectation implies playfulness and ironic distance from a single, integrated core of being, which promises more tolerance of my own self-mistrust. Since I don’t always feel I am being authentic, on the up-and-up, by all means let my companion be not afraid of masks. The natural, wholesome type stifles me by her solemn placidity; she seems so lacking in devious, perverse mischief that I feel apologetically Mephistophelean beside her.

I also appreciate gestures of adornment that go beyond the natural. I like lipstick, for instance. Of course it serves no useful purpose, fades quickly and requires constant reapplication. But it represents a festive ideal, through exaggeration, of the redness of a woman’s lips. There is that suggestion that she has just eaten a cherry ice or bitten someone’s skin bloody. I like the glistening sheen, the taste (if I am allowed to taste it), and the telltale evidence it leaves on the collar or cheek. It is hard for a woman to kiss you without spoiling her lipstick, but that marring is part of the fun. For a man of my generation, who grew up on Cyd Charisse movies, lipstick will always connote something worldly, sexy. If it has no other function but to signify the woman wearing it has taken the trouble to prettify herself for the public, that is enough to gain my gratitude.

It seemed a pity that just as I was coming into my own romantically, in the 1960s, many women started abandoning lipstick, eye shadow and a dozen other tactics in the armamentarium of arousal. In California, where I lived for part of the Sixties, I witnessed the enthronement of the no-fuss, “natural” aesthetic. Guys would boast that their girlfriends looked much more beautiful without all that gunk on their faces. The natural look seemed to be about youth: the creamy, dewy skin of a seventeen-year-old, during that optimum moment when a peachy complexion (for those lucky enough to escape acne) provides all the glow that is required. It so happens I’ve always been attracted to a more experienced, worn-soulful look, so I resent this privileging of youthful sincerity.

Later, cosmetics companies took to marketing “the natural look,” which required quite a lot of product, applying and then removing layers of powder, blush, eye shadow. It probably takes longer to achieve the no-makeup look than it did the older, artifacted one. I agree that the no-makeup look can be very pretty; I am not fanatically anti-natural. But I regard the “natural look” as just another stylistic option.

Living as we do in a post-modern era when all historical, ethnic and environmental styles are available to us like frozen packages in a supermarket counter, it is understandable that we contemporary Marie Antoinettes might wish to play at the pastoral simple life. Hence the fashion in high-rise apartments for country décor, baskets and patchwork quilts and distressed furniture, everything rough-textured and naïve. Meanwhile we want our beds to be nice and comfortable, with humidifiers on the night table. Well, why not? So long as we understand that “natural” is at best an unattainable ideal; me, I prefer affectation.

Art teaches us that the naturalistic effect is a cunningly arranged fabrication. Degas was fond of saying that to capture the believable appearance of something in a painting, you must distort. The natural-sounding dialogue in an Elmore Leonard story is the product of laborious sweat; actual conversation, transcribed from tapes, reads as vague and unconvincing. When we venture into Nature, even trekking to a place with no other humans or manufactured objects, we bring out conditioned responses to the experience. We visit the Grand Canyon and see an Ansel Adams photograph. For most of us, there is no possibility of entering through the doors of perception unaffected. The natural is beyond us. We need to embrace impurity, the mixture of nature and artifice, and stop feeling guilty about it.

To return to female costume: Take the elevation of blue jeans from a grubby if utilitarian work-garment to the unaffected look in leisure wear. Blue jeans are made by petrochemical processes; so much for their naturalness. Anne Hollander, in her book “Seeing Through Clothes,” wisely summed up the contradictions: “To justify and explain their adoption of various modes of nonfashion, women have often invoked the concept of comfort….Jeans worn so tight that the labia majora are clearly molded, and the wearer has to lie down to get the zipper closed, cannot exactly be called physically comfortable; it is the image of comfort that is desirable, the look of wearing something sanctioned by the fashionable ideal of comfort. Trousers are actually no more physically comfortable than skirts, with a few exceptions….”

One argument against skirts, lipstick and other signs of stylized femininity is that they degrade a woman by turning her into an object of desire for the male gaze. While jeans may ultimately be no more comfortable than skirts, the fact that jeans are unisex means that women who wear them may feel less gender-stereotyped, less frilly, more free to act boldly in the world. On the other hand, how is that possible with a tight T-shirt and jeans to deflect the libidinous male gaze? Such a costume packages a woman’s anatomy as explicitly as possible while stripping away her glamour.

I draw a distinction between glamour and physique: glamour is the allure produced by the intersection of comeliness and artifice. It requires the proper setting, the right lighting, elegant clothes and a suitable companion. It is a hard-won sophistication, not for teenagers. The ability to recreate oneself as a mystery, one would think, is an empowerment, not a diminution, of female potential.

I admit that it is intensely flattering for a man to be on the receiving end of that effort. But I am willing to go to considerable bother in return, as is only fair. Nothing could be more artificial than to put on a tuxedo with button studs, cummerbund, satin bowtie. However, I have grown to like the ritual of squeezing into a monkey-suit, just as I like the old-fashioned exactitude of a suit and tie. A poet I knew would attend formal parties wearing a tuxedo jacket and blue jeans, to show off his independence. All he was showing was his dependence on the approval of his absent bohemian pals. Embrace formality, affectation, artifice, I say. What have you got to lose? Besides which, the propriety of formal wear can perform like an aphrodisiac once you get home from the gala. There is nothing more fun than the crumpling of her gown and the wrinkling of your boiled shirt, now that sartorial perfection no longer matters. Let the dry cleaners deal with it tomorrow. Such are the joys of artifice, mixed in with a little nature.

2.

Most men have certain ideal notions of femaleness derived from movies they saw in their youth. No matter how cockeyed some of these archetypes are, and no matter how manfully I struggle to assimilate the truth that women are as variable, real and complex as men are, a part of me continues to want to match up the actual women in my life with the celluloid temptresses and saints in my imagination.

I grew up in the postwar era of dangerous brunettes and redheads, like Rita Hayworth, Yvonne De Carlo, Jane Greer and Jean Simmons, who could no sooner look at a Robert Mitchum or Glenn Ford than they would begin to seduce him and stab him in the back. Double-crossing came as easily to these femmes fatales as smoking a cigarette. Yet you had to sympathize with this survival tactic of what we were told was the “weaker sex.” It was a mystery to me how this supposedly frailer sex could rise not only to a tortuously complicated duplicity, but also to a level of selfless heroism that seemed outside the compass or capacity of masculine experience.

I am particularly fascinated with one convention of older melodramatic films that seems to have disappeared: the woman who stops a bullet for her man. She was usually, in classic-triangle terms, the redundant woman—say, the native mistress of a man stationed in the Orient, a rival of the newly met, supposedly more suitable white lady. The mistress is beautiful. She is faithful, she loves her man and she has a deeper understanding of life than the white lady. So, the audience wonders restlessly, how can the hero reject her?

But because her love for her man is so deep, it transcends self-preservation, as maternal love is often alleged to do. Maybe such passionate romantic devotion exists only in the backwaters of civilization, among colonial or underworld women who have gone beyond the ladylike. Did I mention that sometimes vice takes the place of race? A gangster’s moll or bar girl with a tarnished past, an Ida Lupino/Gloria Grahame type, may also administer the reproachful lesson about how far a woman’s love may go for her man. (In stopping a bullet, she not only solves the triangular disequilibrium, but also reinforces a fundamental law of screen romance: that a supporting player, a sidekick, must die near the end to seal the tentative lovers’ commitment to eros.)

Now, just try to imagine a love so powerful that it would cause a woman to hurl herself in front of gunshots, when most of us would hit the ground. Such love no longer exists, you say; we live in a more calculating age, or to put the matter optimistically, a more progressive age in which women are less dependent on men, less masochistic. Am I sorry to see the convention disappear? To be frank, I don’t know whether to pray for such a love or to be terrified by it.

I try to imagine a man pointing a gun at me. As he starts to pull the trigger, my Chinese girlfriend blankets me with her body. She takes the bullet. As grateful as I am, I cannot help feeling there is a certain presumptuousnesss is someone’s stealing the death that was meant for me. I am so stunned by her act that I forget to knock the gun from the killer’s hands. Now he is pointing it at me again, and she has already given her life for me. Would it be cowardly to prop her in front of me, or would that be a way of honoring her original intention?

In any case, how will I shove her limp body forward at the precise moment the gun is fired? My respect for this woman is growing, not only because stopping the bullet was a noble thing to do, but because it required incredible athletic timing, like a basketball player’s leaping to block a shot. My own reflexes are rustier. Even if I was quick enough to stop the next two bullets with her as a shield, the gunman—always assuming he had six bullets to begin with—might get angry at the waste of ammunition. He might change his tactics, rush behind me and shoot me in the back. How awful, to be shot in the back!     

Why doesn’t my other girlfriend arrive? Isn’t she supposed to bring the policeman who will knock down the door and save me? All my life I have trusted in the Eternal Feminine to save me from disaster, which does not keep me in the least from suspecting all women of being betrayers. So it is inevitable that I start to think that my fiancée, my other girlfriend, may be in league with the killer. But why does she want me dead? I would have bowed out if she had asked me to. It dawns on me that she is an avenger, and that I am about to be punished for my unfaithfulness to the good mistress, she who gave her life for me.

Of course it is idiotic to expect women to die for me. The very idea must be a ghost-remnant of the child’s wholly unrealistic expectation that his mother will love him unconditionally, no matter how meanly he tests her or how sadly he disappoints her. And yet, when I look over at my wife playing with our orange Abyssinian, Newman, on the couch, I can’t help wondering to what lengths she would go to protect me in a fusillade. I hope she would have the good sense to duck. I know she would. Nevertheless, these movie fantasies of Oriental mistresses die hard. I now begin to understand why I bought her, on a recent trip to China, a red silk brocade robe with dragon couchant, and why I keep pestering her to wear it.