the pretenders

ariel levy's 'female chauvinist pig' is profiled the same week the cover of maclean's spreads fear about the wussification of men. on the weekend of all weekends to play dress up it is a good a time as ever to wonder about who we are pretending to be.

i agree with levy: girls and women are participating with faux consent in the hyper objectification of their bodies through avenues like the 'girls gone wild' series and every-day 'slutty' ready-to-wear. at the university where i work i have walked by women who wear t-shirts with such enlightened catch-phrases as 'i'm too pretty to do math' and 'some girls are just born lucky'. sex and the city has been off the air just over a year and already the popularized and 'classy' sex-interest and slow-to-intimacy of samatha has been squeezed out by juvenile narcissism as the post-feminist height of female sexuality.

there is no confusion: the epic lengths of petty effort invested in paris-hiltonizing a female body is a sure substitution for women's real contemplation of pleasure, beauty, and desire, let alone anything else worth thinking about and working for on this earth. female chauvanism is just the newest manifestation of an eternal history of cultural rejection of the subversive act of women wanting. women and men need to be independent enough of the raging, gluttonous consumer machine to try themselves out, know who they are, and discover their individual understanding and expression of attraction and love.

which brings me to the monstrous, poorly-written, elementary maclean's essay on 'poor men don't know how to be men anymore' i just forced myself to read. god that was terrible. if men are feeling so threatened by sophisticated gucci ads shot in milan that they refuse to be emasculated further through housework, they are just as duped as drunken, topless and underage girls in cancun. that's like me refusing to drink skim milk because i was so hurt by the thin models in vogue. i don't know what is more idiotic, actually thinking such a thing or coming up with the theory that that kind of thinking is behind the supposed crisis in masculinity.

there is no crisis. there are a lot of distractions. this halloween let's try to ignore them and pretend to be real people.