myn owene woman, wel at ese
vanity correctly understood
A favorite “problematic book” of mine is Nicholson Baker’s The Fermata. An adolescent male, Arno, discovers he has the power to freeze time, and he uses this power the way an adolescent male might: to undress women without their knowledge and then put their clothes back on before he starts time again. He continues to use this power for this purpose into his mid-thirties. It’s harmless, since it’s not like he’s actually doing anything, since he puts everything back as he found it… right? Arno asks another guy what he’d do with a similar ability. Without even hesitating, he says “rape,” which troubles Arno.1 Rape is a million miles from what he does… right?
Well, not quite, no. In fact, he crosses the line between “lovable pervert ghost” (if there is such a thing) and “hateful sex criminal ghost” more than once.2 Arno knows he should not be doing what he does, which is why he’s constantly arguing, mostly with himself, that what he does is really fine. At the same time, because we as readers are so intimately involved with Arno, we can’t really attribute malice to his actions. We just want him to get a clue.3
Part of what impresses me about The Fermata is the way I find it playful rather than instantly repulsive; I really should not like this book at all, and I haven’t reread it because I suspect it would lose its charm, but it did charm me at the time. Its ability to circumvent the part of my mind going what the hell? comes from Arno’s sincere affection for women. He finds every woman attractive. You feel as if it’s a tragedy to him—and perhaps for the world—that so many women exist whose specific and private beauties will remain forever undisclosed to him.
Arno’s also very lonely, because the other way he uses his power is to figure out what women he’s into like in advance. He looks into their purses to see what they’re reading, so that, on a date, he can be reading the same book. This constant anticipatory mirroring of what he thinks a woman’s ideal partner might be kills any relationship between them.4 Eventually, believing he’s found the right woman, he confesses the whole thing to her. Once she’s convinced he’s telling the truth, she asks: “Arno, wouldn’t it have been just as easy to ask me out?” The answer is no: “It was very, very hard to ask you out today. It’s just not something I do lightly.”5
While I’ve been logged off from the newsletter for February, Substack, as in the social network, has become consumed by arguments about cosmetics and hotness. The longer it went on the less sense I had of what anybody was talking about.6 As the arguments continued and I got more and more lost I typed things into a draft on here. Over time that draft became this email.
Why start with Arno? I guess because his is the perspective I find lacking whenever people argue about whether or not you spend time and effort trying to attract others. That was the thought I kept having when posts about self-optimization were floating past my eyes: maybe people should read The Fermata. Even though I don’t really want to reread it, when I read The Fermata it was a helpful book for me, because it was about a guy who finds women basically attractive. And a weird but true fact about a lot of books I have read over the years is that they are not.7
At the time I vaguely wished for more books I could read “like The Fermata.” If you go looking for books that are “like The Fermata” what you’ll find is further recommendations for highbrow erotica, like Baker’s book Vox, but Vox wasn’t what I wanted. What I liked about The Fermata was its enthusiasm for personal beauty. It was narrated by a guy who, again, basically liked the people he was attracted to, a horndog who was attracted to basically every woman in some individual way. That was how I wanted to feel about myself. And, eventually, how I did, through a process of making jokes about feeling that way and then just sort of… building the habit.
That is, in my mid-to-late twenties I decided to try a social media “bit” where I pretended to be outrageously vain. You are probably wondering what the motivation for doing that could possibly be. The answer is stupid: I wanted to send up astrology, and specifically the way Taurus is always presented as this gorgeous hedonist rolling in money, which I am not.8 So the joke was that I wasn’t like that and that I was posting about ridiculous gowns as if I had a life in which I was even going to wear them. I took many selfies. However, astrology got the last laugh. Sometimes jokes become real and in this case I eventually joked myself right into becoming vain.
Nothing really changed about how I presented myself. I locked down my look in second grade. The only major innovation to take place between then and now was my discovery, in 2014, of leave-in conditioner.9 Since this discovery I have only had good hair days. Before then we rolled the dice.
One way essays about self-beautification by women, who are the main people who write about it, tend to go is something like this: well, isn’t it bad to be spending time and effort on something something society, at the same time something something femininity undervalued, something something I’ll admit I shave my legs because it just feels better you know even if it’s really conditioning hahahaha something something something something, no ethical consumption under capitalism we’re all just trying to get by and.…10
My reaction to this kind of list is usually: did I ask? I’m not anybody’s priest and I don’t have access to their bank balance or how they spend their time or anything else. I’m not sure what I’m meant to do with the information that somebody shaves their legs. The default quasi-left11 pose of the essay for the past ten years has been to present the reader with some elegant dilemma from daily life, recite one’s complicity, and then shrug. If there is one thing I would like not to do here, it is that. Whether or not you are living in contradiction to your own values, or my values, or somebody’s values that you think you should be your values—it isn’t my problem. My problem is something else, which is that I like beauty and I view the pursuit of objectively maximized “looks” as antithetical to the kind of beauty I enjoy. And I am, if not the main character of the universe, at least the main character of this newsletter.
An assertion: “hotness,” in discourse, means having the maximally unobjectionable face and body. It is having a body about which nobody can point out an unattractive feature—or at least getting as close to that as you can—and then staying that way for as long as you can. Hotness, because it implies objectivity and demands, if not stasis, tightly managed declined, is valuable in a way personal beauty, however stupendous, cannot be. A bottle girl is not there because any particular guy finds her beautiful but because she is the kind of girl men are considered to find attractive.12 That’s not a comment on her actual looks but rather her social function.
So while people are in some sense free to find another person beautiful or otherwise, and only a few people have that factor that causes all the attention in the room to turn toward them, hotness is different. Hotness, in the sense of looking like somebody who diligently maintains their appearance to fit an impersonal standard, is attainable. If you’re a beauty influencer, you not only have to be professionally beautiful but professionally seen to be working at being beautiful:13 you have to be striving for hotness the same way a grindset guy is doing… whatever those guys do (day trading?). If you just log on and look good, you have no product to sell.
If you look at beauty this way—that is, that there is such a thing as personal beauty (idiosyncratic) and there is also such a thing as being hot (hitting your marks), and while they may overlap these are not the same thing—most arguments about “beauty” become hard to follow. The arguments people are having are usually about whether or not “wanting to be generally desirable,” and “expending time and money to become so,” makes you a “good” or “bad” person. In these arguments, people will make various statements that are all basically correct. That we live in a culture which both rewards and stigmatizes scrupulous self-maintenance is “true”; that monetizing this self-maintenance is a gigantic business that preys on insecurities is also “true.”14 It is easy to stack up these true claims without getting anywhere, because wearing makeup and going to gym does not make you good or bad. There is no rule that says which set of cosmetic products and procedures fall on the line of acceptable vanity and which fall on the other, though there are always practical reasons to say why something might be a worse idea than another. What is more interesting is why people want them.
There’s a famous interview clip between Dolly Parton and Barbara Walters where Walters is grilling Dolly on why she dolls herself up in such an extreme way. What Walters asks, though not quite so bluntly, is: I can tell you’re a smart woman, so why do you look like such a bimbo? One of the things Dolly says to the various not-quite-direct versions of that question is that she can do whatever what she wants because she’s secure in her own talents and with herself. That’s not coming from somebody whose aesthetic is either minimal or natural. A lot of the Dolly Parton aesthetic is joyfully fake: wigs here, rhinestones there, a blue polyester rose in your hair.
And of course while Dolly is America’s beloved grandmother now I’m old enough to remember that she used to be a joke, too. She’s a genius and part of that genius is not needing to adapt herself to the aesthetic markers of intelligence. She recognizes that as branding and it’s not how she wants to be.15
So I think the better question about beauty is this one: Is the goal to like yourself more, or dislike yourself less? (Perhaps, put in a self-help sort of way: be more yourself, or be less yourself.) It is unlikely that an individual person will act entirely from one kind of motive, but “striving for purity” is not the point here. Beauty is social and in that sense doesn’t really permit pure motives. Nor can I really know the answer to these questions from afar: I cannot peer into people’s minds and discern why they want what they want (or even what they want). Outside of extreme and pathological cases, there’s no particular way to say this behavior is fine and that behavior is bad.16
Still, in all social dynamics, you can give people too much power over you. That is the point of saying that hotness is about being maximally unobjectionable rather than personally beautiful. What I would like to praise is a kind of true vanity rooted in self-love, as distinct from a false vanity rooted in self-hate, without proposing that any particular set of actions matches one type or the other. You can like yourself and get plastic surgery and you can hate yourself and do nothing. And I admit it kind of sucks to be told that the answer to what seems like an insoluble dilemma is to change your attitude and see what happens. But most of the time, that is the answer.17
I’m still on vacation don’t put it out there that I’m not on vacation.…
Relevant quote:
While I was waiting for the cab, I decided to ask him what he would do if he had a remote-control device that, instead of pausing a video, froze the entire universe. He understood the sexual implications of what I was asking immediately.
“What would I do?” he said. “I’d find the nicest, best-looking chick I could find and rip her clothes off and plank her right there.”
I was a little taken aback. “But she wouldn’t be moving. You would really fuck her?”
He said absolutely he would. “I’d find the nicest, mintest chick I could find and carry her off to an alley and rip her clothes off and start hammering the shit out of her.”
“But she wouldn’t be responding!” I again protested.
“So what? I’m talking about a mint chick now, a really mint chick. If she was mint I wouldn’t care if she was moving. Or, okay, if she wasn’t moving, I’d just click the remote on for a second, and she’d start fighting a little, and then she’d be moving, and then I’d turn her off and I’d hammer on her some more.”
“But then she’s fighting you,” I said. “That’s rape.”
“Well, yeah, it’s rape, I guess,” he said. “Call me a sick fucked-up guy, but that’s what I would do.…”
He does rape a woman in fact but is (as I remember it) in denial about having done so.
The way the book ultimately resolves this tension is not satisfying.
I had a memory of this playing a larger role than I think it actually does in the book, as I’m flipping through for quotes, but as I said I don’t plan to reread it.
Her response is to say “everything’s ruined and out of order!” which is funny because this is also what he thinks several pages before:
But I had entirely misjudged my capacity to handle the sound of Joyce’s abruptly resumed business voice in my ears so soon after I had gotten such a huge and illicit idea of her apartment. The fact that she had no notion of what I had just done, that she did not know the full extent of my knowledge of her mattress pad, pained me much more than I expected—not because my unlawful entry was wrong, exactly, but because I felt that my fuller sense of her life was going to make it more difficult for me to ask her out, rather than easier. The more I learned about her, the more I liked her, with a friendly, almost marital sort of well-wishing affection; but also the harder it was to imagine my having dinner with her and pretending that I knew nothing except what she was willing to tell me. Her pubic hair, her braid, I could handle just fine: they were graphic sights and textures whose memories wouldn’t get in the way of any later, more preliminary flirtation, but still-lifes like the maple syrup and the Dover book on the kitchen table made me imagine spending my life with her, and how could I possibly spend my life with her if I had to keep the secret of my Fold-proficiencies and activities from her? This sort of doubt was not entirely unfamiliar, but in the past I had simply concluded (most recently after Rhody broke up with me over this very issue) that I was never going to get married, and I was content with that conclusion. This time, though, I found it depressing to think that I had just been in her apartment, in her life, sitting on her bed, and yet that if I didn’t act on my love—or whatever such a hybrid emotion should be called when you learn important things about a woman all in the wrong order—by asking her out, then I might not, in a year or so, if I ran into her on the street, even remember her name: I would have to use the Fold then simply in order to be polite to her.
I assume most people who read this newsletter just read it in their email and do not even know there is a “social network” component to Substack, so I’ve tried to keep that aspect out of this post, but it’s all sparked by this post here.
Instead, you are more likely to find passages like this one (from Michel Houellebecq’s Submission):
Even so, I was surprised when, just as she was about to get out of the taxi, she invited me up “for a nightcap.” She’s really hit rock bottom, I thought. From the moment the elevator doors shut, I knew nothing was going to happen. I didn’t even want to see her naked, I’d rather have avoided it, and yet it came to pass, and only confirmed what I’d already imagined. Her emotions may have been through the wringer, but her body had been damaged beyond repair. Her buttocks and breasts were no more than sacks of emaciated flesh, shrunken, flabby, and pendulous.
if anybody would like to explain why this is the case to me, for free, here is my birth chart
Shoutout to The Hairpin.
allow me to remind new readers that i am a normie lib bc i have no beliefs about the socialization of industry and refuse to learn economics
I owe this formulation to my friend Clare Coffey.
This is also apparently true of working at the Trump White House.
In this arena, as in others, the idea that what is valued is effortlessness is not always… or even usually… true.
I understand that there’s a guy who hits himself in the face with a hammer involved in this conversation but I’m not onboarding that.
There was no way to put this in the email I guess because I was too busy talking about that classic we all know and love, The Fermata, but the title for this post comes from Mary McCarthy’s “The Man in the Brooks Brothers Shirt”:
“You know what my favorite quotation is?” she asked suddenly. She must be getting drunk, she knew, or she would not have said this, and a certain cool part of her personality protested. I must not quote poetry, she thought, I must stop it; God help us, if I’m not careful, we’ll be singing Yale songs next. But her voice had broken away from her; she could only follow it, satirically, from a great distance. “It’s from Chaucer,” she went on, when she saw that she had his attention. “Criseyde says it, ‘I am myn owene woman, wel at ese.’”
The man had some difficulty in understanding the Middle English, but when at last he had got it straight, he looked at her with bald admiration.
“Golly,” he said, “you are, at that!”
(She is not.)
Yossarian in Catch-22 is also a wholesome pervert.
"And I admit it kind of sucks to be told that the answer to what seems like an insoluble dilemma is to change your attitude and see what happens. But most of the time, that is the answer."
This is so true and also it sucks that it's true! Also, I wonder how many of the writers I enjoy are also Taruses 🤔. We gotta stick together.
I also love Fermata. It was the book that taught me how much fun it is to push a premise as far as you can. A lesser writer would have had him stopping a plane crash or fighting crime but Baker's too much of a rascal. Arlo is problematic but also very human, which is the gift of a great writer, I think. Detestable but familiar. The touch that sticks in my mind is how Arlo activates his power -- it comes and goes with different little rituals he has to perform in order to get it to work, and those rituals change seemingly at random and he's powerless for a time. I can relate to this, too, because I'm constantly trying to figure out ways to outsmart the powerful person inside me who abjectly does not want to write, and I have to constantly change my approach so that guy doesn't get wise. He always does, though, eventually.
A movie version of Fermata was in development for some time, and I recall Neil Gaiman being signed to write it. Yikes.