The destructive effects of female immodesty

(Update 12/30: Laura Wood writes: “Clark Coleman said men should start calling women sluts to get them to dress better. I respond and explain why that isn’t going to happen. I also offer a more likely scenario for change.”)

Laura Wood boils down a point I’ve written about before:

The bared female flesh on display almost everywhere today, and especially visible in the average high school, is emasculating. In general, female reticence, not the overt display of female sexuality, arouses masculine behavior.

That’s exactly right. What draws men to women most of all is female reticence, or, rather, the combination of female beauty and female self-containment, the sense of something mysterious and precious that is to be approached, not the gross, self-aggrandizing female exhibition that we have today. How does a man approach a woman if she’s already shoving her wares in his face? What is there left for him to do, as a man?

In this connection, consider Willem de Kooning’s predatory, teeth-bared women from the late 1940s and early ’50s. De Kooning was a prophet. This is what the female sex, American-style, has now become:

Woman, I (1952)

- end of initial entry -

KB, a female reader, writes:

They have absolutely no idea. Women who are aware of our effect on men don’t splash it around at the office, and we cover up as we age. No woman who actually understands male sexuality would continue to dress like a teenage hooker well into her forties or even fifties, which is something visible in any corporate office in the U.S. These women are completely deluded by advertising and other women.

LA writes:

The image of today’s strutting, full-of-herself, in-your-face female, Penelope Cruz in the main publicity shot for the movie Nine:

December 31

Laura Wood writes:

Mom, is that you?

LA replies:

Your comment, “Mom is that you?”, is both funny and strangely disturbing and evocative.

It echoes some literary line that I can’t put my finger on.

LA continues:

I don’t know, but I think this may be the line your comic yet forlorn comment made me think of. It’s from Bob Dylan’s 1980s song, “Caribbean Wind”:

Atlantic City by a cold grey sea
I hear a voice crying “Daddy,” I always think it’s for me
But it’s only the silence [in the buttermilk hills that calls].

Laura replies:

That’s sad, you know. Reminds me of all the children wondering where their parents are. They were just here a minute ago. Mom. Dad. Is that you? Their mother’s boyfriend watches TV in the next room.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at December 29, 2009 02:00 PM | Send