“Being a woman is a terribly difficult trade since it consists principally of dealings with men.”—Joseph Conrad
I love walking into a room and seeing a beautiful woman.
There’s something special in the pains a particular woman takes to feel not only alive, but attractive. For such a woman, it has nothing to do with men.
I used to believe the impossible and ridiculous standards of beauty men have imposed on women throughout human history were the problem.
Beautiful women might consider this, a little revisionist.
A certain sort of woman can revel in how she feels when she’s made up. It’s where she takes back the narrative of how she should be and can disappear into who she really is, and reappear, again, as both the narrative and narrator.
It’s not the same as feeling powerful in a Brioni tuxedo.
For men, power is inferred. We don’t find it in our looks, but in our performances. The look is a comfort, not a complement. We would never wear ill-fitting shoes to attempt to look how we don’t feel. My boy, women are different.
My mother has a saying: “Beauty is pain.”
She told me a story once of how many women of her mother’s generation would never allow their husbands to ever see them without makeup.
Ever.
My grandmother, allegedly, would lie down to bed with “her face on,” get up and wash it when my grandfather fell asleep, and, presumably, got up early to “put her face back on” before my grandfather saw her, again.
Beauty is, for some women, a feat of artistic excellence. It’s an intellectual exploration in discovering the relationship between the beautiful and the technical.
It’s about symmetry and color, chaos and order, until you learn how to create a unified language on your face. A beautiful woman is not a fluke.
When you walk into a room, you must acknowledge her.
A delicious pastime for many a single man is finding yourself making out in some off-limits room or hall, with a single, ambitious beauty, at a party. You might be in heated throes of passion when you open your eyes to see how beautiful she is.
You might also look up to see an old painting or statue in your periphery, staring back at you with all the voyeurism of a 19th century scandal.
What you feel making out with a beautiful woman is what she feels making out with you—power. The difference is the power source, not the substance.
Parties are nice, because women make more of an effort than men.
The most well-dressed and dandified man is a shadow in a woman’s light. The music and conversation at social events are ambient noises that merely exist to remind you of her. Beauty civilizes men, and gives us the aesthetics of conduct.
For men, our attitude and posture reflects how women appear to us.
We’re molded and shaped by beauty, and aspire to the ethereal nature of what we call ‘beautiful’ without knowing it. What’s thought to be a linear, evolutionary imperative selected to advance procreation, can paint, sculpt, and emit poetry.
This is the salience of beauty in civilizations.
Great works of art across history tend to succeed on the universal aims of its people. You can often measure how a people might behave, build, trade, laugh, and worship, based on the beauty of their artistic products.
A violent war painting might tell you more about the people than the artist, if violence were in defense of the innocent. The use of wood where other materials were available might tell me how the people think about precision in everyday life.
I prefer to do business with beautiful people.
There’s even more to this business of beauty.
In my many experiences, women appreciate it when you tell them they’re beautiful, so long as it’s genuine. They’ll dress you with a hot white fury if it isn’t.
This has to do with truth in beauty, and why it’s among the few natural phenomena we men we’re made to esteem so suddenly. We can’t help ourselves. It reminds us truth is objective, pure, totalitarian, and all-powerful.
Men have been known to accelerate this force, and for two reasons; partly because it’s reassuring we can manipulate the mass of objects; partly because it puts the beautiful and the lover of beauty on equal footing.
After all, what becomes of beauty if no one appreciates it?
For this writer, the social function embodies our universal aims. It’s when we think of art, trade, conduct, even worship, most. Everyone is beautiful at a party, especially the better ones. They’re designed to bring out the best in us.
It’s what I enjoy most in women of ascending social status.
Men have called women vain, because of their preoccupation with material things. I’d say men can be equally vain for caring. I’d also say if both are vain then vanity is moot, and what matters is if we can ever unveil an ostentation to see each other.
My favorite part of kissing a beautiful woman isn’t the kiss.
It’s decelerating from the kiss and opening our eyes, again, and while holding her face seeing how beautiful she is. Of course, I would never insult the moment by telling her. It isn’t what she needs.
It’s also what makes my silence so valuable.