This morning the Atlantic has a new article up, bemoaning the loss of charm in the American male.
Few possess it, and few want to. Explaining men’s ambivalent relationship with an amoral virtue.
So claims Benjamin Schwarz. This is Benjamin, by the way:
I find the image hard to reconcile with the words. To me, Benjamin looks like an enormously charming man, with a great sense of humor and an ability to poke fun at himself. What other kind of man could possibly wear his hair like that?!?!
Oh, he’s gay. Okay. That explains a lot.
http://boatagainstthecurrent.blogspot.ca/2008/12/quote-of-day-caitlin-flanagan-and.html
How does Benjamin being gay explain why he understands charm, and why he might not be seeing a whole lot of it? Well, let’s start with the definition of charm:
charm
/CHärm/
Noun
The power or quality of giving delight or arousing admiration.
Verb
Delight greatly.
Synonyms
noun. spell – glamour – glamor – fascination – enchantment
verb. bewitch – enchant – fascinate – captivate – enthral
Given that most men are heterosexual, and assuming that they have little interest in “delighting” another man, it makes perfect sense that Benjamin doesn’t routinely run into a whole lot of charming men. They’re probably more interested in not sending mixed signals than anything else.
I’m still taken aback by Benjamin’s words, though. On the topic of Cary Grant, he writes:
Grant had developed a new way to interact with a woman onscreen: he treated his leading lady as both a sexually attractive female and an idiosyncratic personality, an approach that often required little more than just listening to her—a tactic that had previously been as ignored in the pictures as it remains, among men, in real life.
That’s quite a portrait. Men don’t treat women as sexually attractive females with idiosyncratic personalities and generally fail in the simple act of listening.
Hmmm.
I wonder why?
In order for a man to treat a woman as a sexually attractive female, she needs to actually BE a sexually attractive woman, no? Certainly, it’s the Advanced Charmers who can take a sexually unappealing woman and treat her as if she WERE, in fact, appealing, but the baseline for a charm offensive requires a minimal degree of attractiveness.
What do men find MOST attractive about women? We’ve been over this before, but what the hell, let’s go there again:
A nice rack
A pretty face
Expressive eyes, preferably blue or green
Long, lean legs
A firm ass
http://www.examiner.com/article/top-5-things-men-find-most-physically-attractive-women-pg-rated
And what do men find LEAST attractive about women:
Being fat
Being a miserable bitch*
http://heartiste.wordpress.com/2011/05/11/why-european-girls-stay-thin/
*You can be a bitch, just not a miserable one. Judgy bitches are A-OK!!!!
I posted a link to Heartiste because I find him hilarious. Sometimes I read his stuff and think, “oh, brutal, dude. That is way too much truth.”
And other times I read his stuff and think, “oh please, dude, you would have failed so hard with me if you pulled that shit.”
http://heartiste.wordpress.com/2013/04/12/how-to-treat-a-beautiful-woman-like-a-plain-woman/
But no matter what he writes, I find Heartiste ….. charming.
I have absolutely no shortage of charming men in my life (although some may claim if I find Heartiste charming, my standards are way too low). JudgyAsshole, CleverGuy and PrinceCharming (obviously) are all very charming men. It is a matter of course for us to express “delight” in one another. I have a ton of admiration for all those guys, and I have no compunctions about showing it.
Why not? It’s fun and flirty and affirming and makes everyone feel absolutely terrific! And it is not to be confused with cock-teasing, which is something altogether different. While there is an acknowledgement of sexual attractiveness in charm, there is nothing more than that.
I’m going to theorize two reasons WHY the art of being charming is not lost, but is definitely being curtailed, particularly by men. First, the ideology of the market economy has taken over and infected our most personal and cherished relationships. Children are economic burdens that you pay someone else to raise. Marriage is a financial partnership in which separate bank accounts and spreadsheets governing the distribution of housework are de rigeur. Parents are dead weights that require governing and managing. Friendships must be nurtured through the art of shopping (mostly for shit you don’t need in the first place).
I think we’ve gotten to the point where people literally cannot think about these relationships without attaching some sort of market value to them. The irony, of course, is that the most economically sound approach to family and marriage and relationships is the single-breadwinner, nuclear family ideal. In his book A Treatise on the Family, economist Gary Stanley Becker makes the argument that a family engaged in task specialization is better off in the long run, because when one person stays at home and takes care of all the domestic issues, the other person is able to dedicate more resources to earning money, and ends up earning more as a result. It’s great argument, and the Nobel Prize committee agreed, awarding Becker the medal in Economics in 1992.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_Becker
Sadly, Becker didn’t seem to see the Divorce Train coming, loaded with fish that don’t need no bicycles and when the train crashed, the breadwinners were left with a bit of crust for a lifetime of work and not much else.
When relationships are reduced to mere transactions, what is the incentive to behave in a way that is charming? What will the price be? For men, it’s gotten to be just a little too high. Charming men are one bitter, fat bitch away from a sexual harassment allegation or worse!
Why would any man behave charmingly to a woman he does not know, and even to those he does?
The second reason men are keeping their charm under wraps is that there just aren’t very many women left to be charming to! Women are stressed out, depressed, overweight, miserable cows for the most part, and men being charming is regarded as so much “benevolent sexism” that must be eradicated from the face of the earth. The harsh truth is that women were the ones who insisted on this new world where their value would be measured in economic terms, and it turns out the new world sucks and now the ladies need someone to blame.
http://www.nytimes.com/1990/12/06/health/women-s-depression-rate-is-higher.html
Guess who that someone is gonna be? Any man that dares to wander the earth acting happy and pleasant and attempting to arouse delight is in for a giant fucking wake-up call! How dare you be happy? How dare you be pleasing? How dare you affirm a woman in a way designed to suggest admiration?
This whole mess is your fault because PATRIARCHY!
I’ve been looking for a reason to post this awesome link to Captain Capitalism, and today is the day!
http://captaincapitalism.blogspot.ca/2013/04/how-to-legally-exact-your-toll-of.html
To be physically attractive, just like a career or anything else worth doing in life, takes effort. You need to work out, you need to run, you need to eat right, you need to dress right, and above all else, you need to have self-control and discipline. You also have to be selfless to a certain extent, considering the preferences and tastes of others in order to prove appealing and attractive to them. You may not like the maintenance required in having long hair, but you’re not having long hair for you, you’re having long hair for him. You may not like lifting heavy blocks of metal repetitively as your brain atrophies, but you’re not doing it for you, you’re doing it for her. In short you have to have a personal philosophy that is opposite of most leftists – hard work and altruism with your own resources.
There is a very, very simple way to encourage the re-emergence of charm from the average American male: act like someone worthy of delighting. Be pleasant, be pleasing, be cheerful. Be as attractive as you can be, and cultivate a personality to go along with your physical appearance. Assume the best in others, listen and above all, be kind.
Charm is a circle. Don’t be afraid to go first.
“Charm is often despised but I can never see why. No one has it who isn’t capable of genuinely liking others, at least at the actual moment of meeting and speaking. Charm is always genuine; it may be superficial but it isn’t false.”
― P.D. James, The Children of Men
Lots of love,
JB