A Naughty New Trend?

I sat in the beauty salon waiting for my son. He, and several of his friends, had recently taken to Jan, a woman who cuts hair for a living and is the mother of one of my son's classmates. But this particular day his haircut, and my gnawing on a tuna sandwich in the waiting area, were not in any sense of the word metrosexual, that new label for fastidious and needy men who demand perfection from clothes to coiffures. Such fussiness is strange to me, raised as I was believing that men were to be ready for action - a scurry off the pavement at any moment - while women were to be elevated to the status of the beautiful. My son and I are clearly not sidewalk or pavement-dwellers, where every step from sun-up to sundown is made on the contraceptive macadam that is truly metro. No, we live in the grass and the dirt; and our very skin is made for gravel (for exfoliation). Many women, and the men who fuss along with the them (in what seems like so much gratuitous indulgence) in salons, do not live so dangerously close to the earth, separated as they are from soil and sand by the courtesy of sidewalks.

Though I know the rural-sexual dirt beneath my fingernails is enough to send paroxysms of revulsion through the refined sets, I permitted myself, as Jan washed my son's hair, to touch one of those scintillating journals that deal with self-conscious fashion. There I read the cover of that finest of literary fare, Marie Claire magazine, with something like incredulity; muttering to myself between bites of tuna and onion. Of course, the journal made me entirely self-conscious, though only briefly, about my own personhood. I imagined I looked like a a retired bus mechanic taking a breather on a chaise lounge inside the Ritz-Carlton. At any moment, I would be urged to move along. But only after a concierge spotted me wiping mayonnaise on my pants.

As I perused that somewhat gaudy magazine cover, one headline caught my eye; it lingered there, and shook my usually solid sense of what humans are supposed to be about. It read, "Sex With Strangers: the NAUGHTY new trend you need to know."

At first, I felt like I had read the mere obvious: "We are all strangers to one another," I muttered to myself. But I checked my cynical spirit and reflected on where we've come in our culture, when sex with strangers is now deemed an exciting distraction from the mundanity of sex with someone a person loves. And I thought about the article to which this headline referred, complete, no doubt, with warnings about safety and exploitation, and yet offering, with proper qualifications, quotes from experts and celebrants describing the delicious benefits sex with strangers provides. Not that sex with strangers is new. I've heard wives in lengthy marriages complain that they feel like they've been "having sex with a stranger" when they've had sex with their own husbands. (Perhaps that's what the naughty new trend is, a dress-up conjugality between spouses where the "stranger" motif is embraced and not resisted.) And then there's the whole one-night stand thing where sex is mere sport and hobby; a playtime that's been practiced by many for a long time, with joy and innocence greeting such lovers with every sunrise, I am certain.

But never have such practices been elevated to high culture, if one can call it either high or culture. Women are encouraged to be exactly what the more disgusting men among us have fought for: women like them, detached from the emotional and spiritual, in a carnal rubbing of parts for the part of a night; living as functional fragments of total humanity. This is feminism par excellence, where women define who they are by the successes and powers of men; embracing standards of achievement, meaning, power, leisure and sexuality defined by the men deemed to be on top.

How is it that women have been so duped into thinking that being on the summit of male-created industries, for instance, somehow makes them more complete women, and not male-derivatives with different body parts? For to be eager to celebrate and participate in one-night stands is not feminine, it is cheaply masculine, and thus women who engage in such prove that men, once again, rule the world. There is no feminism that is not just masculinism for women, where women merely become higher-earning sex objects with power, more sexually available and elastic in the corporate cultures that remain male in spirit and fact.

I tossed down the magazine in my own sense of revulsion. And I thought how curious it is that many of the more disgusting, lecherous men celebrated in our world are the ones with the cleanest fingernails.

There's the real result of feminism.

Contratimes

©Bill Gnade/2005/Contratimes