The baby-bathwater problem

We confuse the baby and the bathwater in two pervasive, important ways.  One is (feminine) beauty, and the other is sexuality.  Both involve men as the bad guy, but that’s not right, either, because the men who swim in these distorted waters also lose parts of themselves.

Beauty affects us all.  We cherish a vase, a painting, or jewelry made yesterday or thousands of years ago.  We invest billions in making ourselves more beautiful.  As Archie the cockroach (of “Archie & Mehitabel”) wrote: if the butterfly people swooned over in the elevator had been a cockroach, they would have stepped on it.  We care about and respond to beauty.  We can’t help it.  It pleases us.

That same beauty has been co-opted by romance and male preferences, right?  Men won’t look at us unless we’re nubile, have the perfect body du jour, wonderful hair, etc.  That makes some women (including me, historically) decide to ignore their own physical self.  I’m damned if I’m going to please some man, the way my male-worshipping mother did.

But the problem is the male-worship, not the beauty.  My mother mis-usedbeauty (as do millions of other women) in a power relationship.  More beauty = more power to attract.  Yes, that’s often true, but it’s about power — and not really about beauty.  Beauty becomes a tool, a means toward a pre-selected end.  Beauty is so much more than that.

I wish early feminism had made this distinction.  Many of us deliberately didn’t beautify ourselves, because beauty was contaminated by the historical injustice of male authority.  I want beauty back without caring whether it pleases some male.  If he likes it, or dislikes it, is peanuts compared to its real importance.

Then there’s sex, again in the realm of power.  Any female who’s been sexually exploited feels the predominance of power in a realm that should have nothing to do with power.  Sexual connection is a grand thing, celebrated by poets and other artists for centuries.  It has its own beauty, immense and profound.

I meant it when I wrote that the men suffer, too.  Men who view beauty as a commodity aren’t able to wash in its soul-restoring waters.  Men who see sex as an outlet for their own urges don’t experience the earth-centering connection of a sexually sharing relationship.  They’ve been as brainwashed as the women.  It’s a shame.  Everybody loses; even the folks who sell us ways to be more beautiful or more sexy, because their souls are corrupted.  And our culture loses, because we squander some of our richest human resources.  Look at the ugliness we create . . . .

So enjoy beauty, your beauty, the beauty of others and of the world.  It isn’t guilty or shallow or frivolous.  It’s eternal.  And if your sexuality has been exploited, take it back; it’s too precious to leave in the hands or mind of someone who doesn’t even know what he was playing with.

Beauty or sex, we need to save the baby.  Toss the dirty bathwater, but keep what matters.

P.S.  I write using the dominant male-female relationship paradigm; the same values apply regardless of gender.