Men are, in fact, pigs.
Sometimes we rise above, though. And sometimes rising above isn't necessary, because kindness, curiousity, humor, intelligence, openness, courage shine through in a way that superficial concerns never enter the equation.
It also helps when women ignore our shortcomings in such a way that forget that we even have them (e.g. my wife's attitude about my 40 extra pounds).
What celebrity is beautiful in that way, that is utterly mesmerizing? Catherine-Zeta Jones, perhaps?
Angelina Jolie
Salma Hayek
Kirsten Dunst (no one ever agrees with me on this one)
My one experience with having been mesmerized made me miserable for about 18 months, so piggish men often do get properly punished.
I think that what's being talked about isn't just the way shallow men are attracted to superficial beauty, though. Some women have a seemingly magical attraction for men, beyond beauty alone. In my case, based on talking to one of her many ex-boyfriends (I barelky new her), it seems to have been motivated by real need for love on her part, combined with a very expressive and mobile face, natural acting skills, and an unguarded nature, combined with fickleness and adventuresomeness and a bit of experimental curiosity about what men do under various circumstances -- for example, as being miserable.
When they were younger, Isabella Rossellini, Audrey Hepburn, and Sophia Loren.
Yeah, I think John's right. It's not so much about celebrity-type beauty as a mesmerizing power that some people seem to have (some men have it too). Of course, the issue becomes much more complicated if we're not just talking about fineness of features, but also considering the things that make people "beautiful" in this powerful way.
Of course, I also feel that eros is like boxing and other competitive sports, in the sense that if you play the game, you always lose in the end. So optimistic win-win theories of eros are like the phony sports leagues where theoretically everyone is a winner.
Great Expectations remains the single scariest book I've ever read. I have never been able to re-read it, or even watch the movies made of it. I can see what Sherry is describing in the book, but it never occurred to me that women would be the gender scarred by the book.
Some women have a seemingly magical attraction for men, beyond beauty alone.
I'd say this is right, and I've commented on it before. Being mesmerizing requires some reasonably high level of objective attractiveness, but it's mostly mental/personality driven.
I can't really share Scheherazade's expressed wistfulness, though -- my sense of the personality/presesentation/whatever required to be enchanting is that it's not a terribly easy way to live. To attract that kind of worship you really do have to need it on some level, and you have to put a lot of effort into maintaining the supply (that is even if you're attracting men and scorning them, there's a certain amount of effort involved in keeping them around to be scorned.) Much more trouble than it's worth.
Scarlett Johansson and Sarah Silverman are mesmerizing.
Meant to link to this comment, but something went wrong.
So is Peaches, but she's not quite a celebrity beyond a certain niche music community葉hink a more overtly sexual Patti Smith. And then there's R. Crumb's archetypal woman. LB's right: Sexiness is an enormous amount of work and perhaps an impossible feat if you're striving against the standard set by the gods. But there are all sorts of niche communities and interests葉he realms we all operate in擁n which effort can pay off despite a lack of phenotypic capital.
(that is even if you're attracting men and scorning them, there's a certain amount of effort involved in keeping them around to be scorned.)
LB--Do you think that being mesmerizing in this way requires that one scorn men? Must the mesmerizer be Estella?
ogged--what are the personality characteristics?
Sexiness is an enormous amount of work
Now I think we've gone too far in the other direction. Some people are mesmerizing without working much at it; I don't think it's the same as what we call "sexiness."
what are the personality characteristics?
I think they differ from person to person, and the people mesmerized often don't know just what they're reacting to.
I wouldn't say so, but given that we live in a society where monogamy is some sort of ideal, if you're enthralling men right and left, you're either scorning most of them or doing some fairly complicated and laborious relationship management. (That sounds cattier than I meant to to -- complicated and laborious relationship management can involve all sorts of things, including being charmingly unavailable rather than scornfully unavailable.) However you manage it, though, it's a lifestyle that involves a lot of work.
Some people are mesmerizing without working much at it
I'm not so sure. Certainly not in the realm of Hollywood beauties. I think some people are graceful and beautiful without working at it, but "mesmerizing" implies to me an intentional regimen. I think LB's getting at the fact that there's something slightly sinister to the word.
"Experiencing men is her thing" said her ex-boyfriend I knew. It was like she had a hobby.
She was also driving my rival, the successful suitor, crazy with her unfaithfulness. When he finally asked he to be monogamous she laughed in his face. She did not sneak around -- she was quite blatant about it. Her lovers had no choice but to forgive her. One guy who had a brief fling went virtually nuts and left town (owing my brother $500). She was good at convincing you, for the moment, that you were wonderful.
Cf. Keats: "The Belle Dame Sans Merci."
Is beauty mesmerizing, really? I always thought that it was beauty plus charisma or mystery.
It's been a while since I've read Great Expectation, but I remember having the impression that Estella was trained to break men's hearts. Part of what made Estella so intoxicating was her cruelty and emotional distance.
No, beauty by itself can be mesmerizing. There have been at least a couple of times when women I've just met have left me dazed and hyperventilating.
Can't tell without having been there, but I would suspect that the women who left you breathless were doing so actively, rather than simply just being that attractive.
There's a story I saw somewhere about Marilyn Monroe walking down the street with a friend, and the friend commenting that she was surprised that Marilyn wasn't being mobbed. Monroe said "Oh, would you like to see me do 'her'?" and switched on her charisma/whatever. Ten steps further down the street, she had a crowd of people asking for autographs.
My old college roommate does this (on a much lower wattage level, of course), and it's very much something she does, rather than just what she looks like.
I don't think the experience of being mesmerizing is limited to just a few women who cultivate cruelty/distance. I certainly don't stop traffic, and the extent to which I get attention on the street is highly dependent on the effort I made in the morning, which is less and less these days, but there are certainly a few individuals in the world who think I am the cat's pajamas, beauty wise, captivating, fascinating, all that. You just have to find the people whose taste you match. And personality traits, something about manner, are part of all that. Different personality traits will make you captivating in different ways to different people.
Are we defining "mesmerizing" as mesmerizing everyone? As driving people to some state of insanity? Maybe the problem is that it's been something like 13 years since I read GE.
I really believe that my nemesis had it down to a science. I suspect that she practiced in front of a mirror.
I once knew a geology grad student容xactly the sort of plain jane that "geology grad student" implies謡ho, every Halloween, would do this absolutely transcendent karaoke performance as "Spitney Beers" on a small stage at a local bar. The sex wattage from that evening was enough to keep her in men for the rest of the year.
Not the same as mesmerizing but still aitch-oh-double-tees.
few individuals in the world who think I am the cat's pajamas
I just had to note this phrase. I need to work it into a conversation today.
And I think you're basically right. I seem to be capable of being captivating to some men and not to others. I assume that it's just that I'm not to their taste, and don't think about it that much.
I think you guys are talking about something different. Sure, everyone is appealing to someone, and the prettier, cleverer, whatever you are the more people who will think you're the bee's knees (ant's ankles, caterpillar's boots). If most people weren't attractive to each other, the species would have died out.
Some people, however, have to a greater or lesser degree a sexual charisma that's a different sort of thing, and that's what I think Dickens was describing in Great Expectations. It's a capacity to focus attention on yourself that's really distinct from whether you're the sort of person you're objects would ordinarily be attracted to.
The second "you're" in the last sentence should be "your". I'm so embarassed.
Cf. Keats: "The Belle Dame Sans Merci."
Aah, yes, the beautiful woman without a thank you. I've encountered many of them.
But a counter-example to "Men never make passes at girls who wear glasses"!
...And there I shut her wild wild eyes
With kisses four.
Well, alright, with a considerable amount of effort, and then the confidence instilled by viewing the effort in the mirror, licking my finger, touching myself, making a satisfied hissing sound, and uttering the word "smokin'", I can walk into a room and attract a lot of attention. On a normal day, less so. But I think this experience is available to a lot of people when they put on their Spitney Beers persona. It's just that most people would find it sort of exhausting to act like that all the time. Further, the experience of being thought captivatingly, fascinatingly beautiful, worthy of obsession, etc, is available to more than a small group of people too.
I guess my point is, what's the original author's complaint? If she wants to mesmerize and she's already pretty enough, she has the tools for it. It seems kind of pointless to be complaining about the fact that people who emit sexy vibes are, in fact, sexy. This reminds me a little of the whole "nice guys" controversy of a few months ago, but with the genders flipped.
That strikes me as a good connection, Tia, but the nice guys' complaint is more dubious. Sherry says that she has a little but not a store of this x-factor quality that both she and men admire, then toys with the idea of holding men accountable for their, or her, unrealistic expectations. Nice guys blamed women for not being attracted to qualities x instead of y.
I think you're right, and right that she hasn't got all that much to complain about. I think it's easy, though, to look at someone who exercises this sort of charisma all the time and to think that they have some ability that's absolutely out of your reach, rather than realizing that they're just doing something you don't particularly want to do, or that you haven't learned how to do.
You mean I have to work at being charismatic?
Awwww.
Well, look, I think everyone got a right to complain. The paradox here is that the author (not atypically for a woman, I think) both wants to be appreciated for things other than her beauty, and also wants to be appreciated by men in the specific way ("mesmerizing") that female beauty leads to male appreciation. That's not really a "fair" complaint, almost as if you were frustrated that nobody will buy you a square circle, but it's also a natural frustration to have with a world that, sadly, has not been organized for our convenience.
34: Cala, going by your writing, you don't have to work at it.
Awww, Chopper.
Will you buy me a square circle if I smile coquettishly?
You too can be a diva and drive men wild -- our instructional software will show you how!
Yes, of course. You'll find it in your fourth-dimensional mailbox.
So who wants to get started on this "organizing the world for our convenience" project?
I nominate LB. She's good at multitasking.
First order of business: Could we make long beards irresistable?
Omar Khayyam?
Ah, love! could thou and I with Fate conspire
To grasp this sorry Scheme of Things entire,
Would not we shatter it to bits - and then
Remold it nearer to the Heart's Desire!
Though it expresses a different sentiment, reading that post made me think of this:
She dwelt among the untrodden ways
Beside the springs of Dove,
A Maid whom there were none to praise
And very few to love:
A violet by a mossy stone
Half hidden from the eye!
--Fair as a star, when only one
Is shining in the sky.
She lived unknown, and few could know
When Lucy ceased to be;
But she is in her grave, and, oh,
The difference to me!
Well, again alright then (to MY), but why were the menfolk getting scolded so harshly for feeling sexually rejected but we feel the women's pain? I recognize that she's not actually coming to the conclusion in the last sentence; she's just toying that, but contra Krison a few comments up I think that's the only distinction. It's not that I don't understand it; I certainly went through my own phase of lamenting my lack of this thing called sexy until I figured out how to synthesize it in the lab.
And women can certainly be annoying about it. I can't tell you how many variants I had to hear in college of how "fucked up" it was that so-and-so and gone after Estella right away, rather than me who he met at the same time, because Estella was prettier, wildly resenting a roommate of mine because natural good looks combined with a habit of cocking her head aside and looking very interested in what so-and-so had to say got her so much lovin'. A friend of mine even enthusiastically endorsed as "powerful" the absert assertion of some visiting gender theorist that "everyone has a right to sex."
I guess I'm saying I think we should be more evenhanded about how we distribute sympathy and blame.
Second on the agenda: I want bitten nails in fashion, and all men should be spontaneously aroused at the sight of the act itself.
So I'm going to make three comments in a row on one thread. Acknowledged: multiple spelling and grammar problems with 46.
It's not that I don't understand it; I certainly went through my own phase of lamenting my lack of this thing called sexy until I figured out how to synthesize it in the lab.
That's part of it -- I think most people really don't get how this works.
The other difference, though, is that there's some basis for thinking that the head-cocking type of sexual charisma is not something that people actually value in a partner. Look at the way people characterize those who exercise that kind of charisma: Emerson's been talking about his 'nemesis', no one likes Estella, etc. Sexual charisma doesn't make one's romantic partner any happier (mostly), it's just useful to pull people in to become romantic partners. So there's something sympathetic about a complaint that it's wrong for such charisma to be so powerful, when it isn't a good thing in itself.
I'm not all that confident of my ground here, but I think I've got something.
Re: 46, the distinction I hoped to make vis-a-vis nice guys is that they don't lament a lack of anything葉hey believe what they have is teh sexy! but women just don't get it. I don't really think that the nice guys want to be appreciated in as "mesmerizing" or in any specific sense葉hey just feel entitled to appreciation.
My nemesis rejected me, so my testimony is invalid. Her two successful lovers I know of were willing to forgive her anything, because the intensity of what she had to give overrode the fact that she was fickle, devious and cruel.
As I said, eros is the wild card in the deck, and doesn't harmonize with the rest of life. Otherwise put -- falling in love is a form of mental illness.
Hey, it's not always so bad. C'mon, sometimes it's a little fulfilling.
Talk to the two other guys, miserable as they sometimes were. They seemed to think it was worth it.
to 49:
but back in the "nice guys" controversy, I could swear men were being reprimanded for lamenting the fact that women were attracted to charismatic jerks. Now it's okay to lament the pull of eros when it pulls you into bad relationships because men are the ones being pulled? I think in all cases, there is truth to the notion that people are sometimes attracted to people (w-m, m-w, w-w, m-m, etc.) who treat them like shit. I had a college boyfriend who sometimes had kinder words for his used Kleenex than he did for me, but boy was I in love. It's also true that in all cases, sometimes jealously plays a wee bit into our assessment of the worthiness of the "charismatic jerk/vapid ditz/rejecting ballbreaker" etc. As for my own position, anyone who's getting rejected, and is in fact a good person and worthy of love, is entitled to my sympathy. It is teh sux. But if they're complaining about the poverty of the other gender's values because they are attracted to sexy people, they deserve to be gently deflated.
to 50
I don't think that acknowledging he was not mesmerizing would get the nice guy off the hook.
I guess it would be helpful if we had an offending nice guy to interrogate about his attitude. I could go look for quotes from threads, but actually I just remembered yet another kid from college. In the midst of arguing that men have it so much harder than women because they have to fear rejection more, he said that women only want men with big pecs, he was balding and thus handicapped in the race, etc. So he did acknowledge there was something he was lacking; he just didn't feel it should matter. He was a jerk for lots of reasons, but I don't think the complaint that "women just want big pecs" was the least of them.
If Sherry had stopped at, "I wish I were mesmerizing" that would be a clear distinction. But as she trends into "men should not be attracted to mesmerizing but otherwise unsavory women" she becomes just like the nice guys.
You know, after trying to draw the distinction, I do agree with you that this is pretty close to the nice guy conversation, except that as I remember that conversation there weren't any actual 'nice guys' defending their position -- just people talking about them. Scheherazade's post seemed within the realm of reasonably wistful rather than objectionable to me, but I can see how a variation in tone would make it problematic. I don't have an equivalent 'nice-guy' post to critique, but people discussing 'nice-guys' they had experience with off-line made them sound more unpleasantly convinced of their own entitlement then Scheherazade sounds to me.
But without something first-hand to critique, I can't validly say that one's worse than the other.
LB is probably right that it's a personality trait as much as an aesthetic. But it's not always or even usually a bad quality. Girls are taught to be nice and pleasant and charming and sometimes this manifests as a seductive/coquettish streak. Most of the very beautiful very alluring women I know are of this type. They can create a lot of resentment, without being at all unkind, simply because men want more from them than they can give, or because other women envy them the power they have.
No, it's a neutral quality in itself, neither good nor bad.
I would say that for people who who have a lot of this kind of charisma and use it indiscriminately, that they often create confusion and difficulty both for themselves and those around them.
the people mesmerized often don't know just what they're reacting to
Sometimes -- perhaps a lot of the time -- it's scent. Little reptile brains, uncoiling whenever ancient stimuli beckon....
I agree with Tia.
And, I think there can be some level of defense for the "nice guy" -"nice girl" position. Sometimes, highly sexually desirable people do act badly.
If it's true that nice girls are generally more sympathetic than nice guys, I wonder if that can be attributed to our different expectations for men and women. A man complaining that women are rejecting bitches comes off not only as a misogynist, but also as a whiny little prat who's covering for his own fundamental weakness. He's exposing himself as less of a man. A woman complaining that men are not attracted to her comes off as more pitiable, since we don't expect a woman to drag a guy off by his hair, and in some profoundly ingrained way we think women need men for protection and sustenance, so a woman who can't get one isn't underperforming, she's just dangerously vulnerable.
nobody mentioned Ingrid Bergman.
I like the ladies.
This seems like the right thread to say: meeting women in bars is impossible.
not impossible, but like ethanol from corn: you put more into it than you can get out.
I'm coming into this conversation late, and perhaps missing a lot of subtleties both for being a newbie and not having read GE, so apologies for my clumsiness. But regarding MY & LB's points, they seem to boil down to saying that a) this mesmerism is a quality generated by those who need it and that b) those lamenting its existence and connection to physical are lamenting because they themselves want it, which seems somewhat unfair. (Am I mistaken?)
If my understanding of that turn is correct, I would counter that for many women this mesmerism, at least as I understand and think I've encountered it, is a powerful and negative third party force not in that it creates an attractive bond that they envy/ hopelessly wish to replicate/don't actually need, but in that it destroys or sucks energy out of a much more pedestrian, heartful, good-quality dependant attractive bond that they want/normally can earn just fine/really, justifiably, do need.
To say it less circuitously--you have plenty of very nice, very kind, very warm, very pretty, very intelligent, very hardworking women who lack this kind of charisma. And in normal circumstances they would do just fine, and earn the sturdy and true love of a good and desirable man. But when one of these whirlwinds of an Attractrix zooms into town, she exerts a power on the men they love and want that not only creates some fascinating mesmersm they can't produce, it also destroys the sturdy, true love they counted on. And it seems like it's all because she's beautiful, and all their hard work and caring and diligence and sincerity and warmth is meaningless. So it's sort of doubly frustrating.
I'm willing to guess that a disparity between the sexes in this social, not genetic, but I think it does exist. I think that when women are similarly fascinated by dashing rakes, there is always some hope they will come to their senses once exposed to his true jerkiness. I have often heard men say so-and-so is mean and they love her for it, while women are perpetually papering over their jerks' jerkiness until they can't anymore. Fascination with the unconventional? The fact is, in society, men are still more powerful and being abandoned by them is still more likely to screw up your life. So I really see this as an internalized fear of the effects of such mesmerism.
I'm agreeing with everyone today. Yes, if you look at my 49, I tried to make pretty much the same point (less articulately) about how this sort of mesmerism is somehow unfair -- that it confuses the process of connecting with romantic partners for the people who haven't got it, or don't want to exercise it.
I do still want to agree with Tia that it's bogus to hold men and women to different standards in this regard -- can I reconcile the two of you by saying that while it is legitimate to be cross with the possessors of sexual charisma who use it indiscriminately or unethically, it's uncool to complain about the people who fall for it? To the extent there are annoying 'nice guys' out there, they're annoying because they're complaining about women's failure to appreciate them. If you want to be appreciated, go out there and make yourself appealing. Bitching about the 'bad boys' they're losing out to, on the other hand, would be reasonable.
Similarly, it seems reasonable for women to be cranky about Estella and the tactics she uses. Pip, on the other hand, gets to decide for himself what he wants. If what he wants is a femme fatale, it's a pity for him, but not something other women particularly have standing to blame him for.
LB, I think that's a good reconciliation, and in fact similar stuff occurred to me last night.
Even though the discussion has moved on and I think we've reached a consensus that beauty is 9/10 performance, I just wanted to tell another illustrative story.
Even in a photograph beauty is performance. In the beginning of my relationship with my current, we weren't quite monogamous yet and I was sick of the photos on my personal ad; I could never get a photograph of me where I looked as hott as conceivably possible (except for a few that, tellingly, an ex had taken, but they were old and/or not suitable for public viewing). My current said, "Anyone can extrapolate from your photos that you're cute," but I told him, "online personals are much less effective when you make people extrapolate. You need to make them fantasize." So I took his digital camera to the bathroom mirror and started snapping, while consciously arranging my face so that I looked like a sexy thang, slightly parting my lips, looking slightly away from the camera, half smiling mysteriously, etc. I got three of the best photos of me ever taken out of about twenty pictures, including all the ones that were fucked up because I was holding the camera wrong. When I put them up on the site, I got comments like "stunning," and "your eyes have a haunted, searching look about them." A famous contemporary painter (no really, I met him, saw his site, read his press clips; his patron for twenty years was Marty Peretz), wrote me to tell me I was beautiful, and he might like to paint me. Of course they were all flirting, but no one flirted so extravagantly with my old pics. And needless to say, no artists stop me on the street to ask me if they can paint me. I think performance takes a ton of energy and I don't really want to spend the little I have on trying to be beautiful. I might occasionally think to myself "I'd give anything to have that kind of power," but my revealed preference is in fact that I'd give very little.
In re: "nice guys" it seems to me that the crucial thing in that discussion was that the aforementioned guys were, typically, not being all that nice. They were simply asserting that a lack of game was evidence of, and or constitutive of, niceness. If you had a woman who was just asserting that possession of superior moral or intellectual qualities logically followed from her lack of mesmeric powers, that would be similarly daft. Switching the genders again, I think it's fair of me to lament that my game's not all it could be. Unfair would be asserting that this makes me "nice" as opposed to "awkward when talking to strangers."
The crucial thing, seems to me, is that one of the arguments advanced by the so-called 'nice guys' were that women are attracted to jerks qua jerks, and so there was nothing these poor nice guys could do to improve their game, not wanting to give up their essential niceness. Which, of course, is silly. Women are attracted to the jerks in spite of their jerkiness, and because of their charisma, and other nice qualities, not because they really like jerky behavior, etc.
With the jerks qua jerks claim is bound up a fair amount of entitlement; that really, these women should be sleeping with meeeeeeeeee, whimpersnifflepout, because I'm nice, evil women, liking being abused instead of sleeping with meeeeeeeeee.
To which the answer is: perhaps, but that doesn't mean you got game and now not only do you have no game, but you're whiny. Which is not helping your game.
The "mesmerizing" post simply lamented that mesmeric powers (I'm imagining this with sparkly purple fire, for some reason, and maybe with soft flute and windchime accompaniment) did not come naturally (and seem less of a worthwhile thing to cultivate than actual kindness), but didn't suffer from the corresponding delusion that men attracted to mesmerizing women enjoy being treated badly.
I think if a guy were to lament that he was just awkward around women and man, wouldn't it be nice if the world worked in such a way that he could not have to put in all the work to be less awkward, it would read about the same as the 'mesmerizing' post. But too often, this sentiment gets conflated with the entitled so-called nice guys up above; I'd agree there's a tendency to read a guy less charitablly.
"Slightly parting my lips, looking slightly away from the camera, half smiling mysteriously..."
There's a whole craft of convincing some random stranger that you're in love with him.
At one point I had a plan to post two pictures on a personals site, one pudgy, disshevelled and short and one well-groomed and not visibly pudgy or short. This would have been just an experiment.
Regarding the jerkiness of jerks -- I will still argue that it's easier to be flamboyant and seductive if you're completely narcissistic, self-centered and inconsiderate of others, whether you're M or F.
This all goes along with myy (ype, but ="mine and only mine") belief that eros is really pretty much discontinuous with everything else, as well as being a high-payoff low-percentage gamble. Some of the distress about relationships comes from the optimistic belief that erotic happiness is normal and that if you're not hppy, there must be something wrong with you.
re: 68 Not to be to much like a dog with a bone, but the original post didn't stop with lamenting her lack of mesmerizing powers, or just say, "wouldn't it be nice if the world worked differently," it went on at least to describe the temptation to call men pigs for being so drawn to beauty, and indeed in this very thread there has been speculation that men love the mesmerizing women at least in part because they're cruel. (I actually think it's true that in some circumstances indifference and cruelty can be part of the aphrodisiacal mix, both men and women are capable of loving someone in part because they're cruel. It may not *consciously register* as something they love, but there's a causal link between the cruelty and the intensity of love that's returned.) I'm not harping on this because I'm in some state of high dudgeon about the double standard, but if there is one, I'm interested in it.
Looking back on Lindsay's thread, I see that she does make a relevant distinction: they think their niceness is the reason for their failure.
I guess I'm willing to broaden the scope of nice guy/nice girl. It is totally cool to lament your lack of money, charisma, game, beauty, whatever; it's just human. But in my book, as soon as you're complaining about the other gender's values, not for their sake, but for yours, you're a nice guy/girl (excluding particular circumstances when, via marrying the person, you really do have a right to them). With labor, there is lovin' to be had for nearly anyone who honestly appraises the currency they have the relationship marketplace and is willing to keep their tastes within their budget/devote some resources to increasing the value of their currency. The process is totally grueling, so I fully support bitching about it, and wishing you had more currency, but that bitching should exclude complaints about men/women and their values, because really, your values are just the same, and there's nothing wrong with liking the fact that she makes you feel powerful/he has a way of looking at you that burns down into your soul/her abs are so tight/he flies you to his beach house in Puerto Rico and ravishes you on the sand. Or whatever. (At least in quasi-rational blog discourse; you can say whatever you want at your drunken all girl cheesecake party.)
mesmeric powers (I'm imagining this with sparkly purple fire, for some reason, and maybe with soft flute and windchime accompaniment)
I believe mesmeric powers were recently depicted this way on Smallville, so you are not alone.
I associate these purple powers most closely with an old roommate of mine. She was an actress, also working as a waiter, and every single man who entered our orbit--co-workers of mine or my other roommate, our friends, neighbors, guests from out of town, family members, or even guys who came in to fix the plumbing-- would magically discover what restaurant she worked at and show up during one of her shifts. This must have happened a hundred times during the year that I lived with her. Seeking her out on her own like that--away from us, the people who had introduced him to her--was always a signal of intent.
I was quite shocked when she told me that a good friend of mine--a guy named Paul who was very intellectual and shy and a little otherworldly--showed up at the restaurant. He was the sort of person who seemed so wrapped up in his own thoughts that he could hardly see where he was going. That he had managed to discover where she worked without asking me, actually find the place without getting lost, and go there specifically to chat her up in such an obvious, deliberate way seemed incredible to me. I could barely picture it. And I was probably a little hurt, in a Sherry-like way, lamenting his susceptibility, but then had to admit that her power is such that even I felt it, and liked to be around her because of it.
I can't believe you'd yield to mesmeric powers that betoken themselves with a wind instrument.
You would say to those powers, "stop that incessant mewling".
Ach, you're right. Maybe ac's roommate is more purple than flute?
"More purple than flute, smoot smoot de boot", that's what I always say.
It stuns my uncomprehending prey, allowing me to perform darker magics upon them.
The thrifty-beguiler-with-a-dyslexic-cow-hankering contingent is thrilled, I'm sure.
ac's story is a good one to turn around and illustrate why such powers can be hell on the possessor.
How do you think a woman feels when over and over again men do ridiculous things to get her attention? When people refuse to treat her normally? Of course you get tired and jaded about it- no one really wants you, they want who they have decided you are in their head. And when you don't return their incessant phone calls, when you're mean enough not to be gratified that yet another man is making an idiot out of himself for no reason on your behalf, you're a cruel and evil bitch.
No one would want to be mesmerising if they really thought about the fact that you don't choose the people who are mesmerised by you. That accountant who is obsessed with WWII? That balding mortician with halotosis? Do you really want them saying 'I was just in the neighborhood and decided to drop by' with a wistful puppy look on their face?
I am certainly not a Great Beauty, but I've had enough people attempt to thrust themselves into my affections that I can empathise with how incredibly horrid it can be.
This was a while ago. She's married now. No longer quite so purple or wind-chimy. And much happier than she was, at the time.
Stories that end well are the best ones.
I think that I've occasionally had a similar effect, and it's really unnerving.
I think that a bouncer at a bar I was walking past nearly forgot to check someone's ID, because he was checking me out. I had a dress on that fit me very well, and I was feeling very confident, but immediately afterwards, I just felt self conscious.
Clearly, I'm not cut out to be a mesmerizer.
End well? When all our hearts are now broken?
If Matt Weiner is talking about me, nothing happened. I just went home.
And Winna, you're right. When I was in college, a guy in my Latin prose composition class basically decided to stalk me by sending me expensive flowers anonymously and writing bad poetry --in Latin and English. I don't know what happened to it, but I do remember a couple of lines.. "Like Diana chaste and fair." and "All I am and all I have I humbly offer you."
Before I got the final poem I had agreed to have lunch with him in a dining hall, and I discovered that he believed we ought to be compatible, because we were both Christians. I'm not kidding.
The master of my House was a Lutheran who was too fond of joking, and he was a little bit intrusive. So he asked me how it had gone. (A whole bunch of people in public had pushed me to take pity on the poor guy. My roommate really let me down, because I had tried to take refuge in the philosophy dept. library after class, and she told him where I had gone.) I told the House master that it hadn't gone well, and that the guy was a Missouri Synod member which made complete sense to the Master.
Anyway, it turned out that the poetry writing wacko had also written an article for the socially conservative magazine (the one that had to attack everything women's studies related) on why patriarchy was essential for civilization. It was filled with Victorian cliches about good women in the domestic sphere softening the tough men.
The article even had a chart with the heading Patriarchal Civilizations Throughout History --1600 (or something like that); Non-patriarchal/ Matriarchal--0.
He knew nothing about me except that I was a Christian, but he wanted me to be an empty vessel that he could fill with his own hopes and dreams Pygmalion style.
Matt, you're clearly just too nice a guy. Learn from Standpipe Bridgeplate. I'm thinking, "More flute than purple, more fun than a gerbil." They'll be prostrate before you. Advice from the fairer sex.
...at the Mineshaft!
87 to 85 to, I assume, 84, with 72 as subtext.
Thesis: Anyone who attempts to appeal to a woman by complimenting her as "chaste" deserves to be set up like Malvolio. No?
Carp. "At the Mineshaft" was meant to follow on to the last sentence of 88.
Tia, I believe you're mocking me. Rhyming "purple," however, is hott.
I think that BG would have made a fine Missouri Synod sex slave had she chosen to do so, but her priorities were obviously elsewhere.
to 92
I know, I was about to say, I was a little offended that MW didn't think 89 had lots of exciting mineshaft activities. What is it that he gets up to over there?
re 91
too bad it's so hard to do well. "She'll sink into the slough of acquiescence with only a burble"?
Patriarchal Civilizations Throughout History --1600 (or something like that); Non-patriarchal/ Matriarchal--0
This just makes me think, Look at the world... and look at my TROUSERS. I mean, that's not the greatest argument for patriarchy.
(I have had much success with the line "look at my TROUSERS," thankyouverymuch. More flute, people.)
Wait, I've got it:
More flute than purple,
Her squeaky voice's chirp'll
Keep Ogged his Tivo from resetting
And more good blog we'll be getting
Am I mesmerizing yet? Because I'm trying, I really am. I decided to devote myself to the task
Or, alternatively
More flute than purple,
Her squeaky voice's chirp'll
Keep Ogged his Tivo from resetting
And Ogged's flute will not be begetting.
[emerges from the haze of poesy]
is what better?
95, "flute" remark, intended to pick up on the Mineshafty resonances of 89.
Hmm. I have a couple of CDs of trombones played in water cisterns; but would mineshafty resonances benefit flutes? Probably not--it would come out shrill. Like us bloggers. Which brings us back to the beginning, like those silly "Connections" columns in Scientific American.
It stuns my uncomprehending prey, allowing me to perform darker magics upon them.
You know the other pickup line that has that effect? "Hey baby, was your daddy an oscillating fan? Because I can hear my phone ringing."
Also, any line delivered while wearing a Viking helmet. Every time.
apostropher, are you going to recite sagas while you're wearing the helmet?
That is a dead-sure pickup line.
"Hearing I ask from the holy races,
From Heimdall's sons, both high and low;
Thou wilt, Valfather, that well I relate
Old tales I remember of men long ago."
And the ravenness, disconcerting, still is flirting, still is flirting,
With my pallid, flustered person - just amazed at our rapport!;
And her flute has all the purple that with windchimes doth usurp whole
Hearts and with a giggling chirp pull good men to her chamber door,
And my will against the power that beams glowing from her core
Shall be exerted -- nevermore!
What men or boys are these? What maidens loth?
What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?
What windchimes and fire? What wild ecstasy?
Heard melodies are sweet, but magical fires
Are power; therefore, ye wind chimes, play on;
Not to the sensual ear, but, mesmerizing,
Pipe and beckon with ditties of no tone.
Matt: with purple magical stockings cross-gartered?
Just by coincidence I just saw part of "An American in Paris" with Leslie Caron on TV. Caron had that magic down perfect. She played a nice enchantress, though.
"Gigi" was probably the same, though I haven't seenn it -- she played a budding courtesan who falls in love with a porr man in that one, IIRC.
The first movie was made in 1950 or so when Caron was 19, and she's still alive and active. When her film career faltered she wrote a book of fiction called "Vengeance".
Gigi is lovely. Where is today's Marie Chevalier?
eb-schweet.
Cala--now I need Sparks notes. Is that a reference to my trousers?
MARIA
If you desire the spleen, and will laugh yourself
into stitches, follow me. Yond gull Malvolio is
turned heathen, a very renegado; for there is no
Christian, that means to be saved by believing
rightly, can ever believe such impossible passages
of grossness. He's in yellow stockings.
SIR TOBY BELCH
And cross-gartered?
MARIA
Most villanously; like a pedant that keeps a school
i' the church. I have dogged him, like his
murderer. He does obey every point of the letter
that I dropped to betray him: he does smile his
face into more lines than is in the new map with the
augmentation of the Indies: you have not seen such
a thing as 'tis. I can hardly forbear hurling things
at him. I know my lady will strike him: if she do,
he'll smile and take't for a great favour.
Oh. No fair assuming I actually remember any of the details of the things I allude to. (Well, I was ripping off your allusion, anyway.)
I will always remember Twelfth Night because of a high school teacher who just liked to say 'Festeh, the jest-eh'. And in college some of my friends went to London and took a course in Shakespeare where they had to perform this scene in the Globe.
eb, 102 is awesome. As a token of my appreciation, I offer you this rhyme:
He'll felch more than Derb'll, so hand him a gerbil.
