Searching for the Perfect Man

In a recent column, Matt Feeney complains about how macho movies like 300 come under fire for being, of all things, “homoerotic.”

Feeney goes on at length about how sad the gay-calling is, but he doesn’t really ask why it happens. Here are my thoughts. These movies hark back to a heroic tradition that has, in modern times, become somewhat confused. It was Aristotle who first catalogued the “tragic hero’s” traits. The tragic hero was strong, intelligent and, under the right circumstances, emotive. His life had a pattern and purpose. He couldn’t just get run over by a truck. He was always the golden boy, the sensitive strong man who took enemy fire to save the life of a friend, or who rescued some helpless woman from rape and dismemberment by cannibals – only to be fried up and eaten himself. He got scant reward. He was brought low by his own physical and mental perfection. He was better than the rest of us.

The tragic hero reflects the Greek philosophers’ obsession with the “perfect man.” The Greek ideal of the perfect man was aesthetic as well as psychological – to be fair, the Greeks were big believers in premarital homosexuality. They weren’t alone. The perfect man became the David of Michelangelo’s sculpture, the Vitruvian man in da Vinci’s sketches. (Both of these artists, incidentally, were gay.)

However, over the years, the archetypal male hero has lost his way. With the onset of equality, we’ve separated certain qualities and assigned them to one or the other of the sexes. Men got physical strength, spatial reasoning, and calm in situations of crisis. Women, on the other hand, got good looks, tenderness, sensitivity and emotion. Nowadays, we tend to think of the ideal body as feminine. Men are just a walking aesthetic disaster.

The problem with the Greek martial hero in this context is that he was a physical ideal, and society has trouble separating physical beauty from sexual attraction. In the more permissive environment of prehistoric Athens, this conflict was no problem. Nowadays, in order to appreciate beautiful men, you have to be gay. In order to appreciate beautiful women, you just need to have eyes.

But even more problematically, the tragic hero was often brought low by his high-minded respect for higher-order feelings. He prominently displayed some of the emotions we nowadays assign solely to women. I have often thought, perhaps incorrectly, that as a society we have evolved to the point where we respect everyone’s emotions, “everyone” being defined as all woman and occasional gay men. To be an emotional straight man is just plain gay.

I’m guilty of this labeling myself. I remember once meeting some guy who made the mistake of confiding to me – perhaps because I seemed more mature than I was – that he really liked certain country love songs. I hiccupped uncomfortably and told him to “be a man.” Also, that I was more of a Leonard Cohen girl myself, Leonard Cohen whose lyrics tend towards the cynical “Shit, I’m fucked up and getting blown by a stranger” theme more than the “Thank God, I love my wife” theme. If I could do this encounter over, I would probably do it differently.

The ultimate point, however, is that the perfect man didn’t need a woman to be complete. And therein lay the problem. What did he need? If he found his match only in other men, and he wasn’t gay, then what was he? An egalitarian, modern civil society has no ready answer to this question.

The bygone greatness of email spam

Today I clicked open my inbox (at work, no less!) and found a letter from Madam Beatrice Elubo. The message had been shipped to the trashbox by my spam filter, but I was curious what kind of woman referred to herself as “madam.” I opened the letter.

Inside I found one of those old-school scams, the kind of letter that made me nostalgic for the days when I was 13 and believed my email could change the world. I still remember my first petition: it was on behalf of a Botswanan boy whom, for lack of memory, I’ll call Ted. Ted had no arms, no legs, no parents and no liver. He had no liver because he’d been poisoned by his evil uncle as part of a vicious inheritance battle that had already claimed 100 Botswanan lives. Despite the apparent hopelessness (not to mention biological inviability) of his situation, Ted held out hope that kind strangers like myself would sign his email, bringing him one name closer to the 1,000,000 signatures required for a free liver transplant in his home country.

I signed another on behalf of the woman of Afghanistan, who were treated like cattle under the Taliban. Despite the tragic melodrama attached to descriptions of these women’s lives, we now know that much of these abuses reflected the truth. It’s too bad my sign of support never reached anyone in power. It strikes me in retrospect that it might have been misplaced email spam, along with fear of terrorism, that softened the President’s stony Texan heart and inspired him to invade.

Looking back, the point of these scams eludes me. They certainly weren’t targeted at swindling me out of cash. Perhaps email spam provides an outlet for stunted creative writers trapped in midlevel managerial positions. It certainly sounds like the kind of thing I would do, given time and unrestricted Internet access.

Today’s letter was more of the same. The madam in question begged sanctuary in the US for herself and her young son. She had been entrusted by her dying husband with 8.5 million dollars, and she needed refuge and investment advice. Midway through the heartfelt missive, the madam revealed that she’d pay 15% of her fortune in exchange for these services. Never mind the unlikeliness of an African royal emailing random American strangers. What upset me is that it was so out of character for a desperate woman to switch from pleading for her very existence to haggling like a real estate broker over the commission.

Perversely, I wanted to respond. I wanted to say that for only 5% more, I’d get her refuge, investment advice, and a lifelong membership with the Friends of the National Zoo. Surely she, living on the wild side in Africa, understands the value of preserving the pride and glory of our planet’s endangered species?

Why I Hate Engagement Rings

According to recent surveys, nearly 30% of Americans have at some point videotaped themselves having sex. While this is good news for voyeurs everywhere (and our amateur sex tapes might have been a better propaganda item to drop over Iraq than the threatening leaflets the Bush administration eventually OK'ed), it also takes the 'conspicuous' part of 'conspicuous consumption' to an entirely new level. For better or for worse, we are becoming Generation "Look at Me, Look at Me!"

In my eyes, shady videotapes are proof that we're more comfortable now than ever with the risk of being exposed to public ridicule. I'm not trying to suggest the Romans wouldn't have recorded their orgies if they could have, I'm suggesting that things we once considered private now lie in a strange gray area.

How does this all relate to engagement rings? It's the reason I hate them. As mentioned in Slate's wedding issue, people only started wearing diamond engagement rings in the 1930's. It was a lonely spinster (no doubt working late one Christmas night, because that's what unmarried women did back then) who came up with the line, "A Diamond is Forever." The theory was that diamonds, like marriage, were a "'til death do you part" sort of deal. Now, of course, the reverse is often true of marriage. But diamonds have stayed steadfast.

Despite their reassuring permanence, engagement rings perturb me. Maybe it's because neither my mother nor my grandmother had one, so I don't associate rings with some tearjerking romantic tradition. Mostly, it strikes me as crass to ask your fiancee you buy you a hunk of gleaming ore as proof of his love ("Baby, I think men with large...credit card debt...are so attractive...") I know that's not how wearers of engagement rings see it - and after all, they do have the population advantage.

But what's more awkward that those locker room non-conversations when one woman sidles up to another, sneaks a sideways glance at her left hand, and reassures herself that her own ring is bigger, better and shinier? It suggests that her boyfriend's love is more pure, or at least that his tax bracket is a few percentage points higher. Thank God, she thinks to herself. Not because it changes her feelings towards him - after all, isn't he the man she loves? - but because now she doesn't have to hide anything. For this reason alone, I would no more want to wear an engagement ring than tattoo my salary on my forehead or exchange homemade sex tapes with other recently-engaged friends.

Then again, while the woman with the smaller ring may feel awkward at, say, a champagne brunch on the Upper West Side, the woman with no ring suffers the worst fate of all. How can she explain this choice without making her fellows feel guilty and judged? Or worse yet, leading them to believe that her fiancee is broke, unemployed, or clueless? If you're opting out of the ring, it's probably best not to mention your engagement in public at all. Let the wedding be a surprise!

The truth is, although my grandmother never got an engagement ring, she does scramble after gems. Indian women obsess about their jewelry. They lie, steal and extort just to show off their taste. Sometimes they resort to heinously gaudy fakes. It's a relic of the days when they had nothing else to call their own and no professional opportunities. A woman's jewelry, gifted to her by others, was her only true measure of worth. To me, living your life by the light of another's carat is old-fashioned. Modern women should have a more self-centered (not to mention equitable as far as the guys are concerned) way to establish status.

Before I conclude, I have to admit that I'm biased. In terms of price-to-value relationship, most precious jewelry doesn't make my cut. If instead of engagement rings we exchanged week-long vacations in the rainforest, or books by famous authors, I'd probably accept the competitive nature of the interaction (does Costa Rica mean a better relationship than Belize? Does the girl who gets a vintage first edition of Remembrance of Things Past have a rosier marital outlook than the one who gets a mass-market paperback of The Da Vinci Code? What if neither speaks French?)

I don't, and other dramas

Yesterday I was looking through a bunch of wedding photos. I was inspired by an article in the Washington Post, a feel-good puff piece about Washington DC couples renewing their vows after 50 years of marriage. It was sweet. It glossed over the fact that most of these couples - all Catholic - had at least 4 kids, some had as many as 10. Clearly, these people take their injunctions seriously.

Personally I don't understand marriage - the thought of inviting all your friends and family to witness you join your life to another person's until you both die - well, I'm being cynical, but it just makes it worse if it doesn't work out. I feel as if life is never as perfect as wedding photographers would have us believe. If you're fortunate enough to actually be that happy, you shouldn't tell anyone. You'll jinx yourself.

But up in Antioch the other day, my aunt was telling me about her wedding. She mentioned the saptapadi, and I realized something. These gestures - the garlands, the sindoor, the seven trips around the fire - strike me as deeply romantic. For some reason I always assumed I didn't want a wedding because I was picturing a Christian wedding. For the life of me, I cannot figure out why I thought this.

There are things I would change. For example, there are never any photos from a Hindu wedding of the bride and groom making out in some exotic locale. That's a Christian tradition, but it's one we should adopt. I've always been annoyed by hypocritical Indian prudishness. This is a culture where long-lost aunts will pinch their niece and nephew's cheeks, and cousins will slap each other on the shoulders, and strangers will feed each other with their bare hands. Meanwhile, for a married couple to kiss each other on the cheek in the morning is somehow improper. Bunch of shit, and it just increases people's overall repression. And anyway, the dishonesty of priests aside, we all know that one of the seven promises is about sex. It's in the Gita.