From puberty onward, nothing disorganizes the male mind more quickly or thoroughly than the sight of the female body-beautiful. It triggers a craving which overwhelms the male’s self-protective instincts. His lust provoked, he will gladly crash through a wall of fire, and through thundering ocean waves, to throw himself, panting and out of breath, into the provocative woman’s arms. Male susceptibility to female beauty gives women a great leverage in their dealings with men; this leverage is further increased by women’s artifice. Their determination to make the female body even more provocative has led to women’s preoccupation with that delusive self-beautification which is commonly known as glamour.
Glamour bathes the body with an illusory beauty; its purpose is erotic provocativeness; its function, during courtship, is to arouse a man’s aesthetic appetites, and thereby lure him into a trap a woman has set to catch a nest slave. The sexiness of her own body, as enhanced by glamour’s tricks, is a woman’s frontline weapon in the battle called courtship.
Female codes of alluring self-presentation do vary with fashion and with culture; but their aim is the same — to provoke desire in men and lure them into woman’s traps. A woman who packages herself for that purpose, and does so effectively, is said to dress to kill. A woman dressed to kill is not dressed to kill deer, or trees, or pigeons, or other women (except with envy, of course); she is dressed to kill men. She is dressed for the man hunt; dressed to lure some fool man close enough to plunge her love harpoon into his heart, and having smitten him, to drag him off to her victory parade, and thereafter to her nest.
Consider a Western woman who walks down the street in a painted face and miniskirt, with her bra-less tits tossing about under a see-through blouse. Contrary to the general belief, she is not walking innocently along her way. She is actually a trouble maker, a walking provocation deliberately assaulting the equanimity of men, a huntress in battle gear set to disturb the peace of the male world. In a just world, she would be arrested for (under)dressing to kill. To appreciate that is to understand the folly of men’s normal attitude to women’s preoccupation with body presentation.
When women discuss their looks, clothes, nail polish, make-up accessories, and things like that, men tend to deride it all: men regard it as evidence of women’s vanity and frivolity. When men see a woman fussing about her looks — bringing out her make-up kit in a crowded bus, plucking her eyebrows in a restaurant, touching up the slightest run in her paintwork, or retouching the smudge in her lip gloss; when a woman spends half a day picking out clothes that will have her calculated effect on onlookers; when she puts on stiletto shoes that threaten to dislocate her ankle, just because, she says, they make her legs look nicer, men are usually amused, and shake their heads at female vanity. But such attitudes show just how stupid men really are — for, it is neither vanity nor frivolity which drives women to such a dedicated pursuit of glamour.
Glamour — the artificial beautification of the body for erotic provocativeness — is serious business. When women discuss their appearance, they are talking shop, discussing the tricks of their most important trade. The aim of glamour, like all magic and enchantment, is to confuse the senses of the onlookers, to dull their reason, to induce in them beliefs which the sober mind would dismiss. When a woman arms herself with glamour, and goes looking for her Prince Charming in the swamp of frogs, her objective is to bewitch him out of his senses, so he can blissfully make with her a bargain most unfair to himself, to wit, a marriage contract.
A woman’s glamour accessories are some of her most important possessions. That handbag with its mirrors, paintbrushes, paints, ointments, decorator pencils and all — it is her magician’s tool box. Have you wondered why it is about the last thing she will part with, even when she has to rush from a burning room? It is to her what his stethoscope is to the doctor, or his briefcase is to the executive, or his tool kit is to the mechanic. In it are the essential implements of her economic activity — namely, self-beautification for the purpose of luring men to serve her. So, when next you notice, at the end of lunch, a woman rushing off to the powder room; when she returns transformed, with every hair in place, with every patch of colour the correct hue; or when she does her repair job at the luncheon table, in full view of all, do not sneer. Take to heart what Ntozake Shange said about beauty being a set-up, and make sure the set-up does not catch you.
A woman undergoing glamourization is like a warrior kitting himself out for battle. In contemporary Western fashion, she will shave her legs and armpits; wear curlers in her wet hair; smear thick paint on her face, and let it dry and cake on her skin; stuff her feet into tight, high-heeled and ankle-snapping shoes; diet herself into an enervating twiggy slimness; and then set out to seek battle.
After her victim has been hauled home (or rather, after her victim has hauled her off to his home where she shall eat him), many a woman tends to abandon her pursuit of glamour. When the hunt is over, one must pack up and put away one’s hunting gear, until it becomes necessary to hunt again. Such a woman ignores her looks, becomes unkempt, gets splendidly fat, turns discourteous, till her bewildered husband wonders if there is any living connection between the demure beauty he wedded and this raggedy harridan he must bear as the cross of his life.
Once upon a time, in London, I heard a British woman talk of having to fetch her flashy dresses out of mothball. When I asked her why, she said that she had to start looking for a new man! The one she once snared using those same clothes had recently gotten away. Her tone was quite businesslike. It was that of a man saying: “It’s time to bring out my baits and rods and go down to the stream. It’s fishing season again.”
Of course, woman’s propensity to glamourization exploits man’s weakness for the female body-beautiful: if men were not simple-minded dupes who are taken in by dabs of paint and whiffs of perfume, I wonder whether women would so dedicate themselves to glamour. I once teased a Nigerian woman about women’s preoccupation with their looks. I suggested that men were far more interested in women’s more solid qualities, and that women might do better by cultivating those. She replied: “It’s all well and good to cultivate all those solid qualities; but you first have to attract him, don’t you? If you don’t, how is he ever going to find out those other qualities?”
Once we remind ourselves that a woman’s principal occupation is the winning and holding of at least one male slave; and that her looks are among her primary assets for this business, we must realize that man’s condescending attitude to her obsession with her looks is obtuse. Not just obtuse; it is a sign of men’s own folly. Would we look down on a hunter who spends time cleaning and oiling his gun; or on a fisherman who lavishes care on his fishing traps; or on any man who is carefully tending the tools of his particular trade? What would we think of a magician who neglected his appearance, or who failed to practice the little tricks he must use to manipulate his audience’s attention? A soldier who regards his opponent’s weapons with contempt, or who fails to recognize enemy weapons for what they are, risks his own defeat.
Men, clearly, do need protection, both from their own stupidity and from their susceptibility to female beauty. Indeed, one of the best laws ever passed by men, one of the few which male legislators have passed in the male interest, was an Act of the British Parliament of 1770. It said:
“All women, of whatever age, rank, profession or degree who shall after this Act, impose upon, seduce, and betray into marriage any of His Majesty’s subjects by virtue of scents, paints, cosmetic washes, artificial teeth or false hair, iron stays, bolstered hips, or high-heeled shoes, shall incur the penalty of the law now in force against witchcraft and like misdemeanours; and marriage under such circumstances, upon conviction of the offending parties, shall be null and void.
Predictably, like most sensible laws in the male interest, it is not known to have been ever enforced. It was probably a dead letter before it arrived on the statute books. Had it been enforceable, the cosmetics giants of the world would never have built a thriving industry. Nor would the advertising industry daily use the glamorous female body to raid the pockets of men on behalf of vendors of all manner of goods and services.
Among feminists, there are puritan prudes who, in crying down “pornography”, object to advertisers’ use of the female body-beautiful on billboards, posters, magazines and television to sell products. They claim that such images “demean women”. It is doubtful that images of beautiful and sexy girls demean women. It is probably only the plain Janes and ugly duckling who feel demeaned when they compare themselves with the beautiful images over which men drool and lose their self-control. The truth or falsity of that jealous complaint is for women to sort out among themselves; however, it should be noted that if public displays of images of the female body-beautiful do “demean women”, then every woman who displays her own body-beautiful in public places (streets, parties, offices, beaches) also “demeans women”. If certain images are to be banned for “demeaning women”, so too must every woman’s self-display of a similarly provocative sort.
Whatever the feelings of puritan prudes, the stark reality is that the female body-beautiful exercises over men the mighty power of erotic incitement. Advertisers have merely learnt from man-hunting women to use this piece of female witchcraft to derange and rob men. If men were smart enough to act in their own interest, they would seek protection, in both law and custom, from all public display of the female body-beautiful. They would follow the example of the Ayatollah’s Iran and ban from streets, beaches, parties and other public gathering places all displays of the female body, especially in cock-teasing outfits and provocative positions. They would ban them, not because the displays “demean women”, but because they derange men, bewitch men, and put men’s cocks into the manipulating hands of women.