glamour

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.

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.

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.

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?”

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 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.

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.