Fifty-One: Pursuit

The gender warriors hate so many things, and it's exhausting to read through their list of all that's "problematic", meaning morally flawed and evil. Nonetheless, a few things do catch my eye.  They hate romances as a genre, and they hate the idea of romance. They certainly hate the idea of seduction. So many of the gender warriors equate seduction with coercion and regard seduction as no better than sex taken by violence. This is not something I can grasp at all. This is nothing that has any connection to the rituals of romance that I grew up with.

They do hate romances as a genre. Faint heart ne'er won fair maiden--- they hate that as an idea, as the underlying text for romantic comedies and romances. The basic story arc for any romance is to introduce the reader to two characters who should be together, then drop obstacles in the way of them coming together. The story is about overcoming those obstacles. The reader's interest is held by watching one character or the other push through obstacles to an ending where lovers can be together. Families, distance, class, misunderstandings, misapprehensions--- all the standard obstacles, all the way back to Greek comedy. Faint heart ne'er won fair maiden... That's been a lesson of romances these last twenty-five hundred years or so.  And that of course is simply a variant of a key lesson in life: what's worth having must be won through determination and effort. The gender warriors hate that. They champion something called "enthusiastic consent", a standard that holds that at the first hint of reticence or difficulty, a lover (male--- always male) must walk away, must never try to persuade or convince. It's a standard that's based on the insistence that romance itself is "problematic". For the gender warriors, passion is always suspect as dangerous and irrational and demanding. Sexual "intimacy" must be something worked through like a Maoist criticism/self-criticism session or a kind of corporate negotiation between robot lawyers.

To immediately walk away at the first hint of reticence says...what? I've asked that question to girls of my acquaintance, and they've all said that they'd feel...somehow offended. It's not that they wanted a clear No to be disregarded, but that a potential lover who'd just shut down at any hint of reticence or uncertainty is saying to them that sex or romance with them isn't worth some effort.  One friend put it simply enough: a boy who'd walk away without trying to persuade or even cajole was saying that he didn't find her worth a few minutes of inconvenience. He could call it embracing "consent culture", but what he was saying was that she just wasn't worth convincing--- which was insulting, really. The girls I talked to told me that the problem with "enthusiastic consent" and "consent culture" wasn't the idea of consent as such, but the idea that they no longer had a way to gauge how much a potential lover valued them, that there was no way to ask a potential lover to show that he'd expend some time and energy and thought to show that he was seriously interested in them. I suppose that's a kind of sexual economics that the gender warriors despise, but it is utterly human: the need to be valued, to be shown that one is worth something.

There is something about "enthusiastic consent" that ruins the kind of romance that I've always liked. I like seductions and flirtations: very formal, very mannered, very based on a kind of dance. Advance, withdraw, advance again. Persuade, tempt, intrigue---  I like the verbal part of it all, too. All very formal and mannered, of course. It's a game that requires two players, and one that I've always loved. The girl involved--- my Young Companion ---understands what's happening and where the dance leads. That's part of it, too. She's chosen to be part of the dance, and she knows where it leads. But there's the whole game of serve and return, serve and return. Flirtation and seduction are about persuasion and temptation, of course, and about a kind of dance through obstacles toward a goal. It's verbal, mostly, and verbal is one of my stronger skills. The delight in it all is about the word games, the ripostes, the serve-and-return that allow both parties to get to the first serious kiss and to the bedroom. Consent is won--- given as a prize for being clever and mannered, for knowing how to volley in the serve-and-return. Or perhaps it's given when the girl lifts an eyebrow and joins in the dance. Seduction and flirtation are both skills, and they're ways to demonstrate a kind of commitment to the pursuit, to how valuable your potential partner is, to offering up mannered delights. Seduction and flirtation are skills, and they're skills that are valued for themselves and show a partner that they're valued, too.

Faint heart ne'er won fair maiden. I still believe in that phrase. And I believe that serve-and-return, that clever words, can win hearts and win through to the bedroom. I believe that the dance is part of the delight. And I will always believe that.

Nineteen: A Walk In The Morning Light

There's a small kerfluffle around the web today about an ad from an "upmarket" chain called Harvey Nichols. The ad is simple enough. It shows various girls coming home in last night's party dresses on what's now known as the Walk of Shame. The point of the ad is that in a Harvey Nichols dress, you'll look both fashionable enough to be out at night but still elegant and professional enough to pass as in daytime attire--- thus avoiding the Walk of Shame look. It's a reasonably cute ad, but it has drawn fire both for what's now called "slut shaming" and for "class privilege". The second claim does perplex me, and I'm not sure how its proponents justify it, or just what privilege it is to shop at Harvey Nichols.

There is a difference between the dawn walk home for males and females. That much is true. I've walked home from young companions' apartments in the morning in last night's clothes, but I've never thought of it as a Walk of Shame. I'm more likely to think of it as a kind of victory march, and I'm likely to recite Housman to myself: Soldier from the wars returning, spoiler of the taken town.... I will add here that the victory isn't over the young girl I've left sleeping in her bed. The victory is over time and fate and entropy. Walking home with a jacket over my shoulder and a tie stuffed into a pocket, I do feel like I've won something, or proven something. But never at my young companion's expense. The goodbye kiss as I left her bedroom for city streets was heartfelt and had no small amount of thank-you to it. Walking home, what I feel is elation. If the world and all the passers-by can tell that I'm returning from a lovely girl's bed, all the better. I've defied time and age and social expectations, and I've been given a whole nested set of gifts: pleasure, certainly, and a sense of renewed life and potential.

I'm usually at coffeehouses early on Saturday and Sunday mornings, and there's always a steady inflow of Walk of Shame girls at the ones near the university--- hungover, tired, often carrying last night's stiletto heels. I can understand why they're walking. It's a close neighbourhood, bars and clubs and undergraduate apartments all together. (I've never understood girls having to do the Walk of Shame in places like London or New York; you'd think last night's partner would have the grace to offer cab fare.) I'm often amused by the girls--- who avoids her friends' eyes, who sits with other returning girls to share stories or commiserate, who's too hungover to do more than try not to go face down on the table. Amused, but never contemptuous. That's a distinction worth making. I enjoy watching them and inferring stories, but I don't feel contempt. I do feel envy, of course, the standard male wish that one girl or another had been in my bed last night. And there's always the fact that last night's party dress may be delightfully revealing in morning light. I can't deny that, and I'd never think of denying it. I will always turn the Male Gaze onto youth and beauty. But there's never contempt or derision. Why would there be?

Well, I still don't understand the "class privilege" attack on the Harvey Nichols ad. The remnants of the class system in Britain are as mysterious as ever the older system was. Is it only that the dresses sold there are expensive? I'll leave that for readers' comments. I will just say that I like seeing Walk of Shame girls--- though I certainly have no interest in shaming them. And while I think of my own dawnlight returns as a small Roman triumph, there's no reason at all why a lovely girl shouldn't stride home with her own sense of victory.